Teia said nothing, though she wasn’t offended. It felt good to be treated as an equal by a full Blackguard. Apparently she didn’t need to say anything, though, because Essel went on.
“It’s uh, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, duty. Obligation and service and what we Blackguards owe and what we don’t. I mean, I loved Gavin Guile being my Prism. He was like my big brother and father and luxiat and the lover I could never have all wrapped up in one. Believe me, I spent more than a few nights with a lover with my eyes tight shut, imagining it was him on top of me, or under me. Mm. That sounds wrong because I started with the brother-and-father thing, doesn’t it?”
“I, uh, knew what you meant,” Teia said.
“I mean, he was our Prism from the time I was girl. I grew up on Gavin Guile. Most heroes get smaller the closer you get to them. But he’s gone. Even if we find him—and surely he would have surfaced by now, if he lived—I saw him, Teia. He was broken. Fingers cut off, eye gouged out, starved. He can’t be Prism now. I don’t know if I’d want him to be, knowing what he once was. And… you know, he’s married, too. That fantasy should have died long ago, but it’s dead now. And I don’t think I want to be a Blackguard for this new Prism. You’ve heard the rumors.”
“Um, no?” Ah shit. Apparently being in her own world so much had some real drawbacks in the gossip circle.
“That’s right, you’ve mostly pulled duty with the White. Well, by order of the commander, none of the Archers are allowed to attend Zymun alone.” She tented her eyebrows at Teia, lips pursed as if it was a significant look.
Except Teia had no idea what it signified. “Huh? Why?”
Essel sighed. “He gets grabby. Won’t take no for an answer. Samite nearly punched him in the face.”
“He laid hands on Samite?” The stocky, one-handed trainer didn’t exactly seem like his type.
“Oh hell no. Gloriana. From the cohort behind yours.”
“Oh, sure, I was there at her swearing in.” It was odd to Teia to already not be the newest, but they were inducting new Blackguards as fast as they could.
“If it weren’t wartime, we’d already have had a number of the Archers buy out their commissions because of him. That’s actually what I’m thinking of doing. Not because of him, though. Or more that he’s not Gavin. I’m thirty-five years old, Teia. I love the Blackguard. But maybe it’s time for me. I mean, after the war anyway, right? I want to get married. Not kids, you know, but a husband? The same man every night used to sound too boring to me. Maybe it still does. But the same man every day? That sounds… I dunno. Warm. Safe. Nice.”
She scowled ruefully.
“But listen to me go on. I guess that’s another thing about community. When someone who filled a certain place leaves it, someone else has to stand in. Karris used to listen to my whinging. Now she’s the White. It doesn’t seem right to bother her with all this, you know? Anyway, sorry to unload. You’re a good Blackguard, Teia. A good Archer. I’m proud to call you sister. Thanks. I feel a lot better.”
Teia had said approximately two words. “Right,” she said. Three. “Anytime.” Four.
“And take care of the Gav thing.”
Teia winced. “Right away.”
Chapter 35
The goddam cards. Kip had absorbed scores of the damned things—and not a one was triggered by a wall of fire or a sinking ship?
The Cwn y Wawr on the second, sinking barge weren’t taking their impending deaths passively. It was the only reason they hadn’t already died of smoke inhalation. They were chained, so they couldn’t reach their own blindfolds, but they’d torn off each other’s.
The initial explosion had blown holes in the barge’s hull, but through those holes, enough light had poured to give a few of them a source for magic. Even as Kip had leapt through the air, they’d blown the upper deck off the barge, leaving most of the hold open to the evening sky.
But there was no key. It wasn’t on the big man who’d triggered the explosions, so it had probably been carried by one of the sentries now dead at the bottom of the river. Nor could most of the drafters actually help. There was a source for sub-red and red from the fire, some oranges, and a bit of weak green from the trees illuminated by the fire, but the sky was too dark for the blues to draft more than a trickle.
The oranges were warding off the fire with walls of their luxin, and the sub-reds were redirecting the heat as well as they could, but it was a losing effort. The barge was on fire in every place not in their direct lines of sight—and it was sinking.
