The Burning White (49 page)

“So you didn’t want mercy for Ruadhán, because you’re afraid he’ll hurt us.”

“How many second chances does a man get? I would’ve said one, and that then he deserves everything he gets and worse. But you give Conn Arthur a third chance—and it feels
right
. You confuse me, and I can’t tell if things work out for you because different rules apply to you, or if you’re just the only person I know brave enough to try them.”

So that was why Cruxer had almost stopped Kip from stepping in front of the window that day: anyone else, he would have stopped, but Kip?

The young commander scrubbed his fingers through his short curly hair. “It’s different, right? Up near the top of the Great Chain, the lines get fuzzy. I know the Lightbringer is going to upend everything.
You
have to obey Orholam, and you have to figure out if following the Chromeria’s will fits with that. Me? I hate that kind of thing. I’m not equipped for that stuff. Not made for it. You decide where Orholam calls us to go. Me? I follow you, unless you do something that outrages the light of conscience Orholam gave me.”

“Or if I put myself in danger,” Kip said.

“Well, I do get to save your dumb ass from yourself, yes,” he said with a short-lived smile. “But that’s not quite the same thing.”

Kip nodded agreement, but his heart ached. How do you save a friend who’s had a trauma burn the wrong lesson onto their heart in words of fire? “Cruxer . . . This rigidity in you, this fear? That’s still the wound. Not the healing. You know that, right?”

“No. It’s not. This is righteousness, and a man
must
fear he’ll lose his integrity in a world like this or he’ll never keep it.”

“True . . . true,” Kip said. And entirely beside the point. He tried another tack. “There were two brothers. During a siege of an enemy city, they heroically broke through a burning sally port door. The city was taken, but they fell wounded and later shared a room as they convalesced from their burns,” Kip said. “Day after day, they spoke as they were able.

“ ‘Fire’s hot,’ the first observed.

“ ‘Still hot, weeks later,’ the second agreed.

“ ‘Burns are the worst,’ the first said.

“ ‘The absolute worst,’ the second agreed.

“ ‘Bravest thing I ever did,’ the first said.

“ ‘Dumbest thing I ever did,’ the second said.

“The first said, ‘If we’d waited, a defender might’ve extinguished that fire, and many more of our friends would have gotten killed trying to take the city.’

“The second replied, ‘If we’d waited, that burning door might’ve fallen down by itself, and we wouldn’t be here, and no one would have gotten hurt saving us when we fell wounded.’

“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, but we did what we had to, and we did it as well as we could,’ the first said.

“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, so we didn’t really accomplish anything,’ the second replied.

“Which one’s right, Cruxer?” Kip asked.

Dawn hadn’t yet rolled over in her bed, much less brushed the horizon with groggy fingers to see if her lover still attended her. But despite the darkness, the armor-bearers and bakers and coal-carriers and dung-boys and the egglers and the fletchers were already up, their diurnal labors slowly displacing the stubborn nocturnal revelry of those soon leaving to greet death. The garrulous and the hateful and the inquisitive and the jocular would come later to see them off. Kin and lovers would trail behind, some mothers following for a league or more, unwilling to turn their faces from sons and daughters they might never see again.

Kip had come down from the wall and the mirror and his angry wife to walk from campfire to campfire, clapping shoulders and admiring weapons and offering a ready ear. Being seen, mostly, though it meant even more to those he touched and nodded to and questioned. A hundred times, he’d raised some offered skin, but had let neither beer nor brandy nor more exotic brews beyond his lips.

A hundred times, he saw a man he barely recognized in his people’s eyes, and he didn’t know if he could maintain the image of that hero and yet remain himself.

“There’s a sadness about you,” a logistics officer in her forties said. “You got respect, wealth, position, beautiful wife, friends—whole world in your purse. What’s that about?”

