The Burning White (11 page)

After she stepped out, wordlessly, he snapped a salute to Samite, and left.

Samite didn’t return the salute; she barely dipped her chin.

She wasn’t usually rude. If anything, oddly, losing her hand had made her less of a hard-ass than before.

Teia had taken advantage of the Blackguards’ noise in moving about the room to position herself in a dark corner behind Samite’s back—the woman was facing the window and the door, where threats were likely to appear. They’d also dull her night vision.

Pretty quickly, Teia realized that Samite intended to stand guard all night. Not good.

Why? What the hell was going on?

Long minutes passed, and none of them moved. Teia was going to have to think of something to get rid of Samite, or she was going to be here all night.

And it’s harder to be totally silent for an entire night than one might guess. Teia relaxed her hold on paryl. She didn’t have the strength to stay fully invisible all night, but with the darkness and Samite staring the other way, she shouldn’t have to.

“You can go,” Karris said from the bed. Finally.

Please obey, Trainer Samite. Please?

But Samite merely squared her shoulders. Though not tall, she was built like a draft horse.

After a long minute, Samite said, “Being this kind of hard? Not good. This kind of hard is brittle. You should weep for him.”

For him? Huh? For Gavin? That had to be it. But why was this happening now? So far as Karris knew, Gavin had been absent for nearly a year.

“
You’re
not weeping,” Karris said. There was nothing of tears in her voice, either.

Ah, so not Gavin, then? Who would they both weep for?

“I’m on duty,” Samite said. “This is your
break
from duty. These hours are when you need to regroup so you can put on your face tomorrow.”

Karris scoffed.

“The dumbest scrub learns that if you don’t take off your blacks and give ’em a wash, you’re gonna stink, and you’ll wear through ’em in no time. That applies to your clothes, too, O Iron White.”

Teia had never heard someone speak so scornfully to Karris, not even when she’d just been Karris White Oak.

“Do I need to order you to go?” Karris asked coldly.

“Not the kind of order I’m required to obey,” Samite said. She turned her back and folded her arms.

“What, you think I’m a danger to myself? I’m not going to
kill
myself.” The condescension was thick in Karris’s voice. Teia had never heard her talk that way to anyone, either.

Then she remembered these two had been in the same cohort. They’d known each other for nearly twenty years, and been through everything together.

You can be a bitch to a heart-friend, when you really have to.

But Samite merely applied the servant’s veto—she pretended not to hear: what I have just heard is a fool’s order; my mistress is no fool; ergo my mistress obviously didn’t give it.

Karris sank back into her covers. Speaking to the ceiling, she asked, “Have you ever done it?”

“It’s not such a horrible thing,” Samite said. “Dying for something you believe in. For someone you believe in. And he did. More than anything.”

“Have you ever done it? Personally?”

“You know I haven’t,” Samite said a few moments later, back still turned.

What the hell? They were talking about a Freeing. Someone must have broken the halo recently. One of the Blackguards?

Teia’s chest went tight. No.

A scroll of the names of every Blackguard Teia knew started unfurling before her mind’s eye. Who was close to bursting their halo? She felt a sting of guilt at the realization that losing some of her comrades wouldn’t bother her at all.

“You want to know a secret?” Karris asked. Her voice was bitter as the black kopi she loved. She sat up. “A secret I barely even dare whisper even here? Here, in my own rooms, to you, my oldest fri . . .” She trailed off.

“What?” Samite asked. Teia drafted the paryl she’d been holding loosely and disappeared before Samite turned around.

The one-handed warrior’s face was forgiving toward this woman who’d been such a bitch moments ago.

But Karris didn’t give the answer. Instead, she looked suddenly ill.

“Oh my God,” Karris said. “This is why Prisms go mad. This is why Gavin was always so wretched at Freeings.”

“What are you talking about?” Samite asked, tense.

“I knew it was hard, Sami. I thought I knew. But . . . it’s not hard.”

Samite’s face was writ with the same confusion Teia felt. Killing their own wasn’t hard? Karris had killed before; surely she knew that the physical act wasn’t so difficult most of the time, so she meant something else.

