“Hasn’t been around long enough to know how tough you used to be,” Vanzer said. “Sad.”
“Long time ago,” Essel said.
“Weren’t they calling her the Iron White? More like the Hungry White,” Gill said.
“You can’ t—you can’t talk to me that way,” Karris said plaintively.
“Bet she can’t even do five pull-ups these days,” Samite said.
“Excuse me!?” Karris sat bolt upright. She’d once matched the women’s record for most pull-ups.
Half an hour later, she’d done those five pull-ups. Barely. And knew she was going to pay for it for days. And pay for everything else, too, training with the Blackguards. It was all coming back fast, though, and she realized how much she needed it. The clarity it brought.
In her time as White, she’d come to think of the hours spent training as hours lost—but now, again, she realized she accomplished more in the hours she still had than if she’d only worked.
Now, in the dawn’s light, she sweated at the rear of a line of Blackguards, doing an advanced form. Standing on her left foot, she snapped out a side kick, sharp and crisp, holding her balance as she then spun and slapped her right elbow into her left hand, exactly at the moment fifty other Blackguards did. Kick, land on the opposite foot, kick again.
She wasn’t a mind, housed in a body; she was body and mind united.
Dammit. How had she forgotten?
Her Blackguards loved her. They saw her. She didn’t know exactly what she needed to do, but she knew she needed to fight for them. She needed to be worthy of these magnificent men and women.
The thought carried her through the rest of the morning’s duties. She’d been elevated not to be honored but in order to serve. So this afternoon, she’d buried her reason for walking down this hallway amid a half dozen other tasks that took her to half of the towers of the Chromeria and even belowground, making numerous stops as if they were spur-of-the-moment decisions to check in on old friends, even to minister to an elderly luxiat who’d broken her wrist in a fall. All of it had been to bring her to this door, flanked by the new, short, and burly Blackguard who’d just been assigned to her detail, a kid named Amzîn.
Because she didn’t know him, she didn’t trust him. It had almost made her abandon her plan. To keep secrets, she had to trust no one, had to make today’s stops seem casual. And she couldn’t do that while checking the guard roster or requesting someone she knew.
Still, it put her alone, with a stranger. The young man who was supposed to be protecting her could well be a spy for the Order of the Broken Eye.
She could just go by this door. Pass it off as nothing. A whim.
In one of the stranger perquisites of her office, this little room was technically hers, albeit low in the bowels of the green tower, and thus much too far away from her apartments for her to use frequently as a second office or library. In her time as a Blackguard, she’d learned that previous Whites had sometimes used this second room as a discreet place for assignations. Karris was using it to tuck her own little secret away from sight.
“Do you want me to open the door, High Mistress?” Amzîn asked.
O sweet Orholam. He was just a kid! Built like a stump and as plain as the day was long, Amzîn had an incongruously high tenor voice. Seemed embarrassed about it, now that Karris had let her surprise at it show.
She owned everything in the room before her, including the person, so she had every right to go straight in.
“Knock, please,” she said instead. It was a weird situation already; she didn’t need to make it weirder.
Amzîn knocked too hard and rattled the door on its hinges. He actually flinched. Apparently didn’t know his own strength.
Karris pretended not to notice.
“Please don’t knock my door down!” a young man shouted from within. “It’s unlocked!”
“Apologies, High Mistress,” Amzîn mumbled.
Karris waved it away.
They stood for a moment longer, then Amzîn suddenly realized that by his training, he was supposed to open the door and go in first to assess the room for threats, and instead he was standing around. He blurted out, “Oh, shit!” and shoved the door open.
It slammed into the slight young man who’d come to open the door, and knocked him head over heels sprawling into the room.
Amzîn froze momentarily, but then checked the room like a professional.
Then he apologized profusely to the young luxiat in golden robes and many chains, who had only risen, wobbly, as far as his knees.
Quentin waved away Amzîn’s proffered hand. “No, no, actually thank you. You’ve saved me all the effort of getting down gracefully in all this regalia.” Facing Karris, Quentin lay himself prostrate, stretching out his hands toward her feet. “High Lady. Gracious One. Beloved Mistress. How may I serve you?”
“Please stand,” Karris said. “I mean, if you can, under the weight of all that.”
The wide Blackguard offered his hand again, but Quentin flinched. “Err, no . . . no, thank you.”
“Amzîn?” Karris asked.
“High Lady?”
“First day solo?”
“Yes, High Lady,” he said, pained. A Blackguard was supposed to be well-nigh invisible to his wards, and he was failing. Horribly.
“Why don’t you take position out in the hallway? I think the threats to my health and well-being are much more likely to be out there . . . if you are.”
He seemed at first relieved, and then at the whipcrack of the last words, stung. His face went from wounded to stoic quickly, though, give him that.
Karris wanted to be forgiving, but she’d been a Blackguard. Second-best wasn’t good enough, and if this kid couldn’t get better fast, she was going to be riding the watch captains for their bad judgment in promoting him.
Besides, she wasn’t going to get close to another Blackguard kid. She’d probably just have to kill him in the end, like she had Gavin Greyling.
He slipped out quietly and professionally.
Orholam damn this war. With all the drafting she was requiring of everyone, Karris was going to be killing a lot of Gavin Greylings before the year was out.
“Seems like a lot more chains than when we last spoke,” Karris said. She had much of the story already from others, which was good, because Quentin’s modesty kept him from giving her the full truth.
“My spiritual director told me I can’t sell them all,” Quentin said. “If I’m to be your scourge of the luxiats, they should see both their wealth and the loss of it. At least until it seems like it’s becoming a contest.”
“How’s that?” Karris asked.
He unfolded the tale succinctly. Ever since Karris had spared his life, recognizing his contrition at what he’d done was real, Quentin had taken on a unique position. She’d made him a slave—her slave—but required him to dress always in gold finery. It was both a personal penance for his own ambition and intended to be a corporate penance for all the luxiats who’d forgotten who they were supposed to be serving.
Quentin was hated and reviled by many of the luxiats, but no one dared physically harm him—as far as Karris knew at least—because he was Karris’s property, and they feared her. As well they should. But even if they hadn’t used fists, Karris was certain many luxiats had used their words to hurt Quentin.