Kip was aghast. “I didn’t know.”
“Because it’s not the kind of thing a warrior shares often. Not even in her cups.”
“And you and my father, you have stories like that?”
She hesitated. How close to the truth did she dare go? How long would he accept evasions?
“Worse?” he asked.
“You can’t rate soul wounds,” she said.
“One thing,” Kip said. “I have to ask. My mother left me a note asking that I take vengeance on my father. She was a…” He swallowed, but continued manfully. “She was an addict and a liar and Orholam only knows what else. I assume she was a camp follower who was spurned afterward, but she said… with her dying breath, she said Gavin was a rapist. It’s not true, is it?”
Rapist. For some reason, Karris didn’t flash back to that awful bedroom and lying on her back quietly, passively drunk, wishing she would pass out, wishing she would fight. Instead, she thought back to the long walk home, the shame at her torn-off buttons that kept her from covering herself decently, the averted stares of the guards she walked past. No one had even offered her a coat. Who wouldn’t offer a young girl, who was half naked and ashamed, a coat?
“Your father,” Karris said levelly, locking eyes with Kip, “is not a rapist.” The man Kip knew as his father, the man who had claimed him as son, Dazen, was not a rapist.
“But it was war. Are you sure?” Kip asked.
Her initial hesitation had been too long. He needed more. It was not the kind of question to which you could leave doubts. Karris said, “Once, in bed, he mistook my cries for cries of pain. It distressed him so much he went soft. Not the reaction a rapist would have, you think?”
For a moment, Kip didn’t seem to understand. Then he blushed furiously. “I, uh, I think that was more than I wanted to know.”
Karris cleared her throat. It was more than she’d wanted to share. She felt the blood rising in her own cheeks. But it was necessary. “Good enough?”
Kip averted his eyes. “About that? Dear Orholam, yes. Please, let’s never speak of it again!”
Karris laughed. “Uh-oh, now I know your weakness!”
“Oh, come on, you can’t!” Kip complained. “No one wants to hear about their parents having—Parent, I mean. Their parent… never mind.”
Parents. Like she and Dazen were Kip’s parents. Dazen—as Gavin—had adopted Kip, and he’d married Karris. So that sort of made Karris Kip’s mother, right?
Parents. One little slip. One little plural. Parent. Mother. It touched something in Karris so cold that the word itself froze on the point of impact. It dropped and broke like a young girl’s princess hopes had on a cold midnight wandering home alone in the cold, eyes wet, thighs wet.
And what might have given Kip that preposterous idea? Perhaps that Karris had been spending time with him every day for months, training him, giving him advice, supervising his education. She’d been manipulated into acting like a mother. Into showing care that could be mistaken for love.
That bitch.
The White had done this on purpose.
What had it been? Her spies must have told her how, after Gavin’s disappearance, Karris had wept when her moon blood came, how she’d obviously hoped that their single night together had impregnated her, like in the stories.
But then, one night had been enough for Karris before, hadn’t it? Back when she’d been a girl, and hadn’t been ready for a child. The mere thought of it sent black clouds churning in her heart. No, don’t think of it. Of course, the White had thought that Karris wanted a child. Karris was facing the end of her childbearing years, and the loss of her purpose as a Blackguard, and the loss of Gavin. Surely Karris would desire to have something of his, of theirs, something to show that all her sacrifices hadn’t been for naught.
The White was trying to make Kip a son for Karris simply because she thought Karris had never had her own. She didn’t know. Karris’s secret was safe.
And how could Karris fault the White for trying to manage Karris’s emotions? Karris was doing the same thing to Kip: lying so he wouldn’t do something disastrous, because if he knew too much, he would act, thinking he knew more than he did.
She moistened her lips. Kip was already studying her as one might study a large dog, wondering if it was going to lunge for your throat or if it wanted to cuddle.
