Chapter 77
“I’ve got something to say. It’s not going to be easy,” Samite said.
Karris had barely finished washing up and getting dressed when Samite came into the Archers’ side of the barracks. Samite was one of Karris’s best friends in the Blackguard: squat, tough, smart, and unfailingly awkward when she tried to be tender. Karris paused, comb in hand. “What’s going on?”
Samite sat heavily on the edge of Karris’s bed. “K, you know how the lords and ladies of the great houses are always trying to get to us Blackguards and make us spies or deserters?”
“I—What does that have to do with anything?”
“One of them got to me. Years ago.”
“What?! Sami, stop! What are you doing?”
“What I should have done a long time ago.” Samite’s face was grim but stubborn. She sat with her elbows on her thighs, hands clasped across each other.
“Who?” Karris barely breathed the word.
“Lady Felia Guile.”
“Lady Guile subverted you?” Karris asked. She’d liked Lady Guile, a lot. Had thought for years that the woman would be her mother-in-law, and the closest thing to a mother Karris would ever know. “How’d she—No, never mind. I don’t need to know. Sami, she’s gone. You don’t need to do this.”
“It was nothing untoward. Two of my brothers were captured by Ilytian pirates and made galley slaves. My family didn’t even know where to start looking, much less how they’d afford a ransom. I went to her. She had people track them down, and ransomed them herself. She brought them here so I could see they were well. She nursed them back to full health, and paid for their passage home. I could never have paid her back; I mean, I used my big Blackguard payout to buy my family a store and a farm. I offered, and she refused. She knew it would ruin my family. She said nothing about it for months, and when she asked me for information later, there was no way I could refuse her.”
A velvet leash, held only by Samite’s sense of honor, of debt. Yes, that was Lady Guile’s style. She’d been a gentle Orange, but an Orange nonetheless.
Samite continued, her voice a dull monotone, as if marching to her own death. “She said she was merely trying to protect her son, and I believed her. He’s the Prism, so I figured we were sharing the same goal. It wasn’t really a betrayal, right? I knew better in my heart, which is why I’m telling you now. But I can’t bear to tell Commander Ironfist. I can’t bear to see the disappointment in his eyes. Regardless, the last duty she entrusted to me was this: she said that after she died, I was to give you this note.”
Samite handed Karris a small note on Lady Guile’s stationery.
“I don’t blame her, you know,” Samite said. “She might have destroyed me, but it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about protecting her family. She did what she did for the Seven Satrapies. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made, and it’s usually us small folk who pay, and we don’t always get to know why. When I was young, I hated that, but I’ve made my peace. It’s the way of the world.” She cleared her throat again and stood. “I’ll, uh, I’ll wait for you outside.”
“Dammit, Sami, why couldn’t you have just left the note on my bed?”
“The secrets were eating me up inside. I can’t live like that, Karris. Not anymore.”
Karris rubbed her temples, trying to collect herself as Samite left. The Blackguard couldn’t afford to lose a woman as levelheaded as Samite, not even normally, and definitely not now, not after they’d lost so many at Garriston. She opened the letter.
In Lady Guile’s beautifully practiced hand, it read, “Dazen loves you, Karris. He’s always loved you. If you’ve confronted him with the truth already, please take the time to ask him what really happened at your family’s estate. I know you don’t want to hear this, but a comforting lie has been poisoning your whole life, and that lie is this: that your brothers were innocent in the tragedy that destroyed your family. They weren’t.”
Karris felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She was breathing fast and shallow, holding on to read it all. Lady Guile was not only admitting that Gavin wasn’t Gavin, she was going from that point to tell Karris things Karris didn’t know. And maybe didn’t want to know.
“Your maid Galaea betrayed your elopement to your brothers. They laid a trap at the estate, and tricked Dazen into coming inside. They had chained all the doors shut and only had red light sources, knowing him not to be a red drafter. He alone got out, Karris. And perhaps he set the fires, but he didn’t chain the doors. I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, Karris, but the blood spilled that night isn’t on my Dazen’s head.
