by Brent Weeks
They drifted into a companionable silence as Tisis wiped her eyes. She ended up cleaning off the kohl makeup dripping from around her eyes with a little towel. When she was done, Kip stared at her quizzically. Without her makeup on, she didn’t look twenty-five years old like she did with it on. She didn’t look her actual nineteen years. She looked about seventeen. No wonder she wore the makeup.
She was just a teenager like him, and they were both very, very alone here.
“Kip,” she said, “the truth is, my family’s in a bad spot. The False Prism’s War wiped out the other branches of the family. Perversely, that strengthened us, because with all the wealth and lands of our entire clan in my uncle’s hands, we became a major family. I think that your grandfather thinks we’re a threat to him. We proposed that I marry your father Gavin to make an alliance, and we thought your grandfather was going to accept. Instead, Gavin married Karris. It was a slap in our faces. Never explained, never apologized for.”
She had been intending to marry Gavin? And she’d had to go from that to putting her hands under the blankets for my grandfather? Now there was a turn of Fortune’s Wheel.
But Kip kept his features carefully blank. There’s a time not to use the Lip.
“I don’t know why, but I fear Andross has decided to let us be destroyed. The war isn’t going well, everyone knows it. Our richest lands are those nearest the Color Prince’s army. We’re afraid the promachos plans to let the Color Prince take our lands and wealth and only stop him after he’s destroyed us. Kip, you have no idea what it feels like to admit this—especially to a Guile—but my family is right on the edge. My mother passed away two years ago. My father’s dead. If it were a will, my older sister Eirene got all the family intelligence, I got all the looks, and all the charisma I should have gotten went to my little cousin Antonius instead. Eirene will continue the family line if she absolutely must, but it would be hell for her, and I won’t do that to her if I can help it.”
“What?” Kip asked. Sure, some women didn’t want to get stuck raising children, but a wealthy family would have slaves for that, wouldn’t they?
A scowl. “I forget you’re not in the gossip circles,” Tisis said. “Her interest in taking any man to bed is about equal to your interest in taking your grandfather to bed.”
“Oh,” Kip said, not understanding. Then, “Oh!”
“My cousin Antonius was on his way here to bring orders from my sister. His ship was captured by pirates. They haven’t asked a ransom, which they would, if he were alive.” Her eyes went vacant, her voice an echo of itself. She obviously loved him very much. “That leaves me,” she said. “Kip, our southern plantations and forests can be defended. But if they aren’t… those are my people. More than fifty thousand of them. I grew up in those lands. I played banconn in their festival parades. I was taught farming and husbandry and logging in those little towns. I played with little boys and girls there. Many of those little girls I played with have children of their own now. Life moves faster out on the farms. I will do anything to save my people.”
Including getting on your back for my grandfather.
“Yes,” she said quietly, reading his mind. “Even that. My virginity for their lives? I’ll take that trade any day.”
For some reason, the statement made Kip deeply ashamed of himself. He’d judged Tisis as if she were merely angling for the attention of the most important man in the room, willing to debase herself even with Andross Guile. Like she was a tramp or a prostitute.
Some of the noble families had made their base on Big Jasper for so long that they had little to no connection to their ancestral holdings. Perhaps the lord or lady would make one trip a year to check how the stewards were keeping things together, but their children were left vying with the children of other nobles for who could throw the most lavish party, who could gamble better or dance better or ride better, with constant talk of who’d bedded whom that morphed into who would marry whom, followed by more gossip of who was carrying on affairs with whom. Or they used some tiny sliver of magical talent to get into the Chromeria, where they ended up doing much the same, with a side of studying. Kip hadn’t been part of those circles despite his pedigree, his time taken up entirely with studies or training.
That hadn’t been a mistake, he knew. Gavin must have realized that if Kip had come in as a bastard from Tyrea and been thrown in among those wolves, they would have torn him apart. That was what the Blackguard training was for. That, and Gavin’s realization that war was coming, and Kip would need as much martial training as possible.
