The Burning White (144 page)

“There’s a battle on, Guile. And is that High Lady Guile with you there? Who would
believe
my luck? You’re even more lovely than I’d heard. And, given the soot and blood you’re covered with, as formidable too.”

“Thank you?” Karris said.

“Why don’t you both hop aboard my newest little treasure?”

‘Treasure.’ That didn’t bode well. Not that there was any option to disobey. The ship had hundreds of well-armed pirates on it, in addition to the sailors. Imprisonment was better than death, but Dazen had had quite enough of imprisonment.

He gritted his teeth and refrained from doing anything stupid, climbing up the extra-long gangplank to get onto the ship.

The Blackguards and the Mighty lined up on the deck with Dazen. No one had moved to disarm them without the Pash’s order, but no one had stopped aiming their muskets at them, either.

“Here’s the thing, Lord Guile,” Pash Vecchio continued, “O sinker of a ship I adored, a ship that cost me a hundred million danars—”

“That much?” Dazen said. “You should really talk to the shipwright about that. The powder magazine would be considerably more secure if—”

“Silence!” Pash Vecchio said. He licked his lips. “We talked. It was rather . . . more direct than peregrinational.”

Pirates. Did they all try to impress with their verbal gymnastics, or was that an Ilytian trait?

But Pash continued, “What I was trying to say—and there’s a battle waiting here, so let’s not drag this out—is that you, Gavin Guile—”

“—Dazen Guile—”

“—you sank a ship I loved. I was very, very . . . very, very,
very
perturbed about that. Disturbed even. Mad even. Mad.
But
it turns out there’s one thing I love more than my flagship. And you managed to find it.”

Oh, nine hells. Seriously? What did I do now?

“My daughter. Behold, the pirate queen!”

A girl jumped out of the door to the captain’s cabin. Dazen recognized her. Orholam’s balls. It was his mother’s room slave.

“High Lord Guile,” Fiammetta said. She bowed instead of curtsying, as she was wearing short trousers, a vest, and somewhat fewer gold chains than her father. She had a beatific smile, and had grown out her bright hair in curls. She was either adopted, or took quite a lot after her mother.

This was the slave girl he’d sent home, practically on a whim, guarded by the Cloven Shield mercenary band. She hadn’t said she was even
from
Ilyta; she’d said she was from Wiwurgh, in Paria.

But of course she had.

Because what do you do if you’re the intelligent daughter of an incredibly wealthy pirate king? You pretend that you’re just a lowly slave unless things get really terrible, because you know he’s going to save you and you’d like him to be able to ransom you cheaply, and you don’t want to stir up his enemies who might kill or buy you to get back at him.

“Dazen?” Karris asked.

“My mother’s former room slave, whom she’d ordered freed . . . but my father hadn’t quite gotten around to freeing yet,” Dazen said.

“Nor had any plans to,” Fiammetta said.

“You never mentioned that,” Karris said.

“Turns out,” Fiammetta said, “Gavin Guile did those kinds of things quite frequently. Swooped in, saved people, left. Protecting his people, risking his life as if that was just what he did. There must be a hundred villages that have stories of the Prism himself coming and saving them from a rampaging wight, or bandits, or a rapacious local governor. He never cared what it would cost to make things right. And only Gavin Guile could track down an illegal slave ship, board it alone rather than sink it from afar, and free everyone aboard with no loss of life. He ended the Blood Wars. He saved an entire swath of Atash when the Blue-Eyed Demons decided they wanted their own kingdom to despoil and he put them down.”

“Wait,” Karris said, “that was you? We thought they’d turned on each other.”

Dazen shrugged apologetically.

“You went
alone
?” she asked, and he wasn’t sure if her outrage was that of a wife or of a Blackguard.

“The way I hear it,” Fiammetta said, “he couldn’t help himself. Traveled the empire and fixed problems wherever he went. Ships saved from storms. Cures brought from afar. The ruthless brought to justice. Practically invisible, yet bringing light wherever he went. People love a man like that. People follow a man like that.”

