“I’m not finished,” Karris said angrily.

“Perhaps then you are not so delicate a flower as you have believed,” the White said.

She said nothing more, and didn’t look at Karris. Karris thought of storming off, of swearing, of crying. Instead, she stood in the rain, letting it cool her anger, tame her wildness as it soaked her hair, pushing strands in front of her eyes. It took her two tries to speak. “For the longest time, I was just going to let it go, but … Why did you send me—me—to infiltrate Rask Garadul’s army?”

“Back in Tyrea?”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Karris said. “Rask was in love with me. I had no idea. You sent me into a situation with no warning. I was captured. Could have been killed.”

The White’s eyes weighed Karris. “Have you ever picked up a weapon in the middle of battle? Perhaps after you’d lost your own?”

“A musket once, in Garriston. When I tried to use it, it didn’t fire.”

“Mm. It happens.” The White said no more.

“Me? I was a weapon you picked up? Not knowing how I’d serve? That is … that’s horseshit. You know me! I’m hardly an unknown for you. And hardly a battlefield necessity. You could have sent any of the Blackguard, and any of a hundred other soldiers or slaves. Half of them could have done as well as I.”

“My purpose wasn’t to win a fight; it was to test a weapon.”

“What?” Karris demanded.

“You’ve many strengths, Karris Guile, but you return to the same ones over and over again. You’re afraid to stretch yourself. I’d given you chances to accomplish other tasks that could easily have been done through a bit of flattery or bribery, and you always took the direct path, relying on authority and hierarchy. But then, when I would prepare myself to cut you loose, you’d do something brilliant that showed me you were capable of thinking for yourself. You simply like to have others give the orders. So I put you in a situation where there was a vital task, but no direction on how to accomplish it. I knew you might die, and I’d have carried your death heavily for misjudging you. Instead you passed, and now I’ve gained something even better than me trusting you.”

Karris scowled. “And that is?”

“You trust yourself. A little more, at least.”

Karris shook her head. “Then why take me out of my position? I understand Andross Guile wanting to take away something I love, but you? Why wouldn’t you fight for me?” And there it was again, the hot tears threatening. Her throat tightened.

The White blinked, and her face transformed in a moment with an intensity that breathed fresh youth into her face. “You listen to me, Karris Guile. I will never stop fighting for you!” She sat back, and looked abruptly old once more. “I grow cold in this rain. Take me inside. But before we go, I have a new assignment for you, Karris Guile. One befitting your new status.”

“My new status? As a widow? As a former Blackguard?”

“As a woman with no work and ample time on her hands.”

It was a slap in the face. Karris’s anger flared. “Am I to knit sweaters and darn socks, High Lady?”

“I’ve lost my mobility. It makes it far too easy to track with whom I meet. You, Karris, are to manage my spies.”

Chapter 10

Teia didn’t cross the Lily’s Stem to the Chromeria until she saw a group of young Blackguards heading back. They were from her ship. Had she really been gone so short a time that the other nunks were only reaching the bridge now? She checked the alleys again, and despite the rain, put on her darkened spectacles again for a moment. She opened her eyes wide, wider, until her eyes were all pupil. She looked left and right and deeper into the intersection. She looked behind herself, deeper into the alley, searching for any sign of paryl, or of the assassin. Nothing.

She grabbed her spectacles and tucked them into a pocket and hurried into the main stream of traffic ever flowing across the bridge, past the Chromeria’s guards, standing in mirrored armor in the usually empty sentry boxes. The war. The war was real now, and they were prepared for an attack. Here. Surreal.

“Is it true?” one of the guards asked the Blackguards. “Is the Prism dead?”

“Lost,” one of them said.

“Lost? What? Like he’s a penny? Lost at sea ain’t just lost. I heard you combed the shores for days, looking for him. Ain’t you lot supposed to keep him from being lost?”

One of the Blackguard nunks, Ferkudi, snarled and leapt at the guard. But the others pulled him back and toward the tower.

“You lot let our Prism die!” the guard shouted. “What good are you if you let a Prism drown on your watch? None of you even jumped after him?”

Ferkudi cursed, and Cruxer got right in the guard’s face. He said something Teia couldn’t hear, but made no move. The guard said nothing more, but he had tears streaking down his face.

These people loved Gavin. They barely knew him, and they weep.

No, maybe that wasn’t right. They didn’t know him personally, but Gavin had been everywhere visible for longer than Teia had been alive. And he’d been a good Prism. The rumors had to be flying everywhere on the Jaspers, with the official word being so pitifully incomplete—not a position at all, really. ‘Lost.’

‘Lost.’ Not a word you want to toss around lightly at the beginning of a war whose two battles had both been … setbacks for the Chromeria.

Gavin had been nigh unto a god to these people, and they’d lost two battles despite having him fight on their side. How would they do without him?

It had been a question the Blackguards had been asking themselves for days. And their failure had not passed their notice, either.

Teia said nothing, though, and walked past with her head down.

Despite that the Lily’s Stem was covered in a dome of blue and yellow luxin, translucent and insanely strong, Teia walked for twenty or thirty paces before she took off her hood. The tide was rising, and the wind was causing whitecaps. The Lily’s Stem crossed the waterline, so now the waves were smashing against the bridge, which didn’t so much as shudder. It was a symbol of the Chromeria itself. All the tumult and the roar of the world crested and smashed against it, and it stood, unchanged, unmoved, impervious.

It was always eerie, though, walking through the light-tunnel, watching bursts of water flare high over your head, sometimes crashing all the way over the tube. There had been attempts to blow the bridge before with barrels of black powder. At least three attempts had been stopped. One wagon had made it, the Tellari separatist inside bleeding, dying from his wounds even as he maniacally set fire to his cargo.

The explosion, confined to the tube, had blasted out both sides like a musket firing two directions. Dozens had died, and yet the bridge held. Ahhana the Dextrous had been the superchromat yellow drafter who’d been the lead drafter creating the bridge, more than two hundred years ago. There were engineers even now who claimed succession down a line of tutors to the woman, so famous had she been.

Teia tried to remind herself of that strength when a wave smashed against the side and washed all the way over the top.

She avoided the others: Ferkudi and some of his friends from the earlier Blackguard classes. For a moment as they laughed, though, happy, not two minutes after grieving and being ready to fight, Teia saw them as her instructors must: children, sixteen and seventeen years old, laughing about someone’s awkward attempts at kissing, and yet warriors at the same moment, lethal and lazy, implacable and silly, man and child.