“Oh
God
,” the White blasphemed, though perhaps such a desperate tone made uttering the holy title a prayer rather than a curse. “Oh God.” Her pale skin went death-white. Her fingers grabbed wads of the covers and she gulped convulsively to keep from vomiting.

“What . . . ?” Samite asked.

“It’s not
hard
, Sami,” Karris said. “I killed that boy, and the veil lifted. This. What we’re doing. It’s not hard. Koios is right. What we’re doing is
wrong
. And if it’s wrong when Gav Greyling offers me his life willingly, how much worse is it when we drag women to the Prism’s knife as they scream and wail and beg us to think of their children?”

Teia felt as if a horse had kicked her. Seeing the White herself lose faith?

Oh, that was pretty bad.

And admit that the Blood Robes were right?

That was also bad.

But that wasn’t the part that Teia’s mind couldn’t hold—like cupped, imploring hands as someone emptied a full pitcher of blood into them. She couldn’t hold the name.

Gav Greyling
. The young, roguish, cute idiot. The lout. He’d only just stopped his obnoxious fake flirting with her.

That asshole. He was just now becoming the friend she needed so, so badly.

He was . . .

Karris had Freed him?

Obviously he’d broken the halo. Probably out on one of the expeditions to find Gavin. And they’d brought him back, knowing what had to be done.

Karris had knifed his heart. Personally.

But after all the people Karris had had Teia kill . . . all the murders of innocent slaves and the kidnapping and murder of Marissia, all the shit she’d ordered Teia to do and to be party to, she, the White herself, was losing faith merely because she’d had to hold the knife? Once?

Now
she flinches?! How dare she.

Sure, you’re only human. You’re allowed to have your doubts.

But you can’t doubt
this
. You’re the White. Any doubts you had should have been dealt with years ago.

If
you
doubt, why should anyone believe?

Among the Blackguard, Gav’s was an honorable death. A combat death. It was counted as succumbing to your wounds from battle. A hero’s death. It was giving your all, and more. It was being willing to give not just your life but even more, your sanity. Most Blackguards, if they felt the halo break, tried to die on the field. Easier that way for everyone. Safer.

But if you didn’t, what you asked in return for your sacrifice was that your friends would end you before you dishonored yourself by hurting those you loved. If possible, if you lived so long, you were accorded the honor of being Freed by your highest commanders, those you trusted with your body and your soul, the head of the Blackguard, or a High Luxiat, or the Prism himself. Nothing short of the dawn Sun Day ritual itself was too important to be interrupted for a Blackguard’s Freeing.

The people who’d put you in the place where you needed to die in order to serve them would hold the knife.

And all you asked for all your suffering and sacrifice was a steady hand on the knife and a steady look in the eye. You asked them to affirm the meaning not just of your death but of your whole life, of the oath of service you’d given and that you were upholding even after breaking the halo, when everything in you screamed to break troth. You asked them to have the basic decency to honor your sacrifice.

How could you become the White, and look into the eyes of a good man who was dying for you, and
blink
?

The Iron White, they called her.

It was a bitter taste in Teia’s mouth. A mock.

Teia felt the darkness all around her like dead, cold fingers touching her cheek; cold, wormy breath blowing down on her hood, wheezing. But as she drafted paryl now, she couldn’t say any more that the darkness was merely a cloak around her than you could say the air was merely around you once you breathed it in.

She opened herself to darkness and it took her. It gave her power, but it changed her, too.

Darkness tore the hem of its robe, and that flapping hem became a fluttering raven that took a perch on her pallid heart.

The winsome, goofy smile of Gav Greyling was no more. And nevermore would be.

Teia would give Karris her report. Not today. But eventually. Teia would do her duty. She always did. The monsters she fought were still monsters. Her friends still her friends. Her commanders still, unfortunately, her commanders. Doubts are for old warriors, not young ones.

But on a personal level? Fuck you, Karris.

You’re making everything you put me through, everything you made me do, be for nothing. Now you’ve given me a dead friend. Why would I give you a live husband?

