The Last Mortal Bond (54 page)

She didn't, but then, wanting didn't much come into the question. According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius when you put him on a bird's back. He'd made it all the way through training, after all, made it all the way to the Trial. Despite his current paralysis, he couldn't be a complete fuckup. She needed him in the battle against Rallen, needed someone to wrangle the Dawn King, to make the best use of the fastest, most powerful bird, and after that … Gwenna had tried to put the thought out of her head, but the truth was there, bald, ugly, and undeniable: after Laith's death, her own Wing needed another flier. Delka might be all right, but Delka seemed too old, too soft, too gentle.

Gwenna just couldn't get out of her mind the memory of Jak swimming the midnight swells, that strong, efficient, almost effortless stroke, the way he wasn't even breathing hard when he climbed out of the ocean and shook off the last of the spray. He could be so
good.
… It was like finding a beautiful blade, perfectly balanced but gone to rust on the surface. You didn't throw away a blade like that. You got a stone and you scoured it clean.

“It's time,” she said again.

He looked at her, then dropped his eyes. She could almost taste his shame, sick-sweet in the back of her mouth. Those strong shoulders slumped forward as he shook his head.

“I can't, Gwenna. I couldn't then, and I can't now. I'm sorry.”

“I don't care what happened then, and I don't care how sorry you are, you need to do this. Your friends need you to do it.” She almost admitted that
she
needed him to do it, but stopped herself. “Let's go,” she said instead.

“I
can't,
” he insisted, his voice quiet but horribly tight. Anger roughened those syllables now, and he jerked away from her hand on his shoulder. “Just leave it, all right?”

“No,” Gwenna said. “It is not all right, and I won't leave it.”

“Gwenna,” Talal said. The leach stood a few paces away, his arms crossed over his chest, dark eyes grave.

“Don't interfere,” she snapped.

“Hull's Trial is a voluntary crucible,” Talal continued. “To make it anything else is to turn it into a sort of torture.”

“Do you see me forcing him?” she demanded, holding her hands up.

Over by the tunnel mouth leading down into the dark, the others watched them, urgency and reluctance warring on their faces. Gwenna could remember what they felt, the slow, mesmerizing burn of the poison gnawing its way up through the flesh, up, up, up, like some awful, mindless acid stupidly seeking the heart.

“Every heartbeat you delay,” she said, leaning in so close that Jak couldn't avoid her face, “is killing your Wing.”

“They're not my Wing.”

“They are until this Trial is over,” Gwenna spat. “And you are
letting them down
.”

His explosion happened instantly and without warning. One moment he was hanging his head, shame and terror steaming off of him. The next, he'd seized her by the shoulders, was screaming into her face, his lips drawn back in a rabid rictus, his spittle hitting her in the face.

“That's why I'm not going to do it, Gwenna! I'm not Kettral. I've never been Kettral. I was good with the birds and that was
it
! And if you think I'm letting someone down now, wait until it comes to a real fight. You saw what happened back on Hook, but you don't understand. It's like that
every fucking time
. I don't want it to be that way. I hate it. I
hate
it. But I can't
help
it, Gwenna. The fear, it just … gets me. It's like a claw closed tight around my heart, and I can't move, I can't
breathe,
all I can think about is getting
out
. Getting
safe
! If this was something I could cut out of myself with a knife,” he said, dropping her shoulders to bare his chest, as though exposing some treacherous organ, “I would start cutting. I would carve it out if it killed me. But it's
not
.” He shook his head, and finally his voice subsided. “It's been there all my life, since I was a tiny boy. This fear is part of every memory I have.”

“I don't accept that,” Gwenna said finally.

“It doesn't
matter
if you accept it,” he said. “It's real. It's an ugly, disgusting fact, but it's a fact.”

“Well, I'll tell you another fact,” Gwenna replied grimly. “If you want to save yourself, if you want to survive, you've got to go down in those tunnels.”

“Gwenna,” Talal said, voice harder this time.

“I'm not going down there,” Jak said. “I quit. I refuse the Trial.”

