The Burning White (95 page)

“Kip, she didn’t tell me that. She said . . . she said someone’s going to die before Ironfist’s people join us. Someone who could avoid it, but almost certainly won’t. Someone who doesn’t deserve to die.”

Kip blinked. “Could be a training accident, then. Someone disembarking from the ships, slipping or something.”

“Could be,” Corvan said, but his eyes were pained.

The lift stopped, but he didn’t open the doors.

Corvan looked down at his feet. “In the Prisms’ War, I found purpose and friendship and status, and at its end, I lost all those, and my best friend, and my wife, and I . . . I did things. I got lost for a long time, Kip. I wish I’d been better to you. A lot better. You deserved more.”

“We’ve work to do,” Kip said. “We’ll talk later. Oh, one last thing!” He leaned close to Corvan and whispered in his ear, even then cupping his hand over his mouth so his lips couldn’t be read, even though they were alone in the lift. “As satrap, you’re entitled to Blackguard protection. Refuse it. You understand?”

The Blackguard had been infiltrated by the Order. If they were going to make a move, just before or during a battle was exactly when the Order would do it.

Corvan understood. He held on to Kip’s forearms for a moment. “I don’t know that He cares. I’m not sure that He even exists, but may Orholam guard you, son.”

“And may He bring you light in your long night, sir,” Kip said.

Then they parted ways, and Kip wondered if it was the last time he’d ever see the man.

Commander Ironfist had been a legendary figure before he left the Jaspers. Striding victoriously into Karris’s audience chamber, every eye upon him, King Ironfist was utterly terrifying.

In accord with Parian customs since the time of Lucidonius, the old Commander Ironfist had dressed modestly, wearing long-sleeved tunics and a carefully folded ghotra to cover his hair. That modesty was a centuries-old antidote to the more-ancient-still flamboyance of the pagan Parians who had come before them. In the Paria of old, the kings and queens had preferred to delight the eye and boggle the mind.

King Ironfist joined the ancient kings now, and he certainly overawed all who saw him. His hair—uncovered—was twisted with gold dust and glue, into a great free crown of jumbled curls around his head. On one eyelid, cribbing from the Nuqaba, was painted the ancient Parian rune for Justice. On the other was Mercy. He wore an eye patch, flipped up now, which could be lowered to cover the one or the other.

On the patch was stitched a fiery orb, an orange eye aflame. His tunic was as tight as a Blackguard tunic, sleeveless, revealing biceps that looked like they could shake the pillars of heaven. But instead of modest black, this tunic was all bold checks of gold and white, brilliant as the sun itself, belted with white leather around a slim waist that emphasized the enormous breadth of his shoulders.

On his left wrist, he wore a manacle and a cruel heavy chain. According to the tale, it was the chain he’d literally torn from a rock wall trying to save his sister, the Nuqaba, from being assassinated. He wore a necessarily broad gold bicep band with a hook by his elbow, from which he suspended the end of the chain so that it was held tight along his forearm.

Ironfist was a king who’d broken chains. Now he used his chains to make war.

At his heels, sniffing the air like wolves first catching the scent of a sheep pen, were two enormous war hounds, a terrible midnight and a smaller albino.

But more frightening than the vestments or the hard tattoos or the new scars or the uncharacteristic showiness of his garb or even the damn-near horse-sized dogs was the look of dull rage in his eyes.

Karris had known angry men. Habitually angry men were always dangerous, but unfocused, undisciplined. You had to keep an eye on them the same way Karris would keep her eye on those hounds, but when such men attacked, it was usually with more ferocity than skill.

For her entire tenure in the Blackguard, Karris had also known dangerous men. Such men would use force when necessary, coolly, passionlessly, and with great skill.

But when a dangerous man got angry, you could be in for something else altogether.

Ironfist’s quiet brother, Tremblefist, had gone into a battle rage once, and thereby earned himself a Name. It had taken the blood of five hundred to quench the Butcher of Aghbalu’s rage. Ironfist was his brother’s equal with a blade, and far more experienced than that young man had been.

Karris had never wanted to see Ironfist truly angry. She had prayed she never would.

Today, her prayer had been denied.

