“Anything,” Ironfist said.

“Not for me. For you. Will take a while to answer.”

“What is it?”

“Before you left home to come here, you met with some people. You made them an oath.”

“What people?” But Ironfist knew, and his heart sank again that Tremblefist knew about that.

“I didn’t want to come to the Chromeria, you know, after what I did at Aghbalu. But I came for you. Seeing you swear yourself to the Order, it, it wouldn’t leave me. I would have happily killed myself, but I couldn’t go while you were in danger. Funny thing. Coming here to save you is what saved me. I came so that someday, when your soul was on the line, and you had to decide which oaths to keep, that I would be here for you. I’m not going to make it, big brother. All that effort, all this time…” And he began weeping. “I failed you.”

As if the failure were his.

There was nothing to say, no way to combat the tears spilling freely down Ironfist’s cheeks.

Tremblefist said, “After the fall of Ru, the others told me how you prayed. It had to be the first time you prayed since mother was killed, huh?”

Ironfist nodded tightly.

“And he answered.”

“He did.” A miracle cannon shot, five thousand paces, to save friends he might be called on to kill.

“So you’ve taken unbreakable oaths to implacable enemies. One to the Bearer of Light, and one to the Maker of it. So you have to decide without me, brother. Which man are you?”

Ironfist had no answer. He clung for comfort to the brother he should be comforting. Like his life, Tremblefist’s death wasn’t easy.

Epilogue 2

Gavin woke, facedown, cold, naked, lying on a hard floor. His missing eye was professionally bandaged, but he had new bruises everywhere. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. Wherever here was. He rolled over, wincing at the many voices of pain singing like a Sun Day chorus, and opened his eye.

It was a small room, curving around him in a circle, shaped like a flattened ball. There was a hole above for bread to be dropped in, and a hole below for his waste. He couldn’t see the color, but the winking crystalline facets told him he was in the very blue cell he’d made for his brother.

It had been repaired.

In the peaceful perfection of the passionless prison, Gavin felt a horror and revulsion unlike any he had ever known. Pain stabbed through his chest. Tight. Breathless, fighting for little gasps of air. His secrets were out, all at once, in front of the last person he loved and the one person he knew could never understand.

Those repairs meant his father was his captor. If he’d found this cell, he’d found them all. That meant he knew everything: the false victory at Sundered Rock, Dazen’s imposture of Gavin, and finally his murder of Andross Guile’s eldest and favorite son in the yellow cell.

It meant Andross planned to make him pay for it.

Stripped bare of clothes, and titles, and privileges, and power, and vision, and freedom, and stripped now of even his false name, Dazen stared at the grim reflection in the shining wall. It looked like a dead man.