The Broken Eye (73 page)

“No danger of that,” Teia said quickly. Marissia was a room slave. She hadn’t had any say over Gavin coming to her bed. That she had chosen to make her service easier by pleasing him rather than harder by fighting him simply meant she was smart. She was doing what she needed to do to survive.

Marissia said, “Someone who says you shouldn’t do something while doing it herself could be considered a hypocrite. Or an expert. Hypocrite or expert, that of all people,
I
offer you advice is not a reason to dismiss it, but actually the opposite.”

“I didn’t call you a—” Teia was baffled. What was Marissia saying?

“You’re sixteen. You thought it. I judged my elders harshly when I was young, too.”

So Marissia loved Gavin. What kind of irony was it that Teia, who had been a slave, would have assumed that Marissia couldn’t love Gavin—because she was a slave?

It wasn’t … what? Normal love? Because Gavin was Prism and Marissia was a slave? Could Teia tell Marissia that what she felt wasn’t love? That Marissia was fooling herself, that really she was only making a bad situation tolerable? If a power difference made love impossible, who could ever love a Prism? Who could ever love a slave?

Maybe it was love, then. But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t easy.

Which was Marissia’s point exactly. The chasm between freed slave and a Prism’s son was narrower than the chasm between slave and Prism. But not by much.

Marissia ate more. Drank more. No hurry, no apparent interest in Teia. She casually scanned the crowd, but the way a bored person eating lunch might. Then she said, “Do you know, I was made a slave at your age.”

Teia stood, turned, propped a foot up on the bench, and began working on her calf in a way that would give her a glimpse of Marissia’s face.

“Things were suddenly expected of me that I found very, very hard. I cried myself to sleep many nights. Sometimes I still feel like that vulnerable little girl. I have an inkling of what the next year will demand of you. I want you to know I’m proud of you. The Order will test you more. They will ask you to do unspeakable things. You will do them. This is an order. In the sight of Orholam, let all the evil you do be on my head, and on the White’s. We’re playing against the Old Man of the Desert himself, you understand?”

“No,” Teia said quietly. “No.”

“You will,” Marissia said. She gazed up at the statue of Karris Shadowblinder, Karris’s namesake. “And stop giving
her
nonsense.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin, stood, and walked away.

Teia remembered herself enough to continue pretending to massage her leg. It wasn’t like she’d had a long time to bond with Marissia, but the woman had been the only person Teia could tell the whole truth. The sudden emptiness in her chest felt like a death.

Death. She’d killed a man in this war in shadow. Maybe Kip was right. Maybe it was justified. But she was going to have to kill again, for the other side. She had no doubt of it. How would the Order really trust her until she’d killed for them?

It wasn’t a matter of
if
they ordered her to do so, it was a matter of
when
. And she was supposed to meet up with Murder Sharp right now.

Chapter 68

Aliviana Danavis followed Phyros into the slum bar. It was the kind of place she would have feared a year ago, with good reason. She’d found new strength in the last months, or at least new fearlessness. But even with that, she never would have come here in her dresses and murex purple. Now she wore her hair in a simple braid, a tricorn hat, her fawnskin trousers still bearing the dark stains of what might have been blood. Before they’d died, she’d had her blue and her green drafter work together to fashion clips onto her pistols like Gavin Guile had, so she could wear all four pistols on her belt and not worry about losing them. She also wore a short saber that she still didn’t know how to use well, despite Phyros’s efforts to train her. A figure-hugging white tunic, but worn long over her trousers in the Tyrean style, and a green jacket waxed against the rain completed the ensemble.

She still stuck out, here in Wiwurgh. Just across the Coral Strait from Ilyta, and positioned at the very mouth of the Everdark Gates, the city was inhabited mainly by Tyreans, Ilytians, and Parians. The crowds of darker faces made something unknot in Liv’s soul. You could hardly get farther from the Jaspers if you tried. Here, she felt beautiful. Men whistled in appreciation, unlike the cool-blooded meat stares the men of the north and west coasts gave. Here a man would let you know his interest, but take his cue and leave you alone if you ignored him or gave a glance and no more.

It had taken Liv a while to get used to it again, and she hated that she’d been changed by her time at the Chromeria.

