Lovely to be starting out easy.
Andross Guile looked as if he had purloined all the youth Karris had lost in the last few months. It wasn’t only that his little round paunch was shrinking, or that his skin, formerly pallid from being so long covered from the sun’s gaze, was taking on color again. His back was straight, his head high, showing the broad Guile shoulders and strong Guile jaw. He was energized by crisis.
A good man for these times, then.
And that’s the first and last time I’ll ever think of Andross Guile as a good man.
“It’s nice to see you smile in such fraught times, High Lady,” he said.
Karris wasn’t a player of that game that Andross liked so much, Nine Kings, but at this moment, she knew she had only one card: her own attitude.
He knew more than she did, so it made sense to defer to him. If he were Ironfist, she would ask, ‘What must we do to win this war?’ But with Andross Guile, there was no way she could position herself as the subordinate.
“Those men I killed,” she said. “How are you going to deal with the fallout from their families?”
His face jumped off a bridge, tried to flip, and landed on its belly. “Me?”
She looked at him levelly. He’d tried to stack the election of the White against her. During the testing, two of the candidates—secretly his candidates—had tried to push her off the great disks to fall to her death. It hadn’t turned out well for them. “If nothing else,” she said, “we share a last name. That’s a problem… for you.”
Then he laughed. “Oh, that is an interesting play. Ha!” He looked at her for a few moments, and she had a brief fantasy that he was bald because his brain generated so much heat it had burnt off all his hair. “I was rather hoping that you might choose to be known by your maiden name, to use the term ‘maiden’… loosely.”
Karris saw Blackguard Gavin Greyling’s eyes go wide. He couldn’t believe Andross was speaking to her that way.
And in that moment, Karris thanked Orea Pullawr for forbidding her to use red or green luxin. After years of her constantly using angry red and impulsive green, Karris’s tongue had been a flame. But the months of abstaining had given her new patience. Karris let the insult pass beneath her feet with blue disdain.
“Hmm,” Andross said, as if it were merely interesting that she did not take offense. As if he’d played a good card, and the play hadn’t worked the way he’d thought, and thus, because he’d been countered, that was the end of it.
She wanted to be angry about it, but that was a waste, too, wasn’t it? Instead she should take note: Andross will make personal insults impersonally, not because he’s trying to insult you, but because he’s trying to find your weaknesses.
“I’ll never prove it,” she said, “but I know. You tried to have me killed. Or you encouraged those who tried. Same thing, as far as I’m concerned. I merely stopped you, so in my view, you shit the bed. You clean it up.”
A frisson went through the Blackguards assigned to Karris and to Andross. They all knew how fast Karris was. They knew how good she was at unarmed combat. She was well within lethal range of Andross Guile. And the Blackguards were charged with protecting both the White and the promachos. What were they to do if one attacked the other? Pulling apart fighters was vastly more dangerous and complicated than simply putting down a threat.
But Andross Guile merely tugged on his nose, scratching it. He looked at the Blackguards and their weapons and their menacing stances. “Stand down, children. You’re here to make us look good, not to actually do anything.”
“While you’re being an asshole for no good reason to people who can’t fight back,” Karris said, “I want to point out something.”
“Oh, please do.”
“Orea beat you. You stacked the cards against us. I know you did. You owned all six of the other candidates, didn’t you?”
“All six? That would be excessive, wouldn’t it?”
“You think you’re the best at all your games. But Orea beat you. She beat you.”
Andross smiled and shrugged. “Luck,” he said, as if Karris’s selection as the White and the death of two of his cat’s-paws were trifles in the course of a friendly wager between friends.
“Not luck. Orholam turns his face against the proud, Andross Guile.”
“You think the divinity himself selected you?” Andross said, amused.
“It is the point of the entire ritual, isn’t it?” Karris asked.
Andross laughed, as if he couldn’t believe how na?ve she was. “You drew one stone in seven. And perhaps there was no luck involved at all, depending on how far Orea stooped to get you where you are. You won. Take your victory, but to mistake that for a divine mandate on your—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” she interrupted.
He paused, and saw she was serious. “Oh, you are surprising, aren’t you? I can’t tell if you’re bluffing or if you actually believe that. No, don’t tell me. I like the uncertainty. You’re not a player, but you are a fascinating card, aren’t you? After all these years, I finally start to see what my son saw in you.”
“Sons,” Karris corrected. Both of them had fallen for her, after all. To the whole world’s sorrow.
“I hadn’t forgotten,” Andross said, his voice suddenly stone.
Oh, so this wasn’t all games and feeling out weaknesses and triggers. There was a personal edge in there. Andross blamed her for all this? For the war, for the loss of his sons? The sheer blind audacious folly.
But Karris wasn’t here to destroy Andross Guile. She was here to make a partner of him. And the truth was, their problems were mutual. Much as they both hated it, they were yoked together not only against external threats, but against internal ones as well. Three Guiles in power went against tradition, if not law. No one was going to be comfortable with one Guile as promachos, another as Prism-elect, and a third as the White.
Karris waved the Blackguards back. “So, how about it?”
“It? You mean me smoothing over your murder of Jason Jorvis and Akensis Azmith? Surely you’re joking.”
“Not murder. Summary judgment of traitors. Which is the direction I’d go in my defense if I were brought to trial.”
“Not self-defense?” Andross asked. “A petite woman like you, against two big men?”
Any trial would be agonizing, of course. People who’ve never been in a fight to the death always seem to think that split-second decisions can be derived rationally, and that a good person will naturally always make the best choice and then carry out what she intends flawlessly.
Self-defense would be the stronger case, as Andross knew. Karris had been targeted for assassination by those two men, each of whom was bigger and stronger than she was.
She’d been scared, she could say. If her reaction had seemed disproportionate, people had to remember that she was a small woman, and they were large, threatening men. She’d merely done as her training taught her: she’d put an end to the threat.
It was all true, but it wasn’t all the truth.
Karris hadn’t been afraid. Combat was scary: you could do everything right and still get killed by a stray bullet or an ally’s error or dumb luck. Fighting two untrained idiots hand to hand? Not that scary.
She might have been able to save them, but she’d had time for only two thoughts as they held on, balanced at the edge of the testing platform: First, that they were the sons of noble families that were needed in the war, and thus they would get away with their treason and blasphemy and murder. Second, that she wasn’t going to let that happen.
Self-defense was a perfectly good legal defense, but telling people their new White had been afraid wasn’t the way she wanted to start her term.