The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  She didn’t have to say about what.

  “Don’t you?” she asked.

  “Know?” Kip asked.

  “You’re gonna play dumb? You? With me?”

  They’d never talked about it directly, even as the Mighty assumed it. It was too precious, too big, too ridiculous for fat little Kip of Rekton to even dream.

  He knew Tisis wouldn’t ridicule him. Knew it absolutely. It wasn’t in her.

  But what if she did?

  He cleared his throat. “I’m not that fat kid from Rekton anymore,” Kip said. He shrugged. He braced himself on the ramparts, the masses of busy people below blending into one unvariegated carpet.

  She stepped up beside him and put one hand atop his.

  She looked out, and her face filled with pleasure at the people united, purposeful, hopeful—and it made him ache. Her satisfaction brought vigor to her beauty, a feminine strength, not fragile like a bloom that might be crushed underfoot, but adaptive, stubbornly growing toward the sun. Like a sapling in good soil, rushing into her strength, that she might bend before a storm, but grow; or be pressed down today and spring back up tomorrow, having grown taller yet overnight.

  Tisis was transforming before his eyes, and he knew he’d played a role in that beautiful mystery, that growing into what she was meant to be. It filled him with humility to be allowed to partake in something so sacred. And it filled him with impossible longing.

  Kip looked out on all those thousands of people taking his direction, and though he knew it was there, he didn’t see the glory of a community united, unselfish, moving toward a worthy goal. He saw thousands of people he could fail. Ten thousand ways he could fall short. And yet, how could he solve the paradoxical audacity in his breast?

  He wanted to be even more.

  How dare he?

  “Kip, do you know what we do when we look at ourselves in a mirror?”

  See ourselves? “Why do I have a feeling that whatever I say next is going to get me in trouble?”

  “Shut up, Kip.”

  “See?!”

  “Kip.” Level, stern, no-nonsense. If they lived so long, she had definite mother material in her.

  Well, he’d certainly put enough father material in her for that to actually happen.

  Which was kind of terrifying: Kip. A father.

  No, he did not want to think about that right now.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Go ahead. You were saying?” He folded his hands and composed himself like an attentive student.

  She studied him for a moment until she was certain he wasn’t making light of things.

  She spun the mounted mirror over and directed Kip’s image at himself, which he didn’t really appreciate. She said, “A mirror turns quiet voices blaring, and can blind you to the whole you by distracting you with details. It breaks you into imperfect pieces of a body rather than integrate you into a whole person. A mirror pushes its will into you, Kip. So if you think a mirror only reflects, if you think a mirror shows you the way you really are, you won’t realize what it’s doing, and you won’t push back. You are that kid from Rekton, Kip.”

  “‘Aren’t,’ you mean,” he said. “Sorry, not important. You just misspoke. Go on.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t misspeak.”

  Yes, you did. He flashed a quick smile. It really didn’t matter.

  She rolled her eyes skyward. “Did you really have to give him a loud silent yes, too?!”

  “You know,” Kip said, “I usually feel smarter than this. And I don’t usually feel all that smart.”

  She took his hands, and she was the comfort of a lantern in darkness. “You are that wounded, fearful child stuck in the closet with the rats.” Her voice cracked momentarily, and lightning of her righteous wrath at what had been done to him flashed in the distance, but she went on. “And you are this man. And I have seen you…” Her eyes filled with tears, but she ignored them. “Kip, when you bring that little boy’s heart and his compassion for brokenness into your rule, I have never seen anyone so powerful.” She wet dry lips, mastering herself. “I think you owe that child abandoned in a locked closet with rats something, Kip. That boy? That boy you’ve poured scorn on, who you called a fat fuck? He survived because he fought. I think you owe him more than your contempt.”

  His cheeks were wet, but he whispered, “I stopped fighting.”

