Klytos raised his voice to a mumble: “… under eye of… this forty-ninth day…”

Kip saw the luxiat eyeing another luxiat, communicating with glances. The other luxiat got up and murmured to Klytos Blue, who spoke sharply back to the man, flushed, and then turned back to his papers.

“As I was saying,” Klytos shrilled, finally speaking loudly enough that even those in the back could hear him. He sneered, “It is part of the Chromeria’s work to bring the most recent work of scholars to blinkered corners of our world. Not long ago, it was considered heresy to speak of our world as if it were anything but a rolled-out parchment. People believed that the world had actual corners—luxiats most of all. Thanks to the blues and to the blue virtues, we now know this to be superstition and not in conflict with the scriptures which were speaking only metaphorically of the satrapies being the center. The center of Orholam’s will is a metaphorical statement, not a spatial one.”

Kip had no idea what he was talking about, but a couple of the luxiats didn’t look particularly pleased with this turn. Kip guessed that if Klytos lowered his voice another time, none of them was going to remind him to raise it again.

“In the last few years, there has been some exciting work done by your compeers in the Tower of Reason regarding the Great Schism and the events that flowed out of the Deimachia, the War of the Gods which most scholars now agree is better translated the War on the Gods. The ‘dei’ of course is the ablative, and in most of our translations, there’s simply not enough contextual evidence to support overturning the generally accepted ‘war of.’ However, in Tristaem’s On the Fundaments of Reason, he points out that with only a few changes in how we understand old Parian grammar, our entire hermeneutics is shifted. These shifts are under way now.”

Kip’s eyes began to glaze over. There were simply too many words he didn’t understand. Even if he did think grammar was interesting, he couldn’t have followed if he’d wanted to. He lost the stream and began looking around the room instead. One old luxiat in her rumpled black robe looked like she was chewing on a lemon. Several of the older students actually looked fascinated, and Kip despaired. Am I going to turn into that?

He’d thought that the Chromeria was a place of learning, yes, but a place of practical learning. He began studying the stained glass mosaics that lined the entire clerestory. There was Lucidonius himself, white-robed and soft-looking, surrounded by his Parian warriors, but his skin a couple of shades lighter than theirs. That was interesting. Kip had always heard he was a Parian outsider.

Oh, maybe he was an outsider even to the Parians.

Kip suddenly imagined furious arguments over exactly what color Lucidonius’s skin color had been when the stained glass had gone in. He knew the Parians claimed him, especially over their rivals in riches and power, their neighbors the pale-skinned Ruthgari. The darker Lucidonius was, the more of a poke in the eye it would be to the Ruthgari.

And now, despite that the stained glass had gone in hundreds of years after Lucidonius died, people would look at the windows and assume that because they were old, they must be accurate.

Fascinating. Kip wished he knew.

Oh, hell. That’s exactly what old windy up there is doing, isn’t it? Turning the world on the parsing of a word, like Kip was imagining the world turned on a bit of pigment in a window.

The Blue had lowered his voice again, and Kip had to lean forward to hear him now. But he’d said a word that had caught Kip’s attention: Lightbringer. “… which is why the Lightbringer is best understood as a metaphor for each one of us. Each of us is to bring light into the dark corners of the world. Not through missionary zeal. If the religions of those beyond the Everdark Gates are serving the barbarians out there well, who are we to change who they are? Are they not also the children of Orholam? We are to bring light into the dark corners of our own lives, by being kind and generous, by speaking well of others, by loving extravagantly. The Lightbringer is not coming. Hear O Children of Am, the Lightbringer is not one. We are Lightbringers all.”

The luxiats’ eyes all seemed ready to pop out of their heads as they ran screaming from the room to bathe themselves in milk.

Kip almost burst out laughing at the image.

Holy shit, Kip. Gotta get more sleep.

The High Luxiat took the dais. He didn’t even look at Klytos Blue. “Choir,” he said, “I wonder if you could close us with ‘Father of Lights, Forgive Us.’ ” It wasn’t, apparently, the song that had been planned.

Oh, nice.

But the men sang it, and they sang beautifully.

Everyone shuffled out after the song and Kip asked Ben-hadad, “So what was all that?”

“A lie from the pit of hell,” Ben-hadad said. Two girls in the row in front of them turned and glanced at him, but he was heedless. “There have always been fights about the Lightbringer. Who he is, or will be, or if he already came. The Chromeria says he already came, that Lucidonius was the Lightbringer. His name means ‘light giver,’ after all.”

“But you don’t buy that?” Kip asked.

“I don’t know all the arguments, but my parents don’t believe it.”

Kip looked at him. It was one of the dumber things he’d ever heard, and by the sudden glum look on Ben-hadad’s face, he could tell the boy knew it, too.

“I don’t want to live after history is settled,” Ben-hadad said.

Which was also dumb: I don’t like how the world is, so it isn’t that way? At least this time Kip was able to keep himself from saying it.

“The Lightbringer is going to be a genius of magic,” Teia suddenly said. She’d been unusually quiet until now. “A warrior who sweeps all before him. He will be great from his youth. He’s going to do things no one ever thought was possible, and bring us back to the true path. Lucidonius wasn’t even a good drafter. He figured out how to make colored lenses, but that hardly makes him a genius, does it? The Lightbringer will protect us. He will slay gods and kings.”

I killed a king.

A chill washed down Kip’s back.

“There are no kings anymore,” an older boy said, butting in. “Lucidonius killed the last of them. And the last gods.”

“Lucidonius’s people did that,” Ben-hadad said. “Not Lucidonius himself.”

“It’s the same thing,” the boy said. “When you say, ‘The Color Prince seized Garriston,’ you don’t mean he picked it up. You don’t even mean that he took it by himself. You mean it was done at his will. It’s—”

“Children!” a black-robed luxiat said, disgusted. Kip wondered how long the man had been listening. “Wielding half-remembered foolishness from your parents and superstitions from the benighted. Get to your lectures. I’ll not have your blasphemies in this holy place. Now! Out!”

Chapter 34

“That dress doesn’t do justice to your beauty,” a young man said to Liv as she emerged from a warehouse some of the displaced women and their children had taken over in Garriston. “Nor do those quarters do justice to your gifts.” He smiled the smile of a man who knows he’s gorgeous. “I’m Zymun. I’m your tutor.”

And he would have been gorgeous, had not his entire look been spoiled by the bandage over his nose, and two black eyes. Zymun looked maybe sixteen or seventeen, Liv’s age, but maybe older, or maybe he simply carried himself like he was older. He had a mop of curly black hair, an aquiline nose made even bigger by the bandage over it, a wide mouth, and perfect bright white teeth. Atashian skin, heavy brows, light blue eyes with a ring of many colors beneath the halo. He wore a new white shirt—who had new shirts, just after a huge battle?—and over his sleeves, his forearms were covered with multicolored vambraces with five thick bands of color against a white background. He wore a sparkling clean cloak that echoed the pattern, from a black fuzzy band for sub-red to red, orange, yellow, and green. A five-color polychrome. Five!