The Blood Mirror

  Whatever leash she’d held on her emotions slipped through her fingers. She turned her back.

  How could he have thought that?

  How could he not?

  But he kept talking, quickly, always quickly. “I mean, they told me I was a cute baby, but I didn’t know what you thought of me. They didn’t like that I was handsome, actually. At least that’s one of the things they beat me for. They said I was a burden. They said I thought I was better than them. It was a lie. I just wanted to fit in. I just wanted to be accepted by someone, anyone. It all got worse when it turned out I could draft. I could show you the scars if you want? Did you get any of the letters I sent you? They said they’d send them on. They promised. They lied about so many things, but I was certain they were telling the truth about sending my letters.”

  Every dream she’d had for her son. Every hope she’d nourished that he would be protected, loved, that he would grow up knowing both a mother and a father—it all burnt and broke at once. Every nightmare from her long nights stepped fully armed from the waves in an instant, invading the beachhead her fears had captured in her mind and setting up camp along the whole coast.

  She’d wanted to let herself off the hook, all these years: he was with a good family, she told herself. The Ashes were her cousins, and had been close with her branch of the family for generations. She’d thought he would be far from wars and danger, that he would be loved and nurtured.

  But that was all a fantasy, wasn’t it? That her abandonment had somehow been beneficial to him, and not just a selfish sloughing off of a problem onto someone else. Now that hook eviscerated her, she fell to her knees, barely able to breathe through her sobs.

  “Mother, mother, please…” he said, and it was as if he were speaking to her from far away. She’d thought she knew Devon and Karen Ash. They’d seemed to be such good people, but then, the real monsters had an uncanny ability to hide right in plain sight, didn’t they?

  “Mother, please don’t turn away again,” Zymun said.

  She beckoned him to come to her. He was there instantly, sitting on the floor with her, burying his head in her chest. He was taller than she was, even sitting, so it was an awkward movement, but she thought she understood. He had never been comforted by a mother, of course he would want to act like a little boy.

  She brushed his hair with her fingers, and a tiny ray of sweetness penetrated all the bitterness.

  He nuzzled his head in against her breast. “Mother, please, I’m so afraid of you rejecting me.”

  “No, never,” she said. “Never again.”

  “Will you promise me you’ll keep me close? That you’ll never send me away?”

  “I swear it,” she said.

  “You swear to Orholam? You swear on your hope of the light?”

  It was a burden, and it invited future pain. It invited the possibility of the kind of hurt that she’d pushed away when Kip had made his innocent joke, calling her mother. She’d failed Kip then; she’d not fail Zymun now.

  “I swear to Orholam, by all that is holy, by all my power and light.” And finally, as that oath passed her lips, as she finally felt that she had done one good thing for him in her life, even if it was only utter some words, something loosened in her chest, and her throat allowed her to say the word that had been denied her too long. “I swear it… son.”

  Chapter 7

  “Kip, it’s been four days. Four days since our wedding, and we still…”

  “I know,” Kip said. He was sitting on their little bed in the captain’s quarters. Another dread night was falling, and the back slapping and jokes about being a sneaky little bugger from the captain and the mate and the squad had been endured already. The public torture ended, the private one begun.

  “We don’t have to try again right away,” Tisis said.

  “And you wore that because you wanted to wait until tomorrow?” Kip asked.

  In her initial excitement and ardor at Getting Married and Not to Some Old Guy, Tisis had packed all manner of lace and silk lingerie. She was wearing a celadon nightgown now that showcased her cleavage and curves. Kip’s new wife was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen—even during the day, when she wore baggy men’s trousers and a tunic too large for her and no cosmetics. Seeing her like this only made everything more painful. “You know the law…” she said.

  “I didn’t until you told me!”

  She pursed her lips. She didn’t like it when Kip raised his voice at her. “Fine, then. We wait three more days, and it’s over. We’ll just… have to figure it out from there. I don’t think Andross Guile will do anything rash—”

  “No, not rash. His vengeance is anything but rash.”

