“You know I don’t remember shit about that battle. I woke up afterward and couldn’t see or hear for a week.”

“You can still fucking count. Number a men we had before, number a men we had after. It ain’t accountancy. Why you gotta trip up my story? You know what happened there even if you don’t remember it all for your own self. Anyway. Garriston was that. I tell you. It was that. Boy’s fucking fifteen.”

They’d noticed Teia then, and gave her a look that would wilt flowers.

Then she saw the next Kip, right after the Weeping Warrior. She saw Kip taking his place in line after Cruxer had come in like a righteous, judgmental god and crippled Aram. Kip, suddenly accepted, beaten, bruised, staggering, beaming, weeping, and whole. That was Kip Unalone: Kip with the scrubs, Kip with his team. Laughing, for one frozen moment, belonging. There was a tragic undercurrent in his face even as he laughed, though, as if he knew this moment was fleeting.

Then Kip Confident. She’d seen this for one second, and only one, but some part of her was certain this was Kip Himself. Kip, averring that while this war wasn’t the best thing, it was the best thing possible. Kip, unself-conscious, who knew when he knew what he was talking about. Kip, who didn’t sleep much. Kip, who knew some of the cost of what he was talking about. Kip, in that moment, wasn’t trying to impress anyone—and that made him more impressive. He was suddenly solid. Adult.

Attractive.

She thought of how she’d not hugged Kip. Why hadn’t she hugged him? She should have. Orholam, she should have.

“I suppose if I tell you something that you already know, you won’t listen to me?” Marissia said.

Teia blinked.

“Like if I pointed out the foolishness of getting your heart tangled with a Guile?”

“No danger of that,” Teia said quickly. Marissia was a room slave. She hadn’t had any say over Gavin coming to her bed. That she had chosen to make her service easier by pleasing him rather than harder by fighting him simply meant she was smart. She was doing what she needed to do to survive.

Marissia said, “Someone who says you shouldn’t do something while doing it herself could be considered a hypocrite. Or an expert. Hypocrite or expert, that of all people, I offer you advice is not a reason to dismiss it, but actually the opposite.”

“I didn’t call you a—” Teia was baffled. What was Marissia saying?

“You’re sixteen. You thought it. I judged my elders harshly when I was young, too.”

So Marissia loved Gavin. What kind of irony was it that Teia, who had been a slave, would have assumed that Marissia couldn’t love Gavin—because she was a slave?

It wasn’t … what? Normal love? Because Gavin was Prism and Marissia was a slave? Could Teia tell Marissia that what she felt wasn’t love? That Marissia was fooling herself, that really she was only making a bad situation tolerable? If a power difference made love impossible, who could ever love a Prism? Who could ever love a slave?

Maybe it was love, then. But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t easy.

Which was Marissia’s point exactly. The chasm between freed slave and a Prism’s son was narrower than the chasm between slave and Prism. But not by much.

Marissia ate more. Drank more. No hurry, no apparent interest in Teia. She casually scanned the crowd, but the way a bored person eating lunch might. Then she said, “Do you know, I was made a slave at your age.”

Teia stood, turned, propped a foot up on the bench, and began working on her calf in a way that would give her a glimpse of Marissia’s face.

“Things were suddenly expected of me that I found very, very hard. I cried myself to sleep many nights. Sometimes I still feel like that vulnerable little girl. I have an inkling of what the next year will demand of you. I want you to know I’m proud of you. The Order will test you more. They will ask you to do unspeakable things. You will do them. This is an order. In the sight of Orholam, let all the evil you do be on my head, and on the White’s. We’re playing against the Old Man of the Desert himself, you understand?”

“No,” Teia said quietly. “No.”

“You will,” Marissia said. She gazed up at the statue of Karris Shadowblinder, Karris’s namesake. “And stop giving her nonsense.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin, stood, and walked away.

Teia remembered herself enough to continue pretending to massage her leg. It wasn’t like she’d had a long time to bond with Marissia, but the woman had been the only person Teia could tell the whole truth. The sudden emptiness in her chest felt like a death.

Death. She’d killed a man in this war in shadow. Maybe Kip was right. Maybe it was justified. But she was going to have to kill again, for the other side. She had no doubt of it. How would the Order really trust her until she’d killed for them?

It wasn’t a matter of if they ordered her to do so, it was a matter of when. And she was supposed to meet up with Murder Sharp right now.

Chapter 68

Aliviana Danavis followed Phyros into the slum bar. It was the kind of place she would have feared a year ago, with good reason. She’d found new strength in the last months, or at least new fearlessness. But even with that, she never would have come here in her dresses and murex purple. Now she wore her hair in a simple braid, a tricorn hat, her fawnskin trousers still bearing the dark stains of what might have been blood. Before they’d died, she’d had her blue and her green drafter work together to fashion clips onto her pistols like Gavin Guile had, so she could wear all four pistols on her belt and not worry about losing them. She also wore a short saber that she still didn’t know how to use well, despite Phyros’s efforts to train her. A figure-hugging white tunic, but worn long over her trousers in the Tyrean style, and a green jacket waxed against the rain completed the ensemble.

She still stuck out, here in Wiwurgh. Just across the Coral Strait from Ilyta, and positioned at the very mouth of the Everdark Gates, the city was inhabited mainly by Tyreans, Ilytians, and Parians. The crowds of darker faces made something unknot in Liv’s soul. You could hardly get farther from the Jaspers if you tried. Here, she felt beautiful. Men whistled in appreciation, unlike the cool-blooded meat stares the men of the north and west coasts gave. Here a man would let you know his interest, but take his cue and leave you alone if you ignored him or gave a glance and no more.

It had taken Liv a while to get used to it again, and she hated that she’d been changed by her time at the Chromeria.

Of course, having the bare-chested barbarian that was Phyros as her bodyguard didn’t hurt in dissuading prolonged staring.

But a sailors’ tavern was different. There were women here, too, but they were even harder than the men. Every sailor and pirate had to walk with friends in the seaside slums, of course. The danger of being knocked out in an alley and waking as the iron cut your ear was real for everyone. But a woman’s lot was worse, as always. As the saying went, ‘A man ’slaved works one oar, a woman ’slaved works every oar on deck.’

Aliviana stepped into the low-ceilinged tavern and glanced around with a haughty, uninterested look on her face. But then she gasped aloud as she saw the man sitting in a corner, staring at her. Her father.

Corvan Danavis was slowly rising to his feet, as transfixed by the sight of her as she was of him. Her father? Here? Impossible.