“Should have guessed. They still alive?”
“Inana is. She’s been holding on. For this.”
“He’s amazing,” Gavin said. “He might even be better than you were.”
Ironfist raised an eyebrow.
Gavin grinned.
Ironfist grunted. It might have been assent. “If he lives long enough.”
“I should go see Inana,” Gavin said. “She was a gem.”
The scrubs began lining up for the little ceremony that would see them become trainees. Kip’s stomach turned. “Can we go now?” he asked.
Gavin said, “This is your friends’ moment of triumph. Think about someone other than yourself. You turn your back on them now, and they’ll remember it forever.”
Kip blinked. Blinked. I’m a self-centered brat.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Commander Ironfist got up and went forward. All the scrubs were lined up according to their placement in the top fourteen. Except for Cruxer, who was down on both knees in the training circle, head bowed, one hand to his eyes and forehead in the sign of the three and the one, praying.
“Cruxer!” Trainer Fisk barked. He was standing in front of Aram at the bottom of the line, ready to pin the Blackguard pin to each scrub’s lapel. “Time to pray later.”
The scrubs were smirking, triumphant, accustomed to and amused by Cruxer’s quirks. They all stood proudly, hands folded behind their backs, stances wide, chests out. All around the training ground, the older trainees and the full Blackguards were standing up, coming to attention themselves. Standing the same way.
“Yes, sir.” Cruxer jumped to his feet and came toward the line. He was smiling, but Kip thought it was a tense smile.
As everyone was standing proud, Kip felt the gulf between him and them intensely. Outsider, loner, alien. They were all he would never be.
“Sir?” Cruxer asked, coming to stand in front of the trainer. He glanced coolly at Aram, who wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Yes, first?” Trainer Fisk said.
“A Blackguard’s training is never done, but is the testing over for today?” Cruxer asked.
Trainer Fisk said, “Yes, of course, now get to your place—”
Cruxer said nothing, but he struck like a serpent, yelling his kiyah and giving his body the sharp countertwist that made his kicks so blindingly fast and powerful. Even Kip, who was looking straight at him, barely saw the strike. Cruxer’s shin, gnarled and calcified by years of kicking against posts, crushed against Aram’s knee. Crushed it backward.
The crunching squish of a joint being obliterated split the sudden silence.
Aram crumpled to the ground, gawping, gasping, eyes agape.
Cruxer dropped his hands instantly and stood in a narrow, nonthreatening stance. Given that he was surrounded by hundreds of men and women attuned to violence and accustomed to stopping it by the most efficient means necessary, that was wise. “Training accident,” Cruxer said loudly, coolly.
For a moment, even Trainer Fisk seemed as baffled as Kip. Finally he recovered. “What have you done?!” he shouted at Cruxer.
Cruxer’s voice was cool, mechanical. “Permanent injuries inflicted during testing result in expulsion. Injuries during training do not.”
“My knee! My knee!” Aram started blubbering. From the sound of his voice, he knew, like Kip knew, like everyone here knew—he would never fight again. He’d be lucky if he ever walked again. Knee injuries like that didn’t heal. Aram was crippled.
Cruxer spoke loudly, clearly, and unapologetically. “I’ve wanted to be a Blackguard since I could walk. I value this brotherhood too highly to let in a man who destroys unity rather than builds it, a man who takes money to destroy one of his own. If the cost to remove him from the Blackguard is that I, too, am expelled, so be it.” Emotion edged his voice for a moment, but he mastered it.
“What?!” Trainer Fisk demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“Aram’s the second best fighter in our class,” Cruxer said. “He took money to finish low. He took money to keep Breaker out.”
“He’s Tyrean!” Aram shouted. “He’s a bastard! I would have done it for free! He’s not one of us!”
“You would have done it for free? So you did do it for money,” Trainer Fisk said, aggrieved, disbelieving. He shot a look over at Commander Ironfist. A straight admission of guilt. How stupid was Aram?
“He’s not one of us!” Aram shouted.
