Parents. Like she and Dazen were Kip’s parents. Dazen—as Gavin—had adopted Kip, and he’d married Karris. So that sort of made Karris Kip’s mother, right?

Parents. One little slip. One little plural. Parent. Mother. It touched something in Karris so cold that the word itself froze on the point of impact. It dropped and broke like a young girl’s princess hopes had on a cold midnight wandering home alone in the cold, eyes wet, thighs wet.

And what might have given Kip that preposterous idea? Perhaps that Karris had been spending time with him every day for months, training him, giving him advice, supervising his education. She’d been manipulated into acting like a mother. Into showing care that could be mistaken for love.

That bitch.

The White had done this on purpose.

What had it been? Her spies must have told her how, after Gavin’s disappearance, Karris had wept when her moon blood came, how she’d obviously hoped that their single night together had impregnated her, like in the stories.

But then, one night had been enough for Karris before, hadn’t it? Back when she’d been a girl, and hadn’t been ready for a child. The mere thought of it sent black clouds churning in her heart. No, don’t think of it. Of course, the White had thought that Karris wanted a child. Karris was facing the end of her childbearing years, and the loss of her purpose as a Blackguard, and the loss of Gavin. Surely Karris would desire to have something of his, of theirs, something to show that all her sacrifices hadn’t been for naught.

The White was trying to make Kip a son for Karris simply because she thought Karris had never had her own. She didn’t know. Karris’s secret was safe.

And how could Karris fault the White for trying to manage Karris’s emotions? Karris was doing the same thing to Kip: lying so he wouldn’t do something disastrous, because if he knew too much, he would act, thinking he knew more than he did.

She moistened her lips. Kip was already studying her as one might study a large dog, wondering if it was going to lunge for your throat or if it wanted to cuddle.

But then that old fear poked its head out of the dark cellar where Karris kept it. Surely the White, so careful in all things, would have investigated Karris fully before handing over her spies. And how good had Karris been at covering her tracks? She’d only been sixteen and seventeen years old.

That cold place went hot. All the shame of that concealed failure ignited.

Who abandons a child? Who leaves a helpless babe in a far country with people she doesn’t even know?

Had they been good to him? Was he well?

She’d lain there, holding Dazen after their marriage, and she’d challenged him to be a good father. She’d been so cool, so correct. All while sitting on her own secret failure like it wasn’t a burning coal. Hypocrite.

And the White knew her shame. Was holding on to it, maybe only to use it if she absolutely had to. Karris would never be free. She felt hot and cold, nauseated.

“Sorry, ‘mother,’” Kip said. He was trying to make a joke of it, but the word was so sharp-edged that Karris couldn’t even hear the joke. None of Kip’s tone could make it past the roaring of the blood in her ears. Just that one, lancet word piercing a boil.

“You are not my son!” Karris spat. Her heart was bile and she was vomiting it out on him, foul and acid, and it tore her throat and ate everything it touched.

Kip had the same look on his face she’d seen on men mortally wounded, staring at their own guts in ropes in their hands, shocked they weren’t already dead, but dying nonetheless.

He turned unsteadily and walked out. He closed the door quietly.

Chapter 67

“This is the last time you and I will meet,” Marissia said. They were seated side by side on one of the benches ringing the Great Fountain of Karris Shadowblinder. Marissia dressed in humble slave’s grays, eating her lunch. Teia was in her nunk’s grays, taking a break from her calisthenics, ostensibly nursing a spasming calf muscle. “I hear you gave your new handler a hard time.”

It was hard to maintain the spy discipline of not looking over to see if she was saying it wryly. Was there a bit of pleasure in Marissia’s tone?

“Could say that,” Teia said, leaning forward to massage her leg so her mouth would be obscured. The point of meeting in public wasn’t to disguise altogether that you were speaking to your handler, it was to make sure you weren’t overheard and to give lip-readers an impossible task. Strangers might exchange a few words, after all. “I want to tell Kip everything. I don’t have anyone. It’s too hard.”

A long pause as Marissia took a drink from her wineskin. “You want to reveal everything to Kip the Lip?” She paused, then delicately took a bite of a small meat pastry.

Teia scowled. That wasn’t fair. Kip might shoot from the hip when he was angry, but he didn’t spill other people’s secrets. He was a good man.

A good man? Kip? When had she started thinking of Kip as a man? Sometimes she looked at him and images seemed to shear off from him like light splitting: different facets, different Kips. Perhaps it was a side effect of the light splitting or drafting so much paryl. If drafting red gradually made you more passionate, and drafting green made you wilder, what did drafting paryl do to you? She saw Kips frozen, each in a line:

Fat Kip, as he had been when he first came to the Chromeria. He was sunk into himself, the blubber a defense against fear and isolation, chin tucked down, shy, self-consciousness and self-pity at war, but thinking.

Broken Kip, mentally going back to Garriston and whatever had happened to him there. They said he’d killed King Garadul. Some said he’d disobeyed an order in doing so, and put the Color Prince in charge. Whatever else he’d done, they said he’d killed a lot of men. No one had put much stock in that. None of the inductees had been there, and the Blackguards said nothing to the inductees about such matters. “He’s a Guile,” was the most they’d say, as if that said everything. As if that said anything. Broken Kip would show up at practice after having thrashed a bully, and he looked defeated instead of victorious, as if he couldn’t believe what he was capable of.

The Weeping Warrior. Teia had only seen glimpses of this one, had heard more of it. Teia had heard Kip self-deprecatingly say something like, “I’m the turtle-bear.” Others said he was a berserker. Kip fighting Aram in his last fight, about to lose his last chance to become a Blackguard. Kip had gone insane as Aram held him down, beating his face in but letting Kip slip just enough so that the judges didn’t call it.

Most young men who went crazy in a fight went stupid, too. But Kip had shot out the lights. It might have been enough for him to beat Aram, if someone hadn’t fixed the lights almost immediately—and was there a rule for that? Aram had picked Kip fully off the ground and was throwing him down in a neck-breaker—Aram himself getting terrified of what he felt burgeoning in his opponent.

Teia had overheard two Blackguards nearby talking. “It’s a good thing they stopped that,” Hezik said. “That Kip would have died.”

“Or if he hadn’t,” Stump said, “a bunch of the rest of us might have.”

“Huh?”

Stump looked at Hezik. “At Garriston, I saw that boy go green golem. You remember the south flank at Sundered Rock, when we thought their line was going to snap, and we suddenly saw Dazen Guile himself? Out there all alone. Captain thought we’d take us a prize?”