She chuckled. “I guess it depends what you mean. Nine Kings? Never. He knew better. You don’t play against those to whom you can only lose. I’ve seen Andross play. He uses his stacks of gold like a bludgeon. There is no gracefully losing a little bit of gold to Andross. It’s win big or lose bigger against him. For my husband to play Andross was to lose a fortune or to lose the whole purpose of his games by exposing how skilled he was.”

“And if I wasn’t asking about Nine Kings?” Ironfist asked. He had been, but she obviously meant to tell him more.

She smiled, and he was glad that he served her. To be the commander of the Blackguard was to stand ready to give your life for those you protected, regardless of your feelings. But for this woman, even frail and with few days left, Ironfist would gladly trade his life. She said, “All I’ll say is this: Andross Guile isn’t the White, and it galls him deeply.”

But the White was chosen by lot. Orholam himself moved his will through that.

But if Andross Guile had thought being the White was a victory within his grasp, maybe that was because it actually had been. Surely to corrupt the election of a White was the work of a heretic—worse, an atheist. Ironfist couldn’t comprehend it.

The further implication—that Lord Rathcore had stymied Andross Guile by instead getting his wife Orea selected—was almost worse. If the White’s election had been tainted by the machinations of men, was it thereby void? How could Orholam tolerate such a thing?

And yet the White was a holy woman, a good woman. Perhaps she hadn’t been involved, or hadn’t known, or hadn’t figured it out until many years later. And then what would you do? Abdicate because there was some blight on your election that no one else had ever noticed and that even you hadn’t known about? Perhaps that would bring greater disrepute on the Chromeria than simply to let it lie.

But it shook Ironfist’s faith. What had Gavin said on the ship? Some jest about being chosen by Orholam—a jest that only made sense as a jest if you didn’t believe Orholam really did choose.

Lord Rathcore had blocked Luxlord Guile from becoming the White, but couldn’t block him from having his son made the Prism.

It almost took Ironfist’s breath away to think of it in such nakedly political terms. He was no naïf. He served these people. He knew that even the greatest had their foibles. He knew they all had vast ambition. But surely, surely some few things must be held holy.

He remembered again holding his mother’s bleeding body, screaming his prayers to Orholam, praying until he thought heart and soul would burst. Praying that Orholam would see him, just for one moment of his life. Hear him, just once. And his mother died.

“Who won? That night. What happened?” he asked.

She was quiet for a moment. “My husband let the young man win. No matter.” The White waved a frail hand, as if to shoo the example away. “Commander,” she said quietly, “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry. Let this be my absolution: as important as it is for you to know what character you are in this little drama, perhaps right now it is more important for you to know which character I am. I am the gambler, Commander, just waiting for Orholam’s eye to rise over the horizon and reveal the truth. I am the gambler, and I’ve bet the family castle, and I’m waiting for the cards to turn.”

“There’s war coming, isn’t there?” Ironfist asked.

She sighed. “Yes, blind though the Spectrum is to it. But I wasn’t talking about the war.”

He walked to the door, stopped. “What happened to that young man?”

“He gambled again later with someone else and lost everything, as gamblers do.”

Chapter 24

“Skill, Will, Source, and Movement. These are the necessaries for the creation of luxin,” Magister Kadah was saying. She had a gift. A great gift. She could make even magic seem boring.

Kip sat in the back of the lecture hall today, stomach growling, but absolutely determined not to open his big yapper. Adrasteia sat in the seat next to his, paying attention, and Ben-hadad was next to her, one yellow lens of his glasses continually swinging down in front of his eye, no matter how he tried to keep it up.

Together, they took up one of the little wooden tables. Sitting together, almost like friends.

It wasn’t real, not yet. They didn’t know Kip. They let him sit with them. It was different. But it was closer than Kip had felt to friendship in a long time.

He looked over at Teia. She saw him looking and glanced over at him, a question in her eyes.

And at exactly that moment, Magister Kadah looked up and caught them. Rotten luck. “Kip, do you have something to share with the class?” she asked.

Don’t do it, Kip. No smart remarks.

Problem was, he had no idea what the magister had been talking about, and his mind had drifted. “I was thinking about the instability of imperfectly crafted luxin,” Kip said. Magister Kadah had been talking about Skill, Kip thought, so it seemed like it might be close to a real question.

“Hmm,” Magister Kadah said, as if disappointed she hadn’t caught Kip napping. “Very well.” She ran long fingers along the edge of her stick, flipped it over. On the back side, there was a color spectrum. She considered it for a moment, rejected it, walked over to the wall.

She opened a panel on the wall. It was dazzlingly bright. The lightwell, Kip realized. There was a slide with a mirror mounted on it, and she pushed that into the light stream. A pure beam of white radiance shot across the room onto a bare white wall behind the students.

“This is light as it is. It is the keystone, the base on which all else is born. And this is how we imagine light is—” She held up a screen over the light stream. Brilliant colors were cast upon the wall, cerulean blue immediately next to jade green abutting on vibrant yellow next to an orange to make fruit jealous next to a clear red.

“These are the colors we draft—minus sub-red and superviolet, of course, which most of you can’t see. We’ll talk about them later. This is how the colors are in a rainbow, right, discipulae?”

There were some mutters. The colors were in the right order.

“Right, discipulae?” she repeated, irritated.

“Yes, Magister,” most of the class answered.

“Morons,” she said.

“This is light in our world—” She held a prism in front of the stream, and it sheared the light into the whole visible spectrum. Unlike the screen, which had the most vibrant colors immediately next to each other, the colors of the natural spectrum were broken into a continuum—but the continuum wasn’t even. Some colors took up more space than others.

“In some ways, drafting is like anything else. If you sit in a poorly crafted chair, it breaks and you fall. It fails its purpose. Poorly crafted luxin is the same. On the color line, there are resonance points. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. This is as Orholam has willed. At these resonance points”—she pointed to the places on the color line that corresponded to the bright colors she had put on the screen earlier—“at these places, luxin takes on a stable form. Becomes itself. Becomes useful.” She pointed to places on the color line, in order. “Why, smarter auditors might ask, why those colors?” Magister Kadah smiled unpleasantly. She did that a lot.