And now that Gavin was dead, and the oak rotted, what happened to the ivy? On its own, it had no strength to stand.

I haven’t mourned him. I put two bullets in his face, and I haven’t mourned him.

I wonder what it smells like down there. I left his body to rot. I didn’t even have the decency to wrap him in funeral cloths. Didn’t want to get bloody.

I didn’t want to get bloody?

There’s always something desperate requiring my attention, isn’t there? As if I can blind myself with activity, with travel, or with war.

He thought of all the wights he’d killed over the years. The White had been right. There had never been any need for him to risk his own life hunting them down. Foolishness to risk a Prism to hunt a few wights. Wights are merely once-men, running in fear, nearly always alone, usually in the wilderness because no one in the world would give a murdering madman shelter. Take a tracker after them, figure out when they sleep, and have half a dozen men fire muskets at the sleeper.

Instead, Gavin had insisted on going after them himself. On facing them. Killing them when they were conscious. Giving them those phony last rites. Trying to purge himself, more than them. Steeped in blood, he sought blood to cleanse himself.

He sometimes still couldn’t believe the White had let him go hunting. But she’d thought he’d kill himself if he didn’t have those trips. Perhaps she’d been wiser than he knew.

The tiny window inset in the cellar’s door opened.

“Tssssss.”

And a woman’s laugh.

It chilled him. Staring there at the now shut window, and his grubby cell and his half a hand, and his dirty beard and his long dirty hair, Gavin felt his chest tightening up. Hard to breathe. Shooting pains.

A thought that he’d batted away successfully a hundred times came back to him, and stood over him, and spat upon him: You’re not going to get out of this. There is no escape.

It was almost puzzling to him. Putting on Gavin Guile hadn’t meant putting on a set of clothes, it had been putting on a new skin. He’d seen flayed men: his spies left for him by his brother. He could still hear their shrieking, and now he felt he was one of them, the Gavin-skin torn from him.

He was going to lose his eyes.

Well fuck his eyes.

‘Orholam will give it to you plain,’ the prophet had told him. ‘You keep up your lies, and you’ll be stricken blind.’

He was already blind. What could they do to him but make all the world see what he already knew? For months now, he’d been a husk. A man when he had been nearly a god. That knife, that damned knife had stolen his power. But there was no getting it back.

He looked around the cellar, and could almost convince himself that he saw brown dirt, brown wood, the silver of metal. But it was all gray. Shades shading into black. Into blindness.

Who had he been deceiving, anyway, thinking he could make a comeback? From this. He had built himself to be the perfect Prism since he was seventeen years old. A seventeen-year-old’s projection of a perfect Prism, anyway. Robbed of the light of his youthful delusions, he was an empty mirror in a darkened room.

Ah, Karris, I’m only glad that you don’t have to see me like this. And if you do see me before my end, I won’t see the disappointment, the horror, in your face.

If I could do it again, would I do it all differently? Would I have stolen your life, Gavin? Would I have come forward, at any point in all my years as Prism, having consolidated my power, and said of my own will, at my own time, ‘I am not he’? I was too great a coward to live in the light. Fitting then that light be taken from me.

He sat, hollowed of feeling, for days. Morning and night, the window would open. He would hear a light step. “Tsssss,” the Nuqaba would say. And she would laugh.

Haruru was as much a legitimate Nuqaba as Gavin was a legitimate Prism. Hundreds of years ago, under Prism Karris Shadowblinder, immediately in the aftermath of Lucidonius’s death, the Parians had been given extra leeway in how they kept the religion. Having been the birthplace or fostering place of Lucidonius, they had demanded special consideration. Prism Karris had allowed it in order to keep the empire together. Though attempts had been made since to keep the two parties more in line theologically, there had been no success in bringing the Nuqaba further under the Prism’s political control.

Most Prisms tried, but war with Paria was something no one had the stomach for. And a succession of Nuqabas had played their hands beautifully, strengthening key positions while giving up the inessential. But the truth was, too many Parians, both within the satrapy and outside of it, considered themselves uniquely bound to the Chromeria. The empire was, as they saw it, theirs. Their man had founded it. Their people had expanded it. To go to war with their own was unthinkable, so long as certain prerogatives were respected.

The Nuqaba was supposed to be a living saint. She was supposed to be mother to all the clans. She was supposed to be a model of patience and wisdom and firm love. She was supposed to look upon her people with the eye of grace. Some had gone so far as to wear a patch over their left eye, the oculus sinister, the evil eye. Not Haruru.

Ironfist and Tremblefist are going to be furious when I kill you.

No, that problem, that thought, that was the old Gavin. That was the Gavin who had power. Who was power.

She came back, to speak to him, or to taunt him.

“You’re going to make a deal with a pagan army?” Gavin asked suddenly. “Your people will kill you for that.” Perhaps worship of Orholam had slipped among the rich and powerful in Paria, perhaps they would be happy to make a deal with a monster. But would the army? Would the villages, and the fleets? Or would those faithful people rather die before they would join with monsters, regardless of what their betters told them to do?

“Not me.”

And then Gavin understood.

She’s a useful idiot, is what she is. One of her nearest advisers probably works for the Color Prince.

It amazed Gavin how stupid ambition made smart people. Haruru controlled the Satrapah Tilleli Azmith totally, but hated having to publicly give the appearance of obeying her—or perhaps of merely being her equal. The Nuqaba wanted to be unfettered. So she’d join with the Color Prince, believing he would then turn toward the Chromeria and leave her alone until he’d dealt with them. Leave her alone. In what world would the man be stupid enough to do that?

The Color Prince wasn’t an Angari pirate, coming to raid. He wanted to be an emperor. He was building up Tyrea rather than plundering it. Doubtless he was doing the same with Idoss and Ru now. It was certainly why he’d stopped or at least slowed his advance. When you spent money to build, you ultimately got more out of the land you held, but it took more time. If he was patient, it might be too late to stop him already. The caves above Ru held millions of bats. The guano contained a key ingredient for making gunpowder—and the Atashians had held a stranglehold on that, making the Chromeria and everyone else pay dearly for what the Color Prince now had for free. And what else could you do with the cedars of Blood Forest but build a fleet?

Both of which took time. With the Chromeria’s navy shattered …

The Color Prince needed time, so he was using this time to divide his enemies. And the Nuqaba was deluded enough to think that if only she had total power over Paria, she could use that time better than the Color Prince could use his time to gather resources from five satrapies.