“I noticed. A Blackguard. An astounding achievement. But you didn’t answer my question.”
Though it was getting darker, the streets were comfortably warm, and if anything, the crowds were getting thicker, people lighting lamps outside their own homes or shops. Others were relaxing, drinking on the flat roofs of their houses. It was almost as if doom weren’t impending.
Gavin looked around and made sure his voice was low enough not to carry. “I’ve lied to everyone. I’ve lied so much sometimes I forget who I was. With everything my brother and I did to Karris… I couldn’t—well, shit, she’s seen us both naked, hasn’t she? If anyone would know, she would. It would be the quickest way to destroy everything.”
“True enough, but you were going to say something else,” Corvan said, looking down at his saddle, giving Gavin that shred of privacy.
“I thought about it, you know? How to marry her and still deceive her. Or, failing that, how to show her that she had no choice but to keep my secret. In the end, she was the one thing I wasn’t willing to defile. After I ran away, she fell in love with my brother. If she figured out the truth and decided to destroy me…” Gavin shrugged.
Now Corvan did look him in the eye. “I don’t know whether to admire you all the more, or to be horrified that you’d be so stupid.”
“I usually opt to admire me all the more,” Gavin said, grinning.
Corvan gave a grudging smile, but didn’t laugh.
They rode through the streets as quickly as they could without crushing anyone, and arrived at the Travertine Palace as darkness set in. Ironfist was standing at the gate. Uncharacteristically, he had a huge grin on his face.
“High Lord Prism,” he said. “Dinner awaits.”
Gavin scowled. If Ironfist was grinning, it meant something awkward, unpleasant, or vexing was coming. But he wasn’t going to ask. With that grin, Ironfist would just grin bigger and enjoy being mysterious. Fine. Gavin started walking toward the private dining hall.
“High Lord,” Ironfist interjected. “The great hall.”
It was only a few steps away. Gavin barely had time to think why they might possibly need the great hall for dinner before he was inside the antechamber to the great domed hall.
The great hall of the Travertine Palace, though perhaps only a third the size of the Chromeria’s great hall, was one of the wonders of the old world. The doorways were enormous bulbous horseshoe arches, striped green and white, speaking of the days when half of Tyrea had been a Parian province. Travertine and white marble alternated everywhere: in the chessboard pattern of the floor, in intricate geometric shapes on the walls, and in old Parian runes that decorated the bases of the eight great wooden pillars that supported the ceiling, their layout an eight-pointed star. Each pillar was a full five paces thick—atasifusta, the widest trees in the world—and none narrowed perceptibly before reaching the ceiling. The wood was said to have been the gift of an Atashian king, five hundred years before. Even then it had been precious. Now they were extinct, the last grove cut down during the Prisms’ War. Gavin had never found out who had done that. When he arrived in Ru, the grove was simply gone. His commanders—Dazen’s commanders—had sworn the last trees were standing when they left the city. Gavin’s commanders after the war had sworn the trees were gone when they arrived.
What made the atasifusta unique was that its sap had properties like concentrated red luxin. The trees took a hundred years to reach full size—these giants had been several hundreds of years old when they’d been cut. But after they reached maturity, holes could be drilled in the trunk, and if the tree was large enough, the sap would drain slowly enough to feed flames. These eight giants each bore a hundred twenty-seven holes, the number apparently significant once, but that significance lost. On first look, it appeared that the trees were aflame, but the flame was constant and never consumed the wood, which was ghostly ivory white aside from the blackened soot smudges above each flame hole. Gavin knew that the flames couldn’t be truly eternal, but after allegedly burning day and night for five hundred years, these atasifustas’ flames gave little indication of going out anytime soon. Perhaps the flames nearer the top were a little duller than those lower as the sap settled in the wood, but Gavin wouldn’t have bet on it.
When the wood wasn’t mature, it made incredible firewood. A bundle that a man could carry in his arms would warm a small hut all winter. No wonder it was extinct.
No torches were necessary in the great hall, of course, but outside the stained glass windows, each also a horseshoe arch, torches burned so that the colored glass would glow day or night, white or green or red.
Again, the colors, the shape itself, all were meaningful to the people who’d built this wonder, and Gavin had no idea what any of it meant. It gave him a sense of insignificance. He didn’t think anything he made would survive five hundred years after he was gone. Indeed, it was mostly luck that his brother Gavin hadn’t razed this very wonder when he’d destroyed this city.
As Gavin walked in, his eyes were pulled from the majesty of those atasifusta pillars to the men and women seated at the great table, every face turned toward him. He was distracted briefly as he stepped past twin shadows flanking the halls. His head snapped to the side, expecting an assassin. No, it was a Blackguard. One on either side of the doorway, and dozens more around the hall, all of them familiar to him. Blackguards? Here?
Oh, the ships of those to be Freed have come. Ironfist must have commanded all these Blackguards to come along.
His eyes returned to the table. There were at least two hundred drafters waiting for him. A small class, as the White had told him. What she hadn’t told him was who was in this class. Gavin knew all of them by face, and most of them by name. He recognized Izem Red and Izem Blue, Samila Sayeh, Maros Orlos, the discontiguous bichrome Usef Tep whom they called the Purple Bear, Deedee Falling Leaf, the Parian sisters Tala and Tayri, Javid Arash, Talon Gim, Eleleph Corzin, Bas the Simple, Dalos Temnos the Younger, Usem the Wild, Evi Grass, Flamehands, and Odess Carvingen. Everywhere he looked, heroes from the Prisms’ War, from both sides. These were some of the most talented drafters in the Seven Satrapies, and they represented every single one of the Seven Satrapies too, even the Ilytians were represented, albeit only by Flamehands, and Eleleph Corzin was Abornean.
Gavin stopped in his tracks, disbelieving. Every year, some drafters from the war were Freed, but Gavin hadn’t had this many of the greats since immediately after it, when so many had been pushed to the brink by the amount of power they’d handled in fighting.
These drafters had all been young during the war, and Gavin had known and dreaded that they’d start passing, but so many, all in one year?
“We had us a pact,” Usem the Wild said, answering Gavin’s obvious confusion. “Some of us who fought together. Said once the first of us had to go, we’d all go together. Wanted another year or two, myself, but better to go out on top, isn’t it?”
“Better to go out sane,” the Purple Bear growled.
“Better to go together,” Samila Sayeh said. “And stop making Deedee feel bad.”
Indeed, Deedee Falling Leaf did look worse than most of them. Her skin was tinged a permanent green, and the halo of her eyes was straining under the green that had overwhelmed her formerly blue irises. She smiled weakly. “Lord Prism, it’s an honor. I’ve been looking forward to this Freeing for a long time.” She curtsied, choosing to ignore, as most of the old warriors did, that she had been on the other side of the war than Gavin.