This monster had somehow sunk one into each hand and sealed it from the air with blue luxin so that you could literally see through each of his hands, albeit as though through a mirage, the image wavering from the heat, which was the signature of a flame crystal. And yet he still retained the use of his fingers, meaning he was either a miracle-working healer or it was some illusion. It had to be. The whole thing was impossible.

Karris saw his eyes last, as she came to stand before King Garadul. The Tainted’s eyes were shattered. The halo was broken everywhere. Colors leaked everywhere from the iris, staining the white of his eyes with every color. The colors themselves swirled constantly, blue coming to the fore as the Tainted studied Karris, green wriggling like a snake through a maze of orange and red.

“You,” King Garadul said, “are a vision, Karris. A sight for sore eyes.”

“And you’re a sore sight for eyes,” she replied, smiling sweetly.

He laughed. “Not only more beautiful than you were as a girl, but sharper, too. Karris, join us. I have a gift for you, but first, I’d like you to meet my right hand.” He gestured to the Tainted. “Karris White Oak, meet the Crystal Prophet, the Polychrome Master, Lord Omnichrome, the Color Prince, the Eldritch Enlightened.”

“Long name,” Karris said. “Must take your mother forever to call you to dinner.”

“You can pick your favorite,” the Color Prince said. His voice was disconcertingly… human. Strong, confident, amused if husky like a longtime haze smoker’s.

“The Motley Fool then.”

Red snapped to the surface of his eyes, quickly replaced by cool, amused blue. “Now, Karris, is that the way your father taught you to speak? You used to be so concerned with pleasing him. So ladylike, so sweet. So tame for a green drafter.”

“That ended a long time ago,” she said. “Who the hell are you? You don’t know me.”

“Oh, but I do,” the Color Prince said. He glanced over at the king.

“Oh, sure, go ahead, let her open her present early,” Rask Garadul said, pretending exasperation.

“Look at me, Karris,” the Crystal Prophet said. “Take a moment. See beyond your fear, your petty disgust, your ignorance.”

Karris bit her tongue. There was something genuine in that raspy voice, some wish to be known. So she looked, silently. The body, of course, was no help, so she studied his face. The luxin-stained skin obscured the features, as did the burn scars. One eyebrow had grown back in white, whether reacting to fire or luxin, she didn’t know. But there was something familiar.

Orholam. The fire. The burn scars. A fist clamped tight around her heart and squeezed. She couldn’t draw a breath. It couldn’t be him, he was dead these sixteen years. But as soon as she saw it, she knew it could be no other. “Koios,” Karris said. So this was why the White had sent her. Her enemy was her brother. Her knees gave out and she sat heavily on the cushions next to the king, lest she suffer a very ladylike fainting spell.

Chapter 68

Gavin stopped drafting as the sun sank below the horizon. He could use the ambient reflected light if he wished, but he was already exhausted. He looked over the scrub brush plain to the south. Karris was out there, somewhere. In all likelihood, he would never see her again, never get the chance to tell her the truth. It saddened him more than he would have imagined possible.

He turned back and studied the day’s handiwork with disappointment. He’d hoped to erect half a league of wall today, at the least. Instead, he’d laid nothing more than foundation, albeit a full league of it. Surprisingly enough, it had been Aliviana Danavis who’d solved the hardest problem so far. Or maybe not surprisingly, given how smart her father was. Gavin had been walking along the trench the workers were digging, spraying yellow into it. Where there was existing wall, he’d let the yellow flow over it like water, sinking into every crack, reinforcing stone and mortar with magic. Where even the old wall’s foundation was gone, he drafted the yellow into solid luxin directly, giving the wall a foundation seven paces wide. Everywhere, he anchored the yellow to bedrock with a half-evaporated, tarry thick red luxin.

But not only was walking slow, but as soon as the luxin reached the level of the ground, Gavin had to throw it. Like every other color, yellow had mass. It weighed about as much as water, and with the amounts that Gavin was moving, he was getting crushed. His muscles would give out far before his drafting ability. Of course, it would only get worse as the wall got taller.

He’d begun using scaffolding, but within half an hour it was clear that that wouldn’t get the wall finished in a month, much less the five days he had.

That was when Liv had sketched out her idea, and like most great ideas, it seemed simple, obvious—after she said it.

Gavin laid two tracks on either side of the wall, and drafted arms to connect them. With the addition of wheels and a harness to hold him, he was able to hang suspended in the air over the wall. The wheels glided along the tracks, so instead of having to move a scaffolding every twenty paces, his scaffolding moved with him. Instead of throwing luxin, he could drop it. It took almost all the physical effort out of the project.

By the time he’d properly drafted the harness so that he wasn’t swinging crazily every time he threw more luxin, it was late afternoon. Gavin had rolled slowly along his tracks, sealing the yellow luxin at twenty-pace intervals and laying more yellow over the sealed points. With the amount of time left before sunset, he’d focused on the brute drafting, so rather than tackle the intellectual challenges of drafting the interior of the wall, he’d decided to draft as much foundation as he could.

He made huge progress, but it was still hard to say whether he was going to finish the whole project in time. If he finished an entire tall, impregnable wall by the time Rask Garadul’s army arrived, except for two hundred paces in the middle, the entire endeavor would be vanity.

Gavin lowered himself to the ground. He wobbled a little as he approached Corvan Danavis, who was holding their horses. Corvan looked concerned. “Just a long time off my feet,” Gavin said.

Corvan accepted that silently. A few blocks later as the sun was fading out of the sky, he said, “So… Karris was captured.”

“Mm-hm,” Gavin said, not making eye contact.

“So you’ve put all that behind you?”

Gavin said nothing.

“Good. I always thought she was the biggest threat to your plan. Enough reasons to hate both of you, and rash enough to tear it all down without thinking. So you’ll antagonize Rask and hope he kills her to show he’s serious?”

“Damn you,” Gavin said.

“Oh, not past it, then?” Corvan asked.

He wasn’t serious about getting Karris killed. Gavin knew that. Corvan might always understand the cutthroat thing to do, but that didn’t mean he always did it.

“So she still doesn’t know?”

“No. That’s why I broke our betrothal.”

“Because she was the mostly likely to see through you, or some other reason?” Corvan asked.

“We destroyed her. Dazen burned down her home and the war took the rest. I didn’t realize she had nothing—and I should have. By the time I offered to restore her family’s fortune, it seemed like an insult. She spat on me and disappeared for a year. When she came back, she was different.”