“No,” Gwenna said, spinning easily on one foot, sweeping the flier's ankle, catching him in a half lock before he hit the ground, wrapping her legs around his chest, then flipping him toward the thrashing slarn. He tried to resist, made a good show of it, actually. He was
strong,
and if they'd been wrestling to a pin, or a blackout, he would have given her a run for her money. She didn't need to pin him, though. Didn't need to knock him out. All she needed to do was hold him half a heartbeat as the slarn's jaws snapped shut on his forearm, tearing away a flap of skin and muscle. Jak bellowed, and she let him loose, rolling away and to her feet, dropping into a fighter's crouch in case he came after her.

Instead, he was staring at his arm. Blood wept down the skin, puddling on the floor. The creature gnashed its teeth, searching for more, and the flier pulled back, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Hull's Trial is voluntary,” he said quietly. “You can't force someone to do it.”

“No one's forcing you,” Gwenna replied. “You have a choice. You can let the poison gut you, or you can go with your fucking Wing.”

*   *   *

“That was wrong,” Talal said.

“Spare me the lesson in morality,” Gwenna spat. She stared into the bonfire, following the shifting shapes as logs turned to embers, then the embers caved under their own weight, sending showers of spark and ash into the air. They'd fed the hungry fire half a dozen times since the last poisoned Wing, including Quick Jak, disappeared down Hull's gullet. It was impossible to gauge time down in the Hole, but it seemed someone should have come back. “I know it's not the way the Eyrie used to do it, but we
need
him, Talal.”

“We do not,” Annick said. She had her bow in hand. Whether she was guarding against a sudden appearance of slarn, or against Manthe and Hobb, who were crouched in whispered conversation over at their corner of the cavern, Gwenna couldn't say. “He is the weakest of the entire lot. And they are all weak.”

“He's not weak,” Gwenna insisted. “He is
afraid
.”

The sniper shook her head as though the statement didn't make sense. “Fear is a weakness. A dangerous weakness.”

“We
all
have weaknesses. I'm not saying Quick Jak is going to be the Flea someday, but he deserves a chance.”

“Chances are something that people need to take for themselves,” Talal pointed out. “Part of your reason for sending them down into the Hole in the first place was to build their confidence. It doesn't build a man's confidence to knock him down, then offer him up as meat for a beast that terrifies him.”

“I know,” Gwenna said, putting up a hand as though she could block the objection. “I understand that. But we all need a nudge sometimes. I was terrified my first barrel drop, couldn't make myself undo the buckle. You know what Adaman Fane did? He cut the straps and shoved me off the talon. And I realized, as soon as I hit the water, that I could do it, that I'd
done
it. The next time, I did the buckles myself.”

“You are not Quick Jak,” Talal said quietly.

“Of course not. We're all our own people.”

“That's not what he means,” Annick said.

“Well, what the fuck does he mean?”

“I mean you're … better suited to this,” Talal said.

“I'm not
suited
to it. Every 'Kent-kissing thing I've learned has been a struggle.”

“Maybe,” Annick said, cutting her off. The sniper pursed her lips, flicked her bowstring with a finger. The note echoed in the empty chamber. Annick waited for it to die out before she continued. “And still, you are what the Eyrie aims for when they train us. You're the perfect Kettral.”

Gwenna stared at her. For a moment all words failed. “Are you fucking
mad
?” she managed finally.

“No,” Annick replied evenly. “I was there when we fought our way free of Long Fist. I saw you command the defense of Andt-Kyl. I saw you pull Qora out of the mess over on Hook.”

“I was
improvising
. Annick, I was
making that shit up
.”

Talal just laughed. The sudden mirth was both welcome and disconcerting. “That's the point,” he said. “Kettral improvise. They fight on the fly. When the Flea put you in charge of the Wing, he did it for a reason. You're good at this shit.”

Gwenna stared from one to the other, unsure what to make of the lump in her throat. Before she could get too emotional, however, the smile slipped off the leach's face, and he was shaking his head.

“That's what we're trying to tell you about Jak. Just because something worked for you doesn't mean it will work for him. I like the guy, too, Gwenna. I'm sorry he's broken, but he
is
broken. You're a great demolitions master and an even better Wing leader, but that doesn't mean you can fix him.”

