“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I can tell you it’s heading toward center. A center? The center… I’m not sure.” She looked apologetic.
“The center of the sea? Like White Mist Reef? Or the center like sinking?”
“Bane float, most of the times.”
Times, plural. “That doesn’t give me anything.”
“It gives you enough.” If the bane was floating toward White Mist Reef, then taking the calculations backward, it would be somewhere south of the Ilytian city of Smussato, perhaps floating in a line from the border between Paria and Tyrea. If he knew where it was going, and he could guess that it would go straight, and he knew where it was going to be at any one time, that should give him a line on which it must be.
“You mean I’m going to find it?” Sudden hope.
“Yes.”
He couldn’t believe it. There had to be a catch. This was going to take some figuring with a map and an abacus, but it seemed too easy. “How long is it going to take me?”
“If I tell you that, you’ll stop looking until the day I said you were going to find it.”
“No I wouldn’t-Yes, yes, of course I would.”
She sighed.
“Am I going to find it in time?” he asked.
“Even I don’t know what you’re asking by that.”
“You can’t do this to me,” Gavin said.
“Please don’t blame me for things I have nothing to do with.”
Gavin licked his lips. She was right. Of course she was right: she could see everything. Unnerving still. “What can you tell me?” he asked.
“That you’ll be here for a while, and that the Color Prince is looking for it, too, and that you better not let his plan come to fruition. It’s growing, Lord Prism, and the more it grows, the more blues will be drawn to it. Blue wights most of all.”
“Why, what happens? All I know is that the bane were tied in with the old gods’ temples.”
“You’ll see. There’s something else I should tell you.”
“There’s a thousand other things you should tell me!”
“If you take Karris when you go fight it, you’re much more likely to succeed.”
“I could have guessed that myself. She’s a useful woman.”
“And if she goes with you, she’ll almost certainly die.”
“Had to be a catch, didn’t there?” Gavin said.
“I’m not trying to give you a catch; I’m trying to give you a chance.”
He shrugged that off. “ ‘Almost certainly’ as in ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or as in two times out of three?”
“When I see her go with you, I watch her die in dozens of different ways. It’s not pleasant for me. Especially since I know that if she lives, we’re probably going to be friends someday. Assuming you don’t bed certain… you know what? I’ve already said too much.”
“You called Karris The Wife,” Gavin said. “But then you said it was wrong. What did you mean?”
“Knowing that if you know, it will change things… do you really want to know?”
Gavin scowled. “Well, yes.”
“Tough. I’m not telling you.”
“Some soothsayer you are,” Gavin complained.
“I’m not a soothsayer. I’m a seer. I see; sometimes I say what I see. I’m not interested in soothing your feelings.”
She meant it, too. Gavin could see the steel in her again. Doubtless it was the only way she could remain human and deal with her gift.
“Karris doesn’t like to be left behind when I head into danger.”
“You’ve brought me fifty thousand problems, Lord Prism. That, however, is not one of them.”
A good shot, and completely fair. He took a breath to riposte, and then thought better of it. “My lady, your wit is as sharp as your beauty is radiant. Since the light has so clearly blessed you with its presence, the most I can do is bless you with my absence. Good day.”
He bowed and left. He was only a few steps away when he thought he heard her murmur something. He shot a look over his shoulder, and swore he caught her staring at She pursed her lips, a quick look of consternation. “I can foresee the end of the world, but I can’t tell when a man is going to catch me staring at his shapely ass.”
Gavin could do nothing more than beat a dignified retreat, strangely aware of his ass with every step.
Chapter 46
The Color Prince had wanted to leave Garriston in six weeks. It had taken eight. Though Liv had spent half her waking hours with the Color Prince, she knew there were entire currents passing right beneath her eyes that she didn’t even see. For a superviolet accustomed to seeing that which others didn’t, it was discomfiting.
One day, a general was found hanged from the open portcullis of the Travertine Palace. Liv only found out after the fact that he had been one who’d advocated staying put, satisfied with regaining Tyrea and settling down in their new country.
The Color Prince had opened his court that day, saying, “While there is oppression anywhere, there is freedom nowhere.”
Liv heard the statement repeated a dozen times that day, and the next day as they marched. He was too busy for her for weeks, spending all his time with his military commanders. Liv was on the outside, literally and figuratively. She rode close to the front, but not with the commanders or advisers. She wasn’t certain of her place, and no one else was either.
The women and men who’d been with the prince since he’d left Kelfing didn’t trust her. She was the enemy general’s daughter. Again. How that infuriated her. In switching sides, her father had managed to make her be cast out from the opposite side than those who’d treated her like an outcast for her entire youth.
After two weeks on the road, one night the Color Prince summoned her to his tent, which was ostentatiously small and plain. A man of the people. Liv wondered how such transparent tricks worked. But work they did.
“So, Aliviana, have you learned your purpose yet?” he asked.
“You only have perhaps half a dozen superviolets in your whole army. I may be the best of them. I know that you’re looking for more, and you’re looking for a test that will help you identify superviolets. Your methods are crude compared to the Chromeria’s. The general level of your drafters’ abilities is poor, and you’re hoping that the perspectives I bring might be valuable to you. That last is speculation, but well supported, I think. So I think you want me to train your superviolets.”
Back in the Chromeria, the magisters had warned their disciples constantly not to rely too much on their luxin to shape their thoughts or their feelings. Here, it was encouraged, and Liv wasn’t sure yet which approach was better. If you were burning away your life by drafting as the Chromeria taught, it made sense to train young drafters not to draft when they didn’t have to. But it had never been clear to Liv that the prohibitions were solely utilitarian. They’d been moral warnings, as if luxin were wine and those who relied on it were morally weak.
If so, she was weak. But the superviolet gave her clarity, and distance from her feelings of inadequacy, of loneliness. She used it and then yellow to pull problems apart, examine them from new angles, and peer right through them, all the time.
He poured himself some brandy, held up a finger, watched it as it turned a dull hot red, and touched it to his zigarro. “That’s all you have for me?”
“You were Koios White Oak,” Liv said. Karris White Oak’s supposedly dead brother.
“Past tense?” he said grimly into his brandy.
She had no answer.
“How’d you find out?” he asked.
“I asked,” she admitted. Not exactly genius deduction.
“And what does this revelation tell you?” he asked.
“Not as much as I’d hoped.”
He swallowed the rest of his brandy in a gulp. “Come with me.”
They walked through the camp in the low light of the shrouded moon and a thousand campfires. As soon as he stepped out of the tent, two drafters and two soldiers clad in white fell in beside them.
“The Whiteguard?” Liv suggested. It smacked of desperation to be taken seriously, a mockery of the Prism.