The Broken Eye (68 page)

Kip wondered how fast he could draft. He wondered if it was faster than Grinwoody and Andross together. He wanted to kill them both. He wanted to stand up and piss on Andross Guile himself to show what he thought of him. But he didn’t think he could get away with it, and having emptied both barrels of his rhetoric in Andross Guile’s face and having hit nothing, he felt suddenly vulnerable, empty. There was no more powder at hand. He was the barely acknowledged bastard, alone, insulting the Guile, throwing epithets and disrespect at the promachos himself.

And all he had at hand was the fact that he didn’t care if he wrecked himself.

Paltry ammunition indeed. He did his best to keep his sudden fear off his face, but if there was one emotion Andross Guile was attuned to, it was others’ fear. He fed on it.

“Want that brandy now?” Andross asked archly, the very personification of a lupine grin.

“I’ll take it,” Kip said, keeping his voice level.

“No you won’t,” Andross said.

The glass was sitting within easy reach. Kip thought of snatching for it—and then thought, how fast Fortune’s wheel turns. One moment, I threaten death in high dudgeon. The next, I grub for a glass of brandy.

And this was part of Andross Guile’s curious power. Another lord might have thought denying his guest a drink was simple rudeness, and been above it. Andross Guile didn’t mind if he lowered himself, as long as he lowered his opponent more. Indeed, shame was a tool to be used against others, because Andross himself was shameless.

Perhaps literally so. He had gotten out of bed naked, without even acknowledging the fact. He seemed unperturbed about being naked, despite having all the spots and wrinkles and sagging skin of a man his age. Though Kip could swear that the paunch Andross had carried was shrinking, he stood at the antipodes from his beautiful son Gavin. Nor did he seem more than peeved at being interrupted pre-coitus.

Perhaps Kip was a poor judge. His own glass of self-horror was constantly full, so the slightest additional drip made the whole thing spill over. But even a normal person would be embarrassed at such a thing, wouldn’t they?

Kip had assumed that his grandfather was ashamed, and had simply controlled it. That his sudden rage had been a cover over the embarrassment. What if, instead, there was a simple void where shame would be for others, and the rage had been merely for Kip interrupting whatever plan Andross had in place to snare Tisis?

A dozen times, Kip had wondered how his grandmother, by all accounts a good woman, had loved this man.

And now another thought occurred to him. What if, instead of loving Andross, she’d loved the world? What if she’d seen herself as the only one who could keep this wolf from the flocks? Felia Guile had been smart, everyone agreed on that. She’d been an orange. She’d been the only person who could get Andross Guile to change his mind. She’d been the bulwark against the storm.

And now she was gone.

Kip was staring at an old man with saggy skin sitting in a faded robe, the bare skin of his legs almost translucent, almost obscene in itself—and he was the one who suddenly felt naked.

“What do you want?” he asked. “You’re old. What does winning even look like for you?”

“Old?” Andross chuckled. “I’ve got a good twenty years left. Kip, if you and Zymun don’t pan out for me, I can start a new family and still have time to groom the next generation. I have the options of a young man again, but with all the advantages I didn’t have when I was young. Do you not know your family’s history?”

Kip wasn’t looking for a lesson. “I looked back as far as my grandfather and gave up in disgust,” he said. It was the best insult he could slip around the thick knot of fear blocking his throat.

“A weaker man would say I owe you, Kip. For what you did on that ship about my … surfeit of red. But I’m not that man. I respect that you have the strength to not be groveling at my feet. However. Defiance is initially interesting, but it grows tiresome quickly.”

“I’d love to hear about the family,” Kip said snidely. The mere fact that he could say ‘the’ family and not ‘your’ family was a huge victory.

“You’ve killed my desire to reminisce. Let it be enough to say that I earned everything we have. By my generation, we were wool merchants—wool merchants with debts and a worthless title that my drunken wastrel older brother nearly sold to pay them. Everything we are—even you, little bastard who’s weaseled his way into legitimacy—is because of what I’ve made us.”

“You wrested control of the family from your brother?” Kip asked, incredulous.

