“On the other hand,” he said, his voice taking on a happy tone as if he hadn’t been threatening Gavin a moment before, “if you succeed, you will be the man who changed the world forever. Who, indeed, saved the world.” He offered the Blinding Knife in his hands to Gavin. “‘Some work of noble note may yet be done,’ eh? What will it be? Death? Or a chance?”

Looking into Grinwoody’s black orbs—no, Anazâr’s, there was nothing of the sniveling slave in this man—Gavin believed him completely. There was no weaseling out of this. No third way. No drafting something so audacious that no one else had ever dreamed of it to escape.

Perhaps it was a measure of Gavin’s stubborn arrogance, even here, even now, reduced to this, that his thought wasn’t of how impossible it all was. He thought, But what if I succeed?

Magic was lost to him, but that was very different from killing magic altogether. Everything he’d done and built and dreamed and created had been because of and with magic. The whole society. His family’s wealth and privilege. His living while his brother died. The skimmers. The condor.

Grinwoody couldn’t be right… but what if he was?

Whistling a melodious little trill, Gunner nudged him. “C’mon, what’ll it be? Death or glory?”

Gavin rubbed the eye patch, and the touch of the black luxin jewel sent unpleasant tingles through his fingers and down his wrist. He pulled his hand away. As the snowy-fingered dawn reached across the sky like a thief, he grabbed the dark Blinding Knife and said, “Let’s sail. Death and glory, Cap’n Gunner.”

“Death or glory. Or,” Gunner said.

Not likely.

He cast his eyes up at the tower. Goodbye, Karris. Farewell, my love.

Chapter 77

“We’ve got a skimmer of Blackguards back, High Lady,” Samite reported as she strode into Karris’s staterooms. There was none of the usual levity from the square-shouldered woman. “There are casualties.”

Karris broke off another damned negotiation for black powder with representatives of the Ilytian pirate kings—now with a pirate queen added in for variety—and left immediately.

In minutes they were in the infirmary. Chirurgeons and luxiats bustled through a ward of gleaming white stone. The infirmary was ablaze with light all hours of the day and night. The sun’s rays were believed to have healing properties. Because that meant it was substantially warmer than other floors of the Prism’s Tower, it was held that the servants and luxiats here were allowed shortened sleeves and hemlines because of the heat.

The truth was grimmer, told in the runnels and gutters in the infirmary floor: short sleeves and hems don’t drag in blood. In its long history, the Chromeria had seen its share of war and pestilence.

Karris composed herself as she walked. She wasn’t the concerned friend or even a stern-faced commander here, she was Orholam’s left hand on earth. As he looked unblinking on every horror, and with mercy on every weakness, so must she appear caring but unmoved. She must be a pillar for others to lean on, never needy, never surprised, never weak. Iron.

The rooms were surprisingly sedate. Karris hadn’t been down here since the last training accident more than a month ago, when two teenaged nunks ended up with scars across their faces from an explosive they’d created—with one blinded permanently.

These days the infirmary was double staffed—evidence of Carver Black’s early preparations for the war—but it faced hardly more than the usual number of injuries, even as the war training of drafters had continued through the last year.

Given the scarcity of other patients and their elevated status, the Blackguards had been given their own room. Most of the injuries were minor: a burn that had seared Gill Greyling’s sleeve to his bicep, a cut across Jin Holvar’s back, an arrow stuck in Presser’s buttock that would be funny someday if it didn’t get infected. But for once, there was no humor, no attempts at levity.

Gavin Greyling lay on a table surrounded by his brothers and sisters. Not a one didn’t have a hand on him. He was stripped to the waist, but Karris saw no wounds on the teenager.

Karris came to stand by his head and put a hand on the dark, sweaty skin of his chest. She looked to his elder brother Gill, who winced as a chirurgeon ripped the fabric away from his own wound and pressed a bandage to it. The young man never moved his reassuring hand from his brother’s arm. So what was Gavin’s wound?

With a groan, Gavin Greyling opened his eyes to see who had just touched him. And Karris knew.

The sclera of his dark eyes were littered with the glowing blue fragments of his broken halos.

“Ah fuck,” Karris said, forgetting everything she’d just prepared.

It seemed to be the right thing to say, though. The Blackguards nodded and grumbled, and Gavin Greyling smiled weakly at her.

“Broken, huh?” he said. “They didn’t want to tell me. I could feel it, though. Something wrong, something let loose in me. Shit.”

“Shit,” Karris agreed. The cat was out of the bag now. What did it matter? These were her people: they would forgive her for remembering she’d been a Blackguard first.

“Ambushed us,” Gavin Greyling said. “We were looking for Promachos.”

“Of course you were,” Karris said. Orholam have mercy. They’d been looking for her husband. Quietly.

Officially, Andross Guile had stopped sending out Blackguards to look for Gavin. They were overworked already, and didn’t need their deaths hastened by drafting more. Other eyes and ears had taken on those duties, searching foreign capitals and rival houses for any whisper of him.

The Blackguards were professionals. They weren’t supposed to have favorites.

But they’d loved Gavin Guile. Quietly. They’d loved him. They would never give up on him.

She had to hold back sudden tears. Gavin Greyling was only eighteen years old. He’d been named after her husband. He’d lived to protect him. Now he was dying for him.

She didn’t ask if they’d found anything. Of course they hadn’t. Asking would only drive home the waste of it. This young man was dying for nothing. But his intentions had been good. Heroic, even. War cared nothing.

“You’re entitled to have the Prism-elect perform your Freeing,” Karris said.

“Fuck him,” Gavin said. “Damn. It feels kind of good to be able to say it free and clear. Sorry, Gill. Sorry, brothers, sisters. But fuck him. I know he’s your son, High Mistress. But you got a blind spot where he’s standing. He’s not a good man, High Lady. No one wants to say it to you. No one can tell you the truth. I can now. Because you have to listen to a dying man, don’t you? He did the Freeing last year, and we were there. We’ve been at Freeings—not me, but this brotherhood—we’ve been there with Gavin Guile every time he had to do the Freeing. We saw how a good man approached that day. We saw him steeling his nerves. We saw his vomit in the chamber pot the morning of. We saw his steel spine all day. We saw his drunkenness the night after and the endless baths and the hands bloodied from him scrubbing them over and over. That’s how a real man takes having to kill seventy or a hundred or two hundred friends. Your son did none of that.”