Kaden didn’t say anything. After a few licks of the stone, Valyn looked up to find his brother staring with those fiery eyes out over the valley below. The depths of the ravine were already sunk in shadow, but the setting sun had caught the far rim, drenching it in bloody light.

“I am,” Kaden said after what seemed like a long time. “Intarra help us all, I am the Emperor.”

Valyn hesitated, uncertain how to respond. During the fight two days earlier, Kaden had been cold as midwinter ice, calm and ready as any Kettral. That certainty, however, seemed to have vanished. Valyn had witnessed something like it on the Islands, had seen men and women, twenty-year veterans returning from successful missions, fall to pieces the moment they set foot back on Qarsh. There was something about being safe again, about being finally and undeniably alive after living so close to death, that made soldiers, good soldiers, soldiers who held it together for days or weeks under the most brutal circumstances, dance like madmen, collapse sobbing, or drink themselves nearly to oblivion over on Hook.

There’s no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker on the four continents. It wasn’t at all clear whether or not Kaden had that kind of resilience, that kind of resolve.

“How are you?” Valyn asked. It was a stupid question, but every conversation had to start somewhere, and Kaden looked like he might sit cross-legged the whole night without saying another word. “After what we ran into down there?”

Valyn had seen scores of dead bodies in the course of his training, had learned to look at the hacked-up limbs and crusted blood the way another man, someone not raised by the Kettral, might consider a side of beef or a plucked rooster. There was even a certain satisfaction to be had in studying the aftermath of violence and seeing answers in the wreckage. As Hendran wrote in his Tactics: The deader a man gets, the more honest he becomes. Lies are a vice of the living. That was true enough, but Kaden hadn’t been trained to pick over bodies, especially not the bodies of his friends and fellow monks. It must have been hard to encounter them—even from a distance—burned and cut to pieces.

Kaden took a long, slow breath, shuddered for a moment, then fell still. “It’s not the older monks that bother me,” he said finally. “They had all achieved the vaniate, had found a way to snuff out their fear.”

Valyn shook his head. “No one escapes fear. Not really.”