It was getting uncomfortably close, and Kip was afraid of what she would say next. “You’ve seen me naked, you know I do,” he said. He grinned.
She shook her head like she knew she’d walked into that. She leveled her soup ladle at Kip’s nose. “Kip, serious hat on, or I make comments about your manhood that you’ll never forget.”
Kip swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
“Taking correction was like losing a limb to me, but it was worth it. A good father doesn’t let his children stay stuck. Orholam is a good father, Kip.”
“Right now, I’m more worried about being a good son.” Deflect, deflect, don’t let her ask what I should give up.
“Then you are wiser than your years,” she said, and he wondered if he’d been nervous for nothing or if she was letting him off easy. Then she got a twinkle in her eye. “Oh, and Kip…”
“Don’t. Please don’t. Please?”
“That’s no limb. A good strong sapling, maybe. Now my husband … That was a limb. Let’s just say maybe modesty wasn’t the only reason I fainted.”
“I said I was sorry,” Kip whinged.
She pinched his cheek. “I know, but you deserved it. Don’t worry. You’ve got more than ample to satisfy. Bigger than my own sons’, and if my daughters speak true, bigger than their husbands’, too.”
“Ah! I have to see these people!”
Chapter 16
Karris sipped her kopi quietly in the Crossroads. The stimulant was a poor choice for her anxiety. She was seated in the clerestory, facing the big, gorgeous stained glass windows that had once been the pride of the Tyrean embassy. She wondered how the owner of the Crossroads had been able to purchase this building, and what it had cost. In the years since the fall of Tyrea, it had become the city’s most fashionable kopi house, restaurant, brewery, smokehouse, and—downstairs, out of sight of those with tender sensibilities—the foremost brothel in the city.
For that matter, she wondered who the owner was.
Kind of thing that a spymistress should be able to learn, isn’t it?
She wasn’t kept waiting long. She supposed that was one of the perquisites of her new position. She was the White’s right hand, and no one would keep the White waiting. The man who sat across from her was an Ilytian banker, the scion of one of the great merchant banking families, the Onestos, twenty-five years old, and probably just now being treated as an adult, brought home from learning his trade in one of the satrapies and now entrusted with meeting the Prism’s bride—or widow. At twenty-five, he could be treated as barely an adult because he still had another fifty years left in his mortal span. How different the lives of munds.
Turgal Onesto was dressed in his Sun Day best, and smelled of some fine perfume Karris would have been able to place if she’d been a lady instead of a warrior these blighted sixteen years. He sat, gulping. It had been a long time since he’d been asked to report. The White had recruited him as a boy. For her part, Karris didn’t feel much better. She hadn’t worn a dress since that bastard King Garadul had captured her and forced her to. She’d wanted to wear her Blackguard clothes, but those had been seized and forbidden her. Karris still wasn’t sure whether they’d been taken on Commander Ironfist’s orders or the White’s. Neither would say, which told her that whichever had done it had done it with the approval of the other.
So here she was, sending a very public message by the garb she had chosen to wear. Because her husband was the Prism, she would wear garb drawn from each of the satrapies, to show she didn’t favor any over the others. Today, that meant wearing a loose-fitting white silk abaya, subtly embroidered with murex purple thread, but she wore the jilbab down—modesty was not prized on the Jaspers as it was in the Parian inland and highlands. Along with the traditional white of mourning, for Parians believed that death was a procession into light, and not into darkness, Karris had chosen some few hints of bright color, not pure funerary white. She wore a bright scarf, white and blue and red and purple and green, though she had bleached her hair white.
My husband is lost, and for this I grieve, her clothing said, but he is not dead. The richness of it said that she expected to be taken seriously, that she was taking her place as a woman of means and influence. She even had a Blackguard bodyguard. That it was her squat friend Samite made that marginally better, but the woman treated her duties seriously, standing beside the table, watching everyone and everything, treating Karris as if she were just another ward who would doubtless be blind, deaf, and dumb to danger.