“You motherfuckers!” Kip seethed, rounding on them. They didn’t know. They didn’t know, but he went red. “You shut your fucking shitholes, or I’ll—”
The conversation broke like ice over a puddle on a cold fall morning. They plunged into the mud beneath, the grime that was Kip.
He’d never spoken to them in anger. Not once in the year and a half—the lifetime—he’d known them. And it was going to shatter their friendship. All because Kip couldn’t control his mouth. Kip the Lip. God. Damn.
“Breaker,” Cruxer said quietly. “They don’t mean anything by it.”
“It wasn’t even Conn Arthur’s bear,” Ben-hadad complained. “I know he’s a moody—”
“Stop,” Kip said, looking away. He turned his back, but didn’t keep walking to the gate. Not yet. “You’re done.”
“Don’t you turn your back on us, you asshole,” Winsen said.
“Don’t,” Cruxer warned Winsen.
“No. Shit gets awful, we have a few laughs. You’ve joined us every other time. Now you pull high ground on us? Go fuck yourself. What’s your problem, boss?” Winsen demanded.
“Let’s forget it,” Kip said.
“Sure. We can joke about that guy’s head we found two hundred paces from his body back at that wagon ambush, but some fuckin’ bear is beyond the pale. Sure, boss, you get to decide what’s funny, too. Because you’re the Lightbringer.”
“I’ve never said that,” Kip said.
“Yes, he is,” Cruxer said at the same moment. But he went on, “And if you doubt it at this point, what the hell are you still doing here?”
“I like the food,” Winsen said. “And I get to kill people.”
Aside from Kip, the rest of them chuckled, but it was forced. They’d all known Winsen long enough to know that the first half was probably a joke—it should be; any spices the cooks laid their hands on had to be sold for actual necessities. But the second half probably wasn’t a joke, and they’d all known him long enough to be uneasy about that.
Long enough, not well enough, because it didn’t seem that any of them did know him well. If there were hidden depths to Winsen—and one expects depths—they remained hidden. He seemed unaffected both by the physical difficulties of a life at war and the moral ones.
“Bad people,” Ferkudi amended for him. He was probably the only one of them who wasn’t a little unnerved by Winsen from time to time.
“Huh?”
“You get to kill bad people.”
“That’s a bonus,” Winsen said. He grinned at their drawn faces. “I am joking, guys.”
But Kip didn’t believe him. Winsen was on their side, but he didn’t actually care. He liked the excitement. When religious or moral conundrums came up at the campfire, the look on his face was akin to the one Kip imagined his own must wear when Tisis talked about fabrics for her eventual ‘real’ wedding gown.
Kip didn’t think Eirene was going to spring for the big wedding. He also didn’t think they were going to live that long, so it was a moot point.
“Oh shit,” Ben-hadad said. “That wasn’t just his brother’s bear, was it?”
“It’s over now,” Kip muttered. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What are you talking about?” Cruxer asked. When Kip started walking without answering, he asked it again, this time of Ben-hadad. Of course it was Ben who’d figured it out.
“You all didn’t stop to think how weird it was that a non-will-cast bear attacked at just the perfect place and time? What? He was just trained that well?” Ben-hadad asked.
“Hadn’t really thought about it,” Ferkudi said.
“That wasn’t Lorcan,” Ben-hadad said. “That was Rónán in Lorcan.”
“Oh shit,” Cruxer said.
“Orholam’s beard, I’m so sorry,” Big Leo said. “I didn’t mean…”
“So wait,” Winsen said. “That was really his brother? In the bear? Didn’t his brother die before we even met him?”
“You’re talking soul-casting. That is… not just a little bit forbidden,” Cruxer said carefully. “I’ve come to appreciate that the Chromeria is sometimes overcareful with these magics. But even the Ghosts absolutely, categorically forbid soul-casting.”
“Yes,” Kip said. “And yet he saved us all today. Which makes him a heretic and a hero at the same time.”
“You knew,” Cruxer said.