  She lowered her head, and Kip saw her swallow quickly. She looked at her silk nightgown. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have worn this, but I didn’t want to tell my sister’s slave to bring me something plainer. She’d ask more questions than they already have.” She mimicked the room slave Verity’s nasally voice: “‘Is mistress’s lord husband gentle enough?’ ‘Does mistress have any… delicate questions?’ It’s not supposed to be like this, Kip. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Tisis, quieter? Please?” Kip said awkwardly. “Remember…” Sound went through the walls of the captain’s quarters as if they weren’t even there. Maybe that was where their troubles had started. Maybe if she could just relax…

  And maybe this was the stupidest thing in the world to worry about right now. The world was falling apart, and Kip—who had fought an immortal and stolen the master cloak from him, who was a full-spectrum polychrome, who was maybe, just maybe, the Lightbringer—Kip who had killed a king and a god and escaped the Chromeria itself with all the Lightguard after him, who had brought along with himself the best and brightest the Blackguard had to offer—Kip, the son of Gavin Guile, couldn’t make love. With his own wife. Who seemed entirely willing—at least on one level.

  It was as if her body itself was rejecting Kip.

  It had all been merely mortifying until Tisis had told him that their wedding contract was automatically revoked if they didn’t consummate the marriage within seven days.

  “I’m a failure as a woman.” As she stood outside the covers in her barely-there nightgown, Tisis’s skin was covered in gooseflesh.

  She bares her heart to you, and you stare at her nipples. Nice.

  “Maybe it’s not you. Maybe I’m doing something wrong,” Kip said lamely. Neither of them believed that, now.

  They were really great nipples.

  She lifted her eyebrows and pulled back the covers he had bunched over his lap. His tunic covered his arousal about as effectively as Tisis’s nightgown covered the fact that she had breasts. He bloused the fabric gingerly and cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just… Your body is doing what it’s supposed to, Kip. I’m the problem. I mean, there are jokes about how all a woman has to do is lie there. ‘Easy as falling off a log.’ Ha!”

  Kip could tell she was heartbeats away from breaking down. Tears were not going to help their problem. “Tisis, maybe we should slow down, take it—”

  “Slow down? Kip! We’ve only got three days left!”

  The law had been passed to protect children from being married off too young by their parents or to prevent marriages of convenience—part of some long-ago fight about taxation or boundaries or testimony compelled by a satrap, Tisis had said.

  “Tisis, it’s freezing out there. Come here. We’ll figure this out together.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and crawled into the narrow bed with him. He threw the covers over her. He’d been thinking she would lie down with her back to him so they could talk and cuddle, but she lay down face-to-face with him instead.

  Before he could say anything, she kissed his neck, and all hope of rational conversation dimmed quickly. Kip still hadn’t blown out the lamp. But her kisses were perfunctory. She broke away almost as soon as Kip w
ent hazy. She reached for a vial on a shelf. Her expression was determined, not impassioned. She poured olive oil into her hand and tugged his clothes out of the way.

  Her touch was a shock of pleasure, despite everything, as she spread the oil on him. If she’d continued for very long, Kip would have lost control. But rather than saying, ‘I want to make love with you,’ the expression on her face said, ‘I will not fail my family.’ She rubbed the rest of the oil on herself, and straddled Kip, hiking up her nightgown just enough to get the work done.

  There were no more preambles. No soft words or touches. She held Kip in place and lowered herself onto him.

  As before, he was stopped almost immediately. She grimaced and pushed harder, harder until she was hurting both of them. She eased off, adjusting him, making sure he was in the right place, and then she banged down again, wincing each time.

  Andross Guile had once used a euphemism, calling a woman’s quim the Jade Gate. Kip had thought it embarrassing. Of course, talking with your grandfather about lovemaking was bound to be embarrassing, but why did all the euphemisms have to sound either dirty or childish?

