The Black Prism

Chapter 23

“We need to talk about your future,” Gavin said. “You have some choices.”

Kip looked at the Prism across their fire. Night was coming on fast in their little island. Kip had slept for hours, apparently, completely missing Garriston and only waking as their boat lurched, hitting the sand as night fell.

“How long will I live?” Kip asked. He was grumpy, hungry, and just starting to comprehend some of the implications of what had happened in the last two days.

“A question for Orholam himself. I’m just his humble Prism,” Gavin said, a wry smile twisting his lips. He was looking out into the darkness.

“You know what I mean.” It came out sharper than Kip meant. Everyone he knew was dead, and he was going to be a green drafter. He’d seen his future in the color wight: death or madness and then death.

Gavin’s eyes snapped back to Kip. He moved to speak, stopped, then said, “When you draft, it changes your body, and your body interprets that change as damage—it heals what it can, but it’s always a losing battle, like aging. Most male drafters make it to forty. Women average fifty.”

“Then the Chromeria kills us or we go mad?”

Gavin’s face went hard. “You’re getting emotional. I don’t think you’re ready for this.”

“Not ready?” Kip said. Gavin was right, Kip knew it. He was on edge. He should just shut up, but he couldn’t help himself. “I wasn’t ready for everyone I know to be murdered. I wasn’t ready to impale some horsemen and jump over a waterfall. Words are nothing. What is it? Once we aren’t useful anymore, we have to kill ourselves?” Why was he yelling? Why was he trembling? Orholam, he’d sworn on his soul to kill a king, was he mad already?

“Something like that.”

“That or turn into a color wight?” Kip asked.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I guess we’ve talked about my future,” Kip said bitterly. He knew he was being snotty, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it,” Gavin said.

“How would you know what I know, father?”

It was like watching a spring release. One second, the Prism was sitting across the fire from Kip. The next, he stood right in front of Kip, his arm drawn back. The next, Kip was hitting the sand, head ringing from Gavin’s openhanded blow, ass scraped from sliding off his log, his wind taken by the fall.

“You’ve been through hell, so I’ve given you more slack than I give any man. You wanted to find the line? You’ve found it.”

Kip rolled face up as he caught his breath. He had sand sticking to the wetness at the corner of his mouth. He rubbed it. Just slobber, not blood. “Orholam’s balls!” he said. “Guess what I’ve found? A line! I’m the greatest discoverer since Ariss the Navigator!”

Gavin trembled, his face a mask. He rolled his shoulders, popped his neck right and left. Though his back was to their fire, Kip could see red luxin smoke-swirls curling into his eyes.

“What are you going to do? Beat me?” Kip demanded. It’s just pain.

Sometimes Kip hated himself for how he saw weakness. The Prism threatened him and the first thing Kip saw was the threat’s emptiness. Gavin couldn’t beat him precisely because Gavin was a good man and Kip was defenseless.

Gavin’s look darkened to murder for one moment, then cleared to simple intensity. The briefest flicker of amusement. “Take a deep breath,” he said quietly.

“What?”

The Prism made a little backhanded gesture, as if whisking away a fly. A gob of red luxin flicked out of his hand and splattered over Kip’s mouth. Kip took a deep breath through his nose before the luxin spread and covered that, too. Then it wrapped around the back of his head, spread over the top of his head, and solidified. Only Kip’s eyes were uncovered, mouth and nose were covered, utterly blocked. He couldn’t breathe.

Gavin said, “You remind me of my brother. I could never win against him growing up. And when I did, he’d give me some patronizing praise that made me wonder if he’d let me win. You see the cracks in things? Fine. It’s proof enough that you’re a Guile. Our whole family has it. Including me. Think about this, Kip: there are a lot of problems that would go away for me if I leave that mask on your face until you’re dead. You might want to think twice before you try to use a man’s conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn’t have one.”

Kip listened, conserving his strength against his rising panic, certain that after Gavin was done talking, he would take the luxin off his face. But Gavin stopped talking, and he didn’t remove the mask. Kip’s stomach churned as his diaphragm worked to suck in more air, pumped down to expel the dead air he held in. Nothing.

He reached up to his neck, trying to find the seam where luxin abutted skin. But the line was smooth, the luxin sticking close to the skin. He couldn’t get his fingernails under it. He reached up around his head, his eyes. If he stabbed his fingernails into the soft skin next to his eyes, he could lift the edge of the mask and get one finger underneath it. His vision was darkening. He looked at Gavin, pleading, sure that the man would step in now.

Gavin watched him, pitiless. “If the only thing you’re going to respect is strength, Kip, first, you’re a fool, and second, you’ve come to the right man.”

The panic came. He should have known better. Kip thrashed, tried to scream, reached up to that thin ridge of luxin by his eyes—but he barely touched it before his hands drooped. He should have known he couldn’t trust…