Eyes turned away, faces filled with shame around the square.
“NO!”
She seemed to almost attack Tisis as she pulled Kip’s body into her own arms. She froze, trembling, muttering her denials under her breath as she stabbed fingers into his neck to feel for the pounding of life there.
Finding none, she stood, Kip’s body sliding limp, gracelessly, out of her lap. She staggered as one drunk.
Her eyes searched the crowd unseeing, wild.
Gill felt a surge of shame. He should guard her in this, too. Protect her somehow from this shame. But he didn’t know what to do. When Gav had died, they’d known what to do for him, how to honor him; Karris had stood with him, somehow. But he had nothing.
She keened again.
He felt sick.
She was the Iron White. They shouldn’t see her like this.
“High Lady . . .” he said quietly.
She shook with her weeping or with rage, the red rising in her against this evil day.
Tisis looked up at her, haunted. “He didn’t try to save himself. Even to the end, he was trying to bring light to us. He was fighting for us. To the very end.”
“No!” Karris shouted, decorum abandoned, spit flying. “This isn’t right! This isn’t happening!”
“High Lady, please . . .”
“You don’t understand! He’s not dead! He’s not dead. Oh, God . . .”
Gill reached a hand out to steady her, but she slapped it away angrily.
“Karris, please, the people—”
“No!” she shouted at him. “Don’t you tell me about—YOU! I know you!”
Suddenly her ire turned on a man in the crowd. An artisan by his dress. He looked familiar, but it took Gill a moment to place him. That was it: the kopi seller from her favorite little stand. Parian by his look, but Ilytian by his accent. Gill couldn’t remember his name or any other connection, though.
Karris quieted as the little man came forward uncertainly. Speaking to the rest of them, she said, “Send everyone to go aid High General Danavis, if he yet lives. If he doesn’t, he’ll have left someone competent in charge.”
“High Lady . . .”
“That’s an order!” she bellowed. “I have work to do.”
Gill waved to the others to go.
Big Leo and his Mighty didn’t move, and Gill didn’t insist.
“You, Jalal. You saved me,” Karris said quietly to the weathered old artisan. “That day those men beat me. Andross’s men. When they beat me to teach me a lesson. I thought . . . but it was you. You carried me back to the Chromeria, didn’t you?”
The old man said, “Who are you, child?”
“Who am I? Who am I?!”
Even to Gill, it seemed a strange question. Was the old man blind?
But Karris. Oh, his beloved High Lady Karris White. His Iron White was edging into hysteria.
Tears spilled down his cheeks and he dashed them away. This was unseemly.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Karris said, cheeks wet, but with hidden heat like a coal burnt to white ash suddenly breathed upon to glow a sullen red. “I’m the fatherless daughter, the bereaved sister, I’m the widow, I’m the impure White, I’m the leader who failed—but there’s one thing I won’t be. I’m the slip of a girl who’ll run through brick walls, and I won’t be the mother without a son. Because who I am doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong.”
But she barreled ahead. “You carried me through all this. You were there when I was broken down, beaten up. And you will not leave me now! You promised me that you’d repay me for the years the locusts have eaten. You promised! And I believe. Orea told me, and the Third Eye confirmed it. So you swore it! HE IS MY SON! And you will not let him be dead. You can’t!” she screamed the last. “You can’t, because if he’s dead, then you’re a liar. You can bring him back. I know you can! If you will it, you can give him back to me. And you have to, or your word is good for nothing!”
She was barely keeping her feet.
Gill’s heart lurched. War had broken strong men and indomitable women before, but Karris?
Not his Iron White, please no.
Did she even know how she sounded?
“I don’t care!” Karris shouted at everyone around her as they looked away, embarrassed for her, brokenhearted. “I don’t care how you look at me. You think I’m crazy? I don’t matter! He does.” She pointed ferociously at the kopi seller. “You all think they could kill my Kip? You morons! You think they could kill Kip on Orholam’s Glare? Orholam’s Glare? How could Orholam look on my son with anything but favor? And mercy. And mercy. Please . . .”
“High Lady, he’s dead. Let him go,” Gill said.
Tears streamed down her face. “I failed, don’t you see? Don’t you understand?! I reached the end of myself, and I failed—but Orholam cannot. He cannot. It’s what I do now that matters, right? And I believe. I believe.”
She sank to her knees and took the hand Tisis offered. And together they wept.
“Please,” Karris begged the old man. “Please, tell them. Tell them who you are.”
“Who do you say I am?”
She looked up and through her tears she said, “I say you’re the one who holds the wind in his fists. I say you’re the one who wraps up the oceans in his cloak. I say you’re the one whose every word proves true. I say you’re the Lord of Lights. I say you’re stronger than death, and . . .” She sank farther, lying prostrate, her face on the very cobblestones, stretching her hands toward the old man as if he were unimaginably far away. “I say I’ll praise you, though you slay me.”
Only then did the old man move. He came forward, and he knelt beside her. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you have been very much misled.”
She expelled a breath, so hopelessly that she clearly wished it were her last.
“Shh, shh,” he said, brushing back her hair behind her ear as if soothing a child. “Very much misled about the extent of your failures, and even more so about your own worth, Karris Agapêtê. Be still, child. Be still. For about this at least you are right: your son isn’t dead, only sleeping.”
Karris took a sharp breath, and Gill’s hand convulsed on his spear. What new insult was this? Was the old man mocking her?
But Karris lifted her head, and the hope in her voice as she spoke to the old man hurt Gill most of all. “Then you’ll wake him?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, slinging his pack around and pulling out his little cups, and filling them with his dark, steaming brew. “What do you think kopi is for?”
His eyes twinkled as with many lights. And as he gently poured the drink into Kip’s mouth, suddenly the night lit with incandescence above them all.
Every eye turned to the Prism’s Tower as a great white light from the east hit it, unimaginably pure and bright.
The whole tower lit with color, and then, too, did all the other towers of the Chromeria in turn as every one of the Thousand Stars flared to life throughout Big Jasper—radiating first with white light, then with every color under the sun.
Then, under the control of some masterful hand on the mirror array, the night filled with light. Directed by some great intelligence that could hold a hundred details at once, the Thousand Stars blossomed and turned—here shooting red source, here focused tight and hot enough to burn some unseen enemy, here giving blue or green, here flooding the enemy with light they couldn’t use, and in fifty other places seeking out friendly drafters to give them exactly what light they needed.