Gavin helped Orholam and Fukkelot, stabbing their oar straight into an Abornean face that appeared in the smoke. It was a cabin boy, not twelve years old. The boy went down, face smashed, a slow match spinning out of his hand.
Fukkelot was trying to shout orders, but in the pressure of the situation, he was seized up with cursing. Orholam had the best view, so Gavin stabbed and stabbed, trying to figure out what Orholam wanted from his actions, throwing his whole, waning strength into the effort. Every so often, he felt the crunch of oar smashing against something softer than wood.
The wind blew the smoke clear enough that Gavin saw boarding nets thrown over the gap between the ships, saw men scrambling across. He thought he heard Gunner laughing somewhere, battle-mad.
The other galley was taller than the Bitter Cob, and Gavin could see the rowers over there huddled beneath their benches, cowering, hoping the pirates boarding their vessel passed them by. Some did. Some slashed at the helpless slaves as they passed, laying open heads, splitting shoulders, hacking off skinny, starvation-frail arms. Because they could. Because man loves to kill.
“Fuck,” Fukkelot said.
“Fuck,” Gavin agreed.
As the smoke slowly cleared, Gavin saw a girl burst from one of the cabins of the opposing galley. She was dressed in men’s trousers and a vest, but her long dark hair bobbed and streamed as she fled. A moment later, a pursuer appeared. It was one of Gunner’s men. He was holding his trousers up with one hand. She must have just escaped him.
Fighting, petite, fierce, and underestimated—the girl reminded him of Karris when they’d first fallen in love. It was intolerable that anyone should—
“You with me?” Gavin asked his oarmates.
He didn’t have time to see if they were. The young woman ran past, running for a hole where the traders’ galley had been stove in. Gavin and Fukkelot pushed on the oar. Orholam guided it. It caught the pursuing pirate in the jaw. He flopped down, twisting, in a spray of sweat and teeth.
The young woman ran past. A sailor appeared out of nowhere as she headed for the gap, and the sea. She didn’t slow, didn’t dodge. Instead, she accelerated right into the skinny man. They collided and her momentum carried them both into the water. And out of sight.
Gavin looked to Orholam. He craned his head out as far as he could, but then shrugged. He couldn’t see anything.
The fighting continued for a few more minutes, but it seemed their part was done. The fight was confined to the other galley, and the exhausted rowers on the Bitter Cob began collapsing to their benches. Some vomited. Gavin looked for Strap. There was nothing but blood, and an entire bench of slaves blown to pieces on the port side, along with one slave across the aisle, and a hole in the starboard side where the cannonball had exited. He saw a tattooed arm that might have been Strap’s.
The hunched form of Leonus limped over toward the splattered remains. “The gods are kind,” he said. He chuckled. “To some of us.” He leaned over painfully and picked up something. It was Strap’s whip, with her hand still clamped on it in death. Leonus pried her grip open and tossed her tattooed arm into the sea. “Looks like you pretty boys have a new foreman. Unless you want to follow the old one?”
Chapter 15
Kip dulled the edge of sharp hours with drafting. The emotional rush of drafting different colors as the sun limped to the top of heaven’s dome distracted him for a while. A few hours. A day. But hunger is sharper than luxin.
Will is a knife of lead. In the end, the body always wins.
That second day with no food, he drafted only what was necessary. He’d already fixed his pack, fixed his boots, drafted a shade for his sun-scorched skin after deciding he couldn’t figure out how to draft luxin clothing.
On the third day, he had to stop following the beach as he reached a rocky point of crags and cliffs. He cut through the jungle. Climbing over mounds of roots, angling up hills, trying to compensate for compensations made hours earlier, he got lost, the canopy blocking out the sun, his own stupidity and heat exhaustion keeping him from doing much but finding a stream and lying down in it.
He woke to the brush of something on his hand. A tiny black-and-orange frog sat there. His skin burned where its stomach rested against skin, acidic slime scorching him. He flinched and it hopped away. Then he looked down, his vision following his gaze like a slow landslide.