She was one to know sorrow. When she’d refused to hand over the location of her daughter and several of her grandchildren, the Blood Robes had burned her brewery down—after locking two of her other grandchildren inside. The daughter who’d been saved couldn’t forgive her for it, so she’d left it all and joined up.

Kip met her gaze. “I want to lead as well as you all deserve, and I’m afraid I won’t.”

Her eyes widened briefly at his honesty, and he could see her tuck that away to share it with others later.

They would love him more for it, he knew, but that hadn’t been why he said it. Somewhere, oddly, he’d displaced some essential part of his fear. He wasn’t, perhaps, fully the man they thought he was, but neither was he a fraud.

It also wasn’t quite the whole truth. Tonight felt like a little death; tonight was goodbye—though he couldn’t tell them that. Every hour of surprise that he gained on the White King and separately on his generals at Green Haven was an hour that might mean the difference between victory and defeat. So Kip had to endure this goodbye alone, even while in the company of those he’d come to love.

He joined the fire of some river sailors and longshoremen and asked a question about some intricate knot a man was using. When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything.

Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.

When he understood and asked if that meant you would use that particular knot with these cotton ropes in this kind of application, but only use it with a hemp rope in these other ones, they seemed to think he was a genius.

For a noble anyway, one offered, testing to see how prickly he was.

He laughed, though. “I see I’m not the only bastard here!”

They lit up. It was almost too easy, with men who wanted to like you.

Then he indulged his curiosity and threw a problem at them. “So let’s say I’ve got a stallion. Fully barded. Sixteen hands. Weighs, what, probably nineteen and a half or twenty sevens? Got a wall fifteen paces high, but straight up, sheer. We can get right to the base. What ropes and knots do I use to lift him as quickly as possible to the top of the wall? And how long does it take? Let’s say I’ve got access to hemp ropes and cotton, much as I need. Manpower’s no problem, but time is.”

They peppered him with a few other questions about what other supplies they had available. Pulleys? Nets? In a minute, they’d devised and refined a plan. Their pleasure in demonstrating their mastery told Kip he was on to something he should repeat at the other fires.

“No, no, no,” a young sailor piped up suddenly after they’d all agreed on their answer. “You’re doing it all wrong. I can get that horse to the top of the wall in half that time. We gotta think about this like our brothers the longshoremen here. We got these standard-size boxes, right?” He held his hands out to show how big they were.

“We already talked about that,” one of the longshoreman interjected. “No matter how you lash ’em together, you can’t make a platform or a sling with ’em. Ain’t gonna be strong enough for—”

“So first thing you do is,” the young man continued, his hands still held out to box size, “you cut the horse into pieces this big—”

Both the sailors and the longshoremen busted up laughing, though the longshoremen followed it with cursing at him for his cheek.

“Watch out, boys,” Kip said, standing to go. “With that kind of approach to problem solving, you might have yourselves a future officer there.”

They laughed again, and he moved on, but not before he took the boy’s name. A quick wit’s the flower of a keen mind. The boy might be an officer yet.

After some hours, he gave in to exhaustion. He couldn’t see everyone, and dawn was coming.

But as he made his excuses and said his goodbyes, he was careful not to tell anyone that he’d see them later. With where they were going, he couldn’t guarantee that he would; with where he was going, he could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn’t.

“Some of you have felt it,” Karris said. “Your leaders in the Magisterium seem, curiously, to lack confidence.” She was addressing a hundred young luxiats in a regular lecture hall. She’d told the magisters she wanted to offer them encouragement in a difficult time.

Instead, what she was telling them might get them all killed, and her with them.

‘I’ve left you a mess. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have failed,’ Orea had told her.

Well. This was where the rot began, so this is where Karris would begin, too. At some point, the shining, idealistic faces of the young luxiats before her would become old and powerful . . . and compromised, and even corrupt.

She didn’t have a master plan yet, but she knew that what Orholam had for her to do began here.

