“Did I get people killed? I killed a king, and I still can’t figure out if it was a good thing or not.” The anguish leaked through and Kip’s eyes welled up. He looked away and gritted his teeth, blinking. Stupid. Get control of yourself.
“I don’t know,” Commander Ironfist said. “But the Color Prince exposed King Garadul on purpose. He wanted him killed. Maybe he’d planned it well in advance. Certainly us capturing Garadul rather than killing him would have tripped him up. General Danavis is very, very good at what he does. He understood in a moment. Most people wouldn’t have. Especially not fifteen-year-old boys who’ve never been in a battle before.”
“But I ignored him. I wanted to kill the king so much I wouldn’t listen to anyone. Anything.” Kip had crushed the king’s head. He could remember the feeling of the man’s skull cracking, brains squishing, blood splurting.
“You were deep in the grip of your color, Kip. So you blundered. Maybe you precipitated a wider war. Maybe. Maybe the general was wrong. Maybe King Garadul would have been far worse than this prince. We don’t know. Can’t know. It happened. Do better next time. That’s what I do.”
That’s why you train.
“Did you ever find out who sent him?” Kip asked.
“The assassin? My sister thought she did. Let’s head to the galley. It’s time for supper, though not as much as either of us would like.”
“But did she get her vengeance on the killer?” Kip asked.
“You might say that.”
“What’d she do to him?”
“She married him.”
Chapter 10
~Gunner~
Tap. Superviolet and blue. As his thumb touched, it was like someone had blown out a candle. The world went dark. Eyes useless. But then, a moment later, there was sun, waves washing over him, blinking, bobbing. Seeing his perspective shift while he felt his body utterly motionless made him queasy.
Tap. Green solved that in a rush of embodiment, touch restored. He was swimming. A strong body, wiry, naked to the waist. The water is warm, strewn with flotsam.
Tap. Yellow. Hearing restored, the shouts of men calling to each other, others screaming in pain or terror. But yellow is more than that; it is the logic of man and place. But the yellow in this one isn’t quite right. Disbelieving. The Prism came out of nowhere. Dodged all his cannon shots. Even when Gunner finally started shooting both at once. That little boat the Prism made moved at speeds he wouldn’t have believed if he’d heard another telling the tale. Ceres is going to take this out on him. Damn Gavin Guile.
But this mind skips around. There’s something—
Tap. Orange. The smell of the sea and smoke and discharged powder, and he can sense the other men floating in the water, and below them, around them—Oh, by the hells. Sharks. Lots of sharks.
His finger is already descending. Tap. Red-and-sub-red-and-the-taste-of-blood-in-his-mouth-and-it’s-too—
The trick with sharks is the nose. Not so different from a man. You bloody a bully’s nose, and he goes looking elsewhere right quick. Easy, right? Easy.
Gunner ain’t no easy meat. The sea’s my mirror. Fickle as me. Crazy as me. Deep currents, and monsters rise from her depths, too. What others call sea spray, I call her spitting in my face, friendly like. Unlike most of this lot, I can swim. I just don’t like it. Ceres and me do our admiring best at a bit of a distance.
She must be ragging something fierce.
The shark she’s sent after me is a tiger shark. Good hunters. Fast. Curious as a crotch-sniffing hound. Mad as a starving lotus eater. Usually twice as long as a man is tall. But the sea’s shown me respect, as she ought. My shark’s bigger. Three times as long as I am tall, looks like. Hard to tell through the water, of course. Don’t want to exaggerate. Hate exaggerators. Fucking hate ’em.
I’m Gunner, and I give it straight.
The scraps and shrapnel lines and barrels of the shipwreck litter the sapphire waters everywhere, but that tiger’s coming back. Depending how tenacious she is, it’ll take me a few minutes to swim to an appropriately sized—
“Oy, Ceres!” I shout as a thought occurs to me. “I know why you’re mad!” Not many people know it, but the Cerulean Sea is named for Ceres. Not for the color. Those tits and twits at the Chromeria think everything revolves around them and their colors.
The tiger shark is circling me, dorsal fin cutting beautiful arcs on the open water. I’m on the edge of the wreckage. I got out first, saw that the fires were headed for the powder magazine. But being on the edge means that shark don’t have to go through the distraction of all the other meat to get to me.