He was covered in leeches. Dozens of leeches. He was dizzy. He rolled to all fours and vomited water and stomach acid all over his hands. He stood and staggered into the jungle, gear forgotten, tearing off his trousers, falling. The world was hot fog. He puked again. Lost himself, not unconscious, but unaware, animal, a beast.
Found himself some time later, naked, sitting in a shifting patch of sunlight. He was staring at the cloudless, merciless sky. Couldn’t bear to look at himself, couldn’t bear to see those wriggling fat black leeches attached to him, sucking his blood into their bloated bellies. Drafting his blood for their blood magic.
Shhhhhh, the wind blew through the branches. Shhh.
He sucked in blue light, the blue blood of creation. Light is life. He sipped blue until it filled him, until he was only thought.
His racing heart slowed. He closed his eyes and let the blue course through him. It filled him with awareness. Thirty-one pairs of jaws, attached at the front and back of the leeches’ bloated bodies to his skin. Four singles who’d had one half or the other knocked free of Kip’s skin by his movement. With the blue in him, Kip remembered some long-forgotten advice on how to remove leeches. Not with fire or alcohol or the juice of lemons, else they’d retract angrily, vomiting foulness back into their bites as they recoiled. Instead, a fingernail to break the seal of their mouth on your skin, front and back. A fingernail and patience.
Kip’s gorge rose once more, but he stared at the sky again until his mind was a placid, still pond. He couldn’t bear it. Not sixty-some times. He lost the blue completely and was almost a beast again, trapped, trapped in his skin with leeches like he was trapped in a closet full of rats—
Like this.
Calm. Gentle. He took in blue, and more blue. He barely had the will to open himself, barely understood what the swirling color was doing almost of its own accord. It filled his body, found every tooth, every Y-shaped incision.
Gather your will.
He had no will. He reached toward sub-red for passion, toward green for wildness.
No, your will. Luxin is your tool; you are not its tool. Stand.
Kip still hadn’t gathered any will, but he stood, feeling persecuted. He knew what to do, but knowing what to do here was like knowing that all you had to do to climb a mountain is to walk. Orholam give me strength.
He already has. Use it.
Arms and legs outstretched, Kip clenched his fists, bowed his head. The power didn’t course through him in a scream of rage and omnipotence, but instead in drops of silent tears. It followed his blood, finding tiny mouths, shutting them, rejecting them, sealing the poisoned blood away from him, and forcing it out, too.
One by one, the leeches dropped off. Dropped off his arms. Dropped off his legs. Dropped off his chest. Dropped off his back. Dropped off his butt. Dear Orholam—dropped off his groin. Dropped off his face.
Kip was streaming blood from sixty-two tiny wounds. The leeches’ poison made blood run free. Kip wondered how much blood he’d lost. Several of the leeches nuzzled his feet, looking for a new spot to feed. He stepped away. He had no revulsion left. There were only problems, and fixing them.
Oh, simple. He drafted blue caps over every cut. As soon as he took a step, he dislodged a quarter of the blue caps. Of course. Blue was too stiff; if he moved, he would lose his bandages.
He leaned against a tree, sat, drafted a blue cocoon around himself, sealed it, sealed his wounds, and slept.
He woke twice to vomit, wasn’t sure if he remembered to draft his bandages or his cage anew.
He dreamt or he had visions or he did things barely aware
. A quietly weeping woman, in the gray morning light, hair in a great kinky halo. “Why are you crying?” Kip heard the voice asking, only realized it was his own after the words were out.
“I weep because you suffer, and only the second sons of Am are entitled to feel pity without passion. And even then, not in life.” She stood and her aspect changed suddenly, flickering between this dignified woman and something entirely other. “Sleep,” she said, quietly radiant. “You won’t die on my watch.”
All faded into fever and nightmares and sweat and shivering cold and thunder and cool water. He heard the sounds of birds screeching, monkeys howling, something like a dog barking at him, but all of it fast, too fast, skipping along the surface of time as if he were in his father’s skimmer, light flashing across his face and disappearing like it was happening in seconds, when he knew it must be days. He had some recollection of holding a broad leaf to his face, funneling water to his lips as a mighty downpour shook heaven and earth.
