As she worked, the ambling circuit of a guard’s watch went from routine to clockwork, superfluities excised, perfect efficiency aspired to. But when you know patterns and can internalize others’ and create your own to exploit them, you can walk twelve unhurried steps, pause by a shrub, and wait for the man with the infection in his groin to scratch, and then move on.

Not that all men or women were such automata. There was some twitchy woman who reacted violently even to the lightest touch. Liv simply gave her a wide berth.

She reached the top of the hill overlooking Azuria Bay on the Blood Forest coast, and her breath was taken away.

The bane lay below her. All of them, and all of them massive. Sub-red sizzling in the waves. Red smoldering. Orange placidly floating. Yellow awash in men and wights, every line perfect. Green bobbing wild. Cool blue melding with the color of the waves. And even the true prize, her superviolet bane, sitting invisible to most human eyes, known to most only by the odd bowl-shaped depression it made in the waves, waiting for her.

That had been the White King’s bait. She had the seed crystal, but he had the bane, her temple. Attuned to her powers, it had called to her and Beliol all these months. Calling, waiting to grant her her full power, for her to take her place as a goddess.

Had she really finished her work, and decided rationally to come here? Or had she been pulled along, manipulated like a drunk to his only source of wine, swearing he’d chosen it—yet every day, despite decay and wreck, he chose it again.

Wasn’t there one last place she was supposed to go to fulfill her mission? One place… near here? Something to do with Kip?

“We will be safe, Mistress,” Beliol said. “I shall know the very moment the least of them thinks of betrayal.”

“And I can trust you, of course,” Liv said. She’d been careful not to voice her suspicions to him before, but now it slipped out.

“I’ve no wish to be chained, either, goddess. What would the Yokeless One be if he were chained?”

No, that made sense.

Her body pulsed with superviolet, of her accord, and she felt at peace and focused again. “You can do this,” Beliol said. “Really, you must do it.”

The bane below were ready to sail to the Chromeria, loaded with supplies and an army and their drafter-paralyzing powers. They were going to win. They would cast off within a day or two at most, and Liv felt no armies within that distance coming to stop them before they could assault the Chromeria itself.

So Kip hadn’t figured it out. Sad.

The Blood Robes couldn’t be stopped, then, and the Chromeria was doomed. There was nothing to be gained by joining the losing side now, was there?

Ah well. At least that made her decision easy.

Releasing the fine superviolet shielding she’d developed to hide herself from the other gods, she whistled a little tune and started down the hill to join the White King.

To be worshipped, she thought, would be very fine.

Chapter 79

Some time later, Kip found himself washed and shaved and somehow, despite all his loitering, still waiting for his wife to appear.

And then she did.

Were they any other couple, Kip wouldn’t be thinking at all right now.

Candles, perfumed water, flower petals across a bigger bed in a more beautiful room than Kip had ever seen. Aromatic oils and all things pleasing to the senses. The Blood Foresters were serious about sex.

Tisis emerged from some side room with a blend of shyness and confidence and expectation and delight. On the trail or in a palace, wearing trousers or a nightgown or nothing at all, a beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. Or so Kip had thought.

But somehow what was becoming familiar had been made new, and what had continually delighted him now left him agog.

For an unutterably beautiful long moment, Kip didn’t think at all. He basked in the revelation of her as if it were the sun on a cold morning when the chill wind dies down and the winter fades.

But then that moment trembled and faltered and fell, and they saw it mirrored in each other’s eyes. They were not merely a husband and wife eager for each other—they were they, and what should be an unalloyed good was instead a battlefield.

For all the times this past year that they’d gone to bed without thinking of their problem, it was impossible to ignore it in the honeymoon chamber.

No honey for us.

He wished he could simply enjoy looking at how she brought light and life to the silken curves of her celadon nightgown, but now Tisis had that look on her face that Blackguard scrubs got during the puke circuit, that last time through any physical conditioning exercise where success was measured by puking only after you finished, rather than before.

Can’t anything be easy?

“No eye makeup,” Kip said. So she was already figuring she’d be crying.

“Thought there was no need to stain the sheets.”

“I think they’re actually prepared for that. You know, honeymoon chamber.”

“Kip, I meant—” she started, irritated, then saw that he was joking.

“Come here. Sit with me.”

He drank her in as she came across the chamber. Part of him thought, Of course I can’t make love with her. She’s far too beautiful. Something had to go wrong with me in the picture.

But he ignored that voice and simply enjoyed her.

She said, “When you look at me like that… I feel so loved… and so wretched. I feel so betrayed by my own body, like you’re starving, and I’m withholding food from you. But I’m not doing it on purpose, Kip!” She sat down heavily.

He took her hands. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m not angry at you for what you can’t control. That wouldn’t even make sense.”

“Angry doesn’t have to make sense. Anger. Whatever. I know you’re upset.”

“I am.”

“You’re disappointed in me, in us, in this sham marriage.”

“No, no, no, and yes. This isn’t what I expected. But I’m not disappointed in you, and our marriage isn’t a sham. But yes, I am disappointed.”

“You’ve been holding something back. I can tell.”

Shit. He puffed out his cheeks. “I hadn’t wanted to put anything else on you.”

She froze up.

He said, “Our wedding vows included an admittedly aspirational bit: ‘Let there be no darkness between us.’ Tisis, on our first night, you said something about ‘again.’ Do you remember what that was?”