“And you gave Conn Arthur an ultimatum,” Ben-hadad said. He gestured around at the destruction the bear had wreaked. “To do this.”
“Because Conn Arthur couldn’t bear to kill him?” Ferkudi asked. He saw the disbelieving, outraged looks of the others. “Oh no! That one wasn’t on purpose, I swear!”
Ignoring him, Cruxer said to Kip, “He lied to you, he said so. About this?”
“I suspected it from the beginning. What would you have had me do, Crux? Put Conn Arthur in front of a tribunal right after the will-casters joined us?”
“That’s the law among their people.”
Ben-hadad scoffed, and the others looked uneasy. It would have been impossible, of course. Even if they’d held the tribunal—not a sure thing, with how much the Ghosts revered Conn Arthur. Even if they’d found him guilty—and how would they, unless he confessed? Even if it had all gone as well as it could, Kip would have lost the Ghosts. They would have exploded or melted away into the forest.
And without them, these victories would have been impossible.
“Does the scripture say, ‘Do the law, and love meting out its punishment’?” Kip asked.
“No, it says, ‘Do justice and love mercy,’” Ferkudi said.
“Thanks, Ferk,” Big Leo said. “He knows.”
“Oh, it was one of those rhetorical…”
“Yeah. One of those.”
“The laws are there for a reason,” Cruxer said stubbornly, but weakening. “Every time we ignore the law, we end with tragedy.”
“Oh, look,” Kip said, “here we are.”
The Nightbringers who’d been in a mob in front of the city’s gate were now arranged in orderly lines and files. It was more formal, but they also all had their weapons close at hand.
But even as they snapped smartly back rank by rank to let Kip and the Mighty pass, someone high in the city wall unfurled several great, festive banners, and Kip knew everything was going to be fine.
The will-cast animals had all been released, so someone—Tisis, no doubt—had procured the remarkably docile black stallion Kip rode when occasions required it. He swung into the saddle less than gracefully. To the general merriment of the Mighty, he was still a rather poor rider.
Beside Kip, Ben-hadad asked Winsen out of the side of his mouth, “Fluffles? You named your cat Fluffles?”
“What? Great name for a cat,” Winsen said. “If I ever do or don’t or did get one, I definitely may or may not have named it that. In some hypothetical fairy story land—or the real one—it may have happened. It’s just for the purpose of illustration.”
“You’re a dick, Winsen,” Ben-hadad said. “I love you, man.”
“Hairless cat,” Winsen said.
“Hairless? They come like that?” Big Leo asked.
“Oh, of course,” Ben-hadad said, light dawning. “Fluffles. The hairless cat. Not hypothetical, then.”
“Odd texture. Feels like foreskin,” Winsen said.
And that was how ‘petting the hairless cat’ entered the Mighty’s lexicon.
Chapter 71
“Andross, you motherfucker.” Karris had waited a week to say those words so she didn’t reveal she knew exactly what had happened in Paria immediately, but checking off “Curse out promachos” wasn’t quite as satisfying as she’d hoped.
“Yes?” he said, as if she’d simply called his name. He’d come into her room carrying two cups. “Kopi?” he asked, proffering a delicate cup.
“I thought we were working together,” she said. She didn’t take the cup.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Go on,’ h
is expression said. He lowered the proffered cup.
“That was no suicide. You killed the Nuqaba, didn’t you?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
She hadn’t expected him to admit it. Crafty old rat. “You… you ass! After all you and I went through drafting that ultimatum, you just assassinated her? She didn’t even have time to respond. I hated her, Andross, but she unified the Parian people. She could have led them to our defense. This is betrayal, Andross. Assassinating a Nuqaba? Are you mad? With how much we need Paria and how fraught the relationship between the Chromeria and the Nuqabas has always been?”
He put her cup down on a table. He sat in one of her chairs, taking his ease. He sipped his kopi.
When the silence stretched on, he looked up. “Oh! I’m sorry, I thought those were rhetorical questions. Done ranting? So soon?”