“High Lady!” Ironfist boomed, coming forward on quick steps. Two warriors flanked him, draped in bold colors, a man with a bocote-wood lion helm with lion’s teeth and a woman with claw scars on her face and wearing a baboon helm. Each was as tall and lean as the hellstone-tipped spears they carried. Drafters, and if Ironfist had deemed them fit to accompany him before his old command, they were surely formidable warriors indeed.

Not one of the twelve Blackguards attending Karris wasn’t sweating.

Ironfist motioned to his
Tafok Amagez
to stay back—right at the point where the Blackguard were about to challenge them to stop. He knew. He knew everything about the Blackguard’s defenses, every seam, every weakness. If anyone could take apart the Blackguard, it was Ironfist.

He said, “How you’ve changed since you came under my tutelage when I was a new trainer, and you that scrawny noble girl hoping to find a purpose in the Blackguard.”

She said nothing. Let him set the landscape of this discussion. She owed him that much.

Besides, if she didn’t hear him out, she wouldn’t know where to put pressure and where to yield so fast his weight carried him off his feet.

“ ‘The Iron White’ they call you now,” he said, sweeping a quick hand at the gathered nobles and courtiers and Colors and every maid and servant important enough to finagle their way into this meeting. He moved it so sharply, not a few of them flinched. “And that, not so long after you dropped Karris White Oak to become Karris Guile, then Karris the White. It seems you’ve gone through many names in a short time.”

“And you, many masters,” Karris said. The retort hit like a whip-crack.

He blinked as if slapped, but he didn’t even slow his walk. Two steps silent, three, before he paused, just outside where the Blackguard would stop a man—but still too close for
this
man to get.

Then he said, “Yet now you’ve lost your name altogether, and I my masters.”

“Have you?” she asked, but she said it gently, quietly. “Have you, my old friend?”

Something in his mien wavered like a blossom struggling to open on a day of jumbled sunshine and rain.

Then it closed tight again.

He put his hands down to his sides and patted the heads of the great war hounds. It was, of course, forbidden to bring war hounds into the audience chamber. A war hound was either a heresy or a target: either an animal that had already been will-cast, or an innocent beast that might be will-cast under your nose by malevolent forces.

Karris had allowed them in without complaint. What else could she do? She’d allowed Kip to keep his, albeit not in the audience chamber itself.

At Ironfist’s tap, the smaller white hound with its pink eyes sat. Ironfist reached up and pulled down his eye patch over the Mercy tattoo, leaving only Justice.

Damn, damn, damn.

“Perhaps we could move to a more private setting?” she asked now. Ironfist was a reasonable man. Had been, anyway. Perhaps she could find that man again, if only she could get him away from all the eyes that demanded he act like a king instead.

But there was little or nothing of the old Ironfist here. This man looked indeed like the kings of old: harsh and terrible and primal. He said, “The Chromeria’s secrecy and lies are what have brought us here. You need my fleet. You need Seers Island’s army. The White King’s armada will arrive tomorrow, and attack then or the next day. You have no time. ”

“You need us as much as we need you,” Andross Guile called out from the side entrance of the audience chamber. He walked in quickly, confidently, like a man twenty years younger. “We can win without you. On the other hand, you know that if the heathen destroys us, he’ll come for you next. The King of Wights is not a man to be content with less than all the world. Joining us is your only hope of stopping him.”

The crowd in the audience chamber was riveted. For some, this was confirmation of the rumors that the White King was coming. Others were hearing it for the first time. All of them knew Ironfist by name at least, and all of them knew he’d declared himself king. Hell, not a few of them probably liked him more than they liked Karris or Andross.

Karris had a sudden paranoid thought wondering if he’d arranged for a coup. What if he’d packed this chamber with his own loyalists?

But no, surely Commander Fisk would have guarded against such things. Right?

But still, her throat was tight. Who knew where else traitors lurked, if Ironfist himself could be one?

King Ironfist was looking at Andross Guile with open disdain on his face as the old man took his seat next to Karris. “Horseshit. You offer your help for hypothetical troubles while you yourself face extinction now. We’re not equals here, so let’s skip the oily preambles, snake. You need my armies. I’m here to tell you the price for them.”

Astonishment rippled through the crowd. No one talked to Andross Guile like that.
No one.