You took my Gavin. Why should I give you yours?

Teia waited until morning. As the Iron White slept in her soft bed, Adrasteia’s mind never wavered, her determination never faltered, her focus never flagged, her will never failed. Witness to weakness, she was implacable.

When the morning shift came in, she slipped out the door and got to work.

Kip was following Tisis through the verdant vibrancy of the forest. The air was thick as hot soup, the ground spongy underfoot with mosses and fanning ferns, but there was no trail. The clouds broke overhead with the kind of downpour that could last a few minutes or all morning. Kip was drenched in warm sky spit within seconds.

It was kind of miserable being out here, actually. And a total relief.

His Nightbringers only nominally controlled this land, not even a league from Greenwall. It should be safe—aside from the snakes. They had scouts farther out, after all, and this was in the direction least likely for them to be attacked by Daragh the Coward’s bandits, or any unlikely sneak attack from Koios. Cruxer was still nervous, of course. But this had to be secret, so only Kip, Cruxer, Ferkudi, and Tisis had slipped away.

“What’s your read on this?” Tisis asked.

“This?” Kip asked. They’d already agreed he couldn’t make a decision until he learned more. That was the whole point of actually hiking out here rather than just sending orders. “You mean . . .”

“Daragh,” she said, gesturing to the scroll case at her belt as if doing so again.

Oh, that. He’d missed it in the rain and with staring at his footing. Daragh the Coward wanted to meet with Kip.

Kip first suspected he was trying to gain time to spread his forces out to shut down supply or reinforcement, but Daragh had asked to meet in person, in neutral territory.

As if there were any such thing.

They’d sent a message back saying that if Daragh didn’t trust Kip would honor a flag of truce, then he obviously wouldn’t trust any deal he might make with Kip, so a meeting was pointless. Thus Daragh could meet him in the city or not at all.

“There’s a reason his bandits haven’t attacked us directly all this time,” Kip said.

“Depends how you define ‘us,’ ” Tisis said.

The bandits literally lived by enslaving and pillaging, with raping thrown in for good measure and murder as their primary tool. That Daragh the Coward hadn’t attacked Kip’s
forces
per se was incidental to her: their victims were Foresters, and that by itself made them Tisis’s people.

“I’m trying to see it—for the moment—as he does,” Kip said. He’d explained this already. In Daragh’s mind, he had avoided attacking Kip’s people, even as Kip had passed through territory he considered his own. That didn’t happen by accident, not with men like this. So to him, that should mean he and Kip could still work something out.

Tisis would rather fight. Regardless. To her Koios was an invader, but Daragh the Coward was a traitor, which was worse. She might not forgive Kip if he fought the invader but forgave the traitor.

Which made her right morally but wrong strategically.

That was tomorrow’s problem.

They came to the small encampment suddenly, set in a hollow hidden by a hill. General Antonius Malargos greeted them outside the longhouse.

The year of being in authority had transformed Antonius. He’d been the gawky young red drafter, terminally the little-brother figure to his cousin Tisis—whom he still adored. He was still lean, but there was a focus to him now, a strength that knew itself and hadn’t given up its striving to grow more. His people loved him because he loved them, and because he was bold. That he had the Malargos good looks didn’t hurt, either. He had an intuitive grasp of tactics, and would throw himself headlong wherever he sensed weakness.

This was, after all, the young man who’d leaped from his own ship as it was being captured by pirates to steal the pirates’ own ship—and in so doing saved Kip’s father.

Oddest of all for a man so bold, Antonius accepted instruction from those he respected.

He himself had no sense at all of strategy; his eyes glazed during those discussions, but he was young yet. Logistics were beyond him completely, but he could have others attached to him to help with those—though it would always have to be someone with a steel spine, because Antonius had little patience for those who said things couldn’t be done.

Kip liked him a lot.

“My people here will keep quiet,” Antonius said.

He had only ten men here. Even at that, Kip wasn’t certain he was right. Antonius’s total faith in his people inspired deep loyalty in return. But Kip knew that the same person might show different kinds of loyalty in different kinds of fights.