“You mean, one of you,” Commander Ironfist said, low and dangerous, stepping forward. “Because you’ll never be one of us, Aram. Unlike Breaker.”
The last word sent a shock through Kip.
“Breaker!” Trainer Fisk barked. “You heard the man. We got room for fourteen, and I only see thirteen up here. Get in line! Double time! Someone get this trash out of here.”
“No! Noo!!” Aram shouted. But the chirurgeons were there instantly and they carried him away, blubbering.
Kip limped over to the line, not even close to double time, but he felt like he was floating all the way. How much poppy had that chirurgeon given him?
No, this wasn’t the poppy.
Commander Ironfist stood in front of Kip. He took Kip’s gold fight token and snapped it into a pendant. The front of the pendant was a black flame. “This is the Flame of Erebos. It symbolizes service and sacrifice. As a candle takes on flame and is consumed to give light and heat, so is a man who takes on duty. Day by day, we give our lives to serve Orholam and his Prism. Will you take this sacred duty, Kip Guile, Breaker?”
“I will.” Kip felt little shivers.
“And will you forswear other loyalties, and have loyalty first to this body, to Orholam, and to his Prism?”
“I will.”
“Then I declare you, Breaker, a trainee in the Blackguard.”
“Break-er! Break-er!” the crowd chanted.
Ironfist let them go on for a few more seconds, then quieted them and worked his way down the line.
The rest of the ceremony passed like a dream. Each scrub was sworn in, and then the older trainees and the full Blackguards gathered around them to congratulate them.
They eventually decided to go to a tavern that the Blackguards preferred—all drinks on the new trainees, of course. Before he let himself be swept out into the evening, Kip looked for his father.
Gavin Guile was standing where Kip had left him, ignoring for the moment a messenger who’d come to him with something or other. He had eyes only for Kip. The Prism wore a bemused smirk, but maybe it was more than bemused. Maybe it was a little proud.
Chapter 93
Karris was dimly aware of the men leaving. She laid her face on the paving stones, praying they wouldn’t come back, hoping for unconsciousness. It didn’t come. She lifted her face and saw a pool of blood where her mouth had been. Her left eye was rapidly swelling shut, and the right doing the same, more slowly.
She felt sick from the blow to her head. There was a foul taste in her mouth along with the flat metal taste of blood. She realized they’d rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t drown on her own vomit.
Messily, she vomited again. She got it all over herself, but the spasms in her stomach kept her curled into a ball. She was heaving just to breathe, and heaving her guts up.
The spasms passed slowly, but her head still felt barely connected to her body, moving at its own pace, sloshing. She rolled onto her stomach again and somehow started crawling.
She could crawl. Good. Part of her noted that she hadn’t broken either her arms or legs. Good, good. Her hands were slick with blood and worse, and the paving stones cut her knees. Her ribs ached every time she took a breath, but if any ribs were broken, they were merely cracked. She’d had broken ribs before, and that hurt worse than this.
Unless, of course, her body was masking the pain. Bodies did that. Damned things. Something caught in her throat and she spat up blood.
Still had her teeth, but she’d bit the hell out of her tongue. So
mething was burning around her neck. She was afraid to touch it, though. Couldn’t, and still crawl.
She reached the intersection five or ten minutes, or a year, later.
What street was this? She’d just come down it, but she couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember what part of town she was in. Not a busy street, though.
But she couldn’t go any farther. Her right eye was completely shut now. She realized her butt hurt. They’d kicked the hell out of her butt. And her legs were starting to cramp up.
She retched again. Dry-heaved.
When she opened her one good eye, she saw someone walking toward her down the street.
The man turned aside and walked wide around her.
Others passed. Men, and women. A man with a cart. None stopped. Orholam, why didn’t any of them stop?
Helpless. She might as well be naked out here. She couldn’t do anything. At the mercy of anyone who passed. Anyone who wanted to take advantage.
She started crying, and hated herself for it. Everything just hurt so bad.
