by Brent Weeks
“The scars,” she said, missing his attempt at humor, though he couldn’t tell whether it was on purpose or not.
“I lost a bet,” he said. He was taking the totally wrong tack here, sailing straight into the storm instead of quartering the waves.
“With some kind of animal?” she said angrily. “Kip, there was a part of our vows that said, ‘Let there be no darkness between us.’ Why are you lying to me about stupid stuff?”
It was supposed to be the setup for a joke:
A bet?
I bet dinner that I could get out of a locked closet. The rats bet I couldn’t. I was dinner.
No one had ever really laughed at that joke, but he thought that was maybe in the delivery.
Right as he was about to explain and apologize, she said, “About those vows. If she showed up, and she became possible, and I would never know…”
“I’m not adding ‘cheater’ to the list,” Kip said.
“The list?”
Damn. Caught out. And no joke was possible now, not after the ass he’d already been. “The list of things I, uh, dislike about myself.” Loathe.
“That decides it,” she said.
“Decides what?” Kip asked.
“Reeny is going to be so furious,” Tisis said. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back. Reeny? Oh, her sister Eirene. “But if you can’t run away with your husband, who can you run away with?”
“What?” WHAT?!
“I’m not going home, Kip. I’m going with you. Wherever you go, I’m going.”
“I really don’t—”
“Save your breath. There’s nothing you can say that will change my mind. Try to stop me and our deal’s off.”
“Empty threat?” After all that talk of failing family…
“How about this one, then?” She stepped close and grabbed his crotch through his clothes. “This stays with me. If you choose to leave my presence, you’ll go without it.”
“Oh, come on, it just finally went to sleep.”
“You find threats of me tearing it off arousing?”
“Not when you put it like that.”
“So it’s settled. I’m going,” she said triumphantly.
He pushed her back. “Tisis. This isn’t a game. We’re going to war. You’re no fighter.”
“And you’re no noble,” she said. “But we’ll teach each other.”
“Tisis, it’s different. Nobles won’t kill you—”
“If you believe that, you’re a fool.”
Well, shit. Kip’s very pause was an admission of defeat.
Tisis said, “You don’t know it yet, but you need me as much as I need you.”
She smiled coyly, but at least she didn’t rub in the victory.
“The squad’s not going to like it,” Kip said.
She pointed at him. “Haha! I beat a Guile!”
He hoped his face was a study in Nonplussed Kip. But she only smiled beatifically for a moment, thawing him more than he would admit.
Then her mouth pursed in quick disapproval. “Also, did you really put clean clothes on your dirty body?”
“Yes?”
She clucked in mock horror. “My lord husband, surely you must know, a lady’s perfumed garden ought to be fragrant, but a lord’s—”
“Ah! Fine! I’ll wash!”
Chapter 12
Teia climbed down the tower using the servants’ stairs. Just a little screw you to her tail. The stairs themselves were clogged enough with servants and slaves and discipulae that there wasn’t much purpose to it other than inconveniencing him and giving herself time to think.
She went to the main floor and across to the other stairs, and went down farther still. Commander Fisk had given her an idea.
In a few minutes, she was at the dungeon. Few people were kept here except a couple of drafters immediately before Sun Day. Those who’d broken the halo would be put in rooms of colors safe to them, or blackened rooms for polychromes. With Sun Day just passed, there should be no one here—except whoever was going to be executed tomorrow.
Two of Carver Black’s tower soldiers were stationed in front of a heavy oaken door. As Teia approached, they stood respectfully. The tower soldiers had always had reasonably good relationships with the Blackguards, but with the influx of Andross Guile’s Lightguards, whom they hated, they now treated the Blackguards like dear friends.
“You’re holding the accused for execution tomorrow?” Teia asked.
“Yes, sir,” the elder tower soldier said. He was long past his prime, stiff knees and lots of experience.