“Wrested? I’ve had more trouble with a bowel movement. I handed Abel a stack of papers for his signature when he was hungover. He barely glanced at them. I paid his own steward a few danars to countersign as a witness, saying it was contracts for warehouses. He didn’t read them either. I seized all the accounts, and my brother didn’t even have the money to pay a solicitor to bring it to a magistrate. Nor the friends willing to lend him such sums.”

Kip reached out for the brandy, unthinking, and this time Andross let him take it. “Oh, thanks,” Kip said automatically.

Andross grinned, as if this too were a victory.

“You’re telling me that three generations of Guile brothers have been at each other’s throats?” Kip asked.

“Three? No. Six that I know of. There was a tale that a witch cursed us when Memnon Guile wed her and then, as we Guiles do, cheated on her. Or more precisely, she found out that he was already wed back home. He left her brokenhearted and wandered the world, having adventures, and when finally he arrived home years later, he was murdered by his brother, who had taken to … comforting his wife in his brother’s absence. Since then. That was six hundred years ago, though I personally doubt that our blood has even a drop of that Guile’s blood in it. Many other families have taken the names of the heroes of old; I’m not sure why we would be different. Not that such a thing bears repeating in public, yes? Regardless, the tale held enough force that it was said in our family that if your wife was older, and you already had one son, not to have any more children, lest you end up with two boys. Not that a son and a daughter guaranteed any better. Selene Guile the First had more mercy than most of the men in our family—or less, depending on what you value. She exiled her brother Adan Guile, after castrating him so that he would have no heirs. She managed to get one of the kings of her era to make the family name and title matrilineal. Which it stayed for a hundred and fifty years, until an enterprising Guile son managed to wrest control back.”

Kip took a drink. He barely noticed the burning. “And you think that’s an acceptable way for families to act?”

“Acceptable? One doesn’t reason with lions. One doesn’t accept reality. One adapts to it.”

“But you aren’t like my father, you didn’t adapt to a situation where your brother was betraying you.
You
were the betrayer.” The words had sounded so logical, so reasonable in Kip’s head before he said them. But as they came out the blunderbuss that was his mouth, they expanded into a razor cloud.

Andross Guile’s expression froze, his knuckles whitened on his brandy glass, showing the hit. It was with visible effort that he contained his rage. He hadn’t become the Red—of all his colors—by accident. “How is it to be you, Kip? Cocooned in layers of protective ignorance thicker than your blubber, a blundering whale with sperm for your brains and unintentional ruins all around? Abel thanked me for saving this family. He thanked me for saving him from a burden he was ill fit to bear, and a string of failures that drove him to self-destruction.”

“So he forgave you. That tells me something about him. What does it tell me about you? Except perhaps—”

“Insolent boy!”

“—that you would destroy a good man who swam seas you wished to call your own? That you are a sea demon, mindless in your territorial rage, destroying your enemies, true, but also driving away even—”

Stop, Kip! Stop before—

“—your own family. Even finally your own wife.”

Oh. Shit.

Andross’s eyes glittered, and Kip’s training took over. His eyes darted back and forth from the whites of Andross’s eyes to his hips: the first places he would be able to detect danger, whether magical or mundane. Then out to his hands, one of which held the crystal brandy glass, which could be flicked toward Kip as a distraction, the other of which could be used to signal Grinwoody.

“Took you long enough,” Andross said. “Finally reached the bottom of your rhetorical toolbox, have we?”

“Huh?” Kip asked. His sense of impending doom hadn’t relaxed one whit, but Andross didn’t look dangerous. Everything Kip’s gut was telling him was contradicted by what Andross’s eyes were saying.

“Bringing up my departed wife. Such an obvious target that I wondered if you were either stupider than I’d imagined, or more self-controlled—and therefore more dangerous—than I’d believed. Turns out I was right about you after all.”

“Did you even—”

Andross raised a finger, and Kip shut up. He hated himself for it a moment later, but his brain must have realized that raised finger was a lifeline, and, for once, had taken control from his tongue.

“Something you should realize,” Andross said. “Merely because a target’s obvious, and an initial line of defenses stands in place, that doesn’t mean the target isn’t still there, and still soft as an egg in its shell. You understand this, Lard Guile. Your disgusting obesity can withstand one insult, at least to the public eye, but even the slightest brush causes your secret self-contempt and shame to grow. So you’ve found my obvious weak spot. Congratulations for having eyes. Just know this: Grinwoody, if he says one more word about Felia, blow his brains out.”

