“I took some liberties from the original design,” Grinwoody said. “It will still kill you if you try to remove it. When you bathe, you can hold it in your hand. Just make sure it never loses contact with your skin.”

Gavin put it on. It snugged against his left eyelid tight enough that it pressed skin into the divot where his pupil lay, lensless. A chill went down Gavin’s spine, and he wasn’t sure it was entirely natural.

Grinwoody’s demonically gleeful look of triumph made Gavin want to punch him in the face.

“It’s a good look on you. Follow me,” the old man said.

He turned his back on Gavin, utterly dismissive of what had once been the most dangerous man in the world.

“Guile,” the dead man said. But now he didn’t speak with Gavin’s voice, but what might have been his own guttural growl. “Take me. I’m the only one who can save you. Touch that black stone in your eye patch to the wall, and I will make you emperor of this world in truth.”

Gavin could swear that in the black-on-black he could make out a pair of hateful gleaming eyes.

He smiled into the darkness. “What kind of a raka do you take me for?”

Expecting claws to dig into his head and pull him back into hell at any moment, Gavin slowly stepped out of the cell.

Another step. Another.

“This way,” Grinwoody said after he swung the door to the black cell shut. “There’s… old superstitions among the Braxians that there’s something terrible below the Chromeria. Like about how you can’t take anything out of there, or something cataclysmic would happen. Andross was always very careful to strip and wash before he came out of here. I also put an emetic in that food. Just in case. Sometimes old traditions and old fears do hide wisdom.”

“What?” Gavin said. But he already could feel the answer to that in his belly. Orholam have mercy, what did the man think, he’d swallowed a stone?

Grinwoody came to a stop in a small chamber. The Old Man was already stripping off his own clothes and washing himself. He gestured to a basin. Gavin staggered over and was messily sick. But apparently it wasn’t an emetic only.

“Can’t take any risks that you swallowed something,” Grinwoody said. “I have somewhere to be. I’ll be back with clothes and real food. Don’t forget: you try anything—and I mean even yell—and that black crystal will go straight through your skull.”

But Gavin was too busy being sick to even think of escape.

Chapter 74

“Your lady awaits in the honeymoon chamber, my lord,” Cruxer said.

They were not, perhaps, words that should have inspired dread.

Kip blew out a breath. He and Cruxer were virtually alone in the Council’s chamber, which they’d converted to a war room. It was late. Big Leo was the only other person in the room, and he was propped against a wall, reading a book.

The first night in Dúnbheo, the Divines had either been in disarray or had intentionally snubbed Kip by not having a room made ready. Kip and Tisis had worked so late they’d simply grabbed the nearest defensible room and slept. He didn’t actually care, but he’d known that other people would—and that they would take his acceptance of an insult as a sign of weakness or barbarity—so he’d made a passing comment about how it was strange a people so famed for their hospitality could make such an oversight.

Tisis had helped, musing that maybe hospitality was more a virtue of the rural areas. The palace staff had been mortified. Outclassed by bumpkins? Unthinkable.

The conveniently dead Lord Comán had been blamed, and the staff had been almost painfully punctilious. Tonight they had prepared a room that was apparently not simply the city’s finest, but a cultural treasure of some sort.

“Breaker?” Cruxer asked.

Kip was staring at the map. “Uh, right. I’m just waiting for one last report.”

“He’s gone, Breaker,” Cruxer said. “It’s not giving up on him to admit it. He just couldn’t take it. Death isn’t the only way we lose people in war.”

Contrary to his promise, Conn Arthur had left immediately, slipping away while the rest of the Nightbringers marched into the city. No one had seen or heard from him since.

“It’s not just him,” Kip said. “Sibéal’s gone, too.”

“Gone? No note?”

“Nothing,” Kip said. “I don’t know if she went after Conn Arthur or if I’m looking at the beginning of a general desertion by the Ghosts.”

“That’s impossible,” Cruxer said. “Why would they?”

“Maybe they think if we save Green Haven they’ll be back under the Chromeria’s thumb and it’ll be the end of them. I don’t know,” Kip said.

“No. Not gonna happen,” Cruxer said with total certainty.

Kip loved him for that.

“And this is not something you need to worry about tonight. Sometimes you move heaven and earth, Breaker, and sometimes you just go to bed and let your wife make you happy. Very happy, if the gleam in her eye tells me anything.”

“You’re a moron to keep her waiting,” Big Leo said from the corner, speaking for the first time in hours.

But Kip didn’t move. That damned map.

“There other problems?” Cruxer asked quietly enough Big Leo wouldn’t overhear. “I mean, between you and her?”

Kip met his eye and was tempted to tell him everything, but how could Cruxer understand? And was it any of his business, anyway? “Nah, it’s, it’s fine. It’s great.”

Cruxer saw straight through the lie. Kip could tell. But he seemed to forgive it immediately. There are things a man just doesn’t want to share about his marriage. “Well, uh, even if there were some, uh, tough things going on, she didn’t seem in a mood to fight tonight.”

“Thanks,” Kip said. “I mean, thanks, really.” For putting up with a lie. That wasn’t worthy of me.

“Nah, I’d say she was in a different mood altogether,” Big Leo said from his corner. Apparently they hadn’t been speaking quietly enough.

But that damned map. Tisis had been working with the refugees from all over the Forest, all day long, to fill in more reports about the White King’s movements. Kip rewound it and watched the light blossom again, everything they had since Ox Ford and even before up to the present.