When he woke again, he was himself.
He felt clear, but weak. He dissolved his blue cocoon, and almost vomited again from the touch of luxin, lightsick. There were paw prints in the mud around his cocoon, big ones, not wolves, though, he knew wolf prints from growing up in Tyrea. There were no human prints, though, not even his own. The woman had been a hallucination, a fever dream.
How much had been dream or delusion? He took a deep breath, checking himself, checking his surroundings. No leeches, no frogs, no storms. Not now anyway.
Kip stood on wobbly legs. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been here. The only indication of passing time was his cuts, scabbed over. So the leeches had been real. He examined the cuts. Leech bites usually heal more slowly than most wounds, but with the blue luxin helping, Kip guessed he’d been in his barely conscious state for less than a week.
The hunger had lost its urgency. Kip felt an odd purity, the serenity of saints and ascetics and the batshit insane. The clarity of a soul detaching itself from its flesh home, perhaps. He walked for an hour before he realized he was naked. His first thought when he became aware of it wasn’t embarrassment; it was protection. His skin was a poor barrier for the rigors of jungle travel.
He began drafting while he walked. He tried green first. It was so abundant, it was the most obvious choice. But he gave it up soon. Too heavy, too coarse to wear against his skin. When he came across a clump of trumpet-shaped dazzlingly yellow flowers, he stopped. He tried to weave cloth of yellow, but he always lost that perfect, fine mesh point where yellow would hold its solidity before he could get a sizable chunk. The smaller the amount of yellow he tried to make solid, the easier it was.
The declining sun lit up a spiderweb, and Kip was mesmerized by the beauty of it. A tiny moth flew into the web and stuck. The spider moved in to make its kill, but Kip was entranced by the web itself. He extended superviolet luxin toward the web—finer fingers than his fingers could ever be. The anchor lines were like steel cables, but the trap lines had little dots of goo in which more line was spooled. Sticky there, but it also kept the line initially tight, while keeping slack so that the webs didn’t snap when fought directly, they would yield and pull and entangle.
Superviolet. Superviolet was the answer. Not to that, but—
It felt like the pieces to the problem were swirling around his head, just out of reach. The sun sank, leaving Kip cold. He hadn’t even drafted his shelter. He sat in a torpor all night. When the sun rose again, he had it.
He wove superviolet into tiny links, like a single chain, though instead of pounding each link shut like armorers did, he could simply draft them into perfect loops one after the other, thereby depriving the chain of any weak areas. Then he flooded that form with yellow luxin, his will having to touch each tiny link to seal it. It took half an hour. No problem.
The second chain was much harder; he had to thread each loop through two other loops of the first chain. In an hour, he had two connected strands of yellow luxin chain-mail cloth. Two connected, impossibly short strands of yellow luxin. He almost gave up then. Instead, he sat, staring. Barely even thinking. The water of a stream rushed past on its way to the sea, and Kip watched. Open luxin still streaming in his fingertips, he touched the water like it was open luxin flowing past, the blood of the earth.
For a moment, he felt Orholam himself, the creator larger than this earth, this creation, but acting through it, like all the universe was luxin held open in His hands. A flash, blindingly bright white light, the sensation of life, light, as Kip was pulled through the water to the sea to every water that touched the sea, flashing out to a thousand veins, river-arteries aglow with power. Everywhere, all at once, not just a tracery of lines on a map, but with depth. Water following the sun’s call and breaking into mist, rising, becoming clouds. Water, lying on the deeps, its belly scratching sunken cities. Whales and sea demons barely large enough to touch his consciousness, giants like minnows darting everywhere, life too small for a human eye, basking in Orholam’s light, their mindless life itself singing his praise by being.
Kip lost consciousness.
When he woke, the strand of cloth was in his lap, twenty links wide. He straightened his legs, worked the cramps out of them from his cross-legged pose. He stared at the strands as if they were mocking him. He hadn’t drafted those extra strands, had he? He’d not been himself, but he thought he remembered all that he had done.
Kip stared at the water, and touched it again, his will open. But now it was only water. “I want to save my father,” he whispered.