  The Guile memory was a curse. That memory was so clear when he thought about it that he tried to never think of it at all. Huddled in a ball on the floor, back slick with blood, exhausted, starving—Orholam, he hadn’t even been fat yet then, had he?—the bodies of rats he’d smashed as he’d thrown his body this way and that, crushing some few of them. Those he’d crushed writhed while dying and were devoured first, as easier food. The pure disgust—rats!—had come first, and long since been scoured away. All that mattered in the end was that they not get his fingers, his toes, his groin, his face. All else he lacked the strength to protect.

  He’d despised himself for his weakness. For flailing like a madman and having nothing left. For not being able to fight. For not having the courage to tear open one of the rats he’d killed to drink its blood to wet his parched lips.

  At least not until it was too late, and the dead ones had already been devoured.

  He was powerless, and it was his own fault. He’d known what he needed to do, and he hadn’t done it.

  And the rats would be back.

  Tisis said, “Every slave stops fighting the chain. But some run every time the chains do come off. And you’re here, Kip. And you have friends. And you trust people. And you love. Are those the hallmarks of the weak and contemptible?”

  “Not… so much,” he admitted.

  “So what I’m looking forward to seeing is you pushing back at that old distorted mirror. I can’t wait to see you repay that hurting boy for his gifts to you by finally bringing your piercing wisdom back to that child. Mirrors break us into pieces because that’s how the eye focuses: one detail at a time, a prism splitting our whole experience, but the heart can be a second prism brought to the first, bringing that which is split back into a whole. So maybe it’s no coincidence that the Seven Satrapies need healing and reintegration as much as you do. Maybe it’s a sign that you’re exactly the one to do it.”

  Kip swallowed. “Ah… so that’s what you meant when you said you believed in me? Got it. That is a little different.”

  “Kip, I believe you’re him.”

  She’d never said it aloud, and he’d never dared to ask.

  He looked into her hopeful eyes, and now he saw reflected there a man made whole. He breathed her in, and she filled his lungs with confidence. She was countering lies, defying contempt—I’m the boy who felt destined for something greater, because I was. She wanted to know if all her efforts were actually making a difference: healing fissures, helping him accept boy and man both.

  “I believe it with all my heart,” she said. “And that’s why I want you to stay.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The satrapies are finished. The empire’s lost. But not everything is. These people need you. No one can lead them like you can. You can’t abandon them in their hour of need. And if you stay—I mean, Lucidonius was able to sweep from Paria through all nine kings. You could do the same!”

  “He faced nine kings who hated each other. We’d be facing them united.”

  “To all his people, the Chromeria is the big enemy. We don’t know that Koios will be able to keep his people united after the Chromeria falls. To his people, they’re the big enemy, his people aren’t going to care about us way out here. We can rebuild. We’d still send messengers to the Chromeria, inviting anyone who wants to flee to join us.”

  “He can immobilize drafters. We have to figure out how to counter that, or the only way to fight would be to send wave after wave of fighters into his wights like grist into a mill until they’re exhausted. It’d take a hundred thousand men to have a chance. Maybe twice that.
Most would die, even in victory. I’d rather lose.”

  “You’ll lose anyway,” she said.

  It felt like a stab in the back. “I thought you believed in me,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to the White King. They’ll kill you, Kip. The Chromeria. Even if you win. Even if you save them all and swear to leave the very next day. You won’t live to see that day. My lord, my love. It doesn’t matter what good you do them. This, too, is your inheritance: no one trusts a Guile bearing gifts. You, coming with only a fraction of your army, but in all your power? They’ll fear you, and hate you. Zymun? Your grandfather? The Order? Even the Magisterium. They’ve all killed for power—and you’ll be the biggest threat yet. My love, they’ll murder you. They’ll believe they must.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “This is who I am,” Kip said, and he raised his hands, fingers arched, stiff. “I used to think I was all thumbs. Turns out I was wrong. I’m all claws.” Turtle-Bear.

  She saw the look on his face, and he saw her world crumble. “Kip, my love, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s not your fault, it’s not your doing. It’s not about you.”

  But her face contorted in grief, and she sank to her knees. “Kip. Kip. This will be the death of you.”