He made her feel powerless. Foolish. Like a child.
Uh-uh.
He moved to take another sip, as if thinking, and Karris’s foot flashed out. If she’d paused to think about what she was attempting, she wouldn’t have tried it.
Her foot swept between his seated legs, pushed forward, and kicked only the delicate cup as he tilted it to his lips. The cup popped into the air, jetting steaming kopi into Andross’s face and hair and across his chest.
Andross roared, blinded and burnt, but Karris was still moving. The killing instinct imbued by so many years of fighting had taught her never to wound a foe without following up to kill immediately. Karris kicked off half of the sole of her right boot, and, before he could lurch out of his chair, she stood balanced easily on her left foot with the blade of her right foot—now lined with an actual blade—pressed against his neck.
She caught the kopi cup.
The blade along the edge of her boot was thin. It had to be to be small enough to conceal in her boot sole and not interfere with walking, but against his neck it was plenty big enough.
Andross sat back down, but the rage didn’t leave his eyes. He raised one beringed finger and pushed her foot aside. She pivoted easily and brought her foot down, but stayed ready for an attack.
“That, my dear, was a miscalculation,” he said. His eyes flicked to the empty cup she’d caught in her hand.
She hoped it was because he was impressed. It had been damn lucky.
But she couldn’t back down. “I’ll decide that.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean for you. I meant for me. You took me by surprise. It doesn’t happen often.” He looked about for a cloth with which to dry himself, and, not finding one or a slave to hand him one, he made an expression as if to say, ‘What am I, among barbarians?’
He picked up a priceless lace pillow with a tiny shrug as if to say, ‘Oh well, when among barbarians, do as barbarians do.’ And he wiped his face and neck dry with the pillow.
It was a pretense, all this calm. The rage never left that deep corner of his demeanor.
Call that a victory, then.
The skin on his face was burnt. She couldn’t tell how badly yet.
But there was no retreat. A burnt face? He’d murdered that woman. Teia had damned herself in her own eyes because of this man’s orders. Karris couldn’t feel remorse.
“So,” he said, “any news on your hunt for Gavin?”
No no no. He was not going to get her derailed. Especially not into that. “Did you kill Satrapah Azmith, too?” she asked.
“Clearly not,” he said. “As she wasn’t a satrapah when she died.”
“Is that a yes?” she asked. Why would he admit to a murder he hadn’t committed?
“No. The woman was a complete idiot. My sources say she had a paroxysm when the Nuqaba told her she might not back her claim against us.”
So he hadn’t known Azmith was the Parian spymaster. Or—dammit!—was merely pretending not to. She said, “My sources suggested it might have been because we stripped her of her position, that she had a heart attack then. I thought her death might be on us.”
“I imagine the pressures of working with that lunatic Haruru for years had more to do with it.”
“Why kill her, Andross? If your assassin failed or had been discovered, you’d have plunged us into a war with two fronts. You’re not so rash.”
Andross gave a sour grin through his pain. “You didn’t know me when I was young, before I gave up drafting red for the same reasons you did. Back to using again, are you?”
Damn her light skin. Her blushes were obvious, and so was the light staining from using red again.
The truth was, she’d been drafting to try to spur on some feeling in her heart toward her son. She and Zymun had gotten off on the wrong foot, and things still weren’t going well, this many months later. He’d continually struck her as somehow off—no doubt that was an artifact of the abuse he’d endured. Her fault. Raised without a mother’s love, abandoned and abused by those who’d taken him on. Any flaws he had were on her. But she’d finally admitted to herself that she didn’t like him.
What kind of mother doesn’t like her own son?
She’d been trying to train herself to have good feelings around him, so they had wonderful food for dinners together, excellent wine, and she drafted red and what sub-red she could: all the things that could provide perfect soil for a new relationship. But she was a stone. It hadn’t worked. Not yet. And when he kissed her on the lips in greeting, she flinched away from his innocent gesture.
She couldn’t reject him, not after all she’d done.
