She smashed down from above like a ton of falling rock, silhouette blocking the stars, stabbing at the other kettral with her beak, raking the wings with her talons. Chi Hoai’s bird shrieked, her own prey forgotten, and rolled in the air, trying to come to grips with her assailant. The two tumbled from view, tearing furiously at each other. For a moment Valyn could only stare. The whole thing had worked as he’d planned—the bait, the attack, the counter—until ’Ra disappeared. If all the birds were gone, they were stranded. The Flea’s kettral might be dead, but the Flea himself was very much alive.

“Into the tunnels,” Valyn shouted, pointing with his blade. It wasn’t what he’d hoped, but hoping too hard was a good way to get dead. Once inside the actual cliff, they could disappear. They could figure out later how in ’Shael’s sweet name they were going to get out of the mountains without ’Ra. If they lived that long.

Laith, however, was shaking his head. “No!” he shouted. “We have to wait for the grab!”

“ ’Ra’s gone!” Valyn said, taking him by the blacks and shoving him toward the cliff.

The flier shoved back. “She’s not gone. She had the speed and the elevation. She’s just tangled up! We have to wait for the extract!”

A flatbow bolt struck just at Valyn’s feet, raising a line of sparks as it skittered away across the ledge.

“They have the range,” Pyrre observed, shifting to put Valyn between herself and the orphanage.

“I know my bird, Val,” Laith said, lips drawn back in a snarl. “I know her. You gave her every chance and she will win. We just need to hold for a few more heartbeats.”

“There’s no cover,” Talal said. “We can’t hold here.”

“The tunnels,” Valyn said, grabbing Gwenna under the arm. “Now.”

As he said the last word, however, a great winged shape rose up over the ledge, screamed once at the stars, and came to rest on the very lip.

“That’s ’Ra!” Laith yelled, surging forward.

Even in the moonlight, Valyn couldn’t be sure, but Laith was already running. As Hendran wrote: Sometimes the good leader has to quit leading and trust his men.

Valyn swallowed a curse, hauled Gwenna around, almost passed out as the bolt in his shoulder grated against the bone, and then, with a brief prayer that everyone else was doing the same thing, ran as hard as he fucking could.

12

Cold like a fist to the heart. Sudden, frigid darkness pressing against his chest, on his face, in his unseeing eyes. The vaniate shivered a moment, then sloughed away like a violently molted skin, and when Kaden opened his mouth to shout, icy brine forced its way down his throat, into his lungs, strangling him. Underwater, he realized. Too late to call back his squandered breath.