Chapter 114
Andross Guile stood in his cabin, examining himself. He stood, shirtless, with no hood, no cowl, no dark spectacles, the curtains open. He looked at his hands, his arms, and then, last, he looked at his eyes. The broken red halo he’d been hiding for months was gone. He still had all his colors-sub-red, red, orange, and yellow-entwined halfway through the irises of his shocking blue eyes, but they were in balance now.
He’d seen the Blinder’s Knife work before-and it didn’t work like this. That knife killed. But when he looked at his shoulder, it was flawless, not even the skin broken. He looked at his eyes again, certain it was some trick. But there the halo was, stable. And he felt hale. He felt better than he’d felt in fifteen years, twenty. He’d had to sink into his own discipline in order to keep the red from driving him mad-and at the end there, he wasn’t sure he was winning.
Now he was simply a drafter again. A polychrome with a good ten years left in his eyes.
This, this changed everything.
Sometime not long before dawn, Kip washed ashore. He couldn’t take credit for swimming in. He’d barely had the strength to float and breathe for the last few hours. He crawled far enough up the sand not to get pulled out to sea and collapsed like a beached whale.
He woke to someone picking at his pockets, around noon. He floundered, slapping their hands away, afraid he was under attack. He sat up, and saw that there were at least a dozen bodies washed up on the beach around him.
The looter started laughing. Kip blinked up at him, but the young man had the blinding noonday sun burning over his shoulder. He was dressed in a dirty white tunic and cloak adorned with many bands of color. He also had a pistol dangling from his hand.
“Oho, I stopped at the right beach, didn’t I?” the young man said. “Lucky, aren’t I?”
Kip looked down the beach and saw the young man’s dinghy on the beach. He must have seen all the dead from the water and decided to loot what he could. Kip was thirsty. “You have any water?” he croaked.
“In the boat. Food, too.”
Kip stood with difficulty. The young man didn’t help him up. Then it hit him. He knew that voice. He squinted against the brightness. “Oh no,” he said.
“Bit slow, aren’t ya?” Zymun said. He stepped forward and punched Kip in the face.
Kip fell and sat heavily in the sand. He checked his nose, eyes streaming. On the bright side, it wasn’t broken. He stood slowly, walked over to the dinghy. He halfway emptied the skin. He had a headache that he thought was a hangover. He hadn’t had one of those before. Plus he was lightsick. Every part of his body hurt. He had a gash along his ribs and his left arm was throbbing from being stabbed.
Kip considered attacking Zymun, who was rubbing his hand: punching Kip had hurt his fist. But Zymun had a gun. He would see if Kip tried to draft-which right now sounded as appetizing as gargling sewage-and Kip was feeling about as agile as a hundred-and-twelve-year-old man. Kip had seen the boy draft, long ago. He had no doubt that Zymun had the will to use that pistol. He got in the boat.
“Take off that belt and give it to me. Then tear off a strip of your shirt and tie it around your eyes,” Zymun said. “Slowly.”
Kip did both. He felt Zymun push the dinghy into the water. Kip lunged forward, tearing off his blindfold.
Zymun was clinging to the prow with one hand, bobbing in the water, halfway to climbing into the boat, and he had the pistol leveled at Kip’s face. “Back. Back!” he said. “I can’t hold on here for long, so if you’re not seated and blindfolded in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your face.”
Settling back onto his bench, Kip pulled the blindfold back up, defeated. He’d almost done it. Almost. The cloak of failure draped easily around his slumped shoulders. Kip Almost. Again.
No. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t that Kip anymore. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t rejected.
He had gotten into the Blackguard. He had been accepted by the best drafters and fighters in the world. He had been accepted by his father. He had fought a king and wights and a god. He’d made huge mistakes: he’d been stupid and weak and cowardly and rejected. Without him, his father wouldn’t have been stabbed. But he also had pulled his father from the waves, had saved his life when no one else could. Kip had donned Almost as his spectacles. There was a middle path, a golden mean between the whore’s son and the Prism’s. He wasn’t really Kip Godslayer, but he also wasn’t the boy who’d knuckled under to Ramir. Not anymore. I am what I do, and I am Breaker.
He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness. He who has ears, let him hear.
It’s time for me to break that old lens.
“Take the oars,” Zymun said. As Kip reached blindly for them, he heard Zymun slip into the boat. Then he felt luxin encase his hands, locking them around the oars. “You row for an hour, and then I’ll give you food and more water. Go on! We got a long way to go, brother.”
Kip started rowing. His left arm did not appreciate it. “Brother?” he asked. His voice came out calm, unafraid, unashamed.
“My grandfather Andross Guile’s summoned me to the Chromeria. He said the rest of his family hadn’t turned out. Said he’s considering adopting me. Said he has big plans.” He paused. “What, didn’t you know? I’m Karris and Gavin’s son. I’m Zymun White Oak.”
Kip’s heart dropped out of his chest, punched a hole in the deck, and killed a dozen fish on its way to the sea floor.
He heard a metallic scrape of the pistol being examined, and he thought that maybe Zymun had decided to kill him after all. Then Zymun barked a laugh. “Holy fuck am I lucky,” he said to himself. “Would you look at that? This gun wasn’t even loaded.”
Chapter 115
Gavin woke to someone slapping his face. He felt awful. The cabin was dark and stank of men who hadn’t washed in ages and bilgewater and seaweed and fish and human waste. There were manacles on his wrists, and he was naked except for a breechclout.
Another slap cracked across his cheek, hard enough to put the taste of blood in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He looked at the man in front of him. His lungs and throat felt raw from the seawater he’d tried to breathe.
“Gunner, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. His voice was raw, too. Last night was a dim memory. “What are you doing?”
“Can’t draft, can ya?”
Gavin held up his hands, empty, helpless. It was so dim in the cabin it would take him a couple of minutes to draft enough to be a threat to anyone. And summoning the will would be a problem, too, with how terrible he felt.
“Give me a couple minutes,” he said. His left eye was swollen. There was-Oh, Orholam! Gavin checked his chest. It was uninjured. What the hell kind of nightmares had he been having? Thinking he’d been stabbed? Had he been drugged and smuggled off the flagship?
“Your eyes are as blue as Ceres’s, Lord Guile. Not a touch of halo in ’em. Always hated luxlords putting on airs. Ordering people around. Not willing to pull their own weight.” He laughed low, as if he’d said something clever. “But I gots my own solution to the little injustices life brings under my purview. It ain’t quite the ship of state, but she is a stately ship, is she no?”
“This your boat?” Gavin asked, still disoriented. He was seated on a bench next to a skinny man with white hair and beard, big eyes, half clothed. All of the men down here were skinny and half clothed, all drinking water or tearing into hardtack. All wearing chains. All watching him.
“Yes, my boat. The Bitter Cob, I call her, for how she’ll leave your nethers raw. She belongs to me, and now you belongs to her. Serve well, Guile. For if this old girl goes down, you go down with her.”