“Yeah, definitely, it’s true. He was,” Big Leo said, looking hard at Holvar but pretending to speak to Kip. “Even if a Blackguard wanted to forgive everything that happened to your old friends who had to flee afterward, that’s still a huge offense, completely unprovoked as it was.”
“Huge?” Ben-hadad said. “More than that. Unforgivable.”
“It’s all right,” Cruxer said, leveling a hellstone stare right at the Lightguards flanking the Blackguards at the door. “Jin was in the infirmary that day with us. She knows the truth of what happened. When men without honor attack you, there’s little you can do to stop the first treacherous blow. All you can do is make them pay later. The Blackguard being the august, honorable company that it is, I’m sure they’ve made those cowards pay since then. Sure of it.”
The faces of the Lightguards reddened and their knuckles went white, and the Blackguards nearby didn’t look much better.
“We are much diminished,” Jin Holvar said, stiff-spined. “A state not helped by our commander and then our best trainees abandoning us when we needed them most.”
“Maybe you should have gone with us,” Big Leo shot back.
“Maybe some would’ve if you’d given us the chance,” Jin said. Before they could answer—or apologize, Kip suddenly felt like an ass—she pushed open the door.
Another gauntlet of expectant faces filled the audience chamber, but to Kip they were an undifferentiated blur. As war-blindness narrows your vision into a tiny cone, so was Kip’s peripheral vision obliterated by his dread at what he was going to see on the dais at the front of the room.
He walked forward, hearing only his blood whooshing in his ears as he was announced. He should have been paying attention to which honorifics they added to glean clues about what kind of reception he was going to receive, but all he could see was Karris and Andross, standing together, one all in white, the other in red.
His half brother wasn’t here. Thank Orholam for that.
The cares of war had had the opposite effects on Karris and Andross. Karris had lost weight, none of it muscle. She had never carried excess softness, but now she appeared to have buried her sorrows in relentless training. Her face was harsh and placid to gauntness. Her dress left her granite shoulders bare, and her hair was bleached to a platinum white. Everything she wore was either white leather, or shimmering white silk pulled taut, or steel. Even her cosmetics were cold, her cheekbones heightened to make her look angular and icy.
And then Kip saw her eyes. She was stunned at him.
And then he knew this was all her court dress. It was her war face. She was the Iron White. This wasn’t a mask or a disguise: it wasn’t not her, but it wasn’t all of her, either.
He wasn’t sure what she was seeing in him, but he turned his eyes to Promachos Andross Guile, from whom he would receive his doom.
Andross seemed to have thrived on war. He looked hale, vigorous. His skin was bronzed from the sun now, and he had an energy and assurance that made him a lodestone to the eyes. The misanthrope’s bitterness had melted away into stern purpose. For the first time, Kip saw a bit of the Andross Guile his grandmother had fallen in love with.
“He looks like Gavin,” Karris said beneath her breath. Kip didn’t think he was supposed to hear it.
“No,” Andross said. “He looks like Gavin’s brother.”
“Dazen? How so?” Karris asked, not looking away.
“Not Dazen,” Andross said. “Sevastian.”
Standing now before them, Kip made a low court bow. “High Lady White. High Lord Promachos.”
As his eyes rose to their impassive faces, he felt a rage as sudden as the old earthquakes in Rekton. How dare they sit here doing nothing while his men fought and died? While slaves had fed them peeled grapes and dormouse pie, Conn Arthur had gutted his own brother, both brothers’ lives burnt out defending satrapies that should have been far more united.
Other men’s blood. Other men’s sweat. Other men’s tears and bile.
And they had denied him even the Blackguard. They played their games while satrapies burned. He had thought them giants, speaking from the heights. They weren’t giants. They were dwarfs on a tower, shouting down with tinny voices at those who labored in the mud, hiding their puny legs under great fields of cloth as if large pretenses would make them larger than life.
Suddenly, Andross Guile broke the long silence, as if he had just seen something that pleased him.
“Grandson!” he said. “Welcome back!”
It was meant to shock Kip, to throw him off balance. But Kip was a child no longer. He wasn’t about to lose the initiative.
“I come with dire news, and I come with help,” Kip announced. “The Wight King is coming. He’s destroyed your fleet. We tried to help, but it was a rout.”
Gasps and little cries of denial from the audience.
“Koios is coming here?” Karris asked, a dry fury in the gaze she shot Andross. “Who could’ve guessed?”
The old man’s face hardened. “And our fleet, which was supposed to be spread out in every direction protecting Sun Day pilgrims from pirates, just happened upon this fleet? And concentrated their forces?”
“They had sea chariots for scouting. If they saw an invasion fleet coming what do you expect they’d do?”
Andross Guile opened his mouth, but Kip cut him off, saying, “There’s more.”
“Out with it,” Andross Guile said.
“Koios is floating the bane here. Six or seven of them. The bane paralyze drafters. It’s why we couldn’t help the fleet more than we did. He also has forty or fifty thousand soldiers. All this we’ve seen with our own eyes.”
Throughout the hall, denial turned to horror. How was the Chromeria to fight fifty thousand soldiers and untold numbers of wights without its drafters?
“But there’s good news,” Kip said, raising his voice.
“Pray tell,” Andross Guile said, eyes flashing.
Kip said, “I can stop them.”
Chapter 70
“This is like one of those festival games, isn’t it?” Gavin said, coming up to the gap. “The promise of an amazing prize if only you do something that looks simple . . . but is actually impossible.” He looked into the abyss before his toes and tried to still the turning of his stomach.
“Many have made the jump with greater infirmities than your own.”
“I’m infirm now, huh?”
They had climbed every circle, and Gavin had just tucked away the last boon stone into his constricting and now heavy pilgrim’s garment. The crown of this great tower couldn’t be more than a half circle away. But here, rather than sitting right in front of the next gate, the pilgrims’ rest area sat right next to an enormous gap in the trail.
Orholam came up to stand beside Gavin at the precipice. “It’s not so far.”
“Not so far?” Gavin asked, incredulous. It had to be seven paces.
Gavin had endured a lifetime’s worth of trials to get this far, and he’d kept his pilgrimage mind-set as well as he could. But this was impossible. Ludicrous. It was suicide.
He leaned forward over the abyss. Wind buffeted him, and he staggered back, heart seizing up in his chest.