Kip heard the
click-clack
of a hammer at his left ear. “With pleasure, my lord,” Grinwoody said.

Slowly, so as not to be thought to be attacking, Kip glanced at the pistol, and the man. Grinwoody was indeed pleased, and the pistol barrel looked huge. Too close to Kip’s eyeball for him to see how good the quality of it was, how likely to misfire. But then, this was Andross Guile’s pistol. It would be the best. Kip was getting faster at drafting, at moving, but he wasn’t this fast. Not yet.

“You wouldn’t,” Kip said. Stupid thing to say. Grinwoody was even standing off to the side so that the gore—and possibly the bullet—wouldn’t fly from Kip onto Andross.

“If you think I’m bluffing,” Andross said, leaning forward to pour himself more brandy, “say her name.”

The moment stretched between them like a lazy cat. Kip knew already that he was going to fold. Andross knew it, too.

“Well, that was a great talk, grandfather.” A little needle to drive home the past loss on that count. “Are we done here?”

Shouldn’t have asked permission. Kip stood. Should have stood first.

“The thing that astounds me, grandson,” Andross said, embracing the loss, showing it didn’t hurt him as much as Kip hoped. Probably deceitfully, but still. Damn. “—is that it must be equally obvious to both of us that I am your only hope. Our family’s enemies will try to destroy you, and our family’s friends won’t try to save you, because they know I despise you. To say nothing of what I may do to you myself. Yet you choose this path. Still. Your father’s gone, surely dead by now. The facts have changed, but you haven’t. Held too long, stubbornness is indistinguishable from stupidity.”

“And would you respect me if I’d come in here and licked your boots?” Kip asked.

Andross Guile looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “Respect? Kip, I’ve destroyed many men I respected. If you wish to add yourself to that list, you’re close to earning the destruction, if not the respect.”

“Please,” Kip said, “underestimate me. It will only make this sweeter.”

Andross grinned wryly, genuinely amused, and it was disconcerting to see that grin. It was all Gavin Guile, and the sense of bereavement Kip felt at seeing that winsome grin on this monster’s face threw him off balance. “If your strategy rests on being underestimated, might not be best to announce such, you think?” Andross asked.

Kip could only find inchoate curses on his once-nimble tongue. He said nothing.

“Enough,” Andross said. He stood and shepherded Kip to the door. He lowered his voice. “Now. The matter I summoned you for.”

Orholam’s knobby knee to my testicles—all this, and we still haven’t talked about what he summoned me for?

“The cards,” Andross said quietly as they reached the door. “I don’t know where you’ve hidden them, but I want them. If you give them to me, you will be my heir. I will take you under my wing and teach you all I know, and I will tell you secrets you cannot conceive.”

The cards? Again? “If I found them, once I gave them to you, you’d just kill me,” Kip said.

“Voice down,” Andross said. He stroked his chin, thinking. “Surely Janus Borig told you how they work. I can draft four colors. But one of the colors I lack is blue. I can feel, taste, and sense what happens inside the cards, but I can’t
see
anything. In order to use the cards to their fullest, I need a full-spectrum polychrome. The other polychromes are … unacceptable for various reasons. I need you, and I would have a continuing need for you. And you would need me to teach you how to translate knowledge into power after I’m gone. If anything, you would be the partner in the superior position.”

Kip blinked. It made too much sense. “If I did this,” he said, “I’d keep the cards in my possession. Otherwise, if you tired of me, you could simply find someone who drafts the colors you lack and put together the pictures for yourself, albeit more slowly than I could do it for you.”

“Done,” Andross said. “With one caveat: my card, my sons’ cards, and my wife’s are mine. If you even look at them before you hand them over, this deal is moot. Think on it. I’ll give you until your half brother arrives or until Sun Day, whichever comes first. Understand, though, if you try to hand over the cards to someone else, I’ll have no choice but to kill you. Your time is running out. Grinwoody?”

The slave made a small, unobtrusive sound to signal his presence.