“Troth,” Gavin said.
“Diggity. Been told I got a fearsome aspect my own self. Guess I can use you to loosen the bowels of any poppy fiends we got. I’ll keep my deal,” he said, recovering his swaggering tone. “Gunner abides his bets.”
Grinwoody lifted his eyebrows at the man’s insouciance, but said nothing.
Gavin said, “You gambled for this?”
“Nah… Sorta… I s’pose you could say… Yes. So you see, arter I lost the first time—my ante the gun-sword, his the ship yonder—he asked me if I wanted to go double or nothin’. I felt real down-like about losing your poky boom stick, plus I didn’t have anything left to lose ’cept this mighty fine jacket what I plundered from an Ilytian pirate king. Plust, whenever has Gunner’s luck been so bad he’s lost twice in a row?” He twisted his ratty beard. “So, uh, arter I lost again, he said I gots to sail my old bosom friend Guile through White Mist Reef. He calls that losing! An’ if we live, I keep the ship! You know our missing?” Gunner asked. ‘Our mission.’
“Oh yes.”
“Ain’t it exasperbating?!”
Exciting? Exhilarating? That was one way to put it.
“Not so loud, please,” Grinwoody said, glancing back toward the Chromeria looming above them all.
“Can’t wait to show you my new girl!” Gunner said. “Guile! Brother! If we pull this off, we’ll be legends!”
Gavin sighed. “Gunner… we’re already legends.”
Gunner winked. “That’s Cap’n Gunner to you.”
Gavin looked up at the Chromeria looming above him. Somewhere up there was Karris. She was this close. She was on this island, greeting this dawn, and she would never know he was here.
He was about to get on a ship and leave—going to his death, no doubt—and she would never know he’d been this close.
All that stuff about controlling the black luxin in Gavin’s eye patch could be a bluff. Could be. But the Order was here, armed, unstoppable, standing behind everyone and everything he loved.
Grinwoody laid the Blinding Knife out over his palms. “Let me make something clear, Guile. I have watched you for decades now. I have seen you prevaricate and charm. I have seen you baffle and obfuscate. I have seen you stand steady as a mountain and then dodge the inevitable with the grace of a bull dancer. I have seen you appear to lose, only to emerge quietly victorious years later. Some would see you as diminished by the loss of your drafting. I don’t accept that. So let me tell you this, as a man who fully appreciates the powers of his opponent, and the dire position I’m putting that resourceful man in: I don’t know if Orholam can be destroyed, but I expect you to find a way to do it. I expect you to turn your whole heart and mind and soul to accomplishing it. If you fail, I will kill everyone you love. Her first.” He cast his eyes up toward the Prism’s Tower where Karris must be. “If anything happens to me or you reveal me, she dies. If she disappears, one of those she trusts enough to take with her will be mine, and she will die. If any of a hundred things happens that is not your obedience and success, I will take away every bright and happy thing in this world that you know.
“On the other hand,” he said, his voice taking on a happy tone as if he hadn’t been threatening Gavin a moment before, “if you succeed, you will be the man who changed the world forever. Who, indeed, saved the world.” He offered the Blinding Knife in his hands to Gavin. “‘Some work of noble note may yet be done,’ eh? What will it be? Death? Or a chance?”
Looking into Grinwoody’s black orbs—no, Anazar’s, there was nothing of the sniveling slave in this man—Gavin believed him completely. There was no weaseling out of this. No third way. No drafting something so audacious that no one else had ever dreamed of it to escape.
Perhaps it was a measure of Gavin’s stubborn arrogance, even here, even now, reduced to this, that his thought wasn’t of how impossible it all was. He thought, But what if I succeed?
Magic was lost to him, but that was very different from killing magic altogether. Everything he’d done and built and dreamed and created had been because of and with magic. The whole society. His family’s wealth and privilege. His living while his brother died. The skimmers. The condor.
Grinwoody couldn’t be right… but what if he was?
Whistling a melodious little trill, Gunner nudged him. “C’mon, what’ll it be? Death or glory?”
Gavin rubbed the eye patch, and the touch of the black luxin jewel sent unpleasant tingles through his fingers and down his wrist. He pulled his hand away. As the snowy-fingered dawn reached across the sky like a thief, he grabbed the dark Blinding Knife and said, “Let’s sail. Death and glory, Cap’n Gunner.”
“Death or glory. Or,” Gunner said.
Not likely.
He cast his eyes up at the tower. Goodbye, Karris. Farewell, my love.
Chapter 77
“We’ve got a skimmer of Blackguards back, High Lady,” Samite reported as she strode into Karris’s staterooms. There was none of the usual levity from the square-shouldered woman. “There are casualties.”
Karris broke off another damned negotiation for black powder with representatives of the Ilytian pirate kings—now with a pirate queen added in for variety—and left immediately.
In minutes they were in the infirmary. Chirurgeons and luxiats bustled through a ward of gleaming white stone. The infirmary was ablaze with light all hours of the day and night. The sun’s rays were believed to have healing properties. Because that meant it was substantially warmer than other floors of the Prism’s Tower, it was held that the servants and luxiats here were allowed shortened sleeves and hemlines because of the heat.
The truth was grimmer, told in the runnels and gutters in the infirmary floor: short sleeves and hems don’t drag in blood. In its long history, the Chromeria had seen its share of war and pestilence.
Karris composed herself as she walked. She wasn’t the concerned friend or even a stern-faced commander here, she was Orholam’s left hand on earth. As he looked unblinking on every horror, and with mercy on every weakness, so must she appear caring but unmoved. She must be a pillar for others to lean on, never needy, never surprised, never weak. Iron.
The rooms were surprisingly sedate. Karris hadn’t been down here since the last training accident more than a month ago, when two teenaged nunks ended up with scars across their faces from an explosive they’d created—with one blinded permanently.
These days the infirmary was double staffed—evidence of Carver Black’s early preparations for the war—but it faced hardly more than the usual number of injuries, even as the war training of drafters had continued through the last year.
Given the scarcity of other patients and their elevated status, the Blackguards had been given their own room. Most of the injuries were minor: a burn that had seared Gill Greyling’s sleeve to his bicep, a cut across Jin Holvar’s back, an arrow stuck in Presser’s buttock that would be funny someday if it didn’t get infected. But for once, there was no humor, no attempts at levity.
Gavin Greyling lay on a table surrounded by his brothers and sisters. Not a one didn’t have a hand on him. He was stripped to the waist, but Karris saw no wounds on the teenager.
Karris came to stand by his head and put a hand on the dark, sweaty skin of his chest. She looked to his elder brother Gill, who winced as a chirurgeon ripped the fabric away from his own wound and pressed a bandage to it. The young man never moved his reassuring hand from his brother’s arm. So what was Gavin’s wound?
With a groan, Gavin Greyling opened his eyes to see who had just touched him. And Karris knew.
The sclera of his dark eyes were littered with the glowing blue fragments of his broken halos.
“Ah fuck,” Karris said, forgetting everything she’d just prepared.