Lord Spreading Oak could find no words.
Kip said, “My esteemed Lords Divine, when the bandit king Daragh the Coward arrives tomorrow with his thousands of raiders and runaway drafters and slave-takers and desperate men, I should like to be here to protect you. But later today, I’m meeting with Satrap Willow Bough’s ambassador. He’s going to ask to me to abandon Dúnbheo and bring my forces to lift the siege on Green Haven—also a worthy and necessary fight. Now, if I’m to stay, if I’m to help this city I so love, I need your help. Can you find it in your hearts to help me, please?”
The crowd heard only that Kip wanted to save them, again, and that the Divines were somehow driving him out of the city instead. Ugly suggestions rippled through them, and the air took on a palpable menace.
The Divines looked at the mob uneasily, and then at each other.
Chapter 13
“My mama suicided just like that,” Gunner announced, heedless of all cues.
Gavin lay stretched out sunning himself on the hard, unforgiving deck of the ship’s forecastle, his eyes closed, still adjusting to the harsh, bleached sunlight of freedom after his long stint in darkness.
Gunner’s voice was like a child pounding on the door when you’re in the middle of a bad lay: Gavin wasn’t enjoying himself as much as he’d expected, but what he was doing was a lot more enjoyable than what he was being called to do.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Captain,” he said, shading his eyes and cracking them open briefly—only because Gunner was the kind of man who might stomp on Gavin’s head if he thought he wasn’t being shown the proper respect.
Gavin had told himself he needed to get sun, needed to get his eyes reaccustomed to the light, needed to feel the light on his skin in case just maybe his disability was healing itself. Or something.
He was better at lying to others, though, than to himself. No, Gavin was lying about, seeking an idyll and finding himself merely idle.
Closing his eyes as if to fend off the captain through his obvious exhaustion, Gavin reached out his fingertips, wishing they might dip into the sapphire waters as they had that morning he touched the sea demon.
Eyes? Eye. Funny how he still thought of them in the plural, while at other times he couldn’t ignore the jagged black monstrosity strapped to him in that eye patch, feeling like it was trying to burrow into his head.
“Y’ain’t gonna ask, is ya?” Gunner said.
He moved into Gavin’s sun, swaying with the waves, so that Orholam’s one eye blinded Gavin’s one eye only half the time.
Instead of conjuring that morning of peace, arms spread touching the waters, and that numinous creature, the memory that came swimming serpentine to the surface was of the day he’d been shackled spread-eagled in the hippodrome, as Orholam stared down, pitiless or powerless, and Gavin’s eye was burnt out by a very apologetic chirurgeon. When she wasn’t burning out people’s eyeballs with a white-hot poker, she was probably quite nice.
Ha. People had thought the same of him, on Sun Days, as he slaughtered so many.
“That evil eye of yourn,” Gunner said with a shudder. That was his charming name for the black jewel that would kill Gavin if he tried to remove it. “It still shivs me the givers.”
Go away, Gunner.
Come to think of it, perhaps many had denounced Gavin for the fraud he was, but his circle of privilege had kept those cries from his ears.
“Kin I touch it?” Gunner asked.
“Probably kill us both if you do. Go ahead.”
What if Grinwoody—traitorous monster that he was—while certainly an asshole, was fundamentally correct? Gavin—nice and charismatic man that he was—had certainly served a monstrous function. All of the empire’s power was predicated on its control of drafters: identifying, training, distributing, and then eliminating them.
Eliminating them? No. Executing them for crimes they might commit.
The Chromeria did this by defining morality and medicine for their own ends. They said that like dementia striking an elderly person, breaking the halo has no moral dimension. It’s a sad, natural process that leads to a person acting contrary to their own character, and in ways that are terribly destructive. Gavin had fought wights; he’d seen the destruction they could wreak. Could.
But the Chromeria coupled this with a moral injunction. It’s not wrong to break the halo, but it’s wrong to run if you do. It’s good, they said, to die right before you do. They said it’s not suicide to volunteer to be killed. It’s serving your community.
They defined Life as one of Orholam’s Great Gifts, but carved out a remarkable exception. To most of the world, a drafter who’d served their community for one or two decades went on a last pilgrimage—Sun Day at the Chromeria—and simply never came back.
Drafters simply only lived to forty or forty-five. That was the way it was.
But Gavin had been the instrument of that brutal reality, ramming the knife through ribs, vomiting empty prayers at black heavens painted white. His conscience revolted at what he did, and he did it anyway.
He was the monstrous fist inside the velvet glove. If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally, requires in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous?
Can one commit murder and walk away clean?
Gunner huffed some sound between a grunt and a bark, still standing there. He hadn’t touched Gavin’s eye, but he’d been watching him all the while.
“What kinda shit horse is this? I get me a broken Guile?”
If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?
The implications were horrifying.
If the Chromeria was fundamentally corrupt, then they were all of them—the Chromeria, the Broken Eye, and the Blood Robes—equally horrific. All committed evil, and all excused their own evil as necessary.
Maybe it was worse than that. It wasn’t that each defined the good differently and thus excused different evils; it was that right and wrong were meaningless concepts: there was only what flavor of power you preferred.
Can good fruit come from a bad tree?
“Blackberries,” Gunner said, moving out of the sun once more, allowing Orholam’s cursed eye to dazzle Gavin.
“What?” Gavin asked, grimacing against the light. “She killed herself with blackberries? How? The brambles?”
“No, that just sorter popped in me eggshelf. Egg bone? Shell. Eggshell.” He rapped on his forehead with his knuckles. “Words, sentences, you know, not my own? Popped in there? Happens to ever’one, right?”
“Yeah, sure, right—no, no. I don’t follow at all. How’d your mom die?” It was the most delicate way Gavin could think of to ask about a suicide. Seemed like Gunner wanted to talk about it, and Gavin probably needed to humor the man. He propped himself up on an elbow, squinting at the man standing over him.
“Wrong question,” Gunner said. “You got it sorter back swords, don’tcha?”
Orholam help him, either Gunner was starting to make more sense, or his madness was contagious, because Gavin understood him perfectly.