Kip remembered the glasses he carried, and put the sub-red on. It didn’t help that much. “For what?” he asked. He could think of a dozen things for which the old monster should apologize, but he couldn’t imagine the man apologizing for any of them.
“For trying to have you killed.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Kip asked.
“Believe me, I thought you did owe me an apology for refusing to die. But this is me apologizing to you.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Kip said.
Outlined against the thin light coming beneath one curtain and glowing in sub-red, Kip saw Andross Guile tense, his fists ball. “Remember what you are, boy!” He relaxed with an effort. “You’d just come to the Chromeria and my son barely knew you. If you’d cracked under the pressure and jumped to your death, it would have been a very brief scandal, brought up idly, revived some six months later when I had new evidence ‘found’ that the woman who’d claimed to be your mother confessed to lying, having taken money from a rival family to smear Gavin. Then it would have been forgotten. You would have just been another attack on a family that has endured a thousand, an anecdote of an attempted smear on a great house.”
“Mistress Helel? You sent that fat woman who tried to throw me out of the tower?” Kip asked. Andross kept talking, but Kip was still struggling to come to grips with what he’d said first.
“Was that her name? Oh, and while I’m clearing the air… I paid those idiots in your Blackguard training class to block you. No harm done, right? Regardless, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Kip asked, incredulous. Like that was enough?
Kip saw an eyebrow rise above one of the big lenses, as if the man was wondering how stupid this fat boy was. Andross Guile raised his index finger. “I want you to know, Kip, I haven’t apologized to anyone in twenty years.”
“I’m honored,” Kip said.
The old man chose to ignore the sarcasm. “Well, if that’s behind us, perhaps you would like to play some Nine Kings?”
“What? What? No! You tried to kill me! You can’t—you can’t just try to kill people because they’re inconvenient.”
Andross Guile’s head tilted like a dog’s, trying to understand this odd, odd boy. “Reality begs to differ.”
But Kip felt the world going gray. “This is all a screen. A distraction. You killed Lucia,” he said. Kip saw her again, stepping into the line of fire. He saw her face bloody, neck torn open by a musket ball, pumping blood, blood, blood. Kip shivered.
“Who?” Andross asked.
“The girl in my Blackguard class who took the bullet you meant for me!”
“What are you talking about?” Andross asked.
Kip’s rising rage wavered. “Someone tried to shoot me, during training. They killed her instead.”
The old man shook his head, like Kip was a moron. “Why would I go to the trouble and expense to block you from the Blackguard if I intended to kill you before you get could get in? I meant you to be a failure, not a corpse.”
“Maybe you were making doubly sure you stopped me.”
“It’s nice that you have such a high opinion of yourself, but use that puny brain of yours. All these accusations. Again! If you were killed, there’d be an investigation. The boys who agreed to block you from the Blackguard would come forward. After all, it’s one thing to make someone fail and have to try again next season, but something else altogether to kill them. You start killing people, and consciences get pricked. You think I’d leave my seal where it could be seen like that? You think I would fail twice the same way? No, boy, believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be.”
As insulting as it was, Kip thought it was probably true. In fact, he thought it was more likely true because Andross Guile had been insulting him when he said it. “So why’d you try to block me from the Blackguard?”
“To foil my son. He has plans for you, and he was defying me. He needed to be punished, and reminded of certain… verities.”
“So why tell me now? What do you want?” Kip had no doubt that the loathsome old man did have a plan. He wanted something from Kip. “I could go tell…”
“Tell whom? Please.” Andross Guile waved it away, and Kip realized that the man could confess with impunity. He was right. No one was going to take Kip’s word, especially not with an utter lack of evidence. “Kip, I have to tell you something, and I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but maybe you will someday. I owe you my life, boy. Oh, not in any melodramatic sense, of course. My wife—your grandmother—left me and committed suicide. Albeit the suicide of the Freeing. I loved her. I lived for her. And she rejected me, preferring to die rather than spend another day in my company. Have you ever faced a rejection so profound?”