Andross snapped back without the least pause, “You’re a disgrace who couldn’t even hold her satrapy against a petty raider from Tyrea. You allowed this to blossom from a small problem to a huge one. Your defense was so heinously weak, I wonder if we aren’t in the presence of a traitor. I never had functional command over those incompetents you insisted on being our generals, unlike the command a promachos would have, so check your memory. Maybe it’s in the bottom of a bottle.”

“You stopped us from defending ourselves!” Delara shouted. “You refused to help! You came too late, and you knew it. You want us to make you promachos?”

“Enough,” the White said.

“I wasn’t talking about me,” Andross said. “I’m too old. That burden is too great and—”

“I’ve lost everyone I l—” Delara shouted.

“Enough!” the White barked. “Delara, you have our sympathies, and you still have your vote, which you will lose if you’re not present to use it. Do not give that up. What is it you propose, High Luxlord Guile?”

I’m too old? The old spider was admitting that? Karris could scarcely believe it. Who would he be proposing instead?

“You all know that I had my disagreements with my son at times, but none of us can deny the unifying effect he had on the Seven Satrapies. He was a figurehead, but he was a well-loved one. In losing him, we have lost one of the most important bonds that holds these disparate satrapies together. For reasons that we should all know all too well, there will be…” He paused, parsing his words carefully. “Unless Orholam relents, it appears there will be no new Prism this Sun Day, but by ancient law we must name a Prism-elect. So we must all be on the lookout for Orholam’s chosen. I’m sure we will all spend much time in prayer. We will have to survive as best we can for a year without one. That means the old orders. Every drafter working together, and offsetting those who have joined the enemy.”

Karris looked around the table and saw drawn, gray faces everywhere. “You’re not giving up on Gavin,” she said. “He’s not dead. You should be focusing your efforts on finding him.”

“Of course we will,” Andross said smoothly. He smiled apologetically, as if dealing with a hysterical woman who couldn’t bear to acknowledge her husband’s obvious death. “This is merely contingency planning.”

Karris wanted to punch his face in.

“Why can’t we name a new Prism?” Arys Sub-red asked.

Karris saw that at least of couple of the newer Colors wondered the same, but Andross said immediately, “This is not a matter for an open meeting.”

“You’re calling this an open meeting?”

“Only the Colors themselves and the High Magisterium may discuss these matters,” the White said, clearly not happy to concur, but doing so. “And not the one without the other.”

Karris’s jaw clenched. Andross was angling for something, and she couldn’t see what it was.

Andross continued, “We have worked together before through such trials, and we can do so again. We shall do so again. Regardless, our needs, our war, and our peoples cannot wait until even Sun Day to find unity. We must face two painful truths before we lose everything: my son is dead, and we need a promachos.”

“He’s not dead,” Karris said.

“Daughter, it speaks well of your loyalty and your love that you hope against hope as you do, but prudence demands a harsher reckoning with truth. Gavin is—”

“Alive,” a voice interrupted from the door. “He’s been taken captive by an Ilytian pirate named Gunner.”

Everyone stopped talking at once. Karris caught a faint glimpse of Marissia as the door closed behind Kip, who had just spoken. Kip! Kip was alive?

And Gavin? Karris’s heart surged. She felt tingles all the way down her arms. It was hope. Real hope, not stubbornness.

In the weeks since the battle, Kip had changed. For one thing, he must have been starved, because he now looked merely thick instead of fat. He looked a Guile. Strong chin, blue eyes bright with intelligence, ringed with green from drafting, broad shoulders, broad chest, thick though still shapeless arms. But the biggest change was in Kip’s demeanor. There was nothing flippant or sarcastic or jokey about him, not in this moment. He was focused, quiet, unimpressed by this collection of the most powerful people in the world.

“So the bastard returns,” Andross Guile said.

“Enough of that nonsense, grandfather,” Kip said. “My father established what I am once and for all.”

“He—”

“Look at me, grandfather,” Kip snapped. “I am Guile. Body, blood, and will. Deny it.” If you dare, his attitude added.

The very air seemed to vibrate with the tension as the men locked gazes. No one said a word. Even Kip’s dagger of a sentence wasn’t a boy’s complaint: he hadn’t said, ‘I’m a Guile.’ He’d said, ‘I am Guile,’ as if he summed up everything that it was to be part of that family. As if he were the culmination of it, which was true in some ways, Karris supposed. He was the only Guile heir.

The only heir they knew about. There was still a Guile bastard out there they didn’t know existed. Must never know. Her stomach knotted up.

The Blackguards standing outside guarding the room looked uncertain. Blackguards never look uncertain.

The air changed. Karris couldn’t tell how she knew, but she knew that Andross had been convinced. Now he was holding the moment purely to buy time—or perhaps for his own perverse amusement, but Karris thought the former. He hadn’t planned for Kip to return. He was turning cards in his brain, three rounds ahead of everyone else.

Finally, a hint of a smile touched his lips. He made a slight gesture of acquiescence. “Please share this news with us, grandson.”

“What did Grinwoody tell you happened? On the ship, I mean? After all, you were wearing those spectacles, and it was dark.”

What was Kip doing? Why did he care what Grinwoody had said? Why offer the cover to Andross Guile, his enemy? Karris’s stomach sank. Kip was offering an out to the old spider, offering to help him cover up. Cover up what?

There would be no cover-up necessary if Andross Guile hadn’t done something wrong. That meant he was at fault for Gavin’s disappearance. Orholam damn him.

“I don’t think you telling us the truth should require any rehearsals of what others have said,” Andross Guile said. Not accepting the olive branch.

Kip shrugged. “Grinwoody and I were quarreling. I’d come along with my father, whom you’d summoned to meet with you. Grinwoody didn’t want me to be there. I’m sure he believed you didn’t want me to be there. He—a slave—laid hands on me, so I pushed him down the steps. Uncouth of me, and I apologize for it, grandfather. I shouldn’t manhandle your property so. With the strains of the battle that day … regardless, he ran back toward us, and…”

Kip hesitated. Grinwoody’s eyes looked dead. The slave couldn’t even speak for himself. He knew that when millstones like the Guiles came together, even the most trusted slave might be sacrificed without a thought, ground to meal in an instant if Andross thought that he might gain something by sacrificing him.