by Brent Weeks
The sun was baking the bay and had been for the last two days. Gavin had stripped off his shirt to cool down immediately, and after modestly sweating through the first day, Karris had followed his lead on the second, wearing only her tight Blackguard’s chemise. The sight of her on her back, lean stomach exposed, legs on either side of him, skin radiant from golden sun and sweat—his breath stopped, thoughts scattered. He tried not to—failed—looked at her breasts.
Briefly, but she noticed.
Gavin could hear his imprisoned brother’s voice, sudden, sharp: ‘So you’d take this, too, huh, brother? Make love with her, as if you were me? You want to hear her scream my name when she’s in the throes of passion?’
If she were any other woman, he would force the moment to its crisis: he would kiss her right now and let her decide. She wanted to say no? Fine, to hell with her. He’d move on. Or, more likely, she’d say yes, and he’d bed her and leave her with a smile on her face—but leave her. At least he’d do something.
Karris was the only woman who paralyzed him.
He remembered lying beside her in her room in her father’s house, so long ago. He remembered kissing that breast, caressing her body, talking as the dawn approached. They’d made love half a dozen times through the night, urgency and passion winning through the awkwardness of inexperience. He had to be gone before her maid came to wake her in the morning.
They’d both known their romance was doomed, even then, even as the children they’d been. “I’ll come for you,” Dazen had promised.
He’d come back as he’d sworn, and she’d been gone—taken away by her father, though he hadn’t known it then; he’d thought she had betrayed him—and her brothers had ambushed him. And he’d started the fire that killed them all: brothers, servants, slaves, children, treasures, hope.
“I’ve done you many wrongs,” Gavin said now. He stood. “And I regret every one of them. I’m sorry.”
He extended a hand to Karris, to help her stand. He thought she was going to refuse for a moment, but then she took his hand, popped to her feet, and didn’t release his hand. She stood close, but her proximity was a challenge. “Do you want to specify what you’re asking my pardon for?”
At Garriston, she’d said, ‘I know your big secret, you asshole.’ And slapped him.
Which hadn’t actually clarified that much. He’d kept a lot of secrets over the years, and whatever she thought she knew could be leagues away from the worst truth. His central secret had necessitated all sorts of other ones over the years.
And by secrets, I mean lies.
So how cold are you, Gavin? How committed to your goal? You’ve killed for it before. Can you do it again?
They were hundreds of leagues away from the nearest Chromeria spy. If Gavin told Karris the whole truth and she swore to expose him or ruin him, he could kill her.
Simple. Easy.
In a fair fight, she’d have a fair chance against him. Her Blackguard training had made her quite a weapon. But there was no fair fight against a Prism.
“I’m just sorry,” Gavin said. He looked away.
She didn’t let go of his hand. She clamped down on it until he met her fiery gaze. “It’s not an apology if you won’t take responsibility. If you can’t even name what you’re apologizing for, you’ve given me nothing. You will not buy absolution on the cheap, not after what you’ve done. Not from me.”
Gavin tried to take his hand back. She refused to let go.
“Let go, or swim,” Gavin said coldly.
She let go.
Damn woman. She made him so furious. More furious because she was right. Damn her!
But he couldn’t kill her, and he knew it. He’d let the world burn down first.
She picked up the luxin tube he’d been using to place charges and handed it to him. “Five more charges should finish the channel,” she said. “But we’ll have to hurry to get it done before low tide. Then we can work on the seawall footings.”
They worked until there was no longer enough light in the sky for Gavin to draft. Karris steadied the boat, and made the forms, and made sure that they were keeping within the lines they’d planned.
The seawall would actually be three seawalls, with two wide gaps: one for ships coming into the bay, and one for ships leaving. The channels through the coral that led to the openings zigzagged, the turns marked by buoys. If they came under threat of attack, the locals could remove the buoys. It was going to be rough work, Gavin thought. He’d learned some things from building Brightwater Wall, but there he’d also had thousands of workers and dozens of drafters to help him.
