Sometime later, they continued. “Are you going to send someone to save Rhoda’s brother?” Karris asked.
“Of course not. I’ll not do her a good turn in return for her treachery. But I will send my best men to find her brother, so we can kill the Order people holding him. If our people save him as an ancillary cost . . .” Andross shrugged. “Sometimes one must do good in order to obtain what one desires.”
Karris shook her head. “Wow. You know, once in a while, I think there’s some things you can’t admit about yourself, High Lord. You like secrets, so I’m gonna tell you this one.”
“It won’t be a secret if you tell me,” Andross said as if utterly disinterested, but she didn’t believe it; if he really didn’t want to hear what she was about to say, he’d have interrupted her to talk about something else.
“Oh, I trust you to keep it quiet,” she said. “It’s this: I think there’s a sliver of kindness growing in you. You better watch out for that.”
He looked at her critically, nonplussed. “Look at you. Full of hope. Naïve despite all evidence and experience to the contrary. Making people feel better about themselves wherever you go. Leaving them eager to be with you, and follow you. You do make an excellent White.”
Karris held her breath, and when he moved to speak, she interrupted. “And I’m going to choose to believe, right now, that the next words out of your mouth are not going to be a clever put-down that undercuts everything you just said.”
He grinned wolfishly, eyes glittering. “Of course not,” he said after a moment.
She wondered if he’d changed his mind about what he was going to say next, but she couldn’t read anything except amusement in his deep eyes.
“You saved me,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“You didn’t have to. I’m one of the few who can stand in your way now, and I’ve showed I will if I think it necessary. You could’ve waited at the door and listened from there. You could’ve had people seize Rhoda and interrogate her after she killed me. Then you could’ve installed your own White. It would make your life a lot easier. The assassination of a White? It would have prompted the Spectrum to give you every remaining power that you don’t already have. And don’t tell me it didn’t occur to you.”
Andross sniffed. He motioned to his new body man, whom Karris didn’t recognize. The slave set down what looked like a ledger book on a side table. “Your wedding present.”
He hadn’t answered her question at all. What? Now? A book?
With a polite tone and wearing her most pleasant diplomatic expression, she said, “You’re too kind. A book. Is it hollowed out for the asp hidden inside?” She scrunched up her face. “Shit! Sorry.”
But he seemed to inflate with immense pleasure. “Aha. The triumph of experience over hope. So it happens even for our peerless White,” Andross said.
Karris tried again. “What is it?”
“The genealogy of the family Guile.”
“A . . . genealogy?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. Gee, I’ll have to crack that open while I eat my sawdust sweetmeats.
“You’re young. I know you’ve no interest in it now. But someday you might. And the answer is the same,” he said.
“The answer?” she asked, baffled.
“To both questions.”
“Sorry . . . both?”
“ ‘Why would I give you this boring old book?’ and ‘Why did I save you at such cost to myself?’ ”
She opened her mouth, closed it. “Yes. Those would’ve been my two questions . . . when they occurred to me about an hour from now. So . . . why?”
He studied her, and his eyes seemed to soften. “Because you’re family.”
Then he left.
Chapter 152
“Darling,” Karris said with a note in her voice like he’d just come back from the bathroom and he’d forgotten to tuck something away.
“Yes?” Dazen asked, double-checking his clothes. They’d decided to process forward together. Different satrapies had different traditions on such things, and he’d been nervous that he (being so recently thought dead) might actually get more applause and cheering than she did. Probably a silly fear. And Karris wouldn’t have cared if he had. But hell, they were already married, and they were a team, so they were walking together.
“Your hand?” she said.
He lifted his right hand.
“The other one. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? What is that?”
He looked down at his left hand and wiggled his fingers. “Just think of it as a bit of, uh, cosmetics. Surely today of all days, you’re not going to object to a little harmless hex-casting, are you?” he asked.
“ ‘Harmless’?” she whispered loudly. “You can’t go out there with a hex-crafted fake hand.”
“Honey . . .” he said. And he gave her the most innocently charming Dazen Guile smile she’d ever seen. Or at least he hoped it was. “I just didn’t want anything about me to distract anyone from you.”
She actually blushed, and straightened her dress. It was a gorgeous something with lots of details that he couldn’t really notice except for the fact that they united together beautifully to heighten his eagerness to take it off her.
Then she looked back at him sharply. “Wait . . . the tooth, too? You did not!”
He gave a lopsided grin to bare his dogtooth. “Go on, try to guess. Denture or hex?”
“Honey! I am the White,” she whispered, looking around at the various attendants who were trying to give them a few private moments before they went out together. “You can’ t—”
“Relax,” he said. “C’mon, it’s what I said last night, and that worked out, didn’t it?”
She shook her head, blushing again. “I am gonna make you pay for that. And this.”
“I look forward to it,” he said. He looked at the shut great doors, with the Blackguards ready to open them at their signal. “Shall we?”
“No, wait,” she said. “I have something for you.”
“Hmm?”
“A wedding gift.”
“A wedding gift? Well, now I feel like the louse,” Dazen said.
“Don’t worry. At first I planned to give you something truly awful, like make you Nuqaba,” she said.
“Endless rituals and bumping into the people who burned out my eye in the first place? I’m not sure how happy I could’ve pretended to be about that.”
“Yeah, I thought it might be too awkward. Too many Guiles at the top as it is,” she said.
“High Lord, High Lady,” a steward said. “Whenever you’re ready. Or . . . the musicians can loop this song another fifteen times, as you will.”
“Oooh, I love the sassy ones,” Dazen said.
“But . . . now I’m lousing this up because I’m pressured,” Karris said. “Anyway, it did make me think of your eye patch. And your eye. All you’ve given for these satrapies. I couldn’t stop thinking of that Parian metaphor about the evil eye and justice and mercy. And I can’t stop thinking how you had that harsh kind of retributive justice burned out of you. You gave up the evil eye. You have no condemnation to give. And I thought there’s something beautiful in that.