“You’re telling me you don’t know? The cards make their connection through light, Kip. The more colors you can draft, the truer your experience.”
“What happened to me?” Kip demanded.
“You saw more than you were supposed to. Let me leave it at that.”
“Was it real?”
“That is a more difficult question than you know.”
“Did she die?” Kip asked.
“Zee? Not in that battle, though she lost.”
“She was fighting against…” Kip hadn’t quite gotten it.
“Darien Guile. Fifteen years later she bought peace by having her daughter marry him. It was said that she wanted to marry him herself, but she was too old to bear children and she knew lasting peace could only be bought by binding the families together forever. There were rumors of an affair between Zee and Darien, but they weren’t true. Darien Guile respected Zee enormously and might have preferred to marry her, but they both knew how much blood might be spilled over one man’s broken oath and one woman’s folly. A lesson your family had to learn the hard way some time later.”
Kip didn’t know what she was talking about, but he assumed from how she said it that the war Zee and Darien had been fighting must have been started by something personal. “Was he a good man?” Kip asked.
“Darien? He was a Guile.”
“What was the second card?” Something about Dagnu. That was the old pagan god. Kip wondered how old that card had been.
“A mistake. I grabbed the closest real card, and I should have known better.”
Which was no answer at all. “These cards all do that?” Kip asked, looking at the wall with awe and fear.
“Only the originals.”
“Which ones are originals?” Kip asked.
“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that many of the cards here are booby-trapped. If you try to take them off the wall, you’ll have some very nasty surprises in store. If you get them off the wall and try to draft their truth, you most likely won’t survive the hell they put your mind through.”
“I thought you wanted to help me,” Kip said.
“I do. I’m just letting you know that if you steal from me, you’ll be left a gibbering idiot. Even the real cards, used correctly, have dangers. Not all truths are beautiful. These cards can make a man delusional. Make him lose himself. They can teach… hideous things to those who wed not wisdom to power.” There was a bitterness in her tone, but before Kip could ask, she went on: “Regardless, a woman must needs protect herself. I don’t care about your father, except to make his card. I don’t care about you, except to make your card. This is what a Mirror does. It’s who I am. It is my mission from Orholam himself, and I will do it well. If you help me do it, I will be happy to help you. You’ve let me know what you can draft. That helps enormously, so I’ll give you this to start: if you play with the deck that Andross Guile gives you, you’ll always lose.”
Chapter 48
“Paryl is unique among the colors,” Teia’s tutor said. “And it is uniquely dangerous.”
Teia scowled. She thought that despite being the weakest and the worst color, at least paryl wouldn’t get you killed or drive you mad. Then she scowled again—because they were standing in one of the Blackguards’ training halls. It was dinner time, and there weren’t many scrubs in the hall. Mostly it was inductees from the classes ahead of Teia’s, but Cruxer was nearby, kicking his shins methodically up against a post. He’d told Teia once that it lightly broke the bones in the shin, and that the body responded by building them up ever tougher. He’d showed her his lumpy shins. It was impressive—and kind of gross. She thought it was the greatest thing she’d ever seen. But right now, he’d slowed his training, obviously eavesdropping.
“What’s dangerous about it?” Teia asked. Her private tutor, Marta Martaens, was more than fifty years old. Ancient for a drafter. Wavy dark hair gone platinum, olive skin, top front teeth missing.
“That you go blind or burn to death.”
Teia took a sharp breath. Oh, is that all?
“To see paryl, you have to dilate your pupils much, much more than most people can. You can do this consciously, yes?” Magister Martaens sucked at her thin upper lip.
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Do it. I need to see.”
It took Teia a moment. It was hard to relax your eyes as far as paryl demanded when you were tense. But then it came.
“Good,” Magister Martaens said. “Now, back to normal. I assume you’ve never seen your own eyes in a mirror when you’ve done that? No? Watch.”