Lovely that I made such a defensible refuge for the Color Prince.
Well, second time’s the charm. He would leave this for the people of Tyrea—now his people—and he would do a few other things to give them a head start on establishing a city. Then he would leave.
They had a small campfire, and Karris cooked some fish she’d snared while Gavin slept. She woke him and they ate together.
“Sorry,” he said, “I should have helped with dinner.”
She looked at him like he was being stupid. “You’re making the Ninth Wonder of the World this week; I can make dinner.”
“It’s not really fair, is it?” Gavin said. “I couldn’t do this without you, but it’ll be the Thing Gavin Built, just like Brightwater Wall was.”
She shook her head. “You’re a mystery to me, Lord Prism.”
He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke in the middle of the night, there was a blanket over him. He saw Karris in the low light of the fire, watching the darkness. He felt an immense gratitude toward her. She’d worked hard all day long, too, and now she was staying up all night.
Her back was to him and to the fire, maintaining her night vision, of course. Gavin and most sub-reds could control their eyes well enough to attain full night vision quickly, but Karris didn’t like to lose even a few seconds of night vision.
Gavin sat up and was right on the edge of calling out to tell her he would take the next watch when he saw her shoulders shake.
Not a shiver. She was crying. Gavin hadn’t seen Karris cry in years.
He knew she wouldn’t be pleased to find out he’d noticed, but he stood and put his hands on her shoulders. She tensed.
“I’ll take this watch,” he said gently.
“Don’t, Gavin,” she said. Her voice was raw, right at the edge.
Don’t what? Don’t touch her? Don’t say anything? Don’t leave?
“Today was Tavos’s birthday,” she said, struggling to get the words out clearly. “I almost didn’t even remember.” Tavos, her brother. He’d died in the fire. He’d been a terrible person, violent, unstable, one of the boys whose jeering had made Dazen believe that if he didn’t fight back that night, he would be killed. But Karris hadn’t seen that, had maybe never seen that side of her brother. Even if she had, he’d still been her brother. “I just miss them all so much. Koios…” She sounded like she wanted to say more, but couldn’t.
Koios had been her favorite brother. He was the only one Gavin regretted killing. The only halfway decent person among them.
And then she did weep. She turned to him, and he held her. He said nothing, still not certain he wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, knowing only that if he said anything, he would say the wrong thing.
Bewildered as he might be, sometimes a man’s highest calling is simply to stand, and hug.
Chapter 19
In his dream, Kip was a green wight, chasing down screaming children and murdering them with blade and fire. He woke alternately furious, weepy, and bloodthirsty, the rage from those phantasms sometimes still clinging to him.
When he got up to go urinate in the middle of the night, a Blackguard accompanied him. It was a man Kip had never met, and he said nothing. Merely walked with Kip, and held him back for a moment while he checked that there were no assassins in the toilet. Ridiculous.
It was a relief to get out of
bed in the morning, though Kip didn’t feel rested in the slightest. Several older, second-year students came and herded the new students toward the dining hall.
Kip was ravenous, but he got no more food than anyone else in the serving line. He reached the end of the line in dread. Tables were laid out in long rows, and students clumped together with friends.
Which I don’t have.
In fact, Kip had quite the opposite. He caught sight of Elio, whose arm was wrapped in thick bandages and hung in a sling. The boy was talking with his friends when he saw Kip. He shut up instantly and blanched.
I should go over there. I should go and sit with them, disarm them with small talk, pretend nothing happened, but assert my right to sit with the toughest boys in the class.
But he didn’t have it in him.
It was only then that he realized there was no Blackguard following him this morning. He looked around at the lines of students, tables, food, servants, and slaves. No Blackguards anywhere. For some reason, it took what little, tottering confidence he had and knocked it over with a breath. They’d seen what he’d done. They’d decided he wasn’t worth protecting.
