Yellow luxin bricks. With what they’d learned building Brightwater Wall, his architects and laborers built forms for interlocking solid bricks. Gavin would walk around the forms every morning for an hour, filling them with yellow luxin, drafted perfectly, sealed perfectly, practically indestructible, and then he’d head out for the day. The laborers took the bricks and built everything out of them.

At first content to simply guard him on the island and while they traveled, Karris had eventually begun helping out on her own. She trained the best of the locals in fighting, sometimes organizing javelina hunts. Though javelinas and the rarer giant javelinas had long been native to Tyrea, there hadn’t been any close to Garriston for decades, and facing the dangerous, unpredictable animals was the next best training to actual warfare.

Whenever Gavin and Karris returned to the island, he was always surprised. With plentiful free building supplies and fifty thousand willing workers and friendly locals and good governance, their little port went from a camp to a settlement in quick order. There were no walls, as per Corvan’s agreement with the Third Eye, who thought that mutual vulnerability was a better guarantor of peace than mutual defensibility. But every other possible structure was springing up. Gavin felt proud to be part of building something for once.

He spent most evenings with Corvan, talking governance, mulling over problems, making plans, even playing a game or two of Nine Kings. It was good to talk, to jest, to drink too much wine every once in a while.

And he’d kept Karris at arm’s length, desperate for her companionship, and desperately fearful of her. Treating those closest to him worst, indeed.

He set the charts down. He hadn’t even been looking at them for the last few minutes.

This wasn’t about Kip, he realized. At least not purely about Kip. For Karris, this was about the path not taken. Kip was of an age where he could have been their son, had Gavin not broken his and Karris’s betrothal. Karris wasn’t saying, How can you keep your distance from a bastard you unknowingly whelped on some peasant? She was saying, Is this the kind of father you would have been to our son?

Orholam have mercy. It was a punch in the stomach.

And she was right.

Kip was a good boy, but Gavin barely knew him. And he certainly didn’t know what to do with him. He should have kept him here, should have trained him himself. It hadn’t even really occurred to him. He’d seen Kip as baggage, a burden to be passed off to Commander Ironfist as quickly as possible.

Everyone had demands of the Prism, and that had been one too many. Kip was a good boy, but he wasn’t Gavin’s son. Gavin could tell the whole world that he was; he could take the disgrace of having fathered a bastard; he could even face his own father over it. But there was a difference between a grand gesture and daily decency.

Add Kip to the list of problems awaiting him when he got back to the Chromeria. Not waiting, festering—many of them problems that he desperately wanted to go tackle, but he felt trapped until he found the blue bane.

The next morning, Karris greeted him as if nothing had happened, and he let it lie, too. There was nothing he could do about Kip or anything else until he found the bane.

So he stopped whenever he saw ships out in the open sea, transformed the skimmer into a dory and rowed to them, asked his questions and deflected theirs, and kept searching. The problems elsewhere had to be growing. If he was gone too much longer, the Chromeria would declare him dead, despite the letters he sent with ship captains and the return letters from the Chromeria that he ignored. But he couldn’t leave his search. He hated blues too much. This, too, was part of his five purposes—to destroy all wights. He owed Sevastian that. Nothing would keep him from it. Not even the Chromeria itself.

He took Karris with him almost every day, partly because she wouldn’t let him leave her, and partly because he hoped she would feel the blue. The Third Eye had let slip that everyone in the proximity of a bane would be affected, but drafters most powerfully. Gavin’s plan was to use Karris to find it, and then go back the next day without her to destroy it. She would be furious with him, of course, but he didn’t care.

And the days passed, and passed, and passed. Two months passed. Three.

Chapter 52

“I can give them to you,” Janus Borig said.

There had to be some catch, of course. No one was going to give Kip something he needed so desperately. The black cards had to be priceless.

“But it’s going to cost me something,” Kip said. She closed the door behind him, threw many latches and bolts home.

“No,” she said. “Free gift. Which, come to think of it, is redundant, isn’t it?”

“But…” he led.

She poked his chest with the stem of her long pipe. “But do you know what it’s like to carry around an item of total wealth in your pocket? Walking down a back alley and knowing that you could buy every single house and shop on the block with what’s in your pocket? It’s terrifying. One of these cards is worth that, Kip. If I give you a deck, you’ll be carrying more than you may make in your entire life. And the wealth isn’t simply monetary. You’d be carrying history. History you could drop in a puddle and utterly ruin, or that could be quite literally stolen and gone forever. Do you have any idea how frightening that is?”

Kip was thinking of the dagger that might or might not still be in the chest in the barracks. He swallowed. “That’s something that’s been bothering me,” he said. “Your home here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice and all, but… it’s here. It’s not where I’d expect to find fortunes.” Which, he realized, might be the point.

“My husband and I built this house. Nigh unto fifty years ago now. I like it here.” She shrugged. “I know it doesn’t seem like a safe place to keep what I have here, but it’s more secure than you know. I spend a fortune to make it secure. The Prism and the whole Spectrum couldn’t come take something that I didn’t want to give them.” She grinned. “Now. Now. Now. Where were—Ah. The black cards. The question is, do you want the black cards because they’re forbidden, or do you simply want to beat Andross Guile?”

Kip scowled. It felt like the wrong answer, but he said, “I just want to beat Andross Guile.”

“In that case, you don’t need a full deck of black cards.” She groped on the counter for a jar with more tobacco while talking.

“I don’t?”

“The cards weren’t outlawed because they made good game cards, Kip. They were outlawed because they told stories that the Chromeria no longer wanted told. Just as when I release the new cards—the first new cards in many, many years—they will not be popular among those they depict.”

“Can I use the new cards?” That would be one way to truly foil Andross Guile.

“No. Absolutely not. They’re not finished, and when they are, my life will be in greater peril than usual. I’ll accept that risk when the time comes, but not yet.”

“Someone would kill you, over cards that are true, that must be true?”

“Especially over such things, Kip. If I could just make up whatever I wanted, then, well, who am I?” She tamped some tobacco into her pipe. It seemed awfully dark. “Some old woman. No one. Truth gives power. Light reveals—”