Teia was suddenly embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Maybe . . . maybe for a lot of things.”
“I’m not,” he said. “Just for the one thing. Nothing else.”
“ ‘The one thing’? What do you mean?” she asked.
He looked at her, clear-eyed and steady. “Murdering Lucia, of course. But I’m glad I got caught, glad I had to face up to what I’d done and what I’d become. I’m broken now, Teia, but I’ve never been so free. I know for the first time what it is to walk in the light. But never mind me. How may I serve you?”
“I—I have no idea.”
“Then may I offer a suggestion?”
She nodded.
“When I saw my orders, I guessed it would be you, so I already got started.”
“ ‘Started’? On what?”
He smiled, and scooted his papers toward her. She sat, and her blood went cold at the heading of his notes: ‘Mist Walking: Myths/Speculation, Ancient/Modern, & Educated Guesses.’
Her heart stopped. “Did she tell you I . . . ?”
He shook his head. “Paryl. I think early on you must’ve believed it was useless, didn’t you? Otherwise, you’d never have told anyone that you could use it. Hard to explain why you would qualify for Blackguard training if you were a mund, though, one supposes. Anyway, I found that a number of the books with the best information about Mist Walkers weren’t even in the restricted libraries. You have to know which authors to trust, of course, but this hasn’t been the hardest research I’ve done, by any means. Now, with you to tell me which information is true and which is exaggerated, I can winnow out which authors were fabulists or given to exaggeration among those I don’t already know.”
Only then did he seem to notice the stricken look on her face.
“Teia, what’s wrong? I thought you would be excited.”
“Quentin, do you have any idea what I’m involved in?”
“I thought that would be obvious,” he said.
She gestured: ‘Go on.’
“You’re trying to discover how the most-likely-mythical Order of the Broken Eye was able to achieve whatever small measure of light diffraction they were, to the extent that latter storytellers would so grandiosely call it ‘invisibility,’ but which, according to the eminent leader of the Eighth Stoa, Ulgwar Pen, was more akin to good camoufla . . . What are you doing with that hood?”
Teia went invisible. Karris had said to trust him absolutely, right? She held Quentin’s gaze for a moment, knowing that her eyes would be visible while receiving light. Then she dipped her head to disappear completely.
His mouth dropped open, and Teia couldn’t suppress a giggle.
That seemed to completely flip his apple cart.
Teia dropped the invisibility just as Quentin went wild-eyed.
“That—that . . . Ulgwar Pen had no idea what he was talking about!” Quentin said. “That liar! Everyone trusted—he made his reputation on that paper! There goes half my report!” He rubbed his temples. “That prompts the question: Was he deceived, or just wrong? Or, Orholam forbid, deliberately misleading? Surely a man of his standing wouldn’ t—well then, what does that say about his paper on the Two Hundred?” He stopped himself. “But I’m thinking like a scholastic. I’m on all the wrong questions, aren’t I? Tell me.”
Teia removed her hood. “The Order is real. They’re assassinating people to this day. Not far away, either. They’ve been at work in the Chromeria itself. Karris assigned me to infiltrate their ranks and destroy them utterly, at any cost. You understand? I’m to do anything at all. Everything,” Teia said. “I’ve had to kill innocents to prove myself, and even that hasn’t been enough. Some of them trust me, but . . . one of their best assassins is hunting me. If I’m lucky, he alone suspects me. I can’t run away, because I still have a chance to stop them—and if I run, they’ll kill my father.”
It was hilarious to see Quentin’s brain explode twelve ways with bafflement. Under the strain of all she’d been through in the past year, Teia’s sense of humor had gone so dark she couldn’t see a dead-baby joke in front of her face. But the surprising part was how much of a relief it was simply to share—with Quentin! The last person in the world she would have thought would understand her new terrible life.
But the awful weight of her secret was halved instantly.
They talked, they planned, they shared what had happened in their lives—each holding back at least some parts, Teia could tell. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Quentin about all the awful shit she’d done. But strangely, with how he reacted to the merely bad shit she did share, and the elliptical references to worse, she could imagine eventually telling him more. Maybe everything.
She’d expected him to radiate condemnation, but without pretending he knew exactly what she’d experienced, instead he radiated sorrow at what she’d been through, and acceptance of her, without accepting all she’d done.
She didn’t know how he did that, but the tight knot in Teia’s chest eased a little. She still felt like she was growing old too fast, like her youth was draining away like water through sand. But for an afternoon, she didn’t feel like she was dying.
“I made up a joke,” Teia said suddenly, as their time was winding down.
“Oh yeah? How’s it go?” Quentin asked.
She suddenly realized her joke was not one to share with a holy man.
True, some of the Blood Forest luxiats were known to be a bit earthy from time to time, but on the whole, luxiats were not known for their ribald senses of humor. And Quentin, who didn’t even like to hug, wasn’t someone Teia could imagine ever being called ‘earthy.’
She grimaced. “Nah, sorry. Forget I said anything. It’s crude.”
“I’ve never heard a crude joke before,” Quentin said.
“You haven’t?” she asked. She didn’t think the luxiats were quite so far removed from—“Oh. You’re kidding.”
“Try me,” he said.
“It’s not . . . it’s not even very funny.” She sank into herself.
“I’m not expecting Aethelfric Yfargwvyn levels of wit here,” Quentin said. “C’mon. It’ll brighten a dark moment, even if it flops. Maybe especially then.”
Aethel-who? “Now we’ve built it up,” Teia protested, “it’s about as funny as a fart joke. And less mature.”
“I love flatus quips,” Quentin protested.
“Yeah, see?!” she said. “Flatus? I mean, even that was dignified! Is that actually the proper name for—”
“It was actually a joke,” he said.
She stopped. “Oh.”
“Pretty bad, huh? Now you owe me a bad joke. C’mon, I even made it be a fart joke,” he said. “Meet me halfway here.”
“Okay. Fine.” She tried to think of a different joke quickly. Something less gross. Some actual fart joke she’d heard. There had been off-color jokes in the barracks every day. But of course now she couldn’t think of a single one.
She covered her face with her hands. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “So I was out following a bad guy, and he’d gone inside this hovel with what I thought was his mistress and I had to wait for them to finish fu . . . meeting.” She grimaced. “Anyway, when I first started doing this, I thought I was going to be like an avenging ghost, and all of a sudden I thought I was more like a fox, like my old shimmercloak—it had a fox on it?” This is awful. “Like I’m this fierce, keen, silent hunter who stalks unseen at night to kill, you know?”