But her face contorted in grief, and she sank to her knees. “Kip. Kip. This will be the death of you.”
“O my love,” Kip said gently. He pulled her to her feet and embraced her, just breathing in the scent of her, cherishing the comfort of her weight against him.
The next words had to be pushed up a hill before they could roll down the other side, unstoppable, but they had to be said. In the years to come, she would need to know that he had chosen this, clear-eyed, if not unafraid. He said, “My love. Haven’t we always known? This was never going to end with me alive. After all, I am the Lightbringer.”
Chapter 40
The door to Karris’s rooms opened, and Samite strode in. “Hey, we missed you at training this morn . . .” She trailed off as she saw Karris’s haggard face and puffy eyes, and then she swore. “Is there some new emergency the boys at the door don’t know about? Because I swear to Orholam, if you’re slipping back into some weak-ass limp-wristed bureaucrat’s skin, I am going to kick your ass so far you need a long-lens to find it.”
Samite was the trainer now, Karris thought, the ghost of a smile touching her lips. “Not a new emergency, no. An old one.”
Late in the bundle of papers, where Karris had breezed past it at first, was a bit from Orea Pullawr. It had been a brief conversation Orea and Karris had had years ago with each other, but here anonymized and left for the benefit of all the future Whites:
‘I’ve left you a mess.’
‘You are the White. It’s your prerogative,’ her strong right hand said.
‘A prerogative I’ve invoked far too often. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have failed.’
And that was it. That was the entirety of her note. The occasion for those words originally had been when Orea’s health had been failing and she’d had to take sometimes to her wheeled chair. It had been an actual mess, too trivial to summon the room slaves for, when Karris was simply standing there. She’d always liked making herself useful, so she’d cleaned it up.
That Orea had left that conversation in this missive without even noting her own name—Karris recognized it by the hand alone, but future Whites (if there were any) would have to guess who’d left this, so the exchange was generalized from one White to her successors: ‘Clean up my messes. May you do better than I did. I’m sorry.’
She’d tried to say it to Karris before, saying something like, ‘I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me,’ when Karris had no idea what forgiveness Orea could possibly want from her, or for what offense.
But now she knew, and it upended all her feelings for the old woman and spilled them on the floor in a tangle.
“Hey! Hey! Where’d you go?” Samite demanded. She snapped her fingers in front of Karris. “Uh-uh,” she said. “You don’t get to retreat. You don’t pull back. Remember who you are, woman!”
Karris’s eyes refocused, but she shook her head and scoffed. “Put your thumb right on it, didn’t you?”
“No, no, no,” Samite said. “You’re not doing this.”
“You don’t know what I’ve just learned.”
“I don’t give two shits what you’ve learned,” Samite said. “I’m worried about what you’ve forgotten.”
“Sami, it’s all worse than we thought. I thought it was bad when I killed Gav . . .” Karris started to open the letters to show her old friend, then stopped. “No, I can’t,” she said aloud, surprised that their rules still bound her inside, though she should respect them as little as Gavin did.
But no. She couldn’t tell Samite. She couldn’t tell anyone. This was her burden to carry. Her stomach twisted. She was alone, as she’d been alone since Gavin had been taken.
“Karris,” Samite said softly, and in that word, not her title, not her full name, Karris saw the broad warrior lift off the mantle of Trainer Samite and become again her dear friend Sami.
“Thank you for standing for me the other night,” Karris said. “I never said thank you for that, for standing watch. It was most ungracious of me.”
Her friend waved it away with her one good hand. “Karris, do you remember Aghilas?”
Karris did. He’d been the fastest scrub in their cohort, and one of the strongest, too, but he hadn’t made it into the Blackguard.
“Let me tell you a story.”
“I don’t have time for—come on, Sami.”
“Before you and I met, I’d trained for years. Years to ready myself to attempt the Blackguard training. I’d spent hours every day making my body my slave. I still wasn’t nearly the best, short reach, not naturally gifted, not fast, merely strong—and not even that strong, compared with most of the boys. I already felt resentful of the others, to tell you the truth.
“And then you showed up: this slip of a girl. Light-skinned, soft, pretty in all the wrong ways, good drafter with two colors but didn’t have a clue how to use them in fighting yet. You were weak, slow, had no endurance. You had no business trying to be a Blackguard. We all knew you’d only been given the chance because you were noble-born.
“Truth is, Karris, I hated you. I was afraid they were gonna bend the rules to let you in.”
“Well, you didn’t need to worry about that. They kicked my ass—”
“And they did.”
“What?” Karris asked, eyes tightening.
“They bent the rules. Maybe broke them, depending on whether you go by the rules as written, or as observed.”
“They what?!” Karris asked. “They did not. I earned my—”
“You shocked the hell out of us, all of us,” Samite went on, and Karris shut up, if only to hear the rest of this slander. “I remember the trainers looking at each other, while me and the other scrubs were waiting for you to finish one of our runs. You were a lap behind us all, and you puked—while running—and you broke stride as your stomach heaved, but you never stopped.”
“I puked every day for a while there,” Karris said, her mind casting back to what she’d always thought of as the best worst days of her life.
“You remember that day when the physickers came and yanked you out of training?”
As if Karris could forget it. Quietly, she said, “I thought I was done.”
“You should’ve been,” Samite said. “I know that now. Trainers tell each other things, not just the rules as written and what to let slide, but also how to keep kids from getting dead. You’re lucky you didn’t die. It’s because of kids like you that they checked our piss every day. You remember that? We submitted to it thinking it was a test of whether we could stand awkwardness and humiliation, but it wasn’t. A kid stops pissing regular, and then it comes out bloody—that kid’s gonna kill himself from exertion.”
“The physickers told me it was pretty bad,” Karris admitted.
“When you were gone, Trainer Tzeddig stopped us and asked two questions.”
“Oh? I never heard about that.” The trainer had asked enough trick questions to make every scrub paranoid.
“She asked us, if we had to pair up that day and fight in teams, fighting to the death against the others, who we would like to have on our side: you or Aghilas. We all said Aghilas, of course—except Aghilas, who tried to be smart.”