Silence.
“I’d pay anything,” he said.
But light abides not a lie. He heard nothing.
There was a part of Kip that had felt destined for greatness from the time he was young. Maybe everyone felt that way. It hadn’t mattered how he looked on the outside, that his mother was mindless in addiction, that he was fat and ugly. No matter how much he despised himself, some part of him thought that someday, someday he would shake the pillars of the earth. That something amazing inside him would be let out. That he had a destiny.
Every stone they’d cast at him, he’d accepted, and he’d used them to construct a little altar to himself. Andross Guile laughing, telling him about the Lightbringer. ‘The old word that says he’ll be a ‘great’ man from his youth could be a pun in the original Parian—another meaning of the word ‘great’ is ‘rotund.’ Which… well.’
He’s supposed to kill gods and kings.
I’ve done that.
He’s supposed to be a genius of magic.
What if I am that?
Gavin had said, ‘Don’t ruin yourself on this foolishness, boy, there is no Lightbringer.’
And yet Kip believed. He wanted to believe. Needed to.
‘I keep trying to draw you as the next Prism, and I can’t,’ the Mirror Janus Borig had told him. And then as she died, she’d said, ‘I know who the Lightbringer is now.’
She meant me. She had to mean me.
But there was only silence.
Kip stood. He followed the stream to the shore, turned north. At sunset, he found a lone farmhouse. An older woman in a simple farmer’s dress was standing outside, singing a song to the setting sun in a language Kip didn’t recognize. She saw him from afar, smiled, and beckoned him to come with one hand as she continued singing. The sound was like the rivers and the winds and the deeps of the sea, and the warmth and light of a fire against a child’s fears of the darkness. It held the promise of the morning and the comfort of a mother’s heartbeat.
For Kip, who hadn’t heard a word spoken in days, the euphonious rise and fall of foreign syllables unencumbered with translation were a perfect, gentle transition from the raw terrors of the jungle into the sparse, hard-earned comforts of this frontier farm.
“So you’re it,” she said, voice low and calm, moving slowly as if he were a wild animal, speaking softly as her song faded, settling into Kip’s heart. She smiled. “Was thinking I heard wrong. ‘Clad in light’?
” she asked, addressing the sky. She laughed heartily and that perfectly human sound made Kip wake as if from a dream.
But not all at once.
He realized he was still naked. He draped the cloth in front of him, but without urgency, without embarrassment. He had a thought and knew it was strange at the same time: the locals have a custom, this clothing custom, though here there are no thorns to snatch and tear your skin; I should go along.
The locals? You mean humans, Kip?
Ah, there he was. He himself, Kip the Lip. Some part of him was glad that that Kip wasn’t gone for good.
She studied his eyes, seeing him come to himself, and her leathery, freckled skin wrinkled merrily. “He told me to expect something today. Been on tenterhooks through all my washing and weaving. Had that little phrase, ‘clad in light,’ pop in my head.” She shook her head. “Convinced myself it was ‘lightly clad.’ Well, you are that, aren’t you? Good thing the Good One sent you now, young sir. I fainted the first time I saw my husband naked. No wyrthig, swear. Took the shine right off the rose for him, I tell you, and I didn’t do much better for years. The Lord of Light loves to give me a gentle elbow about all that from time to time. But come. Let’s take care of you.”
And so she did. She took Kip in, fed him from the soup she’d already had on, though she only gave him the broth, then she bathed him, tended his wounds, and put him to bed. When he woke, two days later, she fed him again. Coreen was a widow, but several of her sons and daughters lived within easy walking distance and one at least visited each day, so when Kip told her he needed to go to the Chromeria, she found out that a trader was due to leave in two days and would make room for Kip—for free. Kip spent one more day abed, and then was up.
They developed an easy rapport, joking and teasing as if they’d known each other for years. She reminded him of Sanson’s mother back in Rekton. The woman had always made extra cakes or sweetmeats or pastries, and they’d played an informal game of Kip trying to steal one or two without her noticing. He almost never got away clean, and when he did, she’d ask him some question that he would try to answer around a mouthful of whatever.