The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “I think that unlikely,” Orholam said. “But go now. Go find your answers, if you dare.”

  Gavin wiped the soles of his feet clean, rubbed his hands together, and breathed, breathed. He said, “A lack of daring has never been my problem.”

  Then he sprinted toward the gap.

  And he leapt.

  And he, Gavin Guile, who had fallen so far, only to climb so high; Gavin Guile the indomitable, the dauntless; Gavin Down but Never Defeated; Gavin Guile soared through the air as the winds plucked at him and tried to turn him from his purpose—and he landed safely on the other side, rolling once and then coming to his feet.

  He stood and whooped, recklessly baring his teeth at the gate so few had even seen.

  It was simple gold, adorned in a spare Ptarsu style, latched but not locked. There were no boon stones here for having made the jump. Perhaps finishing the pilgrimage was supposed to be reward enough. Orholam lay beyond, supposedly.

  Gavin pulled the gate open.

  A membrane hovered in the air between him and the last stair: the lock to which Grinwoody had claimed only Gavin himself could be the key. The test only Gavin himself could pass.

  Without hesitating, Gavin pushed into it. It bubbled and clung and gripped, seeming to catch on the fragments of his dead power like splinters catching on a wool tunic, but he pushed through, and soon stood gasping on the other side.

  Then, grinning his fierce broken-toothed grin, victorious, he sprinted up the stairs two at a time to his destiny. Or his doom. Whichever.

  Chapter 71

  ~Andross the Red~

  18 years ago. (Age 48.)

  Felia says, “The grammar here can be parsed half a dozen ways, as usual with the Scriptivist’s prophecies, and that’s without what was redacted. Worse, I’ve seen translations of it before. ‘Breaking a great rock, the black fires of hell, on earth once more unleashed / did unleash / shall unleash / unleashes the…’”

  “Does it help us?”

  “I would have said no, if I’d known what it would cost us for you to get it from that girl…” And suddenly, she is blinking back tears. Her jaw is tight and she looks away. But then she is suddenly fierce. “Tell me. You never told me. Three weeks you were on a ship, coming home, and I can’t stop smelling you, as if her scent would linger so long.”

  What is this? “You gave me permission. Explicitly.”

  “I didn’t know it would feel like this!”

  Felia is better than this. Next she’ll be asking for information she doesn’t want to know.

  She hits my chest with an overhand blow that must hurt her more than it hurts me. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, Andy! Don’t you dare!”

  I go flat, a calm to her storm. I drop the paper on the table. I wave a hand to the slaves attending us in the open garden to begone, and a look to Grinwoody to let him know to tell them that if the others eavesdrop, they’ll be beaten and sold to the galleys or the mines. Then I turn my attention back to my love.

  “Ask what you will,” I say. “But ask only what you want answered.”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Yes,” I answer immediately. I had thought that was implicit.

  She swallows. “Damn you.” She takes a few breaths, but I can’t read whether she’s regained herself. On her head be it. She will get only the truth of me, as I have sworn.

  “Did you have to?”

  “That was our deal,” I say.

  “I know what our deal was. I’m asking you to say it.”

  “I deemed it the best course.”

  “And how hard was it to convince you, Andy? I know you had many lovers before our marriage. Are you bored with me? I know that since Sevastian died I’ve not been the eager lover I once—”

  “Stop! This had nothing to do with you, or that.” I take a breath. There were deeper wells of suffering here than I was aware of. But her anger triggers something at my core, burning and furious.

  I beat down the flames. As I so often do.

  “Flirtation wasn’t enough,” I say. “I gently floated bribery, but her family is wealthy and she loved her position at the library. There was nothing I could give her. And she was so young and innocent, there was nothing to use as blackmail. I didn’t have the time to hire agents to put pressures on those she loved, or the security that I could do so without her simply reporting it. So I seduced her.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” she practically spits.

  I go cold. “It had been more than a month since I last shared your bed, and that had been a perfunctory goodbye, not the desperate lovemaking of a woman likely to be driven mad by jealousy, my dear. Yes, I enjoyed the release.”

