“You said before that you were sometimes wrong, right?” he asked Corvan’s beautiful wife.
“Sometimes,” she said sadly.
One in a thousand. He’d faced worse.
“Dazen,” Corvan said quietly. He swallowed, looking out to sea, looking at nothing. “My lord, she tells me if I go with you, I can only make it worse. Otherwise, I’d… My lord, it’s been an honor.”
And then, as Gavin got onto the skimmer and Corvan pushed the boat out into the gentle surf, The Third Eye said, “Orholam guide you back, Lord Prism.”
He was sure that she didn’t mean back to the island.
Chapter 102
“I’m going to kill him, someday. But he’s good at what he does. I’ll give him that,” Zymun said, rising from their bed in the predawn darkness. Liv was already up and dressed, almost finished fighting her hair into some order. “I’ll let him do the work of uniting the satrapies, and then take it from him. Unless he threatens to botch it, of course.”
“What are you going to do? Once you become king, I mean.” She slid the hairpins in place, adjusted the bit that was falling in front.
“Emperor,” Zymun said, correcting her. “And whatever do you mean? What will I do? You’re not very smart, are you?”
Not smart enough to avoid you in the first place, clearly. She froze. His charm had been slipping more and more frequently. He was a lizard beneath it. There was something wrong with him. Something thin, an essential shallowness. How had she not noticed before? When he touched her now, her flesh grew cold. Her body had known. She’d told herself that she was extricating herself carefully, but she wasn’t: she was afraid. Afraid to be a woman alone in an armed camp. Such fear didn’t befit a drafter. Such fear didn’t befit a woman. He wanted to treat her like she was nothing? Hatred coiled in her breast.
It took all of her self-control, but she turned and looked at him with a mask of cool condescension. “Zymun, Zymun, Zymun. Emperor? Please. There is no trace of greatness in you.”
She slipped out of the tent deftly. She was shaking. What about your big plan to make him tire of you? To escape his clutches and make him think it was his idea?
All in pieces now. Shit.
Knowing the smart thing to do and having the makeup to do it were two different things. To hell with him.
Liv went directly to the Color Prince’s tent. He was gone. She found him instead on the outskirts of the camp, greeting new drafters who’d abandoned Ru or other Atashian towns. At least half of them were on their last year or two of life. Cowards, Liv thought.
But armies are composed of those who join for bad reasons as well as good, and the prince despised no one who helped him. Liv approached him, bowed deeply, and said, “Magnificence, may I have a private word with you?”
The prince measured her, then excused himself.
“Zymun is planning to betray you,” she said without preamble.
“Thank you. Will you teach this class of recruits for me?”
“What?” she asked. “ ‘Thank you?’ That’s all?”
He looked at her sharply.
“My apologies, my prince. I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”
He favored her with an indulgent smile. “When did you find this out?”
“I’d suspected he had an… overlarge opinion of himself, but he didn’t say anything treasonous until this morning.”
“And you came straight to me.”
“Yes, my lord.”
A retainer emerged from the ranks and started coming toward the prince. He lifted a hand, telling the man to wait.
“You knew,” Liv said.
“I knew.”
“So… Did you send me to spy on him?”
“You tell me,” he said. Another servant looked ready to come forward, and again he motioned to the woman not to interrupt. Running an army meant making decisions from dawn until dusk and beyond.
“You weren’t testing him. You were testing me,” Liv said.
“Oh?”
“You knew he’d betray you; you didn’t know if I would. So I passed. Was Zymun in on this?” If he had been, that would mean that he was still favored by the Color Prince, and the way Liv had left him wasn’t simply over her loyalty to the prince. She might have just made a powerful enemy, without at the same time making a more powerful friend.
“Do you know what happens to an egg, when you keep it warm?” the prince asked.
“It hatches?” Liv said.
“And when you make it hot?”
“I’m not sure I—”
“It cooks.” He smiled, indulgent, magnanimous. “Everything has a proper time and season. Some things rushed are spoiled. This is why so many of the Chromeria’s wights go mad and become dangerous, not because wights are innately so, but because their drafters get to the end of their human span and then panic. Panicked people do shoddy work. If instead they worked deliberately, over a course of years, to prepare themselves for the transition, their odds of success increase dramatically. If they had people to teach them what to do, just imagine what we might accomplish.”