The Blinding Knife (24 page)

“You’re joking.”

“Terrible sense of humor, if I were. It’s not very funny, is it?”

“You’re serious?”

“Second time’s the charm, I guess. Come, we need to get you out of those rag—those clothes and into something more becoming.”

He was her tutor, put over her by Lord Omnichrome himself, so Liv supposed that meant she had to obey him. She shrugged and followed him through the city. The warehouse wasn’t far from the Travertine Palace, because it felt safer to be close to the soldiers. Being a woman alone during wartime meant never being off your guard.

But as Liv followed Zymun, she saw that his garb was better than armor. “Is everyone so afraid of drafters here?” she asked.

“Afraid? They respect us, which is only right, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Ah. So this is why you needed a tutor.”

Well
that
was patronizing, and Liv didn’t appreciate it one bit.

“The Chromeria makes slaves, Liv. It depends on making those it trains being so indebted to them that you become at best an indentured servant—with the term of your indenture being the rest of your life. A slave, in other words. The Free reject that. We recognize instead
the natural order as it is. Did you choose to be born a great beauty? Of course not. But you are. You can do with that what you will. Similarly, you were born a drafter. We can wish that all were born with our gifts, and the Color Prince is investigating how this might be done. But the fact remains, we are special. We have a gift that other men and women don’t. We didn’t do anything to earn that gift—we can’t choose to be drafters. But we are. We don’t ask those who have gifts to chain themselves, as we don’t ask those who are skilled in running to get fat so they don’t make us feel bad for being slow. We are what we are, as wild and free as nature made us. When you walk the streets as a drafter, men know that if they accost you, you can kill them. They can fear that or simply respect it like they’d respect a woman carrying a pistol. With the advantage, of course, being that a pistol only has one shot.”

They passed workers clearing rubble-strewn streets and finally arrived at a little store undamaged in the fighting. An old woman greeted her. “So good to have business! Thank you, thank you, oh, and so beautiful you are! A marvel I’ll make you. I have an order for three dresses, yes?” she asked Zymun.

“If that’s what Lord Omnichrome ordered,” Zymun said.

“Very well then, strip down,” she told Liv.

Liv looked at her, then over at Zymun, who showed no inclination to leave. “Do you mind?” she asked him.

He looked her up and down, grinning mischievously. “Very much, but as you wish. Can’t fault me for trying.”

He stepped outside and left her in the capable hands of the seamstress. The woman took her measurements quickly, compared it to her height, had her turn around a few times, and then allowed her to dress. She made three quick sketches and showed them to Liv. “Everything is to be the finest possible for you, my lady. This first will be wool, but it’s a goat’s wool from the Abornean mountains. Warm, but so soft you won’t believe it.”

“That sounds…” Wonderful? Amazing? “… expensive.” Liv hated herself for saying it, but she’d been poor for so long, she couldn’t help it.

“Ha! That’s not the start of it. I’m doing the trim of your silk dress with true murex purple. The finest silk, too, of course. Who’s going to waste true purple to dye bad silk? Ten thousand murex shells harvested just for you.”

Liv felt a little sick to her stomach. Silk? True purple? “I meant… I’m really sorry. What I meant is, I don’t have any money. Maybe plain wool? Just one dress?” Truth was, she didn’t even have the money to pay for that, but her pride couldn’t take admitting utter poverty.

“Oh, you pretty little thing, you don’t have to pay! The Lord Omnichrome is taking care of everything. One warm dress, one for everyday wear—that one will be upland Atashian cotton—and one to dazzle. Looks like you could use some new shifts and undergarments, too?”

“Please! I don’t generally… well, war, you know.”

“Of course, of course. And we’ll get you a clean dress to wear in the meantime.”

That offer turned into a clean dress and a hot bath, ostensibly because the old woman didn’t want her getting the dress dirty, but Liv thought the seamstress was happy to have someone to spoil, someone to talk to.

As she scrubbed herself with a sponge and let the hot water unknot her muscles, Liv fought the rush of tears just below the surface. She blew out a breath, feeling like she could cry and she would feel better afterward, but she didn’t want to look all splotchy and swollen. She was sure the old woman wouldn’t care—she had the air of someone who’d understand—but Zymun would come back to pick her up later, and he’d ask. And how can you explain
why
you were crying when the answer would either take an hour or one word? Neither would make him understand. She’d just look like a weak girl.

Liv blew out another breath.

“That’s a lot of sighing,” the old woman said. Liv hadn’t noticed her come in.

“Have you ever realized that everything you ever believed was a lie?”

“Everything? The sky is green now?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Teasing, child.” The old woman paused, then heaved a little sigh of her own. “I believed my husband was faithful to me. When that fell, it seemed like all the world did with it.”

Liv hesitated.

“No, child. Don’t tell me. I’m a stranger. Take my kindness, but don’t trust so much, so easily. You’re a beautiful young woman in a
perilous place. Put on some armor. Just remember what’s armor and what’s you, so when it’s time to take it off, you can.”

The old woman walked out, and Liv knew that she’d done her a kindness greater than she could have by listening to her churning thoughts.

Liv had joined the enemy. She could excuse herself and say that she’d hoped her action might inspire the Color Prince to save Kip and Karris, and it had, but in truth she’d lost faith in everything the Chromeria had taught her. If the fruit is poison, why respect the tree?

But if the Chromeria itself was corrupt, how deep did that corruption go? If they’d taught one lie, how many others had they espoused? It made her feel sick to her stomach, like she was looking into the abyss. If the Chromeria was corrupt, and the Chromeria was supposed to be a central font of Orholam’s will, what did that say about Orholam himself?

