… he’ll pluck the immortal’s own beard and steal the shade from his head in the Great Library.

Quentin shrugged. “The plucking of beard hair is an idiom for vexing him, and to steal the shade from a man’s head—to a desert people? Not appreciated. So irritate and infuriate? Why the repetition? I don’t know. Checking the dates on both of those idioms to see when they were in use in the pertinent cultures might shed some light, but it’s a rejected prophecy anyway, so that’ll be low on my list.”

Kip said, “But why contest that one? It seems specific and clear.”

“It is. Unfortunately, we know that Lucidonius never went near the Great Library, and it’s been ash for nigh unto three hundred years now. Tellari separatists burned it down. Gave their lives, merely to take away something we loved and that made us better. May Orholam curse them.”

“That’s all very interesting, and not very helpful.”

“I know, and I haven’t told you the other thing, which is more of both.” Quentin looked suddenly so drained with his excitement past that Kip put a hand on his arm to steady him. Then he took his hand away at Quentin’s frown.

“And what’s that?” Kip asked.

“There’s some great stuff in these libraries. I mean I found out why the Feast of Light and Darkness can be a month off the actual date of the autumnal equinox, like it was this past year. It’s—never mind. Doesn’t matter. There’s also some really terrible stuff in these libraries. More terrible than good, I think. Even focusing narrowly, I’ve come across … Doesn’t matter. None of that other horrible stuff has been erased. So far as I can tell none of the other stuff that I would have expected the luxors to object to has been erased—except everything about the Black Cards. Even their names. They’re just gone, Kip. Nothing else has been erased: just some parts of the Lightbringer prophecies and everything about the black cards. There’s some connection. Some force that doesn’t want us to see the truth here. But it’s all gone. Down to even the impressions a pen would have pressed into parchment. They wanted to keep a secret, and they have. They’ve already won.”

Chapter 58

“What are you doing down here?” Karris asked. She was standing in the doorway of the Prism’s exercise room.

As the winter months had passed, Kip and Karris had fallen into a comfortable rhythm. They spent most of the morning together every day, six days a week, then each went off to their other duties.

“Putting in a bit of time on the bag.” He shrugged.

When he’d first started training with Karris, Kip hadn’t known her well enough to pick out her moods, so over the months, he’d only seen after the fact that she was slowly taking off the shuttered lenses of depression. When she was down, she was more serious, adult, focused. She had that mask on now, her hair dyed raven’s black, pulled back.

“He’s coming back,” Kip said. He turned away from the heavy bag and let his green luxin gloves dissolve. Six months had passed since Ru, almost six months of training and fighting and watching only full Blackguards go out on the skimmers to look for Gavin or the bane. Almost six months of bad news from the war: the loss at Ruic Head, the raids in northern Atash, the cataclysm at Ox Ford, the pyrrhic victory at Two Mills Junction, the steady reading of the Lists, the rolls now full of names of those who’d died from camp diseases, infections, dysentery.

Almost six months hitting this damn bag, hoping to convince that one torn seam to give way and rip open, and it had barely loosened. It was a youthful fantasy to beat the sawdust out of a heavy bag, he knew. He knew it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to do it.

“So you always say.” Karris disappeared behind a screen set up off to one side, and reappeared, wearing the equivalent of Blackguard garb. Red today.

The White was snipping away all Karris’s ties to the Blackguard. The red garb had been an early imposition. Then she’d forbidden Karris to train in the Blackguard’s area in the great yard below the Chromeria. Forbade her to draft. Sent her on little errands. And if it seemed some days like Karris had been crying before she came to train Kip, she never missed a day, and Kip knew that she’d come to look forward to their training. It was one last little slice of her old life, mixed with a new purpose.

“I’m right,” he said. “Last time I was worrying about when Gavin would show up and save the day, I turned around and he was standing right there. Scared a stain right into my pants.”

“Kip! Ew!”

“I was wondering,” Kip said to distract her. “Why do you always call me Kip?”

“Because I’m not a Blackguard anymore?” she asked. She did this sometimes, making him dig deeper.

“It’s not that. Some of the others use Breaker for me, too.”

“Breaker’s your warrior name.”

“You teach me how to fight as much as anyone. Even my book learning with you is focused on fighting strategy and histories of battles.”

Karris went to a weapons bucket, carefully freeing a long, narrow, flexible staff with crescent-shaped blades on each end. She balanced it across her shoulder and stooped, digging through another barrel of nubs and guards. She found what she was looking for and fastened a hard wooden guard with a sponge projecting on each end. Pensive, she said, “We put on a face when we go into battle. You can forget Kip for a time and become Breaker when musket balls are whistling past your ears and your throat burns with the black smoke, and the luxin rage and battle rage join in you. But you’re still Kip. Inside, somewhere, even in that moment, you’re still you. Some warriors want to throw away the other man trembling within them and become only a warrior. It can be done for a time.

“But the other man always comes back, and if he’s been shut in a closet somewhere, unable to grow and learn and come to accept what the warrior does and what the warrior loves, then both of them will be cripples in peace and in war. If you despise your own frailty, rather than come to peace with it, you’ll not only hate yourself, you’ll hate everyone who’s frail. A good commander knows the strength of his men and pushes them to the edge of it, but not over. A good man knows his own strength and does the same.” She smiled. “Of course, at your age, you like to think your limits are both a lot greater and a lot narrower than they actually are.”

“And at yours, you like to think the converse?” Kip said. He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but it seemed witty.

Instead, Karris’s mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed, and her voice went chilly. “You’re calling me old?”

Kip gaped. “I—I…”

She grinned.

“Ah hell. Got me again.”

“Watch your mouth, young man, or I’ll wash it out with soap.”

“That was only my second!” Kip complained. She said he could say hell twice a day, no more. Blackguards guard their tongues, and all that.

“I distinctly counted three,” Karris said.

Kip glowered. Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said sternly. “And quit it.”

Hell, hell, hell. Kip smiled.

“I heard that, too. You always smile when you’re being secretly defiant.”