“ ‘The Iron White’ they call you now,” he said, sweeping a quick hand at the gathered nobles and courtiers and Colors and every maid and servant important enough to finagle their way into this meeting. He moved it so sharply, not a few of them flinched. “And that, not so long after you dropped Karris White Oak to become Karris Guile, then Karris the White. It seems you’ve gone through many names in a short time.”
“And you, many masters,” Karris said. The retort hit like a whip-crack.
He blinked as if slapped, but he didn’t even slow his walk. Two steps silent, three, before he paused, just outside where the Blackguard would stop a man—but still too close for this man to get.
Then he said, “Yet now you’ve lost your name altogether, and I my masters.”
“Have you?” she asked, but she said it gently, quietly. “Have you, my old friend?”
Something in his mien wavered like a blossom struggling to open on a day of jumbled sunshine and rain.
Then it closed tight again.
He put his hands down to his sides and patted the heads of the great war hounds. It was, of course, forbidden to bring war hounds into the audience chamber. A war hound was either a heresy or a target: either an animal that had already been will-cast, or an innocent beast that might be will-cast under your nose by malevolent forces.
Karris had allowed them in without complaint. What else could she do? She’d allowed Kip to keep his, albeit not in the audience chamber itself.
At Ironfist’s tap, the smaller white hound with its pink eyes sat. Ironfist reached up and pulled down his eye patch over the Mercy tattoo, leaving only Justice.
Damn, damn, damn.
“Perhaps we could move to a more private setting?” she asked now. Ironfist was a reasonable man. Had been, anyway. Perhaps she could find that man again, if only she could get him away from all the eyes that demanded he act like a king instead.
But there was little or nothing of the old Ironfist here. This man looked indeed like the kings of old: harsh and terrible and primal. He said, “The Chromeria’s secrecy and lies are what have brought us here. You need my fleet. You need Seers Island’s army. The White King’s armada will arrive tomorrow, and attack then or the next day. You have no time. ”
“You need us as much as we need you,” Andross Guile called out from the side entrance of the audience chamber. He walked in quickly, confidently, like a man twenty years younger. “We can win without you. On the other hand, you know that if the heathen destroys us, he’ll come for you next. The King of Wights is not a man to be content with less than all the world. Joining us is your only hope of stopping him.”
The crowd in the audience chamber was riveted. For some, this was confirmation of the rumors that the White King was coming. Others were hearing it for the first time. All of them knew Ironfist by name at least, and all of them knew he’d declared himself king. Hell, not a few of them probably liked him more than they liked Karris or Andross.
Karris had a sudden paranoid thought wondering if he’d arranged for a coup. What if he’d packed this chamber with his own loyalists?
But no, surely Commander Fisk would have guarded against such things. Right?
But still, her throat was tight. Who knew where else traitors lurked, if Ironfist himself could be one?
King Ironfist was looking at Andross Guile with open disdain on his face as the old man took his seat next to Karris. “Horseshit. You offer your help for hypothetical troubles while you yourself face extinction now. We’re not equals here, so let’s skip the oily preambles, snake. You need my armies. I’m here to tell you the price for them.”
Astonishment rippled through the crowd. No one talked to Andross Guile like that. No one.
And then anyone who remembered that Andross had stripped Iron-fist of his command of the Blackguard saw the depths of the antipathy between the men. This was not going to be pretty. This was why Karris hadn’t wanted Andross here.
Andross didn’t say anything immediately. Didn’t bring his old commander to heel with a word.
And if he didn’t, everyone saw, it had to be because he couldn’t. Thus, Ironfist was telling the truth when he announced their weakness. The Jaspers really were that vulnerable.
And suddenly, the people were afraid.
Perhaps, working with paints mixed from vermilion rage and white-hot anger and black vexation, a painter as talented as Janus Borig might have been able to capture the spirit of Andross Guile now being publicly humiliated by a slave.
But he mastered himself and merely twitched a hand as one would to a servant: ‘Go on.’
Karris knew she should intervene, soften the grind of stone on stone between these two men: Ironfist, fed up with the years of injustices, and Andross, unable to believe a slave would step so high out of his proper place.
But she had no words. Her heart was in her throat.
King Ironfist tilted his head, thoughtful, almost taunting.
It was coming now. Ironfist would propose the alliance, the kind that could only be sealed by her marriage. She would have to marry Ironfist tonight. With this attitude, he wasn’t going to let his men off their ships until it was done. And ‘done’ meant signed, sealed, and consummated.
Though she was a grown woman, somehow she hadn’t let herself think that last part through. She would see it through. She knew that. She wasn’t going to faint this close to the finish line. But how could she bear to take this angry stranger’s weight upon her? Once they were behind closed doors, would he become, somehow, her dear friend again?
But there would be no reprieve, no hoping he might delay the consummation, no blotting herself out with drink as she’d done with the real Gavin Guile—Ironfist might know that story, and he could give her no excuse to annul the marriage. She would take him to her bed, and she would do it sober, and she would meet his eyes while she did it.
Would she feign pleasure while she betrayed the only man she’d ever loved?
Orholam have mercy, what if she felt pleasure?
Would she hold back some position, some act, hoping to hold on to some piece of her own soul?
For some reason, until now, Karris had thought of dishonoring her office and dishonoring Ironfist and Gavin as somehow external: those would be acts others would judge unfairly, not understanding why she did them or how much good she was accomplishing. When she’d thought of her betrayals, she’d imagined only before she did what had to be done, and after.
Now she couldn’t help but imagine the during.
But she would do it. To save her people, she was going to do it, even if for every moment of it she imagined Gavin somehow walking in on her, she was going to do it.
Finally, King Ironfist spoke, looking at Andross. “I gave you the best years of my life. My brother, Hanishu, did, too, and then he died for you. And in return, you threw me out like garbage, and then you ordered the murder of my sister.” Now the new king stared at them both, and Karris wasn’t spared the heat of his gaze.
She suddenly felt things sliding off-kilter, like a wagon too heavily loaded careening down a thin mountain road suddenly jumping out of the safety of the ruts to where the cliffs waited.
“This is not a negotiation. This is an ultimatum,” King Ironfist said. “You’ve taken my family from me. You want my help? I want a dead Guile. You, old man. Or you, Karris. Or Kip. You decide.”