She meant it, too. Gavin could see the steel in her again. Doubtless it was the only way she could remain human and deal with her gift.
“Karris doesn’t like to be left behind when I head into danger.”
“You’ve brought me fifty thousand problems, Lord Prism. That, however, is not one of them.”
A good shot, and completely fair. He took a breath to riposte, and then thought better of it. “My lady, your wit is as sharp as your beauty is radiant. Since the light has so clearly blessed you with its presence, the most I can do is bless you with my absence. Good day.”
He bowed and left. He was only a few steps away when he thought he heard her murmur something. He shot a look over his shoulder, and swore he caught her staring at—
She pursed her lips, a quick look of consternation. “I can foresee the end of the world, but I can’t tell when a man is going to catch me staring at his shapely ass.”
Gavin could do nothing more than beat a dignified retreat, strangely aware of his ass with every step.
Chapter 46
The Color Prince had wanted to leave Garriston in six weeks. It had taken eight. Though Liv had spent half her waking hours with the Color Prince, she knew there were entire currents passing right beneath her eyes that she didn’t even see. For a superviolet accustomed to seeing that which others didn’t, it was discomfiting.
One day, a general was found hanged from the open portcullis of the Travertine Palace. Liv only found out after the fact that he had been one who’d advocated staying put, satisfied with regaining Tyrea and settling down in their new country.
The Color Prince had opened his court that day, saying, “While there is oppression anywhere, there is freedom nowhere.”
Liv heard the statement repeated a dozen times that day, and the next day as they marched. He was too busy for her for weeks, spending all his time with his military commanders. Liv was on the outside, literally and figuratively. She rode close to the front, but not with the commanders or advisers. She wasn’t certain of her place, and no one else was either.
The women and men who’d been with the prince since he’d left Kelfing didn’t trust her. She was the enemy general’s daughter. Again. How that infuriated her. In switching sides, her father had managed to make her be cast out from the opposite side than those who’d treated her like an outcast for her entire youth.
After two weeks on the road, one night the Color Prince summoned her to his tent, which was ostentatiously small and plain. A man of the people. Liv wondered how such transparent tricks worked. But work they did.
“So, Aliviana, have you learned your purpose yet?” he asked.
“You only have perhaps half a dozen superviolets in your whole army. I may be the best of them. I know that you’re looking for more, and you’re looking for a test that will help you identify superviolets. Your methods are crude compared to the Chromeria’s. The general level of your drafters’ abilities is poor, and you’re hoping that the perspectives I bring might be valuable to you. That last is speculation, but well supported, I think. So I think you want me to train your superviolets.”
Back in the Chromeria, the magisters had warned their disciples constantly not to rely too much on their luxin to shape their thoughts or their feelings. Here, it was encouraged, and Liv wasn’t sure yet which approach was better. If you were burning away your life by drafting as the Chromeria taught, it made sense to train young drafters not to draft when they didn’t have to. But it had never been clear to Liv that the prohibitions were solely utilitarian. They’d been moral warnings, as if luxin were wine and those who relied on it were morally weak.
If so, she was weak. But the superviolet gave her clarity, and distance from her feelings of inadequacy, of loneliness. She used it and then yellow to pull problems apart, examine them from new angles, and peer right through them, all the time.
He poured himself some brandy, held up a finger, watched it as it turned a dull hot red, and touched it to his zigarro. “That’s all you have for me?”
“You were Koios White Oak,” Liv said. Karris White Oak’s supposedly dead brother.
“Past tense?” he said grimly into his brandy.
She had no answer.
“How’d you find out?” he asked.
“I asked,” she admitted. Not exactly genius deduction.
“And what does this revelation tell you?” he asked.
“Not as much as I’d hoped.”
He swallowed the rest of his brandy in a gulp. “Come with me.”
They walked through the camp in the low light of the shrouded moon and a thousand campfires. As soon as he stepped out of the tent, two drafters and two soldiers clad in white fell in beside them.
“The Whiteguard?” Liv suggested. It smacked of desperation to be taken seriously, a mockery of the Prism.
“Are there no mirrors in nature?” he asked, seeming to read her thoughts. “There have been four attempts on my life. One by one of my former generals. Three by parties unknown. Light cannot be chained, but the Chromeria hopes it can be extinguished.”
They passed the camp in its thousands. It was more organized than when it had marched on Garriston. Practice, Liv supposed. Few people even noticed their leader moving down the path, and those who did didn’t seem to know how to salute him. Some bowed. Some prostrated themselves. Some gave a more military salute.
“The blues want me to standardize the response to me,” the prince said around his zigarro. “But I only want to impose what order is needful. More order is needful while directing an army than I would like, but once we tear down what the Chromeria has built, the needs will change. All will be free in the light.”
They stopped in front of a gallows on the western edge of the camp. Four men were hanged there. In the low light of torches, Liv couldn’t see their faces, but she did see the unnaturally elongated necks. The prince held up a hand and a beam of yellow light shone on the dead men. There was dried blood down each man’s chin. Their features were swollen. The birds had been feeding on them.
Liv didn’t know much about how bodies rotted, but she knew enough to be able to tell that these men had been dead for more than a day. So they couldn’t be criminals; the army had just arrived here.
“They’re our zealots. Martyrs now. These were men I sent to spread the news to Atash, to prepare the way for us. They went unarmed. They were only to speak, to convince. Their tongues were torn out and they were tortured before they were hanged. The Atashians didn’t even wait for them to cross the border. Invading our land to kill the unarmed? This is a declaration of war and commencement of hostilities. Atash has sown the wind. They will reap the whirlwind.”
“You tell a lot of lies, don’t you?” Liv asked. Then she swallowed. The superviolet made her understand structures, but not necessarily obey them.
The prince’s guards stiffened. Liv saw glares of hatred from them. But the prince looked over at her curiously. “I forget who you are,” he said. Then his voice cooled. “But perhaps you do, too.”
She swallowed again.
“I don’t deny that I already intended to liberate Atash, but they have drawn first blood. Against innocents. And let me tell you this, Aliviana Danavis. It’s time for you to step beyond the illusions of your childhood. A lie told in the service of truth is virtue. Do you know why Ilytian pirates have plagued the Cerulean Sea for centuries?”