The Blinding Knife

  “Kip, in a very short time you’ve become one of the most important arrows in my quiver. But you’re not the only one. Orholam help me if you were.”

  It was a slap to his whiny, fifteen-year-old face. And a well-deserved one.

  Gavin cursed again. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I can’t do what I have to do with one weapon, no matter how sharp. Kip, you deserve more of my time, but right now I have about three emergencies to deal with, and my enemies are probably moving fast. Can you wait?”

  Emergencies. Important stuff, like saving the world, preventing wars—or maybe winning them—fates of hundreds of thousands in the balance. And Kip wanted him to what? Sit around and talk? Wrestle? Play a card game?

  I’m needy. Weak. A distraction from the important things. People could die because of my pathetic whining. Orholam, Kip, be a man.

  Kip swallowed and straightened his back. “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

  Gavin hesitated. “If it… if it makes any difference, I, I should have taken you with me. I should have taught you personally. I didn’t—I didn’t think of it. I’m not used to thinking of anyone but myself. And… I’m sorry.”

  Kip didn’t know what to say.

  “How many colors can you draft now?” Gavin asked.

  “Sir?” The question seemed out of nowhere.

  “Colors?” Gavin insisted.

  “Um, four, five? Your father made me wager my right to the practicum, so I haven’t been able to work on it as much as I’d like.”

  Gavin frowned. “Tell me what you can do.”

  “Only blue and green are stable. Red’s inconsistent. Yellow’s all over the place, and I haven’t drafted sub-red again since Garriston.”

  “You know they say the Lightbringer will be a genius of magic.”

  “I’m… I’m not that, sir.” He’d said “will.” That meant his father believed that Lucidonius hadn’t been the Lightbringer, that the Lightbringer hadn’t come yet.

  “No, you’re not, Kip. Not because you’re not a genius. You may be. Not because you’re not tremendously talented, smart, and gifted, and mentally nimble. You are. You’re not the Lightbringer because there is no Lightbringer. It’s a myth that’s destroyed a thousand boys, and led a hundred thousand men to cynicism and disillusionment. It’s a lie. A lie more tempting the more powerful you are. Like all lies, it destroys those who long entertain it. And that’s why I lied to you.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a polychrome. If you’re angry at me because your test didn’t show that, I deserve your anger. You’re both privileged and despised for your birth, for one parent or the other, depending on who’s hating you at the moment. You’ve got a right to have a chip on your shoulder, but I didn’t want you to become a monster. So I didn’t want you to know how powerful you were going to be. That’s why I falsified your test.”

  “Wh-what?” Kip had been denying all the evidence of his expanding colors because of that damned test. He’d been wasting his time practicing the bouncy balls of doom while he could have been working on other colors?

  “I don’t apologize for it, Kip. I wanted you to grow up a little. I wanted you to get the measure of yourself before we added the burdens of vast talent onto your new burdens of being the son of the Prism, having everyone you ever knew murdered, and moving to a new home and jumping into social circles you probably never imagined.”

  “So why do you get to decide? Because you’re the Prism?”

  “Because I’m your father. I had to grow up too fast, and I didn’t do it at all well. You know what it is to start a war when you’re seventeen?”

  “I thought you were eighteen.”

  “Young, regardless,” Gavin said, but a quick expression leapt across his face, a tightening in his eyes, passing so fast Kip couldn’t read it. “Long time ago, but I remember wanting to be an adult so bad it stuck on my tongue. I wanted people to take me seriously, to care what I thought. To listen to what I said without that amused, tolerant look on their face—‘Here goes the young lord again.’ I’ve been there, Kip, and people died because I didn’t handle it well. Orholam send that the price you have to pay is never so high, but I didn’t want to force you into a position where any mistake you made could get you or others killed.”

  Kip glowered. “Well, when you say it like that it all makes sense and stuff.”

  Gavin took his cloak off. “Come. Fold those up tight,” he said, pointing to the shimmercloaks. “We’ll talk about them later.”

  Father and son folded up the cloaks carefully and bundled them inside Gavin’s cloak. Gavin folded it over his arm nonchalantly. He grabbed the deck box in his hand, concealed again by the cloaks.

