All of which combined to make Kip’s other searches nearly impossible to even begin. He had sworn to avenge his mother—and crushing King Garadul’s head somehow hadn’t made that ache go away. Then he’d sworn to find out if his mother was lying about Gavin Guile. He couldn’t imagine the man had actually raped her, but liar and addict and horror though she was, she still deserved that of her son.
Of greater concern, though, was that he’d sworn to make Klytos Blue step down.
He really had to stop swearing.
The problem with both goals was that he barely knew where to start. He couldn’t exactly ask, “Pardon, can you tell me where the damning evidence about the currently serving Colors and Prisms is kept?” And with his books being checked up on, any wider reading he did want to do had to be done carefully. Kip had found several books of genealogy to learn about Klytos Blue, and then waited until he saw one of the young women who assisted the libraries reshelving books and slid his books into her stacks.
At this rate, he’d never find anything. There was only one shortcut to get to the libraries that might have the information he needed: make it into the Blackguard.
So what had begun as something he attempted to please his father whose ultimate purpose he didn’t understand now became the only possibility. Kip trained and studied and read books in the library and didn’t sleep much, nightmares interrupting his rest every night, until he would crash and sleep for a day or two straight.
There was no punishment for missing class. The Chromeria let the sponsors handle that. It made Sponsor Day deeply unpleasant for those students who loafed. But Kip didn’t have a sponsor. He went to class, though, even when he hated it. To miss would be to disappoint his father, to be a failure.
And then fight day came, the culmination of the month’s training.
Though Kip was clearly the worst in class, by entering at number four he’d made it terribly unlikely that he could fail out this month. But the entire system was designed to force the cream of the class to rise. On testing day, each student was given a fight token. The testing started at the bottom, with the lowest-ranked students given a chance. Number forty-nine would go first. He could only challenge someone within three places, and if he won, he would be awarded that person’s fight token, which he could immediately use again to keep climbing.
Before they started, a boy asked the trainer, “Trainer Fisk, sir? Why do we have to fight with the spotlights instead of giving us spectacles?”
The trainer said, “You ask now? Why not ask when you started?”
“I, uh—everything was new,” the boy said. Kip could tell the truth. The boy had been too intimidated to ask then.
“Anyone have a guess?” the trainer asked.
“Spectacles could break in training, and they’re worth a fortune,” Teia said.
“And the glass could blind us if it broke,” someone else chimed in.
“True, but those aren’t the most important reasons,” Trainer Fisk said. “Let me tell a little story. Far as I know, it’s true. Back in the days of Prism Karris Shadowblinder, just after Lucidonius himself had introduced colored lenses to the world, there was a young man who joined the Ilytian Heresy, though the same could have happened to anyone. Blue drafter named Gilliam. He had his blue lenses, and he never took them off. It was a time of wars to make ours look paltry, so none blamed him. The lenses were a symbol of power, and of status, of course. The technology to create colored lenses was known to only a few, so having the lenses showed that you were wealthy as well. He was in many battles over the years, mostly on the wrong side, but that’s neither here nor there. A number of years later, he tried to assassinate Prism Shadowblinder. He cut through her guards handily, and then he faced the Prism herself. She berated him for using the spectacles her own husband had given him to fight her. She berated him for using them too much.
“But of course he thought she was stalling, and he tried to kill her again. She snatched the spectacles from his face. It was an overcast day; there was no blue for him to draft, and in moments he was hamstrung. She asked him then if he understood. He didn’t. She picked up a simple iron spear and told him to stop her. Of course it was impossible. He looked everywhere for blue. There was none. And then, as she came closer, he felt the reds and greens and yellows sliding into his eyes. He was a full-spectrum polychrome, and he’d never known.
“But having never used the colors, he couldn’t control them, couldn’t bind them to his will in the time he had. And she slew him as he screamed. He who has ears, let him hear.”