The Blood Mirror

  But they’d loved Gavin Guile. Quietly. They’d loved him. They would never give up on him.

  She had to hold back sudden tears. Gavin Greyling was only eighteen years old. He’d been named after her husband. He’d lived to protect him. Now he was dying for him.

  She didn’t ask if they’d found anything. Of course they hadn’t. Asking would only drive home the waste of it. This young man was dying for nothing. But his intentions had been good. Heroic, even. War cared nothing.

  “You’re entitled to have the Prism-elect perform your Freeing,” Karris said.

  “Fuck him,” Gavin said. “Damn. It feels kind of good to be able to say it free and clear. Sorry, Gill. Sorry, brothers, sisters. But fuck him. I know he’s your son, High Mistress. But you got a blind spot where he’s standing. He’s not a good man, High Lady. No one wants to say it to you. No one can tell you the truth. I can now. Because you have to listen to a dying man, don’t you? He did the Freeing last year, and we were there. We’ve been at Freeings—not me, but this brotherhood—we’ve been there with Gavin Guile every time he had to do the Freeing. We saw how a good man approached that day. We saw him steeling his nerves. We saw his vomit in the chamber pot the morning of. We saw his steel spine all day. We saw his drunkenness the night after and the endless baths and the hands bloodied from him scrubbing them over and over. That’s how a real man takes having to kill seventy or a hundred or two hundred friends. Your son did none of that.”

  Her heart caught in her throat. This was the blathering of a madman, the raving of the dying. But to cut him off would be a cruelty the Blackguards would never forgive. She had to listen to his words, no matter how vile.

  “Your son enjoyed killing seventy men and women. Enjoyed it. And don’t you dare excuse him as a true believer who thought he was sending souls to a better place, to their just reward. He barely prayed the prayers his position demands. He giggled. He killed women before they’d finished their confessions. He stabbed them through the stomach first. Or the loins. He did it for fun.”

  And her heart sank. And her heart died. Her son. Her son was inhuman—and she’d known it for long and long.

  “Perhaps you can’t hear this. Perhaps telling you the truth will only gain your condemnation and his. But I live to serve you, Karris White Oak, Karris Guile, Karris White, my Iron White.” And now tears spilled from those broken eyes. “I have adored you, always been in awe of you, and I’ve never known how to tell you that this shadow grows in your very house. I have nothing to gain from this, but Karris… he is poison. He may be the flesh of your flesh, but he is not the flesh of your spirit. He is nothing like you. You are so good, and so worthy. Please. Cut him off. Cut him out. And don’t let him near me. High Lady—”

  “Enough, brother,” Gill Greyling said, putting a hand on Gav’s shoulder. “We will tell her the truth of it all. I promise. But for now, enough.”

  It was as if the jaws of her mind were being pulled open until the corners of her mouth tore open, and her throat were being stuffed with putrid meat faster than she could swallow. Make it stop. Just make it stop. “Are you ready?” Karris asked, cold as iron is cold.

  “I am,” he said.

  They helped him sit, and then stand. He looked at his compatriots, this boy of eighteen summers. He whispered words in the ears of some, nodded to others. He acted with a gravitas far beyond his years. A few of the Blackguards rushed from the room, unable to contain their weeping though they were supposed to stand strong.

  Their weakness was forgiven.

  Moving slowly—a wight must move slowly amid the Blackguard—Gavin Greyling approached Karris last.

  He knelt. First he looked to his brother Gill. “I’m sorry, brother. You told me to take more care a hundred times. I never listened.”

  “I should—”

  “It’s not on you,” Gav said. He squeezed his brother’s hand. “Brothers, sisters, I’m sorry to leave you before the final lap of the race.”

  Commander Fisk was weeping. He said, “One cannot give more than all. You have finished your race, Blackguard. You may put your burden down.”

  “Permission for an extended absence, sir,” Gavin said.

  Commander Fisk cleared his throat twice trying to find his words. “Permission granted, soldier.” He snapped to attention, and all the Blackguards followed. The commander drew an ancient dagger from his belt, said to have been passed down from Karris Atiriel herself and the first Blackguard. He spun it in his hand and presented it to Karris.

