“Life is lived in the pauses between wars. Any peace is better than any war, some say.”

“Do you take me for one of those?” she asked.

“I’m not asking anything of you. Any place your troops hold today, they shall keep. It shall be my side that falls back.”

“And I’ll guess that your spies will be repeating all this on the streets of Big Jasper within the week? Undermining support for the war?”

“Mm. That sounds like an excellent idea. It’s a weakness of your empire: people here never want to bleed for strangers over there. Whereas my word is holy writ. I command the gods themselves. I say when it is time to bleed and when it is time to build, and none question me. Not bad for the weakling once beaten by your sadly deceased husband, mm?”

“What you’ve suffered doesn’t excuse what you’ve done,” Karris said.

“I’m not looking for an excuse.”

And then she saw the terrible logic of it. Koios might be faced with a particular weakness right now that prompted him to a truce; perhaps he was waiting for someone to be bought off, or a critical shipment of black powder to come through. Certainly any pause would undermine support in the satrapies. But those things might not be the point at all.

Koios wanted both sides to rearm and come back to battle with more terrible weapons because Koios wanted slaughter. He wanted to demolish an entire generation. It wasn’t just that he wanted to kill everyone who stood in his way and war was the most efficient way of lining up your enemies and finding out which of your friends might be too formidable someday. He wanted to prove that the Chromeria’s way of doing everything was utterly broken. He wanted to kill their apologists, and anyone whose very memory would gainsay his new story.

It’s easier to build a new culture on the graves of the dead than around the homes of the living.

“This isn’t the kind of trap I was expecting,” she said.

“Trap my own sister?” he said, but his mouth twisted.

“If you kill me, I’ll be a martyr for attempting to find peace, and you’ll prove that you’re untrustworthy. Dammit, Koios, how’d you come to this?”

“Fire burns away illusions,” he said.

“So now you’ll plunge the satrapies into the fire, hoping it cripples everyone else as well?” she asked bitterly.

“I’m not a madman,” he said. “It’s beneath you to suggest I am. Too convenient by half. As lazy as I’d expect from some Chromeria witch or Magisterium sycophant. I thought better of you, though.”

She looked at him sadly. “Your plan isn’t mad, brother; it’s evil.”

“Evil is what we call what we don’t understand.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to leave here today and wonder why I didn’t try to kill you before you could do more harm, aren’t I?”

“It’s not in you to break a pledge, sister.”

Maybe it is, this once.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “How do you convince them all that you’re a polychrome?”

“Simple. I became one,” he said. “The same way Dazen Guile did it.”

He noted her confusion.

“You’ve either become a better liar than I’d have expected of you, sister, or you’ve stayed exactly, disappointingly the same, and you’re still the wide-eyed naïf who helped start the last war. You do know that the man you married is Dazen Guile?”

She tried not to react, but his face lit up.

“You did. So, not a complete naïf. But he kept some things from you. Heartbreaking.”

“Are you really trying to poison my marriage?”

“Dazen took all pleasures of the flesh from me. If I can be a fly in his ointment, I will. I wish he were alive so I could kill him with my own hands. But… we must all deal with our little disappointments, mustn’t we?”

“I think we’ve said everything profitable here,” Karris said. “Goodbye, brother. Nice chariot.”

She turned her back and started walking away.

“I did have a trap,” he said as she left. “But I’ll not trigger it. My gift to you, sister, for the love we shared.”

She turned again. “The next time we meet, O White King, shall be the last. For the love I bear still for that precious boy who died in fire, I will end you. And I’ll weep for him, but for your death I will feel only relief.”

He said nothing, only watched her go, and when they pushed away from the island, the skimmer was surrounded by a score of will-cast sharks. The fearsome beasts fell into an escort formation around the skimmer.

But as soon as they reached deeper water, an enormous black shape burst through their ranks and scattered them like chaff. A whale? A black whale?

“More than just men are concerned with this war,” Karris said. “That should comfort us.”

Should. But then, she didn’t feel any comfort herself.

They didn’t wait to see what happened. They pushed the skimmer to full speed and headed for home.

Chapter 51

“This could be good news,” Tisis said in a voice that told Kip the sentence was bound to continue in a direction he wasn’t going to like, “but I doubt it.”

Thought so.

“You remember I told you about my cousin Antonius?” she said.

“The one you said got all the family charisma?” Kip said. “This is him?”

“I might not have mentioned his flaws.”

The island was like the intertwined fingers of lovers this morning, soft and hard, billows of fog covering and revealing a thousand spears and muskets arrayed on every shore around the island. The beauty of the warm, diffuse light of the rising sun setting off the threatened death. “So what about this could be good news?” Kip asked.

“Lord Guile,” Derwyn Aleph of the Cwn y Wawr said, coming up to them. “The men are ready.”

Everyone had formed up neatly with their various constituencies. They weren’t integrated or arrayed exactly the way Kip would have preferred. It would do for now. Kip hadn’t read any books on what to do when you’re outnumbered and surrounded—and on an island. Probably because no competent commander in history had ever put himself in such a position.

“Good. We wait,” Kip said. He motioned for Tisis to go on.