Cruxer blew out a breath. He looked from face to face. “I can’t lead where you won’t follow, so I’m in. But I want you all to remember this. We had a choice here.”

Kip wanted to follow up about the Lightbringer silliness, but after the ominous gravity of that, it was too awkward.

They fell back to their studies. Gradually, they got back to their complaints about the archaic diction or how much work the magisters were expecting them to master or their Blackguard training or, in Quentin’s case, with how he couldn’t figure out the organization of the restricted library yet, which didn’t follow any of the usual schema.

When they were getting up to leave, Cruxer pulled Ben-hadad aside. “Ben. A word.”

Kip hung back.

“Ben, this squad is like a body. We’ve all got our different parts to play, but we need to work together. I need to know—”

“This is about me saying I don’t trust anyone to know best for me?” Ben-hadad asked.

“That’s right.”

“Crux,” Ben-hadad said. “I don’t trust you to know what’s best for me. But I trust you to know what’s best for the squad. For the Blackguard. And they matter more than I do. That’s why I take your orders. And why I will. To the death.”

Cruxer’s whole demeanor eased, and he was suddenly less worried leader and more happy young man, glad to have a friend back.

“Besides,” Ben-hadad said. “Every body needs an asshole.”

Cruxer groaned.

“Did you hear that?” Kip said. “He just volunteered to take all the squad’s shit.”

“I didn’t mean I was the asshole!” Ben-hadad said.

“It always comes back to poop jokes, doesn’t it?” Cruxer said.

“In sailing, the poop by definition is at the—” Teia started.

“Don’t.”

“Ah, just one crappy—”

“No.”

Chapter 41

It seemed that every time that Kip thought he’d seen all of the Chromeria, he found out that there was much, much more to it. Today, he was meeting Karris in the workshops beneath the blue tower. There were smelters and glass furnaces here, racks of tools lining every wall, and at least a hundred men and women swarming, drafters and non-drafters each at their appointed task.

Despite the furnaces burning along one wall, there was no smoke, and the temperature was only slightly elevated. Vents were everywhere—for air, but also for light. The purest lenses Kip had ever seen cast spotlights in perfect colors for drafting onto tables. This was where the work of light-crafting and research into practical applications for luxin was conducted. Everywhere, he saw people looking at papers or slates holding calculations they’d done in the study rooms above, checking them against what they were seeing in practice.

Kip saw his tutor standing next to a plain, fair-skinned woman with her blonde hair pulled in a severe ponytail, sleeves rolled up, skin stained faintly green and yellow, though she couldn’t have been much more than thirty years old. Burning through her life fast.

Seeing Karris beckon him, Kip walked over. Since she’d started tutoring Kip, Karris had begun wearing the finest dresses and newest fashions. Kip had asked her about it once, and she said that with her short, lean figure, people constantly took her for younger than she was and questioned her—challenged her, in her eyes—far too often. By looking as rich as a Guile, Karris forestalled hassles. Kip knew she would have preferred to wear her blacks instead, but she only wore those when she and Kip trained together, and even then, despite the cost of clothing, her “blacks” were red or green rather than black. That part of her life was dead, she said. And the even way she said it, never looking Kip in the eye, told him how much it grieved her.

“This is Lady Phoebe Kalligenaea,” Karris said. Her hair recently was a chestnut brown with lighter highlights, rich-looking and boring. She was also growing it out longer than she ever would have worn it as a Blackguard.

“She’s got the finest control of any yellow superchromat known. Including Gavin. Lady Kalligenaea, this is my husband’s son, Kip.”

“Mistress Phoebe will do,” the woman said. “I’m a master crafter, and down here, that means more than a silly title passed down through accidents of birth.”

“Isn’t being a yellow superchromat an accident of birth, too?” Kip asked.

Kip the Lip. But this time he didn’t squint his eyes and sink into his embarrassment. He watched her instead.

“Aha! Maybe so, but I work to make the most of this accident. The other I avoid as much as possible.” She grinned, and revealed a big gap between her front teeth.

“So you’re better than the Prism?” Kip asked.

She looked like she’d bit a lemon. “At small things. I could never make Brightwater Wall, that’s for sure.”

“What are you better at?”

Mistress Phoebe looked over at Karris. “Direct, isn’t he?”

“It’s refreshing,” Karris said. “At times.” She gave Kip the look. He understood.

“I’ve worked with the Prism, taught him,” Mistress Kalligenaea said. “Luxin makes sense to him. Karris tells me you’re same. His signature is magic that is beautiful and breathtaking in its sheer audacity—a whole wall of yellow luxin, who would dare such a thing? Much less dare it while an army was closing in? But … it lacks a certain elegance. Made of yellow, you could have a wall that still meets the requirements for strength—that is, capable of taking sustained cannon blasts—at maybe a third the thickness Gavin chose. When he isn’t sure, he opts for more, always more, rather than to sit with paper and abacus.

“It’s not a sharp criticism, mind you. If you have unlimited drafting potential, using more because it’s quicker is a logical choice. The rest of us would burn out that way in days. We must opt for elegance over force. The other thing Gavin does well is that he remembers everything. It’s sort of nauseating, to be quite frank. Once he gets a design right, I’ll see him staring at it, turning it over in his hands, and then it’s in his head. Ten years go by, and you ask him to reproduce the same cooling rack for bread, and he does it. It’s a marvel. But! We aren’t here to talk about Gavin Guile, we’re here to teach you. They tell me you’re a superchromat.”

The words of his testers echoed in his ears: freak. “Some would say a superchromat boy is like a dog that can bark, ‘I love you’—”

“‘A novelty, not a precedent’?” Her nose crinkled. “Tawenza Goldeneyes is a gifted tutor, better than I. She’s also a bitch. Karris told me she refused to tutor you. Even after Karris came down on her. Flat refused.”

“Called me a strumpet,” Karris said. She did not seem to find it humorous.

“Sorry?” Kip said.

“No matter. If she hadn’t, Lady—Mistress Phoebe wouldn’t have taken you on,” Karris said.

“You understand, if I take you on, and you ever get a chance to show up Goldeneye’s discipulae, I want you to do it. Which means you have to be better than they are.”

Kip grinned. “With pleasure. I’m at least that much like my father.”