“Of course, there was no easy way to let you know what really happened. I had several people over the years try to introduce the topic to you obliquely. You rebuffed any discussion. Please pardon my clumsy attempts to make peace.
“My dear child, Dazen thought you’d fallen in love with Gavin and that was why you’d become betrothed to him. He thought you could never forgive him for what you thought he’d done. After Sundered Rock, I urged him to marry you quickly before Andross could interfere. He refused, Karris. He said he could kill his own brother, and he could lie to all the world, but the one thing he would never do was take a woman to bed who loved his brother. He couldn’t lie to you. Silly fool, he broke his betrothal to you because he loved you.”
Karris wanted to be sick. She couldn’t stop reading.
“And he loves you still, Karris. Believe me, I eventually gave up hope and urged him to marry other women, but he could never get you out of his heart. Please forgive him, child, and please forgive me, too. By putting these truths in writing, I’ve delivered our family into your hands. You can destroy Dazen if you so desire, and this will be proof. I would trust no one else with such power over my son, but I see no other way. I wish only that I’d had the opportunity to say this all to you myself, and that I had done better at making peace between you, that I might see my grandchildren before I died. May Orholam’s light shine on you, Karris. Sincerely, Felia Guile.”
Karris felt numb. She read the letter again, and wondered at herself. How had she believed such preposterous lies in the first place? On the night they were to elope, Dazen had sneaked around her family’s estate and chained every door shut and then set the place afire? Or he’d arrived with a dozen men to do the same task—men who had never been found or mentioned again, after Gavin got the armies marching after his brother?
No, this made much more sense. Why else had her father insisted on getting Karris out of the city that very night? Because he knew about the trap his sons had planned, perhaps that he had helped them plan.
And then when it went bad, her father had gladly covered up his sons’ murderous guilt in the deaths of everyone at the estate, and had done so with Andross Guile’s complicity, because it rallied the other noble families around Andross’s favored son Gavin. It had been a conspiracy, just not the one Karris had always thought.
The drums of war had started pounding, and Karris, young and weak, had simply believed that her elders must know things she didn’t. Things that made the war inevitable, that made Dazen’s guilt indisputable.
Since then, Karris had always struggled to bring together the two Gavins she’d known: the one who’d been betrothed to her but then used her cruelly and cast her off like she was garbage, and the later one who broke their betrothal and her heart but then treated her kindly. The inexplicability was what had twisted her into knots: if she’d known Gavin was a cruel cad, she could have written off her infatuation as the stupidity of a young girl deluded by a man’s good looks and charm and power. It was the parts of his character that seemed totally contradictory that kept her in limbo.
And now, instead of the hard revelations prompting gales of tears at years lost and lies believed, Karris felt relieved. At peace.
She took each page of the letter and held it over a candle. Each burned in a flash.
Karris grinned at that. Fire paper. Lady Guile might have trusted her, but that didn’t mean she wanted the letter to be hard to destroy.
Dazen loved her. Dazen had always loved her. And he was holding terrible secrets. Alone. His respect for her, his love for her, had made him keep her nearby. It had made a thousand hard tasks harder for him. If he’d wanted, he could have had her cast out of the Blackguard easily. He could have had her imprisoned. He had never taken the easy way out, not where she was concerned.
She stood, feeling lighter than she had in sixteen years, and walked to the door. Samite was standing there, waiting for her. She had her hands behind her back, as if hiding something.
Samite said, “Lady Guile said that after you read that note, you’d have need of some serious firepower, one way or the other.” She brought her hands out from behind her back. In one hand was a large old pistol. In the other was a painfully beautiful lace chemise and a matching corset with short stays that would cost a Blackguard a year’s wages. “So which is it going to be?”
Karris stared openmouthed. Lady Guile! Scandalous! And Sami was holding that up in the middle of the barracks, for Orholam’s sake! “Who’s on Prism duty tonight?”
“Think it’s some of the new boys.”
“Perfect,” Karris said. She grinned.
“Karris, what are you…” Samite said.
“Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help me with my hair?”