The Blood Mirror

  But trained warrior-drafters were scary, too. And these Cwn y Wawr were in bad shape, whether they knew it or not. They’d been freed from death or servitude, but they’d lost two precious things: their confidence and their honor. They’d lost their confidence in being betrayed and captured and needing to be rescued, and they’d lost their honor in pursuing a separate peace with the White King.

  A soldier without confidence and honor is a breath away from becoming a brigand or gangster.

  But it had always been a fool’s dream. Kip, leading men to destroy the White King himself? These two camps were like lodestones pushing against each other invisibly, endlessly.

  Ergo, just flip one. They’ll fuse themselves together.

  Right?

  Kip stepped ashore without a word, without so much as a nod at the men standing there to ask him a question.

  Drafting green from a thousand trees shining on each bank of the river in the noonday sun, he threw down steps and made a small platform to stand on. “We,” he declared, “are damaged but not dismayed, oppressed but not overwhelmed. We are the Broken, for when our oaths were tested, we broke them and ourselves. We were the despised: Here are my best friends. This world sees a bastard, an orphan, a hostage, a cripple, an idiot. I call them the Mighty. We—you—are outcasts all, the homeless driven from the lands where our mothers were buried. They have taken the light from our lives. Killed our loved ones, our friends. Taken our homes. Left us to wander as ghosts and feral dogs.”

  He didn’t remember, afterward, much of what he said after that. He was looking at the faces, watching how they moved, the little twitches of expression. A man’s face is the surface of a pond, reflecting the sky, reflecting the trees, reflecting whatever is the object of his gaze and his love, the reflection hiding his depths. But when a wave passes, in the swell, for an instant, you can see what lies beneath the waters.

  Their ears listened to his words, but their hearts inclined to the sincerity of his soul, deep calling unto deep: We have lost, but we are not lost. We have failed, he told them… but we can do better. We can be forgiven, we can make things new. This is not the end for us.

  “They have taken the light from us. Yes. But now they expect us to cower like dogs beaten and fade like shades forgotten. But I don’t see dogs and shades here. Do they not know what they’ve begun? I see wolves. I see ghosts…”

  He looked around at them as if they had forgotten who they were, and he was here to hold up a mirror for them that they might remember.

  “Have you forgotten? Have they made you, for this brief hour, forget? Ghosts and wolves hunt at night. They think we cower, waiting for the light? Alone we are broken, bereaved, afraid. Together we are strong. Together we will hunt. In darkness, we will usher them into the final darkness. Alone we were weak and frightened. That time is past. Together, today, we are the Nightbringers.”

  It ended with cheers, and tears, and not a single accusation that this person or that was disloyal or heretical or dangerous. Somehow it ended with a hundred and twenty will-casters, two hundred thirty Cwn y Wawr, and two hundred civilians swearing fealty to Kip.

  And Kip’s fool dream that he might destroy the White King was like a babe stillborn, lying pallid and cold in his hands—taking sudden breath, stirring, squalling; thus was born his army.

  Chapter 47

  There was nothing special about the basement where Teia would commit her first murder. Other than, naturally, the four iron rings anchored in one wall, and the old man shackled spread-eagled between them.

  Teia set down her candelabrum. If only it were so easy to lay aside her conscience. The old man was wearing slaves’ white. He was gagged, but he didn’t appear to have been beaten. Most importantly, he wasn’t blindfolded.

  They didn’t care that he saw her face. Her last, dim hope had been that this was just a test to see if she’d do it—maybe this ‘slave’ was in fact a plant from the Order itself whose assignment was to see if she broke and tried to free him.

  But that hope, like all hopes, drained away.

  Master Sharp had left. He didn’t care. He’d given her no deadline at all, though obviously some lackey of the Order or someone hired by it was coming at some point to dispose of the body.

  If there was no body here, Teia would be exposed as either disobedient or incapable of the work the Order had for her to do. Either would be a death sentence for her.

  This was literally his life or hers.

  The man looked at her with a slave’s hooded wariness. You tried not to betray too much as a slave, lest your fear or hatred or disgust or longing earn you a beating.

  ‘Earn.’ Orholam damn us all.

  She could see him trying to place her so that he might guess what to expect: Traders’ clothes, perhaps? Young—she had always looked young for her age, which was made worse by her short hair and what looked like mere skinniness when her clothes covered her arms and shoulders. She probably didn’t look too frightening to him, though. Just a slip of a girl, she was.

  No, old man, I am death come for you.

  “This shouldn’t hurt,” Teia said.

  Slaves had superstitions about who was the most likely to be brutal to them. Insecure wives, drunkards, slave owners barely rich enough to own slaves but desperate to do so to prove their status, the youngest children in wealthy households, and that particular breed of rich luxiat that strained under the hypocrisy of keeping slaves while Orholam taught that all men were brothers. Where did Teia fit? this man was wondering. Sometimes a very young girl didn’t see a slave as a slave. He might be a playmate, an adult kinder than others because he gave her his time.

  Sooner or later, they learned.

  “Not until the end, anyway,” she said.

