“You weren’t going to tell him about bla—”

“Indeed I was,” Lady Janus Borig says. “Your son is not simply precocious, Felia. He is terribly bright; he is handsome; he is charming; and you have spoiled him horribly. In other words, he has all the makings of a true monster.”

My mother blinks. No one talks to her like this.

“Though I wonder.” She takes a deep breath on her pipe, not merely drawing the smoke into her mouth, but inhaling it. Mother doesn’t say a word, which tells me that she respects this terrible old lady immensely. “I suppose his elder brother beats him from time to time?”

“Best of friends one minute, fiercest enemies the next.”

“Do you ever win those fights with Gavin?” the old woman asks me.

I shake my head, glowering.

“You think I don’t like you,” Lady Janus Borig says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m trying to save you.” She turns to my mother. “You should let those White Oak boys thrash him a few times.”

“What?!”

“You’re clever enough to pick one of the younger ones who won’t do real damage. Perhaps a broken nose spoiling Dazen’s looks a bit would be the best thing for him. And learning that he is not invincible, that would be best for the world, I think.”

My mother lowers her voice. “Is this … is this your gift speaking?”

“Pshh. This isn’t prophecy. I’m simply wiser than you, girl.”

My mother blinks, but accepts the rebuke. Suddenly she seems very young.

“I’ll tell him of black luxin, but I’ll tell him true, or I’ll tell him nothing at all. I think it would be best for him. But you’re the one who will have to live with the screaming in the night from the bad dreams.”

“If he thinks he’s ready,” my mother says, and her eyes are burning.

“You said you’re not afraid of anything,” Lady Janus Borig says to me. “Are you afraid now?”

Click.

Suddenly, Kip was standing in total darkness. He was himself once more. Where was he? When was he?

He drafted sub-red and widened his eyes. It was his own room. Click? What had that been?

He strode to the door, opened it, peeked out. Andross Guile was barely disappearing down the hallway.

What in nine hells?

The card memory had taken almost no time at all. The click was the settling of the latch.

He hadn’t been certain until this moment, but now he knew: he’d lied to Teia. He had bungled everything, but he hadn’t sprung a Janus Borig trap. He hadn’t erased the cards. He’d absorbed them all—and he had a sudden, clear, sick conviction they were going to drive him mad.

Chapter 81

Teia only pretended to flee. As soon as Andross Guile kicked her out to talk to Kip, she walked hurriedly past the Blackguards standing watch and headed down the hall and out of sight. She summoned the lift, but didn’t get on.

Instead, she pulled up the hood of her cloak. She looked left and right, saw no one, and willed herself to become invisible.

Nothing.

She felt up in the neckline and found the choker, a narrow band of metal that was attached to the cloak at many points. She pulled it up against her neck. She trembled, a shudder of revulsion coursing through her.

No one collared their slaves on the Jaspers. It was considered gauche. Beatings and other discipline were to be carried out at home, not in public. To need to discipline one’s slave in public reflected poorly on your own mastery. Slaves, of course, knew that any public defiance, however satisfying, would be met with double punishment later.

Other cities, and other men, were not so civilized—or perhaps not so hypocritical. This wasn’t the first time Teia had worn a collar, but it was the first time she’d done so voluntarily. The feeling of constriction around her neck was almost unbearable.

Things to do, T. Not much time, T. Could come out any second. Still have to figure out how to use the damned thing.

She moved the loose necklace that held the little vial of oil aside. Her hands held the choker’s clasp loosely. Unmoving. She was breathing deeply, almost hyperventilating, and not clasping the damned clasp.

Chains. I’ve done everything in my life to get away from chains.

Part of her argued with that. Some garbage about differences between slavery and a cloak that empowered her. It didn’t change the visceral revulsion.

These are the chains I choose.

The chains I choose.

She cinched the choker tight and extended her will. Teeth shot out of the choker and sank into either side of her neck. They hurt so bad she doubled over and almost screamed.

And then her breath was taken for another reason. She could feel it. The cloak had a presence within it. It wasn’t a whole personality; instead—if the chirurgeons were correct, and cogitation took place in the human brain—it was as if the cloak had all the parts of a person’s brain that dealt with light splitting and magic sunk into it, with a whisper of personality there. To make this cloak, someone had given her life—or had it taken from her. The cloak knew how to split light in the ways that Teia had barely glimpsed when she broke into the White’s office.

In all her life, Teia had had to struggle for every excellence. She could sing, but had seen other slaves remember every note in a tune in one or two hearings. She could fight, but she’d seen other Blackguards combine throws and punches and kicks into series as fluidly as if fighting were a language and they were constructing elaborate arguments. Her own style was terse, fast, but ultimately simple, without nuance. She could look at Cruxer or Winsen and see that they were already maturing into the best in the world, their skills growing by leaps and bounds. That was beyond her, and always would be. Her speed would get no better. Her reach was terminally short. In a continuum that began with Big Leo and Kip and Ironfist, she was not strong. Her aim would improve, as would her knowledge of where and when to strike. Among the best, she would become mediocre, every scrap of her skill earned only by the most challenging labor.

Nor had she any excellence in her studies. Despite his difficulty reading, Ben-hadad could extemporize, looking at the gears and pulleys and weights and strengths of each luxin and designing machines as if it were play to him. Kip could memorize, and make great intuitive leaps. If study were scrivening, they wrote in a perfect hand, and illuminated their manuscripts for fun while the dullards caught up to them. By contrast, Teia held the quill in her fist.

At the touch of whatever will was animating the cloak, Teia knew two things immediately. First, light splitting at the level of the old mist walkers was as difficult as any magical or mundane skill in the world. It was as difficult as juggling and sprinting and singing at once. Blindfolded. Second—more importantly—it made sense to her.

Simply using this cloak would teach her more than any master could.

She already saw how this cloak was superior to the other. None of the cloaks—not even this one—split light beyond the visible spectrum. Sub-red was too long a wave to be diverted and reformed within the thin layer of fabric, and superviolet was too fine.

Even among lightsplitters, the only people who had a chance to be fully invisible to all spectra would be paryl drafters. A true mist walker might use a shimmercloak to handle visible light while using a paryl mist to handle the last two spectra herself.