“I think offense is the last thing we feel, High Lady…” Tempus paused. It was within protocol to address the White as ‘High Lady,’ but he’d obviously meant to append her name, and his wits failed him. ‘High Lady Karris’ because of their Blackguard friendship, or was that too informal? ‘High Lady Guile’ because of her long-hoped-for marriage? But that had been so brief and so painful, and did that seem to ignore all she had accomplished under her own name? ‘High Lady White Oak’? But did that seem to ignore her marriage?
She saw his dilemma. “I prefer ‘High Lady White,’ thank you. I am those other names as well, but for the time Orholam has given me in this office, I am the White before all else. Caleen?”
Her slaves had finished putting the pins in her hair, and now they set a large wig and headdress on Karris’s head. Luminous sea demon ivory had been carved into a seven-pointed crown. Suspended above the central point was a single winking diamond, smaller than one would expect. Platinum-white hair cascaded down around Karris’s shoulders, but each tip had been dyed one of the seven colors where it swept back up to entwine with the ivory crown.
Her only nod to her origins as a green and red drafter was a single earring in each ear, a ruby and an emerald. She waved away any powders. “I’m pale enough,” she said. “And I care not if they see me sweat.” Even while the slaves worked, another held up a series of parchments for her to peruse. The White would nod every so often, and the slave would turn the pages. The woman was illiterate, and once Karris had to motion for her to turn the page right side up.
The White was practicing her speech, Teia realized.
“I take it back,” Karris said. “Give me some powder.”
Captain Tempus cleared his throat. “On most days, the White being late would be expected, High Lady White. But noon waits for no one.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Karris said, peeved. Then she sighed. “I’m sorry. In the unexpected absence of my chief room slave, it is kind of you to remind me. I am well aware of the pressures of time today. Please don’t act differently. I’m not accustomed to… all of this. Any of it. Orea made it look so easy.”
“She’d been doing it ten years by the time you knew her,” Samite said. “Your first time in the sparring circle, you don’t try to win; you try to survive.”
“Doesn’t seem like an ideal time to be learning as I go, does it?” Karris asked.
Tell me about it, Teia thought.
Karris stood, her makeup finished. “Shall we?” she asked.
Samite said, “You aren’t… I mean I understand dismissing some slobbering luxiats, but you aren’t actually going out there like… Or do I need to find a new job?”
Karris grinned. “Ha! I was just playing with you. I wondered how far you’d let me go. All things may be permissible, but not all are fruitful.”
She beckoned, and two slave women came from the closet, carrying a dress between them. It opened like a clamshell, sideways. Karris stepped into the sleeves as if into a jacket, and the rest was buckled tight around her.
“How did the tailor take my instructions?” Karris asked the younger of the slaves.
“I believe ‘apoplexy’ is the word. But obedience, too.”
Karris grinned at the Blackguards. “Pull this down. All this silk is under tension, and this razor embedded in this channel should cut it instantly. So if I need to fight—or, more likely, if I’m injured and you need to carry me away from danger or see how bad a wound is, you can cut the dress off in a matter of moments.” She turned to the slave. “Shorter sleeves next time.”
“He said if you asked for shorter sleeves to tell you to look for another tailor, because he’ll be jumping off each of the seven towers until one of them finally agrees to release him from this hell you’ve confined him in.”
Karris laughed. “Is it a universal rule that the more talented the artist, the more of a pain in the ass?”
“We’re all pains in the ass if we can get away with it,” Samite said. “Great artists are just allowed to get away with it more.”
Waving away the slaves now just fluffing her skirts, Karris asked, “How do I look? Never mind. Don’t answer that. It’s too late to change. Noon waits for no one.”
She stopped at the door, though.
“Some of you know already, but some of you are too young to know me. I don’t look forward to this. I’ve killed wights and men, and I don’t even like killing wights. There is a time to agonize, and there is a time to act. Today we do what must be done, and we don’t shrink from the truth or from our duty. Trainer Samite, you remember Ithiel Greyling?”
“Of course. Those Blue-Eyed Demon mercs put a dung-smeared arrow through his hand,” Samite said. “May Orholam send them to a lower hell.”
“Ithiel knew those arrows. You try to treat them, and you get gangrene. You die, always. The chirurgeon said he could just take the hand at the wrist, but you’d still risk death. If he’d done that, maybe Ithiel could have been a trainer, like you. But Ithiel had two boys. He didn’t want to give up fighting, didn’t want to give up the Blackguard he loved. His wife had already done that in order to marry him. But he loved his family, too, and wanted to be there for them. So we took off his arm at the elbow. Instantly.”
“Bravest thing I ever saw,” Samite said.
“To realize in an instant that you aren’t going to have the life you’d hoped for, but not waste a moment complaining, instead acting instantly to save what good you can? That’s more guts than I’d have had,” Karris said. Orholam have mercy, Karris hadn’t been thinking of Gavin until the very moment she said the words. She pushed it away, tried to get back on track. “He lived until just a couple years ago, didn’t he?”
“Indeed. And raised two damn fine sons,” said Watch Captain Tempus.
No one was looking at Gavin and Gill Greyling, but Teia saw tears streaking down both their faces to see their father honored so.
“What we do today, with this execution, is that cut,” Karris said quietly. “We may cut too deep. We may kill men who could have been saved. The one is all rot, but the other two, in gentler times… Perhaps they could be treated with gentler medicine. Today we cut deep so we may save the whole body. But I want you to know, I hate it, too.”
Quentin, Teia thought. We’re going to kill you. Dear Orholam, Quentin.
Chapter 22
I’m no better than my brother. But I live.
Gavin waited, starving, fasting, wondering if his father saw him or if he had been forgotten. His entire gambit rested on his father’s seeing him choose death, and the water flushing the cell every week erased all evidence of that.
Nor would Gavin necessarily even know if his father came down to observe him and left.
But you can never blink when you stare down a Guile.
There was only the bland trickle of water, so slight that it usually clung to the ceiling and coursed down the wall with only the occasional drip. It had, over the years, worn a slight gutter in the blue luxin. He plugged that gutter with the two remaining fingers of his left hand, watched the water back up and spill out of the gutter and finally course around his fingers and into oblivion.
Death always finds a way.
Stop what gaps you may;
Scream defiance that you live,
Life leaks through the mortal sieve.
When he’d constructed these cells, he’d thought that there were two main problems with any prison: what comes in, and what goes out. He’d spent restless nights figuring out exactly how to deliver the food, and how exactly to take away the waste and the water.
He’d gotten it exactly backward. The problem with a prison isn’t what comes and goes; it’s what stays.
When he shat—rarely now, it had been so long since he’d eaten, but it had been a problem from the beginning—he had to wipe with his left hand like the barbarians of old in the Broken Lands. There was no way to wash his hand adequately after. Thus, when he ate, he had to tear apart his bread with right hand and his teeth, feral.
Once in the first days, he forgot, and ate three bites with both hands.