Of course, having the bare-chested barbarian that was Phyros as her bodyguard didn’t hurt in dissuading prolonged staring.

But a sailors’ tavern was different. There were women here, too, but they were even harder than the men. Every sailor and pirate had to walk with friends in the seaside slums, of course. The danger of being knocked out in an alley and waking as the iron cut your ear was real for everyone. But a woman’s lot was worse, as always. As the saying went, ‘A man ’slaved works one oar, a woman ’slaved works every oar on deck.’

Aliviana stepped into the low-ceilinged tavern and glanced around with a haughty, uninterested look on her face. But then she gasped aloud as she saw the man sitting in a corner, staring at her. Her father.

Corvan Danavis was slowly rising to his feet, as transfixed by the sight of her as she was of him. Her father? Here? Impossible.

And he wasn’t alone. There were a good ten drafters in some sort of military attire with him, light blue tunics emblazoned with a golden eye high on the chest. Her father wore one as well, though richer, with brocade and a sword at his hip. He was the leader of them.

Emotions rolled over Liv like a swell rolling over a swimmer at sea. After the surprise, there was a little bit of that little-girl glee, but trailing that like a secondary wave that engulfs you just when you think the worst is past was raw anger, unfaded despite the passage of months.

Her father waved her over to join him at his table, and she went, but as she walked, she felt the tableaux shift in her head. It took on sudden symbolic connotations: her father beckoned her to walk to him; he didn’t come to her. He stood there, asking her to leave her friends and join him at the place he had prepared for her.

What was he doing here? Had he been following her? Impossible! But here? In one tavern of hundreds, on the other side of the world? It was too much coincidence to be coincidence.

Stop being a twit, Liv. It’s your father.

He crossed the last few steps between them quickly, as if he couldn’t hold back any more, real joy etched on his features. They embraced.

For a dozen heartbeats, all was well in the world.

Finally, they released each other.

Here it comes. She stood with her back straight. She suppressed an urge to tug the laces at her tunic’s open neckline tighter.

“Aliviana,” her father said. “You look so strong.”

It was the last thing she’d have expected from the legendary General Corvan Danavis. It slipped right under her armor. “So do you, daddy.”

He laughed, and she couldn’t help but smile.

“Will you join me?” Corvan said. “I saved us a table.”

Saved it? Like he expected me? How could he know she’d be here?

“Of course,” she said.

“I’ll dismiss my people if you dismiss yours,” he said, eyes twinkling.

Liv hadn’t even been aware of Phyros coming to stand behind her. But she paused. She didn’t need to let her father dictate what she did or didn’t do.

“No disrespect,” Corvan said to Phyros. “I’ve heard you’ve done yet more mighty deeds in keeping my daughter safe, Lord Phyros Seaborn. I owe you everything.”

Phyros scowled, and Liv realized she’d never heard his surname, nor known that he was of noble blood. The thought that he’d concealed that fact from her, and that her father had known it, nettled Liv. “He can sit with your people.” In a place this crowded, being at the next table would be enough to be out of earshot.

A one-eyed bar slave came over as Liv took her seat, and her father said, “Drinks for these three tables. On me. You have mead? Keep it flowing.” When the man left, Corvan said, “Have you had it before? There used to be a large Angari community here in Wiwurgh, so you can find some of their foods and drinks still. Little of their blood.”

“There were Angari here?” Liv asked. She hadn’t seen a single blond head here.

“After the Everdark Gates were closed, the community was isolated. A plague came and killed the Angari in much lower numbers than the Parians here. The Parians blamed them for the plague. They exterminated them all. Any half-bloods they could find, too. Even people who were a quarter Angari, or children generations later born with light skin, found life here unbearable. They moved elsewhere in the satrapies or simply found it impossible to marry. Extinguished, completely.”

It was the kind of trivia her father knew that had always amazed Aliviana. He knew something interesting about most everything.

“It was the superviolet,” she said.

“Huh?”

“The Angari priests were superviolet drafters.”

