The Black Prism

Chapter 58

The door closed behind them, and abruptly Kip and Liv were alone, away from the important people and the matters of state. Children once more.

Liv looked at Kip for a long time.

“What?” Kip asked.

“Sometimes it’s really strange to me that you are who you are. A week ago I would have blushed just at seeing Commander Ironfist. Now I’m sitting in the finest rooms in the Travertine Palace—and they’re mine?”

“I’ve given up trying to understand it all,” Kip said. “I think if I stop and think too much—” I’ll become a blubbering baby. “Things will just fall apart.”

In a moment, Liv’s face changed. Her eyes softened, compassion etched on every feature. “You were there. In the village. When it happened.”

“At Green Bridge with Isa and Sanson. And Ram, of course.” He still wanted to sneer at the very thought of Ram, but that seemed cruel and small now. “Ram and Isa were killed. Sanson and I got away. But eventually they killed him too.” Kip’s voice was wooden and distant even in his own ears. He couldn’t even look at Liv. If he saw her compassion, he’d break. He already looked weak and foolish and young and fat in her eyes, a boy to be pitied. He didn’t need to make it worse by crying. “My mother made it out but her skull was smashed. I was with her when she…”

“Oh, Kip, I’m so sorry.”

He pushed that down, pushed it aside. “Anyway, I really do hope your father got out. He was always good to me. In fact, if he hadn’t made me leave when he did, I’d be dead.”

Liv said nothing for a time. Kip couldn’t decide if it was an awkward silence or not. “Kip,” she said finally, “I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to… Things can be really complicated now. With who your father is, and the way things are at the Chromeria… Sometimes things don’t really go the way we want, and we—”

“Am I supposed to have some idea what you’re talking about?” Kip asked. “ ’Cause…”

She opened her mouth and looked at him again. Then he saw the gates come down. “I’m just really glad you made it out, Kip.”

“Thanks,” he said. Thanks for not trusting me enough to say whatever you just wanted to say. “Should we get started?”

She smiled wanly, like she wanted to say more but didn’t know how. “Sure. Come out to the balcony.”

They walked out onto the balcony, which hung literally over the sea. From above, they could hear the muffled voices of men speaking on top of the Travertine Palace. Kip stood looking out at the sea, trying to put himself in a frame of mind to concentrate, and said, “What do I do?”

“To draft you need four things,” Liv said. “Skill, Will—”

“Source, and Still,” Kip said. “Er, sorry, I have picked up a thing or two.”

“Right. So there’s basically modifications and nuances to each of the big four, but that’s where it all starts. Let’s start with source.”

Kip thought that he’d picked up a lot of what she was going to say, but one doesn’t interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny. Liv rummaged through her pack and pulled out a rolled-up green cloth and then a white one.

“We’ll hold off on the color theory as much as we can,” she said. “We know you’ve drafted green. So your source can either be something reflecting green light in the world or you can take something that has green as a component color and look at it through a lens.”

“Huh?” Kip said. So much for this all being a repeat. “What do you mean reflecting green? You mean something green?”

“Something you’ll learn the further you go in the Chromeria is that your experience of a thing and the nature of the thing itself are often different things.”

“Sounds… uh, metaphysical,” Kip said. Hadn’t Gavin said something like that?

“Some take it that way, too, but I’m speaking strictly physically. Look at this.” Liv pulled out another cloth. It was a red spectrum, but instead of flowing smoothly from the deepest to the lightest red, there were parts that took steps back. “When you look at this, Kip, you can tell that it’s off. It generally goes right, but there are subcolors out of sequence. Most men can’t see that. They think it’s right. They can differentiate these four spectral blocks here, but not these blocks inside. It doesn’t matter how hard they try, or how long they study it. Their experience of it is less nuanced than yours or mine. Now, quite honestly, we don’t know if what you and I see is the totality of what is actually there, or if some people from beyond the Great Desert might think we’re as blind as we think the men are who can’t tell this from this.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know. In class, the magisters usually have every boy come to the front and attempt the test, just because so many of the girls who can see the differences can’t believe that everyone else can’t see them too. It’s pretty humiliating. Actually, I think it’s worse for the girls who can’t see it either. The boys aren’t expected to pass. The girls who can’t see it feel awful.” She shook herself. “Tangent. The point to remember, even if you don’t believe it now, is that color doesn’t inhere in a thing. Things reflect or absorb colors from light. You think this cloth is green. It’s not. Really it’s a cloth that absorbs all colors except green.”

“This is us saving color theory for later?” Kip asked lightly.

She paused, then she saw he was teasing and she smiled. “No you don’t, I’m not going to get drawn into more tangents. The point is, light is primary. This cloth, in a dark room, is worthless to you. Obviously, you can take the religious significances pretty deep, but you and I are only going to talk about the physical, not the metaphysical. You can draft green light. There are only a couple of ways for you to do that. The best is to have green things around you. Especially if you have lots of them. Especially if you have lots of different hues and tones available.”

“So, like a forest.”

“Exactly. That’s why before the Unification, the green goddess Atirat was worshipped in Ruthgar and the Blood Forest more than anywhere else. Green drafters flocked to the forests and the Verdant Plains because they were more powerful there than anywhere else. In turn, those lands were dominated by the green virtues and the green vices, either simply because of the sheer amount of green being drafted there or because Atirat was real. Take your pick.”

