Gavin felt an old dread, like the sting of an old master’s lash. Bas was a green/blue/superviolet polychrome. Every drafter was changed over time by his colors. Only the wildness of green would make the formerly order-obsessed Bas skip his place in line. But the orderliness of blue was making him crazy to know why, to see how things fit together. “Bas, I’m going to tell you something I’ve only told one other person in the world. I’m going to answer your question. You deserve it.” He lowered his voice. “When I was sixteen years old, I had a… a vision. A waking dream. I was in front of a presence. I fell on my face. I knew he was holy, and I was afraid—”

“Orholam himself?” Bas asked. He looked doubtful. “My mother told me that people who say they speak for Orholam are usually lying. And Dazen is a liar!” His voice pitched up at the end.

The last thing Gavin needed was Bas shouting something about Dazen. “Do you want to hear my answer or not?” he asked sharply.

Bas hesitated. “Yes, but don’t you—”

Gavin stabbed him in the heart.

Bas’s eyes went wide. He grabbed Gavin’s arms. Gavin withdrew the dagger.

Coldly, so coldly, Gavin said, “You gave the full measure, Bas. Your service will not be forgotten. Your failures are forgotten, erased. I give you absolution. I give you freedom.”

By the time he said “absolution,” Bas was dead.

Gavin lowered the man to the floor carefully. He went and knocked at the side door. The Blackguards came in and took the body, and just like that, Gavin got away with murder.

Chapter 79

The man was a liar. Kip didn’t know exactly what was lie and what was truth, but Lord Omnichrome was King Garadul’s right hand. They’d massacred his village. For nothing. If murder was nothing to them, what was a lie?

But there was truth here, like all the best lies. That really was what the Pact meant. No wonder they talked about it in sidelong conversations, hushed tones. You got old, you broke your halo, you became like a mad dog. They had to put you down. Kip remembered when Corvan’s dog had been bitten by a raccoon and later started foaming at the mouth. Corvan, the alcaldesa, and some of the other men loaded muskets and went after it. Corvan himself blew its brains out. He hid his face afterward, and everyone pretended not to see his tears. It had been a year before he talked about that dog, but when he did, it was never of its madness, never of killing his dog. This was the same. No one talked about the Freeing because no one wanted to dishonor the dead: “Kip was a great man, right until he went crazy and started trying to kill his friends. Right until we had to put him down.”

So it was a hard truth. That didn’t make it a lie. Indeed, it probably made it more likely that it was true.

But no one in this crowd wanted to accept that. They wanted someone to blame for the death of their parents. They didn’t want to die themselves. They could dress that up in some holy-sounding bullshit, but Kip had seen behind the veil. These people were murderers. Gavin was a good man. A great man, a giant among dwarfs. So he had to do hard things. Great men made the hard choices, so everyone could survive. So he held people to the Pact, so what? Everyone swore to it. Everyone knew what they were swearing. There was no mystery, no con. They made a deal, and they liked the deal until they had to pay the price.

These people were cowards, oathbreakers, scum.

I have got to get out of here.

He turned and saw the last woman he expected to see here.

“Ilytian water clocks claim this is the shortest night of the year,” Felia Guile said from the doorway. “But it’s always been the longest for you.”

Gavin looked up at her, gray-faced. “I didn’t expect you until dawn.”

She smiled. “There was some disturbance with the order. Bas the Simple cut in earlier than he was supposed to. Some withdrew until later.” She shrugged.

Withdrew? So maybe they know. It’s all falling apart.

Maybe it’s best this way. I kill my own mother now, and she doesn’t have to see it all come crashing down.

“Son,” she said. “Dazen.” The word was almost a sigh, a release of pent-up pressure. Truth, spoken aloud after years of lies.

“Mother.” It was good to see her happy, but terrible to see her here. “I can’t—I didn’t even take you on that flight I promised you.”

“You really can fly?”

He nodded, his throat tight.

“My son can fly.” Her smile lit her face. “Dazen, I am so proud of you.”

Gavin tried to speak, but failed.

Her eyes were gentle. “I’ll help you,” she said. She knelt at the rail, opting for more formality. With his mother, Gavin should have known. “Lord Prism, I have sins to confess. Will you shrive me?”

Gavin blinked back sudden tears, mastered himself. “Gladly… daughter.”

Her attitude of simple piety helped him play his part. He was not her son, not here and now. He was her spiritual father, a link to Orholam on the holiest day of her life.

“Lord Prism, I married unwisely and lived fearfully. I let myself be owned by my fear that my husband would put me aside, and didn’t speak when I knew I should. I let my sons be pitted against each other, and one is dead because of it. Their father didn’t foresee it because he was a fool, but I knew.”

“Mother,” Gavin interjected.

“Daughter,” she corrected firmly.

Gavin paused. Acquiesced. “Daughter, go on.”

“I have spoken cruel words. I have lied a thousand times. I have treated my slaves without regard to their welfare…” She spoke for five minutes, not sparing herself, blunt and forthright, not condensing her answers for her sake, but for Gavin’s—he had others to shrive this night. It was surreal.

Gavin had heard stunning admissions and seen darker sides of people with saintly reputations for the last sixteen years, but hearing her confess beating an innocent slave in her rage minutes after finding Andross in bed with another woman was heartrending. Dislocating. To hear his mother confess was like seeing her naked.

“And I have killed, thrice. For my son. I lost two boys; I couldn’t bear to lose my last,” she said. Gavin could hardly believe her. “Once I got a Blackguard who suspected him reassigned to a dangerous post during the Red Cliff Uprising, where I knew he would be killed. Once I directed pirates to the ship Dervani Malargos was taking home after having been lost in the wilds of Tyrea for years. He claimed to have been closest to the conflagration at Sundered Rock and to have seen things no one else had. I tried to buy him off, but he slipped away. And once I hired an assassin during the Thorn Conspiracies, using the cover of someone else’s fight to murder someone who was about to blackmail my son.”

Gavin was speechless. In the first year of his masquerade, he’d killed three men to protect his identity and exiled a dozen more. Then two in the seventh year. He hadn’t killed anyone in cold blood since—until Bas. He’d known his mother had protected him, but he’d always thought she’d done it by passing on information she learned. His mother had always been fiercely protective, but he’d never imagined how far she would go. How far he would force her to go because he’d supplanted Dazen.

Dear Orholam, how I wish I believed in you, that you might forgive me for what I’ve done.