Then Kip saw some kids he recognized: the boy with the strange spectacles who’d sat behind him in class yesterday and some others from the Blackguard training class. They were the outcasts—Kip could tell immediately. They were the awkward, the intelligent, the ugly, with those Blackguard hopefuls who were destined to fail out early and were merely trying to get in from some vain hope of their own or their masters’. There was, of course, space at their table, and space around them, as if they were contagious. Kip went over.
“Can you read?” the boy asked as Kip came close. His flip-down spectacles currently had the blue lens down over one eye, and the yellow down over the other.
Kip hesitated. Did they not want him? “Um, yes?”
“You need to get to lecture if you can’t. If you can, you need to check the work schedule. Hold on, you had that—Oh, never mind, of course you can read. You told Magister Kadah to go stuff herself.”
“Really?” a homely girl asked.
Kip ignored her and tucked into his food.
“Why are you sitting with us?”
“You looked nicer than them,” Kip said, gesturing with a toss of his head toward the tough boys. “You want me to leave?”
They all looked at each other. Shrugged. “No,” the boy with spectacles said.
“So, what are your names?” Kip asked.
The bespectacled boy pointed to himself, “I’m Ben-hadad,” then to the homely girl, “Tiziri,” then to a gangly, gap-toothed boy, “that’s Aras, and—”
They were interrupted by a girl’s voice. “Hey, did you all hear about Elio getting his halos tapped by the new—” She cut off as she saw Kip.
“And… that would be Adrasteia. Classic, Teia.”
“We’ve met,” Kip said dryly.
Teia opened her mouth, then sat down silently, defeated.
“I didn’t hear,” Aras said. “What, new who? What happened?”
“Aras,” Teia said through gritted teeth.
“What? Was there a fight?” Aras asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a fight,” Kip said.
“You? You were in a fight? With Elio?” Aras said.
“You broke his arm in three places!” Adrasteia—Teia?—said.
“I did?” Kip asked.
“Wait, you broke Elio’s arm?” Ben-hadad asked. “I hate that kid.”
“Is that how you hurt your hand?” Tiziri asked. She had a birthmark over the left half of her face. She wore her kinky hair flopped over that way to try to hide it, but it was a futile attempt.
Kip looked at his bandaged hand. He was supposed to get a fresh poultice smeared on it every day. He’d forgotten this morning. He didn’t even know if he could find the infirmary from here. “No, uh, this. I kind of got thrown into a fire.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You have to start from the beginning,” Ben-hadad said. “Aras! Stop staring over there or they’ll know we’re talking about—”
Aras, Teia, Tiziri, and Kip all glanced over at Elio’s table at the same time—and saw that Elio’s friends were all staring at them. Caught.
Ben-hadad scrubbed his chin where his beard was just coming in. “Hopeless,” he said. He flipped up both of the color lenses on the spectacles. He fixed his gaze on Kip, one eye looking slightly larger than the other. Kip had heard of the lenses that corrected bad vision before, but he’d never seen them. It was unnerving. “So,” Ben-hadad said to Kip, “spill.”
“About Elio? He came over and hit me a few times, and I punched him in the nose.”
They waited.
Kip spooned in more gruel.
“Worst. Storyteller. Ever,” Teia said.
“You punched him in the nose so hard his arm broke in three places?” Ben-hadad prompted.
“Look,” Kip said, “it wasn’t a big thing. I was really scared and I knew he was going to hit me, so I—you know? I hit him first. I kind of panicked.”
“And broke his arm?” Teia asked.
Kip shrugged. “He said he was going to kill me.”
Their looks were somewhere between dubious and totally impressed.
Kip decided to defuse it with humor. “I’ve only got one good hand. Now if he comes after me, we’ll be even.”
Not funny.
“Holy shit,” Aras said. “I saw you at the tryouts, but I had no idea you were that good.”
“You don’t look like a badass,” Ben-hadad said. “But I guess it proves you’re a Guile.”
“I heard after the fight was over, you broke his arm because he called you Lard Guile,” Tiziri said. She hadn’t been at Kip’s tryouts, obviously.
