by Brent Weeks
Her elbow into his ribs would have been a gentle nudge if he hadn’t been flung into a wall last night.
“Ouch!” he said.
“Serves you right,” she said.
“So what’s the first rule of running away?” Gavin asked. The dawn was red, magnificent, and he had a beautiful woman in his arms. This seemed to be the best place in the whole world.
“You can’t bring logic or practicality into running away. Everyone knows that.”
“Ah. So we can go naked?”
“You’re impossible.”
“True, but on the other hand, you can’t say you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into.”
“No. That’s true.” She said nothing for a while, and Gavin thought she might have drifted off to sleep. What was the saying about a red sky in the morning? Something about storms coming? Thanks, Nature, I appreciate some omens with breakfast.
“I…” She sounded tentative. “I know that you’ve been trying, with Kip I mean. I heard you went to his testing.”
“While I should have been with you. Protecting you.”
“Protecting me? Don’t make me hurt you.” She rolled over, braced her head on an elbow. “You were exactly where you should have been.”
He said nothing.
“So… how’s it going?” she asked.
“He’s a good boy. Smart. My plan is working perfectly, so far. He has no idea how talented he is. I put him with the best young fighters in the world, and he’s hanging in there. By his fingernails, but hanging in.”
“He’s not that good of a fighter, is he?” Karris asked. “Without previous training?”
“No, he’s not. But he’s made the right friends, and he’s got the respect of the right people. They’ve made it possible for him to stay in—which is as much a success in my eyes as if he’d been the best fighter there. The point of him being in the Blackguard wasn’t to teach him to fight; it was misdirection; it was so he would measure himself against the best people rather than against the best whisperers and the best drafters.”
“You’re brilliant, and your plans always work, my lord husband, but that wasn’t what I was asking about and you know it. Misdirection indeed.”
He was glad she could catch him, glad to be known that much by this amazing woman—but not glad to be caught. His face fell. How’s it going? “He’s a good boy…”
She waited for the but. He could tell she knew it was coming.
“But he’s not my son.” It was a failure to speak it. “He grins this quirky grin and I see his father.”
“All of you Guile men have that grin. Even your father used to charm—”
“I killed Kip’s father, Karris. The boy is so desperate not to be an orphan he’s latched on to me. So desperate to please he’ll do anything I ask. What will he do if he ever finds out the truth? If he came after me, tried to kill me, who could call him the betrayer? I’m raising him and making him formidable, and the more he loves me, the more he’ll hate me when he finds out I’ve deceived him from the beginning. Through no fault of his own, he’s a viper, Karris. And the tighter I hold him to me, the more likely he is to bite me.”
Karris studied him quietly. “All true. All beside the point. You kept a secret for sixteen years from me. Keeping it from a boy who hasn’t known you and will never know your brother? Child’s play. What’s really going on?”
“Look, this soul-searching is deeply meaningful and everything, but what I did before, I’d do again. Karris, if you were falling off a cliff, and I could save only you or me, I’d save you. No question. Because even though I know that I can do things for the world that you can’t, I don’t care. I knew I should kill you, that you were the person most likely to destroy me. I knew that this… this was incredibly unlikely. But I love you, so I didn’t care. When I look at Kip? I’d make the rational choice. And I feel bad about that, but I feel bad when I send soldiers into war. I like Kip; I wouldn’t want to lose him. I want to get to know him more. But I don’t love Kip, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Someone pounded on the door. “Lord Prism.”
“One minute!” Gavin called.
Karris had an odd intensity in her eyes. “My lord, I was never helplessly in love with you—well, maybe when we were children I was. But in the years since, my feelings for you have come and gone. But my admiration for the man I saw you to be never changed. You twisted me in knots because the good man I felt you were—my Dazen—and the man I thought I knew you to be—Gavin—were so different. But I saw that you were the kind of man who was worthy of my love. I knew the man I would marry would be good and strong and gentle and honorable and smart and stubborn enough to handle me and… Hold on, I know there must be some other virtue,” she teased.
“Charming? Never forget charming.”
“Sometimes I could do with less of that,” she said. She got serious. “I chose you.”
“Ah, you couldn’t resist me.”
“Yes, yes I could,” she said flatly. “I chose you.”
“How startlingly… unromantic,” he said. He was reminded of her affinity for the blue virtues, despite being a red and a green, for thinking things through, for making the columns add up.
“I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.”
There was another knock on the door. “Lord Prism! The Spectrum is meeting right now, and they wish to speak with you. Lord Prism?”
“Dazen,” Karris said suddenly, “no matter what happens, I love you.” Something about her voice was raw, as if she were right on the edge.
Gavin had a sudden intuition. “Karris, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“I just—”
“What did the Third Eye tell you?”
Silence. He’d hit it; he could tell.
Karris moved to get up, but Gavin grabbed her hand. “Karris, please…”
She looked back at him, then looked away. “I’ll tell you, but I’m not telling you anything else no matter what you say, understood?”
“Understood,” Gavin said. He grimaced, but he knew Karris when she got stubborn.