  “‘Release,’” she says. I used the word to imply that the sex had been a mere physical process, but somehow she turns it into an indictment of our whole marriage. As if I want to be released from her. From my vows.

  But I’ve already said more than I would’ve, were I fully in control. “Anything else?” I growl.

  “Did she enjoy it? How was it? For her. For you.” Felia has retreated into cold bitch.

  I take a deep breath, and then another, until the red recedes, until I can see her with compassion again. My Felia. She has been so alone, and everything she loves has been threatened. First Sevastian taken. Then Gavin’s growing distance. Now this thing we must do with Dazen. And now me.

  Felia is afraid she’ll lose me, too.

  “Did I give her the first orgasms of her life? Did I turn her into a wanton who craved my cock like the desert-parched crave water? Did she wake me in the morning with her mouth hot on me? Did she beg me for acts that you’ve avoided since soon after we wed? Did she pursue me as you have not in years? Is that what you want to ask? Why don’t you ask this question, instead, and ask it of yourself: in the pursuit of my goals, was I ever a man to take half measures?”

  “Never,” she breathes, unblinking, but her hands have gone to her stomach, like a man with a gut wound in war, wanting to know how bad it is, needing to know, but not daring to find out.

  “Why don’t you ask what you really want to know? Did I hold her afterward? Did I let her sleep with her head on my shoulder in your place?” All the questions slip from my grasp like hounds eager for the hunt. I can’t bear for her to be dishonest in this. Felia doesn’t care about the mechanics of the thing, where we’d fornicated or how many times I’d brought the girl to the storms and the rain. She wants to know if she can be replaced.

  The love of my life is fierce, and she is bleeding, and that’s my fault as much as it is Orholam’s and Orea’s and Ulbear’s.

  “Fee,” I say gently. “Let there be no darkness between us. Having decided the bed was the only battlefield by which I could seize our prize, you’re damn right I didn’t tiptoe over those marriage oaths you released me from. Doing that could have meant I did it all for nothing. Do you want to hear how I alternated between mumming the masterful, attentive lover such as she’ll never know again in her life and the guilt-wrenched husband who needed to go back to his wife and children, just so that she was ever desperate for me and ever fearful to lose me? Do you want to know every step by which I isolated her from her family and friends so that when it came time to betray them and her duties, she was happy to do it, if only it meant I would stay for another few weeks? And how when she gave me the scrolls, I left that very night, with no explanation at all, doubtless destroying her—because my heart ached for you? You think that one awkward, arrhythmic virgin could displace you? You think she could be your equal in the bedchamber or—”

  “She’s half my age, and hasn’t borne three children, and as you said, I’ve not been—”

  “Do you think I’m a man who could fall in love with a woman I don’t respect?” I snap.

  “A man will believe almost anything if one properly addresses what’s below his waist.”

  “You think in four weeks—”

  “The brief time makes it worse, Andross! I don’t fear that I’m not the e
qual of that poor girl; I fear I’m not the equal of your imagination. A man can’t fall in love at first sight with a woman; he falls in love with what he imagines she is. She is the canvas onto which he casts his hopes and dreams. And if the reports are right, this girl was a particularly lissome and nubile canvas indeed.”

  “What am I, seventeen?!”

  “Why, because men old enough to know better have never traded their aging wives for younger, stupider ones?!”

  “You know me too well for this. This is madness dressed up as fear. I’ve proven my troth a thousand times. You know about all the women who have tried to seduce me since we married. You know about the old lovers who’ve tried to ignite my interest again since I became the Red. I hold you in my eyes, Firuzeh Eszter Laleh Dariush. My Felia, my Felia Guile, how could I trade you? What kind of magic cunt would a woman have to have to even tempt me for an instant? From you? You! A woman who could be empress, should she will it? You think I would trade that girl’s gullibility, her weakness, for your strength?”

  But I still see fear in her eyes.