He wasn’t being rude at the sight of a petite young girl who—to another tower soldier—might look like the epitome of how far the Blackguard’s standards had fallen. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Through a quirk of protocol, tower soldiers always addressed Blackguards as ‘sir,’ regardless of gender. Apparently it had originated with some gaffe or deliberate insult involving a particularly manly Archer. The Blackguards had turned it back on the tower soldiers, demanding that every one of them be called sir—when Teia had complained to Quentin that language was weird, he had speculated that it was perhaps analogous to how all magisters were called magisters regardless of gender, rather than magistri and magistrae, while the declensions of the nouns for their pupils were retained as ‘discipula,’ ‘discipulus,’ ‘discipulae,’ and ‘discipuli,’ while a mixed group of girls and boys went by the feminine plural ‘discipulae.’
As Quentin had explained to Teia, “Language isn’t weird. People are weird. Language makes sense until people get their phoneme pukers on it.” Teia had no idea what that meant, but she got the gist.
The younger man looked at his officer, obviously unaware of the protocol. “Uh…”
“Later,” the older man said. “How can we help you?”
“I need to interview them,” Teia said.
They looked ready to say no.
“I’m on the execution detail tomorrow, and they’re not telling us anything,” Teia said. “I’ve got to… ascertain in what respects they may present dangers… to the assemblage.”
With soldiers, if you spoke bureaucratese, they’d assume you’d been assigned to do it. All the bullshit orders come dressed in jargon. If you just said what you wanted, they knew it was your own idea.
She switched back to her own tone. “You know what happens if something goes wrong during the execution—it’s on us. With all that’s gone on recently, the Blackguard ain’t takin’ another hit.”
The older soldier looked as if she were asking the impossible and he hated to say no.
“Look,” Teia said. “I’m not even a full Blackguard. I’m doing my vigil tonight. I’ve just been on duty, and after holding vigil all night, my first official detail is watching what everyone tells me is a horrific way to die. Orholam’s Glare is the death they scare drafters with from the moment we first learn we can draft. The Blackguard’s stretched thin to breaking, and it’s all made worse by those Lightguard assholes running my friends off as if they’re traitors. I know this isn’t the normal way of doing things—but what’s been normal about anything recently? You can take all my weapons, do whatever you need. I just need to talk to them so someone can check it off a list. And I’m not going to have my first official act be lying to my commander by telling him I did it if I didn’t. But I don’t want to start my service by failing a simple assignment, either. Can you cut me some slack?”
Momentarily, Teia was kind of impressed with her own lying.
“Not many Blackguards would let us take their weapons. Your lot tend to hold that privilege pretty fierce,” the older man said. It was a singular right: Blackguards were allowed weapons in the presence of satraps and diplomats and Colors and the Prism himself. It set them apart from everyone else, not least the tower guards like these men.
Teia quirked a grin. “Eh, if you ask me tomorrow when I’m a real Blackguard, I might not give them up so easy!”
They laug
hed together, and Teia put her weapons on the table.
The old man moved to unlock the door. “I’d not get in arm’s reach of that false prophet. I know you have training and all, but madness gives ’em strength. The young luxiat mostly sits there and cries. But madness… You never know. Last one’s the drafter, watch them vipers. No offense. Oh. Shoes.”
“Shoes?” she asked.
“You have to take off your boots. Put on these.”
Teia hadn’t noticed, but there were slippers of various sizes on a mat. She stepped into the appropriately sized pair.
The door opened onto the strangest prison Teia had ever imagined. All the surfaces were lined with mirror. Orange lux torches provided a single dim spectrum of soft light.
The older soldier accompanied her down the shimmery hall. Even the floor was mirrored, the slippers polishing the pounded silver with every step. They approached the first door and the soldier handed Teia a mirror mounted on a handle. He demonstrated how she should use the mirror to peek around the corner to see any threat. Then, after she’d put the spectacles on, he handed her a tiny knife with an oversize handle. The blade wasn’t even as long as her little finger was wide.
