Behind him, soft cloth scuffed over stone. He turned to find Annick and Talal, the Wing’s sniper and leach, approaching, sliding over the wide slabs of rock on their bellies as though they’d been born to the motion. They pulled up just behind Valyn, the sniper immediately nocking an arrow to her bow, Talal just shaking his head.

“It’s bad,” he said quietly. “No prisoners.”

Kaden considered the leach silently. It had come as a surprise to discover that men and women who would have been burned alive or stoned to death for their unnatural abilities anywhere else in Annur served openly with the Kettral. All Kaden’s life he’d heard that leaches were dangerous and unstable, their minds warped by their strange powers. Like everyone else, he’d grown up on stories of leaches drinking blood, of leaches lying and stealing, of the horrifying leach-lords, the Atmani, who in their hubris shattered the very empire they had conspired to rule.

Another thing about which I know too little, Kaden reminded himself.

In the short, tense days since the slaughter and rescue, he had tried to talk with Talal, to learn something about the man, but the Kettral leach was quieter, more reserved than the rest of Valyn’s Wing. He proved unfailingly polite, but Kaden’s questions yielded little, and after the tenth or twelfth evasive response, Kaden started talking less, observing more. Before they flew out, he had watched Talal smudge the bright hoops in his ears with coal from the fire, then his bracelets, then his rings, working the char into the metal until it was almost as dark as his skin.

“Why don’t you just take them off?” Kaden had asked.

“You never know,” Talal had replied, shaking his head slowly, “what might come in handy out there.”

His well, Kaden realized. Every leach had one, a source from which he drew his power. The stories told of men who could pull strength from stone, women who twisted the sharp grip of terror to their own ends. The metal hoops looked innocuous enough, but Kaden found himself staring at them as though they were venomous stone spiders. It took an effort to stamp out the emotion, to look at the man as he was, not as the tales would paint him. In fact, of all the members of Valyn’s Wing, Talal seemed the most steady, the most thoughtful. His abilities were unnerving, but Valyn seemed to trust him, and Kaden didn’t have so many allies that he could afford the prejudice.

“We could spend all week hunting around the rocks,” Talal went on, gesturing to the serrated cliffs. “A couple of monks might have slipped the cordon—they know the territory, it was night. . . .” He glanced over at Kaden and trailed off, something that might have been compassion in his eyes.