“Damn her,” Delara Orange said with real grief, “I told her she couldn’t keep having children forever.”

“We each serve as best we know,” Andross said quietly. It was meant to be comforting, and for a moment, Karris believed him. She’d forgotten that before he’d become the spider, he’d been a man of charisma almost as great as his son’s.

She looked at him now, wondering. Could a red wight maintain such a façade? Perhaps grief was a passion, too.

The Spectrum joined the White in a prayer for the deceased, and Karris found some peace in the cadences, rising and falling. Dead during childbirth. She remembered her own childbirth. The pain. She’d thought she was dying herself. She had wanted to die, for a time. And then she’d realized she didn’t hate herself, she hated her weakness. She’d come back, remade herself, joined the Blackguard, become brave.

And yet she’d run from that child. Was still running. Still felt sick at the very thought of it. She hadn’t told Gavin about it, when he’d exposed all of his shameful secrets to her. He’d bared his throat to her, and she’d held him and listened, as if she were pure.

Her child—her son, for they’d told her the gender of her child by accident, though she’d begged them not to—was out there now, deep in the woods of Blood Forest, right in the path of an army of wights. It turned her stomach.

You can’t run forever, Karris.

“I’m sorry to intrude on our grief,” Andross Guile said, finally, when the prayers were finished. “But as we all know, these present crises give us little respite, no matter how much we need it.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Andross,” Delara said. “Bring your business.”

Karris grabbed for the dagger in her pocket. A red wight, rudely contradicted? Powder, meet sparks. But …

Andross Guile smiled sadly. “Delara, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been rude to you. Unfeeling. You’ve endured much in these last months, and I’ve added to your burdens, not eased them. I beg your forgiveness.” At first, Karris thought he must be mocking her, a snide, stone-cold deadpan sarcasm. But his gestures were placating, his tone sincere.

Someone leaned back in her chair, and when it creaked, the whole room could hear it, loud as a musket shot.

Andross Guile looked down at his lap, as if ashamed. “These last years have been hard for me. I have seen my own power shrink. I stopped drafting to retain my sanity, and it was like shutting off the tap to Orholam’s majesty for me. I have lived in darkness. The physical darkness made me sick, and became moral darkness as well. I have only thought of myself. I mistreated you, my fellow Colors, and I abused those closest to me: my last remaining son and my wife. Now both of those have been taken from me. My wife took the Freeing against my wishes. Slipped away because she feared—rightly—that I wouldn’t give her my permission. When I lost my last son—” He stopped, a hitch in his voice.

He raised his head and turned his bespectacled eyes toward the White. “You and I have jousted for years,” he said sadly. “And for years, I have resisted your wisdom. For years, I have been on the very edge of the halo. I took to wearing gloves, and black spectacles, not just to shield myself from light, but to shield myself from your sight. So you wouldn’t know how close to that fire I stood.” He heaved a sigh, and Karris gripped her dagger tightly, wondering if he would shoot out of his chair and start killing.

“It is time,” Andross said, “for truth.”

Karris widened her stance, putting her feet on either side of her chair so she could jump.

Andross began tugging off his long gloves. “At our last meeting, I am ashamed to confess it, but I was at the break point, and when we prayed for a miracle, I had only a mustard seed of faith that Orholam could do anything for us. For me.” He looked up, intensity writ in every line of his face. “But I am here to tell you today that Orholam is mighty. And he is good. I fell asleep at prayer, believing nothing could save me, ready to suicide when I woke. I slept. I dreamed. In my dream, Orholam told me that old and frail as I am, he is greater than my frailties. He is magnified in my weakness. He is mighty to save. We are earthen vessels, but we can serve for his honor, and he will empower us to serve as he wills.” Andross took off his gloves and tossed them on the table. He threw back his hood. “I prayed, I slept, I dreamed, I heard, and I am remade.” He opened his cloak and dropped it in his chair, and took off his darkened spectacles and dropped them on the table.

Karris had known that Andross Guile was in his mid-sixties—knowing they would die young, drafters usually married early, usually bore children as soon as possible—but in her mind she’d believed he must be ninety years old at least. He was old, he was decrepit, he had one foot in the grave.

But this Andross Guile wasn’t the one she had known. She dropped her stolen dagger from nerveless fingers.

Andross Guile was bedecked in a luxin-red tunic with gold brocade that emphasized the broadness of his shoulders, the power of his straight back. His once-lank hair had been cut short, washed, combed. His skin seemed young, taut where it had been loose and flabby. But none of those were the real wonder. He laid his hands on the table, then turned them over.

Neither back nor palm was stained with red luxin. And as he turned his eyes on each Color in turn, finally coming to Karris, she saw the real miracle: Andross Guile’s halos weren’t even halfway through his irises. He looked like a man with ten more years of drafting in his eyes.

It was impossible. It had to be a hex, a phantasm of orange magic.

“Touch me,” he said. “Look and see. Delara, is this a hex?”

“N-no,” she said. She didn’t appear to be able to say anything else.

Jia Tolver did touch Andross. She touched his hand, his arm, in open wonder. The others needed no such proof.

“Orholam be praised,” Klytos said, and if nothing Andross had done or said for the last few minutes had seemed calculated, Klytos’s invocation of Orholam certainly did. It snapped Karris back to reality. Andross Guile, whatever had happened to him, was still Andross Guile. She shouldn’t lay down her wits simply because the impossible had happened. He was a Guile; the impossible always happened with that damned family.

Of course, I’m a Guile now, too. Dammit.

Andross let the silence stretch until it seemed someone else was about to fill it, and then he said, “Orholam has charged me with a task, and has equipped me for it, and today, I ask the Spectrum to concur with his will. I am to put down this heresy, this blasphemous Color Prince, and to do so, I must be made promachos.”

It was a little rushed, but perhaps Andross Guile didn’t see any benefit in waiting.

“I nominate Andross Guile to be promachos,” Klytos Blue said.

“I second my nomination,” Andross said.

“Point of order!” Delara said. “Do we even have a quorum? Green is gone with no replacement yet named, the Prism is missing, and Arys has not yet been placed at rest.”

“The election of a promachos requires a majority of the currently serving Colors,” Andross said.

Carver Black nodded, confirming the truth of that. Everyone around the table quickly calculated what that meant. Black had no vote. White voted only in ties. With Sub-red dead and no replacement yet named for her, and Gavin missing along with the vote he carried as the representative for the exiled Tyreans who’d moved to Seers Island, a majority meant he only needed three of five.