The main lock holding the chains to the deck was already submerged. It was one thing to try to pick a lock with luxin when you could see it, but holding your breath, trying to feel the lock through foul water and keep drafting long enough to work the tumblers of a well-made, huge lock?
Kip had already failed thrice.
He surfaced with a gasp.
Two rows of men chained closest to the lock had already been pulled beneath the water and fought no longer. A third row were still holding their breath, eyes squeezed tight shut or rolling with terror. The men of the fourth row were submerged to their throats. They tilted their chins up, sucking air, no longer screaming.
One drafter, three rows back, had drafted a large cone around his own neck. He was shouting at the others telling them to do the same, but between the cone muffling his voice and everyone else screaming, no one noticed. Except Kip.
The cone would buy the man time when he was pulled under the waves. Until the water reached above the top of his cone, he could still breathe. Almost every one of the men chained here could have done the same, but they hadn’t thought of it.
Kip could do it for them.
But that was a distraction, wasn’t it? He could save ten or twenty men so they could have another minute or three of life—but only if he abandoned the main problem: the damned sinking barge.
If ten more men had to die while he solved the problem, that was the price he had to pay.
Well, that they had to pay.
Come on! Not one of the damned cards was going to help him?
“Breaker!” Cruxer shouted from above, standing on a nonburning remnant of the upper deck. “Not much time!”
So he’d caught up. Kip looked at him and saw Cruxer had a coil of rope in his hand. The other end stretched out beyond him toward the shore.
Immediately, dozens of voices cried out for him to save them. As if he weren’t trying. As if he could.
Kip looked through the water. It was up to his neck, too. The next row went under.
He couldn’t save them.
He nodded his failure to Cruxer. He had to leave. They couldn’t be saved.
Cruxer threw the rope toward Kip, but immediately dozens of hands reached up to catch it.
A man grabbed it and tore the ends away from his neighbors. “Save me! For the love of Orholam, please!”
Kip waded up the main aisle between the rowers’ benches, feeling a panic build in him. He was going to be trapped here. He not only wasn’t going to save them, he was going to die himself.
Bubbles came up in the water as a submerged man despaired of holding his breath any longer.
“Breaker!” Cruxer shouted. “I believe!”
Cruxer cracked open a mag torch, and it flared shocking green.
Kip couldn’t leave them. He had to do this. He was the only one who could.
He made it to the man holding the rope. “Give me the rope. I can save you.”
But the man was fear-frozen, desperate, beyond reason.
Kip clobbered him and took the rope. He pushed back into the deeper water, took several deep breaths, and pushed under water.
He found the lock again. But the lock didn’t matter. The chain was too strong to break. But the chain was just a bond, and a bond wasn’t evil. A chain could be a lifeline. What mattered was what you were bound to.
By touch in the cool, murky water, Kip found the enormous metal loop that bolted the cha
in to the deck. He wound green luxin thick around the chain, pushing his will into that space until the green luxin filled it.
He called to mind then that boy he had been so long ago, trapped in that closet with the rats, biting, scratching. It came back all too readily. But he pushed past the remembered terror—that wasn’t what he needed now—and there it was: the unspeakable thirst for freedom, the longing to break something, to get out.
Every muscle in his body flexed and he roared, bubbles erupting from his mouth, and he felt something crack.
Kip surfaced, gasped, and went down again, even as another row disappeared under the waves.
The big loop was torn loose of the decking, but only one huge nail had pulled fully free. The bolt hadn’t broken; one of the clinch nails that had been pounded through the deck and then bent aside had been pulled through.
Kip pushed the chain beneath the freed side, and then moved up the submerged rows by feel.
There were identical, much smaller loops holding the chains bolted to the floor at every row.
But Kip had the process now. Attacking the clinch nails rather than the bolts, almost as quickly as he could push through the water, he tore out one after another with an explosion of luxin and wood and breath.
He surfaced again, and waded forward. The men were shouting. They didn’t understand because they couldn’t feel the slack in the chains until their own loops were broken.