And then anyone who remembered that Andross had stripped Iron-fist of his command of the Blackguard saw the depths of the antipathy between the men. This was not going to be pretty. This was why Karris hadn’t wanted Andross here.

Andross didn’t say anything immediately. Didn’t bring his old commander to heel with a word.

And if he
didn’t
, everyone saw, it had to be because he couldn’t. Thus, Ironfist was telling the truth when he announced their weakness. The Jaspers really were that vulnerable.

And suddenly, the people were afraid.

Perhaps, working with paints mixed from vermilion rage and white-hot anger and black vexation, a painter as talented as Janus Borig might have been able to capture the spirit of Andross Guile now being publicly humiliated by a
slave
.

But he mastered himself and merely twitched a hand as one would to a servant: ‘Go on.’

Karris knew she should intervene, soften the grind of stone on stone between these two men: Ironfist, fed up with the years of injustices, and Andross, unable to believe a slave would step so high out of his proper place.

But she had no words. Her heart was in her throat.

King Ironfist tilted his head, thoughtful, almost taunting.

It was coming now. Ironfist would propose the alliance, the kind that could only be sealed by her marriage. She would have to marry Ironfist tonight. With this attitude, he wasn’t going to let his men off their ships until it was done. And ‘done’ meant signed, sealed, and consummated.

Though she was a grown woman, somehow she hadn’t let herself think that last part through. She would see it through. She knew that. She wasn’t going to faint this close to the finish line. But how could she bear to take this angry stranger’s weight upon her? Once they were behind closed doors, would he become, somehow, her dear friend again?

But there would be no reprieve, no hoping he might delay the consummation, no blotting herself out with drink as she’d done with the real Gavin Guile—Ironfist might know that story, and he could give her no excuse to annul the marriage. She would take him to her bed, and she would do it sober, and she would meet his eyes while she did it.

Would she feign pleasure while she betrayed the only man she’d ever loved?

Orholam have mercy, what if she
felt
pleasure?

Would she hold back some position, some act, hoping to hold on to some piece of her own soul?

For some reason, until now, Karris had thought of dishonoring her office and dishonoring Ironfist and Gavin as somehow external: those would be acts others would judge unfairly, not understanding why she did them or how much good she was accomplishing. When she’d thought of her betrayals, she’d imagined only before she did what had to be done, and after.

Now she couldn’t help but imagine the
during
.

But she would do it. To save her people, she was going to do it, even if for every moment of it she imagined Gavin somehow walking in on her, she was going to do it.

Finally, King Ironfist spoke, looking at Andross. “I gave you the best years of my life. My brother, Hanishu, did, too, and then he died for you. And in return, you threw me out like garbage, and then you ordered the murder of my sister.” Now the new king stared at them both, and Karris wasn’t spared the heat of his gaze.

She suddenly felt things sliding off-kilter, like a wagon too heavily loaded careening down a thin mountain road suddenly jumping out of the safety of the ruts to where the cliffs waited.

“This is not a negotiation. This is an ultimatum,” King Ironfist said. “You’ve taken my family from me. You want my help? I want a dead Guile. You, old man. Or you, Karris. Or Kip. You decide.”

“Or Zymun?” Andross asked quickly, as if he were merely gathering information.

“Ha! How much of a fool do you think I am?” Ironfist barked. “No. I’m not here to solve Guile problems. I’m here to be one. You decide. I’ll be back at midnight to see the deed done. If you don’t, we join the White King.”

Without another word, without a look back, Ironfist and his retinue strode from the hall, their footsteps echoing loudly in the utter silence of hundreds of noblemen and women who could only stare at one another in wide-eyed fear.

Andross had thought he was so smart. Andross had been so sure Ironfist would do the rational thing, the thing Andross would do. But Ironfist wasn’t rational; he was grieving; he was furious, and he was hell-bent on revenge.

Ironfist was sounding a death knell that couldn’t be unrung. The satrapies would die—if not tomorrow, then next year. After this, even if Paria and the Chromeria together defeated the White King, this blood Ironfist demanded
would
be answered with blood. But Karris couldn’t blame him. Not in the least. Ironfist hated injustice; it was something she’d always admired about him. And she and Andross had murdered his people first.