The Blinding Knife (13 page)

The bully didn’t stop: “I’m going to kill you, you fat little bastard. You can’t hold me forever, and once I get out, you’re going to have to watch your back. I’ll be there. I’ll be waiting for you, and you won’t get off with a sucker punch next time.”

Kip realized suddenly that he was riding a tiger. There was no winning here. He was in a position of power, so he’d look the bad guy if
he used it to his advantage. The normal course of things now was that he would give Elio an ultimatum, like Take it back! or something similarly stupid. Elio would refuse, and Kip would be stuck. If Kip let him get up, Elio would come back tomorrow—and he probably would beat the snot out of Kip. If Kip tortured Elio by grinding his arm, it wouldn’t do permanent damage, but many of the boys wouldn’t know that, and even if Elio submitted, Kip would look like a cruel bastard to everyone in the barracks. Or worse, someone would interfere before Elio submitted, and Kip would look cruel
and
weak.

Stalling, Kip said, “Elio, I might not look it, but I’m tougher than you, I’m meaner than you, I’m smarter than you, and I will always go further than you dare.”

“Save it, shit-eater,” Elio said, sensing weakness in Kip’s hesitation. “Oww! Start begging now, you little bitch.”

Kip was suddenly so tired of it all. What had Ironfist said: ‘The winning is just the beginning’?

“Elio, I was going to give you one more chance to take it back. But you’re not going to take anything back. You’re too damn stupid, and I’m too tired to keep playing this game. But I want you to remember something after you go to the infirmary: this
is
me being merciful.”

Still holding Elio’s wrist in the wristlock, Kip brought his left forearm down sharply with his weight behind it.

Elio’s arm broke with a crunch. Everyone gasped. A bit of bloody bone speared through the skin. Elio screamed. It was a high-pitched sound. Not what you would have guessed the boy would sound like at all.

Kip got off. As forty boys watched, wide-eyed, Elio crawled away, bleeding, weeping. He stood and lurched out of the barracks, cradling his broken arm. None of the boys helped him. No one in authority ever came.

As Elio careened out of the door, Kip saw that his Blackguard—the slim, tall young man—was standing in the dark corner, leaning against the wall. He’d watched everything, no doubt ready to move if Kip’s life were in danger. Other than that, he wouldn’t interfere. He just watched, eyes glittering, face blank.

With feigned nonchalance, Kip lay back down in his bed and pretended to go back to sleep instantly. Just leave me alone. He turned his back toward the boys who were whispering to each other, amazed, repeating the story that didn’t need repeating. They’d all seen it.

Kip’s sleep was a lie. Eventually the boys snuffed their candles. In the darkness, Kip relived the battle at Garriston.

The man he’d thrown into the campfire, skin tearing off his face like chicken sticking to a pan. The eyes of men, faces contorted with fury, trying to kill Kip, hefting weapons as Kip fell through the gap in the wall. Fell, fell. Feet kicking at him from a hundred sides.

The taste of gunpowder in the air.

The joy of sweeping a blade into a man, his flesh parting, the blade winning free of his flesh, liberating blood and soul.

Surrounded by soldiers, matchlocks coming up. Kip shooting their own musket balls in their faces.

An eyeball, blue as the sea, sitting on a paving stone, the head it had been blown out of nowhere to be found. Staring at Kip, staring. Accusing. Killer.

What have you done?

He remembered losing fights to Ramir, the village bully. They’d thought Ramir was going to be pressed into King Garadul’s army. Kip had killed soldiers—boys—no older than Ramir at Garriston. Boys who’d probably been pressed into service. Innocents doing guilty work.

He’d thought he wanted to kill Ramir, sometimes, back when he was a boy. Back when he didn’t know what it meant. Back when he didn’t know how easy it was.

What kind of monster have I become?