How could he let such corruption be? Either he didn’t care, or he didn’t have the power to do anything about it, or he didn’t exist. Liv felt a chill despite the hot water. It was a thought that couldn’t be called back.

But there was no answer. Doesn’t care, can’t fix, or doesn’t exist. No matter what, things were not as Liv had believed. It was like having a nice warm cloak of comforting suppositions ripped off her shoulders.

So be it. This was what it was to be an adult, to be a strong woman. Her father had raised her to believe certain things, but her father wasn’t omniscient. He could be wrong. And if he was, Liv wasn’t going to be a moral coward. She would face the world as it was.

She’d once heard an old philosopher quoted in one of her classes: ‘The truth is so dear to me that if Orholam stood on one side and truth on the other, I would turn my back on my creator himself.’

So be it. Fealty to One, that was the Danavis motto. Liv’s fealty would be to the truth.

Simply considering that was scary, terrifying as she thought about the decisions she made all the time based on what was right—which was based on what was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria taught was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria believed about Orholam. Taking out that linchpin?

But at the same time, it was tremendously freeing. She would be strong. This was hard, but she would do it. She wouldn’t shrink from
hard truths or embrace comforting delusions. She would be a warrior for truth.

She finished bathing, the impulse to tears forgotten, steel in her spine. And then she ate what the old woman brought her, though it was only a thin broth dotted with a few potatoes.

“It isn’t up to my normal standards, but well, war, you know,” the old woman said, a twinkle in her eye.

Liv laughed.

“After I finish your dresses, I’ll be able to serve you something much better, I promise.”

When she was finished, Liv felt a thousand times better. She thanked the old woman and stepped outside.

Zymun was sitting on a crude bench, tossing little blue disks out of one hand into the air and shooting them with green from the other.

“You were waiting for me the whole time?” Liv asked.

He tossed a blue disk up and blasted it into oblivion, harder than necessary.

“Oh. I forgot about you,” she said. Oops, that didn’t come out quite like she meant it.

“You get away with that shit because you’re beautiful?” Zymun asked. “If so, quit it.”

“You keep saying that. I don’t know if you’re trying to make a backhanded compliment or a stupid forehanded insult.” She wasn’t beautiful. She knew that. On her best day, she could manage a bit of
cute
. Anyone who said different was trying to get something from her.

Zymun looked like he was going to tear into her, but then his mouth twitched. “ ‘Forehanded insult’?” he asked. “That your own invention?” But he grinned.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” She scowled, feeling stupid. “I thought you weren’t a blue,” she said quickly. He had five colors on his cloak and vambraces, but not blue and not superviolet.

“Not yet,” he said. He drafted another blue disk. Liv could tell the color was off, and in barely more than a second it frayed apart and dissolved. “Hoping I grow into it. It’s so close it’s infuriating. Blue has so many uses. Plus, as nice as it already is to be a five, I can’t help but dream of being a full-spectrum polychrome.”

He was reaching to be a seven-color drafter with exactly the same kind of statements Liv had used a few months ago when she was
longing to have her second color recognized. It was never enough, was it? There’s always someone better than you.

Still, if seven colors might be within reach for Zymun, that meant the boy was on another plane altogether.

“Sorry about forgetting,” Liv said, looking at her feet. “I didn’t think I was important enough for you to wait around for me.”

He smiled, and broken nose, black eyes, and all, he was terribly handsome. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

It was strangely freeing to be so busy that he had no time for friends—or his lack thereof. Over the next weeks, Kip spent his mornings in class and working, spent hours more on the Blackguards’ field, and then headed to the library. He got to know the staff, and they him. As often as not, a stack of books was waiting for him—the ones he requested every day, plus whatever ones Rea Siluz thought he might find helpful.

He would find an isolated desk, and not leave for eight or ten hours, depending on when the last librarian left. Every day he scowled at the older students, and stayed late with them a few times—until he was discovered and banned from the library for a week. Students also weren’t allowed to reshelve their own books. Apparently so many had done so incorrectly for so long that it became a nightmare for the librarians. Now, after being read, books were to be deposited at one of the two desks for the purpose on each level of the library. Kip also quickly learned that despite taking up three full levels of the Prism’s Tower, this library was only a small sliver of the total number of books the Chromeria owned. Many more were kept below ground. Dims were not allowed in the secondary libraries, period.

All of which combined to make Kip’s other searches nearly impossible to even begin. He had sworn to avenge his mother—and crushing King Garadul’s head somehow hadn’t made that ache go away.
Then he’d sworn to find out if his mother was lying about Gavin Guile. He couldn’t imagine the man had actually raped her, but liar and addict and horror though she was, she still deserved that of her son.

Of greater concern, though, was that he’d sworn to make Klytos Blue step down.

He really had to stop swearing.

The problem with both goals was that he barely knew where to start. He couldn’t exactly ask, “Pardon, can you tell me where the damning evidence about the currently serving Colors and Prisms is kept?” And with his books being checked up on, any wider reading he did want to do had to be done carefully. Kip had found several books of genealogy to learn about Klytos Blue, and then waited until he saw one of the young women who assisted the libraries reshelving books and slid his books into her stacks.

At this rate, he’d never find anything. There was only one shortcut to get to the libraries that might have the information he needed: make it into the Blackguard.

So what had begun as something he attempted to please his father whose ultimate purpose he didn’t understand now became the only possibility. Kip trained and studied and read books in the library and didn’t sleep much, nightmares interrupting his rest every night, until he would crash and sleep for a day or two straight.

There was no punishment for missing class. The Chromeria let the sponsors handle that. It made Sponsor Day deeply unpleasant for those students who loafed. But Kip didn’t have a sponsor. He went to class, though, even when he hated it. To miss would be to disappoint his father, to be a failure.