Finally Kip pulled the last one free, directly beneath Cruxer. He looped the rope Cruxer had given him through the chain. “Pull!” he shouted.
And suddenly help arrived as the Cwn y Wawr from the first boat freed themselves one at a time. First a single man helped Cruxer lift men out of the hold, pulling the chain in like a fishing line, the enslaved flopping about like fish.
Then another man jumped into the hold with Kip, giving the imprisoned men a foot up to climb out. And then another came to help keep the chain from getting tangled. And others arrived, pulling the dead from the water.
The whole line was still bound together, so if any part was dragged underwater, at least half the men would be pulled down with it.
There was a sharp crack, and water gushed into the boat, but the men didn’t feel it, even as the deck bucked beneath their feet.
The healthy heaved on the chain, and the chained made it to shore.
A few exhausted minutes later, Kip and everyone else had been dragged onto the bank. Nine men couldn’t be revived and several others had died in the initial blasts or in their own escape attempts—at least two lay facedown on the riverbank having cut off their own arms to escape their shackles, only to bleed to death in cold freedom.
The pale Cwn y Wawr commander, the short, gap-toothed, black-haired man named Derwyn Aleph, had tried to use his barge’s key on the still-chained men’s locks. It hadn’t worked.
He looked at the corpses bound to his men, and he looked to the forest, from which reinforcements might come at any time. He turned to Kip, who was seated on the riverbank, barely able to move.
“By your traditions, you can’t defile the dead, nor can you leave them behind,” Tisis said. Kip had no idea when she’d arrived. “But your men can’t possibly carry them through the forest with the speed you need to move if you’re to escape.”
The man gave a stiff nod.
“Tell your men to look away,” she said. “Ferkudi, Big Leo, if I’m to lead these people, I can’t be ritually unclean in their eyes. Cut these men free of the chains, and put their bodies on our skimmer.”
She walked around so the commander could look at her rather than seeing what Ferkudi and Big Leo did. And to their credit, the Mighty did it quickly and without question or complaint, quickly lopping off hands and feet and freeing the dead from the chains that still bound them to the living. To Kip, it was a sudden synecdoche of all that warriors do: the stomach-turning, soul-scarring butchery that society asks for the safety and squeamishness of its soft souled.
Tisis said, “We’ll lay them out on Fechín Island at the Black River confluence. Burial is yours, though.”
Derwyn looked overwhelmed with gratitude. He pointed at Kip with his chin. “Who is he?”
“Does it matter?” Tisis asked.
“Only to spread the tales,” Derwyn said. “A hero’s due.”
“Then he is Kip Guile, leader of these Mighty, who call him Breaker. Perhaps he is the Luíseach, perhaps he is the Diakoptês, though he claims neither. He is my husband. Even were he not, he is the man I would follow to the ends of the earth.”
Derwyn looked into the wood, deep in thought or merely peering for approaching enemies, and then turned to Kip, who sat on a stump, wrung out and wet, feeling anything but heroic.
Kip’s thoughts were running in the opposite direction: Wow, that was really dumb. I never should have done that. Why can’t I think before I do anything? Cruxer’s gonna kill me.
As his men sat or stood or stretched or bound up each other’s wounds, they all watched, and the Forester said, “These names tell me that you are a great man. I have seen great men. The chains you lifted from my wrists tell me that you are a strong man. I have known strong men. But you didn’t dive into that water to save us so that we might be your weapons. You knew we’d sought a coward’s peace. Most men would leave us to the hell we deserve for our faithlessness. The lives you have saved this day will testify unto eternity that you are a good man. A man who risks his life to save strangers testifies not to their worth but to his own. I have never seen or known a man to be great and strong and good as well. I will see you in three days with any who will join me. I care not what others call you; if you will have me, I will call you lord.”
Unable to quite process so much kindness at once, looking for some way to shrug it off and make a joke, Kip glanced over to find Cruxer glowering somewhere.