“Come now, sweetie,” a man said over her. “Everything’s going to be fine. Such a brave girl you are.” Sounded Ilytian, by the accent. Karris hadn’t had good luck with Ilytians. Didn’t think much of them. “Dressed as a Blackguard, but white as a sail. You’re Karris White Oak.”
She couldn’t answer. Stopping crying was all she could manage. Nodding her head was a victory.
“I’m going to pick you up. I want you to think about everywhere you hurt so we can tell the chirurgeons when we get to the Chromeria. Acceptable?”
“Y-yes.” Something about him seemed familiar. But no, she was certain—
He picked her up, and she promptly passed out.
When she woke, she was in a bed. She could tell she’d been dosed with poppy, because she felt far too good. She heaved her head left, saw the world swim, and then heaved it right.
Gavin’s room! Ha! She’d been here before. And oh-ho! There was the man himself, the Light of the Tower, the Star of Stars, the Moon’s Right Hand. He was awfully handsome, standing there, that one wave of his hair falling in front of his eyes.
“Karris?” Gavin asked. He looked terribly concerned. “Can you hear me?”
“Mmm,” she said. She smiled at him. She remembered seeing him without his shirt on at Seers Island. Mmm. “I want to see you naked,” she said.
Oh dear! Had she really just said that? She laughed.
Gavin turned to a little man Karris hadn’t noticed before. A chirurgeon in slave’s robes. “I think we can ease up on the poppy,” he said.
“Always trying to tell me…” Karris lost the thought. And consciousness.
Chapter 94
Tell her. You have to tell her.
Gavin rolled the little brown ball of opium between his finger and thumb. Karris was still asleep, and the people were scurrying every which way in the hall outside, preparing for war.
When the messenger had come to him at Kip’s testing, Gavin had at first refused to understand the man’s words, then nearly panicked. That Karris had been beaten had affected him far more than he would have expected.
“Look to what you love,” his father had said.
They’d sail at high tide tomorrow. The mobilization was unbelievably fast because everyone had known that when the permission came, they would have to move fast. What was transpiring now was simply the last-minute orders. Still, there were a thousand decisions to be made. And though Gavin wasn’t technically part of them, he still knew more than anyone here how to successfully put together an armada and an army.
But for now, he sat at Karris’s bedside. When he’d first seen her, caked with blood, he’d thought she would be crippled by her injuries. Then, after the chirurgeons had tended to her and reported, he’d thought it was a miracle she wasn’t hurt worse. Now he realized she’d been beaten expertly and exactly how much whoever did it had intended. She’d been meant to look awful—without incapacitating her permanently. It had been intended as a warning to Gavin, not a declaration of war.
His father had no idea.
He didn’t have any proof it had been his father, of course. There were any number of possible suspects, but with this timing, this care, this precision? Gavin didn’t need proof.
Seeing her on the bed, wrapped in bandages, unconscious, Gavin was made aware of how small she was. When she was awake, talking, her personality was so big you forgot. But here, she looked so vulnerable, a delicate flower, bruised.
“I’m going to rip their damn arms off. I swear it,” Gavin said quietly.
“You talking to yourself, or am I that bad of a faker?” Karris asked, cracking one eye. The other opened a bare slit through the swollen blackness.
“You’re back,” Gavin said. His relief was like a crushing weight lifting.
“Did I… say something…” She trailed off.
“Something embarrassing while you were mudged on poppy? Like about seeing me naked? No.”
She closed her eyes. “You’re lucky it hurts to move, or I’d beat you bloody, Gavin Guile.”
“Dazen,” Gavin said quietly. That one word was the whole reason he’d come here. The whole reason he’d waited until Karris was lucid, but after all the buildup, he was still surprised to hear the word.
A bruised and swollen face and two black eyes and a split lip were not the easiest canvas on which to read emotions, and Gavin saw nothing. Karris’s eyes were closed. Like she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d passed out again.
A solitary tear leaked from the corner of one closed eye and tracked down her cheek.
