The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “You didn’t have to. I’m one of the few who can stand in your way now, and I’ve showed I will if I think it necessary. You could’ve waited at the door and listened from there. You could’ve had people seize Rhoda and interrogate her after she killed me. Then you could’ve installed your own White. It would make your life a lot easier. The assassination of a White? It would have prompted the Spectrum to give you every remaining power that you don’t already have. And don’t tell me it didn’t occur to you.”

  Andross sniffed. He motioned to his new body man, whom Karris didn’t recognize. The slave set down what looked like a ledger book on a side table. “Your wedding present.”

  He hadn’t answered her question at all. What? Now? A book?

  With a polite tone and wearing her most pleasant diplomatic expression, she said, “You’re too kind. A book. Is it hollowed out for the asp hidden inside?” She scrunched up her face. “Shit! Sorry.”

  But he seemed to inflate with immense pleasure. “Aha. The triumph of experience over hope. So it happens even for our peerless White,” Andross said.

  Karris tried again. “What is it?”

  “The genealogy of the family Guile.”

  “A… genealogy?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. Gee, I’ll have to crack that open while I eat my sawdust sweetmeats.

  “You’re young. I know you’ve no interest in it now. But someday you might. And the answer is the same,” he said.

  “The answer?” she asked, baffled.

  “To both questions.”

  “Sorry… both?”

  “‘Why would I give you this boring old book?’ and ‘Why did I save you at such cost to myself?’”

  She opened her mouth, closed it. “Yes. Those would’ve been my two questions… when they occurred to me about an hour from now. So… why?”

  He studied her, and his eyes seemed to soften. “Because you’re family.”

  Then he left.

  Chapter 152

  “Darling,” Karris said with a note in her voice like he’d just come back from the bathroom and he’d forgotten to tuck something away.

  “Yes?” Dazen asked, double-checking his clothes. They’d decided to process forward together. Different satrapies had different traditions on such things, and he’d been nervous that he (being so recently thought dead) might actually get more applause and cheering than she did. Probably a silly fear. And Karris wouldn’t have cared if he had. But hell, they were already married, and they were a team, so they were walking together.

  “Your hand?” she said.

  He lifted his right hand.

  “The other one. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? What is that?”

  He looked down at his left hand and wiggled his fingers. “Just think of it as a bit of, uh, cosmetics. Surely today of all days, you’re not going to object to a little harmless hex-casting, are you?” he asked.

  “‘Harmless’?” she whispered loudly. “You can’t go out there with a hex-crafted fake hand.”

  “Honey…” he said. And he gave her the most innocently charming Dazen Guile smile she’d ever seen. Or at least he hoped it was. “I just didn’t want anything about me to distract anyone from you.”

  She actually blushed, and straightened her dress. It was a gorgeous something with lots of details that he couldn’t really notice except for the fact that they united together beautifully to heighten his eagerness to take it off her.

  Then she looked back at him sharply. “Wait… the tooth, too? You did not!”

  He gave a lopsided grin to bare his dogtooth. “Go on, try to guess. Denture or hex?”

  “Honey! I am the White,” she whispered, looking around at the various attendants who were trying to give them a few private moments before they went out together. “You can’t—”

  “Relax,” he said. “C’mon, it’s what I said last night, and that worked out, didn’t it?”

  She shook her head, blushing again. “I am gonna make you pay for that. And this.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said. He looked at the shut great doors, with the Blackguards ready to open them at their signal. “Shall we?”

  “No, wait,” she said. “I have something for you.”

  “Hmm?”

  “A wedding gift.”

  “A wedding gift? Well, now I feel like the louse,” Dazen said.

  “Don’t worry. At first I planned to give you something truly awful, like make you Nuqaba,” she said.

  “Endless rituals and bumping into the people who burned out my eye in the first place? I’m not sure how happy I could’ve pretended to be about that.”

  “Yeah, I thought it might be too awkward. Too many Guiles at the top as it is,” she said.

  “High Lord, High Lady,” a steward said. “Whenever you’re ready. Or… the musicians can loop this song another fifteen times, as you will.”

  “Oooh, I love the sassy ones,” Dazen said.

  “But… now I’m lousing this up because I’m pressured,” Karris said. “Anyway, it did make me think of your eye patch. And your eye. All you’ve given for these satrapies. I couldn’t stop thinking of that Parian metaphor about the evil eye and justice and mercy. And I can’t stop thinking how you had that harsh kind of retributive justice burned out of you. You gave up the evil eye. You have no condemnation to give. And I thought there’s something beautiful in that.

  “And I don’t want people to look away from your eye patch because you’ve been wounded. I want them to see it and be reminded of what you sacrificed for them.” She took out a white silk eye patch with subtle embroidery, white on white. “I’m having others made. Jeweled ones nearly as prismatic as your eyes used to be. Different expressions. I figured I can play dress-up with you every day.” She looked up at him, nervous. “I’m kidding. I mean, I am having some made, but you don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it. You don’t have to wear any of them if you don’t like.”