“Hellstone,” he said to her puzzled look. “If they somehow draft. Drains out their luxin without killing ’em. Works on you, too, though, so don’t let ’em take it from you. Oh, and if they capture you, our orders are to go in with muskets firing. We don’t try to recover hostages. They know it. It’s not a bluff. We’ve done it before.”
“Great. Thanks.”
He left and she heard the door being barred behind her.
She opened the window inset in the door of the first cell. She extended the mirror, and was surprised that she knew the man therein. She closed the window. It was the Color Prince’s prophet, the spy handler she and the Mighty had surveilled months ago. He’d tried to kill Big Leo. It wouldn’t bother her to see him executed or to leave a paryl tag on him for assassination. Good option, maybe.
She walked down the mirrored hall farther, little slippers scuffing a floor that really should have been cleaner. Men. It was as if they were physically blind to messes unless you pointed them out specifically: Is this floor clean? Yessir. Do you see this dirt? Yessir. Did you see it before when you just told me it was clean? No, sir.
Teia opened the next cell’s window, peered in with the little angled mirror, and paused. The young man inside had his head down, ignoring the sound of the opening window. He was a disheveled mess, but there was something familiar about him, too.
Orholam have mercy.
“Quentin?” Teia asked.
He froze up, and it was an admission of guilt. A moment later, his head snapped up. “No,” he said. “No, no.”
“Quentin, what are you doing here?” Teia asked. She unlocked his door and stepped inside. Teia was petite, though stronger than many would guess, now. But if there was one man from whom she had nothing to fear, it was Quentin. He was skinny to the point that it was painful to look at him. He so often forgot to eat while studying, he probably weighed less than she did. He was a brilliant mind, though, a polymath who mastered subjects within months that took others a full career. He read scrolls and books within hours, and remembered nearly everything he read.
His was the kind of scholarly mind that came along once in a generation, if it was a great generation.
“Quentin, what’s going on?” she asked. His cell was a cube with mirror walls and floor and a luminous orange ceiling that gave a sickly hue to the boy’s skin.
He looked at her with such shame that she thought he was going to throw up. “They found me,” he said. “They never gave up.”
“Who? What?” she asked.
“I didn’t even know her name when I did it,” he said.
“What?”
“It was supposed to be Kip,” he said. “I didn’t know him or any of you then. It was before I’d met you.”
“Quentin, what the hell are you talking about?”
“But I knew. When he gave me the orders to do it, I knew it was wrong.”
“What did you do, Quentin?”
He looked up at her as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t already know. “I tried to kill Kip. Lucia stepped in the line of fire. I didn’t mean to hit her… But I did try to murder him, so it doesn’t really count as an accident, does it?”
“No,” Teia said, aghast. Quentin had become their friend. Twitchy, nervous, and scared a lot, but they’d written that off to his having the lopsided brain of a genius.
“It was why I swore an oath to Kip that I’d never lie to him. I was hoping he’d ask, one day. But he never did, and then he left, and I thought—I thought maybe Orholam had forgiven me. But then the Blackguards came. They’d never given up on finding who’d killed her. I was hoping they wouldn’t take me alive.”
“You? You shot Lucia?” Teia had barely seen the hooded figure raise the musket. In her dreams, it had always been some monster. Someone eminently capable. Some assassin whose bullet had been intercepted through Orholam’s will alone. Not a scared kid. Never Quentin.
“It was pathetic how easily they turned me. A little bit of threatening, a little bit of bribery. That’s all it took. I knew it was wrong, Teia. They’re going to execute me, and I deserve it.”
“Who sent you?” The orange light in here was making Teia feel as slippery as the Old Man of the Desert himself.
“High Luxiat Tawleb. I told the White as much. But he’s sworn it’s a lie, of course. And what is my word against his? I’ve no evidence.”
It was true; Teia could tell. There was no guile in Quentin’s voice or gaze.
