“The Lightbringer is going to be a genius of magic,” Teia suddenly said. She’d been unusually quiet until now. “A warrior who sweeps all before him. He will be great from his youth. He’s going to do things no one ever thought was possible, and bring us back to the true path. Lucidonius wasn’t even a good drafter. He figured out how to make colored lenses, but that hardly makes him a genius, does it? The Lightbringer will protect us. He will slay gods and kings.”
I killed a king.
A chill washed down Kip’s back.
“There are no kings anymore,” an older boy said, butting in. “Lucidonius killed the last of them. And the last gods.”
“Lucidonius’s people did that,” Ben-hadad said. “Not Lucidonius himself.”
“It’s the same thing,” the boy said. “When you say, ‘The Color Prince seized Garriston,’ you don’t mean he picked it up. You don’t even mean that he took it by himself. You mean it was done at his will. It’s—”
“Children!” a black-robed luxiat said, disgusted. Kip wondered how long the man had been listening. “Wielding half-remembered foolishness from your parents and superstitions from the benighted. Get to your lectures. I’ll not have your blasphemies in this holy place. Now! Out!”
Chapter 34
“That dress doesn’t do justice to your beauty,” a young man said to Liv as she emerged from a warehouse some of the displaced women and their children had taken over in Garriston. “Nor do those quarters do justice to your gifts.” He smiled the smile of a man who knows he’s gorgeous. “I’m Zymun. I’m your tutor.”
And he would have been gorgeous, had not his entire look been spoiled by the bandage over his nose, and two black eyes. Zymun looked maybe sixteen or seventeen, Liv’s age, but maybe older, or maybe he simply carried himself like he was older. He had a mop of curly black hair, an aquiline nose made even bigger by the bandage over it, a wide mouth, and perfect bright white teeth. Atashian skin, heavy brows, light blue eyes with a ring of many colors beneath the halo. He wore a new white shirt—who had new shirts, just after a huge battle?—and over his sleeves, his forearms were covered with multicolored vambraces with five thick bands of color against a white background. He wore a sparkling clean cloak that echoed the pattern, from a black fuzzy band for sub-red to red, orange, yellow, and green. A five-color polychrome. Five!
There were only perhaps twenty five-color polys in the Chromeria. Maybe a few more still in training. If this boy was cocky, it was for good reason.
Insufferable.
“You lose a fight?” Liv asked. How rude!
“Failed an assassination attempt, actually. Took a punch in the face. And got beaten for my failure when I got back. After swimming through shark-infested waters.” He smiled.
“You’re joking.”
“Terrible sense of humor, if I were. It’s not very funny, is it?”
“You’re serious?”
“Second time’s the charm, I guess. Come, we need to get you out of those rag—those clothes and into something more becoming.”
He was her tutor, put over her by Lord Omnichrome himself, so Liv supposed that meant she had to obey him. She shrugged and followed him through the city. The warehouse wasn’t far from the Travertine Palace, because it felt safer to be close to the soldiers. Being a woman alone during wartime meant never being off your guard.
But as Liv followed Zymun, she saw that his garb was better than armor. “Is everyone so afraid of drafters here?” she asked.
“Afraid? They respect us, which is only right, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so.”
“You suppose so? Ah. So this is why you needed a tutor.”
Well that was patronizing, and Liv didn’t appreciate it one bit.
“The Chromeria makes slaves, Liv. It depends on making those it trains being so indebted to them that you become at best an indentured servant—with the term of your indenture being the rest of your life. A slave, in other words. The Free reject that. We recognize instead the natural order as it is. Did you choose to be born a great beauty? Of course not. But you are. You can do with that what you will. Similarly, you were born a drafter. We can wish that all were born with our gifts, and the Color Prince is investigating how this might be done. But the fact remains, we are special. We have a gift that other men and women don’t. We didn’t do anything to earn that gift—we can’t choose to be drafters. But we are. We don’t ask those who have gifts to chain themselves, as we don’t ask those who are skilled in running to get fat so they don’t make us feel bad for being slow. We are what we are, as wild and free as nature made us. When you walk the streets as a drafter, men know that if they accost you, you can kill them. They can fear that or simply respect it like they’d respect a woman carrying a pistol. With the advantage, of course, being that a pistol only has one shot.”