“It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s as if they almost think that the life-giving Lord in whom we believe is not, perhaps, so superior to the pagans’ ancestor worship and ritual orgies, and their elevation of drafters as innately more valuable than other men and women. Why are our leaders so tentative? Is it merely because they are old? What is so wrong with us? Has one day passed since High Luxiat Tawleb’s execution on Orholam’s Glare that you haven’t asked yourself, ‘How could the High Magisterium itself shelter such a person?’ A murderer in league with Nabiros himself? And then we saw Pheronike—not simply serving the immortal but somehow
hosting
him. How can such things be? Why is our faith spineless? Have we nothing to offer a dark world desperate for light?”

There was still time to bail out, to offer some anodyne exhortation to be faithful and do good.

Karris hadn’t brought the red folio, but everything she did now was informed by it, and by the fact that Orholam had armed her with it. Why would Orea choose Karris to succeed her? Why, out of all those smarter, holier, and more impressive in a hundred ways, would Orholam choose her to be His White now?

It could only be because Karris was a warrior. So she sometimes needed direction? Orea’s letter was that much: clean up the mess, whatever the cost. Fight. Die if necessary. Inspire others to join you in that, through your example. Karris could do that.

The red volume was, damnably, missing large chunks of its text. Apparently at least one of the later recipients of the work had ignored their pledge, or considered themselves not bound by an oath they hadn’t consented to.

A later pen claimed that at one point, the folio had been sealed with some sort of a will-crafting magic so that it wouldn’t even open until a new White had signed her name and assented with her will to the oath. Now oath-binding was another magic forbidden, and mercifully lost.

But despite what had been erased, what remained was enough. Karris wasn’t the first of the Whites after the folio had been altered, and her predecessors had been brilliant and curious and indefatigable in restoring what they could. While some had written circumspectly, others were bruisingly blunt.

Careful to use the past tense, Karris said, “My own husband, the Lord Prism, the Highest Luxiat, himself did not believe in Orholam.”

Gasps went up. They looked at her as if she were sullying the dead, and her own husband, no less. These young luxiats liked her a lot, she could tell, so they were doubly aghast.

“You’re shocked,” she said. “So it will grieve you to learn that none of the High Magisters were shocked at all by his disbelief. In fact, I’d be surprised if his atheism
wasn’t
shared by some of them. They cared little. So long as Gavin kept up the pretense of faith, they were content. He did his duty faithfully, except that he had not the faith that undergirds those duties.”

If they had dared to shout her down, they would have then. It was why she had excluded the High Luxiats and their staff, not by barring them from the meeting but by pretending it was yet another informal exhortation of the kind she’d done many times before.

Indeed, she’d met with three other classes recently and given them each an uninspiring lecture. Giving the same stultifying lecture, three times, had been enough to bore the important luxiats and magisters away.

All that in order to set this up.

The sole person of any standing in the room, a Magister Jens Galden, looked ill to the point of fainting. He stood at the back, and suddenly looked as if he were uncertain if he should bolt and go summon his superiors, or if he had better stay so he could keep a record of what outrage she spoke next.

She and Quentin had not chosen these young luxiats at random. Among their number was the order of the
auditarae
—a group dedicated to the preservation of contemporary and ancient history. The auditarae’s discipline involved training their memories with various tricks and a great deal of practice to a point where they could listen to a speech of half an hour and replicate it point for point, if not word for word. Others of their order were trained in a traditional shorthand, and partnered with an auditarae, so that together they could compare their recollections and notes to form an accurate representation of the speech. This was not primarily for an accurate text of the speech—skilled shorthand was more than adequate for that—instead, the auditarae wrote annotated copy akin to a musical text, noting accents, rising or falling volume, pitch, speed, obvious sarcasm, physical movements, and other verbal flourishes or delivery idiosyncrasies. These, requiring judgment calls, were more art than science, and the auditarae worked first in isolation with their partner and then often compared their results with other auditarae.