  That was another evil of slavery, wasn’t it? How it twisted not only the enslaved, but their owners as well. Teia had seen the worst impulses of her onetime playmate Sarai not only tolerated but encouraged as far as slaves were concerned. Surely every child has terrible impulses. Surely every mother says, ‘No, child, don’t hit!’ Except a slaveholder says, ‘No, child, you may only hit Kallas or Elpis!’

  And Kallas was twisted by accepting the blows of his mistress’s brats. And Elpis was twisted by her weekly rapes at her master’s hands. And her master was twisted by thinking it was natural and moral, his right.

  This is why Orholam hates slavery, as he hates divorce and war. But he tolerates them. They are his compromises with humanity, with the hardness of our hearts. For who could imagine a world without any of those?

  She let loose a cloud of paryl from her palm, and then, given the darkness of the room, she remembered her dark spectacles, and took them off.

  The slave shuddered at the sight of her irisless black eyes, monstrously agape, swallowing all light.

  He bucked against his shackles. He tried to scream, but whoever had gagged him had not just bound a rag around his mouth—which did little to nothing. They’d filled his mouth with a rock and then bound it in place. Poor bastard.

  And old, and male. Because an old worker slave was cheap. An older woman could be put to work inside, watching children or knitting or doing simple tasks. Not all were, of course, but enough that they generally cost more than old men broken by long physical labor.

  Teia felt far away from herself. As she streamed paryl through one of his arms, looking for the nerves, another part of her immediately started concocting schemes, each more impractical than the last. She could take the man out of here under the cover of her cloak—too small. She could wait until darkness—and what if someone came before then? She could find a dead body about his age and size—where? She could kill the Order’s lackey who came to get the body—and who was to say that wouldn’t be just some innocent grave digger? Even if it was one of the Order’s people, killing them would tip her hand, wouldn’t it?

  It was already too late to go after Murder Sharp and try to kill him and then pretend she’d never gotten the orders. She hadn’t even thought
of it when he’d left.

  “Mmm! Mmm!” His eyes rolled back in his head and he bucked again, making her lose the paryl stream, dammit.

  He thrashed, tearing the skin at his wrists, blood trickling down his bare arms.

  She could simply disobey—and show that she wasn’t loyal. That was death. But perhaps she could disobey for some excellent reason—she refused to kill slaves because she’d been a slave, or, or…

  It wouldn’t matter. Not to the Order. Not in wartime. Disobedience was death. Their secrecy was more important to them than having another assassin.

  She’d have to run away, far, far from here, to some city or village where they would never find her.

  She found a thick tendon and pulled the paryl tight around it. His arm barely twitched before the paryl shattered. Apparently she wouldn’t be pulling anyone around like a marionette with paryl.

  In the right place, though—say by making a finger twitch on a trigger—it could make all the difference, couldn’t it?

  She was doing it. Exactly what the Order had commanded. She was using this slave like a practice dummy. A whetstone on which to hone her skills razor sharp. Not a human. Not an old man with fears and hopes and a history.

  I’m a Blackguard. This is what I must do. I’m a soldier, under orders. This is war, and I am a soldier. I could have run away, but I chose this. I could run away now.

  She could get money. How could you stop a thief who could make herself invisible?

  How she wished she were back in the Prism’s training room. She could bathe in superviolet and blue until there was only the cold logic of necessity.

  The nerves! At last. She tweaked a bundle at the slave’s elbow. His arm dropped, paralyzed, until the shackle caught his wrist. He gasped.

  The problem was how much sense it all made. It made sense for the Order to train her. It made sense that she be trained on old, useless slaves who would die within a couple of years anyway. On the Chromeria’s side, it made sense that Teia be ordered to comply with whatever the Order demanded. It was the only way they could get her close enough to uproot them.

  Karris was an admiral accepting the death of her men on the front lines to protect more at home. Accepting, even, the corruption and breaking of those at the front lines to protect the lives of those at home.

  But all that logic couldn’t argue with the fear on the face of this man, who’d done nothing to deserve a death that accomplished something so near to nothing it surely couldn’t measure against his life.

  She would use these skills she would learn here with this man’s pain and his death against the Order—but first she would use her skills for it. How did that balance any scales?

  She wasn’t killing an innocent on purpose; that was the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Bad guys killed the innocent on purpose; good guys sometimes killed the innocent, but only by accident while trying to kill the enemy.

  But she was killing an innocent deliberately in order to get a chance to kill the guilty. How was she any different from a marksman who shoots a child in the legs so that he can gun down any combatants who came to save the child?

  No, the Order was making her do this. It was the Order who would kill her if she refused.

  Alone, the Chromeria would never order this. Experimenting on and murdering a slave for practice was the Order’s way of doing things.

  Yet here she was.

  The Order would keep sending her slaves until she mastered all the skills they demanded of a Shadow. If she mastered them quickly, they would send her sooner to kill targets out in the world. If she mastered them slowly, they would send her more and more slaves to practice on—and then murder.

  There was no good choice, if she stayed. Nothing that would let her stay innocent.

  If she ran, she wouldn’t be a murderer. But she would never avenge Marissia, either. The spymaster was probably dead, but to run would mean giving up on her. Then Teia would never stop the Order, and they would continue murdering whomever they wanted. They would forever take their tithe of blood.

