“We’ll proceed,” he said.

The luxiats carried away the screens, and the candidates were brought to stand in a circle.

“Brace yourselves,” the High Luxiat told the audience. “There is often a great deal of wind.”

Wind?

At some signal Karris didn’t see, all the windows in the room slid down into slots, even as the windows in Gavin’s room one floor above did. There was a cold wind, but there wasn’t much of it after the initial gust. The morning was still and warm.

Then the floor shifted. Karris instantly dropped her center and stood wide in a fighting stance. It was the floor beneath her and the other candidates. Ismene looked at her and grinned as if to say, Isn’t this exciting?

The five-pace-wide circle on which they stood rose out of the floor. Patterns on the audience chamber floor sank, revealing tracks—and the entire disk the candidates were standing on started sliding toward the open window.

“Am I the only one to whom this seems like a really bad idea?” Karris asked.

“Jump off, then,” Jason Jorvis said.

She was standing right at the edge of the disk, and she had been considering doing just that, until he spoke.

The disk slid out the window and into the air, supported on a vast arm protruding from the Prism’s Tower two stories below. They slid out ten, then twenty paces from the side of the tower, and the great windows of the audience chamber rattled shut.

Oh. Karris understood. Everyone was to see what happened, but no one was to be able to draft to affect the outcome. The nobles were craning their necks to see more clearly, but Karris’s eyes were suddenly drawn up.

Atop the Prism’s Tower, one of the massive crenellations had split off and fallen several stories. That had been the rumbling sound she’d heard. The huge chunk of stone was dangling, suspended by a woven steel cable. Karris had been atop that tower a hundred times. There were no steel cables and massive bolts in the crenellations. And the precision of the break made it look purposeful. She was trying to see more of it—where did that cable go?—when her platform shuddered again. Seven additional smaller circular platforms unfolded from beneath the larger platform. The seven circles sank geared teeth into the edge of the larger platform and began wheeling slowly around them.

Now, on each of the smaller circles sat a narrow pedestal, and on the pedestal, in teak and velvet, a white ball. They were identical. After they circled all of them once, they stopped.

Naftalie Delara had drawn number one. She said, “No point in delaying, I suppose.” She looked heavenward. “Orholam guide me. Orholam bless my choice.” She went to one of the pedestals and took the white ball there.

Out on balconies of each of the seven towers, a Blackguard and a luxiat stood as a team, watching each other, watching the other teams, and watching that no one would come out onto their balconies to interfere with the ceremony.

But whatever cheat Andross had arranged was doubtless already done. He’d arranged who would pick, and somehow told them beforehand which stone was the one. The mechanics of the cheating would never be visible, and in picking sixth, her choice would likely be moot anyway—a choice between two stones of which surely neither was the correct one. Pointless and barren, like so many years of her life.

Eva Golden Briar took longer, but settled on one in short order.

The White had sacrificed Orholam only knew what to get Karris here, and they’d lost. Karris didn’t even know which smiling face hid a liar. Maybe all six did. Andross Guile always had backup plans behind his plans, didn’t he?

Karris heard musket fire again and could tell that it came from the top of the Prism’s Tower. There were some few people gawking at the candidates through their windows, but no one was out on the balconies, and none was armed that Karris could see. What the hell was going on? The Blackguards on the other towers looked alarmed, too, but were glued to their stations.

Akensis Azmith had selected his stone while Karris looked. Croesos Ptolos took longer, hesitating a long time before one, praying, and then taking another. Then Ismene Crassos went. She looked at each of the three remaining for a long time. Went back to one three times, and finally picked it up.

That left Karris, and two stones.

Listen to the will of Orholam, huh?

She walked up to the first stone. White, round, small enough to fit comfortably in her palm—for whatever reason, it didn’t feel right.

Now that was odd. She approached the second, studying it closely, and felt a strong urge to take it in her hand immediately.

She crossed her arms. She’d claimed to the White that she wanted Orholam to speak to her in a way that was obvious, but here it was, and it was obvious, and she didn’t like it. If Orholam’s voice was a slap in the face, then of what value were Karris’s ears? It somehow seemed to devalue her intellect, the intellect Orholam himself had given her. She should be a participant in Orholam using her.

Shouldn’t she? Or was she being arrogant?

The fiery green/red drafter she had been not so very long ago would have made a decision and to hell with it. Orholam could do his part or not. If this was his big plan, he’d have to do it. It was all probably pointless anyway, the correct stone already taken.

But Karris wasn’t that girl anymore. She had been foolish. She had done things for which she hated herself still. She’d tried to burn herself to ash, and been too excellent to die. She’d tried to blot out the weakness with borrowed purpose as a Blackguard. And now the ache and the disappointment were as much a part of her as her passion and her wildness. She was not a creature of isolated extremes, that disjunctive bichrome, not anymore; she was a whole cloth in the making, integrated.

Ignoring the waiting nobles at the window and the waiting candidates around the disk, Karris turned toward the morning sun. The perfect fiery orb was losing its red tone as it rose, becoming gold.

Karris spread bare arms, saluting the sun, soaking up its full-spectrum light, accepting it and reveling in it.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all.

When you ask for bread, Karris, would I give you a stone?

And as she raised her arms, glorying in the light, she heard the sound of something huge giving way and an enormous stone crenellation plunged right in front of her.

With the sound of a whip unfurling, a line attached to that great stone spooled out. The other end strained over a pulley at the top of the Prism’s Tower, and this stone plunged down, and down. It hit the ground and plunged through it as if the ground been designed to let it through, and it fell into the great underground yard, under vast tension. At the same time, the steel cable unspooled out, away from the tower. It sprang free of the water between Big Jasper and Little Jasper; it tore right out of the top of the walls ringing Big Jasper’s east side and then stood, straining, tight, making a straight line from the top of the Chromeria almost to the docks.

‘Would I give you a stone?’ Karris burst out laughing. And then, as she turned—everyone was watching the great cable—she saw a flash of green at the corner of her eye. What? She looked at the horizon, but she knew—she knew—that the green flash only came at sunset. And then it hit her again. She looked toward Big Jasper.

The star towers were spinning their mirrors, lighting up the crowds, festive, playful. One had caught the green tower and reflected it briefly to Karris.