“Really? Oh, maybe I have heard that,” he said, his eyes flicking up as he searched for the memory. “But…”

She felt a little stab of pleasure. “The priests of Ferrilux blessed their worshippers’ food and water. Living in poverty for generations, the Angari must have noticed that it had an effect. So if that later plague was born of bad meat or bad water, the Angari wouldn’t have died as much.”

“Religion saving lives?”

“Clearly only in the short term,” Aliviana said. “Since it got all of them killed.”

“I still don’t understand,” Corvan said. “Are you saying their god intervened with their food?”

“It’s the superviolet. Disease loves darkness. We infuse all our bandages with superviolet. Men recover from wounds that would otherwise suppurate and gangrene. The chirurgeons have said our survival rates for even minor wounds are five and ten times better than those left untreated.”

“Aliviana, that’s brilliant,” Corvan said.

“It wasn’t my discovery,” she said. “I hear that there are even a few chirurgeons using it at the Chromeria now. They don’t understand why it works, but they’ve seen that it does.”

“No, I didn’t mean the discovery—though it was. I mean you, applying it like that, backward, figuring out history with what you know. Orholam’s beard, think of the tragedy of it. The Parians”—he looked around the Parian tavern—“the ancient Parians massacred the very people who could have saved them. Not to mention the countless lives that could have been saved in the centuries since then.”

“And saved countless superviolet drafters from the drudgery of only writing secret messages back and forth to each other.”

“Indeed. So you must have whole corps of superviolet healers.” He drew idly in the wetness ring that had formed around his mead cup.

Distracted, Aliviana almost volunteered more, but stopped herself. She wasn’t going to give him any details about the disposition of the Color Prince’s forces.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking out loud. It’s a brilliant leap. Of course you’ve already put it to the best use. I’m sorry. I had no idea that my historical anecdote would intrude on our present … difficulties. How have you been? Did you get my letter—no, never mind, that doesn’t matter.”

The bar slave finally brought their mead, having served Phyros and Corvan’s men first. Stupidity, or a deliberate slight? Liv wondered. Drinking the sweet sharp mead gave her an excuse to gather her wits. She couldn’t see any harm in sharing, and if she shared, surely he would, too. So she began.

The sea had fought them all the way. Liv and her crew had been through horrible storms. They’d frequently needed to stop to make repairs. Then they’d been marooned in a fishing village for a month, stuck in what they’d come to call a crystal storm. Shards of blue luxin the size of a thumb and edged with sharp angles beat down day and night, for a count of twenty-seven, then stopped for some multiple of that long, and then began again. Anyone caught outside in the storm was shredded. The crystals themselves broke apart almost instantly in the sun afterward, leaving gritty blue dust everywhere.

It had seemed like the end of the world must be upon them, but when they finally escaped, they’d found the crystal storm was localized. People twenty leagues away hadn’t even noticed clouds.

They all knew what it had to be, though Liv didn’t tell her father. The blue bane had regrown, somewhere, and no one was in control of it. Or a madman was.

Their galley had been destroyed in the crystal rain, and they’d commandeered a new ship outside Garriston—fine, stole it. When Aliviana had seen a small river running green and wanted to go investigate, the crew had been so frightened, they’d nearly mutinied.

They’d later lost two drafters after the idiots had humiliated some pirates in a tavern fight. The pirates ambushed them in a dark alley, and mortally wounded them.

The lesson Aliviana’s men had taken from that was that when you fight pirates, kill them and all their friends. Against her orders, they’d gone looking for vengeance and sunk the pirates’ ship. With all the pirates aboard.

She’d had to execute another drafter for instigating that and disobeying her. She had qualms about that. One of the men killed in the ambush had been the drafter’s lover. The men were greens. They had a hard time obeying rules.

But after that, her authority hadn’t been questioned again.

It also meant that as they finally made it to Wiwurgh, she had only two drafters and Phyros. The captain and his men had disappeared, not even taking their pay—though they had stolen the galley.

That brought her here, carrying a fortune, looking for a ship and crew crazy enough to search the very mouth of the Everdark Gates for the superviolet seed crystal—or bane. Though of course Liv didn’t tell her father that they were looking for anything. “And that’s it,” she said. She realized as she’d been speaking that it was tremendously comforting to talk to someone who loved her. To connect.