  Now he felt as if he were bringing a battering ram to the Jade Gate. The gate was winning.

  Tisis began crying, tears streaking silently down her cheeks, making her cosmetics run, and still not giving up. She was hurting Kip, and she was definitely hurting herself.

  “Tisis. Stop. Tisis!” Kip whispered.

  She didn’t listen to him.

  He grabbed her hips and held her still. “You’re hurting me.”

  “I can do this,” she hissed.

  Much as he’d tried to avoid the common areas in the public baths, Kip had been around enough to know that his horn wasn’t freakishly huge. It wasn’t that; he doubted he could fit his littlest finger inside Tisis. She said it wasn’t her hymen, either. That had broken when she was young. This was pure muscle, and it was clenched so tight that if he’d been inside her when it clamped down, he’d have been left with a jerky stick.

  “Tisis, stop.”

  She released her hand’s death grip and sat on him, defeated. “What do we do, Kip?” Her sitting felt far nicer than anything else she’d done, but perhaps that was just an absence of pain.

  “You’re beautiful,” Kip said. “And I’m lucky to have you.”

  Her expression softened from its desperate anger. She lay down on him and rested her head on his chest. She tried to speak, but then dissolved in tears.

  Kip figured it was better than her sleeping with her back to him silently as she had for the first three nights. Maybe it was his own fault. With the shock of the battle and their flight and Goss’s death at the Chromeria and Tremblefist’s likely death at the cannon tower and Kip’s declaration that he wouldn’t be going with Tisis to Rath, they hadn’t even tried to make love the first night.

  The second night, she’d found out that he really did plan to take the Mighty to war, instead of going to Rath with her. She’d been furious with him, and he’d been mortified at the idea of having to strip naked and expose his body and his scars in front of a woman whose beauty would make a goddess cringe. She’d blown out the lamp, handed him the olive oil, and gotten in bed, legs spread, silent, her whole demeanor saying, ‘Just get it over with, you animal.’

  Despite a lack of personal experience, Kip hadn’t been completely clueless—he’d thought. Tisis had gotten spitting mad with his fumbling, finally taking charge herself. And… nothing. He’d found nowhere to go when he was on top, not because he was an idiot; he’d found nowhere to go because there was nowhere to go. They’d pretended to sleep, back to back.

  The crew’s jokes the next morning had been unbearable. And that was when Kip had missed his opportunity. He should have confessed to… whom? One of the Mighty? None of them had even hinted that something like this was possible. The randy captain? Ugh. Someone, anyway, that things weren’t going well. Or going at all.

  But how stupid could you look? What kind of mockery did that invite? I took a beautiful woman to bed, and I didn’t know what to do?

  The third night had been better and worse. Tisis hadn’t told any of her slaves, either, apparently as ashamed as Kip was. She’d failed her family too many times, she’d said. She wasn’t going to fail again. But she’d decided she wasn’t going to take it out on Kip, and then she’d begged his pardon.

  They’d made some perfunctory moves at kissing and caressing—and tried and failed again. She’d been furious, but not at Kip.

  I should have made love with Teia when I had the chance.

  The one thing Kip had thought he’d definitely be getting when he’d agreed to marry Tisis, he was being denied.

  Maybe he should let the marriage be annulled.

  But Andross had assigned Kip to this task. He would assume that the failure was a deliberate betrayal. The Chromeria needed Ruthgar bound to it by the Guile/Malargos marriage. This was bigger than Kip, bigger than his frustration. Tisis and her family needed it, too, though the Guiles had gotten the better of the bargain. She had been a hostage of the Chromeria, a guarantor of the end of the Blood Wars between Ruthgar and Blood Forest. She could leave Big Jasper legally after she was married, but leaving before that without permission was a breach of the articles of peace—something damn near akin to an act of war.

