The woman closed the skin tight, turned, and took a deep breath. “Eikona, thank you for meeting with me. My message is secret, and important. First, please see that I am no threat.” She knelt gracefully and spread her hands, palms up.

“Go on, and hurry, the ship casts off in minutes.”

“Yes, lady, of course. I come from the Order of the Broken Eye. We mean you no harm. Indeed, quite the opposite.”

An unwilling shiver went through Liv. She’d wanted to believe that Mistress Helel trying to assassinate Kip was an aberration, a woman ill in the head, delusional. She’d wanted to believe, as Gavin and Ironfist had said, that the Order was a loose collection of thugs taking on an old legendary name in order to raise their prices. But this woman seemed calm, professional, not a braggart. And the use of Mistress Helel as an assassin was nothing short of brilliant. Who would suspect a heavy, middle-aged woman of being an assassin?

So it was possible the Order was real. It was no wonder this woman was being so careful to show she posed no threat.

Seeing that Liv wasn’t going to speak, the woman hurried on. “The prince gave you a necklace; on it, there is a chunk of living black luxin. That jewel is a death sentence. It is the way he believes he can control you.”

“What? How does it work?”

She paused, painfully. “We don’t know, except that he believes he’s mastered it, and that it will compel obedience. He believes it enough that he’s willing to make gods.”

“You speak dangerous words.”

“Does he seem a man content with others having greater power than he does? He wishes to be a god of gods.”

“What do you wish of me?” Liv demanded. “You think to test my loyalty so easily?”

“The prince espouses freedom, does he not? How is a leash freedom?”

“Freedom doesn’t mean a lack of responsibilities. It means a choice between them. He is to make me a god.”

“Forgive me, Eikona, but you will make yourself a god, or fail. On your own. And black luxin is not so easily tamed as the prince believes.”

A shout from outside drifted in. “Casting off in two! Rowers to your places!”

“Black luxin,” Liv scoffed. “It’s merely obsidian.”

“How can you say so? You who have seen it?”

Liv turned away. The swirling jewel was in her pocket, ever in her pocket. And the prince’s instructions were clear: she must put it on before she claimed the bane. “It is … merely cunningly cut. Tricks of the light.”

“The stones are related, lady. The old stories aren’t lies, but they’ve been corrupted. Obsidian is black luxin, dead black luxin. It is said that all the obsidian in the world is the last remnant of a great war, thousands of years before Lucidonius. A holocaust that devoured light and life for millennia, from which we are still recovering. The living stuff … Eikona, it has will. It is insanity given form. It is a hole of nothingness that can never be filled. If you put it to your neck to feed and the prince’s control slips, it will kill you. It has will; it may have intellect, too. If it devours a goddess, who is to say what it would do next?”

So Liv had been right to be leery of having the thing next to her skin. If this girl was telling the truth. “What does the Order want?”

“Most of our knowledge has been lost to time and bloody purges. We are a weak, wan thing. A shadow of a shadow. And I the least of our folk, in case I was captured and tortured. We’re not your enemies, Eikona. Become Ferrilux. Serve the Color Prince. Do all that you wish, but do not put black luxin in the nexus of your power. Do not put it in the center of the bane. One slip, whether the prince’s or yours, and who is to say but that it would eat all the magic in the world?”

Chapter 28

They needed to have this out. Teia was in some sort of trouble, and Kip was going to make her tell him what it was. During a rest at practice, he’d told the squad a little about his adventure and almost the whole truth about what had happened to Gavin.

“There was a fight, over a dagger. Grinwoody tried to grab it and I tangled with him. Andross joined in and Gavin intervened. Everyone tangled up. My father diverted the blade into himself so I wouldn’t get stabbed.”

More than a few puzzled glances at that. Why was it harder to tell a partial truth than a complete lie? Kip rushed on. “But that wasn’t the amazing thing. I jumped in after him. I lit some red to make a beacon, and when we got pulled out by this pirate, the dagger was a dagger no longer. It was a full-length sword with seven jewels of each of the seven primes in the blade. And when they pulled it out, Gavin … Gavin was alive. He didn’t even bleed.”

They asked him questions then, most of which he couldn’t answer, and Cruxer swore them all to secrecy; then, because their break had already extended for half an hour, he called it a day.

Teia had slipped out of practice before he’d noticed, and he hadn’t seen her at dinner, so now he was waiting up for her in their room.

He’d been waiting half an hour, getting more and more cross, when he had a thought. He went to the tiny desk and found no papers. He hadn’t noticed before because they simply weren’t there. His ownership papers of Teia, that he’d already signed over. She’d taken them from his room, thinking him dead, and turned them in.

Of course she had. He couldn’t blame her for worrying that with him gone, anyone might take his signed transfer of title. That was why she wasn’t here. No longer his slave, she’d moved into the barracks. Good for her.

She owed him nothing, and the bond of master to slave—unwelcome though it had been—was gone. But maybe that had been the only bond they’d shared, and it felt like she’d given up on him.

He’d wanted her to be free, but he’d still wanted her to owe him, to be eternally grateful, to be somehow therefore subordinate. He’d wanted her to be free, but he wanted to decide for her how she should use her freedom.

Kip swore aloud, and went to bed.

The next morning, he went to breakfast, then checked the lists. He wasn’t on any work details. He supposed that meant he should go to class.

Class. Ugh. He stood in front of the lift with all the other students and withdrew into himself, carrying his black little storm cloud around with him.

Of course, there were a thousand things Kip still needed to learn. He had some experiential knowledge, but almost no other kind. It would hamper him eventually, he knew. Hell, it already had. The extent of his knowledge was the bouncy green balls of doom. Well, practically. It wasn’t going to be enough to keep him alive in the coming war.

Plus he’d managed to lose the knife that he was now more and more afraid was Important. Andross Guile had called it the Blinder’s Knife. It was only because he’d been vague with the squad about where it came from that they hadn’t asked him more about it. He’d let them think that it was Gavin’s.

And how did my mother come by that, anyway?

Kip walked in to Magister Kadah’s classroom. It was hard to believe that he’d first walked in here only a few months ago. He felt like he was ten years older. He sat at the back of the room. Even in a discipulus’s clothing again, he didn’t think he’d be able to escape notice, but there was no reason to stick his thumb in Magister Kadah’s eye.