It wasn’t fair, but Kip wasn’t reminded of Andross Guile and his thousand manipulations and machinations, his dispassionate way of fucking with everything for his own ends, even if those ends were merely his own entertainment. Instead, he was reminded of his mother. She had lied reflexively, for no purpose. She manipulated him, too, always, ever twisting him into guilt and shame when she could have accomplished the same ends with a simple request. Her manipulations were wanton and wounding and pointless.

“You kept what they were a secret from me—even when we were half an hour from meeting the Ghosts’ mortal enemies. I came this close to walking into a trap blind. You could have gotten us all killed. Balls, Tisis, Cruxer could have said something about will-casting heathens and I would have agreed out of hand. After… I mean, I feel like we just came to this new understanding, this new place, and things are so good between us—and you sided with them against me.”

Whoa. Kip the Lip. That got away from him a little.

She said nothing. She didn’t even turn around, damn her.

“Turn around,” he demanded.

“No.”

“You’re just like my mother,” Kip said. Untruer words had never been spoken. “You ever side against me again, and we’re finished.”

Still not speaking, she stepped past him, averting her face and bringing a hand up to block his view—so he couldn’t see her tears, no doubt, as if that very action weren’t rubbing in that he’d made her cry.

Mere moments after she was gone, Kip’s hot blood cooled. But he didn’t move. She was in the wrong!

So why did he feel so wretched?

Should have waited until after sex to fight.

Never choose fighting over sex.

He opened the tent flap, but he couldn’t see her anywhere.

Kip knew he should go after her. Bugger what anyone else in the camp thought of him. They were busy with their own pleasures tonight. He needed to go apologize. He needed to go tell her he was an asshole.

These new clothes were too wide across the shoulders and chest and too tight across the belly, too much effort to keep clean. Too damn grown up.

Putting on Kip the screw-up, Kip the fatty, Lard Guile, Kip the victim who soaked up damage and mistook passivity for placidity, who thought that being imperturbable was being invincible, putting on that old Kip was like putting on his old tunic. It reeked; it was stained and dumpy, but it was comfortable.

He couldn’t suck in his gut and stand up straight every day. He was a child, pretending to be a lord.

He could remember his mother, sneering when Kip told her he’d been beaten again by Ram, after he’d seemed so nice for several weeks: ‘Don’t be a fool. No one ever changes.’

And then he remembered something Gavin had said after he’d assigned Kip, impossibly, to the Blackguard: ‘Don’t decide to change. The world is full of people who have decided to change but haven’t. Don’t decide to change—change. If you want to be different, act different.’

The bed was calling Kip to comfortable stasis and self-recrimination.

Before he could think any more, he went out into the camp.

But he never found her. He’d waited too long.

Eventually he returned to their tent, alone.

Dammit.

Kip pulled out the rope spear he’d started working on to keep his hands busy. He set a yellow hood on his lantern and started once more. The color set him in balance and helped him step away from his problems as a leader and mull them over in a new way—and he actually made good headway on the project, too. Ben-hadad had pointed out jokingly that if you made the links of chain small enough, the chain rope would be as flexible as real rope.

It hadn’t been so simple, but after studying hemp ropes and then applying some other colors of luxin, Kip was actually making good progress.

Once he thought he heard the tent flap open, but when he looked up a moment later, no one was there.

He went to bed alone, and somehow he slept until he was awakened by Cruxer. The morning was as foggy as Kip’s head, and as he came to join his generals and Tisis, Kip saw why he’d been awakened. On every bank opposite their little island were soldiers, armed and ready for war, bearing the Green Boar of Eirene Malargos. The Nightbringers were surrounded.

“So,” Kip said to Tisis, “I guess your sister hasn’t forgiven us for running away?”

Chapter 49

Gavin sat in his hell. Sat silent, cross-legged, with the poisoned bread clasped lightly in his hands.

“Useless,” the dead man said to him.

The poison, and the bread, and the hunger—his companions—they were oddly precious to him now. His world had contracted to a space as narrow as his dreams and as wide as his rib cage with its knocking, laboring heart.

He was, perhaps, losing coherence.

They have loved the darkness.

How could anyone love darkness?

He supposed that in darkness, everyone was as blind as a one-eyed man. His handicap became universal.

He was afraid of dying, he saw that now. But he was also resigned to it. He didn’t think he deserved better. Karris deserved better.

He should never have married her. Should never have drawn her into his circle at all. He was poison, and he’d known it. And yet he had let her love him.

She’d had nothing from him but grief. It was so unfair. Unfair of him, who should have known, and unfair of Orholam to allow it.

But then, of all people it was unseemly of him to whinge about fairness, wasn’t it?

“You could be in Karris’s bed now,” the dead man said. “You coward.”

The first part cut through Gavin like a black luxin tooth. But the latter part—coward?—was oddly off point. Was the young him so obtuse that he thought such an insult would hurt him?

Gavin knew he was a coward in certain areas—it had taken him fifteen years to be honest with Karris. But in physical danger he was often careless to a fault. Had he really once thought ‘coward’ would be a cutting insult? Odd.

It actually took his attention away from the open sore that was Karris and how badly he’d treated her. At some point, seated cross-legged as he was, he faded into sleep.

As he stood atop a tower, a dream giant towered over him, a colossus of light, blocking out the sun, but its own features not thereby cast into shadow.

Gavin felt himself guttering under the force of the giant’s gaze, no, melting like a candle man in a holocaust, wax streaming from every limb, right on the edge of combustion.