  “You know,” Kip said, “Janus Borig said I wasn’t going to be the next Prism. Not that I really wanted to. I mean, I want you to be the Prism forever. But…”

  “But if you’re not going to be the Prism, and there’s no such thing as the Lightbringer, then that means you’re going to be nothing?” Gavin asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Kip said, averting his eyes. “Sounds… awful, huh?”

  “Yes,” Gavin said. “Let’s go.”

  Kip was a muddle. No Lightbringer? But Janus Borig had said she knew who the Lightbringer was—when she was looking at me. Afterward, when he finally thought about it, Kip had dared to hope that meant…

  Exactly what his father had thought Kip would hope it meant. She could have meant, I know who the Lightbringer is… the Lightbringer is no one. Or, the Lightbringer is Lucidonius. Or she could have just been wrong. Right?

  She’d said that her paintings had to be true, but Kip didn’t know that to be true. Even if her paintings had to be true, that didn’t mean her words did. She could easily have been lying, or just wrong. Even if she was right, and Gavin was wrong, she hadn’t painted the Lightbringer. Maybe she wouldn’t have been able to. Or maybe it would have been too obscure to tell anything. Even then, she’d said that sometimes her paintings weren’t literal.

  Kip followed Gavin out of the Blackguard barracks. A man and a woman Blackguard fell in behind them, natural and unobtrusive. Kip wondered how they did that. Long practice, he supposed. Just like everything in the Blackguards’ lives.

  Maybe that was why being a Blackguard appealed so much to him. Everything they got was earned. Not like Kip’s life. They didn’t care whose son he was, they cared if he could do the work.

  Gavin set the weights in the lift—Kip had never really noticed it before, but though the Blackguards guarded Gavin’s life, they weren’t servants. Kip wondered if that was because Gavin had established that he wanted to do things for himself, or if the Blackguards simply refused to do more than protect him. They headed up, surprising Kip, who thought Gavin would make him go back to his own room.

  They were deposited on the top floor. Gavin’s and the White’s floor.

  “So your grandfather gave you trouble?” Gavin asked.

  “Sir,” Kip said. “Your father… um, he’s denied me, sir. You know, denied that I’m your son.” Kip swallowed. Of course he knows what it means, moron. “That’s what I meant when I said I failed.”

  “Really?” Gavin said. “This is going to be fun, isn’t it?” There was no mirth in his tone. He turned to one of the Blackguards, a lanky Ilytian with a crooked smile. “Lytos, this is my son, Kip. Kip is my son.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. He had a strangely high voice. “I understand.” Oh, a eunuch. Kip had heard that some Ilytians believed eunuchs were better drafters than boys. His teachers had ridiculed the idea, though: cutting a man’s balls off doesn’t change his eyes, she’d said. Cutting off one end of a man doesn’t change the other. On the other hand, it did obviously change a man’s voice, so maybe the idea wasn’t that ludicrous. Or maybe it kept a man’s voice from changing, which obviously wasn’t the same thing. Unless there was something about puberty that also changed a man’s eyes—maybe imperceptibly, but enough to skew men’s color vision and make their magic fail
more often than women’s.

  Again, the problem was that you couldn’t tell what exact tones another person perceived, so everyone made the best guess they could. And apparently some people were confident enough in their guesses to cut off a child’s testicles.

  Kip was living in a mad world, among people who were happy to do worse than he could dream. He shivered.

  Gavin looked at him, and understood. He touched Kip’s shoulder briefly.

  Lytos peeled off as they walked through the security checkpoint and spoke to the officer in charge. Not five seconds later, Lytos was walking quickly to catch up with Gavin and Kip. Another Blackguard—Kip’s Blackguard, he supposed—was with him. Samite. Kip was glad to see her again. He hadn’t seen her much since the day he’d first arrived. He grinned at her. She simply raised an eyebrow.

  They walked to Gavin’s room, went inside. Gavin beckoned Kip to follow him. Like a particularly squat shadow, Samite followed Kip in and took her place behind the door. She was Kip’s bodyguard now, and that meant guarding him even in Gavin’s room. Even from Gavin, if it came to that?

