Instead, the hundreds of luxiats docilely accepted the change of guard, accepted being checked for weapons, and marched willingly to the Color Prince.
Odd, Liv thought. Suicidal. Using their freedom to lose their freedom. Surrendering power. Insane. She looked at the letter again.
When they were finally brought forward, the Color Prince met them himself. He was mounted on his spectacular white stallion Morning Star.
“Why Neta Delucia, I had no idea you’d taken the black robe,” the Color Prince said, addressing a woman in the front row. “Your devotion, though deluded, is… refreshing.”
Neta Delucia was the city mother who the prince had said would head the opposition. So apparently the young corregidor had been successful after all.
Neta spat toward the Color Prince. “You bought him. That little coward. That little traitor. I knew you would.”
“I knew you were the only one who had a chance to stop him,” Koios said. “So how he’d win, your bad luck?”
“He struck half an hour before my men were to arrive to take him to prison.”
“I could use a smart woman willing to do what needs to be done,” the prince said.
Neta looked like she couldn’t believe she was being given a second chance. After a moment, she fell to her knees, heedless of all the condemned men watching. “My lord, I would be happy to—I would be delighted and honored to serve.”
“Who’s the traitor now?” the Color Prince asked. He turned his back on her.
“But my lord! You said you needed me!” she shrilled.
“Enough,” the prince said.
“My lord! My lord! Please! Please!”
“Silence her,” the prince said.
A soldier stepped forward and slashed a dagger across her neck. Blood sprayed out of her throat and she crumpled. She lay on the ground, gasping out her last breaths.
Liv felt a wave of nausea, and quickly drafted superviolet to gain control of herself.
“I didn’t mean kill her!” the prince said. “I—it doesn’t matter. She didn’t deserve to be with these servants of Orholam anyway.” He raised his voice. “Luxiats, I detest everything you love, and I hate what you’ve done to the Seven Satrapies. But I admire your courage. Your deaths will spare thousands on both sides. For this one act, I admire you. Die well.”
The Color Prince turned to the soldiers guarding them. “Bind them, hand and foot. All of them.” Some few wept, but none fought, none screamed. Then, as hundreds of soldiers descended with ropes and bound the unresisting luxiats, he turned to his own gathered people.
“My brothers and sisters, today is the first day of a new order!” Cheers interrupted him, and he had to wait while they quieted. “Today, we take our first steps out of darkness.” More cheers. If anything, to Liv Koios looked irritated that he wasn’t able to finish. She gathered that he hadn’t spoken to huge groups very often, especially not huge and enthusiastic groups flushed with victory and bloodshed. “We have been kept chained by the Chromeria and by her luxiats. Are we going to stand for it any longer?”
“No!” a few men cried.
“Are we going to let the Chromeria tell us what to do?”
“No!” the crowd joined in, now catching on. It was like the old call and response, but this time against the luxiats, rather than with them.
“Are we going to go quietly into the darkness?”
“No!” This time, everyone joined, even those far enough back that they couldn’t possibly have heard the prince’s question.
This is the mob, Liv thought. This is the beast. But beasts can be harnessed.
“Our future lies before us. Our victories lie before us. They lie there!” He pointed to the city, where the gates were opening even now.
Nice timing, Liv thought. But then, maybe he’d been stalling until he saw the gates about to open. Well done, regardless. Well played.
A huge cheer, but the Color Prince wasn’t done. “Between us and our future stand the luxiats.” He pointed to them. “Are we going to let them stop us?”
“No!”
“Then I say we march. I say we march right over those who would stop us.”
“Yes!”
“If sacrifices must be made, let them be their sacrifices!”
“Yes!”
“Are you with me?”
“Yes!”
He glanced at Liv and said quietly, “Are you with me?”
She swallowed. Looked at the letter one last time. Dropped it in the mud. “Let’s go.”
And, so help them Orholam, that’s what they did. The soldiers laid the bound luxiats across the road, and the whole army marched over them. The army kept in lockstep, marching heedless, as if they were simply traversing difficult terrain, ignoring the living beneath their boots.
After the army passed, the Color Prince’s white-robed drafters followed. Their long white robes and dresses trailed into blood and took on a scarlet edge.
Then all the rest of the people came. Some tried to step around the groaning, screaming men and women. Others deliberately stomped groins and fingers, carried rocks to crush heads. Soon, it didn’t matter. The bodies turned to jelly, the road bloody mud as gore was churned with the uncaring soil. Liv heard later that through good luck or bad, some of the luxiats had survived until the heavy-laden wagons’ iron-rimmed wheels passed over them at the tail end of the army.
The army entered the city, victorious, cheering, drunk on their own omnipotence. And soon they were marching on, but now they had names, names they’d won in blood and battle. Names for their implacability. Some called them blasphemers, and so they were. Some called them luxiat-hunters, and so they became. Some called them Red Robes, and saw the blood as a sign of their viciousness. They accepted them all, and marched. And among them, every drafter cherished the blood on the hem of her robe, and after washing, they would dip their hems in cow’s blood to renew the stain. It gave a stench to them, especially when they passed en masse. But they called it the smell of freedom, the sacrifice of others. Some quietly called them animals. They called themselves invincible. They called themselves the Blood Robes.
Liv’s status meant she stayed in one of the Idossian nobles’ own apartments that night. She got drunk, and when Zymun came knocking on her door once again after midnight, this time she didn’t turn him away.
Chapter 73
“You’re going to take them from me, aren’t you?” Kip asked. The words came out all raw and jagged. Harder and harsher than he intended.
“What?” Gavin asked. He scowled.
It was as if while Ironfist had been here, Kip was able to be the Kip who was training for the Blackguard, the Kip who had some tenuous friendships and was starting to be good at some things. And now, with Ironfist hinting that Gavin was going to yank him out of the Blackguard, everything else came flooding back. Not just nearly getting killed tonight and having Janus Borig die in his arms, but his mother dying in his arms, bitter and accusatory. “I knew it. I knew if I didn’t look at them right away, someone would steal them. I just didn’t think it would be you.”
Kip knew he wasn’t mad about the cards—he was mad at being helpless. Before Gavin Guile had come along, sweeping everything up in his wake, Kip had had his own shitty life in his own shitty town with his shitty, shitty friends. Ever since Gavin Guile had come into his life, he felt like he’d been plunged underwater. And now his last breath had escaped and he was panicking, flailing, punching whoever happened to be nearest.