But Cruxer wasn’t glowering. He beamed. The rest of the Mighty ranged from Winsen’s expression of ‘Of course we’re awesome’ to Big Leo’s stolid approval to Ferkudi’s huge smile. Ben-hadad was had already processed whatever he was feeling and was back to fixing something.
Last Kip looked at Tisis, but even she didn’t give him some humorous out. Her eyes shone with tears of pride. It was as if all of them were reflecting back a different man than Kip had ever thought he was. What if the story I’ve been telling myself about who I am has been wrong?
And a chunk of his self-loathing broke and faded away. Kip straightened his back. “I look forward to seeing you and whoever joins you at Fechín Island,” he told Derwyn Aleph. No joke. No self-deprecatory smile.
Then, having taken all the gear and weapons and provisions they could carry from the first barge, they scuttled it. And far more readily than two hundred men carrying a hundred paces of heavy chain should have been able to, the Cwn y Wawr disappeared into the forest.
Chapter 36
“You cannot go this long without seeing me. Not ever again. Understand? I forbid it. Forbid!”
Karris had given in to the temptation to abuse her powers and decided that she was entitled to the services of the Blackguard’s physicker/masseuse, Rhoda. She’d decided it was acceptable as long as she didn’t take either of them away from their duties. Unfortunately, that meant they were meeting two hours before dawn.
The Chromeria was home to all sorts of strong personalities from all over the world, and with that came idiosyncratic styles of dress and cosmetics use, but even here, Rhoda stood out. Of Tyrean and Parian lineage, she had dusky skin and wavy hair that she wore in a topknot, the explosion of hair above it woven with colored beads. When outside, she wore a broad-brimmed petasos with a hole cut in it for her topknot. Of slim build, except for a round soft belly that made her look perpetually pregnant, she wore more, and more garish, face paint than anyone Karris had ever seen, but no perfume—“That’s for whores,” she said—but once she put her hands on your muscles, nothing else mattered.
Rhoda knew Karris’s body like no one else in the world. She started wit
h a quick examination of Karris’s body—checking the mobility of that left ankle she’d sprained so long ago, testing how far and how evenly her limbs moved. She clucked and pulled and tweaked. She found aches Karris hadn’t even been aware of, and old injuries Karris barely remembered.
Then she went to work. She was a sub-red, and her hands radiated heat deep into Karris’s left shoulder, still swollen from when she’d jumped off the top of the hippodrome into the Great River. At an old hamstring injury, she pulled the heat away, as well as the heat from Karris’s own body, her hands becoming as ice.
“And what is this?” Rhoda asked, her elbow working on a spot low in Karris’s back. Karris grunted. She wasn’t required to answer. “Too much sitting. Feel this?”
Karris mumbled into her cushions, “I have to hold court, you know that.”
“Iron White can talk while standing, yes? Talk standing. Also this?” Rhoda grabbed a double handful of Karris’s hair. She always ended with the scalp massage. It was Karris’s favorite part, the sweetest medicine of their time together. But now she tapped at Karris’s hairline with one finger. “Gray. And not just one or two. At your age. You always dyed your hair for whimsy. Now, not fun. More sleep. Is order.”
“Too much to do,” Karris said. “Too many decisions to make.”
In fact, she should be going over her lists right now. There were so many items now that she had to write down the nonsecret ones.
“This is what happens when you stay away,” Rhoda said. “You forget how this works. I tell you what you doing wrong. I tell you what price you paying for what you doing wrong. I tell you how fix. Then you ignore me.”
“I’m sorry, Rhoda,” Karris said. She sighed.
“Iron White, ha! Feel like Iron-Necked White to me.”
She was glad to hear Rhoda tease her about it, but it had had an odd effect on Karris, being called the Iron White, as if she were a Name. She had recoiled from it at first: I’m not that.
But the more she thought about it, the more she realized rejecting it was foolish as a practical matter. If she were ever to check off ‘Win the war,’ she had to lead. She had not the animal presence or the huge charisma of her husband. She was small. It meant something, that, even if it shouldn’t. But someone small could be known for being hard and quick—not just physically, but mentally, too.