“They
did
,” Dazen said. Once. He tried to say it without bitterness. For good and ill, a Guile might never forget what he’d done, but other people certainly did.

“They do still,” a woman’s voice said from the recesses of the captain’s cabin. “I traveled all over the Seven Satrapies, and everywhere I went, they told me tales of their Gavin Guile, who came and stood for them, who fought for them.”

Dazen’s knees almost went out from under him, and he heard Karris gasp as she recognized the voice.

“Everywhere,” Marissia said, “they love him, and when I asked them if they’d fight for Gavin Guile in his hour of need, they
ran
to answer the call.”

Dazen couldn’t speak. He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe his eyes as Marissia strode out of the gloom.

Dazen crushed her in a hug, and Karris—gracious Karris!—joined him immediately.

Fiammetta, who had apparently become a great friend of Marissia’s, couldn’t help herself. She crashed into the hug, too.

He choked out, “I thought you were dead. I thought that was on me, too.”

“But how? How?” Gavin asked.

Marissia said, “Your father’s an asshole, but he doesn’t always murder people when he can avoid it. He exiled me to one of those little islands he owns. I escaped.”

“But how did you—?”

“Escape? Gavin Guile,” Marissia said in a reproving tone, “I am not a woman without resources.”

“ I—”

“Enough!” Marissia said. She was radiant, smiling fiercely despite the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Come see!”

She pulled him out onto the forecastle, where she raised one of his arms, and the pirate queen Fiammetta came to his other side and raised the other. Thousands of voices roared at seeing him, not just those sailors on the great ship but the sailors on all the others around them.

Pash Vecchio’s fleet had to make up more than a third of the White King’s entire armada. And it was shifting into a formation that didn’t make much sense if they were preparing to invade the Jaspers.

Marissia said, “Every one of these thousands you see here: every gunner, soldier, and sailor has told me some variation of the same thing: ‘When I needed help most, Gavin Guile stood for me. How could I not stand for him now?’ ”

Dazen was speechless. Proud as he was, he’d never understood what people meant when they said they were humbled by a gift.

He understood now.

“This isn’t Pash Vecchio’s fleet, Gavin Guile,” Marissia said. “It’s yours.”

Pash Vecchio cleared his throat awkwardly. “I was against all this, but . . . but you should really have a daughter. Then you’ll understand.” He glowered. “Come on, Orholam with the squirts, people, this is the part where we betray the pagans and destroy their armada. Isn’t anyone going to give the order?”

“What order?” Dazen started to ask. Was this why the whole pirate fleet was coming to bear not on Big Jasper but on the White King’s battered armada, into which they’d already driven a wedge?

O my sweet Orho—

“Fia?” Pash Vecchio said, unlimbering a massive curving sword.

He flicked it spinning into the air.

Fiammetta jumped up to a gunwale and snatched it out of the air. She shouted, “Who stands with Gavin Guile?”

Pash Vecchio launched a signal flare even as she brought the blade down with an impressive flourish.

The people roared, and the thunder of many cannons rose like a chorus of a thousand voices, shouting:

“I stand, I stand, I stand with Gavin Guile.”

The goddess once known as Aliviana Danavis watched the battle play out from atop the Prism’s Tower as the sun rose. She’d tended to her wounds throughout the night, pausing when her flesh required it and simply watching as Andross Guile directed astonishing quantities of light with deft control. She was glad, then, that he’d chosen to become an old man rather than a god.

The fall had not only nearly killed her, it had shaken her. More importantly, it had shaken Ferrilux’s hold on her. The immortal was more cunning than she’d given him credit for, and if not for being hurried by this battle, he might have taken her over by degrees.

It was going to be a very long war between them.

