Dear Orholam, what harm will these men do that I might prevent?

But it wasn’t her place. Orholam had put her here, but he’d put her in the Blackguard, too, and he’d put a longing in her whole heart to be a Blackguard. She couldn’t betray all that. She was called to be a shield, and shield she would be.

And like that, the cobwebs cleared and what she had to do was simple.

The White wasn’t dead. Not yet.

Teia waited only until her chance came, and slipped out of the room. She made her way downstairs, stilled the bell above a servants’ door to the outside, and went out. She slipped past the Blackguards, climbed the roof of the stables in the back, and vaulted over the high fence. After a block, she dropped the invisibility and simply ran.

She was almost all the way back to the Chromeria before she realized that both Andross and Zymun could see in the sub-red. If it had occurred to either man to look in sub-red while she was in the room, she would be in a dungeon or dead right now. The thought made her sweat run cold.

Lucky, T. Now let’s hope that luck holds.

Chapter 83

Gavin had expected some casual cruelty on his way to the hippodrome, like being forced to wear a hood, or locked in a carriage or palanquin with something disgusting so that his last sight before the cheering crowds would be of filth. Instead, he was allowed to ride inside a normal carriage, albeit with doors that locked from the outside, and windows too small to wiggle through.

He was also chained and tied up nearly as much as he would have tied up himself in this situation. But still, he could see, and by luck, he got the better window.

He wanted to think that knowing these were among the last things he would see lent everything a certain poignancy, but the truth was that the Great River Delta was always beautiful, and now, with Sun Day on the morrow, it looked as vibrant as he’d ever seen a day in whites and grays look.

As the carriage rumbled through the cobbled switchbacks down Jaks Hill where the great families had their estates, Gavin could see the myriad farms stretched out on the plain below. With the warmer weather and the passing of time, the floodwaters had deposited their yearly tribute of fertile silt. Some fields were now dry. Others were muddy. Some few were still under a bare thumb of water. Thousands of shorebirds filled land and sky. Egrets and herons and cranes and ducks and geese and red-winged blackbirds had arrived from their migrations or emerged from hiding. Rushes and cattails and a thousand kinds of grass had sprung up in the lines between perfect fields. The land must be a debauched party of greens and browns and points of color like jeweled fingers flashing in torchlight.

Gavin’s monochromatic vision was a curse once again. This world had faded to textures.

He sank back into his carriage seat.

Some part of him still expected a crash at any moment, a violent stop, fighting—rescue.

But none came. The image of the baby black widow spiders rolling over him in a wave changed. Now the eggs were grains of black powder, wadded down the blossoming barrel of a blunderbuss. Gavin, the elder, watched: a hole in his forehead, a hole in his jaw, head bobbing like an old man with the twitching sickness because the tendons supporting his head had been clipped by the passage of bullets and brains out the back of his skull. Dead Gavin smiled around broken teeth, blood washing from the front of his head and his mouth and the back of his head, too, too much blood for a man to bleed when his brain had been stopped. Too much blood for a man to bleed, period. He cocked that blunderbuss, aimed it at his little brother’s stomach.

He fired.

The blunderbuss vomited black death through Dazen’s guts. He jerked, looked down with trepidation. All his soft tissues were gone. He stood on his spine alone. A writhing mass of black spiders fed on his guts, grew into adults in moments, and swarmed, devouring. They climbed his spine, wrapped under his hanging skin, and went inside his rib cage. They devoured his lungs. He couldn’t breathe, feeling them from the inside, taking life from his very core. And then they ate his heart. It seized, labored, thumped one last time, and stopped.

He fell. Opened his mouth to seek some forgiveness, but only spiders burst forth, burning his esophagus like bile, spewing over his tongue, crawling out of his nose. He was covered with black spiders, a living stinging biting blanket, sticky as tar. His brother stood over him and laughed. His eyes crinkled and he leaned forward—Dazen had forgotten how Gavin did that, how he doubled forward, eyes shut when he laughed hard.

Now Dead Gavin stood over him, laughing, and the sun shone through the hole in his head like a third eye. The beam of light fell on Dazen just as the spiders began crawling up his cheeks. They were going for his eyes! He jerked, but his arms were useless, his mouth pried opened. And then the spiders began attacking his eyes, biting, poison squirting deep into those orbs, filling his precious orisons with acid.

Gavin jerked awake. They were in the city proper now. He gulped and blinked, the sun high above, cutting through the gap in the carriage’s window curtain. Not quite noon. He was sleeping through his last sights. But still the dream clung to him. Would Gavin laugh at him like that, doubling over, out of breath? Or would he have some compassion for him now, at the end?

His guards chuckled. “Never seen a man who could sleep on his way to torture. You got stones, friend.”

Gavin looked at the guard, searching him for some sign of humanity. Was this man part of his escape plan? No. No. Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.

I shouldn’t have killed you like that, brother. It wasn’t worthy of me. It wasn’t worthy of you. I don’t think you would have taken shriving from me, but I should have offered. Should have given you a chance to prepare yourself. Killing you without warning, that was for me. That was for my nerve, which I knew would fail me.

Because I still loved you. And love you still.

A Guile’s love is a bullet through the brain.

He bowed his head even as the sounds of the hippodrome floated down into the street. A race must have been under way. The streets were packed, and though carriages had the right of way that came with crushing power, it still had to slow as they approached the enormous crowds around the hippodrome. The carriage added its tinny bell to the din: shouting voices of vendors, angry yells from other drivers, a distant yell decrying a thief, the throbbing roar of the crowd inside the hippodrome swelling in time to their favorite chariot coming round, the hoots and jeers of fans outside, the rattling of tuned bamboo wind chimes and more, cowbell and brass and drums competing among the fans.

But the colors were mute. Gray on gray on dark gray on black. The smell of cooking pork and curries and roasted nuts in caramel was far more vivacious. Gavin peered through his curtain and saw a little boy in rags, lean to the point of starvation, staring back at him.

A lookout for the rescue?

But the boy merely watched him go by.

The carriage turned and went down a long ramp, accompanied by many shouts, and then was swallowed by darkness. A gate rattled shut behind them. This area was off-limits to the public.

And Gavin’s last ember of hope died. They didn’t know he was here. Like so many other things, his father had been able to keep it secret. Gavin was going to lose his half-useless eyes, and then he was going to die. Funny how he was more worried about his eyes than his life.

They have stolen light from me. What is life without light?