“You look well, Koios,” Aliviana said. “It seems I’m not the only one who’s changed since you sent me away with an assassin whom you ordered to either murder me or chain me up like your other pet djinn.”
“Daughter! Our new Ferrilux!” the White King said. “You speak like one who has become the goddess of pride indeed! You have blossomed into all I had hoped you might be, with a little additional cheek thrown in for good measure.”
He chuckled, and his people seemed to take that as a sign that it was safe to laugh, and they did.
It was an odd sound, laughter; one she had neither made nor heard for a year, twelve days and twenty hours, seven seconds. Only after it was gone did Aliviana think that she should have been listening to the messages that laughter carried. Was it the laughter of a people afraid of their king, or of people in awe of and in love with him?
Too late.
The unfamiliar emotional freight had gone unweighed, and her memory could no more call it back to take its measure than one could call back an insult carelessly offered.
“May I have a word? In private?” she asked.
Her jaw strained suddenly against her effort to open it. Don’t grovel, Beliol hissed.
No one else could hear him. Careful not to let her irritation show on her face, she slammed the thought down and even triggered her zygomatic major muscle. From this distance, the White King might take it for a pleasant smile. “Please,” she added.
Chapter 5
“Another nightmare?” Tisis asked. “You think the assassination attempt . . . ?”
“No. The other thing again.” Kip scooted to the edge of their bed. He’d left his side sweat-damp.
“I’d kind of hoped . . .” Tisis’s sigh echoed his own. He could tell she’d been up for a while, meeting with her spies or something. She’d even selected clothes for him. She thought he slept too little, and tried to protect him.
“How’d I ever find you?” he asked her.
“The first time, I was sabotaging your initiation. I think the second was when I was jerking off your grandfather.”
“Honey, I didn’t mean—”
“Just so you know, in case you ever thought I might make comparisons, you are—”
“No, let’s not!” Kip said.
Tisis was not a disinterested party when it came to discussing these particular dreams. Dreams of Andross Guile.
“Should I summon the attendants?” Tisis already had the small bell in hand, a sign that he was already late.
He held out a staying hand. “Can I tell you something? Something bizarre?”
Of course he could, but she didn’t put down the bell.
“I dreamed of him as a young man. He’s going to woo a bride and trying to save the Guile family as he does so, and he doesn’t even realize—for all his smarts—that he’s broken, utterly broken by his own brother’s recent death.” He paused.
“So far . . . not that bizarre,” Tisis said. Her own lack of sleep was making her shorter with him than usual.
Kip looked down at the Turtle-Bear tattoo on the inside of his wrist. The inks or luxins that made the colors were all still vibrant from the Battle of Greenwall a few days before; it would fade, in time. He’d been using every color of luxin recently. The wick of his life was burning fast. Maybe that had something to do with the dreams.
“They’re not dreams, exactly,” Kip said. “I think they’re dreams of a card.”
“But you forget most of what you see when you wake. Exactly like a dream.”
“Well, yes. I didn’t say it wasn’t a dream at all. Just that it’s a dream of a card.”
“You said you’d never touched the full Andross Guile card. That he was too clever to allow all of his experiences to be captured.”
He had said that. Janus Borig had convinced Kip’s grandfather to let her do two very partial cards, stubs, that showed only particular scenes, similar to what an untalented Mirror could make, or what a good Mirror would make of an item. The card needn’t show the maker of that item’s entire life story; the card’s focus would be limited to the item itself. Kip had only touched a stub card. So he thought. “And I believed it fully to be true,” Kip said. “But these dreams . . .”
“Nightmares,” she said. “And, as they’re of that creature, it’s fitting that your dreams are twisted. This is the man who hired an assassin to murder you—his own grandson—before you’d even met, who forced you to play literal games for Teia’s life and freedom, who has killed Orholam only knows how many innocents in his life, and not incidentally arranged for my future husband to walk in on the most humiliating moment of my life, after he’d convinced me to whore myself. Thinking you’re living that disgusting thing’s life? That’s a nightmare. And you never touched his card, so it’s also a delusion. And considering everything you need to do—yesterday—it’s a distraction, too.” Tisis rang the bell to summon the servants more loudly than necessary. “You’re going to be late,” she said.
And then she was gone.
She wasn’t really mad at him, he knew. She’d apologize for this tonight. They were all of them adjusting to the burdens of their new, magnified positions and the quagmire they’d stepped into. Tisis was trying to take care of Kip as well as everything else—first, even—and it must seem to her that he wasn’t even trying to help her help him. He was spending precious minutes talking about dreams while he was late to a council of war?
But he hadn’t even told her the worst part, the thing out of all the landscape of impossibilities that had actually struck him as bizarre before he even woke. The young Andross Guile that Kip had seen from the inside during his dream? Kip had sort of liked him.
“No need to cry, Your High and Mighty, I’m here,” Winsen said.
Kip looked up, surprised. He hadn’t even heard the door open.
Winsen. Why did it have to be Winsen?
Kip wasn’t crying, anyway. Just feeling morose. Not that he expected Winsen to understand fine gradations of emotions.
“Where are the servants?” Kip asked.
“I asked them to step out so I could assassinate you,” Winsen said.
“You’re not gonna let that go, are you?” Kip thought he only thought it, but it slipped out. Damn, just when he thought he was getting better at governing his tongue, Kip the Lip showed up again.
“Let it go?” Winsen said. “You all looked at me like I was really gonna kill you. Except Ferk. But that’s only because he’s too dumb. I think he was just running over to give me a lecture on weapon safety.”
“You know,” Kip said, rubbing his eyes, “I kind of hate you sometimes.”
“Yeah, but you hate me less than anyone else does.”
For a moment, Kip was stunned to silence by the near compliment.
“And the feeling’s mutual!” Win said, as if to save them from having a moment. “You all done with your beauty rest, princess? Can we go now—you know, to that meeting you ordered us all to be at a half hour ago? Cruxer’s been shittin’ cobbles.”
“Thank you for that,” Kip said.