Sigrid didn’t respond. She just fixed the younger woman with those bright blue eyes and dragged the tip of her belt knife—the only weapon she had bothered to draw—along the inside of her own arm. A line of dark blood welled up behind the steel. She pointed the blade, still dripping, at Gwenna’s throat. Gwenna wasn’t afraid of much, but Valyn saw her swallow heavily. Back at the Eyrie, Sigrid’s reputation for beauty was matched only by the stories of her cruelty, and though the Flea had been a fair, if demanding trainer, the rumors surrounding his Wing were much darker.

“How did you know?” Valyn coughed. His head throbbed, and he could taste blood, hot and bitter on the back of his tongue. He felt the dark anger rising inside him, anger at Gwenna for blowing the floor before his order. Anger at himself for failing to outthink the Flea. Jaw clenched, he waited for the wave of fury to pass. No one was dead. That was the important part. Despite the explosion, despite all the drawn steel, no one was dead. There was still time to talk, to negotiate. It was still possible the Flea wasn’t trying to kill them at all, that they could work something out. Valyn just needed to keep the arrows from flying a little bit longer. “How’d you know we were going to blow the floor?”

The Flea shook his head. “We’ve been doing this a long time, Valyn.” He sounded weary rather than triumphant. “You did well, with the camp and the escape. Against a lot of other Wings, you’d be free now, and we’d be cursing as we dusted off our blacks.”

Valyn smiled bleakly. “But we’re not up against the other Wings.”

The Flea shrugged. “Like I said, we’ve been doing this a long time.” He gestured toward Annick. “Now tell your sniper to put down her bow. Then we can talk.”

Aside from Valyn’s own drawn blade, Annick was the only one who had managed to bring a weapon to bear: her string was drawn, the arrow’s point fixed on the Flea. If it bothered the other Wing’s commander to stand a finger’s twitch from death, he didn’t show it. His lined face didn’t show much of anything.

There were plenty of vets back on the Islands who looked like Kettral from their boots to their brains, all muscle and jaw. Not the Flea. Short and dark, middle-aged and pockmarked, with gray hair hazing his scalp, he’d always looked to Valyn more like a farmer stomping in after a long day in the fields than the most successful Wing commander in the history of the Eyrie.

“We shouldn’t disarm,” Annick said. “Not after last time.”