She shook her head. “You’re a mystery to me, Lord Prism.”
He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke in the middle of the night, there was a blanket over him. He saw Karris in the low light of the fire, watching the darkness. He felt an immense gratitude toward her. She’d worked hard all day long, too, and now she was staying up all night.
Her back was to him and to the fire, maintaining her night vision, of course. Gavin and most sub-reds could control their eyes well enough to attain full night vision quickly, but Karris didn’t like to lose even a few seconds of night vision.
Gavin sat up and was right on the edge of calling out to tell her he would take the next watch when he saw her shoulders shake.
Not a shiver. She was crying. Gavin hadn’t seen Karris cry in years.
He knew she wouldn’t be pleased to find out he’d noticed, but he stood and put his hands on her shoulders. She tensed.
“I’ll take this watch,” he said gently.
“Don’t, Gavin,” she said. Her voice was raw, right at the edge.
Don’t what? Don’t touch her? Don’t say anything? Don’t leave?
“Today was Tavos’s birthday,” she said, struggling to get the words out clearly. “I almost didn’t even remember.” Tavos, her brother. He’d died in the fire. He’d been a terrible person, violent, unstable, one of the boys whose jeering had made Dazen believe that if he didn’t fight back that night, he would be killed. But Karris hadn’t seen that, had maybe never seen that side of her brother. Even if she had, he’d still been her brother. “I just miss them all so much. Koios…” She sounded like she wanted to say more, but couldn’t.
Koios had been her favorite brother. He was the only one Gavin regretted killing. The only halfway decent person among them.
And then she did weep. She turned to him, and he held her. He said nothing, still not certain he wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, knowing only that if he said anything, he would say the wrong thing.
Bewildered as he might be, sometimes a man’s highest calling is simply to stand, and hug.
Chapter 19
In his dream, Kip was a green wight, chasing down screaming children and murdering them with blade and fire. He woke alternately furious, weepy, and bloodthirsty, the rage from those phantasms sometimes still clinging to him.
When he got up to go urinate in the middle of the night, a Blackguard accompanied him. It was a man Kip had never met, and he said nothing. Merely walked with Kip, and held him back for a moment while he checked that there were no assassins in the toilet. Ridiculous.
It was a relief to get out of bed in the morning, though Kip didn’t feel rested in the slightest. Several older, second-year students came and herded the new students toward the dining hall.
Kip was ravenous, but he got no more food than anyone else in the serving line. He reached the end of the line in dread. Tables were laid out in long rows, and students clumped together with friends.
Which I don’t have.
In fact, Kip had quite the opposite. He caught sight of Elio, whose arm was wrapped in thick bandages and hung in a sling. The boy was talking with his friends when he saw Kip. He shut up instantly and blanched.
I should go over there. I should go and sit with them, disarm them with small talk, pretend nothing happened, but assert my right to sit with the toughest boys in the class.
But he didn’t have it in him.
It was only then that he realized there was no Blackguard following him this morning. He looked around at the lines of students, tables, food, servants, and slaves. No Blackguards anywhere. For some reason, it took what little, tottering confidence he had and knocked it over with a breath. They’d seen what he’d done. They’d decided he wasn’t worth protecting.
Then Kip saw some kids he recognized: the boy with the strange spectacles who’d sat behind him in class yesterday and some others from the Blackguard training class. They were the outcasts-Kip could tell immediately. They were the awkward, the intelligent, the ugly, with those Blackguard hopefuls who were destined to fail out early and were merely trying to get in from some vain hope of their own or their masters’. There was, of course, space at their table, and space around them, as if they were contagious. Kip went over.
“Can you read?” the boy asked as Kip came close. His flip-down spectacles currently had the blue lens down over one eye, and the yellow down over the other.
Kip hesitated. Did they not want him? “Um, yes?”
“You need to get to lecture if you can’t. If you can, you need to check the work schedule. Hold on, you had that-Oh, never mind, of course you can read. You told Magister Kadah to go stuff herself.”
“Really?” a homely girl asked.
Kip ignored her and tucked into his food.
“Why are you sitting with us?”
“You looked nicer than them,” Kip said, gesturing with a toss of his head toward the tough boys. “You want me to leave?”
They all looked at each other. Shrugged. “No,” the boy with spectacles said.
“So, what are your names?” Kip asked.
The bespectacled boy pointed to himself, “I’m Ben-hadad,” then to the homely girl, “Tiziri,” then to a gangly, gap-toothed boy, “that’s Aras, and-”
They were interrupted by a girl’s voice. “Hey, did you all hear about Elio getting his halos tapped by the new-” She cut off as she saw Kip.
“And… that would be Adrasteia. Classic, Teia.”
“We’ve met,” Kip said dryly.
Teia opened her mouth, then sat down silently, defeated.
“I didn’t hear,” Aras said. “What, new who? What happened?”
“ Aras,” Teia said through gritted teeth.
“What? Was there a fight?” Aras asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a fight,” Kip said.
“You? You were in a fight? With Elio?” Aras said.
“You broke his arm in three places!” Adrasteia-Teia? — said.
“I did?” Kip asked.
“Wait, you broke Elio’s arm?” Ben-hadad asked. “I hate that kid.”
“Is that how you hurt your hand?” Tiziri asked. She had a birthmark over the left half of her face. She wore her kinky hair flopped over that way to try to hide it, but it was a futile attempt.
Kip looked at his bandaged hand. He was supposed to get a fresh poultice smeared on it every day. He’d forgotten this morning. He didn’t even know if he could find the infirmary from here. “No, uh, this. I kind of got thrown into a fire.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You have to start from the beginning,” Ben-hadad said. “Aras! Stop staring over there or they’ll know we’re talking about-”
Aras, Teia, Tiziri, and Kip all glanced over at Elio’s table at the same time-and saw that Elio’s friends were all staring at them. Caught.
Ben-hadad scrubbed his chin where his beard was just coming in. “Hopeless,” he said. He flipped up both of the color lenses on the spectacles. He fixed his gaze on Kip, one eye looking slightly larger than the other. Kip had heard of the lenses that corrected bad vision before, but he’d never seen them. It was unnerving. “So,” Ben-hadad said to Kip, “spill.”
“About Elio? He came over and hit me a few times, and I punched him in the nose.”
They waited.
Kip spooned in more gruel.
“Worst. Storyteller. Ever,” Teia said.
“You punched him in the nose so hard his arm broke in three places?” Ben-hadad prompted.
“Look,” Kip said, “it wasn’t a big thing. I was really scared and I knew he was going to hit me, so I-you know? I hit him first. I kind of panicked.”
“And broke his arm?” Teia asked.
Kip shrugged. “He said he was going to kill me.”
Their looks were somewhere between dubious and totally impressed.
Kip decided to defuse it with humor. “I’ve only got one good hand. Now if he comes after me, we’ll be even.”
Not funny.