Putting on Kip the screw-up, Kip the fatty, Lard Guile, Kip the victim who soaked up damage and mistook passivity for placidity, who thought that being imperturbable was being invincible, putting on that old Kip was like putting on his old tunic. It reeked; it was stained and dumpy, but it was comfortable.
He couldn’t suck in his gut and stand up straight every day. He was a child, pretending to be a lord.
He could remember his mother, sneering when Kip told her he’d been beaten again by Ram, after he’d seemed so nice for several weeks: ‘Don’t be a fool. No one ever changes.’
And then he remembered something Gavin had said after he’d assigned Kip, impossibly, to the Blackguard: ‘Don’t decide to change. The world is full of people who have decided to change but haven’t. Don’t decide to change—change. If you want to be different, act different.’
The bed was calling Kip to comfortable stasis and self-recrimination.
Before he could think any more, he went out into the camp.
But he never found her. He’d waited too long.
Eventually he returned to their tent, alone.
Dammit.
Kip pulled out the rope spear he’d started working on to keep his hands busy. He set a yellow hood on his lantern and started once more. The color set him in balance and helped him step away from his problems as a leader and mull them over in a new way—and he actually made good headway on the project, too. Ben-hadad had pointed out jokingly that if you made the links of chain small enough, the chain rope would be as flexible as real rope.
It hadn’t been so simple, but after studying hemp ropes and then applying some other colors of luxin, Kip was actually making good progress.
Once he thought he heard the tent flap open, but when he looked up a moment later, no one was there.
He went to bed alone, and somehow he slept until he was awakened by Cruxer. The morning was as foggy as Kip’s head, and as he came to join his generals and Tisis, Kip saw why he’d been awakened. On every bank opposite their little island were soldiers, armed and ready for war, bearing the Green Boar of Eirene Malargos. The Nightbringers were surrounded.
“So,” Kip said to Tisis, “I guess your sister hasn’t forgiven us for running away?”
Chapter 49
Gavin sat in his hell. Sat silent, cross-legged, with the poisoned bread clasped lightly in his hands.
“Useless,” the dead man said to him.
The poison, and the bread, and the hunger—his companions—they were oddly precious to him now. His world had contracted to a space as narrow as his dreams and as wide as his rib cage with its knocking, laboring heart.
He was, perhaps, losing coherence.
They have loved the darkness.
How could anyone love darkness?
He supposed that in darkness, everyone was as blind as a one-eyed man. His handicap became universal.
He was afraid of dying, he saw that now. But he was also resigned to it. He didn’t think he deserved better. Karris deserved better.
He should never have married her. Should never have drawn her into his circle at all. He was poison, and he’d known it. And yet he had let her love him.
She’d had nothing from him but grief. It was so unfair. Unfair of him, who should have known, and unfair of Orholam to allow it.
But then, of all people it was unseemly of him to whinge about fairness, wasn’t it?
“You could be in Karris’s bed now,” the dead man said. “You coward.”
The first part cut through Gavin like a black luxin tooth. But the latter part—coward?—was oddly off point. Was the young him so obtuse that he thought such an insult would hurt him?
Gavin knew he was a coward in certain areas—it had taken him fifteen years to be honest with Karris. But in physical danger he was often careless to a fault. Had he really once thought ‘coward’ would be a cutting insult? Odd.
It actually took his attention away from the open sore that was Karris and how badly he’d treated her. At some point, seated cross-legged as he was, he faded into sleep.
As he stood atop a tower, a dream giant towered over him, a colossus of light, blocking out the sun, but its own features not thereby cast into shadow.
Gavin felt himself guttering under the force of the giant’s gaze, no, melting like a candle man in a holocaust, wax streaming from every limb, right on the edge of combustion.
“Please!” he begged. He held up a hand to block out the light, to find some darkness in which to hide. But his hand itself shimmered, turned to liquid glass. It gave him no shade. He was transparent.
But he wasn’t clear.
Threaded through the pellucid flesh of his very hand were veins of thorny black, quivering angrily, exposed and hurting in the light, shrieking soundlessly, grinding and twisting to find some relief.
As the thorns rotated, splintering and lacerating the flesh they called home, Gavin’s entire body convulsed with pain. He fell.
From the pure white marble ground, he crossed his glassine arms to defend himself. And saw another thick vein of parasitic, bloated blackness in his other arm. He tore open his tunic and saw, encased and strangled in a cage of thorns, his own black heart. No, not black. It was gray, diseased.
It pulsed loathsomely. And he was disgusted. And he was ashamed.
He plucked it from his chest to fling it away and die, rightly die.
And then he saw, at his heart’s heart, a glimmer.
Storm clouds were gathering overhead, massive thunderheads of judgment, coming with such speed as to make up for how long they had been delayed. The air, so thin up here, changed palpably.
But Gavin had seen the white. His gray heart writhed, and the whiteness was swallowed again.
“No!” he shouted to the coming storm and the wind that whipped his body cold. “I need more time!”
Chapter 50
Karris wasn’t certain how he’d gotten the message to her without its being intercepted. For that matter, she wasn’t certain it hadn’t been. She wasn’t certain the message was real. Even if it was real, she wasn’t certain it wasn’t a trap.