  A mad world.

  The big, open room was spotlessly clean and as beautiful as the last time Kip had been here. But now he knew a lot more about drafting than the first time he’d been here. Knowing more, he was more impressed. There were hellstone panels in the walls that you could hit with superviolet luxin to control the windows and the artificial lights above. There was sub-red luxin woven through the floors and the ceiling to keep the room warm, counteracting the chill that invaded through the dozens of floor-to-ceiling windows.

  But before Kip could marvel at the workmanship and luxury even of the windows themselves, he saw Marissia, Gavin’s room slave. She must have had warning that Gavin was coming, because she was wearing finer clothing than Kip had ever seen her in before. He supposed that the gray color technically was in obedience to the sumptuary laws, and her hair was carefully kept free of her ears to show where they had been snipped vertically and cauterized in the Ruthgari style, but she looked astoundingly good. But the fitted cut and her lean curves hit Kip more like the background roar of ocean waves crashing to shore. He was arrested by the look on her face. She took a steadying breath, desperate for approval, eager for favor, eyes only for Gavin.

  Kip had seen dozens, hundreds of people look at his father with adoration in their gazes. He’d seen people look at him with veneration in their gazes. This was love.

  As fast as if he were trying to follow a cannonball in flight, Kip looked over to Gavin’s face.

  The Prism was obviously pleased. He smiled widely, and Kip saw his father’s eyes sweep over Marissia’s body appreciatively.

  Ew. That’s my father. Looking at a woman like—

  Kip didn’t want to think about it. He looked away.

  “Marissia,” Gavin said.

  Marissia hurried over and knelt at Gavin’s feet. She kissed his hand. “My lord.”

  Kip couldn’t help but look back at them.

  “You’ve been crying,” Gavin said.

  “Yes, my lord. I have much to tell you.” She glanced over at Kip. Ah, in private.

  Gavin handed Kip the cloaks and the card box. He walked to a closet, rummaged for something.

  Kip cleared his throat awkwardly and walked over to one side of the room where there was a table and chairs. Marissia had already risen by the time Kip sat, and was speaking quickly to Gavin, with her hand to the side of her mouth, in case Kip was a lip-reader, he guessed.

  These people know what they’re doing, and they’re playing for keeps. Kip felt the familiar sinking feeling. He was so far out of his depth all he could do was flail.

  “No!” she said, her voice rising just enough for Kip to hear it. “No alarms. I’m certain—” She lowered her voice again.

  Gavin asked several quick, sharp questions, heard the low answers, then nodded a few times. There was a knock on the door. Gavin appeared to curse. “Yes?” he said.

  The door cracked open. Kip couldn’t see who it was, and Gavin made a very subtle gesture to him to stay where he was. Always keeping secrets, his father. Not letting anyone know anything that might endanger them all. Samite, blocked from sight as she was by the open door, remained silent, unseen.

  “Gavin,” an older woman’s voice said. “I was hoping you might accompany me downstairs. It is your business that will be before the Spectrum, after all, but I’d enjoy a word first.”

  The White. Gavin was talking to the White. Kip swallowed again.

  “Of course,” Gavin said.

  He turned around and addressed Marissia, but Kip could tell that he was really talking to him. “I’ll be back in an hour. Stay out of trouble.”

  Marissia curtsied deeply. She knew when to play along. Gavin nonchalantly tossed something onto his bed, flicked his eyes to Kip to let him know it was for him, and then left.

  After the door closed, Marissia turned to Kip. “It appears you’re to stay here, young master. Do you have any needs?”

  “Perhaps a bite to—”

  “Excellent. Then if you’ll excuse me, I have urgent errands for the Prism. Please do stay out of his things. He’s not very understanding about those who violate this, the only sanctuary he knows.”

  “I under—”

  But she was already gone, the door snapping smartly shut behind her.

  “—stand,” Kip said. He glanced, chagrined, at Samite beside the door. Her lips were pursed, trying to keep from grinning, no doubt, but otherwise her face was expressionless.