Kip had assumed that Tisis was part of those circles. After all, she was rich and highly talented with green and beautiful. She had to be petty and boring and gossip-mongering to make up for it, right?
It made Kip wonder how people judged Gavin Guile, who was frustratingly Everything Good. Surely they must secretly hate him. Come to think of it, what did people think of Kip, who’d swooped in out of nowhere and taken up the mantle of the foremost family in the Seven Satrapies?
Suddenly, the Blackguard looked like a warm blanket that Kip didn’t ever want to leave. People judged him for himself there, mostly. Some of them even liked him. No one had given him trouble for being Tyrean since he became an inductee. What mattered in his unit was what you were doing to help the unit succeed. Kip hated being judged, but had barely noticed when the judgment of him stopped.
And here was Tisis, ready to sell her body to save her people, and Kip was judging her and calling her whore.
“Orholam have mercy,” he muttered into the water. “Tisis, I’m so sorry for, for everything. For how I treated you. For what I said. It was vile. I’m so, so sorry.”
She blinked rapidly, looked away. “I tried to go back to him, you know? After you left. He wouldn’t take me. Put me out of his room like a…”
Kip said, “He is… not a nice man.” A deep hatred started burning there. It was one thing for Andross to debase Kip, then point out his debasement and laugh at him. It was quite another to see him do it to someone else.
“No,” she laugh-cried. She dabbed an eye with a finger, getting control of herself. “No, he’s not that. You know, the only thing that really surprises me is that he didn’t bed me first. I mean, I already feel pretty gross about myself—‘gross about myself’? Well, you know what I mean. I would have felt a hundred times worse if he’d used me and then cast me off. It seems more like his style. I mean, we’d barely gotten started—sorry, you don’t want to know all that. Maybe he was afraid I’d get pregnant and then he’d have a bastard to worry about.”
No, it wasn’t that. He was playing a different game.
But Kip didn’t say anything.
Hey, she hadn’t said ‘another bastard to worry about,’ so apparently she had some tact.
For the next few minutes, as she recovered, Kip studied her openly. Without the makeup she always wore, she was still intimidatingly beautiful, but this natural beauty was softer, and of course younger, than that icy perfection. He found himself warming to her.
What just happened? Did we just kind of become friends? How did that happen so fast?
Andross Guile, who pissed on everything, had said she would try to seduce Kip. Was that what this was? A very clever seduction? Was she simply playing him?
He couldn’t see it.
Hell, if she was this good and this was all an act, he’d rather be on her side regardless, because if she was this good, no one else was going to stand a chance.
“So, uh, my skin’s getting all pruney,” Kip said. “How do we get out of here gracefully? Ladies first? I mean, it doesn’t matter since I’ve already seen you naked, right?”
She sighed and let herself sink into the water until she was blowing bubbles in it. “So,” she said. She winced.
Kip waited. Nothing. “So?” he prompted.
She bobbed higher and he glanced down through the water, though he didn’t think she noticed. Dammit! And he’d been so high-minded a few
moments ago. “So I didn’t just come here because I needed a bath, though I notice you haven’t washed, pruney or not.”
“Oh. Right.” Kip picked up the soap from the edge of the bath. He started soaping up his left shoulder awkwardly.
“So I shared all about my family and the situation I’m in…” Tisis said.
Kip stopped soaping. She expected him to do the same? “Tisis, it’s been really nice talking to you. I mean, really nice. A huge surprise, actually, but a bunch of classes end right around now, and dozens or hundreds of people are going to be heading down here any minute. I don’t think we have time for my whole history.”
They heard the banging of a distant door slamming, and both of them nearly bolted.
“Right,” Tisis said. She licked her lips. “But you are isolated, too, right? I mean, I need friends, you need friends, right? Something solid.”
