Kip squirmed. He had needed his father, not just in the early years but since then. He’d not meant this to go to casting guilt, but he didn’t want to rush in and say anything untrue to try to brush it away, either. The wound was real. He didn’t blame Dazen, but it still ached.
In many ways, he barely knew his father, and that very thought was edged with razor desolation.
Dazen was quiet for a long while, and Kip—as he never could have before—filled the silence not with words but with listening.
Finally, Dazen took a deep breath and said, “Kip, when I didn’t deserve it, Orholam gave me a second chance—maybe a thousand-and-second chance. I don’t deserve it with you, either, but . . . Kip, if it’s not too late, can we start over? Can I try again at being your dad?”
Chapter 149
When a protocol officer had questioned where Gavin should be seated in the overflowing great hall (the whole Dazen thing would be dealt with later, Andross had decided), Andross Guile had given one of the most Andross Guile responses Dazen had ever heard: “The sun is not dimmed by the presence of other stars in the sky, nor even by the moon.”
All in white with gold brocade, Dazen was seated on the platform. He was quite the subject of fascination, of course, and the marveling that he was still alive had already started to turn to what his new position might be. Clearly, he couldn’t be Prism again. He couldn’t draft. But no one expected him to do nothing. Certainly Andross didn’t; he’d already started to float ideas about how to use his son’s reputation and charisma to stitch the satrapies back together.
But every one of their meetings thus far had been public. They hadn’t had to speak about the long night, or Sevastian.
For the moment, Dazen was quite content to be simply the White’s husband, and he was happy to sit at her right hand rather than her at his. She was resplendent in her whites, but she’d dyed her hair from its harsh platinum white, now, back to her natural auburn. He loved it.
Andross had contrived some last-minute duty that kept Kip busy while everyone else was being announced and seated. Rather than being ushered in a side door at the front, though, in the hush of the hall, the young man came in from the back with Tisis. He walked with his head ducked, trying to be inconspicuous on the long walk up the center aisle, chagrined at being late.
Kip had learned a lot in the last few years, but he could still be charmingly naïve.
He had no nobles under his own authority, and all his own soldiers were outside the great hall, so perhaps he really hadn’t expected anything.
The Blood Foresters stood for him first. Then the Tyreans, who counted him one of their own. His Mighty, seated in the front row as if family, stood, too.
Then, in singles around the hall, drafters stood. They knew what he’d done.
With help, King Ironfist (still ‘king’ technically, until some formalities were worked out) stood. He gave Kip the old Blackguard salute.
All the Blackguards followed suit.
And then everyone stood, from the High Luxiats down.
Dazen and Karris stood late in order to let Kip know that no one was standing because they were following their lead.
The youngest Guile looked humbled, honored, as his eyes went from face to face and he recognized friends young and old. Kip and Tisis embraced Dazen and Karris and took their places beside them.
One of Kip’s Mighty, Winsen, coughed loudly. Suddenly there were gasps throughout the room, and then laughter spread fast on its heels. Those on the platform had to turn around to see it: at the front of the room, next to the staid official banners of Houses Guile and White Oak and Malargos, and Andross’s banners and the Light-bringer’s banner, and the banners for the various satrapies, a very ad hoc, homemade-looking banner unfurled. It appeared to be a child’s drawing of a turtle with a shock of hair on its head and a goofy grin on its face, with big bear claws and wings of fire.
Seeing it, Kip immediately blushed and buried his face in his hands.
The audience roared with laughter and then cheered.
While a steward rushed to take the Turtle-Bear banner down, Kip turned to the Mighty and drew his hand across his throat.
They all made very unconvincing shrugs: ‘Who? Us?’
Dazen couldn’t stop smiling. In some ways, they were still just a bunch of damn kids.
But they loved one another, and that was priceless.
Naturally, Andross Guile waited until the furor had died down, and then waited some more. But once he’d begun, with all the usual pomp and spectacle Dazen expected from such a ceremony—the magic, the music, the processionals, a surprisingly brief prayer by High Luxiat Amazzal—the ascension ceremony was short and to the point.
The Colors and representatives for each of the Seven Satrapies and the six remaining High Luxiats (one had belonged to the Order and was dead) each knelt before Andross and swore their fealty to him as Prism, emperor, and Lightbringer. Everyone else in the hall was allowed to take the oath from their own seats.
Andross had moved fast in these first few days. Indeed, not just fast; he’d moved like a man who’d been making a list for decades of all that would need to be done.
It wasn’t impatience, either. Amid all the work of cleanup and reconstruction and burial and immolation of enemy corpses, there was still the euphoria of their improbable victory. Only the war was on people’s tongues. Lesser stories—such as vast banking families being given ultimatums, and certain troublemakers being thrown in prison, new laws curtailing slavery and the capture of fugitives, restructuring in the Magisterium—these didn’t even need to be hidden: they simply weren’t that interesting in comparison to all else that had happened.
Andross had gathered the Spectrum and High Magisterium and suggested a sentence of death or bereavement (a term he claimed he’d dug up somewhere, but he may have simply invented it) by the Blinding Knife for the Blood Robe drafters and wights who’d been captured. The suggestion was unanimously approved.
Bereavement was, he claimed, what had happened to Gavin when he’d been stabbed with the Blinding Knife and had lost his magical powers but not his life. Andross planned to use the opportunity to figure out the exact mechanics of the blade: Did it matter who held it? Did what the wielder wished to have happen to the condemned change what the blade did?
Karris’s young luxiats—whose ranks were suddenly swelling by the day—were reclaiming lost knowledge, including some from books older scholars swore previously had left entire pages blank. Dazen didn’t know if this was a reclamation against the old workings of black luxin, or if Andross was instructing his forgers among the scholars to insert his own preferred teachings.
But the crux of it was that the luxiats claimed that before Vician’s Sin, retiring drafters at the Freeing simply retired. They were Freed, not of their lives but of their bonds of service—and also their magical gifts, as Dazen had been.
Except that some also died, judged by Orholam Himself, it was said. So drafters, never certain what they would receive at their judgment day, would still approach it with fear and trembling. Sun Day would remain a somber and holy occasion, but also one filled with joy for the righteous.
So they claimed. The world would find out soon enough.
Dazen had only begged his father to wait a little while. He had an intuition he wanted to explore.