  “I love it.” He took off his black eye patch and closed his eye, ducking his head while she put the white eye patch in place.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  The great doors opened. They processed forward together, but the cheers and the music and the voices were all hushed to Dazen’s ears. These first days with her had been full of such wonder he could hardly believe it. He felt like he was continually being reminded of things he adored about her that he’d somehow forgotten in the time they’d been apart. He felt so united, so whole.

  They’d wanted to stay up late last night, just talking—so they did. Talking, connected, they wanted to make love—so they did. Resting safe in each other’s arms, they wanted to tell each other everything, so they did.

  In these first days, conflicts seemed but trifles easily overcome, and all the demands on their time were somehow met, and only heightened their joy of reunion at the end of the day.

  They weren’t children; they knew this was a special time and a fleeting one, but there was nothing cynical in that recognition, nor at all resigned to eventual stagnation: they were, simply, in the first great thaw of spring, and they were enjoying the warmth of the sun, without demanding that it never rain or snow again.

  The ceremony went on, with more speakers and more prayers than Dazen would have liked (one of the trifling conflicts), and he kept stealing glances at her as if to memorize every detail of her irrepressible smile.

  Then they faced each other, held each other’s hands, and renewed their vows.

  As they finished, he said, “Do you mind if I maybe show off a little?”

  “Dazen Guile,” she said. “If I was bothered by you showing off, I wouldn’t have married you. Twice.”

  “So I had this dream last night,” he said.

  “You’re telling me about this now? We’re supposed to process out.”

  “They’ll wait,” Dazen said. As if twenty thousand people weren’t watching. “So this dream… Orholam was talking to me and He said, He said that because I asked a boon for others and not
for myself, that He wanted me to carry a new message for Him in a special way for all those wounded and left bereft by this war. He said with Him, sometimes the healing is fast and sometimes it’s slow, and oftentimes it’s not finished while we still live. But with Him, it’s never, ever partial.”

  “That’s a good message, honey.” She smiled and squeezed his hand. His maimed hand.

  First her expression flashed apologetic, then she looked down, confused. That was the hand whose fingers were illusions.

  But the illusions had held.

  “So yeah,” he said. “I kind of lied? I didn’t really forget my wedding gift to you. Orholam’s really?”

  “What!?”

  He locked his gaze with hers, and as if they were all alone, not in front of thousands, he pulled off his eye patch.

  He’d thought this moment was going to be a gift for her, but instead he was awestruck anew by the unmerited favor he’d been shown. For he didn’t simply see his bride through the new eye as well as he would have seen her through the old eye he’d lost. He saw his bride through eyes made new. He saw her truly, lit by an unstinting compassionate light, and he knew her every strength and every fight and every wound as he had never known them before, and his heart swelled as if to cover every hurt and rejoice in every joy.

  His feelings for her had smoldered for most of his life, banked patiently as if against his will, a stubborn affliction almost, a strong but by now unsurprising love—but now it surprised him, after all, as his love leapt up at seeing this divine creation before him, a jewel with more facets and color and depth than he’d ever imagined, and his love was suddenly burning white-hot, as when they were young, but with an abiding strength beneath it like old oak, tested and true.

  Her eyes went wide with wonder and alight with such joy as he would have never dared hope for her.

  Finally, he rejoined the stream of time, and took a breath, and realized it was his first breath in some time. And he squeezed her hand with the hand Orholam had made whole.

  “Now, for the fun part,” he said, grinning reckless foolishness. His body felt so full of hope and light he couldn’t contain it. “I’m not sure how this is gonna go. Or if, honestly. You ready?” he asked.

  She didn’t know what he was talking about, but her grip was as strong as iron and her face was radiant.

  “Whatever it is… Hell yeah!” she said.

  The high drapes opened and bathed them in Orholam’s light.

  Dazen raised his hands and it was as if all the goodness that had been pouring into him through these days came bubbling out to bless everyone he loved here—and his love had grown a dozen times over—and with skill and brilliance and no small amount of audacity, never stopping to consider whether he could really do what he was about to attempt, without giving it a little test first just in case, but simply believing, as if he were Prism once more, about to dazzle the thousands with spectacle and wonder, he called the colors to him.

  He called. And they came.

  Epilogue 1

  An hour before his second wedding, Kip looked in the full-length mirror on the wall of the small parlor and marveled: part of him supposed that most anyone could look presentable if they were worked on by the most tenacious hairdressers and personal stylists, and he certainly had been thrown upon the untender mercies of those predators as they dug for any shaking sliver of attractiveness to drag out of its den and into the light to be devoured—but instead his wonder was directed at how he himself saw that schlub.

  Seeing himself now, somehow he felt like he saw better than he ever had.

  The cosmetics, the clothes, the hair, the shaved and lotioned skin, the anointing oils, the posture, the dazzling bright colors and pleasing patterns: these were all the lampshades we settle over our light hoping to cast a hue and color others will find acceptable. We hope we’ll find it acceptable, too.

  But others don’t even see that color, for they view us through their own lenses, filtering our already-filtered light in ways we can only guess. Nor do we see ourselves true, for we wear our own lenses, and sometimes the eye itself is dark, and how great the darkness!