But then that old fear poked its head out of the dark cellar where Karris kept it. Surely the White, so careful in all things, would have investigated Karris fully before handing over her spies. And how good had Karris been at covering her tracks? She’d only been sixteen and seventeen years old.
That cold place went hot. All the shame of that concealed failure ignited.
Who abandons a child? Who leaves a helpless babe in a far country with people she doesn’t even know?
Had they been good to him? Was he well?
She’d lain there, holding Dazen after their marriage, and she’d challenged him to be a good father. She’d been so cool, so correct. All while sitting on her own secret failure like it wasn’t a burning coal. Hypocrite.
And the White knew her shame. Was holding on to it, maybe only to use it if she absolutely had to. Karris would never be free. She felt hot and cold, nauseated.
“Sorry, ‘mother,’ ” Kip said. He was trying to make a joke of it, but the word was so sharp-edged that Karris couldn’t even hear the joke. None of Kip’s tone could make it past the roaring of the blood in her ears. Just that one, lancet word piercing a boil.
“You are not my son!” Karris spat. Her heart was bile and she was vomiting it out on him, foul and acid, and it tore her throat and ate everything it touched.
Kip had the same look on his face she’d seen on men mortally wounded, staring at their own guts in ropes in their hands, shocked they weren’t already dead, but dying nonetheless.
He turned unsteadily and walked out. He closed the door quietly.
Chapter 67
“This is the last time you and I will meet,” Marissia said. They were seated side by side on one of the benches ringing the Great Fountain of Karris Shadowblinder. Marissia dressed in humble slave’s grays, eating her lunch. Teia was in her nunk’s grays, taking a break from her calisthenics, ostensibly nursing a spasming calf muscle. “I hear you gave your new handler a hard time.”
It was hard to maintain the spy discipline of not looking over to see if she was saying it wryly. Was there a bit of pleasure in Marissia’s tone?
“Could say that,” Teia said, leaning forward to massage her leg so her mouth would be obscured. The point of meeting in public wasn’t to disguise altogether that you were speaking to your handler, it was to make sure you weren’t overheard and to give lip-readers an impossible task. Strangers might exchange a few words, after all. “I want to tell Kip everything. I don’t have anyone. It’s too hard.”
A long pause as Marissia took a drink from her wineskin. “You want to reveal everything to Kip the Lip?” She paused, then delicately took a bite of a small meat pastry.
Teia scowled. That wasn’t fair. Kip might shoot from the hip when he was angry, but he didn’t spill other people’s secrets. He was a good man.
A good man? Kip? When had she started thinking of Kip as a man? Sometimes she looked at him and images seemed to shear off from him like light splitting: different facets, different Kips. Perhaps it was a side effect of the light splitting or drafting so much paryl. If drafting red gradually made you more passionate, and drafting green made you wilder, what did drafting paryl do to you? She saw Kips frozen, each in a line:
Fat Kip, as he had been when he first came to the Chromeria. He was sunk into himself, the blubber a defense against fear and isolation, chin tucked down, shy, self-consciousness and self-pity at war, but thinking.
Broken Kip, mentally going back to Garriston and whatever had happened to him there. They said he’d killed King Garadul. Some said he’d disobeyed an order in doing so, and put the Color Prince in charge
. Whatever else he’d done, they said he’d killed a lot of men. No one had put much stock in that. None of the inductees had been there, and the Blackguards said nothing to the inductees about such matters. “He’s a Guile,” was the most they’d say, as if that said everything. As if that said anything. Broken Kip would show up at practice after having thrashed a bully, and he looked defeated instead of victorious, as if he couldn’t believe what he was capable of.
The Weeping Warrior. Teia had only seen glimpses of this one, had heard more of it. Teia had heard Kip self-deprecatingly say something like, “I’m the turtle-bear.” Others said he was a berserker. Kip fighting Aram in his last fight, about to lose his last chance to become a Blackguard. Kip had gone insane as Aram held him down, beating his face in but letting Kip slip just enough so that the judges didn’t call it.
