“Me, too,” she said. “It’s my vigil night. I’m to become a Blackguard at dawn.”
“Congratulations!” he said, and he seemed to have real joy for her. But then his face darkened once more. “Will you… if you have time… will you pray that I’m brave? I’m not naturally courageous, and I don’t want to shame myself.” There was a hitch in his voice, and his cheeks were wet. “Further.”
“I swear it. I’ll…” She cleared her throat. It was hard to speak. “I’ll be on the White’s detail tomorrow. If you need strength, you just look at me, Quentin. I’ll stand for you.”
Chapter 15
The Emperor of the Seven Satrapies sat upon his luxin throne impassive. Legs folded, hands draped over his knees. He shat and didn’t even move. He stopped eating, and soon he didn’t even need to shit.
He sat at the center of all things, moving only to stretch and lick at the trickle of water that tracked down the wall, around the curve of his cell, and down into the waste chute over which he sat.
His bread fell out of the chute above and tumbled to him. He picked it up with his left hand, and promptly dropped it because of his missing fingers. Carefully he picked up the bread again and put it in the semicircle in front of himself. It was a torture to have the bread always before him, but there was a purpose to this, to being seen to starve.
I am Guile.
Everywhere he looked, he saw only himself reflected in the walls of the cell. Had it not always been thus? Had he ever seen anyone else, ever?
She was dead. He’d killed her. For her good service, he’d rewarded Marissia with death.
He had loved her, he saw now. He’d loved her with a love as small as his own soul. He’d loved her as a man loves the hand he masturbates with. And thought as much about her.
He was not a good man, Gavin Guile.
Dazen Guile. Whichever.
A brief smile creased the arrogance that was his face. He’d fooled the old man with his disguise. He’d fooled Andross Guile once. He would do it again.
No prison can hold me, father.
Another day. Another piece of bread. And he was weakening. His breath was foul, his skin greasy, muscles weak, eyes intermittently blurry.
All normal stages of fasting, though he wasn’t sure how much his body could stand. He hadn’t started healthy.
The pain of hunger was deserved. The torture of having the means to ease it within reach had been more than earned.
But more than simply deserved, the pain was necessary. One doesn’t fool Andross Guile on the cheap.
And when the time came, he dreamed of Marissia, dreamed of throwing her off a balcony when Karris found her in his bed.
He dreamed and he woke, and he found he couldn’t much tell the difference. Fewer leg cramps in the dreams, perhaps. Karris. This was for Karris.
The dreams were redolent of déjà vu. He’d dreamed of this cell when his brother had suffered down here. For sixteen years, he’d dreamed of this soothing blue hell, the facets of the blue luxin crystalline walls shimmering like sun on the sea.
Idly, Gavin wondered how his father had repaired the damage of the real Gavin’s escaping. Andross couldn’t draft blue, so he must have had help. But any help would have had to be taken care of afterward. If Andross had been careful enough to bring Marissia down here alone, it meant he was keeping all knowledge of these cells to himself.
It would have been a lot of murder if he’d had to fix each of the cells that the real Gavin had escaped from.
But of course Andross Guile wasn’t as wasteful as his second son when it came to drafting. There was no way he would bother to maintain numerous functioning cells. He would have only two. One to hold Gavin, the other as a backup. If Gavin broke out of one, Andross would let him stay in the second until he repaired the first and fixed its weakness, and then he would move Gavin back into the first cell again. Efficient and cold.
As Gavin should have been.
He could still hear the muskets echoing in the cramped space as he’d blown his brother’s head apart.
What had Andross thought when he found the corpse?
Karris! Are you looking for me? Surely, surely she must be. She’d rescued him from the Nuqaba herself. She wouldn’t abandon him now. But how could she find him?
Funny. Funny how he’d obsessed over keeping this prison secret for so long, and now his only hope was that someone would find it soon.
Gavin hadn’t buried his brother. Hadn’t done anything for him. Just left him there to rot. Literally to rot.
Who did that?
He remembered Gavin laughing when they were children. Some prank he’d played on one of the White Oak boys. They’d put honey down the sleeping boy’s underclothes. The boy, Tavos, somehow hadn’t noticed until the next day, hours after waking, when he was already out in Sapphire Bay on a fishing trip with his father. The waves had been high that day and Tavos couldn’t swim, so it had brought an abrupt end to the trip and the permanent ire of Tavos White Oak and his father.
How his big brother Gavin had laughed.
That Gavin would never laugh again.
But it was just another murder in the list, wasn’t it? Dazen had to have killed, personally, perhaps more people than anyone in history.
He was not a man, he was an epidemic. He moved across the land snuffing out drafters young and old, broken halos traded for blood. He had spilled a river of blood—and in that river of blood, all he saw was his own reflection.
He was not a good man, Dazen Guile. He didn’t deserve to escape. But he was going to. Not for himself. She deserved to have a husband, and she’d been cursed to love Dazen.
The least he could do was be there.
The bread beckoned him to give up this farce of a suicide attempt, but he didn’t touch it.
One doesn’t fool Andross Guile on the cheap. He scrubbed his face with his crippled hand.
In the gleaming gray wall, he saw a dead man. One eyed, smiling back at him, the dead man winked.
Chapter 16
Kip was blind for three days. He had never been more afraid in his life. What was a drafter without his eyes? How could he let everyone down by leaving the fight before they’d even really begun?
He didn’t put it in words. Who would understand?
Despite the darkness, or perhaps because of it, the Nine Kings cards he’d absorbed kept triggering in his head. He lived as men who’d lost limbs. As a heretic woman who’d had her eyes put out. As a broken warrior lashing out at those who loved him.
It wasn’t exactly a comfort.
Comfort. That was the name of a pistol, wasn’t it? Abaddon, the King of… Locusts?
But that thought, that memory—was it even his own memory?—slipped away from him like all the others.
Tisis shared the bed with him, snuggled up against him, but she didn’t seem to know how to bridge the gap. He held her close, but without his eyes to judge her expressions, he didn’t trust himself not to make a fool of himself or hurt her by doing the wrong thing. They slept only.
On the third day, he sat up in bed and took off his bandages. He could see perfectly. His eyes felt well.
But those who broke the halo usually felt well. Part of the madness was believing that you weren’t mad.
Verity nearly dropped her tray when she came in and found him up.
“My lord,” she said.
“My apologies, caleen.”
“Please, my lord, call me Verity.”
“With pleasure. Verity, will you look at my eyes and tell me what you see?” Best to know how bad it was immediately.
“Is that safe?”
Kip nodded, and she pulled back some heavy drapes they’d put up on the walls. Where had those been when they were trying to make love in here? Verity stared at his eyes for a long moment as he blinked. From the quality of the light, it had to be late morning.
“There’s something—forgive me, my lord—there’s something captivating about your eyes, as if a color beyond color shines there, but your halo’s intact, if that’s what you were worried about.”