  “If you believe that,” I say, “you haven’t lost me, you’ve lost yourself.”

  She searches my eyes, for any falseness, I suppose. If I could play so many others so skillfully, so cruelly, could I not play her, too? I try to open my gaze to her, as we did when we were young, but I can only see red.

  After only a moment, I can see her gaze turn inward. “I don’t feel strong. Not anymore.”

  “You’re strong enough.”

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  I point and raise my voice. “Door’s that way.”

  It’s a slap in her face. She literally gasps. “Would you let me go? Easy as that? After all we’ve been through? All we’ve done?”

  “Letting you leave me would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But this is war, no matter that only you and I see it now. If you’re going to turn coward, I need to know before I trust you with my future and the world’s.”

  “I’m not strong enough—”

  “Strength is a choice. Courage is a habit. Unfortunately, cowardice is, too.”

  She looks me in the eye for the longest time. “We haven’t made love since you got back.”

  I raise my hands, palms up. Whose choice was that?

  But then I understand. Even this many years into our marriage, this new circumstance requires new responses: knowing her wounded, I’ve made overtures only. Hurting, reactive, she’d needed determined pursuit instead, while I had been certain that determined pursuit would get me an explosion of anger.

  It would’ve. I see that now.

  But perhaps we’d needed that to lance this boil. I hadn’t needed the fight, hadn’t wanted the mess and fallout of a huge argument, so I thought we didn’t need it. An error.

  She lets it go. Looks down. Turns back to the table.

  She says, “The worst of it is that I’ve seen copies of this scroll before. So at first I thought it was all for… nothing.”

  As she finishes the sentence, I walk up behind her. I breathe in her hair, looming over her, hands bracing on the table to either side of her, but I don’t touch her.

  She puts her hand on my sleeve to push open the cage of my arms, but I hold, and she doesn’t push hard.

  “I need your everything, Fee,” I tell her. “Without you, I am utterly alone in this world. A candle on a rampart with a storm coming. An ox dragged from the path by the weight of the empty yoke where his partner belongs. I can’t do the work set before us without you, heart of my heart. I need your wisdom. I need your kindness. Your perspicacity. Your hand on the oar. I need that strength in you that you’ve always underestimated. Your hidden ferocity.” I kiss her neck softly and am rewarded with a wave of gooseflesh. “You are my compass, my windlass, and my following wind. I need you like a singer needs a voice, like a tune needs a tempo, the chorus its pitch. I need you like a spearman needs his shield, the charger his harness, like the archer his bow. I need you like the crops need the sun, the dyer her colors, a drafter the light. I need you as the stars need the night. I need you as a poet needs words…”

  Still she says nothing.

  “And I want you. I want you like that night out in the vineyard at Stony Brook. I want you like that very unstealthy Sun Day Eve in our tent right next to your parents’. I want you like that morning atop the red tower with the luxiats banging on the door, wondering how it had been locked from outside.” My voice lowers below a whisper of warm breath in her ear. “God, how I want you…”

  The moment stretches, a privation and a punishment as I breathe the sweet scent of her. I long to grab her and take her, to make the decision for her that I can tell she doesn’t want to make. But I don’t.

  Never has our union been of a weaker partner bowing ever to the whims of the greater. Nor can it be. In all the world, she is the one flower I will not crush beneath the wheels of the great siege engine that is my will.

  She doesn’t move.

  The moment stretches beyond bearing.

  I won’t wait forever. I won’t see my need turned to weakness, my hunger turned to starvation. I pull back.

  But she snares my sleeve, and as a rider controls all the raging mass of a charging warhorse with a few narrow strips of leather, I am stopped.

  Is this a partnership after all?

  Sometimes I wonder if she is not far the greater of us.

  She doesn’t make me wait long enough to pursue the thought. She wants to know she has my full attention. She tilts her neck a little, to let her hair fall clear of the spot I kissed before.

  I know she needs this. I know she wants to punish me a little. I know she needs to feel my pursuit, but it irks me, too, to be bidden like a dog. I am Andross Guile.