  In normal times the Ruthgari hostage leaving without permission would be a diplomatic gaffe understood between friends. During a war in which the loyalty of Ruthgar was in question, it would be far worse. If Eirene Malargos actually was on the brink of siding with the Color Prince, regaining her beloved sister would give her freedom to join him if she wished it. If the Chromeria handled the gaffe poorly, though, threatening her, it might actually push her into the Color Prince’s camp. Annulling their marriage could mean breaking an alliance.

  Tisis’s sobs had quieted, and she shifted as if to get more comfortable to sleep on Kip. Which was actually really nice. Way better than frigid silence. But the motion made her leg brush Kip’s horn. Great. Here for a moment he’d nearly forgotten about it. She froze.

  She sat up. Her makeup had run, and her eyes were puffy, and there was clear snot under her nose. “I should at least take care of you,” she said, her voice sniffly, right on the verge of crying again.

  It was not a thought that hadn’t occurred to Kip in the last four nights.

  Kip the Lip was back, already speaking: “In the history of the world, there have been five great unromantic invitations to romance, but this… this outshone them all.”

  She pounded a fist on his chest. “Kip! Not funny!”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “I am not.” But of course she was. Her face was a war of humor and frustration and despair and tears. “It’s either smile or cry, and I hate crying.”

  “I have an idea,” Kip said.

  “What?”

  “Not a good idea, mind you.”

  “What is it?”

  “All I can promise is that it’s a little better than crying.”

  Chapter 8

  If this had been any other time in his life, Gavin could have taken the shock, absorbed it silently, and gone on to the next appointment of an overfull day. In every down moment, he would have chewed through the surprise. He would have lain it down for six or ten hours, not thinking about it at all. And then, passionless, he would pick up that shock late in the day and rationally decide what to do about it.

  But in this gray hell, there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing else to think of. Little to see except the expectant face of Marissia, like a loyal hound expecting a beating.

  Except not loyal.

  Nor a hound.

  “Not a slave?” Gavin asked. “You clipped your own ears? Who would do such a thing?”

  “I was eighteen years old when I came to serve you,” Marissia said. “But I had been deeply in love with you for three years already. Though you’d never seen my face. From as early as I could remember, I’d heard tales from my f
riends, from my mother, and my grandmother. Everyone knew about the perfect Guile brothers.”

  Gavin wondered sometimes if he’d been so stupid when he was young that he hadn’t seen how different his life was from everyone else’s. He and his brother had taken the affection and attention as their natural due, and his mother had muted people’s more exuberant gestures skillfully. In many ways, he’d had no idea that not everyone grew up as cherished as he did.

  She went on. “I didn’t pay much attention to the False Prism’s War. It was so far away from Blood Forest. I knew there was some horrible girl who was to blame for everything, and that the fighting was awful. I thought you must be very brave. And then the war was over, settled in some distant land, and almost immediately, the Blood War started up again.”

  “Tell me. Tell me everything. Give me it all.” Maybe he could regain his equilibrium if he didn’t have to speak for a while.

  She still couldn’t meet his eye. “My experience of the war was almost anticlimactic. My family was wiped out by pieces, and each time, I was supposed to be at the places the raiders hit, and I simply… wasn’t. For me, it was like my family disappeared slowly, every time I turned my back. I never saw their bodies. I never felt the heat of the burning fields, or touched the broken gates. I never smelled the forbidden magic still steaming in the air. A cousin would bring in a confirmation: he’d seen the bodies himself, there would be no ransom, there was no mistaking my sister’s death, then my father’s, then later my mother’s. There was no false hope, but also never a chance to grieve. The land that had been taken from us was being held by enemies. There would be no visits to graves, no remembrance wreaths, no dirges or holy fires against Long Night.

  “I was brought quietly to the Jaspers—and found out that after I’d left, my cousins had been killed, too. I decided I had been spared for a purpose. My grandmother Orea was more distraught than I’d ever seen her. And then you came back from Rath. You’d just ended the Blood War, which had been simmering for centuries. You simply ended it, with a fatal wave of your hand.