“Which brings us to our present difficulty,” the Old Man said. He stayed where he was, against one curving outer wall of the tower. He was hooded and cloaked, and a glint of spectacles was visible—the paryl ones, Teia guessed. “Your actions up until now had allayed my suspicions. Or so I thought.”
“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Teia said. “I’m still proving myself? Fine. Tell me to kill her. I will. I don’t care. You told me to get close. I am. But I’ve never forgotten what I’m there for. And you still haven’t given me my…”—she took a sharp breath through her nose and corrected herself—“a cloak.”
“Allaying my suspicions is one thing; earning my trust is quite another,” the Old Man said. “But even that is in jeopardy now.”
Teia said nothing.
Murder Sharp had faded back, off to the side, far enough that he was out of Teia’s peripheral vision. The serpent fear in her guts wakened and turned. She looked at him with a challenge in her eyes.
He stared back blankly and started picking at his fangs.
“Let’s talk about your father,” the Old Man said.
“What? Why?” she asked, not able to keep the surprise from her voice.
“The White paid all his debts, right around the time you became a Blackguard. She had no reason to do that.”
There was no pretending ignorance, not with the Old Man. No deflection. “She told me it was normal to look into Blackguard scrubs’ lives to see if there were any ways enemies could exploit them, turn them. I was shocked, too. But she said she was dying and had no heirs, and her wealth could at least do some good.”
“You never told the other Blackguards about it.”
“Well, none of the ones on your payroll, apparently,” Teia said. She sounded like a snotty kid even to herself.
Murder Sharp tensed at her disrespect, and she made a soothing gesture.
“Easy. Sorry. Look, I didn’t tell anyone. Look.” She took a breath. “We all came from different places, and some of us talk about our pasts and some don’t. They can see my ear. They know I was a slave. A fair number of the girls who came from that life… well, we don’t volunteer much, and the others don’t ask. There’s everything from orphans to nobles’ children in the Blackguard. I thought that by telling what she’d done for me I would sound like I was bragging. But yes, absolutely, it meant the world to me.”
“Enough to buy your loyalty?”
“As a slave, I’m pretty attuned to people trying to buy me, thanks. It wasn’t that. She wasn’t using her money to put me in her debt, not precisely. To her, the money was negligible. The effort and the care were the real expenses. She was a great woman, and she was kind to me. I know she was clever, too, but I saw no falsehood in it.”
“But it was enough to buy your loyalty all the same,” the Old Man said.
“If you have to put it like that, yes. Like you ‘bought’ mine by melting down all those silver items I stole that Lady Crassos was using to blackmail me, I suppose.”
He chuckled and wagged a finger. “Point. Very clever, very true. Did it work?”
“It did, until now,” she said gloomily. No, it had never worked. It had always been clear to her that she was working with monsters.
“We killed Orea,” the Old Man said. “Specifically, Murder did. Your master. That a problem for you?”
Teia flinched. As soon as the old woman had come up, she’d been desperately searching her mind for any time Murder had mentioned her, and if she was supposed to know that the Order had killed her—but all her information had come from sources the Order couldn’t—shouldn’t—know about. “I suspected as much,” she said.
“But you never asked. Despite feeling loyalty to her,” Sharp asked skeptically.
“I cared about her, yes. But she was old, dying already. I wasn’t going to ask about it until I knew you trusted me. I look forward. Why risk my own neck for someone who’s already dead?” It seemed so easy, somehow, here in the darkness, to talk and think like those who were empty.
“This,” the Old Man said. “From a girl who likes to hold grudges? You’re not angry at me or Sharp?”
“Oh hell yes! I’ve got a list of things I’m furious at you for,” Teia said. “But I’m not an idiot. Being mad at you isn’t like being mad at your neighbor who gets loudly drunk every night after you go to bed; it’s like being mad at the weather. Raise your fist to your neighbor, you might change things. Raise your fist to the sky, and you’re a fool.”
He seemed to appreciate the flattery. But then he walked over to one of the great mirrors on the east side of the tower. It was blackened, burnt—not just soot on the glass, but the silver backing itself was mottled and melted, ruined. “I asked you to meet us here for two reasons: The lightwells are handy to dispose of a corpse if necessary—we can’t disappear a Blackguard, and slipping down these is easy enough that it could be accidental. Second, for this. I like physical illustrations when I can afford them.” He patted the mirror. “Do you know how this happened?” he asked.
“Sir? No.”
“No one does. It happened during the executions on Orholam’s Glare—which is when anything would fail, one imagines. The intensity of that light scared off no few of our newest members. The caretakers of these mirrors are slaves, of course, but highly prized, intelligent, taken excellent care of, like the Blackguards themselves. They swore it must be sabotage, for they would never, never leave so much as a smudge on one of the great mirrors, certainly not before such a grand occasion. Others claim it was the djinn himself who reached his will up and smote the mirror, but that he couldn’t break even one before he died.
“Carver Black himself hasn’t been able to replace it. The backup mirrors appear on their lists of inventory they purchased years ago, but not in their storehouses. Not our work, actually, just old-fashioned corruption—someone long ago lining their pockets. Creating new mirrors of the quality needed to replace this one has been impossible because of the war. They require Atashian or Tyrean glass and silver from the Karsos Mountains bonded by one of three lens makers in Ru. So here it sits, long months after its failure. Marginally useful, kept in place mostly because the other mirrors need the counterweight, not because it does much of anything. It failed its purpose. Perhaps it never should have been put in service in the first place.” He stepped away from it. “I don’t want you to fail me, Adrasteia. I won’t allow it. So I will test you to your limit, and perhaps beyond.”
He took a breath, studying her, and she held herself still and reflective as silver. Let him see only himself in me, she thought.
Then he said, “Your father is here. On the Jaspers.”
And suddenly the cloud of danger suffusing the room like paryl gas crystallized in Teia’s chest, choking her heart. Father? Here? He’d mentioned coming to the Jaspers in that letter last year that Orea Pullawr had shown her, but Teia’d never imagined he’d actually follow through on it.
And the Order had known about him before anyone.
“I want you to prove yourself. I want you to earn my trust like Elijah here did.”
No, no, no.
The Old Man said, “Only pain makes us sharp. Only pain makes a Sharp. Are you ready, Teia? Ready to become a Shadow? Ready to become my left hand as Murder is my right?”
Murder Sharp’s eyes were orbs of midnight. Teia couldn’t expand her own eyes without his seeing it, couldn’t look for the paryl that she knew must be around and through her right now like a choking cloud. Any move that so much as smelled like hostility would mean death now. “We’re your family now, Adrasteia,” Sharp said.
“To become Teia Sharp, you must sever the last link of your loyalty to any other before us,” the Old Man said. “You’ll be given one hour to say your goodbyes, and then you’ll kill your father. You’ll be well paid for this. The rest of your family will be taken care—”
“Fuck you,” Teia said. “No. Never.”