“I told you I love a spectacle,” Rea said, and she smiled fiercely, and that smile was terrifying and sexy and breath-suckingly, knee-weakeningly, eye-blindingly bright; it was a flame that beckoned on a cold night and a fire that burned like a forge.
Kip’s tongue failed him. He averted his eyes. He had to. The very room seemed more alive in the light of her presence. He nodded at the floor.
I remember.
I didn’t take it seriously.
Holy shit.
She flared golden wings out broader than the room; they went right through the walls. There was a hum of gathering energy. Then she beat those enormous wings once and shot out of the world.
Slowly, he stood up and dusted himself off.
Always fooling around with people—people?—he shouldn’t. One of these days that was really going to bite him in the ass. He saw the testing stick on the floor. He’d knocked it down as he fell. He reached over and picked it up.
For an instant, the testing stick’s edge seemed to flash green like a quick wink at sunset. Kip scowled.
He looked at it more closely, but there was no color in the ivory. None.
He pressed his finger on the stick again.
Nothing.
Must have imagined it.
Epilogue 2
The dawn prayers atop the red tower had concluded. The young women and men, discipulae and luxiats both, departed quietly, as was required, allowing those who remained to continue meditating and praying. But the moment their feet touched the stairs, they immediately broke into happy conversation, eager to dive into days full of instruction and labors mental, spiritual, and—as the Jaspers needed workers for repairs and healing—quite physical.
A few worshippers and contemplatives remained, huddled in warm layers against the early morning’s cool wind, hoping to hoard a treasure of quiet calm in their hearts against the chaos of the coming day.
Teia was here on her physicker’s orders, sitting with her father. Every day she was supposed to try to last one minute closer to dawn before shielding her eyes once more behind layers of leather and her pitch-black spectacles. She couldn’t even make it halfway to dawn yet, but it was good to sit beside her father.
Her physicker’s hope was that her contracting pupils would break down the crystals of the lacrimae sanguinis slowly so that the poison might be worked out over months without killing her. In the meantime, contracting against the hard crystal matrices would help her keep her eyes from atrophying so that she wouldn’t be blind when the poison did dissipate. He said ‘when,’ but she’d heard the ‘if’ he was hiding.
What it actually meant was that she felt incredible pain and nausea every day, to the point where sometimes she hoped to die.
Really, they had no idea whether it would work and she’d be rehabilitated, or if they were simply daily tearing open again a wound that would otherwise heal.
Even if it worked, she had a long, long road ahead of her. She most likely would never work for the Blackguard again.
So now she was on the disability dole, like a Blackguard who’d had a limb blown off. Her injuries weren’t visible, weren’t debilitating in the same way, but she was just as useless to the Blackguard. A sudden flash of light—such as, oh, every single time someone drafted, or lit a lantern, even the flash of sunlight on steel—might kill her. Even if it didn’t, it could blind her permanently, and it would definitely incapacitate her as she seized up, vomiting.
So she was forced to wear impossibly dark spectacles and the eye patches over both eyes.
“Baba,” Teia asked, “what are you supposed to do with a bird with broken wings?”
He put his hands on her shoulders, and when he finally spoke, there was a hitch in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. But I would hold her. Just hold her.”
And so he did, embracing her silently, not trying to fix anything. He was not, perhaps, a great man who shook the pillars of the earth, but he was her father, and for today at least, for this hour, his embrace blunted the jagged black edges of her hellstone thoughts.
He held her as she cried, and in some deeply aching, wordless place inside her, just a little, something thawed.
Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “Come on, Baba. We’ve gotta go get ready soon so we can be there when Kip and Tisis get married. Again. Nobles are weird.”
Her father grunted. “So . . . do I have to thank Kip for sending those bandits to find me and save me from the Order before I can punch him in the nose for breaking my little girl’s heart? Or can that wait until afterward?”
“Baba! Don’t you dare! And he didn’t break my heart. I’m fine. And those men aren’t bandits . . . anymore. Daragh’s men were the only ones disreputable-looking enough to get into that neighborhood without raising any eyebrows.”
But they’d barely started heading inside when someone barked from the stairs, “Hey! Shithead!”
“Excuse me?” Teia’s father asked.
“Not you. That stunted little crotch fruit of yours,” Winsen said. “Hey, layabout! Sluggard! The hell you doin’ up here still?”
“What are you talking about?” Teia asked. “This is what I’ ve—”
“Training?” he said as if she were as dumb as a bag of rocks. “I know you’ve got a nice gig here, getting fat and fartin’ around with daddy. No disrespect, buddy—though I’m not sure why I oughta respect you. You clearly have none for yourself or you’d not have spawned our navel lint of doom here.”
“Wh-what?” Teia’s father said.
“Teia,” Winsen barked, “vacation’s over!”
“You flea-bitten, pox-eaten son of a whore!” Teia said. “You shitlicking, vomit-slurping, fart—er, sorry, Baba. Winsen, you know—”
“Oh,” Winsen interrupted. “Shit. Right.” Something hit her chest. She snatched it out of the air before it hit the ground. At least she still had her reflexes.
“What’s this?”
“Here, come inside.”
Inside, where it was much darker, Teia examined them in paryl.
They were glasses—no, more like small goggles, barely more than eye caps connected at the bridge of the nose. She shed her dark spectacles and eye patches, keeping her eyes shut tight, and put them on. She frowned. These new eyepieces had wide, curving lenses to preserve her peripheral vision, but otherwise fit tightly to the angles of her face perfectly, with leather cushions blacking out light from the sides or below. But the lenses were clear.
Not helpful.
“What’re these?” Teia asked.
“This is the fun part,” Win said, and he smacked the frames at her temples.
She cried out as tiny spikes stabbed into her skin and the lenses suddenly darkened.
“What are you doing?!” Teia’s father demanded.
“I told ’em we should cut you loose like so much deadwood,” Winsen said, “but Ben-hadad and Breaker been working on this all week. Ferkudi stole materials. Quentin translated some maybe-heretical books. Big Leo covered for everyone. Not that they all don’t have more important stuff to do, in my own humble and disregarded opinion, thank you very much! They copied some ideas from Breaker’s old spectacles, which were supposedly made by Lucidonius himself or whatever. Then they added some new tricks. These’ll darken or lighten almost as fast as your own eyes can dilate or constrict—and you won’t even have to think about it. There’s, ehh, maybe some slightly or totally forbidden will-casting in there, though you won’t hear me telling the tale. They’ll allow you to isolate whatever spectrum you want—including superviolet, which you couldn’t see before, so I guess that’s a bonus? Breaker had to beg Súil to help. She claimed the paryl nearly fried her brain.” Winsen shrugged. “Guess that explains what happened to make you the way you are, using paryl all the time. Anyway, now you can see. Without dying.”