The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Anything, anything to prove it should belong to you?” Kip asked.

  “You have no reason to believe I’ll rule well.”

  “I believe you’ll find reasons to rule well.”

  Andross’s face reddened.

  “No, no, I know I seem like I’m being flippant. And, fine, I sort of was, because I know how you love that, but mostly I’m not.” Kip took a breath. “There are things in this life that I need. Things that I can hardly function without: My wife, a few close friends, hard work, the camaraderie of shared purpose, things to figure out. Some leadership, because I’m pretty good at it and I chafe under incompetence. But I don’t need power. I don’t need every eye to be on me every time I walk into a room. I don’t need strangers to know who I am or be in awe of me. I wouldn’t give up those first things in order to be the most important man in history. Because that man will also be the most isolated man in history. I’ve been isolated, and it’s not for me. Not at all. If I were declared Lightbringer, could I make it work? I mean, you sort of get to define the job as you go, right? Yeah, maybe I could, with a lot of help. I might even be a good Lightbringer. But I don’t need it. You? You do.”

  “I’m the best one for the job!”

  “So what’s your problem?” Kip asked.

  “I didn’t earn it! I didn’t beat the overwhelming odds. I didn’t show the magical genius. I didn’t die twice. You did! We fulfilled all the prophecies—not me. I’ve spent my life preparing for this, and now I’ve proved myself to everyone except the people who matter—the son and grandson I’ll defraud in taking it. How can I accept a crown I didn’t earn?”

  Kip gave him a sidelong look. “Maybe… rule as if it’s a gift, and not something you’re owed?”

  Andross’s temper flared for a moment, then cooled. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with the power you’re giving me.”

  “I know,” Kip said. “And hell, in a month? I’ll probably be kicking myself for this. You played a long game, and Orholam folded on His last card and gave you the victory. Now play the longest game. You’re the Lightbringer. Now be the greatest Lightbringer anyone could imagine. Don’t just win. Live victoriously.”

  Andross grew thoughtful, then scowled. “You know,” he said, “I can’t tell if you’re wise beyond your years or just a dumb kid full of slogans.”

  “Me, either,” Kip said.

  Andross cracked a smile even as he shook his head. “Definitely gonna have to exile you somewhere.”

  “Somewhere nice?” Kip asked.

  “No, just far away,” Andross said.

  “I could use a good wedding trip with my bride.”

  “Oh, Orholam have mercy.”

  “Also I need a job. I don’t think I have any money.”

  “So it begins,” Andross said darkly.

  “Actually, I might’ve also put the family on the hook for a few expenses in Blood Forest. And everywhere else.”

  “What?” Andross asked. “And when were you planning to tell me this?”

  “Why bring up a few little debts when we were all going to die?”

  “How ‘little’ are we talking?”

  “The Malargos family will have to help. And maybe some bankers. Definitely some bankers. Maybe all the bankers.”

  Andross said, heading for the door, “Hellmount’s good for a honeymoon, I hear.”

  “Oh, grandfather,” Kip said, stopping him before he went out. “I heard from the messengers that you also brought light to my people at the siege of Green Haven and saved the city. And definitely saved my friends. Thank you.”

  Andross stared at him for a few moments, then nodded and left.

  Alone, Kip wondered if he’d done something very, very good or very, very bad. He turned to head out the other door and saw his father watching him. “How long have you been there?” Kip asked.

  “You know,” Dazen said, fiddling with the black eye patch he wore now, “when I was kid, when Sevastian died, I felt like I’d suddenly lost not just my brother but also my father. Growing up, I longed for someone who would mentor me, tell me how to do things—instead of just judging me when I failed. My father’s work was always everything to him. The scraps went to Gavin, and I got nothing. I missed out with you—”

  “Not exactly your fault,” Kip said. “You didn’t know I existed for most of my life.”

  “I’m not talking about those years. I mean since I found you.”

  “C’mon, you’ve been a bit busy saving the world.”

