“So you always loved Gavin?” Kip asked.

She saw the trap just in time. “This, this conversation is finished,” she sputtered.

“But you tried to elope with Dazen. Why would you do that if you loved Gavin all along? Dazen was the younger brother. There was no advantage in marrying him. There was no reason to elope with him except for love.”

“I was young!”

“I’m young. I don’t destroy the world over it.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Karris said.

“Because I only get lies and evasions every time I ask.”

It took the wind from her sails, though anything but becalmed. He was right. He deserved the truth, and he couldn’t be told the truth. He thought his father was his uncle, and his uncle his father, and he hated the one and loved the other, in the wrong order.

“Kip,” she said quietly. “How many times have you told the story of what happened to you at the Battle of Ru?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

He said nothing for a moment, then gave in. “Once or twice, when I was with the squad. We’d been drinking. Even in my squad, some of them were so … so excited to hear about it. It seems … obscene somehow.”

“I was there with you, Kip, and you did nothing wrong. In fact, you were the hero that day.”

The word dropped between them like an ill-fitting garment. Kip couldn’t pick it up.

“We all acted bravely, Kip. We all did what we had to, but your actions made all the difference. And you’re reluctant to recount them, because anyone who wasn’t there can’t really understand the terror of that island coming alive and trying to devour us, of those men and women remade into giants, and of that feeling of seeing the Prism himself helpless. Our Prism, who can do everything, for whom all things are easy as breathing, and there he was, helpless. You acted like a hero would act, and you got lucky and it mattered. But you know, as warriors know, how easily you could have been unlucky, how others just as brave and braver still did more and greater things, but because they failed or were simply unseen, will never be known.”

Kip swallowed, said nothing. “Baya Niel must have talked. I heard about it in a song. In a song! They took some old drinking song and put my name in it! I almost threw up.”

“It wasn’t Baya Niel,” Karris said.

“What?”

“It was me. I talked to some of the most popular minstrels in the Jaspers.”

Kip’s face twisted like she’d betrayed him. “But you … you understand. How could you?”

“Because it’s true, Kip. It’s not all the truth, and what’s true about it may be misunderstood, but that others will misunderstand doesn’t mean we keep the truth in a basket. And because the day may come when you need a Name.”

“I don’t want another name,” he said, glum teenager again. “I’ve already got too many.”

“Not a name like Kip, a Name, like Breaker. As in, ‘I am become a Name.’” If he didn’t know the Gevison, he should.

“I don’t want that either,” he said.

“I wasn’t done. You can barely tell a story about a battle in which everyone came out looking good. You didn’t fail. You didn’t fire a musket as a friend moved into the line of fire and got his face blown off. You weren’t a coward that day. We fought odds beyond human comprehension, and if it wasn’t a victory for us, at least it wasn’t a victory for our foes.”

Her lips were suddenly dry, for here she must tell him truths and lies linked, and he would never forgive her for it. “There were no battles that simple in the False Prism’s War. None. How can you tell stories of what you did when it seems everything you did was wrong? When you were a coward and your friends died because of it? Or is it less painful to tell of when you almost died because your own kin failed you, running away when they could have saved you easily? A man who’s a hero one day can be a coward the next, and sometimes even telling of our heroism reminds us of our cowardice.

“My brother and sister Blackguards fought and killed cousins they’d met a hundred times. Classmates with whom we’d played pranks on our magisters. Lovers with whom we’d shared a first kiss. Samite had an unrequited love for this ridiculously handsome cavalier. His family joined the other side. Samite was part of a strike force that infiltrated a city, found the cavalier with his fellows and their families camped in one of the great stables of the city. They barred the doors and set it afire. She listened to him burn to death, screaming to her to have mercy, not for himself but for his family who were inside with him. Samite loved horses. Riding was her one refuge from her cares. She won’t ride now unless she must. She doesn’t feel worthy after burning two hundred and seventy of the innocent creatures to death—and all those people. She was sixteen years old.”

Kip was aghast. “I didn’t know.”

“Because it’s not the kind of thing a warrior shares often. Not even in her cups.”

“And you and my father, you have stories like that?”

She hesitated. How close to the truth did she dare go? How long would he accept evasions?

“Worse?” he asked.

“You can’t rate soul wounds,” she said.

“One thing,” Kip said. “I have to ask. My mother left me a note asking that I take vengeance on my father. She was a…” He swallowed, but continued manfully. “She was an addict and a liar and Orholam only knows what else. I assume she was a camp follower who was spurned afterward, but she said … with her dying breath, she said Gavin was a rapist. It’s not true, is it?”

Rapist. For some reason, Karris didn’t flash back to that awful bedroom and lying on her back quietly, passively drunk, wishing she would pass out, wishing she would fight. Instead, she thought back to the long walk home, the shame at her torn-off buttons that kept her from covering herself decently, the averted stares of the guards she walked past. No one had even offered her a coat. Who wouldn’t offer a young girl, who was half naked and ashamed, a coat?

“Your father,” Karris said levelly, locking eyes with Kip, “is not a rapist.” The man Kip knew as his father, the man who had claimed him as son, Dazen, was not a rapist.

“But it was war. Are you sure?” Kip asked.

Her initial hesitation had been too long. He needed more. It was not the kind of question to which you could leave doubts. Karris said, “Once, in bed, he mistook my cries for cries of pain. It distressed him so much he went soft. Not the reaction a rapist would have, you think?”

For a moment, Kip didn’t seem to understand. Then he blushed furiously. “I, uh, I think that was more than I wanted to know.”

Karris cleared her throat. It was more than she’d wanted to share. She felt the blood rising in her own cheeks. But it was necessary. “Good enough?”

Kip averted his eyes. “About that? Dear Orholam, yes. Please, let’s never speak of it again!”

Karris laughed. “Uh-oh, now I know your weakness!”

“Oh, come on, you can’t!” Kip complained. “No one wants to hear about their parents having— Parent, I mean. Their parent … never mind.”