But he didn’t know any way out.
Orholam, his brother was out of the blue? Did Marissia even remember how to switch over the chutes? Maybe Dazen would starve to death. No… no, he’d shown her, years and years ago, how to do it, against just this eventuality. She had an excellent memory. She’d do it right.
Nonetheless, he had to get back. And going back meant heading right into the middle of everything that threatened him most.
“Aha!” The Third Eye sniffed. “Here it is.”
Scrunching his forehead, Gavin glanced over at her. Noticed her nipples-dammit, got bigger things to worry about here, Gavin! She was leaning back, looking up again, this time not in prayer, though it again outlined her cold-stiffened nipples clearly against the fabric of her dress. He sniffed to see what she was talking about.
Smelled nothing. Sniffed again, and caught something very faint.
Something prickled on his skin, the lightest of touches. He looked over at the Third Eye.
She was grinning like a little girl. He didn’t understand. Then something touched his arm. He brought it close, but it melted before he could get a look at it. Snow?
It was cool tonight, but it wasn’t cold enough for snow. Not even close.
He could smell it now-the familiar mineral, chalky odor. Blue luxin.
More hit his upturned face, his arms. It was snowing.
“Blue delights in order,” the Third Eye said. “I know you can’t see it, but every flake is blue. Utterly beautiful, Lord Prism. I’ve never seen so stunning a harbinger of doom.”
Gavin’s heart dropped. Other than in the mountains of Paria and Tyrea, most of the Seven Satrapies went years without seeing snow. Gavin caught a flake on his sleeve, squinted at it. It looked like a snowflake. The blue luxin, free of his control, was running amok-but for blue, running amok meant randomly imposing order. Like organizing the crystals of a snowflake. It was a tenuous order; the unnatural snow was melting almost immediately.
“If it starts with this, what will it do next?” Gavin asked.
“Something worse,” the Seer said. “And it’s already doing it. We’re simply so far away that this is all that’s reaching us.”
“The bane,” Gavin whispered.
She nodded.
“Can you tell me where it is?”
“It’s moving, and I see outside of time.”
“So?”
“If something stays in one place, it doesn’t matter when I see it. But if something moves, finding it inside a particular time is problematic.”
“Which isn’t the same as impossible,” Gavin said, his heart leaping. If he could save himself the trip to Paria to see the Nuqaba, he could avoid all sorts of problems.
She scowled. “No, it’s not.”
Any time the Prism showed up in a major city, there were a thousand things that could only be done by him-not least endless rituals. The best he was ever able to get away with was doing one ritual for each color. And one of those would now expose him. He might be able to bluff his way past it, if he were there for only a week or two to find out what he needed, but the less he had to rely on his luck, the better. And if she could just tell him what he needed to know…
She looked over at him, and it obviously didn’t take a Seer for her to know what he was going to ask her next. She sighed. “I don’t see everything all the time all at once, Lord Prism. And I need light. I’ll look for it for you tomorrow.” She raised a finger. “I don’t promise that I’ll tell you all of what I see. I don’t promise that knowing won’t cost you something.”
“Aha, so now comes the bargaining. You’re going to save me at least two weeks and lots of awkward conversations with a powerful woman I once outmaneuvered. What’s it going to cost me?” He was trying to set the floor low. The Third Eye would be saving him a whole lot more than that. And, being who she was, she could probably find that out, if she really cared to take the time to look. But as she’d said, she was human, and there was a lot of history and future for her to dig through.
But she shook her head. “I didn’t mean that kind of cost. My help will be a gift. You don’t need to earn it. But though truth is a gift, it’s not always one people thank you for.”
“Ah. That kind of cost,” Gavin said, suddenly grim.
“Does the man who ‘killed his brother’ expect the truth to be easy?”
Killed my brother. If only. But of course, she knew that. She knew what it was costing him to maintain that deception and why he’d done it and what the truth would cost the world if it came out. She must also know the price of truth through her own gift in a thousand ways that Gavin would never know.
The Third Eye looked over at him, compassion in her eyes, and suddenly Gavin saw that she was a woman of tremendous depth. A leader in her own right. A woman who understood what Gavin was doing, why, and what he faced. He found her tremendously appealing. If his damn stubborn heart hadn’t already been claimed, he could have fallen for her. She knew it, too. She hadn’t been lying earlier: she really had been trying to make the attraction purely sexual-so that there wasn’t the danger of something deeper.
As crystalline flurries spun around them, flecks of order spun in chaos, Gavin peered into the night as if he could unravel its mysteries. “So, you and me, disaster, huh?”
She smiled, full red lips, perfect teeth. Nodded, met his gaze. A remorseful twitch touched the corner of her mouth. “Utter.” She gazed at him appreciatively, but as if saying farewell to the prospect of bedding him. “But I do have one prophecy for you already, Lord Prism, in the style you so love: Get there before noon. Three hours east, two and a half hours north.”
Sounded simple enough. He did like that. And then he realized that she hadn’t told him north and east from where. He said, “That’s only going to be helpful in retrospect, isn’t it?”
She grinned cryptically.
“You enjoy this, don’t you?” he asked.
“Immensely.”
“I haven’t really had much use for prophecy,” Gavin said.
“I know,” she said. “It was one of the first things I saw about you. What happened?”
“Happened? I think I always thought it was-oh, no, there was something. When I was a boy and my brother stopped playing with me, I’d find these prophecies in old books, and I’d dream that I could decipher them. There was this one: how’d it go?”
He was asking himself, but the Third Eye said quietly,
“Of red cunning, the youngest son,
Will cleave father and father and father and son.”
“How’d you…?” he asked.
“I see that line burning in bitter fire over your head, Lord Prism. What did you take it to mean?”
“The youngest son of red cunning-the youngest son of the red Guile-the youngest son of the Guile who becomes the Red. So Andross Guile’s youngest son. It was a prophecy about my little brother Sevastian.”
“And then he died. Murdered.”
“By a blue wight. He was everything that is good about my family with none of the bad. If he were alive, everything would be different.” He shook it off. “Your prophecies aren’t like that. I mean, maddeningly vague. I mean, except for this last one.” He grinned. “Why is that?”
She touched her third eye thoughtfully. “We’re human, Gavin. My gift didn’t come with a list of rules. I’m muddling through. I’m making it up as I go. But I feel the same temptations I’m sure all my predecessors have felt: to be important, to help those I love and harm those I hate, to be held as almost a god, to guide and be loved-or to say hell with it, I’m not responsible for this damned thing, and just spew everything I see. I hold my tongue when I’m not sure. I think others have spoken more, but more cryptically, hoping that they wouldn’t be held responsible if things went wrong. And then, of course, there have been frauds: Seers who were not Seers at all.”
“Can you tell me if that prophecy was a fraud?”
“I have no idea where to even start looking.”