  I shake my sleeve free of her grip and pull away, but before she can turn, before she can say a word, I grab her hair and kiss her roughly on the other side of her neck. Twisting her, I lift her onto the table and find her lips.

  In the tales, every time true lovers come together, it is with such fervency and effortless skill that the heavens and the earth are shaken and nothing can ever be the same. Such is a lie, of course, but it’s another expression of the central flaw of the glass that drama holds up to reality: everything depicted in that glass matters.

  In reality, lovemaking rarely changes things. Most isn’t even that memorable. In most lives, the heavens and the earth are shaken rarely by lovemaking, or perhaps never.

  But sometimes they are.

  Even with the ancestral gift of the Guile memory, the next minutes disappear in the turbulence of feelings unmoored from thought and pulled into the deep waters of passion.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, some time later.

  I had absolutely intended to tear her Ilytian lace undergarments to show her my unbridled desire for her. The roughness following that had… not been the result of a rational internal dialectic.

  “You can make it up to me—”

  “I can, huh?”

  “—but there’s nothing to forgive.”

  “What?” And then it hits me. “You hexed me?”

  “You can’t hold it against me after I confess it, right?”

  “Felia!” I don’t know whether to be mad or a little proud of her. She used to be such a stickler for the Chromeria’s rules.

  “I wanted you to be rougher,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “You could’ve asked.”

  “I wanted you to apologize afterward. And to have to make it up to me. Speaking of which, you still need to.”

  “Make it up to you?”

  “As in, right now. Carry me to our bed. I’m not sure I can walk.”

  * * *

  “There were a couple of words that have changed meaning in our own language since those earlier translations, but it was all solid scholarship. And then I saw this.” She points to a single point on the lambskin, right where the redaction begins.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

>   “A flaw in the leather? A stray quill mark? A stain of any kind from the intervening centuries.” She shrugs. “A good translator or copyist wouldn’t speculate, but only communicate what she knows. But when I look at the whole scroll, and see what’s missing and how, it seems to me that whoever redacted this was in a hurry here. There are numerous places where he or she was sloppy. These three dots here at the end of the line, if I guess where the lines of text fell, could be all that remains of the three horns of a ‘shin.’ This could be the foot of a ‘khaf sofit.’ It could as easily be ‘resh’ or ‘nun sofit’ or ‘tsadi sofit’ or ‘zayin’ or ‘dalet,’ but when I compare his earlier handwriting, his ‘shin’s were tall and elegant, and his ‘khaf sofit’s extended a little lower than the others.”

  She’s getting into the minutiae. But she sees my impatience.

  “If I’m right,” she says, “then this dot”—she lays a piece of parchment over the area and draws a delicate curve—“is part of an aspirate, a breath mark, as in the way ‘Or’holam’ was once written. It’s the right time period. Breath marks in punctuation only started falling out of scholarly usage some eighty years later, with Polyphrastes’ Dictions.”

  “But this mark obviously isn’t for ‘Orholam.’ You’ve discovered something else,” I say.

  “‘Discovered’ is too strong. I’ve ‘speculated.’”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll show you instead.” She lines up the parchment edge over the original scroll so that one edge just touches the breath mark and, farther down the absent line of text, the three dots of the missing ‘khaf sofit’ protrude. “You understand, what I’m doing here is by no means ‘translation.’ It’s a guess, not scholarship.”

  I say nothing, and she picks up a quill, shaved precisely as the ancient Parians shaved theirs to give the proper calligraphic quality to edges and curves. Her lettering is not only beautiful, it is also such a match for the Scriptivist’s handwriting that it would make a forger proud. The spacing and size of the letters is exact. She starts from the breath mark and moves left, unhurried. “There is nothing internally or in the other writings of the Scriptivist to support this,” she says as she draws the ‘khaf sofit,’ its three horns coming above the edge of her parchment to touch the three dots on the scroll. She finishes the phrase and steps back.