  “O my love,” Kip said gently. He pulled her to her feet and embraced her, just breathing in the scent of her, cherishing the comfort of her weight against him.

  The next words had to be pushed up a hill before they could roll down the other side, unstoppable, but they had to be said. In the years to come, she would need to know that he had chosen this, clear-eyed, if not unafraid. He said, “My love. Haven’t we always known? This was never going to end with me alive. After all, I am the Lightbringer.”

  Chapter 40

  The door to Karris’s rooms opened, and Samite strode in. “Hey, we missed you at training this morn…” She trailed off as she saw Karris’s haggard face and puffy eyes, and then she swore. “Is there some new emergency the boys at the door don’t know about? Because I swear to Orholam, if you’re slipping back into some weak-ass limp-wristed bureaucrat’s skin, I am going to kick your ass so far you need a long-lens to find it.”

  Samite was the trainer now, Karris thought, the ghost of a smile touching her lips. “Not a new emergency, no. An old one.”

  Late in the bundle of papers, where Karris had breezed past it at first, was a bit from Orea Pullawr. It had been a brief conversation Orea and Karris had had years ago with each other, but here anonymized and left for the benefit of all the future Whites:

  ‘I’ve left you a mess.’

  ‘You are the White. It’s your prerogative,’ her strong right hand said.

  ‘A prerogative I’ve invoked far too often. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have failed.’

  And that was it. That was the entirety of her note. The occasion for those words originally had been when Orea’s health had been failing and she’d had to take sometimes to her wheeled chair. It had been an actual mess, too trivial to summon the room slaves for, when Karris was simply standing there. She’d always liked making herself useful, so she’d cleaned it up.

  That Orea had left that conversation in this missive without even noting her own name—Karris recognized it by the hand alone, but future Whites (if there were any) would have to guess who’d left this, so the exchange was generalized from one White to her successors: ‘Clean up my messes. May you do better than I did. I’m sorry.’

  She’d tried to say it to Karris before, saying something like, ‘I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me,’ when Karris had no idea what forgiveness Orea could possibly want from her, or for what offense.

  But now she knew, and it upended all her feelings for the old woman and spilled them on the floor in a tangle.

  “Hey! Hey! Where’d you go?” Samite demanded. She snapped her fingers in front of Karris. “Uh-uh,” she said. “You don’t get to retreat. You don’t pull back. Remember who you are, woman!”

  Karris’s eyes refocused, but she shook her head and scoffed. “Put your thumb right on it, didn’t you?”

  “No, no, no,” Samite said. “You’re not doing this.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve just learned.”

  “I don’t give two shits what you’ve learned,” Samite said. “I’m worried about what you’ve forgotten.”

  “Sami, it’s all worse than we thought. I thought it was bad when I killed Gav…” Karris started to open the letters to show her old friend, then stopped. “No, I can’t,” she said aloud, surprised that their rules still bound her inside, though she should respect them as little as Gavin did.

  But no. She couldn’t tell Samite. She couldn’t tell anyone. This was her burden to carry. Her stomach twisted. She was alone, as she’d been alone since Gavin had been taken.

  “Karris,” Samite said softly, and in that word, not her title, not her full name, Karris saw the broad warrior lift off the mantle of Trainer Samite and become again her dear friend Sami.

  “Thank you for standing for me the other night,” Karris said. “I never said thank you for that, for standing watch. It was most ungracious of me.”

  Her friend waved it away with her one good hand. “Karris, do you remember Aghilas?”

  Karris did. He’d been the fastest scrub in their cohort, and one of the strongest, too, but he hadn’t made it into the Blackguard.

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  “I don’t have time for—come on, Sami.”

  “Before you and I met, I’d trained for years. Years to ready myself to attempt the Blackguard training. I’d spent hours every day making my body my slave. I still wasn’t nearly the best, short reach, not naturally gifted, not fast, merely strong—and not even that strong, compared with most of the boys. I already felt resentful of the others, to tell you the truth.

