“What do you think?” she asked.
“I sort of figured you were running half the satrapy,” Kip said. He wasn’t really joking. She was far more comfortable with governance than he was.
“Only half?” she asked.
They shared a smile.
Then she said, “Today I was placing and recruiting sources and acquiring a number of diaries from our new recruits’ camp, including Daragh’s, and securing the cooperation of several minstrels who were previously tasked with writing songs about the bandits’ exploits. Then I was arranging interviews with camp girls, washerwomen, and servants from their old haunts. Within the week, we’ll know exactly which of our new recruits is irredeemably villainous. I’ll not only have a very good idea of which men are likely to commit future outrages, but I’ll have sources nearby keeping an eye on them. Your part will be to keep some fluidity in the unit personnel assignments until then. I also took care of all my usual duties.”
Kip cursed under his breath. “Dearest?”
“Yes, my love?”
“What happens when you realize you don’t actually need me?”
“Oh, come now,” she said, but she couldn’t help but beam. “You tell us what we’re going to do. I merely make sure it happens.”
“ ‘Merely,’ ” Kip said, sarcastic, “because that’s the easy part.”
“And your own role is so simple that you’re going to bed early?” she asked.
Which brought him crashing back to the present. And the future.
“You ever think you were destined for something greater?” Kip asked.
“Than what we’re doing?” Tisis asked. “I thought my life would be way less everything than this.” Then she asked, “You?”
“Think? No. I tried not to think, because I was sure I’d become like my mother, that I’d go from stuffing my face with food today to stuffing my nostrils with gutwrack tomorrow.” Or haze, or ratweed, or anything to obliterate a day.
“Really?” she asked.
Her eyes filled with such empathy that he couldn’t bear it.
“Sorry,” he said, with a quick fake grin.
“But . . .” she said. “Why’d you ask?”
“Oh, a man asked me that question once. Green wight I ran into outside my hometown, just before . . . you know, the king’s army came.” It felt like a lifetime ago.
“Gaspar Elos?” she asked. Oh, right, he’d told her the story. He was probably boring her.
He nodded. “Funny,” Kip said. “Back then, Koios’s side imprisoned this wight and I freed him. How’d we switch sides?”
“You didn’t. They’re deceptive, Kip. Corrupted.”
“Orholam’s gift shouldn’t be corruptible, should it? Shouldn’t lead inevitably to death.”
“Standing daily in the sun is a blessing; standing in the sun from dawn to dusk every day will burn even the darkest skin. Every gift must be received and released with the appropriate measure. Even the gift of life leads to death, Kip.”
“It just feels wrong. Madness at the end of every road for us.”
“What did he say?” Tisis asked.
Kip knew she meant Gaspar. How long had the wight’s words festered under his skin like a jagged splinter? From the beginning, he supposed. Bury and ignore them as he would. Tell himself he couldn’t be bothered by the words of a wight, a liar, an enemy, or simply a man who’d ruined himself and wanted to make sport of a vulnerable boy.
Yet still the splinter lay embedded in his psyche, inflamed.
“ ‘You ever wondered why you’re stuck in such a small life?’ he asked me. Of course I had! What young man doesn’t? ‘Do you know why you feel destined for something greater?’ and for a moment I think I really believed he might be a messenger from Orholam Himself, come to give me meaning for my shitty life. Why had I found him? So randomly, out there alone, at that very hour? It was like it was appointed. Like maybe this was my great purpose calling.” Kip trailed off. “What a child I was. So desperate and weak and full of hope that something great would simply happen to me.”
“What did he say, Kip?”
“I don’t know why I even care. I certainly shouldn’t be deciding the fate of an empire on some throwaway insult. It doesn’t matter.”
“Kip.”
Kip licked his lips. “He said the reason I felt destined for something great was because I was an arrogant little shit.” He shook his head and half chuckled. “Actually kind of funny.”
“No. Cruel,” Tisis said. “A sharp wit can puncture a wineskin overfull of ego. But any bully with a club-wit can shatter an empty crystal glass.”
Kip shrugged. The man had said, ‘There’s a prophecy about you. Not Rekton you. You you.’ But it had all been a setup for the taunt, hadn’t it? He said, “Just a stranger. Dead one now.”
She looked skeptical.
He shook it off. “I should get—”
She put a hand on his arm, stopping him. She was biting her bottom lip, intense. Then she took a deep breath. “I believe in you, but that’s not enough, is it? You need to know. For you.”
She didn’t have to say about what.
“Don’t you?” she asked.
“Know?” Kip asked.
“You’re gonna play dumb? You? With me?”
They’d never talked about it directly, even as the Mighty assumed it. It was too precious, too big, too ridiculous for fat little Kip of Rekton to even dream.
He knew Tisis wouldn’t ridicule him. Knew it absolutely. It wasn’t in her.
But what if she did?
He cleared his throat. “I’m not that fat kid from Rekton anymore,” Kip said. He shrugged. He braced himself on the ramparts, the masses of busy people below blending into one unvariegated carpet.
She stepped up beside him and put one hand atop his.
She looked out, and her face filled with pleasure at the people united, purposeful, hopeful—and it made him ache. Her satisfaction brought vigor to her beauty, a feminine strength, not fragile like a bloom that might be crushed underfoot, but adaptive, stubbornly growing toward the sun. Like a sapling in good soil, rushing into her strength, that she might bend before a storm, but grow; or be pressed down today and spring back up tomorrow, having grown taller yet overnight.
Tisis was transforming before his eyes, and he knew he’d played a role in that beautiful mystery, that growing into what she was meant to be. It filled him with humility to be allowed to partake in something so sacred. And it filled him with impossible longing.
Kip looked out on all those thousands of people taking his direction, and though he knew it was there, he didn’t see the glory of a community united, unselfish, moving toward a worthy goal. He saw thousands of people he could fail. Ten thousand ways he could fall short. And yet, how could he solve the paradoxical audacity in his breast?
He wanted to be even more.
How dare he?
“Kip, do you know what we do when we look at ourselves in a mirror?”
See ourselves? “Why do I have a feeling that whatever I say next is going to get me in trouble?”
“Shut up, Kip.”