“She hedged, of course, said she doesn’t see everything perfectly…”
“The Third Eye, with less than helpful help? Yes, I’m familiar with—”
“She told me when you’re going to die,” Karris said in a rush. Then she stood and threw a robe around her shoulders. “Now get up, lazybones, we’ve got a long day ahead of us.” She smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes.
Chapter 105
“I lured you here under false pretenses,” Andross Guile said as Kip came into his dark cabin. The Red had of course taken the captain’s cabin, and though he’d put curtains on the windows, it wasn’t nearly as pitch dark as his own apartments back at the Chromeria. Kip had forgotten to soak up superviolet light before coming in, so he was at the mercy of the dim light and his ears. But Luxlord Guile seemed to be in unusually good spirits, and that put Kip on his guard. “I don’t want to play a game with you. I want to apologize,” Andross said.
Kip remembered the glasses he carried, and put the sub-red on. It didn’t help that much. “For what?” he asked. He could think of a dozen things for which the old monster should apologize, but he couldn’t imagine the man apologizing for any of them.
“For trying to have you killed.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Kip asked.
“Believe me, I thought you did owe me an apology for refusing to die. But this is me apologizing to you.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Kip said.
Outlined against the thin light coming beneath one curtain and glowing in sub-red, Kip saw Andross Guile tense, his fists ball. “Remember what you are, boy!” He relaxed with an effort. “You’d just come to the Chromer
ia and my son barely knew you. If you’d cracked under the pressure and jumped to your death, it would have been a very brief scandal, brought up idly, revived some six months later when I had new evidence ‘found’ that the woman who’d claimed to be your mother confessed to lying, having taken money from a rival family to smear Gavin. Then it would have been forgotten. You would have just been another attack on a family that has endured a thousand, an anecdote of an attempted smear on a great house.”
“Mistress Helel? You sent that fat woman who tried to throw me out of the tower?” Kip asked. Andross kept talking, but Kip was still struggling to come to grips with what he’d said first.
“Was that her name? Oh, and while I’m clearing the air… I paid those idiots in your Blackguard training class to block you. No harm done, right? Regardless, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Kip asked, incredulous. Like that was enough?
Kip saw an eyebrow rise above one of the big lenses, as if the man was wondering how stupid this fat boy was. Andross Guile raised his index finger. “I want you to know, Kip, I haven’t apologized to anyone in twenty years.”
“I’m honored,” Kip said.
The old man chose to ignore the sarcasm. “Well, if that’s behind us, perhaps you would like to play some Nine Kings?”
“What? What? No! You tried to kill me! You can’t—you can’t just try to kill people because they’re inconvenient.”
Andross Guile’s head tilted like a dog’s, trying to understand this odd, odd boy. “Reality begs to differ.”
But Kip felt the world going gray. “This is all a screen. A distraction. You killed Lucia,” he said. Kip saw her again, stepping into the line of fire. He saw her face bloody, neck torn open by a musket ball, pumping blood, blood, blood. Kip shivered.
“Who?” Andross asked.
“The girl in my Blackguard class who took the bullet you meant for me!”
“What are you talking about?” Andross asked.
Kip’s rising rage wavered. “Someone tried to shoot me, during training. They killed her instead.”
The old man shook his head, like Kip was a moron. “Why would I go to the trouble and expense to block you from the Blackguard if I intended to kill you before you get could get in? I meant you to be a failure, not a corpse.”
“Maybe you were making doubly sure you stopped me.”
“It’s nice that you have such a high opinion of yourself, but use that puny brain of yours. All these accusations. Again! If you were killed, there’d be an investigation. The boys who agreed to block you from the Blackguard would come forward. After all, it’s one thing to make someone fail and have to try again next season, but something else altogether to kill them. You start killing people, and consciences get pricked. You think I’d leave my seal where it could be seen like that? You think I would fail twice the same way? No, boy, believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be.”
As insulting as it was, Kip thought it was probably true. In fact, he thought it was more likely true because Andross Guile had been insulting him when he said it. “So why’d you try to block me from the Blackguard?”
“To foil my son. He has plans for you, and he was defying me. He needed to be punished, and reminded of certain… verities.”
“So why tell me now? What do you want?” Kip had no doubt that the loathsome old man did have a plan. He wanted something from Kip. “I could go tell…”
“Tell whom? Please.” Andross Guile waved it away, and Kip realized that the man could confess with impunity. He was right. No one was going to take Kip’s word, especially not with an utter lack of evidence. “Kip, I have to tell you something, and I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but maybe you will someday. I owe you my life, boy. Oh, not in any melodramatic sense, of course. My wife—your grandmother—left me and committed suicide. Albeit the suicide of the Freeing. I loved her. I lived for her. And she rejected me, preferring to die rather than spend another day in my company. Have you ever faced a rejection so profound?”
Kip thought of his mother, choosing to blast her brain on haze or any other intoxicant she could get until she was able to forget him, committing a slower, less noble suicide day by day. But Andross Guile wasn’t looking for commiseration.
“I wanted to die. I considered following her and laying open my veins in the bath. And do you know what saved me?”
“Me?” Kip asked dubiously.
