Chapter 67
“This is the last time you and I will meet,” Marissia said. They were seated side by side on one of the benches ringing the Great Fountain of Karris Shadowblinder. Marissia dressed in humble slave’s grays, eating her lunch. Teia was in her nunk’s grays, taking a break from her calisthenics, ostensibly nursing a spasming calf muscle. “I hear you gave your new handler a hard time.”
It was hard to maintain the spy discipline of not looking over to see if she was saying it wryly. Was there a bit of pleasure in Marissia’s tone?
“Could say that,” Teia said, leaning forward to massage her leg so her mouth would be obscured. The point of meeting in public wasn’t to disguise altogether that you were speaking to your handler, it was to make sure you weren’t overheard and to give lip-readers an impossible task. Strangers might exchange a few words, after all. “I want to tell Kip everything. I don’t have anyone. It’s too hard.”
A long pause as Marissia took a drink from her wineskin. “You want to reveal everything to Kip the Lip?” She paused, then delicately took a bite of a small meat pastry.
Teia scowled. That wasn’t fair. Kip might shoot from the hip when he was angry, but he didn’t spill other people’s secrets. He was a good man.
A good man? Kip? When had she started thinking of Kip as a man? Sometimes she looked at him and images seemed to shear off from him like light splitting: different facets, different Kips. Perhaps it was a side effect of the light splitting or drafting so much paryl. If drafting red gradually made you more passionate, and drafting green made you wilder, what did drafting paryl do to you? She saw Kips frozen, each in a line:
Fat Kip, as he had been when he first came to the Chromeria. He was sunk into himself, the blubber a defense against fear and isolation, chin tucked down, shy, self-consciousness and self-pity at war, but thinking.
Broken Kip, mentally going back to Garriston and whatever had happened to him there. They said he’d killed King Garadul. Some said he’d disobeyed an order in doing so, and put the Color Prince in charge. Whatever else he’d done, they said he’d killed a lot of men. No one had put much stock in that. None of the inductees had been there, and the Blackguards said nothing to the inductees about such matters. “He’s a Guile,” was the most they’d say, as if that said everything. As if that said anything. Broken Kip would show up at practice after having thrashed a bully, and he looked defeated instead of victorious, as if he couldn’t believe what he was capable of.
The Weeping Warrior. Teia had only seen glimpses of this one, had heard more of it. Teia had heard Kip self-deprecatingly say something like, “I’m the turtle-bear.” Others said he was a berserker. Kip fighting Aram in his last fight, about to lose his last chance to become a Blackguard. Kip had gone insane as Aram held him down, beating his face in but letting Kip slip just enough so that the judges didn’t call it.
Most young men who went crazy in a fight went stupid, too. But Kip had shot out the lights. It might have been enough for him to beat Aram, if someone hadn’t fixed the lights almost immediately—and was there a rule for that? Aram had picked Kip fully off the ground and was throwing him down in a neck-breaker—Aram himself getting terrified of what he felt burgeoning in his opponent.
Teia had overheard two Blackguards nearby talking. “It’s a good thing they stopped that,” Hezik said. “That Kip would have died.”
“Or if he hadn’t,” Stump said, “a bunch of the rest of us might have.”
“Huh?”
Stump looked at Hezik. “At Garriston, I saw that boy go green golem. You remember the south flank at Sundered Rock, when we thought their line was going to snap, and we suddenly saw Dazen Guile himself? Out there all alone. Captain thought we’d take us a prize?”
“You know I don’t remember shit about that battle. I woke up afterward and couldn’t see or hear for a week.”
“You can still fucking count. Number a men we had before, number a men we had after. It ain’t accountancy. Why you gotta trip up my story? You know what happened there even if you don’t remember it all for your own self. Anyway. Garriston was that. I tell you. It was that. Boy’s fucking fifteen.”
They’d noticed Teia then, and gave her a look that would wilt flowers.
