“Grandfather’s idea?” Kip asked. It sounded like Andross Guile. Have the boy educated, trained, and kept off the table. A perfect hidden card. While being honed into the perfect weapon, Zymun would also be kept from developing his own allies at the Chromeria. He would be perfect for Andross’s use against Gavin or the Spectrum, but he wouldn’t be a threat to Andross himself. The boy didn’t even realize how cynically Andross was using him.
Guess I’ve become a little cynical myself, to see it so clearly. Or maybe I’m only cynical where Andross Guile is concerned.
Regardless, Zymun didn’t answer. Or perhaps he answered by nodding.
In two days, Zymun had never asked about Karris. He seemed to think her position on the Blackguard made her acceptable to have as a mother, but not intrinsically powerful, and therefore not interesting. He saved his questions to arm himself for his meeting with Andross Guile. Kip wished he could be there to see that.
The next time Kip’s oar slipped off a wave, he coughed hard. He wheezed into his hand and pushed the blindfold up his nose fractionally. Coughing, even fake coughing, hurt like hell. He’d inhaled a lot of seawater after he’d jumped into the Cerulean Sea to save Gavin Guile.
He’d once thought of himself as the turtle-bear, made with a special gift for absorbing punishment. He was really going to have to come up with some other special gift. This one was terrible.
He went back to rowing. Zymun had made him strip off his shirt, both so he could see if Kip tried to pack luxin, and to keep himself warm. With the cloud cover and the autumn wind, it was chilly for much of the morning and evening. Rowing and sweating, Kip didn’t notice the lack so much.
At the end of each stroke, his head naturally tilting back, Kip took a tiny sip of blue under the blindfold. In the weak, gray, cloud-filtered light, the sea was soup, and his eyelashes and the blindfold blotted out most color, but he didn’t need much. Couldn’t take much at once, or Zymun might see it. With only a little at a time, Kip’s skin was dark enough to camouflage the luxin as it traveled from his eyes, through his face hidden by the blindfold, down his back, and was packed beneath the skin of his legs and butt, out of sight. Zymun had checked his scalp and the skin hidden by the blindfold a few times, so an abundance of caution was in order.
Now, certain that Kip wouldn’t draft, Zymun expected him to attack at night, when his own powers were weakest. But as a full-spectrum polychrome, Kip knew weakness wasn’t measured in colors. There was no difference between Zymun having a dozen sure ways to kill him and only having one, if time was limited enough. In fact, if Zymun could be more easily surprised because he had a dozen ways to kill Kip than if he’d had only one, then those extra ways actually made him weaker.
Some people think that you play Nine Kings against the man, not the cards. It sounds clever, but it’s rarely true.
By late afternoon, Kip had enough luxin. It took all of his concentration to row and push his pain aside and slowly thread the luxin up his back, up the back of his neck, up into his scalp. To draft luxin, it had to be connected to blood. Most drafters chose to tear open the skin at their wrists or under their fingernails. After a while, scar tissue formed; the body adjusted. But you didn’t have to push the luxin through a spot where you’d done it before, and Kip didn’t intend to. Every fraction of a second lost made death more likely.
The sips of blue made it all seem so logical. Kip’s senses were acute, filtering out the wind and his own heaving breath. He divined that Zymun was seated facing him. Kip knew where the bench was, could tell that Zymun was seated in the middle of it from how the rowboat sat even in the water. He could hear Zymun shift from time to time, looking behind them or to shore.
The blue couldn’t mute sounds, though, only sift them. The irregular wind obliterated much of the information Kip could have used. Nor did blue mute all his body’s agony. Kip had husbanded his dwindling resources as carefully as possible, acting slightly more exhausted than he was so that he could grab a moment of rest between each oar stroke—balancing Zymun’s laziness against his own life.
It had to be today. It had to be soon. He didn’t have much strength left.
Kip hunched, grunted in pain, and released the oars, faking a leg cramp. The move was sudden enough it probably almost earned him a musket ball between the eyes. He massaged his leg with both hands, evaluating, testing, stretching not just his legs, but his hands and arms, too.
There was a sudden snort and a small cry.
Planting his legs wider than he had before, making them less helpful for rowing, but hopefully more helpful for a sudden leap, Kip settled back into his place, groped blindly for the oars. He pretended he hadn’t noticed, but he died a little.