“Sure, that’d be… nice. I don’t know if it’s possible. Sooner or later, I’m going to get kicked out of the Blackguard, or nicely promoted out of it. You saw. My grandfather hates me. I’ve secured funding to keep on at the Chromeria, but yes, you could say my position is… not strong.” He’d been so assiduously not thinking about it that thinking about it now slapped him in the face.
She exhaled a big breath again. “That’s pretty much what I thought. I have a plan, and I don’t want you to answer now, but I want you to think about it seriously. Come down to the baths next week, same time. The same slave will meet you and bring you back here.”
“Now I’m curious,” Kip said.
She was blushing. “This is not exactly how I’d planned for this to happen…” She took a deep breath, let it out. She bobbed under the water. Scrunched her face as she emerged.
“Why am I the one who feels awkward here?” Kip asked.
“Marry me, Kip.”
A sound like someone was strangling a small animal came from somewhere. Oh, Kip’s throat.
She blushed harder. “Just think about it?”
“What?!”
Then she daintily dashed up the steps out of the bath, snatched Kip’s bathing robe from its hook, and ran tiptoe out of the room. Between her words and her nudity, Kip was speechless.
“Hey, wait!” he shouted finally. “I don’t know how to get out of here! There’s only that one robe!”
Then he realized he, a man, had just shouted—in the women’s baths. Idiot! He jumped out of the water and dashed in the opposite direction from where Tisis had disappeared. Naked turtle-bear coming through!
Chapter 71
In the closest thing to a corner she could find in a circular library, Teia was working on her assignment for Murder Sharp. The man might be an utter horror, but he was also a font of knowledge about paryl. And as far as Teia knew, with Marta Martaens having fled, he was the only source of knowledge about paryl available: there was nothing in even the forbidden libraries about paryl. Damn luxors.
But Murder Sharp dropped the answers to her biggest questions like they were nothing.
“The other colors,” she’d ventured, “they have metaphysical effects.”
“Meta-what?”
Oh, right. Murder Sharp hadn’t gotten his education in the Chromeria. Best not to make it look like she was trying to rub it in. “Like red makes you more prone to anger, and superviolet makes you more logical over time. What does paryl do?”
He’d chuckled. “Haven’t noticed, huh? Maybe you’re special, like me. I’m a bit of a curiosity among paryl drafters.”
A curiosity. That was one way to put it. But she painted a carefully neutral but interested look on her face. He’d given in.
“Paryl makes you a feeler. Think about it. It’s way down below sub-red, opposite to superviolet. Superviolet makes you more logical. Paryl makes you empathetic. You get incredibly attuned to the emotions around you, whether mundane or magical. I’m lucky. I’m just aware of them; they don’t affect me. Other paryl drafters—most of the few we got—aren’t so lucky. They themselves feel what others are feeling. For some, to a horrifying degree. ‘Weep with those who are weeping, rejoice with those who are rejoicing.’ It could have been written with a paryl in mind. That refined feeling, though, is our greatest weakness and our greatest strength. It’s why we feel light itself. First, we get good at feeling light’s effects. Then we simply become aware of light itself. Then we can split it.”
“All paryls are lightsplitters?” How could the Chromeria not know such a thing?
“One in ten, maybe. Which is about a thousand times more frequently than other colors.”
It turned out that half of what Marta Martaens had taught her about paryl was worthless. Paryl made a gel, Marta had said. Master Sharp had admitted that could be done, but wondered why you’d want to use it very often. “There’s a resonance point higher up that can be used to make a gel. We only use it to mark targets, because it evaporates quickly. Other than that? Good for paryl torches, I guess, but I just fling the light directly. So maybe if you want to give paryl to someone else for some reason?” And then he’d shown her another resonance point: it was a gas. It was also much, much easier to draft than paryl’s solid or gel forms.
Then he’d given her the assignment she was working on now. She drafted a shell of paryl in a bubble around her.
