Eirene’s eyes were damp, and Gavin didn’t know if she was thinking of those who’d died that day, or her father who’d died before, or all that she had lost in leading her family, or whether she was thinking about Felia Guile and the friendship of that great woman that she’d been deprived of. “Did she … did she speak of me? At the end?”

The most tempting lies are often best shunned. It proves your honesty. Gavin shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. Our time was … very limited. The Color Prince was almost literally at the door, and we had a city to defend. It was an abbreviated Freeing, at best.”

And he had her. By Orholam’s beard, he had her. He was going to claw his way up out of this cell, and out of this country, and he was going to climb the heavens. He would fell the sun. There was nothing Gavin Guile couldn’t do. He was not only his magic. He was a man unlike any other man who’d ever gone before. He was a man to rival Lucidonius himself. He was a god.

“Lady Malargos, set me free. I will win this war, and I will repay every debt you are owed, and I will make the Color Prince pay in blood.”

But then the door opened, and of all people, of all the real Gavin’s old friends and lovers and enemies and those who were all three in a singular body, the Nuqaba walked in. She was dressed in the casual style that a Parian lady would usually only wear in her own home, among her ladies and eunuchs, and that she was dressed so here told Gavin that she was an honored guest and a close friend of Eirene Malargos. She wore jeweled slippers, women’s loose mid-calf-length trousers secured with a multifolded brocade belt with long fringe, a light blouse open in the front, and a vest snug about the bust decorated with precious stones matching those on a number of necklaces and a loose scarf about her hair.

She wore the small tattoos of her position as Nuqaba, almost invisible against her rich black skin: one just below her lower lip, and one under each eye in decorative Old Parian script. Under the left eye, it read, “Cursed Accuser,” and under the right “Blessed Redeemer.”

“Greetings, Gavin,” the leader of Paria said, “do you know what this is?” She held up a metallic chain with a large jewel on it like living fire captured in amber. “This is the seed crystal of the orange bane. Among other things, it detects lies, and you, you glorious fuck, you are a liar.”

Chapter 57

“I’ve figured out something really exciting,” Quentin said. He was standing on the table in the restricted library. His hair was askew, and he had a few days’ growth of scrubby uneven beard. “Unfortunately, it’s trivial and not at all helpful!” He laughed, and it was the ragged sound of someone right on the edge.

Kip said, “Quentin, why are your teeth red? Tell me that isn’t blood.”

“Heh-heh-heh.” His voice pitched up crazily. “Nah, it’s not blood. Khat. You know khat? It’s a stimulant. Never used it until today—uh, three days ago. With kopi and khat and…” He looked down at several bowls below the table.

“Please tell me you haven’t been using the High Luxiats’ flower jars as chamber pots,” Kip said.

“Kip, under a thin veneer of excitement, I think I might be about to collapse.”

“That seems likely,” Kip said. “What did—did you drink the flowers’ water first?”

“I couldn’t drink it second. That would be gross. Plus, there wouldn’t be any room.”

Kip shook his head. He reached up and grabbed Quentin and put the young man down on the floor. He didn’t trust Quentin to jump down without hurting himself. The reedy scholar barely weighed more than Teia.

“Um, thanks?” Quentin said. “And please don’t touch me again. I don’t … I just don’t like being touched. Thanks.”

Kip shrugged. So Quentin was weird. Not any weirder than the rest of them. “So…?”

“The Black Cards and the Lightbringer are connected!”

“That is … exciting. I guess. How?”

“That we don’t know anything about either of them! Ha!”

Kip said, “Not so exciting.”

“I, I, I told you that I figured out the organization scheme, right?”

“That was like three weeks ago.”

“Right, right. I, I found all the references to the Lightbringer—I’ll show you those in, in, presently—and there was a problem with all of them—”

“Problem?” Kip interrupted. “What kind of problem?”

“One moment, one moment! So I had this thought and I went and I found all the books on the Black Cards. I couldn’t find them at first, but then I didn’t look for books on Black Cards—those have all been burned or stolen or what, what have you—so instead I looked for books about all the cards, but written before the Black Cards were declared black, that is, heretical, see?”

“Smart.” Kip wasn’t following, but it didn’t seem to matter.

“And I found the very same thing!”

“Same as what?” Kip asked.

“Same as the Lightbringer mentions!”

“But you didn’t tell—”

“Oh, right, right. Look.” Quentin pointed to a tiny book on the table.

The leaves were so old they were fragile and stained. “What is this?” Kip asked.

“It’s a luxiat’s prayer book. It was stitched into book form rather than a scroll so it could be thumbed through more easily, and fit in a pocket. They made them durable, and with plenty of empty pages at the back for the luxiat to record notes or prayers or dreams from Orholam or prophecies. This one belonged to Darjan himself.”

“The warrior-priest?”

“A leader of the aħdar qassis gwardjan. A green guardian priest.”

“The writing looks funny,” Kip said.

“The text? It looks funny to me, too. I don’t speak all these languages. I paired all the oldest books not in Parian or Old Parian with their translations. Sort of handy that the translations have been moved to this library, too.”

Kip hadn’t meant the text per se, though of course he couldn’t read it. He meant that there were blanks in the text. Spaces floated as if someone had written in invisible ink in them, but there were no words there. “What’s with the gaps?”

“Look at the translation book, right, right below it.”

The book of translation had gaps, too. They weren’t precisely aligned with gaps in the original, at least not by spacing. But Kip could guess that they must be aligned by meaning.

“It’s, it’s the same in all of these,” Quentin said. “Someone’s erased a lot.”

“Erased ink?”

“Or, or, or … or they wrote in some invisible ink. You’re the polychrome. You tell me.”

Kip shielded his eyes from the lantern and widened his pupils out to look in sub-red. Nothing. He soaked up some sub-red luxin from the lantern and brought it to his fingers—

“Kip, you’re forbidden to draft sub-red in a library!” Quentin said. “You can get expelled!” He obviously meant to whisper the last word, but he did it so loudly he might as well have been shouting.

But Kip was already done. There were no heat-reactive inks. He narrowed his gaze to superviolet—so often used for secret writing. Nothing there. He gently streamed superviolet luxin over the page, but nothing fluoresced. Then he donned each pair of colored spectacles in turn and gazed at the page. Nothing, nothing in any color.