Maybe trading in your name made it impossible for anyone to know who wore the veil?
For that matter, how sure was Kip that this woman was the real Keeper of the Flame?
Winsen climbed up a bookcase, as if it were something people did, and then stood atop it, strung bow and spare arrows in one hand, nocked arrow and string in the other, though pointed down.
The woman took a deep breath, bracing herself. She loosened the choker that held tight the layers of veils from her brow around her face and head. The outermost veil covered even her eyes, but the inner, tighter veils had small jeweled cutouts for her eyelashes—which told Kip that she wore the veils even while with her inner circle.
Slowly, she removed her veils one at a time, doffing and folding each with careful and identical motions. She’d done this many times. So if she was an impostor, she was one regularly.
At the last veil, she bowed her head and reached up to the base of her skull. Her fingers worked at the knot where the band around her forehead was tied.
The Mighty vibrated with tension like a bowstring drawn full to the lips, and held . . . held.
Slowly, she lifted not just the veil, not just the band around her forehead, but what seemed at first to be her entire scalp.
No, it was a cap, a wig into which the red hair was woven.
Revealed under the wig, her natural brown hair was patchy, her scalp mottled by open sores. She set aside the veil and wig and lifted her face.
And suddenly, even as he heard the sharp intake of breath through teeth beside him as Tisis saw and stifled a gasp, Kip’s heart was moved not to disgust or fear but to pity.
Though she was not yet thirty years old, the Keeper’s face was covered with weeping sores and distended by tumors. No wonder she kept herself wrapped like a corpse for the pyre—she would surely go to one soon. Everywhere, even where it was swollen by tumors, her skin gleamed. Little points of gritty golden light burned within her distressed skin everywhere, as if an exploding shell had pierced her with a hundred thousand fragments of ever-burning shrapnel.
It had a fatal beauty to it, pulsing brightly in time with her every heartbeat.
The Keeper held herself defiantly, though, apparently impervious to her wounds and to Kip’s scrutiny as much as to her assured demise.
It was a resolve Kip knew well.
She wasn’t horrified at her own ugliness nor dismayed by the warm death humming glee in her bones. She was stalwart despite what must be constant pain: she was like a runner who’d be damned if she would falter this close to the finish line.
And Kip knew with his heart: This wasn’t a dying woman who happened to hold an important position. This was a woman dying because of her position. This was the warrior who’d volunteered for a fatal mission; this was a high priestess who’d offered herself for the sacrifice, approaching the altar and the knife. But she wasn’t going to go quietly.
She unbuckled the fabric-covered plates from her forearms and then her broad, heavy skirts, and stood in her simple tunic and trousers, creased from her overgarments.
“Chi,” Kip blurted. “You’re a chi drafter, aren’t you?”
Puzzlement flickered in her angry eyes. “Why would you say that? You haven’t even touched chi since you got here. I’ve been watching your eyes and your soulbrand from the moment you arrived. I heard about the lightstorm out on the waters. They say you pulled apart paryl and chi twisted into waterspouts, drafting both at the same time. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. Or is that a lie meant to pass to legend?”
Soulbrand?
“Do you know a lot about lies . . . Priestess?” Kip asked instead.
She blinked as if struck.
“I’m not here to give answers, but to hear them,” Kip said.
“Not lies,” she said, defensive, bitter. “Secrets. Secrets we must keep lest the Chromeria put us on Orholam’s Glare.”
Kip had no idea what a masterful drafter of chi could do, but it would be invisible to the Mighty, and to Kip—unless he acted immediately. The danger hadn’t passed. Indeed, stripping a secret truth naked risked shame, and shame could spur violence.
What he did next was exactly the wrong thing to do. It was exactly the opposite of what Andross or Gavin would have done, but Kip waved the Mighty off.
Though the Mighty barely shifted their positions, the air changed immediately.
The Keeper noticed. The golden burning of her skin dimmed; her pulse slowed. But her shoulders slumped. “We only want to use the gift Orholam gave us,” she said. “Drafting kills every drafter. But our color makes us ugly first, so ours is forbidden? Ours kills us faster, yes—in five or ten years rather than ten or twenty—but if we studied chi as every other color is studied, could we not learn what is safe? Why can we not bring our gifts in offering to the Lord of Lights, too? Why can we not serve mankind openly, as other drafters do? You, Lord Guile, have a wealth of colors. If you never draft chi again, you can serve with eight other colors. I have only the one. Are we chi drafters so monstrous that Orholam would have us destroyed? Or can God see beauty where the Magisterium sees only shame?”
“Tell me,” Kip said. He looked down at his hands. He’d known, somehow. That ugly heat in his joints when he’d drafted chi—it had felt like he was cooking, like something was deeply wrong, deeply unsafe about the outer-spectrum color. With a sudden shot of hot fear like whiskey in his belly, he wondered if the same death taking this woman was growing in his own bones at this very moment.
Gently, he said again, “Please. Tell me.”
The gathering storm of her righteous indignation frayed and scattered. Her lifted chin descended. The pulsing gold light slowed to a normal pace. A sigh released the last of her resistance.
“Our ancestors thought our cancers were a sign of a god’s displeasure at some sin they’d committed. The priests said they bore the tumors as punishment on the people’s behalf. They used their own suffering to control the people—even as they desperately searched for cures. Over many generations of careful notes, they figured out that chi kills everyone, even our families, if we have them. The more chi we use, the faster we die. Generally. Not always. This is my tenth year. It’s quite long, as we reckon such things. I’m lucky, most say.”
“You use chi for the Great Mirror?” Kip asked. “I thought the mirrors were controlled with superviolet.”
She inclined her head, and Kip couldn’t help but glance at features shaped as if by an angry child mashing clay. “May I put my raiments back on?” she asked. “For your protection . . . but for my vanity, too.”
For my protection? What the hell does that mean?
“Of course,” he said instead.
“I’ll take you to the Great Mirror. It’ll answer your questions better than I can.”
Chapter 21
The warm, compassionate light of orange dawn had thawed Teia’s iced fury. A little. Karris was unworthy of Teia’s service, but Teia’d given too much to earn her position to serve poorly just because her commander was shit. She was better than that.
And to be fair, unlike Karris, Teia hadn’t had to kill any of her friends to do her job. That had to take some getting used to, she guessed.
So before coming back to the Blackguard barracks, she’d dropped off a coded note for Karris in one of their dead drops. Teia couldn’t bear actually speaking to the woman right now, but Karris deserved to know her husband was alive.