“That I don’t understand.”

“We’ll worry about all that later. The second-best way to draft is to have spectacles. Like these.” She reached into her pack and pulled out a little cotton pouch. Loosening the drawstring, she withdrew a pair of green spectacles.

“You don’t draft green,” Kip said.

“No, I don’t,” Liv said, smiling.

“They’re for me?” Kip asked. Tingles shot down his spine.

Liv smiled broadly. “Usually there’s a little ceremony, but it amounts to a congratulations.”

Kip took the spectacles gingerly. They had perfectly round lenses set in a thin iron frame. He put them on his face. Liv stepped close and measured where the arms of the spectacles passed over his ears. Kip could smell her. Somehow, after a full day skimming across the entire sea and fighting pirates and then baking in the sun, she smelled wonderful. Of course, Kip hadn’t been this close to a woman very often—except his mother, usually covered with sweat or vomit on the nights he was unlucky and had to carry her home. Isa had smelled good too, but different than Liv.

Isa had barely crossed Kip’s mind in the last days. He’d thought about her, but there was something hollow there. He’d let himself daydream about kissing Isa someday, but maybe that had been more because she was there than that she was perfect for him. Or because she was there and Liv wasn’t, and Kip needed something to distract him from thinking about Liv.

And now here she was. She’d measured both sides, and she took his spectacles off and was carefully bending the arms to fit behind his ears.

“Hmm,” she said. “Your right ear’s higher than the left.”

“My ears are lopsided?” Kip said. As if I didn’t have enough to be self-conscious about.

“Don’t worry, mine are too! Really, most people’s are off a little bit.” She paused. “Just not quite so much.” She shook her head in disbelief.

“I’ve got freakish ears?”

Liv grinned wickedly. “Gotcha.”

“Orholam’s ba—Ahem, beard.” Kip scowled. Every time. Every stinkin’ time.

She smiled, self-satisfied, and gave the nose pieces a final bend, then propped the spectacles on his face. “There. You might have to play with them to make them more comfortable, but they aren’t really meant to be on your face all day long anyway.”

He looked around, and was not terribly surprised to see that most everything had a greenish tinge through the green glass.

“What you’re seeing is white light from the sun reflected off of surfaces, then filtered through your lenses. So if you’re surrounded by white marble walls or something, you’ll be able to draft almost as much as if you were in a forest. The lenses aren’t as good as drafting from natural greens, but it’s better than nothing. You can’t just look at anything, though. Look around. You see how some things really look green, and others don’t? Like if you look at this cloth, what color does it appear to be?” She drew another cloth out of her bag.

“Uh, red.” Kip thought he could hear Gavin’s voice from the floor above them, getting louder, angry.

“It is red.”

Refocusing his attention on Liv, Kip looked over his glasses, and though the cloth’s tone was changed a little, it was indeed red. “So how does that work?” he asked.

“The spectacles will only help if there are surfaces that are reflecting green to you. White surfaces work best because white is all the colors together. Much less good, but sometimes possible, will be drafting through your lenses when looking at yellow or blue surfaces, since green is a secondary color.”

“Lost me there.”

“So now you want the color theory?” She grinned, joking. “For your purposes, if you need to draft, the spectacles will help most if you can find things that are either white or light-colored. Ripe wheat would work, a spruce tree won’t,” Liv said.

“I think I can remember that,” Kip said. The whole things-aren’t-the-color-they-are thing really didn’t make sense, but he suspected he could wrestle with that later.

“Good, so that covers source. For the time being.”

You mean we still have to cover skill, will, and still?

Liv said, “I don’t want to beat this to death, and I’m sorry you don’t get to have the ceremony, because maybe that helps this sink in. Those spectacles are now your most important possession. Not only do most drafters have to save up for months or even a year to afford one pair of spectacles, but everyone then immediately saves for a spare pair. If you get rich, or if the Prism orders it, I suppose, you can have a custom pair made by the lens grinders. They can give you a darker or lighter green or adjust the frame for fit or looks. But without your spectacles, you’re close to powerless. I know you’ve been with the Prism, but he’s the exception. He doesn’t need spectacles. His eyes don’t halo. He can use as much magic as he wants. The rules don’t apply to him. Even the rules for Prisms don’t seem to apply to him. Can you imagine anyone else coming in here, alone, and simply taking over? From the Ruthgari? And the funny thing is, they’re going to take it. They won’t like it, but they’ll—”

A man’s voice from the roof interrupted her. “I don’t give a good god’s damn what your paper says, there’s no way you’re—” The man cut off with a yelp.

Kip looked up just as a man plunged past their balcony. He landed far below with a huge splash in the bay, and Kip saw him struggle to the surface, spluttering, his rich clothes billowing in the water. He started crying for help.

“This is outrage—!” someone started to shout, then Kip saw another man plunge past the balcony. He splashed in the bay, almost on top of the governor.

There was a gigantic burst of light. “So help me, the next one of you isn’t going to land in water,” Gavin said, his voice ringing.

Kip expected to hear gunshots—surely the governor had guards—but there was nothing. They took it.

That’s my father. That’s my father?

Gavin imposed his will, and the world took it.

“So,” Kip said, feeling very much like the men floundering in the bay beneath him, barely able to swim and desperate to be pulled out. “So. Will. That’s next, right?”