  “That was my father’s excuse for all the terrible shit he did, too,” Dazen said, “but…” Dazen cleared his throat. Adjusted his eye patch. “I mean, I see you do what you just did with your grandfather, and, Kip, I’m so damn in awe of you…” His eye misted up, but he kept going. “And… I’m so damn sorry. You needed a father. And now I’m too late.” And suddenly tears were streaming down his cheek and his breath was strained. “I missed my chance. You’re a man already now. And a fine one,” he said, getting control of himself. “A better man than I ever was. And I want to be proud of you—but you did it all without me. How can I take pride in what you’ve done without my help? You didn’t need me. To do all this, you didn’t need me.”

  Kip squirmed. He had needed his father, not just in the early years but since then. He’d not meant this to go to casting guilt, but he didn’t want to rush in and say anything untrue to try to brush it away, either. The wound was real. He didn’t blame Dazen, but it still ached.

  In many ways, he barely knew his father, and that very thought was edged with razor desolation.

  Dazen was quiet for a long while, and Kip—as he never could have before—filled the silence not with words but with listening.

  Finally, Dazen took a deep breath and said, “Kip, when I didn’t deserve it, Orholam gave me a second chance—maybe a thousand-and-second chance. I don’t deserve it with you, either, but… Kip, if it’s not too late, can we start over? Can I try again at being your dad?”

  Chapter 149

  When a protocol officer had questioned where Gavin should be seated in the overflowing great hall (the whole Dazen thing would be dealt with later, Andross had decided), Andross Guile had given one of the most Andross Guile responses Dazen had ever heard: “The sun is not dimmed by the presence of other stars in the sky, nor even by the moon.”

  All in white with gold brocade, Dazen was seated on the platform. He was quite the subject of fascination, of course, and the marveling that he was still alive had already started to turn to what his new position might be. Clearly, he couldn’t be Prism again. He couldn’t draft. But no one expected him to do nothing. Certainly Andross didn’t; he’d already started to float ideas about how to use his son’s reputation and charisma to stitch the satrapies back together.

  But every one of their meetings thus far had been public. They hadn’t had to speak about the long night, or Sevastian.

  For the moment, Dazen was quite content to be simply the White’s husband, and he was happy to sit at her right hand rather than her at his. She was resplendent in her whites, but she’d dyed her hair from its harsh platinum white, now, back to her natural auburn. He loved it.

  Andross had contrived some last-minute duty that kept Kip busy while everyone else was being announced and seated. Rather than being ushered in a side door at the front, though, in the hush of the hall, the young man came in from the back with Tisis. He walked with his head ducked, trying to be inconspicuous on the long walk up the center aisle, chagrined at being late.

  Kip had learned a lot in the last few years, but he could still be charmingly naïve.

  He had no nobles under his own authority, and all his own soldiers were outside the great hall, so perhaps he really hadn’t expected anything.

  The Blood Foresters stood for him first. Then the Tyreans, who counted him one of their own. His Mighty, seated in the front row as if family, stood, too.

  Then, in singles around the hall, drafters stood. They knew what he’d done.
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  With help, King Ironfist (still ‘king’ technically, until some formalities were worked out) stood. He gave Kip the old Blackguard salute.

  All the Blackguards followed suit.

  And then everyone stood, from the High Luxiats down.

  Dazen and Karris stood late in order to let Kip know that no one was standing because they were following their lead.

  The youngest Guile looked humbled, honored, as his eyes went from face to face and he recognized friends young and old. Kip and Tisis embraced Dazen and Karris and took their places beside them.

  One of Kip’s Mighty, Winsen, coughed loudly. Suddenly there were gasps throughout the room, and then laughter spread fast on its heels. Those on the platform had to turn around to see it: at the front of the room, next to the staid official banners of Houses Guile and White Oak and Malargos, and Andross’s banners and the Lightbringer’s banner, and the banners for the various satrapies, a very ad hoc, homemade-looking banner unfurled. It appeared to be a child’s drawing of a turtle with a shock of hair on its head and a goofy grin on its face, with big bear claws and wings of fire.