  Then he snapped back to attention with his Blackguards. Some met Gav’s eyes as he looked from face to face. Others couldn’t bear it. Gill was shaking like a leaf trying to keep his composure.

  The ward fell silent, even other patients hearing the hushed flap of immortals’ wings.

  “I shall miss your jokes,” Karris said. “I shall miss your light and easy spirit.” Her own was as heavy as a millstone.

  “Let’s not stretch this out longer than I can take,” Gavin said. He pulled the skin of his chest tight against his ribs to show the chinks between the bones. He stared at his brother’s face and squeezed his hand hard.

  “Well done, good and faithful servant. Orholam take you to your rest,” Karris said.

  Then she stabbed him in the heart, sliding the dagger home hard, and then pulled it out quickly.

  Gill held Gav’s hand until the light went out of his eyes, and then lowered his brother’s body onto the table and fell across him, weeping.

  Karris fled, all her ideas of dignity and position forgotten, until she found herself on a rear balcony, in the shadow of the Chromeria, looking over the back bay, where a bone-white ship was loading. She gripped the rail unseeing.

  She had always thought that heartbreak would arrive with tears and wailing, disconsolate flopping about and shutting oneself in one’s bed chamber. Not eating. Not sleeping. Looking gaunt and pale, like in the stories.

  For her, the sound of her heart cracking was simple and sharp and accompanied by nothing other than silence. It came in one sentence, pitiless and plain, stilling all argument and complaint:

  So this is what my life is now.

  Gavin, are you out there somewhere? She would know if he were dead, wouldn’t she? She would have a feeling, right? Why did he feel so close, after all this time?

  But that was only a stubborn, stupid denial.

  She couldn’t afford to lie to herself anymore. She couldn’t let any more good kids die for her willful blindness.

  The Third Eye had told her, Orholam will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.

  But God either didn’t see, or didn’t care, or didn’t save. The husband she’d longed for was gone; the son she’d longed for was rotten; the stepson she should have kept she’d driven away. God was a liar.

  Her fields were barren and sere, picked clean. Her story was over. Now she would merely survive. She would do her duty. That was all there was.

  This is my life now.

  “Commander,” she said, not turning.

  “High Lady?” Of course he had followed her. In all the ways that didn’t matter, she was never alone.

  “I know they were motivated by love, but there will be no more expeditions to search for my husband. I forbid them. He is gone. Let us live for the living, not die for the dead.”

  She straightened her back and squared her shoulders, and, with an iron heart, she finally did what she’d sworn she would never do.

  Find Gavin.

  Below, the bone-white ship cast off from the quay. As the sun slowly rose, Karris watched it sail away until it disappeared into the horizon.

  Chapter 78

  Liv reached the crest of the hill unseen, of course. Her mastery of her new powers had grown greatly in what was now almost a year since she’d ascended. Now, when people weren’t paying attention, she was able to impose order on their very thoughts.

  As she worked, the ambling circuit of a guard’s watch went from routine to clockwork,
superfluities excised, perfect efficiency aspired to. But when you know patterns and can internalize others’ and create your own to exploit them, you can walk twelve unhurried steps, pause by a shrub, and wait for the man with the infection in his groin to scratch, and then move on.

  Not that all men or women were such automata. There was some twitchy woman who reacted violently even to the lightest touch. Liv simply gave her a wide berth.

  She reached the top of the hill overlooking Azuria Bay on the Blood Forest coast, and her breath was taken away.

  The bane lay below her. All of them, and all of them massive. Sub-red sizzling in the waves. Red smoldering. Orange placidly floating. Yellow awash in men and wights, every line perfect. Green bobbing wild. Cool blue melding with the color of the waves. And even the true prize, her superviolet bane, sitting invisible to most human eyes, known to most only by the odd bowl-shaped depression it made in the waves, waiting for her.

