Maybe I could go back to Tisis afterward.
No. Her sister Eirene would be too insulted to accept that. And not just Eirene. Tisis understood politics, but she wouldn’t understand this. She would never forgive him if he didn’t fight for her to the death. Rightly so.
But it wasn’t his death he would be fighting to, if he refused this.
It was death for everyone.
Without the Parians, the Chromeria was doomed. Maybe they were doomed even with it. But without it, they didn’t have a chance.
But . . . Tisis!
Kip thought he was going to throw up.
“A wet cloth for your face, my lord?” Grinwoody asked, polite as a handshake from a stable-mucker. Kip hadn’t even noticed his return.
“But if I win this game,” Kip said, “all those things will still be true. You’ll still need the fleet. You’ll still want everything else long-term, too.”
“I have another grandson to marry off, worse luck for that poor girl. If you win, I’ll just have to gamble that with time so pressing, Ironfist won’t be able to look too deeply into Zymun’s affairs or his character. I had hoped to spend him elsewhere. But I’ll have you know: if you win—if you become Prism, things might actually be worse for you. Ironfist might already know about Zymun’s character. Then you won’t be able to blame me when you put Tisis aside.”
“You make this sound like it’s all cold intellect and unblinking rationale. It’s not.”
“Oh?” Andross asked.
“You’re punishing me.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Why? I brought an army of drafters back here! I’ve done more for this family than anyone. And more for the Seven Satrapies, too!”
“Your disobedience destroyed my plans,” Andross said.
“Your plans were shit! You underestimated me. You thought I was worthless, so you gave me a worthless post as a hostage in Ruthgar’s court.”
“I don’t like to dwell on plans that went nowhere—”
“Because you can’t admit that what I did was better. You, O Mighty Andross Guile, you were wrong!”
Andross shook his head slowly. He tamped the ash off his zigarro. Finished his last sip of whiskey, then stopped Grinwoody from pouring him more. “My tea now, I think,” he said. Then he looked at Kip once more. “Finished?”
“Yes,” Kip said.
He was only delaying the inevitable.
He was going to have to play, wasn’t he?
“Then know this,” Andross said. “If you’d obeyed me and gone to Eirene Malargos, the Nuqaba would have been obligated to stay another week or month while the preparations for your official wedding to Tisis were made. In that time, with your help—or without it, if you chose to be worthless—that insane bitch who put out Gavin’s eye would have been assassinated. Things were arranged so the blame would’ve fallen on the White King. Regardless, the Parians would have spent the last year united and rallying troops for us. And without that Nuqaba at their doorstep, whom they’d considered untrustworthy and hated and been preparing their defenses against, the Aborneans would’ve built us another navy. The Parians then would’ve been deployed on those Abornean ships and circled the satrapies behind the White King—claiming Garriston first, then Ru. That navy would’ve attacked any supply lines the White King mustered near the coast. The White King would’ve had to try to deal with that threat. Depending on how many troops the White King sent back from his front lines to deal with that, Blood Forest might not have fallen. But you’re right, I was willing to let it fall, to win the war.
“Instead, the Nuqaba lived. And her indecision about whether she was willing to commit treason outright and join the White King ending up freezing Ruthgar, Paria, and Abornea while the White King got stronger everywhere. All that, grandson, is on you. All that happened so you could go play boy soldier. Then Ironfist showed up and took power, and everyone was frozen again, because no one knew which way he would jump.
“So, Kip, you ask if I’m punishing you? The truth is your punishment. If you’d obeyed me, you may well have been stuck in Rath for a year, but there’d be no need now for you to annul your marriage to Tisis. Nor would I have let Eirene treat you like a hostage, much less a prisoner. Do you really think I’d let the world see a Guile disrespected?”
“If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have . . .” Kip said, but he sounded pathetic.
“And you showed me you were trustworthy when?” Andross asked sharply.
In the last year, Kip had begun to feel that he was a somebody. That he had something to contribute. That he was smart, brilliant even. That he’d done good things.
And he had. But they’d been small things, with no understanding of the big picture.
So now he was the author of his own misery. The identities fell from his too-narrow shoulders, and their drawstrings caught about his neck as they fell, strangling him—Kip the Hero, General Kip, Satrap Kip, King Kip. Everything he’d done had made things worse than if he’d done nothing.
How does grandfather do this? How does this man make all my accomplishments look like shit before my own eyes?
And if he can still do this to me—even if it’s not fair, and I fear that it is—then does that not, in itself, prove that he is better than I? Ten thousand men might follow me to likely death, but Andross can turn a hundred thousand by his will and word alone.
Who, then, is the greater? Who’s smarter? Who’s more worthy to lead?
Andross seemed loathsome because he wasn’t Gavin Guile. But if this loathsome man could and would save a million lives, what made him loathsome? The dying might march into the grave smiling behind Kip’s banners, yet they would still be marching into the grave.
How exactly did that make Kip better than his grandfather?
How we must seem like insects to this man. Kip was a smart man. He knew that now. Without arrogance, without joking self-deprecation. It was a fact. But Andross Guile was as high above him as a man was over dogs.
By chain, or beatings, or simply by voice and with wagging tail and lolling tongue, in the end, Kip would obey him.
He might as well take the offered treat.
“I’ll play,” Kip said, and it was a betrayal, and it was inevitable, and it was freedom. “But there’s a condition.”
Chapter 82
~The Master~
Three years ago. (Age 63.)
“It’s over, dear,” she says. “We were wrong. Join me in the Freeing this year. Maybe we can find forgiveness for our sins together.”
“We just need to hold out,” I say, adjusting my dark spectacles even as the sun sinks low on the horizon. “The world needs us.”
“So we believed,” Felia says quietly.
“The time’s fast approaching. We knew what we were in for. Forty years—that’s only a few more!”
“So we believed,” she says.
“The Lightbringer is to be the greatest man of his era. Who else could it be? Who is greater than I?”
“You are a great man, Andross Guile,” she says calmly.
“You’re patronizing me.”
“Never,” she said, and I believe her.