Koios had asked her to meet—Koios, her lost brother, though now he styled himself the White King. Koios, who had been her favorite. He’d signed the message “Koios.”
So here she was, in a skimmer with a half-dozen Blackguards, waiting for the trap or the prank to reveal itself, or, just possibly, for a meeting that might change the future of the satrapies and save tens of thousands of lives.
The Blackguards kept her skimmer moving in random circles so they wouldn’t have to flee from a full stop if it came to that. Each man wore his spectacles and had full grip of his color and a musket. Karris didn’t offer advice to the Blackguards on their disposition, though she would have when she was first elevated; she had brought only the best Blackguards, and they knew their work.
Except, of course, that they had allowed her to come at all. Commander Ironfist might not have.
She had prepared her arguments before she’d summoned Commander Fisk. They had all boiled down to one thing: if I can end the war with words alone, it’s worth the risk. If Fisk had been adamant, she would have brought up that she missed her brother. That was true, but it was false, too. She was pretty certain the man who had been her brother was long dead.
But Commander Fisk hadn’t argued at all. ‘Who do you want on it?’ he’d asked instead.
‘You’re not going to try to stop me?’
‘You’re the Iron White. In my experience, you stop when you’re good and ready.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘I don’t know if I like being trusted so much.’ Have I changed so much? Has the world?
Fisk only sighed. ‘I only know one man who could stop you, and begging the High Lady’s pardon, but I’m not that man, nor will I tell him without your leave.’
Fisk didn’t mean Gavin. He didn’t mean Ironfist. He meant Andross.
Was this what happened when you didn’t have strong voices aro
und you? Gavin and Ironfist would have kept her from making mistakes. Instead she was alone.
For a single moment, she remembered the day when she was seven years old, and her hateful slave-tutor Izza had forbidden her to leave her reading lessons until she finished ten pages, even though Karris told her that she needed to use the latrine. Shaking and crying, she’d made it through five pages before she’d wet her léine.
She’d opened the door, and Izza was gone. Her father was in the library instead, meeting with an important noble. He’d looked at her as if she disgusted him. ‘Look what you’ve done!’
She soul-wept, hysterical, but he had pushed her away when she tried to hug him.
Karris had never tried to hug him again.
It had been Koios who’d found her after she’d fled. He’d wrapped his cloak around her and walked through the manse with her. When their mother had asked why Karris was wearing his cloak, he’d said they were playing a game. He’d taken her to the nursery slaves to wash her and her clothing, and commanded their silence about the matter.
The slave Izza hadn’t been beaten. That wasn’t Rissum White Oak’s way. That would have been too direct for him. Instead he sold her to the silver mines at Laurion. Karris still felt a stab of shame at the elation she’d felt when she’d heard that.
The silver mines! An educated slave should never have faced such a punishment. Especially not a woman.
Ah, that was why she’d thought of that day now: shame and disappointment and her brother, all twined together like wintering serpents in a ball of slithering warmth.
She was still thinking of that day, of that young man whom she’d adored as only a young girl can adore her big brother, when they spotted the islands.
His note had invited her to choose whichever island she wished in the cluster, that she might be assured there was no trap. There were a dozen tiny islands here, differentiated mostly by how much or how little vegetation covered them. The Blackguards studied them through long lenses and picked one.
She jumped out of the skimmer as it came to rest on the blindingly bright white sand. Her Blackguards had chosen one of the smallest islands. As she waded ashore, they spread a cloth over the skimmer to hide its workings.
Karris had worn her whites. She thought that the odds of an assassination attempt were about one in two—yes, Commander Ironfist would have been furious they’d come. With those odds, there was no need to make herself clumsy with frocks and petticoats. She had a brace of Ilytian wheel-lock pistols tucked in her belt. They were all ivory and scrimshaw—a bit fussy for Karris’s tastes—but they were also the finest pistols in the Chromeria’s armory.
Truth was, the whole Iron White thing had taken on a life of its own. Every diplomat and noble who appeared before Karris brought a gift that somehow incorporated white. White leather, white silk, white cotton, white flowers—flowers! White with actual iron, white with platinum because it was more expensive, and every once in a while, some daring soul would do white with gold—for the sun, you see? Because you are so close to Orholam, you see?
Oh, I see.
Did no one—no one?—remember her love for color?
If only someone would bring her something red, or green, or black, she would grant their petition immediately, regardless.
But Karris wasn’t a woman anymore. To become the Iron White was to become a symbol. If her greatest sacrifice in this war was giving up her preferred fashions, she should really wake each day with a heart full of gratitude. She could only hope that someday the inner woman resembled these trappings.
“There he is,” Gill Greyling said, lens up to his eye. “But what the hell is that?”
He handed the monocular off to his brother.
“Don’t know. But it’s moving fast,” Gav said.
“He wouldn’t reveal that they have skimmers like this,” Karris said. I don’t think. “Not for free.”
When the ship got close, she saw that it was shaped like a chariot, and that thick lines disappeared into the waves before it. Six dorsal fins like jagged teeth bit the waves.
