“I didn’t come here to fight you,” Kaden said.

“Then you will die a beast.”

“And you are certain that killing me will best serve your work?”

“You are the Emperor,” Gabril responded, as though that settled everything.

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Am I?” He fingered the rough fabric of his coat, then ran his hand over the tabletop between them. “The clothes on my back are my only clothes. This wooden table is worth more than all my possessions.”

“When you return to your palace—”

“I cannot return to my palace. When my father died, others took his place.”

Gabril hesitated, then shook his head.

“And so one lion has replaced another. You have lost your empire and come to me thinking I will help you regain it. You judged me poorly.”

“It is you,” Kaden replied evenly, “whose judgment has gone awry.”

Gabril narrowed his eyes. “You tell me in my own ears that this is wrong, that others have not killed your father and stolen your empire?”

“So far you are right.”

“And yet you would have me believe that you do not want it back?”

“No,” Kaden said, taking up the knife before him, turning it back and forth, watching the sunlight play off the honed edge. It felt good in his hand, solid and strong. With an easy, fluid gesture he slammed the point into the table, watched it quiver. “I am not my father,” he said, “and I am not my sister. I do not want my empire back. I want it destroyed.”

38

After a decade spent studying small-team tactics and training to fight in Wings of five or six, it was easy to forget just how impressive a full Annurian field army really was. As a child, Valyn had seen legions march down the Godsway of the capital, rank after perfect rank, pennants held high, spears precisely angled toward the sky. He remembered the pageantry, but had forgotten the sheer mass of men and metal, the sense that an entire city had taken up arms. As he studied the encamped Army of the North from behind a small copse of trees, however, he found himself struck anew by the sight. None of the individual soldiers could match the rankest Kettral cadet, of course, but that was missing the point; the army was never intended for the precise work of the Kettral. Where the Kettral relied on timing and precision, the army was a creature of mass and momentum, slow to start up but near impossible to stop.