The door’s open. Nothing for it but to charge through now. Gavin said, “Corvan Danavis and I came up with the plan a month before the Battle of Sundered Rock. We’d made so many bargains with so many devils that even though I thought my original cause was just, I knew a victory would be disastrous for the Seven Satrapies. Corvan gave me a scar to match Gavin’s, and a spy gave us the details of his battle dress.” Gavin heaved a breath. “My mother knew it was me instantly, of course, but she didn’t want to lose her last son so she coached me how to be Gavin. I thought if I could keep my disguise for even a few months that I would be able to stop most of the damage to the Seven Satrapies. I didn’t realize how hard it would be with you. I didn’t know how to even talk with you. I thought you loved Gavin. Marrying you—as him?—it was one betrayal too many, Karris. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. But maybe what I did was worse.”
The broken betrothal hadn’t turned out so well. She’d disappeared, humiliated, financially ruined, and he’d thought he would never see her again. Part of him had been glad, the part that wanted to live. Surely Karris would be the one to see through his masquerade. The year she’d been gone had given him time to solidify his mask, to become Gavin Guile.
“Tell me,” she said. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and she made no motion to clear away her tears. “Tell me everything.”
Her tone gave him nothing. It was cold, flat, lifeless.
She already knew enough to get him killed, so he didn’t know why it should be hard. In for a den, in for a danar, right? But the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach wasn’t about life and death. Somehow, those were paltry things. This was about disgusting a woman who meant more to him than anything he’d ever known.
He drew a deep breath. Leaned back in his chair, leaned forward. Seven years, seven impossible goals. He’d failed at this goal every year for the past sixteen. If she killed him for this, at least he would have done something right.
So he talked. He told her about the fire at her family’s house, how he’d found he could split light that night, and how he’d been wild with rage, thinking she’d betrayed him. He told of fleeing in shame. Of being pursued. Of having an army coalesce around him he wasn’t even sure he wanted to have. And then of Gavin rebuffing his offers to surrender. He told her how he’d finally started fighting with his whole heart. Of putting Corvan Danavis in charge of his
armies. Of fighting across the length of Atash, of promises from several Parian clans. Of how they’d needed those Parian reinforcements so badly they’d fled to meet them all the way into Tyrea—where they finally found out they’d been betrayed. The Parian clans weren’t coming.
He said little about the final battle. He’d killed a lot of men that day, some of them brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of men and women he’d come to admire since.
Then he talked about the years since. How he’d faced the challenges of learning to be Gavin, and how he’d tried to right the wrongs that so few of the other members of the Spectrum cared to try to redress.
He spoke for more than an hour. And as he spoke, he could feel her softening, warming toward him, her expression opening. And finally, he’d reached the Battle of Garriston and its aftermath and how she’d slapped him and said she knew his secret, and how he was afraid she’d known the full truth. Quietly, he shared how he’d had to decide whether he should tell her the truth, or kill her.
Any warmth that had been gathering was dissipated like he’d thrown his windows open in winter. He saw the muscle in her jaw twitch. You were going to kill me, you asshole? it said.
“You wanted the truth,” Gavin said. “Telling you means you could kill me.”
“It makes sense, you bastard, just don’t expect it to warm the cockles of my heart.”
He had nothing to say. He realized he’d ground the little brown grain of opium to dust between his fingers.
“I am who I am, Karris,” he said. Then he realized how ridiculous saying that was right now. “I mean, I am the Prism, so…”
“I know what you meant. So. Is that it?”
He hesitated. “No. That’s not it, Karris. I killed Gavin last night.”
“You mean metaphorically?” she asked.
So he told her. Then he backed up and told her about Ana, and he told her the truth.
“But the Blackguards… they said she jumped.”
“They lied to save me, Karris. I didn’t ask them to. I swear. Ana said some pretty foul things about you, and I knew I’d lost you forever. I threw her out onto my balcony—I, I don’t think I was trying to murder her, but she hit the railing and tumbled right over. I went to the roof to try to balance. I can’t anymore. So I went down to let Gavin out, to let him kill me.” He couldn’t look at her. Even with her battered face, he could read horror easily enough.