Teia hadn’t been friends with Lucia. She could tell early on that Lucia wasn’t going to make the cut to become a Blackguard. Why make friends with someone who wasn’t going to be around long?
It was practical, but also somehow heartless.
“Quentin, I came down here hoping to find a solution for a dilemma. Seems I have.”
She tagged Quentin with a paryl marker for the assassin.
“What dilemma?” Quentin asked. “What do you mean?”
But this murderer wasn’t entitled to an explanation.
Teia left.
Chapter 13
Kip stood in the captain’s cabin, trying to put on his Breaker face before he headed out to face the squad.
They were going to be rightly livid with him. After all their training, the Mighty had reached a rough equivalency with each other, a working strength. Adding Tisis to the Mighty’s war party would be like adding a fifth leg to a dog. They couldn’t help but trip over her, have to compensate, slow down, and get tentative as they had to protect her.
But here he was.
He opened the door to a bright shining noon, good wind and few clouds. He acted nonchalant, as a young groom would be after a wild night of connubial exertion. Just a twinge of smugness as he walked astern toward where the Mighty were working to create a skimmer.
The captain, a black-haired, fair-skinned Blood Forester with long mustache and beard like a lamprey attached to his face, grinned at him as he walked past.
“Finally found the pearl button, huh?” he asked, slapping Kip on the back and laughing.
The what? But Kip just blushed ruefully, accepting the teasing as if he didn’t think the man was an asshole.
“Day five!” the captain said. “Ha! We had bets going. You won me two danars. Seems like a smart lad, I said, and that’s one eager lass he’s got there if I don’t miss my guess. Won’t take him a whole week, I said. I was drunk. You done me right, though—and you clearly did her right last night. How many times was—”
“Hey, hey,” Kip said, putting a hand out to stop the man. “That’s my wife, huh?”
It had been four times. Four times, lying side by side, throwing their bodies around to make the bunk squeak and Tisis crying out while Kip grunted and groaned and then they tried to muffle the sounds of their laughter.
‘Four
times?’ Kip had asked Tisis. ‘Isn’t that a lot?’
‘Not really. I mean sometimes when I…’
In sub-red, Kip could see the heat of her blush spread through her face despite the darkness. ‘When you…?’ he’d asked.
‘Uh, when I’ve heard people talk about lovemaking,’ she’d said.
Even though he’d had the impression that wasn’t what she was talking about, he said, ‘I always thought those were exaggerations, bragging, because then I’d hear the older Blackguards joke about not being that young anymore.’
‘But we are young,’ Tisis had said.
Young enough that neither of us knows how many climaxes in a night is believable, Kip had thought. So they’d faked four for her and three for him, and laughed and plotted until the early hours. He’d had as much fun in bed as you could have without having as much fun as you want to have.
Apparently they’d hit the correct number to be believable for their age, though, because the captain raised his hands in quick surrender. “Didn’t mean no disrespect.” He grinned. “Quite the opposite. Good day, my young lord.”
Pearl button?
The Mighty were deep in discussion at the stern, where they were building the skimmer. All wore their blacks, with the insignia of the Mighty at the collar: a powerful figure with arms outspread, radiating power, but his head downcast as if in prayer or concentration or grief. No matter how many times Kip saw it, something about that figure stirred something deeper than memory in Kip. How had Andross Guile picked this emblem? Surely that scorpion had a soul insensitive to art.
“Breaker!” Cruxer called out. The Mighty’s leader was tall and slender, confident and handsome. A blue by nature as well as by the thin luxin streaks in his brown eyes, he was serious but not humorless. He always did the right thing, and he always did it quickly. It made him a great leader. Believing the best of others, he somehow brought it out. “Breaker, would you get over here and tell Ben-hadad that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is?”
Kip had expected some gibes about ‘sleeping in,’ but, of course, that he’d dodged gibes for the moment didn’t mean they wouldn’t come later. But when the squad teased him, it didn’t bother him. They’d given up everything to be here with him and with each other.