  If she ran, she wouldn’t be guilty of anything except cowardice.

  I don’t run.

  Fear was a shackle. Fear was a shackle she would never wear again.

  Orholam, forgive me for what I am about to do.

  Teia pulled off the man’s gag and removed the stone from his mouth. “What’s your name?” she asked quietly.

  “Rajiv.”

  “Rajiv? You don’t look Atashian. What’s your birth name?”

  He looked at first as if he couldn’t remember. Finally, in a tone that said, ‘Must you take also this?’ he said, “Salvador.”

  “You’re Tyrean.”

  He nodded.

  “Any family, Salvador?”

  “A son.”

  “Slave?”

  “No longer. They took him from me. Beat him to death years ago.”

  “As they do,” Teia said. Fuck them. “I wanted to tell you, Salvador, that your death today is going to accomplish something. That it’s part of winning this war, once and for all. That it’s a secret, but I swear you’re part of something good.” She looked down at her hands. “I wanted to tell you that, but I’m not sure it’s true.”

  I don’t run away.

  But I promise this, my innocent Salvador, hollow though my promise may ring: I will avenge you.

  Perhaps that’s all that’s left for me.

  She rubbed a sore dogtooth absently and then, gathering her will, went to work. And when she was finished, she had by no means mastered paryl.

  He would not be the last.

  Chapter 48

  Of all the improbable situations Kip had found himself in during his short life—killing a king, killing a god, actually having friends, being able to jog more than a few steps without collapsing and dying of equally lethal doses of heart attack and embarrassment—this situation struck him as the most implausible yet.

  He was standing at the open flap of his tent with a beautiful woman who wanted him, who seemed to genuinely want him. Tisis practically glowed with pride in Kip and hunger for him. It was so weird it actually gave him pause, and made him think.

  Thinking was clearly the enemy here.

  The Cwn y Wawr and Ghost camps had joined together on the island, and tonight they were celebrating the end of generations of internecine strife and oppression. It was the wildest party Kip had ever seen. The kind of party where before you slipped into your tent, instead of worrying that you were going to disturb your neighbors, you worried that it might already be occupied.

  And Kip. Goddam Kip. He was seriously considering not making love with this beautiful woman. Against every sane consideration, Kip was stuck between his pride and having some good old-fashioned dirty fun with his mind-blowingly amazing wife.

  Swallow your pride and take what you’re given, you fat idiot. This is better than you deserve. Why can’t you just enjoy it?

  Tisis gave a little wave and a wink to her healer friend Evie Cairn, who’d been teaching her battlefield medicine, and tugged on Kip’s belt again, her other hand holding open the flap of the much-larger tent the Cwn y Wawr had insisted on giving them. “You coming inside, or do you want to get started right here?”

  But then her smile faded as she saw the look in his eyes. She dropped Kip’s belt.

  “We have to talk,” Kip said. Not words he would have ever imagined speaking.

  When bodies should speak, words are the enemy, moron.

  “This is about the will-casters, isn’t it?” Tisis said. She swallowed. She looked around guiltily, blonde hair glowing in the light of the rising moon, unwilling to meet his eyes. She ducked into the tent.

  It looked like flight, and it triggered a predator instinct. Kip went after her. “You manipulated me.”

  Her back to Kip, Tisis said nothing. She lit a lantern.

  It wasn’t fair, but Kip wasn’t reminded of Andross Guile and his thousand manipulations and machinations, his dispa
ssionate way of fucking with everything for his own ends, even if those ends were merely his own entertainment. Instead, he was reminded of his mother. She had lied reflexively, for no purpose. She manipulated him, too, always, ever twisting him into guilt and shame when she could have accomplished the same ends with a simple request. Her manipulations were wanton and wounding and pointless.

  “You kept what they were a secret from me—even when we were half an hour from meeting the Ghosts’ mortal enemies. I came this close to walking into a trap blind. You could have gotten us all killed. Balls, Tisis, Cruxer could have said something about will-casting heathens and I would have agreed out of hand. After… I mean, I feel like we just came to this new understanding, this new place, and things are so good between us—and you sided with them against me.”

  Whoa. Kip the Lip. That got away from him a little.

  She said nothing. She didn’t even turn around, damn her.

  “Turn around,” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “You’re just like my mother,” Kip said. Untruer words had never been spoken. “You ever side against me again, and we’re finished.”

  Still not speaking, she stepped past him, averting her face and bringing a hand up to block his view—so he couldn’t see her tears, no doubt, as if that very action weren’t rubbing in that he’d made her cry.

  Mere moments after she was gone, Kip’s hot blood cooled. But he didn’t move. She was in the wrong!

  So why did he feel so wretched?

  Should have waited until after sex to fight.

  Never choose fighting over sex.

  He opened the tent flap, but he couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Kip knew he should go after her. Bugger what anyone else in the camp thought of him. They were busy with their own pleasures tonight. He needed to go apologize. He needed to go tell her he was an asshole.

  These new clothes were too wide across the shoulders and chest and too tight across the belly, too much effort to keep clean. Too damn grown up.