The Blinding Knife(253)

She waited for the but. He could tell she knew it was coming.

“But he’s not my son.” It was a failure to speak it. “He grins this quirky grin and I see his father.”

“All of you Guile men have that grin. Even your father used to charm—”

“I killed Kip’s father, Karris. The boy is so desperate not to be an orphan he’s latched on to me. So desperate to please he’ll do anything I ask. What will he do if he ever finds out the truth? If he came after me, tried to kill me, who could call him the betrayer? I’m raising him and making him formidable, and the more he loves me, the more he’ll hate me when he finds out I’ve deceived him from the beginning. Through no fault of his own, he’s a viper, Karris. And the tighter I hold him to me, the more likely he is to bite me.”

Karris studied him quietly. “All true. All beside the point. You kept a secret for sixteen years from me. Keeping it from a boy who hasn’t known you and will never know your brother? Child’s play. What’s really going on?”

“Look, this soul-searching is deeply meaningful and everything, but what I did before, I’d do again. Karris, if you were falling off a cliff, and I could save only you or me, I’d save you. No question. Because even though I know that I can do things for the world that you can’t, I don’t care. I knew I should kill you, that you were the person most likely to destroy me. I knew that this… this was incredibly unlikely. But I love you, so I didn’t care. When I look at Kip? I’d make the rational choice. And I feel bad about that, but I feel bad when I send soldiers into war. I like Kip; I wouldn’t want to lose him. I want to get to know him more. But I don’t love Kip, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Someone pounded on the door. “Lord Prism.”

“One minute!” Gavin called.

Karris had an odd intensity in her eyes. “My lord, I was never helplessly in love with you—well, maybe when we were children I was. But in the years since, my feelings for you have come and gone. But my admiration for the man I saw you to be never changed. You twisted me in knots because the good man I felt you were—my Dazen—and the man I thought I knew you to be—Gavin—were so different. But I saw that you were the kind of man who was worthy of my love. I knew the man I would marry would be good and strong and gentle and honorable and smart and stubborn enough to handle me and… Hold on, I know there must be some other virtue,” she teased.

“Charming? Never forget charming.”

“Sometimes I could do with less of that,” she said. She got serious. “I chose you.”

“Ah, you couldn’t resist me.”

“Yes, yes I could,” she said flatly. “I chose you.”

“How startlingly… unromantic,” he said. He was reminded of her affinity for the blue virtues, despite being a red and a green, for thinking things through, for making the columns add up.

“I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.”

There was another knock on the door. “Lord Prism! The Spectrum is meeting right now, and they wish to speak with you. Lord Prism?”

“Dazen,” Karris said suddenly, “no matter what happens, I love you.” Something about her voice was raw, as if she were right on the edge.

Gavin had a sudden intuition. “Karris, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”

“I just—”

“What did the Third Eye tell you?”

Silence. He’d hit it; he could tell.

Karris moved to get up, but Gavin grabbed her hand. “Karris, please…”

She looked back at him, then looked away. “I’ll tell you, but I’m not telling you anything else no matter what you say, understood?”

“Understood,” Gavin said. He grimaced, but he knew Karris when she got stubborn.

“She hedged, of course, said she doesn’t see everything perfectly…”

“The Third Eye, with less than helpful help? Yes, I’m familiar with—”

“She told me when you’re going to die,” Karris said in a rush. Then she stood and threw a robe around her shoulders. “Now get up, lazybones, we’ve got a long day ahead of us.” She smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes.





Chapter 105




“I lured you here under false pretenses,” Andross Guile said as Kip came into his dark cabin. The Red had of course taken the captain’s cabin, and though he’d put curtains on the windows, it wasn’t nearly as pitch dark as his own apartments back at the Chromeria. Kip had forgotten to soak up superviolet light before coming in, so he was at the mercy of the dim light and his ears. But Luxlord Guile seemed to be in unusually good spirits, and that put Kip on his guard. “I don’t want to play a game with you. I want to apologize,” Andross said.