“Worst fight speech, ever,” Winsen said.
“But…” Kip said, grinning suddenly. “We have a few advantages. Inside Tyrea and Atash, there were people who wanted the Color Prince to win. He threw off odious bonds and tore up bad treaties. He freed slaves. He promised wealth and a return to ancestral gods. A certain slice of the people loved him. That’s not true in Blood Forest. The people here care deeply about nature, and they see wights as profoundly unnatural, defying the order of the seasons themselves by which life yields to death. Moreover, the Color Prince lost his temper here. He wiped out whole towns, and let his men ravage and rape others. This is the satrapy just across from the border town where two hundred young women jumped to their deaths off the walls of Raven Rock with their children in their arms. The people here are scattered, but they’re tough and they know the land intimately. They’re hunters and trappers and guides and lumbermen and river captains. In some areas, they’ve never much recognized the Chromeria, but they will recognize someone who comes in and fights a hated invader with them. We gather everyone who’s willing and has something to offer, and we show the Color Prince why it’s called the Blood Forest. Tisis grew up there. She knows the people and their customs. With her help, we’re going to go to the Deep Forest, we’re gonna raise a small army, and we’re going to save the satrapy.”
“In other words,” Big Leo said, “we’re going go fuck up the Color Prince. Like I said.”
Kip punched the big man in his good shoulder. It was like hitting a side of beef. “Exactly. I just had to use more words to explain it for the slow ones.”
“Don’t you guys look at me!” Ferkudi said.
And so, nearly in sight of the capital of Ruthgar, they boarded the odd new skimmer that Ben-hadad had dubbed the Mighty Thruster.
Kip had shaken his head. Tisis had muttered, “Boys.” Ferkudi had guffawed. Winsen had grinned. Cruxer had blushed and said, “You can’t call it that.”
“We’re the Mighty,” Ben-hadad said. “The propulsion units are thrusters, that’s all.” The damn liar.
“I guess you’ll be the first man to ride the Mighty Thruster?” Tisis asked.
His brow wrinkled. “That makes it sound…”
“Make sure you take a good wide stance, legs far apart, or he’ll throw you.”
“He? I didn’t…”
“Do you need more instruction? Because I’m getting quite adept at riding a mighty thruster myself,” she said.
Ben-hadad blanched.
“You’ll want to make sure you have a good grip, and loosen up your hips a—”
“All right! All right!”
Hours later, they sped into the mouth of the Great River—on the good skimmer Blue Falcon.
Chapter 19
“It’s your fault. This war. This madness. All this death and insanity.”
Gavin lifted his head at the sound of the voice, but there was no speaker with him in his cell, no slot open to the outside from which a taunter could hurl word-bolas at him. He closed his eyes again. The silence was a pillow over his face.
Which was odd, considering the hard surfaces reflected back every sound he made. But motionless, barely breathing, seated with his legs crossed, his fingers splayed in the sign of the three in an attitude of prayer, he was habituated to his own little noises. It was only natural that, too long deprived of sensations, he would start hallucinating.
How did you make it so long, brother?
His brother had gone mad down here, but slowly. So slowly. Sixteen years in this monochromatic hell, and for how long had he been sane? Ten years?
Gavin didn’t think he could make it two months.
Odd.
He’d barely moved since Marissia had been taken away. He had control of nothing but his own body.
Seven days. Seven days he’d eaten nothing. In the natural progression of fasting, he hadn’t even been hungry since the wretched third day.
On the seventh day, water had cascaded down the umbilicus above him. First, the rush of soapy water. When Gavin had created this prison, he’d thought it was a measure of his kindness to give such a luxury. Plus, he didn’t know how long a man could live in filth without getting some sort of infection, sickening, and dying. The Prisms’ War had seen plenty of filth, but it had been a war measured in months. Even then, nearly as many men had died of disease as from battle.
But when he’d designed the prison, he’d forgotten about heating the water. A rush of cold, soapy water to a naked man with no means to heat himself was no kindness.
Even my attempt at kindness was cruelty.
But Gavin endured the torrent. He rubbed some water over his wounds, but made no move to clean his beard or skin. He merely sat near the cloaca on the floor and watched as his bread was soaked sodden and sucked away.
The lime, to defend against scurvy, came next. (There were no oranges now, with the loss of Tyrea.) Gavin couldn’t tell, of course, if his father had dyed it blue as he himself always had dyed the oranges he’d sent his brother.
But Gavin didn’t scramble to grab the lime.
The clean water flowed next, rinsing away the soapy water and the lime.
Gavin sat, impassive, his face in his hands.
In the new cleanness of the cell, he could somehow smell afresh his own stench—deliberate, this time—and the slight chalk aroma of blue luxin. He glanced up at his reflection, pinched to inhumanly narrow proportions by the curving of the reflective wall, shimmering slightly with the crystalline facets of so much blue luxin. It looked disgusted with him.
The gaunt figure said, “Starving yourself? You think that’s an acceptable way for a Guile to go? Grow a spine.”
“I control what I can,” Gavin said.
“I didn’t peg you for a coward.”
“What do you mean?” Gavin challenged his reflection. I’m unhinged, he thought.
“Make up your mind. You still have teeth, don’t you? You want to live, bite the bread. You want to die, bite your wrist. Bleed out.”
Maybe it wasn’t his imagination.
Gavin could imagine taunting himself, but this wasn’t how he would have done it.
With his hands in front of his face, Gavin couldn’t see if the reflection’s mouth moved in time with his own or not. Was his sanity so tenuous?
“What am I doing?” Gavin asked aloud. Talking to oneself was one thing, talking as if one were really two different people was something else.
Then he felt a chill down his spine. He could have sworn this time the reflection didn’t move quite correctly.
He tilted his head. Squinted. Sniffed. The reflection wasn’t quite moving in time with him.
“You don’t remember?” the reflection asked. This time, Gavin was sure its mouth moved, whereas his hadn’t. But the voice was all in his head. “Where’s your perfect memory, Gavin Guile?” it asked.
“Dazen.”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? After what you did. Filicide.”
No. It didn’t matter. “What are you?” Gavin asked. “I don’t feel mad. Nor fevered. I’ve not been fasting so long that I should see apparitions.”
“You really don’t remember. I’m appalled. Gavin Guile, the man so near to being a god, has forgotten his own creation? But some part of you does remember, doesn’t it? Else why are you talking in your sleep?”
“What are you talking about? What are you?” And then it hit him. “Orholam have mercy, you’re the dead man.” The name itself was a distant echo. Something his brother had ranted about once, years before, perhaps?
“You still don’t understand how cruel you really are, do you?”
“I wasn’t cruel,” Gavin said. “I did what I had to. I couldn’t kill him, and I couldn’t let him go. This was the only way. It was only supposed to be until I established my rule. Things escaped me. There was never a time I could release him safely. I thought there would be, someday. I never did anything to be cruel, though. It was never that.”