Most young men who went crazy in a fight went stupid, too. But Kip had shot out the lights. It might have been enough for him to beat Aram, if someone hadn’t fixed the lights almost immediately—and was there a rule for that? Aram had picked Kip fully off the ground and was throwing him down in a neck-breaker—Aram himself getting terrified of what he felt burgeoning in his opponent.
Teia had overheard two Blackguards nearby talking. “It’s a good thing they stopped that,” Hezik said. “That Kip would have died.”
“Or if he hadn’t,” Stump said, “a bunch of the rest of us might have.”
“Huh?”
Stump looked at Hezik. “At Garriston, I saw that boy go green golem. You remember the south flank at Sundered Rock, when we thought their line was going to snap, and we suddenly saw Dazen Guile himself? Out there all alone. Captain thought we’d take us a prize?”
“You know I don’t remember shit about that battle. I woke up afterward and couldn’t see or hear for a week.”
“You can still fucking count. Number a men we had before, number a men we had after. It ain’t accountancy. Why you gotta trip up my story? You know what happened there even if you don’t remember it all for your own self. Anyway. Garriston was that. I tell you. It was that. Boy’s fucking fifteen.”
They’d noticed Teia then, and gave her a look that would wilt flowers.
Then she saw the next Kip, right after the Weeping Warrior. She saw Kip taking his place in line after Cruxer had come in like a righteous, judgmental god and crippled Aram. Kip, suddenly accepted, beaten, bruised, staggering, beaming, weeping, and whole. That was Kip Unalone: Kip with the scrubs, Kip with his team. Laughing, for one frozen moment, belonging. There was a tragic undercurrent in his face even as he laughed, though, as if he knew this moment was fleeting.
Then Kip Confident. She’d seen this for one second, and only one, but some part of her was certain this was Kip Himself. Kip, averring that while this war wasn’t the best thing, it was the best thing possible. Kip, unself-conscious, who knew when he knew what he was talking about. Kip, who didn’t sleep much. Kip, who knew some of the cost of what he was talking about. Kip, in that moment, wasn’t trying to impress anyone—and that made him more impressive. He was suddenly solid. Adult.
Attractive.
She thought of how she’d not hugged Kip. Why hadn’t she hugged him? She should have. Orholam, she should have.
“I suppose if I tell you something that you already know, you won’t listen to me?” Marissia said.
Teia blinked.
“Like if I pointed out the foolishness of getting your heart tangled with a Guile?”
“No danger of that,” Teia said quickly. Marissia was a room slave. She hadn’t had any say over Gavin coming to her bed. That she had chosen to make her service easier by pleasing him rather than harder by fighting him simply meant she was smart. She was doing what she needed to do to survive.
Marissia said, “Someone who says you shouldn’t do something while doing it herself could be considered a hypocrite. Or an expert. Hypocrite or expert, that of all people, I offer you advice is not a reason to dismiss it, but actually the opposite.”
“I didn’t call you a—” Teia was baffled. What was Marissia saying?
“You’re sixteen. You thought it. I judged my elders harshly when I was young, too.”
So Marissia loved Gavin. What kind of irony was it that Teia, who had been a slave, would have assumed that Marissia couldn’t love Gavin—because she was a slave?
It wasn’t… what? Normal love? Because Gavin was Prism and Marissia was a slave? Could Teia tell Marissia that what she felt wasn’t love? That Marissia was fooling herself, that really she was only making a bad situation tolerable? If a power difference made love impossible, who could ever love a Prism? Who could ever love a slave?
Maybe it was love, then. But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t easy.
Which was Marissia’s point exactly. The chasm between freed slave and a Prism’s son was narrower than the chasm between slave and Prism. But not by much.
Marissia ate more. Drank more. No hurry, no apparent interest in Teia. She casually scanned the crowd, but the way a bored person eating lunch might. Then she said, “Do you know, I was made a slave at your age.”