It was, of course, invisible. It was also so delicate that any touch shattered it. But delicate didn’t mean useless. With the bubble surrounding her, she drafted paryl gas to fill it. This, too, was invisible—which was why she could practice in the library without worrying about being interrupted, so long as she flipped the page of the tome open in her lap every so often and didn’t let them see her eyes.
By drafting paryl, Teia was made more sensitive to the touch of colors. Having paryl gas actually touching her skin seemed to enhance that sensitivity even further. Having it surround her also meant she was breathing it, though it had no taste and only the faintest scent.
The paryl bubble not only acted as a good way to contain the paryl gas, but it was also a lens. Just as a blue lens filtered out all colors except blue, or as a clear glass window still filtered out some superviolet light, so too did paryl have an effect on the light that passed through it. It was like a gentle sieve.
A sieve of light? The idea had seemed impossible, but it was true. Paryl nudged every color closer to its true color—that spectrum at which it could be drafted. Through even this much paryl, each color seemed more vibrant, brighter. Master Sharp said this was evidence that paryl was the master color. Except he said it like it was capitalized. ‘Paryl is the Master Color,’ he’d said, his voice reverent.
But Teia had heard red magisters come up with reasons why red was the best color. Blue magisters told their upper-level discipulae why blue was the true color—Orholam’s favorite shade, the color of sea and sky. Yellows made the case for why yellow was Orholam’s favorite—the strong center of the spectrum, whose solid heart was unbreakable gold. As far as Teia was concerned, much as she would like paryl to be amazing and great—it was her only color, after all—paryl was just another color with some quirks. Like yellow could be liquid or frozen and was useful in each form.
Teia had seen the tenth-year discipulae—those few permanent students who were able to convince their sponsors that they could best serve them by doing research—experiment with polarized lenses. When one lens was placed in a beam of light, nothing appeared to happen. When a second was placed downstream in the same beam, still nothing happened—until either lens was rotated. Then the beam of light went dark.
This seemed to be something similar. Unless, of course, it was something totally different. She was forbidden to ask anyone about it.
She finished her assignments for her other lectures, maintaining the bubble as well as she could while doing so. It was impossible, and even when she did it right, she realized she soon ran out of air. For that matter, she was inhaling an awful lot of paryl gas. Was that healthy?
On the scale of things likely to kill yo
u, T, breathing paryl goes somewhere below murderous heretics, insane assassins, conquering pagans, and plain stupidity.
That was one way to look on it.
She finished her work and headed back to her barracks. She tried to maintain the bubble, drafting in quick gulps, averting her eyes from passersby, then returning them to normal, and glancing once again after traversing only a few paces. But the bubble kept snapping from her uneven support of it—the rolling motion of walking itself broke the bubble at whatever direct support beams she attached to it. Then when she was sure she was supporting the bubble correctly, walking so lightly and fluidly and holding the bubble at so many points it shouldn’t break, she watched as the force of the wind from her walking caved the front of the bubble in. It held form for one second, then cracked and split and dissolved into nothing. Again.
“Tsst.”
The whisper almost didn’t register. Teia walked right past the open door, totally absorbed in her—oh hell!
She froze. Master Sharp! He was dressed in the embroidered linen and wide belt of a rich Ruthgari, with his petasos worn on his back, the ties interwoven with gold threads. A part of her noted the clothing with approval: rich enough to allow free movement around most of the Chromeria, but not so rich as to be memorable.
He beckoned her to step into the room he was in. It was an office of some kind. He’d clearly broken in. She made sure no one was looking, and stepped in.
“This will be quick,” Master Sharp said. He grinned at her, all perfect teeth. He closed the door behind her. “The time has come for you to prove your loyalty. Sun Day is only three days away. The White is attending rehearsals, right now. You will go to a room two floors below her room. Out the window, you’ll find a knotted rope. It will take you up one floor. Then you’re to use these to climb to the next.” He handed her a bag of what felt like rocks.
She took one out. It was a crescent roughly the size of her hand. The mouth of the crescent was almost flat. A tab of blue luxin stuck out from the mouth.