Gavin put the fist-sized charge into the tube and began spooling out a narrow finger of green luxin, pushing it under the waves. In the last two days, he’d gotten pretty good at this, but he still couldn’t rely on the charges, which were made of intermixed layers of yellow and red luxin wrapped around a bubble of air. The trick was making that innermost layer improperly—in exactly the proper way. The luxin bubble decayed, exposing the unstable yellow luxin to air. That
unstable luxin flashed into light, igniting the red luxin. The successive layers did the same and made an explosion big enough to clear the reefs.

But handling explosives that you’d deliberately made unstable was tense work. And sometimes the charges blew as soon as they touched the reef; other times they didn’t blow up for several minutes, or at all.

Karris was steadying the boat, sometimes poling, sometimes rowing.

This time, the explosion came before Gavin had pulled away the placement tube. The tube shot out of his hands, and the sea jumped beneath their boat. Gavin had been braced for the wave, but the tube shooting up into the air pulled him off balance. He stumbled backward. Ordinarily, falling in the water would have been fine, but at the moment it was full of razor-sharp chunks of coral boiling up to the surface from the explosion.

Karris snagged Gavin’s belt as his foot plunged into the water. She heaved. He swung abruptly back toward the boat and swept her feet out from under her as he crashed onto the deck.

Gavin rolled hard to keep from capsizing their little craft, and ended up on top of Karris. He laughed. “Nice catch!”

The look in her eyes was so intense that he thought his heart was going to stop.

“Get. Off,” she hissed. Her body was rigid. He must have misinterpreted that split-second look. For a sliver of an instant he could have sworn—

“Sorry,” he said. He pushed himself up. “Good catch,” he said again. Did she cling to him just for a moment there? Did her body rise with him, keeping the contact for just one moment more? He looked at her.

The sun was baking the bay and had been for the last two days. Gavin had stripped off his shirt to cool down immediately, and after modestly sweating through the first day, Karris had followed his lead on the second, wearing only her tight Blackguard’s chemise. The sight of her on her back, lean stomach exposed, legs on either side of him, skin radiant from golden sun and sweat—his breath stopped, thoughts scattered. He tried not to—failed—looked at her breasts.

Briefly, but she noticed.

Gavin could hear his imprisoned brother’s voice, sudden, sharp: ‘So you’d take this, too, huh, brother? Make love with her, as if you were me? You want to hear her scream
my
name when she’s in the throes of passion?’

If she were any other woman, he would force the moment to its crisis: he would kiss her right now and let her decide. She wanted to say no? Fine, to hell with her. He’d move on. Or, more likely, she’d say yes, and he’d bed her and leave her with a smile on her face—but leave her. At least he’d do something.

Karris was the only woman who paralyzed him.

He remembered lying beside her in her room in her father’s house, so long ago. He remembered kissing that breast, caressing her body, talking as the dawn approached. They’d made love half a dozen times through the night, urgency and passion winning through the awkwardness of inexperience. He had to be gone before her maid came to wake her in the morning.

They’d both known their romance was doomed, even then, even as the children they’d been. “I’ll come for you,” Dazen had promised.

He’d come back as he’d sworn, and she’d been gone—taken away by her father, though he hadn’t known it then; he’d thought she had betrayed him—and her brothers had ambushed him. And he’d started the fire that killed them all: brothers, servants, slaves, children, treasures, hope.

“I’ve done you many wrongs,” Gavin said now. He stood. “And I regret every one of them. I’m sorry.”

He extended a hand to Karris, to help her stand. He thought she was going to refuse for a moment, but then she took his hand, popped to her feet, and didn’t release his hand. She stood close, but her proximity was a challenge. “Do you want to specify what you’re asking my pardon for?”

At Garriston, she’d said, ‘I know your big secret, you asshole.’ And slapped him.

Which hadn’t actually clarified that much. He’d kept a lot of secrets over the years, and whatever she thought she knew could be leagues away from the worst truth. His central secret had necessitated all sorts of other ones over the years.

And by secrets, I mean lies.

So how cold are you, Gavin? How committed to your goal? You’ve killed for it before. Can you do it again?