  Seeing it, Kip immediately blushed and buried his face in his hands.

  The audience roared with laughter and then cheered.

  While a steward rushed to take the Turtle-Bear banner down, Kip turned to the Mighty and drew his hand across his throat.

  They all made very unconvincing shrugs: ‘Who? Us?’

  Dazen couldn’t stop smiling. In some ways, they were still just a bunch of damn kids.

  But they loved one another, and that was priceless.

  Naturally, Andross Guile waited until the furor had died down, and then waited some more. But once he’d begun, with all the usual pomp and spectacle Dazen expected from such a ceremony—the magic, the music, the processionals, a surprisingly brief prayer by High Luxiat Amazzal—the ascension ceremony was short and to the point.

  The Colors and representatives for each of the Seven Satrapies and the six remaining High Luxiats (one had belonged to the Order and was dead) each knelt before Andross and swore their fealty to him as Prism, emperor, and Lightbringer. Everyone else in the hall was allowed to take the oath from their own seats.

  Andross had moved fast in these first few days. Indeed, not just fast; he’d moved like a man who’d been making a list for decades of all that would need to be done.

  It wasn’t impatience, either. Amid all the work of cleanup and reconstruction and burial and immolation of enemy corpses, there was still the euphoria of their improbable victory. Only the war was on people’s tongues. Lesser stories—such as vast banking families being given ultimatums, and certain troublemakers being thrown in prison, new laws curtailing slavery and the capture of fugitives, restructuring in the Magisterium—these didn’t even need to be hidden: they simply weren’t that interesting in comparison to all else that had happened.

  Andross had gathered the Spectrum and High Magisterium and suggested a sentence of death or bereavement (a term he claimed he’d dug up somewhere, but he may have simply invented it) by the Blinding Knife for the Blood Robe drafters and wights who’d been captured. The suggestion was unanimously approved.

  Bereavement was, he claimed, what had happened to Gavin when he’d been stabbed with the Blinding Knife and had lost his magical powers but not his life. Andross planned to use the opportunity to figure out the exact mechanics of the blade: Did it matter who held it? Did what the wielder wished to have happen to the condemned change what the blade did?

  Karris’s young luxiats—whose ranks were suddenly swelling by the day—were reclaiming lost knowledge, including some from books older scholars swore previously had left entire pages blank. Dazen didn’t know if this was a reclamation against the old workings of black luxin, or if Andross was instructing his forgers among the scholars to insert his own preferred teachings.

  But the crux of it was that the luxiats claimed that before Vician’s Sin, retiring drafters at the Freeing simply retired. They were Freed, not of their lives but of their bonds of service—and also their magical gifts, as Dazen had been.

  Except that some also died, judged by Orholam Himself, it was said. So drafters, never certain what they would receive at their judgment day, would still approach it with fear and trembling. Sun Day would remain a somber and holy occasion, but also one filled with joy for the righteous.

  So they claimed. The world would find out soon enough.

  Dazen had only begged his father to wait a little while. He had an intuition he wanted to explore.

  Andross had granted it, saying the scholars could use the extra time anyway.

  In the meantime, the Blood Robe drafters were held in mirrored cells or darkness or in rooms carefully draped with colors they couldn’t draft. Andross hadn’t even suggested utilizing the dungeons Dazen had crafted and been held in, and Dazen certainly didn’t want to think of them ever again.

  Surprisingly enough, Dazen rather enjoyed all the pageantry, though most of his enjoyment came from the fact that he wasn’t the person on whom the entire ceremony depended for once.

