As the thorns rotated, splintering and lacerating the flesh they called home, Gavin’s entire body convulsed with pain. He fell.
From the pure white marble ground, he crossed his glassine arms to defend himself. And saw another thick vein of parasitic, bloated blackness in his other arm. He tore open his tunic and saw, encased and strangled in a cage of thorns, his own black heart. No, not black. It was gray, diseased.
It pulsed loathsomely. And he was disgusted. And he was ashamed.
He plucked it from his chest to fling it away and die, rightly die.
And then he saw, at his heart’s heart, a glimmer.
Storm clouds were gathering overhead, massive thunderheads of judgment, coming with such speed as to make up for how long they had been delayed. The air, so thin up here, changed palpably.
But Gavin had seen the white. His gray heart writhed, and the whiteness was swallowed again.
“No!” he shouted to the coming storm and the wind that whipped his body cold. “I need more time!”
Chapter 50
Karris wasn’t certain how he’d gotten the message to her without its being intercepted. For that matter, she wasn’t certain it hadn’t been. She wasn’t certain the message was real. Even if it was real, she wasn’t certain it wasn’t a trap.
Koios had asked her to meet—Koios, her lost brother, though now he styled himself the White King. Koios, who had been her favorite. He’d signed the message “Koios.”
So here she was, in a skimmer with a half-dozen Blackguards, waiting for the trap or the prank to reveal itself, or, just possibly, for a meeting that might change the future of the satrapies and save tens of thousands of lives.
The Blackguards kept her skimmer moving in random circles so they wouldn’t have to flee from a full stop if it came to that. Each man wore his spectacles and had full grip of his color and a musket. Karris didn’t offer advice to the Blackguards on their disposition, though she would have when she was first elevated; she had brought only the best Blackguards, and they knew their work.
Except, of course, that they had allowed her to come at all. Commander Ironfist might not have.
She had prepared her arguments before she’d summoned Commander Fisk. They had all boiled down to one thing: if I can end the war with words alone, it’s worth the risk. If Fisk had been adamant, she would have brought up that she missed her brother. That was true, but it was false, too. She was pretty certain the man who had been her brother was long dead.
But Commander Fisk hadn’t argued at all. ‘Who do you want on it?’ he’d asked instead.
‘You’re not going to try to stop me?’
‘You’re the Iron White. In my experience, you stop when you’re good and ready.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘I don’t know if I like being trusted so much.’ Have I changed so much? Has the world?
Fisk only sighed. ‘I only know one man who could stop you, and begging the High Lady’s pardon, but I’m not that man, nor will I tell him without your leave.’
Fisk didn’t mean Gavin. He didn’t mean Ironfist. He meant Andross.
Was this what happened when you didn’t have strong voices around you? Gavin and Ironfist would have kept her from making mistakes. Instead she was alone.
For a single moment, she remembered the day when she was seven years old, and her hateful slave-tutor Izza had forbidden her to leave her reading lessons until she finished ten pages, even though Karris told her that she needed to use the latrine. Shaking and crying, she’d made it through five pages before she’d wet her léine.
She’d opened the door, and Izza was gone. Her father was in the library instead, meeting with an important noble. He’d looked at her as if she disgusted him. ‘Look what you’ve done!’
She soul-wept, hysterical, but he had pushed her away when she tried to hug him.
Karris had never tried to hug him again.
It had been Koios who’d found her after she’d fled. He’d wrapped his cloak around her and walked through the manse with her. When their mother had asked why Karris was wearing his cloak, he’d said they were playing a game. He’d taken her to the nursery slaves to wash her and her clothing, and commanded their silence about the matter.
The slave Izza hadn’t been beaten. That wasn’t Rissum White Oak’s way. That would have been too direct for him. Instead he sold her to the silver mines at Laurion. Karris still felt a stab of shame at the elation she’d felt when she’d heard that.
The silver mines! An educated slave should never have faced such a punishment. Especially not a woman.
Ah, that was why she’d thought of that day now: shame and disappointment and her brother, all twined together like wintering serpents in a ball of slithering warmth.
She was still thinking of that day, of that young man whom she’d adored as only a young girl can adore her big brother, when they spotted the islands.
His note had invited her to choose whichever island she wished in the cluster, that she might be assured there was no trap. There were a dozen tiny islands here, differentiated mostly by how much or how little vegetation covered them. The Blackguards studied them through long lenses and picked one.
She jumped out of the skimmer as it came to rest on the blindingly bright white sand. Her Blackguards had chosen one of the smallest islands. As she waded ashore, they spread a cloth over the skimmer to hide its workings.
Karris had worn her whites. She thought that the odds of an assassination attempt were about one in two—yes, Commander Ironfist would have been furious they’d come. With those odds, there was no need to make herself clumsy with frocks and petticoats. She had a brace of Ilytian wheel-lock pistols tucked in her belt. They were all ivory and scrimshaw—a bit fussy for Karris’s tastes—but they were also the finest pistols in the Chromeria’s armory.
Truth was, the whole Iron White thing had taken on a life of its own. Every diplomat and noble who appeared before Karris brought a gift that somehow incorporated white. White leather, white silk, white cotton, white flowers—flowers! White with actual iron, white with platinum because it was more expensive, and every once in a while, some daring soul would do white with gold—for the sun, you see? Because you are so close to Orholam, you see?
Oh, I see.
Did no one—no one?—remember her love for color?
If only someone would bring her something red, or green, or black, she would grant their petition immediately, regardless.
But Karris wasn’t a woman anymore. To become the Iron White was to become a symbol. If her greatest sacrifice in this war was giving up her preferred fashions, she should really wake each day with a heart full of gratitude. She could only hope that someday the inner woman resembled these trappings.
“There he is,” Gill Greyling said, lens up to his eye. “But what the hell is that?”
He handed the monocular off to his brother.
“Don’t know. But it’s moving fast,” Gav said.
“He wouldn’t reveal that they have skimmers like this,” Karris said. I don’t think. “Not for free.”
When the ship got close, she saw that it was shaped like a chariot, and that thick lines disappeared into the waves before it. Six dorsal fins like jagged teeth bit the waves.
As they entered the shallows, Karris caught sight of a hammer-shaped head and an eye streaming blood or glowing from within with some demonic light.
It took everything she had not to step farther away from the waves. A rational part of her whispered, ‘They’re simply will-cast sharks,’ probably with red luxin. But her stomach didn’t hear that, her weak knees couldn’t hear it, her tight throat wouldn’t.
Iron White, Karris. Iron White. She painted on ambivalence and hoped it could fool the brother who’d known her so well.
Heedless of the sharks, six bodyguards clad all in white hopped from the chariot and waded ashore. They even wore white veils of precious silk, and bore ataghans and punch daggers and krises. There were no muskets that she could see.