“Aha, so now comes the bargaining. You’re going to save me at least two weeks and lots of awkward conversations with a powerful woman I once outmaneuvered. What’s it going to cost me?” He was trying to set the floor low. The Third Eye would be saving him a whole lot more than that. And, being who she was, she could probably find that out, if she really cared to take the time to look. But as she’d said, she was human, and there was a lot of history and future for her to dig through.
But she shook her head. “I didn’t mean that kind of cost. My help will be a gift. You don’t need to earn it. But though truth is a gift, it’s not always one people thank you for.”
“Ah. That kind of cost,” Gavin said, suddenly grim.
“Does the man who ‘killed his brother’ expect the truth to be easy?”
Killed my brother. If only. But of course, she knew that. She knew what it was costing him to maintain that deception and why he’d done it and what the truth would cost the world if it came out. She must also know the price of truth through her own gift in a thousand ways that Gavin would never know.
The Third Eye looked over at him, compassion in her eyes, and suddenly Gavin saw that she was a woman of tremendous depth. A leader in her own right. A woman who understood what Gavin was doing, why, and what he faced. He found her tremendously appealing. If his damn stubborn heart hadn’t already been claimed, he could have fallen for her. She knew it, too. She hadn’t been lying earlier: she really had been trying to make the attraction purely sexual—so that there wasn’t the danger of something deeper.
As crystalline flurries spun around them, flecks of order spun in chaos, Gavin peered into the night as if he could unravel its mysteries. “So, you and me, disaster, huh?”
She smiled, full red lips, perfect teeth. Nodded, met his gaze. A remorseful twitch touched the corner of her mouth. “Utter.” She gazed at him appreciatively, but as if saying farewell to the prospect of bedding him. “But I do have one prophecy for you already, Lord Prism, in the style you so love: Get there before noon. Three hours east, two and a half hours north.”
Sounded simple enough. He did like that. And then he realized that she hadn’t told him north and east from where. He said, “That’s only going to be helpful in retrospect, isn’t it?”
She grinned cryptically.
“You enjoy this, don’t you?” he asked.
“Immensely.”
“I haven’t really had much use for prophecy,” Gavin said.
“I know,” she said. “It was one of the first things I saw about you. What happened?”
“Happened? I think I always thought it was—oh, no, there was something. When I was a boy and my brother stopped playing with me, I’d find these prophecies in old books, and I’d dream that I could decipher them. There was this one: how’d it go?”
He was asking himself, but the Third Eye said quietly,
“Of red cunning, the youngest son,
Will cleave father and father and father and son.”
“How’d you…?” he asked.
“I see that line burning in bitter fire over your head, Lord Prism. What did you take it to mean?”
“The youngest son of red cunning—the youngest son of the red Guile—the youngest son of the Guile who becomes the Red. So Andross Guile’s youngest son. It was a prophecy about my little brother Sevastian.”
“And then he died. Murdered.”
“By a blue wight. He was everything that is good about my family with none of the bad. If he were alive, everything would be different.” He shook it off. “Your prophecies aren’t like that. I mean, maddeningly vague. I mean, except for this last one.” He grinned. “Why is that?”
She touched her third eye thoughtfully. “We’re human, Gavin. My gift didn’t come with a list of rules. I’m muddling through. I’m making it up as I go. But I feel the same temptations I’m sure all my predecessors have felt: to be important, to help those I love and harm those I hate, to be held as almost a god, to guide and be loved—or to say hell with it, I’m not responsible for this damned thing, and just spew everything I see. I hold my tongue when I’m not sure. I think others have spoken more, but more cryptically, hoping that they wouldn’t be held responsible if things went wrong. And then, of course, there have been frauds: Seers who were not Seers at all.”
“Can you tell me if that prophecy was a fraud?”
“I have no idea where to even start looking.”
“You said you saw it in bitter fire over my head,” Gavin said. “How about there?”
“I saw the words for a moment, yes. That doesn’t mean they’re true.”
“You’re honest to a fault, aren’t you?” Gavin said.
“I hope not,” she said. She smirked, a devious, playful twist on her full lips.
Gavin wanted to tear her clothes off.
He looked away and cleared his throat. “My lady, good night, and ahem, now that we’ve decided not to make a most delightful mistake together, I hope together we make our next meeting less… strained.” He stood and brushed nonexistent crumbs off his lap pointedly. He grinned. But he wanted her agreement in this. He’d made mistakes that he knew were mistakes before.
She offered her hand and allowed him to help her stand. She stretched as if tired, but quite obviously to give him a chance to admire her while she looked away. He could tell what she was doing, and yet he admired her all the same. She gave a small, naughty smile. “You know,” she said, “I’m actually really quite modest most of the time.”
No, actually, I don’t know that. He merely cocked a dubious eyebrow, quickly smoothed it away, and like a gentleman politely lying said, “Of course you are.”
She laughed. “That you’re impossible makes you somehow even more fun to play with,” she said.
“When most people flirt with disaster, it’s a figure of speech,” Gavin said.
“Dangerous toys are the best toys. I pray you sleep well, Lord Prism.”
Well, there was a prayer they both knew wasn’t going to be answered.
Chapter 38
“The old gods weren’t worshipped because the people of the Seven Satrapies were ignorant fools,” Zymun told Liv. They were walking together to the outskirts of Garriston, heading through the Hag’s Gate to the plain between the old wall and Brightwater Wall, where most of the drafters were camped. “The old gods were worshipped because they were real.”
“Go on,” Liv said, not doing a great job keeping her skepticism back.
A brief look of fury shot across Zymun’s face, quickly smoothed away. He looked at her intensely. Who’s the tutor here?
Liv blushed. Her instant reaction had been an artifact of her old beliefs. She’d always heard that the old gods were figments of the primitive imaginations of the peoples who lived around the Cerulean Sea before Lucidonius came. But if the Chromeria lied about other things, then that could be a lie as well. She cleared her throat. “I mean, go on.”
“I think the peoples of the Seven Satrapies knew it, too. From nowhere, it seems, little statues of the gods have resurfaced. Hidden in attics, in cellars, in secret family shrines in the woods. Keep your eyes open as you walk the camp, you’ll see little signs. Soon, there will be priesthoods reestablished, worship will become public. You look skeptical.”