  That had been the White King’s bait. She had the seed crystal, but he had the bane, her temple. Attuned to her powers, it had called to her and Beliol all these months. Calling, waiting to grant her her full power, for her to take her place as a goddess.

  Had she really finished her work, and decided rationally to come here? Or had she been pulled along, manipulated like a drunk to his only source of wine, swearing he’d chosen it—yet every day, despite decay and wreck, he chose it again.

  Wasn’t there one last place she was supposed to go to fulfill her mission? One place… near here? Something to do with Kip?

  “We will be safe, Mistress,” Beliol said. “I shall know the very moment the least of them thinks of betrayal.”

  “And I can trust you, of course,” Liv said. She’d been careful not to voice her suspicions to him before, but now it slipped out.

  “I’ve no wish to be chained, either, goddess. What would the Yokeless One be if he were chained?”

  No, that made sense.

  Her body pulsed with superviolet, of her accord, and she felt at peace and focused again. “You can do this,” Beliol said. “Really, you must do it.”

  The bane below were ready to sail to the Chromeria, loaded with supplies and an army and their drafter-paralyzing powers. They were going to win. They would cast off within a day or two at most, and Liv felt no armies within that distance coming to stop them before they could assault the Chromeria itself.

  So Kip hadn’t figured it out. Sad.

  The Blood Robes couldn’t be stopped, then, and the Chromeria was doomed. There was nothing to be gained by joining the losing side now, was there?

  Ah well. At least that made her decision easy.

  Releasing the fine superviolet shielding she’d developed to hide herself from the other gods, she whistled a little tune and started down the hill to join the White King.

  To be worshipped, she thought, would be very fine.

  Chapter 79

  Some time later, Kip found himself washed and shaved and somehow, despite all his loitering, still waiting for his wife to appear.

  And then she did.

  Were they any other couple, Kip wouldn’t be thinking at all right now.

  Candles, perfumed water, flower petals across a bigger bed in a more beautiful room than Kip had ever seen. Aromatic oils and all things pleasing to the senses. The Blood Foresters were serious about sex.

  Tisis emerged from some side room with a blend of shyness and confidence and expectation and delight. On the trail or in a palace, wearing trousers or a nightgown or nothing at all, a beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. Or so Kip had thought.

  But somehow what was becoming familiar had been made new, and what had continually delighted him now left him agog.

  For an unutterably beautiful long moment, Kip didn’t think at all. He basked in the revelation of her as if it were the sun on a cold morning when the chill wind dies down and the winter fades.

  But then that moment trembled and faltered and fell, and they saw it mirrored in each other’s eyes. They were not merely a husband and wife eager for each other—they were they, and what should be an unalloyed good was instead a battlefield.

  For all the times this past year that they’d gone to bed without thinking of their problem, it was impossible to ignore it in the honeymoon chamber.

  No honey for us.

  He wished he could simply enjoy looking at how she brought light and life to the silken curves of her celadon nightgown, but now Tisis had that look on her face that Blackguard scrubs got during the puke circuit, that last time through any physical conditioning exercise where success was measured by puking only after you finished, rather than before.

  Can’t anything be easy?

  “No eye makeup,” Kip said. So she was already figuring she’d be crying.

  “Thought there was no need to stain the sheets.”

  “I think they’re actually prepared for that. You know, honeymoon chamber.”

  “Kip, I meant—” she started, irritated, then saw that he was joking.

  “Come here. Sit with me.”

  He drank her in as she came across the chamber. Part of him thought, Of course I can’t make love with her. She’s far too beautiful. Something had to go wrong with me in the picture.

  But he ignored that voice and simply enjoyed her.

  She said, “When you look at me like that… I feel so loved… and so wretched. I feel so betrayed by my own body, like you’re starving, and I’m withholding food from you. But I’m not doing it on purpose, Kip!” She sat down heavily.

  He took her hands. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m not angry at you for what you can’t control. That wouldn’t even make sense.”

  “Angry doesn’t have to make sense. Anger. Whatever. I know you’re upset.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re disappointed in me, in us, in this sham marriage.”

