Chapter 47

“Secrets?” Kip asked. “What secrets?”

“I don’t know. Yet,” Janus Borig said. “That’s why I brought you here today. I wanted to know if you were one of them.” She sucked at her teeth. “You’re not.”

“So is that good news or bad news?” Kip asked.

“It is very, very bad news.”

“I still don’t understand,” Kip said.

“Understatement.”

“Huh?”

“Come here.”

Kip came to her side. She showed him her sketches. The first was of a cloaked, hooded figure, lit from behind, long hair falling in front of his eyes in a dark curtain, eyes dimly gleaming from behind the mass, a beard with gleaming beads woven in, a dagger drawn. An assassin? Another showed a bald, ebony-skinned man, bleeding from a cut under one eye, wearing an eye patch, spinning short swords in both hands. Another showed—

“Wait, that’s Commander Ironfist,” Kip said.

“Ah, so it is. Thank you,” she said. “What happened to his hair?”

“He’s in mourning for his lost Blackguards.”

“Ah yes, of course.”

“Why are you asking me? Why does he only have one eye?”

“Does he not only have one now? Hmm. It’s not always literal.” Her head tilted to the side. She scrawled an old Parian word on the paper below Ironfist.

“Guardian?” Kip asked.

“Sentry. Watchman. Guardian. Vigil Keeper. Strong Tower. Quiet.”

“Quiet?” Kip asked. “How’s that fit?”

“Not him. You. Be quiet.”

“Oh, oh, sorry.”

She drew a scrawl around his neck. A necklace. But her hand paused when it got to what was hanging from the chain. She sucked at her pipe, bringing the dormant coals back to life. Then she sighed. “Lost it.”

“I’m still back at what you’re doing with Commander Ironfist,” Kip said. There was some corner of dread turning over in his soul. She turned her eyes on him, and his heart flipped over and convulsed, tried to crawl off the squeaky clean floor to the stairs, its palpitations making it hop like a deranged bunny, the worst escape attempt in history.

“Do you think being Prism is too small for you, boy?”

“You keep saying these things that make no sense to me,” Kip said.

“Because I keep trying to draw you as the next Prism, and I can’t. You won’t be the Prism, Kip.”

“I don’t aspire to that,” Kip said. A chill. Like being collared by history.

“Do you aspire to more?”

“There is no more, is there?” Kip asked. What could be bigger than being the Prism?

“Is there a name that the others call you?”

“You mean besides Kip? Sure: Fatty. Lard Guile. Bastard. Pokey.”

“Something else. Maybe I’ve gone about this wrong. Maybe instead of trying to make your card, maybe I should try to decide which card is yours.”

“Look, I just came here to learn how to play better. Can you help me or not?”

“What do you know about Zee Oakenshield?”

“Nothing,” Kip said. He’d never even heard the name.

“Do you know anything about the cards?”

“I know all sorts of things about the cards. I’ve memorized seven hundred and thirty-six of them by name and ability. I’ve committed a dozen famous games to memory. I know twenty of the standard decks and why they work. Does that count for anything?”

“No.”

“Oh hell.” If Kip had honestly wasted all the time he’d spent studying, he was going to find the nearest tall building and throw himself off.

“I jest,” she said. “It means you’re ready to start.”

“I feel a sudden, intense desire to throw a temper tantrum,” Kip said.

She squinted at him. “The cards are true, young Guile. And that’s why this game has been played by generations of fools and madmen and wise women and satraps. Take a moment and soak that up. The strengths and weaknesses on the cards are honest to the figures they depict. Not all-encompassing, of course—for a few numbers, a few lines, and a pretty picture can only tell so much—but not misleading. But that’s only the beginning of the greater truth, the greater gift that is Mirroring.” She walked over to the wall and grabbed a card. She sat on a stool and spun around twice like a little girl. “Come, look, and see. Taste of the light of Orholam.”

Superstitious drivel, or magical invocation, or efficacious prayer? Kip had no idea. The old woman seemed half mad. Maybe every word she was telling him was a lie or a delusion.

The card was, Kip guessed, an original—a young woman, dressed in leathers, buttons of turquoise, pale skin, flaming red hair piled atop her head, caged between black ironwood thorns. Green stained the skin of her left arm, which was down at her side, leaves coiling about it. Her right hand was behind her back, as if she might be concealing a dagger. She stood straight-backed, and the smirk on her face was imperious, ready for anything.

“This is your great-great-great-great-grandmother, Zee Oakenshield. In most ways, she is the founder of your house, though the Guile name comes from elsewhere.”

She was attractive, and there was nothing about her to remind Kip of himself—but that smirk was all Gavin Guile. It was like the artist had carried her expression over a century and dropped it on the man.

Instead of commenting on the startling similarity, and the obvious gift the artist must have had to have captured it so well, Kip said, “She doesn’t even have a shield.” Inane. Nicely done, Kip.

“She never carried a shield, oaken or otherwise. The name was for something else. But I needn’t tell you. You see the gems?”

Kip nodded. There were five tiny gems, framing the picture, one at each corner, one above her head.

“Draft a bit, any color, and then touch all those gems at the same time.” She pointed at a painting with broad bands of the drafting colors on one wall.

Kip stared at the blue. Blue was far less frightening than green. Within seconds, he felt the wash of cool rationality. Should he obey this woman? Well, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t learn anything. The only reason he’d come was to learn. Besides, what was she going to do with a card that she couldn’t do to him with one of her many guns?

With the blue in his fingertips, he touched the gems.

Nothing happened.

Well, that was a little disappointing.

“Push harder,” Janus Borig barked. “It needn’t bleed, but it must be near enough to call to your blood. You’ve got soft hands. It shouldn’t be hard.”

Soft hands? Kip grimaced, but obeyed, tapping the blue jewel hard, his other fingers loosely over their corresponding jewels.

Zee blinks to clear her eyes, peering into the dawn. Filtering through the smoke of two burning cities on either side of the Great River, the rising light is red. It’s disorienting, having his view cast this way and that, without his body moving, without any control.

There are enemy soldiers on both sides of the Great River. Kip can almost hear the whisper of thoughts attached to those men—who they are, what they do—but “enemy” is the only thing that drifts through to him.