“Ha! Don’t flatter yourself. Nine Kings. Distractions saved me. Even this old heart takes time to muddle through grief, but those distractions kept me alive long enough to do it. My petty tortures of you kept my mind occupied, gave me something to look forward to. Would Kip fail here? What could I come up with to take away from him when he lost our game tomorrow? How else could I test the boy, in ways that strained you but gave you some chance for victory?”
“You did not let me win. Don’t even pretend you—”
“Bah! You think your wits are a match for mine? Well, I’ll let you wonder. Now shut your mouth, I’m trying to thank you.”
Kip fell into sullen silence, feeling abruptly like a child again. Robbed of his rage, he felt powerless in Andross’s august presence.
Andross sighed. “Well, there. Thank you. That is all.”
“That’s it?” Kip asked.
The man sank down lower in his chair. Grimaced. “You’ve earned my respect, Kip. You’ve overcome adversity that would have crushed lesser men. You’ve surprised me. Not once, but several times. When I think of you, I’m disgusted and disappointed that my son could make… this. And yet, despite this blubber and this loud mouth and this utter lack of self-control, these Tyrean manners and…” He waved a hand, as if there was much more objectionable about Kip but that it was a tangent. “Despite it all, Kip, you consistently win.” His voice grew scratchy. “I have lost my wife and all my boys now, one way or another. Perhaps I am to blame for some shred of that. But you, Kip, you have proved you are a Guile. I will hinder you no more.” He turned away and gestured Kip to go.
Kip walked to the door slowly, bewildered.
“Perhaps,” the lonely old man said in the darkness, not turning, “perhaps someday we could play that last game you owe me.”
Kip left the cabin and closed the door under Grinwoody’s disapproving eyes.
Chapter 106
Gavin knocked on the door out to the balcony and let two very cold Blackguards back in. They didn’t make eye contact, but they did grin at the floor. “Well done, sir,” one said beneath his breath. “Woman’s got some lungs,” the other said to the first, clearly intending to be overheard.
The first winked, not at all stealthily, at Karris, who covered her face and laughed ruefully. They were like her brothers. Gavin wasn’t going to get in the middle of that. That relationship would change now that she was his wife. But Gavin didn’t want to kill her joy. Let things change in their proper season. He rang the slaves’ bell.
Marissia and another slave, a skinny old woman with Ruthgari skin tanned so leathery she looked Atashian came in and began laying out their clothing at Karris’s direction.
“I didn’t even realize you’d moved all your things in,” Gavin said.
“I wanted to wait for you; it seemed presumptuous to invade without being asked, but my kin in the Blackguard kicked me out.”
Gavin laughed. He noticed as Marissia dressed him that Karris was watching him closely, watching how he looked at Marissia. Hiding it well, but jealous. For her part, Marissia was a cipher. Professional, calm, more rumpled this morning than usual, but that was because she’d probably slept in the hallway, rather than in her closet-sized room off Gavin’s quarters, where she slept when she didn’t share Gavin’s bed.
In his years as Prism, Gavin had grown used to having very little privacy, at least not from the Blackguard or from Marissia, but what had seemed amusing when the Blackguards had teased him about overhearing him and Karris making love all night, sometimes loudly, seemed less humorous when he saw Mar
issia’s carefully blank face and deeply shadowed eyes.
There are nations at stake, and I’m thinking about a slave’s feelings. Gavin cursed inwardly.
After getting dressed—Karris picked out his clothes, something that Marissia had done for ages—Gavin went downstairs. He stopped only to say, “Twenty minutes, meet me at the back door, packed and ready for war.”
Karris nodded grimly. It was almost daylight, and they couldn’t afford to burn too much of that.
Facing the Spectrum was almost a relief. Gavin thought it was definitely better than being stuck between two jealous women who both had good cause to be angry at him. It was a fight that Marissia couldn’t have, of course, because it was a fight she would lose spectacularly, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t feel, or that she was wrong to. Orholam have mercy. Four Blackguards accompanied him. It was understandable, given the assassination attempt last night, but it still made Gavin feel like a prisoner.
“You have me for ten minutes,” Gavin said.
“Pardon?” Delara Orange asked.
“There’s going to be a battle for Ru in two days, and I need to be there.”
“And how are you going to do that? We thought you were with the fleet,” the Blue said.
So Gavin explained, concisely. He could travel across the sea in a day. There was already a map on the table with the disposition of forces that they had guessed. Gavin moved and added and subtracted forces until it was accurate.
“How do you know all this?” Delara asked.
“I’m the Prism,” Gavin said. “Five minutes.”
“You can’t treat us like this. We aren’t slaves to take your orders. What will you do if we don’t let you go?” Klytos Blue asked.
Turning cold eyes on the little man, Gavin said, “I’ll kill you and piss on your corpse.” He meant it.
Klytos Blue’s mouth dropped open. His wasn’t the only one.
“I came here as a courtesy,” Gavin said. “But thousands of people are going to die if I don’t leave, so tell me, is there anything wrong—anything at all—in valuing thousands of warriors over one spineless worm?”