They were hundreds of leagues away from the nearest Chromeria spy. If Gavin told Karris the whole truth and she swore to expose him or ruin him, he could kill her.

Simple. Easy.

In a fair fight, she’d have a fair chance against him. Her Blackguard training had made her quite a weapon. But there was no fair fight against a Prism.

“I’m just sorry,” Gavin said. He looked away.

She didn’t let go of his hand. She clamped down on it until he met her fiery gaze. “It’s not an apology if you won’t take responsibility. If you can’t even name what you’re apologizing for, you’ve given me
nothing
. You will not buy absolution on the cheap, not after what you’ve done. Not from me.”

Gavin tried to take his hand back. She refused to let go.

“Let go, or swim,” Gavin said coldly.

She let go.

Damn woman. She made him so furious. More furious because she was right. Damn her!

But he couldn’t kill her, and he knew it. He’d let the world burn down first.

She picked up the luxin tube he’d been using to place charges and handed it to him. “Five more charges should finish the channel,” she said. “But we’ll have to hurry to get it done before low tide. Then we can work on the seawall footings.”

They worked until there was no longer enough light in the sky for Gavin to draft. Karris steadied the boat, and made the forms, and made sure that they were keeping within the lines they’d planned.

The seawall would actually be three seawalls, with two wide gaps: one for ships coming into the bay, and one for ships leaving. The channels through the coral that led to the openings zigzagged, the turns marked by buoys. If they came under threat of attack, the locals could remove the buoys. It was going to be rough work, Gavin thought. He’d learned some things from building Brightwater Wall, but there he’d also had thousands of workers and dozens of drafters to help him.

Lovely that I made such a defensible refuge for the Color Prince.

Well, second time’s the charm. He would leave this for the people of Tyrea—now his people—and he would do a few other things to give them a head start on establishing a city. Then he would leave.

They had a small campfire, and Karris cooked some fish she’d snared while Gavin slept. She woke him and they ate together.

“Sorry,” he said, “I should have helped with dinner.”

She looked at him like he was being stupid. “You’re making the Ninth Wonder of the World this week; I can make dinner.”

“It’s not really fair, is it?” Gavin said. “I couldn’t do this without you, but it’ll be the Thing Gavin Built, just like Brightwater Wall was.”

She shook her head. “You’re a mystery to me, Lord Prism.”

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke in the middle of the night, there was a blanket over him. He saw Karris in the low light of the fire, watching the darkness. He felt an immense gratitude toward her. She’d worked hard all day long, too, and now she was staying up all night.

Her back was to him and to the fire, maintaining her night vision, of course. Gavin and most sub-reds could control their eyes well enough to attain full night vision quickly, but Karris didn’t like to lose even a few seconds of night vision.

Gavin sat up and was right on the edge of calling out to tell her he would take the next watch when he saw her shoulders shake.

Not a shiver. She was crying. Gavin hadn’t seen Karris cry in years.

He knew she wouldn’t be pleased to find out he’d noticed, but he stood and put his hands on her shoulders. She tensed.

“I’ll take this watch,” he said gently.

“Don’t, Gavin,” she said. Her voice was raw, right at the edge.

Don’t
what
? Don’t touch her? Don’t say anything? Don’t leave?

“Today was Tavos’s birthday,” she said, struggling to get the words out clearly. “I almost didn’t even remember.” Tavos, her brother. He’d died in the fire. He’d been a terrible person, violent, unstable, one of the boys whose jeering had made Dazen believe that if he didn’t fight back that night, he would be killed. But Karris hadn’t seen that, had maybe never seen that side of her brother. Even if she had, he’d still been her brother. “I just miss them all so much. Koios…” She sounded like she wanted to say more, but couldn’t.

Koios had been her favorite brother. He was the only one Gavin regretted killing. The only halfway decent person among them.

And then she did weep. She turned to him, and he held her. He said nothing, still not certain he wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, knowing only that if he said anything, he would say the wrong thing.