  Then Andross stood and spoke. “We have endured much, and we have many labors before us. Changes are coming. I shall not restore to us some mythical golden age from the past. The only golden age open to us lies before us. If these satrapies are to endure, they must rest upon a foundation of justice. This will be hard, for many of us have suffered such grievous injustices that we’ve allowed ourselves to inflict injustices on others, as if we each were impartial judges who happen to rule in our own favor, always. This coming age will bear great fruit, but we will have to till the rocky soil of our own hearts to plant that fruit so that our ch—so that our children and our children’s children may enjoy it.”

  He pursed his lips, and then, in a less practiced voice that suggested he was diverging from the speech he’d memorized, he said, “Some of us have done things in this war… even done things to win this war for which we must repent. I foremost among us.”

  Dazen had more than a merely healthy cynicism for his father’s every act and word, but this hit like a right cross. Confession? Contrition? From Andross Guile? Was this another put-on? Another trap?

  But from where Dazen was seated behind the old man, he hadn’t been able to see his face, couldn’t tell if this was just another game, another manipulation, and already Andross was back to his scripted remarks.

  “This is the project we begin. As we fought together, we will work together, all of us: luxiat and noble and drafter and farmer and fisherman and smith. We will mourn together, and we will celebrate our victories and Orholam’s. We will bind up the wounds of these Seven Satrapies, and we will make them stronger, and more just and more honorable than they were before. By the grace of Orholam, despite our many losses, the list of our allies and friends has grown in these dark hours, and those who sacrificed to serve in our darkest hours shall not go unrecognized in the light.”

  Andross was a plain speaker, given to sentences too long for many people to follow, and it wasn’t the kind of speech designed to draw forth applause, but it did anyway. These people needed it.

  “Oh. There is one other matter,” Andross said with obvious relish and a smile. “The much-delayed official wedding of my son to Karris White Oak. This will begin tomorrow. The party will continue for a week. And as a special additional pleasure, my grandson, Kip, will soon celebrate his own long-delayed official wedding to Tisis Malargos as soon as her family arrives. As we’ll be celebrating already, I’d like to join my ascension celebration to their parties. Naturally,” Andross Guile said, “you are all invited.”

  He smiled, and the years sloughed off him as the people roared their applause. He actually looked more than surprised; he looked delighted, as if the acclamation was soaking long-dry soil in his heart.

  Dazen, obedient token and good son, stood and waved, to even louder applause. Kip copied him from across the aisle and got his own applause—just as loud.

  Then K
arris stood, and then Tisis, and the applause grew louder still.

  Dazen grinned at Kip, and saw his son had the same fool grin he did.

  Must run in the family.

  “Not a bad speech, old man,” Dazen said after all those on the platform had recessed off to one of the side rooms.

  “Felia wrote it,” Andross said. “Thirty-eight years ago. Not all of it, of course. But she told me to give them some reason to cheer at the end.” He pursed his lips. “She should be here.”

  “She did all she could to make it so the rest of us are,” Dazen said.

  Andross expelled a slow breath at that. He seemed different. They walked together out a rear exit of the hall. They were about to go separate ways, but now they paused.

  The new Lightbringer said, “Kip was right, you know: I’m the right person for this time. I know the personalities, the old feuds, the true stories behind family myths, the economies and the familial ties. With help from more handsome and tactful faces, I can bind up these satrapies as no one else could hope to. I know what can be broken and what can only be bent slowly. I can make these lands better—safer, stronger, richer, fairer, more just, more open, more free. I have perhaps ten years left to my mortal span, twenty if I’m disciplined and fortunate, and I will make this land endure—not fall apart under a weaker personality or less capable hands.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Dazen asked.

  “Son, you know how I view vows.”

  “Yes.”

  “This office? I vow to do my best to be worthy of it.”

  Dazen nodded his thanks and turned to go.

  “Oh, and one last thing. Not that it will mean anything to you,” Andross said to his back. His voice lowered. “Not that it should. It shouldn’t. But I’m grateful for both of you. Proud of you.”

  Fists tightening, Dazen barely suppressed the urge to spin and punch his old man in the face.