  He sat down at the table. Stay out of trouble, huh? He looked over at the bed and then at the deck box, and, for one proud moment, thought of not opening it.

  Hell with that.

  The cards practically leapt into his hands.

  The door opened, and Kip slammed the cards back into their box and hid it under the cloaks.

  Oh, it was just Teia.

  “Hey, Master,” she said, eyes twinkling. “The Prism’s slave told me you might still be here. We’re supposed to go to practice.”

  “We need to talk about that master thing,” Kip said.

  “No, we need to talk about our strategies for the Blackguard testing. After practice.”

  “We don’t need to talk about strategies yet, do we?” Kip asked.

  “We don’t.”

  “They sent you in here to distract me,” Kip said, understanding.

  “Commander said you’d just been through something traumatic. Your partner’s supposed to look out for you. Now come on.”

  It was almost like having a real friend. But of course Teia had to look out for Kip. She was his slave. Kip gave a wan smile. “Almost a real friend” wasn’t half bad, considering.

  He picked up the card box again as he stood. Samite cleared her throat.

  Kip looked at her. She returned his look blandly. He put the box down, feeling like a chastened child. He gestured toward the bed: Can I get that at least, Mom?

  Be my guest, her expression said, tolerantly amused.

  Kip picked up a little stick of ivory from the bed. He had no idea what it was.

  “Oh, that’s a testing stick,” Teia said, coming over to stand beside him. “From the Threshing. It shows what colors you’ll likely be able to draft. Why’d he give you a testing…”

  The stick lay across Kip’s open palm. It had all seven colors.

  Chapter 74

  Gavin greeted the White with a smile as their Blackguards fell into place behind them. Elessia, a petite woman, light-skinned for the Blackguard, was pushing the White’s wheeled chair. This was a change. The White was weakening, then.

  For some reason, though he had feared her for nearly two decades, the thought brought him nothing but dread. She was dying, and so was Gavin. And if she continued drafting so much, so, too, was Karris. Maybe this generation’s time had passed.

  Meanwhile, the heretics under the Color Prince grew strong. Kip wouldn’t be ready in time. Not with Gavin dying at th
is rate. He’d lost two colors in what, four months?

  “So you faked Kip’s test so your enemies wouldn’t know he was a full-spectrum polychrome?” the White said.

  Yes, let’s do jump right in. Anything to not give her a commitment to balance while she watched. “Pretty much, though someone sent an assassin after him immediately, so it obviously didn’t work.”

  “It appears someone is trying to start up the Order again. There have been a few unexplained murders in the time you’ve been gone. But we can talk about that later.”

  They entered the lift together. Gavin took his time setting the weights. First, he wanted to get the weight exactly right so the stop wouldn’t be jarring for the old woman. Second, he wanted her to hear what he had to say.

  “If you told me your plans beforehand every once in a while, I could help you, you know, Gavin.”

  But that would require me to trust you.

  “But that would require you to trust me,” she said.

  Scary. Too much time with the old goat. He wondered if he was becoming more like her, or she him. Now there was a scary thought.

  “What’s the endgame, Gavin?”

  Endgame? He thought of his seven purposes. Seven purposes in seven years. He was two years in now. And he didn’t have five years left anymore. He’d learned to travel faster than anyone ever had. Hell, he’d learned to fly. He’d failed at freeing Garriston—though if he followed Corvan’s argument, he’d actually succeeded by saving the people. He still hadn’t told Karris the truth, but he’d do that once he left here. And the other four? Well, he’d be working toward all of them in this meeting. And he certainly couldn’t tell her about any of—

  “So there is an endgame,” she said. She lifted her eyebrows, coolly amused.

  Shit. He’d forgotten who he was talking to here. Forgotten to guard his every expression. Forgotten to lie first and think later. Protect. Guard. Hide. The fugitive’s motto. Honesty is death. Loneliness is weakness.

  “War,” Gavin said darkly. “The end is always war.”

  “I don’t even know that they’ll declare war, but if you think they’re going to declare you promachos again, you’re insane,” she said as he applied the brake. He stopped them perfectly even with the level so that her wheeled chair could exit smoothly.