Teia sank into her seat.
“It wasn’t like that,” Kip said. “Really. It was just really fast, and then it was over in like three seconds. I got lucky. Seriously. Ask Teia. She’s tougher than I am. She kicked me in the face yesterday.”
“What? What? What?” Ben-hadad said. “Teia?”
“Kip was assigned to be my partner,” Teia said. She grimaced.
Oh, thanks.
Ben-hadad asked her, “Partner? You tried out? I thought you weren’t going to try out until next year.” He looked momentarily hurt, but then covered it. “I would have come! Ha, scrub!”
Kip’s lifted eyebrows asked the question for him.
Aras said, “Ben-hadad got here too late for the drafting lectures year last spring, but he did test into the spring class of the Blackguard.” He turned to Teia. “But you said you thought the Blackguard was stupid. Standing in the path of swords to protect idiots is for idiots, you said.”
“Aras, you’re sitting next to Kip Guile,” Tiziri said.
“I know. I heard the first time. What’s the—Oh, oh! I’m sure Teia didn’t mean your father’s an idiot, Kip. She probably meant the White. I mean, I guess it’s gotta be one or the other of them, huh? Maybe the Red? Oh, wait, that’s your grandfather.”
“Aras!” Teia said.
Ben-hadad said, “Teia, you said you didn’t want to hurt people for a living.” He seemed to take Teia’s secrecy about trying out as a personal betrayal.
“I don’t!” Teia said, defensive.
“Then, what? When I argue for you joining the Blackguard, what they do is garbage and idiocy, but Kip comes along and—”
“That has nothing to do with anything! Not all of us are bichromes, Ben. You might even be a poly. You can go wherever you want, do whatever you want. You’re going to be powerful enough that no one will care who your parents are. I don’t even have a real color.”
“Your color is just as real as anyone’s. People just don’t recognize it yet, Teia, we’ve talked—”
Teia shot back, “If no one recognizes it, no one’s going to recruit me for it either. Maybe in five years more people will think like you do, but for now I’ve got no other options. It’s all I’m good for. Don
’t you understand? I tried to find another sponsor. I failed, and my mistress ordered me to try out for the Blackguard.”
“I didn’t know your mistress ordered it. I’m sorry,” Ben-hadad said.
She’ll make it in, Kip thought, but he said nothing. He was the one who’d unwittingly revealed the secret. He was just hoping that by being quiet he might avoid further wrath.
“And you, partner, thanks a lot,” Teia said.
Chapter 20
Kip finished his breakfast, still feeling hungry. Teia got up and went over to the lists on the wall. She left her bowl and spoon and glass on the table, as it seemed that most everyone did.
Ben-hadad and Tiziri got up and left, too, heading in different directions. Only Kip and Aras were still sitting at the table. The gangly boy was a slow eater. The apple of his throat was distractingly large, making him look like a large, kind vulture.
“Are we supposed to do anything with our bowls?” Kip asked.
“Huh?” Aras had been looking over at some girls. Pretty, in the same plain uniforms as everyone else, but with jewelry at their wrists and throats. Rich girls. Out of reach, but not out of the reach of dreams, from Aras’s distant look. “Bowls? What?”
“Are we supposed to put away our bowls?” Kip asked. Back home, no one would tolerate a fifteen-year-old shirking washing up.
“Slaves do it. You should go. First shift starts soon.” Aras went back to staring at the girls.
Leaving the table felt like abandoning safety to go back and play in the fields of the wolves. But there was no putting it off. Kip stood and headed toward the wall of lists. He passed by some older discipulae just coming to eat. A boy and a girl walked by, their arms down at their sides, eyes intent with concentration, their food held on blue trays that they each were drafting. Each raised their hands slowly as they walked, trying to adjust the open luxin without spilling their food and drink. Then they sealed their trays, almost simultaneously.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” the boy was repeating. He’d sealed the luxin badly, and even as he reached the table, his tray disintegrated, dropping his bowl and glass, both of which shattered.