Then she saw the next Kip, right after the Weeping Warrior. She saw Kip taking his place in line after Cruxer had come in like a righteous, judgmental god and crippled Aram. Kip, suddenly accepted, beaten, bruised, staggering, beaming, weeping, and whole. That was Kip Unalone: Kip with the scrubs, Kip with his team. Laughing, for one frozen moment, belonging. There was a tragic undercurrent in his face even as he laughed, though, as if he knew this moment was fleeting.
Then Kip Confident. She’d seen this for one second, and only one, but some part of her was certain this was Kip Himself. Kip, averring that while this war wasn’t the best thing, it was the best thing possible. Kip, unself-conscious, who knew when he knew what he was talking about. Kip, who didn’t sleep much. Kip, who knew some of the cost of what he was talking about. Kip, in that moment, wasn’t trying to impress anyone—and that made him more impressive. He was suddenly solid. Adult.
Attractive.
She thought of how she’d not hugged Kip. Why hadn’t she hugged him? She should have. Orholam, she should have.
“I suppose if I tell you something that you already know, you won’t listen to me?” Marissia said.
Teia blinked.
“Like if I pointed out the foolishness of getting your heart tangled with a Guile?”
“No danger of that,” Teia said quickly. Marissia was a room slave. She hadn’t had any say over Gavin coming to her bed. That she had chosen to make her service easier by pleasing him rather than harder by fighting him simply meant she was smart. She was doing what she needed to do to survive.
Marissia said, “Someone who says you shouldn’t do something while doing it herself could be considered a hypocrite. Or an expert. Hypocrite or expert, that of all people, I offer you advice is not a reason to dismiss it, but actually the opposite.”
“I didn’t call you a—” Teia was baffled. What was Marissia saying?
“You’re sixteen. You thought it. I judged my elders harshly when I was young, too.”
So Marissia loved Gavin. What kind of irony was it that Teia, who had been a slave, would have assumed that Marissia couldn’t love Gavin—because she was a slave?
It wasn’t … what? Normal love? Because Gavin was Prism and Marissia was a slave? Could Teia tell Marissia that what she felt wasn’t love? That Marissia was fooling herself, that really she was only making a bad situation tolerable? If a power difference made love impossible, who could ever love a Prism? Who could ever love a slave?
Maybe it was love, then. But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t easy.
Which was Marissia’s point exactly. The chasm between freed slave and a Prism’s son was narrower than the chasm between slave and Prism. But not by much.
Marissia ate more. Drank more. No hurry, no apparent interest in Teia. She casually scanned the crowd, but the way a bored person eating lunch might. Then she said, “Do you know, I was made a slave at your age.”
Teia stood, turned, propped a foot up on the bench, and began working on her calf in a way that would give her a glimpse of Marissia’s face.
“Things were suddenly expected of me that I found very, very hard. I cried myself to sleep many nights. Sometimes I still feel like that vulnerable little girl. I have an inkling of what the next year will demand of you. I want you to know I’m proud of you. The Order will test you more. They will ask you to do unspeakable things. You will do them. This is an order. In the sight of Orholam, let all the evil you do be on my head, and on the White’s. We’re playing against the Old Man of the Desert himself, you understand?”
“No,” Teia said quietly. “No.”
“You will,” Marissia said. She gazed up at the statue of Karris Shadowblinder, Karris’s namesake. “And stop giving her nonsense.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin, stood, and walked away.
Teia remembered herself enough to continue pretending to massage her leg. It wasn’t like she’d had a long time to bond with Marissia, but the woman had been the only person Teia could tell the whole truth. The sudden emptiness in her chest felt like a death.
Death. She’d killed a man in this war in shadow. Maybe Kip was right. Maybe it was justified. But she was going to have to kill again, for the other side. She had no doubt of it. How would the Order really trust her until she’d killed for them?
It wasn’t a matter of if they ordered her to do so, it was a matter of when. And she was supposed to meet up with Murder Sharp right now.