  “No, no, no, and yes. This isn’t what I expected. But I’m not disappointed in you, and our marriage isn’t a sham. But yes, I am disappointed.”

  “You’ve been holding something back. I can tell.”

  Shit. He puffed out his cheeks. “I hadn’t wanted to put anything else on you.”

  She froze up.

  He said, “Our wedding vows included an admittedly aspirational bit: ‘Let there be no darkness between us.’ Tisis, on our first night, you said something about ‘again.’ Do you remember what that was?”

  She looked stricken. “‘Let’s try again,’ I think? How do you expect me to remember—”

  “‘Not again,’” Kip said. “You said, ‘Not again.’ Can you explain that to me?”

  She couldn’t cover the guilty look that flitted over her face for the barest fraction of a second. “No,” she said, “I’m sure that wasn’t it, I was frustrated, and I said, ‘Dammit, let’s go again.’”

  “Tisis,” Kip said gently.

  There was a long silence. Then, not moving her eyes from the floor, she said hollowly, “There was a boy. Almost two years ago now. I wasn’t even that interested in him, but I was furious with Eirene. My sister was sleeping with every willing woman in three satrapies, and she wanted me to be the perfect virgin. She said since she was never going to marry, I had to carry the family honor. It wasn’t a religious thing. Eirene doesn’t believe in anything but honor and money. But I had to act virtuously so I could be sold like a pillow slave to the highest bidder. I love my sister, and she’s apologized to me a few times when she’s been drunk, but the apologies never changed the deal. She insisted I had to do this one thing—like it’s simple for me. She has to do all the hard stuff in every other aspect of her life, she said, so it’s only fair she gets to relax in her private life.

  “Anyway, I was with this boy, and we were pushing the boundaries one night, sort of daring each other to go further, but I kept thinking about how furious Eirene would be, and we tried, and… when he couldn’t get in, he didn’t take it as gracefully as you did, Kip. He, he said I wasn’t a real woman. That I was a fr
eak. And I said some pretty terrible things, too. I said if he ever spoke of it that I would tell everyone how he didn’t even last long enough to get inside me. We never spoke again, and every time I would see him, my stomach would knot up all over again. I thought maybe because I was older now, it would just work with you, but I was afraid, too. I expected you to reject me if it happened… and then it did. I sort of still do. Expect your rejection, I mean.”

  Kip sighed. He had two thoughts at once, and one was terribly selfish. “Tell me about this ceiling. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “The… ceiling?” She was incredulous.

  “Please.”

  “What? You need some distance from all this girlish emotion?”

  He took a deep breath and blew out the spark of her rudeness before it could reach the tinder pile of his resentment. He was not a good man, but he could pretend for a little while longer. “Please, it’s soothing. I think we could use some of that.”

  “Fine,” she said in her not-fine-est tone.

  God, what a bitch, a hard, unforgiving part of him said. I am trying to give us a chance—

  But another part of him said, God, how she’s hurting. And that voice, slower and softer, utterly silenced the first. Peace, Kip, peace.

  The muscles in her cheeks clenched, but she silently surveyed the undulating, burnished wood that formed the ceiling. “I can’t remember the name of the woodwright, but there are treasured examples of his work all over Blood Forest. Few are so large, though. It’s called Túsaíonn Domhan, it means ‘A World Begins.’ It’s supposed to represent a pond where a single rock has been thrown. These are the waves expanding from the center. At different times of the year and different times of day, two people can lie down head to head right below the center and see different colors and even visions, some claim. Apparently, getting all these beams to match in color and curvature is considered impossible now, and it’s endured like this for three hundred years.”

  “What about the gold… stars? The knotholes?”

  “Oh, that’s an old tradition. In woodworking like this, knots in the lumber are a tremendous challenge. You can’t get beams this size without them, of course. They’re a problem when you’re felling the trees because the saws bind in the knot, and then when the lumber is cut, the knot becomes a weakness in the structure. In every way, the knot is a flaw, an embarrassment that must be worked around, glued or minimized or covered over as well as possible.