“Orholam told me.”
Gavin looked at him.
“Just yankin’ ya. You been on ships long as I have, all the good gossip comes around. Got that bit from a man who knew him before he was even named Gunner. Can’t remember what his birth name was, though. Didn’t seem that interesting at the time. Say, you’re a dreamer of dreams, aren’t you?”
“I dream now and again,” Gavin said dismissively. “Everyone does.” But his stomach knotted up. He preferred this prophet silent and sweetly smiling.
“Powerful dreams. Dreams that scare the hell out of you? You wake in a panic, your chest so tight you can’t breathe, soaked in sweat?”
Absolutely. Gavin shrugged a maybe.
“You’re going to have a dream, tonight, tomorrow, I’m not sure, but soon. Remember it. Pay attention.”
“You can’t make me dream dreams,” Gavin said.
“I can’t. It’s a game Orholam and I played, back when. I say he’ll do something that I think is in line with his will, and then he kind of has to do it, or he’ll look bad, not me.”
“Great game.”
“That’s only the half of it. Every time I do that, he throws me something to do that I think is impossible and that I’m too frightened or too awkward to do. It used to be simple things, but they were hard for me at the time. He’d say, ‘Go tell that woman her husband loves her.’ And I’d feel like a fool, a crazy man to approach a stranger and say such a thing, but I’d muster up the juice to do it—and this slip of a girl looks at me like I hit her with a hammer between the eyes, and she bursts into tears. I never hear the rest of the story, but a year later, I see her with him, and they’re both beaming and she’s got a babe in arms. She looks at me, and she winks. Later, it got harder. ‘Go tell the governor that if he puts his hands on his brother’s wife one more time, he’ll be dead in a month.’ That one didn’t make me terribly popular. That governor took it, though. Didn’t even say a word to me. The brother’s wife, on the other hand? She tried to kill me.”
The lightning approached, and the drunk pirates watched it come.
“Lift anchor!” Gunner shouted drunkenly. “Wake the slaves. We ride the storm!”
A pirate saw Gavin and Orholam where they were chained to the mast and came to hustle them down to their bench. The last thing Gavin saw before he was pushed belowdecks was Gunner standing on the railing, balancing with the rigging in one hand and waving a gun-sword with the other. Lightning cracked, highlighting his figure.
“Ceres!” Gunner shouted, his cheeks shining with tears—or perhaps only rain. “Ceres, you bitch! Kill me if ya can! I defy you! I—” And then the roar of thunder blotted out all else.
Chapter 23
“Sir? You don’t seem surprised,” Teia said to Ironfist. “Did—did you know?”
“I look like a babe in the woods to you, nunk?”
“Sir?”
“The Blackguard is the best of the best. The houses try to get their hooks into most of our students, one way or another. They’ve been successful often enough that we’ve had to grow canny ourselves.”
“So you knew?”
“Come with me,” he said.
He put his ghotra on carefully and they walked to the lift. “When I look at you, ask me if I want you to stay at the checkpoint,” he said. He set the weights and they took the lift to the top, where the Blackguards greeted him at the checkpoint.
“The White in?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Samite answered.
Ironfist paused, looked at Teia.
“You want me to stay here, sir?” Teia asked. Ironfist was being this careful? With Samite? He was worried about his own Blackguards reporting … what? That Teia was accompanying him on a meeting with the White? Such a meeting would be innocuous enough, wouldn’t it? But that he was being careful meant that he was protecting even this from betrayal—by Blackguards he’d worked with for his whole adult life. Part of Teia wilted. She wanted the Blackguards at least to be pure. Something had to be pure and good, even if she wasn’t. It also made the guileless Blackguard commander seem more crafty than she’d ever considered.
“It’ll be fast,” Ironfist said, as if weighing it and dismissing the thought without too much thinking. “Come.”
They walked together to the White’s room. The Blackguards there announced him and Teia both—Teia was surprised that they actually knew her name. One should never underestimate the Blackguard, she supposed.
The White dismissed her old room slave and her secretary as they came in. The old woman had been drafting since Teia saw her last. It made her look healthier, but Teia knew it was only a veneer of health. If the White had decided it was permissible to draft, it meant she was planning to join the Freeing come Sun Day.