  Kip had been so certain for so long that there was nothing he could do to make himself acceptable that he’d hidden his light altogether. The mirror had been an enemy who, overwhelming in his might, had simply needed to be avoided. But the mirror is ever a liar: when you yourself cut out half the light by which you see, how can the mirror be anything but?

  ‘Let me see my skin, but with no pink tones.’… ‘Oh, how awfully pale and ugly I am.’

  We see others not as they are but as we see. We see ourselves not as we are but as we see—and as we are seen, for we each cast our light on each other, too. Surrounded by those who cast only brutal light, we see some truth, and sometimes necessary truth, but a lie if we think it all the truth.

  Kip had been shedding filters and lampshades for the last few years now. Being stripped of drafting was different, though. It not only changed his sight, but it changed the very light he cast in the world. It certainly was changing how people saw him.

  He’d gone to the Threshing Chamber immediately, hoping his loss might be temporary. But the testing stick had shown nothing. He’d kept it like a bad-luck charm: he was a mund.

  Others had paid more in this war. Others had worse injuries. This burden wasn’t going to be easy, and yet… he felt hopeful. As one must wear clothing, one must wear shades—clothing itself is one of them!—one must present oneself to the world, and yet he felt that now he could bring more of his light to the world than ever before. He looked now into the mirror and felt, well, approval.

  “Looking pretty good there, soldier,” he said. He straightened his back—not that these clothes let him slouch much—and then he flexed a bit.

  Someone whistled behind him, and he felt the blood rush to his face. He spun.

  It was Rea Siluz, in a shimmering burnous, a strand of pearls at her neck, and a bright galabaya down on her strong brown shoulders. She was literally radiant. Skin bright and luminous, eyes brighter still and mischievous. A smile like a current in a river where you thought, ‘That’s a nice smile,’ and then suddenly you were three leagues downstream wondering what had happened. Every part of her was beautiful and strong and potently feminine, and the sum was more than its parts.

  “Wow! You’re just—wow!” Kip said. He suddenly understood why people had worshipped the immortals.

  “I didn’t want to underdress for your big day. Still…” She seemed to dim a bit. A couple of smile lines appeared, and her teeth suddenly seemed less than perfectly straight, and her proportions shifted slightly. “Better?”

  “Perfect for starting a riot,” Kip said.

  She sniffed. “Here you said you loved a spectacle.” But she shifted still further, until she looked like the prettiest mother in the city rather than in the history of the world.

  “You came,” he said, smiling broadly. His heart welled with appreciation. “I wasn’t exactly sure how to send you an invitation. The luxiats looked at me funny when I asked.”

  “It’s a big day. Days of profound healing capture our attention as much as days of war.”

  “It’s so good to see you again. But I have to admit, I’m still not really sure why I’m doing this. I’m—well, look,” Kip said. He picked up the Threshing testing stick and showed its lack of colors to her. “I’m not even a drafter now. Not a satrap—oops, missed that bet, I guess. Not a king. Not, not anything. And don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much delighted just to be alive, but I don’t really understand doing the whole big-spectacle-wedding thing.”

  “It’s not really for you,” Rea Siluz said.

  “And if you’re going to get married a second time, don’t you usually go more casual rather than more formal?” Kip asked. The entire island was celebrating the party of a century. “Seven days! Do you know I have to give four speeches, and that was with me winning the argument about how many I had to do!”

 
; “Kip. It’s not for you.”

  Kip knew it wasn’t only for Gavin and Karris, and certainly not for the much-lesser-known Kip and Tisis. It was a celebration of victory, and of life. It was as necessary as midwinter festivals amid the chill and death of every year. The people had mourned, and now was time to celebrate.

  “So I had this question,” Kip said.

  “About me running away when you faced Abaddon,” Rea said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Kip said. He paused, then admitted, “Out loud.”

  She laughed. She’d apparently forgotten to tone down the beauty of that sound.

  “You said once that you were less than he had been but more than he currently is. I kind of took that to mean you’re more powerful than Abaddon.”

  “Kip, our power isn’t measured by numbers in a ledger.”

  “But… I didn’t really misunderstand, did I?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “And you don’t lie, do you?”

  “Oh, my little Guile bulldog. Next you’re going to ask—”

  “Why did he kick your ass?” Kip said.

  “Why indeed?” she asked as if baffled.

  Or as if teasing him.

  Kip cocked his head as the possibility dawned on him. “You… you didn’t.”

  She nodded.

  “You let him win?” Kip asked, outraged.

  “I prefer to put it that I wagered on you, Kip. Yes, I had the power to push him out of your world for a time, but only you could bring him fully into it and thereby make him vulnerable to being banished from this world forever.”

  “Well… dung,” Kip said. “I mean, well done.”

  “Good job, little one. Controlling that tongue will be harder for you than killing ‘gods’ ever was.”

  “Hold on. You’re not going to leave now, are you? This feels like goodbye. Before this torture of a wedding, too. You got dressed up and everything!”

  “There are… oddities to how mortal and immortal time overlap. Every moment I am with you is a moment I cannot be elsewhere in the other realms. My liege has few warriors as gifted as I.”