  “And then you showed up: this slip of a girl. Light-skinned, soft, pretty in all the wrong ways, good drafter with two colors but didn’t have a clue how to use them in fighting yet. You were weak, slow, had no endurance. You had no business trying to be a Blackguard. We all knew you’d only been given the chance because you were noble-born.

  “Truth is, Karris, I hated you. I was afraid they were gonna bend the rules to let you in.”

  “Well, you didn’t need to worry about that. They kicked my ass—”

  “And they did.”

  “What?” Karris asked, eyes tightening.

  “They bent the rules. Maybe broke them, depending on whether you go by the rules as written, or as observed.”

  “They what?!” Karris asked. “They did not. I earned my—”

  “You shocked the hell out of us, all of us,” Samite went on, and Karris shut up, if only to hear the rest of this slander. “I remember the trainers looking at each other, while me and the other scrubs were waiting for you to finish one of our runs. You were a lap behind us all, and you puked—while running—and you broke stride as your stomach heaved, but you never stopped.”

  “I puked every day for a while there,” Karris said, her mind casting back to what she’d always thought of as the best worst days of her life.

  “You remember that day when the physickers came and yanked you out of training?”

  As if Karris could forget it. Quietly, she said, “I thought I was done.”

  “You should’ve been,” Samite said. “I know that now. Trainers tell each other things, not just the rules as written and what to let slide, but also how to keep kids from getting dead. You’re lucky you didn’t die. It’s because of kids like you that they checked our piss every day. You remember that? We submitted to it thinking it was a test of whether we could stand awkwardness and humiliation, but it wasn’t. A kid stops pissing regular, and then it comes out bloody—that kid’s gonna kill himself from exertion.”

  “The physickers told me it was pretty bad,” Karris admitted.

  “When you were gone, Trainer Tzeddig stopped us and asked two q
uestions.”

  “Oh? I never heard about that.” The trainer had asked enough trick questions to make every scrub paranoid.

  “She asked us, if we had to pair up that day and fight in teams, fighting to the death against the others, who we would like to have on our side: you or Aghilas. We all said Aghilas, of course—except Aghilas, who tried to be smart.”

  Aghilas had never been as funny as he thought. “She whack him upside the head?” Karris asked.

  “She whacked him upside the head,” Samite said with a smile. “Then she said we’d have to be fools not to choose Aghilas, that he was one of the most naturally gifted athletes she’d ever seen. He was fast, strong, and quick with a dozen weapons, or without any at all. Then she asked us if, in a few years, we had to go to war, who we’d want to have fight beside us: you or Aghilas.”

  Karris realized momentarily that she hadn’t thought about her damned papers in several minutes, but she was enrapt.

  “Some of us figured this had to be the trick part, so we said you instead of the obvious answer, but when she demanded why, none of us could say. You could see the traps opening up in front of your feet with that woman and still never avoid them. I hope I can be half the trainer she was.”

  “Well, what’d she say?” Karris demanded.

  “Do you know why you piss blood when you’re killing yourself from overexertion?”

  “What?” she asked, not following.

  “Your body panics. It starts devouring its own muscles.”

  “That sounds… unhelpful, when one’s already overexerted.”

  “Trainer Tzeddig pointed after you, where the physickers were carrying you, and—” Samite’s voice cracked with sudden emotion. She cleared her throat, but her eyes brimmed. “And she said, ‘That girl Karris has all of two muscles to rub together, and she wants to be here with you so bad she’s literally pissing them down her leg. She is working harder than anyone here. That goddam slip of a girl is working herself to death. Aghilas, do you know how good you could be if you worked half that hard? I don’t, and I don’t think you ever will, either. Last week we rigged the race so you couldn’t do better than second—and you gave up and didn’t finish in the top ten. You haven’t stopped complaining since. You know who’s never complained?’” Samite shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Orholam’s stones, I remember it like it was yesterday. That woman was magnificent when she was chewing our asses.”