Annick nodded. “Keep trying, and someone's going to get hurt. Killed.”

“That
happens
to Kettral,” Gwenna retorted. “We get killed.”

“Quick Jak's not Kettral.”

Gwenna turned away, staring into the tunnel where it snaked away into the labyrinth below. When she finally managed to speak again, her own quiet words sounded strange in her ears, half desperate, half defiant:

“Not yet.”

*   *   *

By the time they'd heaped the central fire with wood another half-dozen times, the sniper's warning was starting to look horribly prescient. All of the Wings had returned from the Hole—bloody, with broken fingers or twisted ankles, limping, leaning on one another, glancing over shoulders at some remembered terror, at a recollected triumph—all except for Quick Jak's.

The rebels clustered around the fire, too exhausted, mostly, for the sharing of stories or the comparing of wounds. Some dozed off, while others went at the stores of dried meat and fruit with a vengeance. They looked more like weary workers at the end of a long harvest week in the fields than they did soldiers, but Gwenna could smell the satisfaction on them, could hear the new note of pride in their voices. Sure, she'd changed the rules of the Trial; sure, she'd given them plenty of light and sent them down in groups; sure, it was ten times easier than what Gwenna's own class of cadets had faced. None of that
mattered
. Not to them. Not now. They'd faced the slarn, had gone down into the Hole panicked and poisoned, and then they had found what they were looking for and come back out. They had
won
.

All of them but Quick Jak and his three companions.

Gwenna had taken to pacing impatiently over by the tunnel mouth, eighteen steps to the ledge, turn, eighteen steps back. She'd tried stepping into that darkness and listening, but that made it worse. For someone with her hearing, there were a hundred sounds whispering up from the depths of the cave, water washing the cold stone, wind etching the stalactites, underground rivers rumbling in the rock's throat. The sounds of Hull's darkness—none of them human.

After she'd paced off the distance four or five hundred times, Delka came over to join her. Talal was busy tending to the wounded—wrapping bandages and splinting fingers—while Annick continued to stand watch against any number of hypothetical threats, the seen and the unseen. Both of them had given Gwenna her space when she finally shoved her way free of the fire and the questions both, leaving her to stalk back and forth in a cloud of her own doubt. Delka, however, had gone into the Hole before the whole scene with Jak. She had no idea what had happened, and a smile creased her lined face as she approached.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

Gwenna stared at her. The punctures in the woman's arm had scabbed over, but she had other wounds—a gash across her scalp that left her face streaked with blood, a huge contusion on her left shoulder, purple so dark it was almost black except at the red, angry edges. Blood smeared her teeth. She looked like she'd spent half the night losing a rough fight, like she ought to be sleeping it off somewhere dark and quiet, not standing in front of Gwenna grinning. Not fucking
thanking
her.

“For what?” Gwenna demanded.

“For letting us do it. For encouraging us.”

“Encouraging…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head, remembering Quick Jak's frantic thrashing as she held him down, imagining him and the others lost in the tunnels below, maybe dead already, ripped to fleshy ribbons by the slarn.

“You see anyone else when you were down there? Any of the … others?”

Delka met her eyes, shook her head slowly. “Just slarn. But we weren't really looking, Gwenna. They could be finding the egg right now. They could be on their way up already.”

“Or they could be dead,” Gwenna said.

To her surprise, Delka nodded. “They could be dead,” she agreed, voice matter-of-fact. “That's what it is to lead soldiers, Gwenna. Sometimes you make the right decision and people still get hurt. Sometimes they still die.”

“I understand that,” Gwenna growled. “I understand it better than
you
do. While you were eating sliced firefruit over on Arim, I was up to my elbows in blood fighting the Urghul in Andt-Kyl.” She could still hear Pikker John's screams as the horses lashed to his limbs pawed the earth, tearing him apart. She could still see the captives, bound hand and foot, heads bent toward the dirt, helpless as statuary in the moment before her starshatter rent them to pieces. “I know you lose people in a fight, but this isn't a fight.”