As they entered the shallows, Karris caught sight of a hammer-shaped head and an eye streaming blood or glowing from within with some demonic light.
It took everything she had not to step farther away from the waves. A rational part of her whispered, ‘They’re simply will-cast sharks,’ probably with red luxin. But her stomach didn’t hear that, her weak knees couldn’t hear it, her tight throat wouldn’t.
Iron White, Karris. Iron White. She painted on ambivalence and hoped it could fool the brother who’d known her so well.
Heedless of the sharks, six bodyguards clad all in white hopped from the chariot and waded ashore. They even wore white veils of precious silk, and bore ataghans and punch daggers and krises. There were no muskets that she could see.
In turning back to their old gods, were the pagans turning back to old technologies as well? Orholam, let it be so.
Upon reaching the shore, the bodyguards turned and cast blue luxin to make a bridge. The White King walked to shore without even dampening his boots, leaving only a hunchbacked charioteer behind.
They stood nearly a hundred paces from each other, a man in white and a woman in white, across the white sands, under Orholam’s white, hot eye. Karris drew her pistols and handed them off. She drew her bich’hwa and her ataghan and handed them off as well. Last, she took her green and red spectacles off their necklaces and gave them away.
The White King handed off a scepter that could serve as a mace, and a simple hunting knife. He started across the sand without hesitation.
Of course, either of them could be hiding another weapon. But they were drafters. They both were weapons, against which the only defense possible was vigilance. Karris walked toward him.
When she’d been captured by King Garadul, her brother had appeared in the vast carapace of luxin armor he’d created for himself. But this man didn’t so much as shine in the sun. There were no luxin angles reflecting light, no winking blues or flashing yellows.
He was smaller than she remembered, barely even taller than she was. But then she saw his face. Somehow she’d forgotten, the scouring of time a mercy.
The burn scars. Orholam. Her beloved brother’s face looked as if someone had given a wax poppet to a cruel child. His face had been melted. One eye was lower than the other. A thick knot of tissue had fused his cheek to his neck, and then been cut.
He looked far, far worse than when she’d met with him in Tyrea. It couldn’t all be the lighting, but neither did these look like fresh scars. He’d been burnt then, but not misshapen.
She composed herself against the pity and despair. She had to be sharp and cold for this. She was the White, and her office settled over her like a blanket of snow, covering the cracks in her armor.
“Koios,” she said, choosing to let some warmth seep through her tone. She was happy to see him. She was happy to have a chance to end this war, slight though it might be.
“You’ve come a long way since last we met,” he said, gesturing to her robes. Even his voice had changed from when he’d been young. Husky, damaged by the smoke, changed by that damned fire that had changed everything else.
“As have you,” she said.
“You mean this?” he asked, pointing to his face. “It was hexes, before, to minimize your horror, I hoped. I have since become… more comfortable in my own skin. Or what’s left of it, I should say.” He smiled as if it were some unfunny joke.
“I was referring to the lands you’ve conquered and the untold misery you’ve spread for scores of thousands,” Karris said.
“We’ve freed four of the nine kingdoms of old,” he said, barely hearing her. “But there is so much to be rebuilt. So much that was destroyed through ignorance and greed.”
It was as if they were speaking different languages. He saw himself as a builder?
“This is hopeless, then, isn’t it? There is no bridge across this chasm,” she said.
&n
bsp; He smirked, and it was his old lips, unscarred; his old expression, and an old memory. “I had forgotten how intuitive you are, sister. You wrapped yourself in the blue virtues, but you understand with your heart first. Always did.”
“And does that make my judgments suspect?” she asked, coolly.
“On the contrary. I think you’ve grasped the crux of the matter. There can be no peace between us, only pauses to rearm.”
“Is that what you’re seeking? An armistice?” Karris asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Effective immediately. My armies have advanced as far as Azuria in Blood Forest. We’ll give the city back as a sign of goodwill. In the north, we’ve crossed the Great River. We’ll fall back to the west bank. The truce lasts until spring. It will give everyone a chance to harvest the fall and winter crops—lest everyone starve.”
“My generals tell me Azuria is indefensible. You’re giving me what I could take with little effort.”
“And yet you have not taken it,” Koios said. “Perhaps you are spread thinner than you would like to admit.”
He was right, although the real reason they’d not taken the city was that the question arose, what then? Her armies were needed elsewhere, and the Chromeria and Satrap Briun Willow Bough of Blood Forest were concentrating on keeping Green Haven free. Instead she said, “If we both rearm, it only guarantees that the next war will be even bloodier.”
“Life is lived in the pauses between wars. Any peace is better than any war, some say.”
“Do you take me for one of those?” she asked.
“I’m not asking anything of you. Any place your troops hold today, they shall keep. It shall be my side that falls back.”
“And I’ll guess that your spies will be repeating all this on the streets of Big Jasper within the week? Undermining support for the war?”
“Mm. That sounds like an excellent idea. It’s a weakness of your empire: people here never want to bleed for strangers over there. Whereas my word is holy writ. I command the gods themselves. I say when it is time to bleed and when it is time to build, and none question me. Not bad for the weakling once beaten by your sadly deceased husband, mm?”