Teia stood, turned, propped a foot up on the bench, and began working on her calf in a way that would give her a glimpse of Marissia’s face.
“Things were suddenly expected of me that I found very, very hard. I cried myself to sleep many nights. Sometimes I still feel like that vulnerable little girl. I have an inkling of what the next year will demand of you. I want you to know I’m proud of you. The Order will test you more. They will ask you to do unspeakable things. You will do them. This is an order. In the sight of Orholam, let all the evil you do be on my head, and on the White’s. We’re playing against the Old Man of the Desert himself, you understand?”
“No,” Teia said quietly. “No.”
“You will,” Marissia said. She gazed up at the statue of Karris Shadowblinder, Karris’s namesake. “And stop giving her nonsense.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin, stood, and walked away.
Teia remembered herself enough to continue pretending to massage her leg. It wasn’t like she’d had a long time to bond with Marissia, but the woman had been the only person Teia could tell the whole truth. The sudden emptiness in her chest felt like a death.
Death. She’d killed a man in this war in shadow. Maybe Kip was right. Maybe it was justified. But she was going to have to kill again, for the other side. She had no doubt of it. How would the Order really trust her until she’d killed for them?
It wasn’t a matter of if they ordered her to do so, it was a matter of when. And she was supposed to meet up with Murder Sharp right now.
Chapter 68
Aliviana Danavis followed Phyros into the slum bar. It was the kind of place she would have feared a year ago, with good reason. She’d found new strength in the last months, or at least new fearlessness. But even with that, she never would have come here in her dresses and murex purple. Now she wore her hair in a simple braid, a tricorn hat, her fawnskin trousers still bearing the dark stains of what might have been blood. Before they’d died, she’d had her blue and her green drafter work together to fashion clips onto her pistols like Gavin Guile had, so she could wear all four pistols on her belt and not worry about losing them. She also wore a short saber that she still didn’t know how to use well, despite Phyros’s efforts to train her. A figure-hugging white tunic, but worn long over her trousers in the Tyrean style, and a green jacket waxed against the rain completed the ensemble.
She still stuck out, here in Wiwurgh. Just across the Coral Strait from Ilyta, and positioned at the very mouth of the Everdark Gates, the city was inhabited mainly by Tyreans, Ilytians, and Parians. The crowds of darker faces made something unknot in Liv’s soul. You could hardly get farther from the Jaspers if you tried. Here, she felt beautiful. Men whistled in appreciation, unlike the cool-blooded meat stares the men of the north and west coasts gave. Here a man would let you know his interest, but take his cue and leave you alone if you i
gnored him or gave a glance and no more.
It had taken Liv a while to get used to it again, and she hated that she’d been changed by her time at the Chromeria.
Of course, having the bare-chested barbarian that was Phyros as her bodyguard didn’t hurt in dissuading prolonged staring.
But a sailors’ tavern was different. There were women here, too, but they were even harder than the men. Every sailor and pirate had to walk with friends in the seaside slums, of course. The danger of being knocked out in an alley and waking as the iron cut your ear was real for everyone. But a woman’s lot was worse, as always. As the saying went, ‘A man ’slaved works one oar, a woman ’slaved works every oar on deck.’
Aliviana stepped into the low-ceilinged tavern and glanced around with a haughty, uninterested look on her face. But then she gasped aloud as she saw the man sitting in a corner, staring at her. Her father.
Corvan Danavis was slowly rising to his feet, as transfixed by the sight of her as she was of him. Her father? Here? Impossible.
And he wasn’t alone. There were a good ten drafters in some sort of military attire with him, light blue tunics emblazoned with a golden eye high on the chest. Her father wore one as well, though richer, with brocade and a sword at his hip. He was the leader of them.
Emotions rolled over Liv like a swell rolling over a swimmer at sea. After the surprise, there was a little bit of that little-girl glee, but trailing that like a secondary wave that engulfs you just when you think the worst is past was raw anger, unfaded despite the passage of months.