The Broken Eye(13)
Chapter 5
Teia and some of the Blackguards finished their morning calisthenics on the Wanderer’s rear castle as the sun climbed the horizon. She and Cruxer and five of the other top inductees were the only ones from their Blackguard trainee class on this ship. The others were on another ship with the other half of the remaining full Blackguards. Though they were constantly reminded that they hadn’t taken full vows and were thus not full Blackguards yet, that didn’t mean the Blackguards watered down the nunks’ exercises. Cruxer had followed their example manfully, and they had followed Cruxer’s as well as they could, muddling through complicated forms they’d seen but had not yet learned.
Commander Ironfist, leading them, took no notice of the stragglers. The legendary warrior had always been a cipher, but for the past week he’d been even more intense than usual. Teia didn’t know if the exercises (and their horrible butchery of them) was another pedagogical technique, or if the leader of the Blackguard simply didn’t see them. Regardless, the commander scrubbed his scalp with a wet cloth, cooling off. He had a stubble of wiry hair on his head now. He’d stopped shaving it bald and anointing it with oil after the Battle of Ru, more specifically, after the Miracle Shot—a prayer and six thousand paces and a direct hit on a newborn god. He glanced at the rising sun, its disk not yet fully clear of the horizon, glowered, and wrapped his ghotra around his head and headed down the steep steps to midships.
Working the soreness out of an ankle she’d twisted when she’d stumbled on a rope—er, line, on a ship, apparently—during an unfamiliar form, Teia walked over to the gunwale where Kip and Gavin Guile had plunged into the sea a week ago.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Cruxer asked, coming up beside her at the railing. Little Daelos, the shade to Cruxer’s sunshine, came with him.
Cruxer could have been talking about a hundred things. Hard to believe that they’d fought in a battle? That they’d lost? That they’d fought a real god? Hard to believe that Gavin Guile was dead? But he wasn’t talking about any of those, and Teia knew it. “Impossible,” she said flatly.
“How are you doing with it?” he asked.
Her elbows resting on the railing, she turned and looked at him, disbelieving. Sometimes Cruxer could be the most excellent human being she’d ever met. Other times, he was a moron. “It’s a lie, Cruxer. It’s all lies.”
“But the Red wouldn’t lie,” Cruxer said weakly. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. Cruxer had grown up with good people in authority over him, and he was scrupulously moral himself, so he didn’t have the reflexive disrespect and suspicion toward those in power a slave girl did.
“Go on, Teia,” Daelos said. “You know that Breaker blamed Andross Guile for trying to block him from joining the Blackguard. And we know Breaker got drunk that night. With how rash he always was, I don’t see what’s so hard—”
“Is,” Teia interjected.
“What?” Daelos asked.
“How dare you give up on Kip. Go away, the both of you. I’m sick of you.”
Daelos rolled his eyes like she was being an unreasonable woman. It made her want to show him what she would do if she were actually unreasonable. On the other hand, Cruxer simply paled. He pushed back from the railing. Teia knew he’d only come over to check up on her, like a good commander does. But good intentions don’t cover everything. They left without saying a word.
You’re being rude and unfair and you should apologize, T.
But she didn’t.
Andross Guile said he’d mocked Kip that night, as he always did. He had no love for the boy, he’d admitted. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything in the aftermath of a battle. But how was he to know Kip was drunk? He’d never imagined Kip would attack him.
Gavin Guile and Andross’s slave had tried to intervene. Kip had stabbed Gavin accidentally, and when Gavin Guile fell overboard, Kip had been so distraught, he jumped in after him.
And there the matter rested. Watch Captain Karris White Oak—or was it Watch Captain Guile now that she’d married Gavin?—had gone insane, shouting that they must be wrong, that Andross was lying. Teia thought the woman was going to attack Andross physically until Commander Ironfist had intervened and literally carried Karris off the deck. She’d not emerged since.
No one else contradicted the Red. There had been more than a few tense conversations between Commander Ironfist and the Blackguards who had been assigned to protect Gavin that night. The Prism had ordered the men to bed, and who would have thought he would be in danger on the very night he’d proven his heroism once again? He’d killed a god!