The locals? You mean humans, Kip?

Ah, there he was. He himself, Kip the Lip. Some part of him was glad that that Kip wasn’t gone for good.

She studied his eyes, seeing him come to himself, and her leathery, freckled skin wrinkled merrily. “He told me to expect something today. Been on tenterhooks through all my washing and weaving. Had that little phrase, ‘clad in light,’ pop in my head.” She shook her head. “Convinced myself it was ‘lightly clad.’ Well, you are that, aren’t you? Good thing the Good One sent you now, young sir. I fainted the first time I saw my husband naked. No wyrthig, swear. Took the shine right off the rose for him, I tell you, and I didn’t do much better for years. The Lord of Light loves to give me a gentle elbow about all that from time to time. But come. Let’s take care of you.”

And so she did. She took Kip in, fed him from the soup she’d already had on, though she only gave him the broth, then she bathed him, tended his wounds, and put him to bed. When he woke, two days later, she fed him again. Coreen was a widow, but several of her sons and daughters lived within easy walking distance and one at least visited each day, so when Kip told her he needed to go to the Chromeria, she found out that a trader was due to leave in two days and would make room for Kip—for free. Kip spent one more day abed, and then was up.

They developed an easy rapport, joking and teasing as if they’d known each other for years. She reminded him of Sanson’s mother back in Rekton. The woman had always made extra cakes or sweetmeats or pastries, and they’d played an informal game of Kip trying to steal one or two without her noticing. He almost never got away clean, and when he did, she’d ask him some question that he would try to answer around a mouthful of whatever.

She took care of me, knowing my mother wasn’t doing so, and she did it in a way that never made me ashamed. She made it a game, for me. Kip had seen the fun in it before, but he’d never seen the kindness of it until now.

And she’s dead. Like all of them.

Maybe Coreen’s jokes and laughter were a kindness, too. She’d seen that Kip was barely sane; she’d heard him wake sweating and screaming from another of the dreams, and she treated him like a mother would treat an incorrigible friend of her son. Kip found out that her late husband had been a renowned veteran of the Prisms’ War, though she never said on which side and Kip didn’t ask, and that made more sense of it. She had some of a warrior’s sense of humor: black and light, irreverent to death as death was irreverent to all else.

But she had a warmth, too, that was hugely appealing, and part of Kip wanted to stay here forever.

On his last full day, dressed in the widow’s husband’s clothes, which fit well due to Coreen’s labors with a needle and thread, Kip fixed what he could around her cabin. He drafted a few yellow lux torches, made some fire rocks to help start a blaze easily, tried his hand at drafting green to fertilize the vegetable gardens of her two daughters, and fixed a broken axle on a haycart by sheathing it in solid yellow luxin—something useful he’d actually learned during his lectures. Imagine that.

The morning he left, Coreen said, “I can’t let you go without saying my piece. Have I earned that?”

“Of course.”

She took a deep breath. “Kip, the Lord doesn’t want you to think you’re worthless, but he may want you to think you’re worth less than you presently think. He wants your eyes to be whole, so you have an accurate view of you. It’s done in love, you understand? When you surrender what isn’t under your control, you’re not giving up a crown, you’re giving up a yoke. I told you about my prudery in my youth. I was a beautiful girl, and though I never would have said it, I thought I was more virtuous than Orholam. My false virtue—not modesty, pride—took the joy out of my marriage bed. I’d fought to maintain a virtue, and I thought that because I’d had to fight so hard, it must be the highest good. Giving up my claim to look down on those I didn’t approve of was like losing a limb. But do you know what it’s like to try to walk with three legs?”

It was getting uncomfortably close, and Kip was afraid of what she would say next. “You’ve seen me naked, you know I do,” he said. He grinned.

She shook her head like she knew she’d walked into that. She leveled her soup ladle at Kip’s nose. “Kip, serious hat on, or I make comments about your manhood that you’ll never forget.”

Kip swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Taking correction was like losing a limb to me, but it was worth it. A good father doesn’t let his children stay stuck. Orholam is a good father, Kip.”

“Right now, I’m more worried about being a good son.” Deflect, deflect, don’t let her ask what I should give up.

“Then you are wiser than your years,” she said, and he wondered if he’d been nervous for nothing or if she was letting him off easy. Then she got a twinkle in her eye. “Oh, and Kip…”

“Don’t. Please don’t. Please?”

“That’s no limb. A good strong sapling, maybe. Now my husband … That was a limb. Let’s just say maybe modesty wasn’t the only reason I fainted.”

“I said I was sorry,” Kip whinged.

She pinched his cheek. “I know, but you deserved it. Don’t worry. You’ve got more than ample to satisfy. Bigger than my own sons’, and if my daughters speak true, bigger than their husbands’, too.”

“Ah! I have to see these people!”

Chapter 16

Karris sipped her kopi quietly in the Crossroads. The stimulant was a poor choice for her anxiety. She was seated in the clerestory, facing the big, gorgeous stained glass windows that had once been the pride of the Tyrean embassy. She wondered how the owner of the Crossroads had been able to purchase this building, and what it had cost. In the years since the fall of Tyrea, it had become the city’s most fashionable kopi house, restaurant, brewery, smokehouse, and—downstairs, out of sight of those with tender sensibilities—the foremost brothel in the city.

For that matter, she wondered who the owner was.

Kind of thing that a spymistress should be able to learn, isn’t it?

She wasn’t kept waiting long. She supposed that was one of the perquisites of her new position. She was the White’s right hand, and no one would keep the White waiting. The man who sat across from her was an Ilytian banker, the scion of one of the great merchant banking families, the Onestos, twenty-five years old, and probably just now being treated as an adult, brought home from learning his trade in one of the satrapies and now entrusted with meeting the Prism’s bride—or widow. At twenty-five, he could be treated as barely an adult because he still had another fifty years left in his mortal span. How different the lives of munds.

Turgal Onesto was dressed in his Sun Day best, and smelled of some fine perfume Karris would have been able to place if she’d been a lady instead of a warrior these blighted sixteen years. He sat, gulping. It had been a long time since he’d been asked to report. The White had recruited him as a boy. For her part, Karris didn’t feel much better. She hadn’t worn a dress since that bastard King Garadul had captured her and forced her to. She’d wanted to wear her Blackguard clothes, but those had been seized and forbidden her. Karris still wasn’t sure whether they’d been taken on Commander Ironfist’s orders or the White’s. Neither would say, which told her that whichever had done it had done it with the approval of the other.