She hadn’t answered, and Andross took her silence as assent. He picked up the kopi he’d brought for her, and sipped it as if nothing had happened. “We were working together, High Mistress. If the Nuqaba were going to comply, I’d given orders that the assassination be called off.”
A lie, almost certainly. Teia hadn’t mentioned any way for her orders to be canceled, and no one there from the Order could have gotten orders in time to stop her regardless, because they didn’t have skimmers. Unless Anjali Gates belonged to Andross?
Damn! Yet another person to put in the file of those who might be Andross’s.
Investigate Anjali Gates.
But Karris couldn’t let him know that she knew the possibility of canceling the answer to be a lie. Orholam’s balls, it was impossible to keep all this straight!
“As it was,” Andross continued, “we were able to establish how hard you are, and how dangerous it is to cross you. Your ultimatum drove a Nuqaba to suicide—which it only would have if she’d already been planning to commit treason. And because she died before she could come out against us, none of the people who would have joined her had done so publicly. Think of it this way: if things are close and the tribes aren’t sure who to side with, if they’d followed her and then we killed her, they would fear you’d hold it against them. So all things being equal, they would then have to join the White King. This way, they still have the possibility of joining us.”
“Why would they fear me if they hadn’t acted yet? I’ve shown myself to be forgiving when possible.”
“Ah, but you see, men never believe others are more good than they are. Bad men see mercy as weakness. Smart men see it as shrewdness. Saintly men might see the truth of it, but sadly there are few saints among those we’re trying to convince to join us.”
“And you’ve guaranteed that,” she said, though she couldn’t argue with that much. She had dossiers on all the tribal chiefs, and she knew all the satraps and Colors herself. No saints among those, and few enough even among the High Luxiats. “Because of what you’ve done, we’ll have people join us who have only the barest loyalty. We may be inviting traitors into our midst.”
“A truth every time one recruits. Would you forego allies altogether?” Andross asked. “I’ve seen you down at the yards, watching the training.”
“What of it?”
“You’ve accelerated the training. How many drafters have died because of that?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“Horse shit.??
?
“Twelve,” she said.
“Twelve dead, to save some number you’ll never know. That’s our business here, Iron White. Trading blood now for what we pray is less blood later. Stop looking back.”
“Who’s to say the tribes who join us won’t turn when we get to battle?” she asked.
Andross grinned smugly. It was a cold mirror of Gavin’s happy self-satisfaction when he did something clever. Gavin’s delight made you want to join him; Andross’s made you hate him more.
He said, “That’s why I blooded the Parians and Ruthgari early at the Battle of Ox Ford. It’s hard to join up with an army after they’ve killed your sons and brothers, even if it is in your best interests.”
“You’re saying you sent them to die on purpose?”
“I wasn’t hoping they’d be massacred like total incompetents, if that’s what you’re asking. But I sent them to what I knew would be a hard fight, yes. The Parians in particular used to have a reputation to be exactly the people for that. That their losses would be another thing to keep them on our side if things went poorly was part of my thinking, yes. I knew the Nuqaba was crazy, but I didn’t think she was insane. She might not even have been able to bring her people to join the White King. But if she’d tried to join him and instead started her own civil war, that wouldn’t have helped us, either, would it? Not in time.”
“So you had reason to think that Satrapah Azmith would join us?”
“Weak people like Azmith don’t lead rebellions. They fall back to doing what they’re supposed to do. At worst, she would have dragged her feet, and another visit, this time by you or me personally, would have been sufficient to regain Paria once and for all. Of course, the Parians have the same problem that afflicts every fighting force subjected to protracted peace.”
“And what’s that?” Karris wasn’t sure they were done talking about his assassination, but Andross slid from one thing to the next like an eel.
“Do you know the true genius of my second son?”
“What?” What did Dazen have to do with this? Gavin. Oh hell.
Yes, she did know Gavin’s genius quite well, thank you.
“Dazen was brilliant. Smarter than Gavin, but Dazen had his mother’s—” Andross cut off suddenly, overwhelmed with emotion.