She limped to the edge of the tower. Not everyone realized it yet, but the battle had already been decided. The pirate fleet was fresh and had better position, and the Blood Robes’ leadership was in utter disarray, some ships counterattacking and colliding with other ships fleeing, contradictory orders, confusion—it had all the elements of an impending slaughter.

Nor was the fleet the only surprise: that, the hosts and their immortals might have destroyed. The dawn had brought sea demons, and they were devouring the bane from beneath. The fresh seed crystals with which the Blood Robes had planned to renew any bane they lost simply winked out of Liv’s perception, ingested into those great cruciform mouths and digested by their great cetacean gullets.

Interesting. The sea demons were a conundrum she hadn’t studied yet. She would have to, in the coming centuries.

She heard the clank of the mirror-array frame’s metal on metal as it came to a rest. Then Andross Guile began unstrapping himself. He looked weary, and angry.

“What are You playing at?” he demanded. He wasn’t looking at Liv. He was looking skyward. “Orholam! That can’t be it. This was to be my last and greatest game. This was to be everything!”

She studied him, curious. He had summoned magic from the far corners of the empire. He’d empowered thousands of drafters through the entire night, and killed countless of his enemies by his own will. He’d saved the empire. Turned the war.

And it wasn’t enough for him.

Suddenly, to Liv’s left, the old spectral form appeared. “Kill him!”

Ferrilux hissed. “We’ll give you all power. Power such as Koios could only dream of. But kill Andross Guile now!”

With stony eyes, Liv met Ferrilux’s gaze for a moment and then turned her back. Ferrilux hated being ignored more than anything. She smiled.

“How dare you take it from me,” Andross Guile said to the heavens. “This was to be my greatest trial and my greatest achievement. But you had
them
do all the parts I didn’t know if I could do.”

He climbed out of the mechanism. He looked toward the door into the Prism’s Tower, but no one came out.

Andross Guile, the Lightbringer, was utterly alone.

Gathering the superviolet to her to float her down, Liv stepped to the edge of the tower.

The battle was over now. There would be hours of murderous cleanup, but now it was only a matter of bloody time. Now it was just meat slaughtering meat.

The old man had dropped to his knees. “I don’t understand,” he said. “My whole life. My whole life . . .”

People, Liv thought. So strange.

She floated down from the tower and crossed the bridge. There was nothing for her here now.

It was a mistake. She had barely left the Lily’s Stem when she saw him, being carried in a litter.

Her father.

He shouldn’t have been able to see her, but there was something odd about people’s vision when they were close to death. It was another thing she would have to investigate someday, she thought.

For the moment, she pulled her hood down, hoping this more mundane cloaking would save her the bother of speaking with him. But even surrounded by his soldiers and being hurried to the Chromeria, he saw her. “Stop! Stop!” he commanded them, and they did. He pushed a man out of his way, and stared at her, transfixed. “Aliviana?”

For some reason, she froze. He was dying, she saw. Internally bleeding in half a dozen places, as from a great fall.

His men piled up behind him, unready for the sudden stop.

He sat up, though it was a bad idea in his state, ignoring everything in the world for her. He was like that. A good man, Corvan Danavis.

“Oh, my Aliviana,” he said. “You’re here! You’re alive!”

She looked at him, and she saw instantly what he couldn’t bear to see, and thus, like a human, he did not see: the gulf between them was unbridgeable now.

He seemed to see it in her eyes, though, and then, finally his own eyes took in the superviolet crystal clumps at her joints and hands and by her eyes, and the placid stillness of her face.

He started weeping weakly, horrified. “Oh, my Aliviana, what have they done to you?”

That sparked something in her. Some old defiance. Some old, human outrage. It almost felt good.

“ ‘Done to me’?” she asked. “They did nothing
to
me. I chose this.”

“Liv. No. My daughter. My darling one. Please. Come back.”

Come back? To what? To being human and frail? To being subservient? No. There was a hierarchy, she saw now. But it was organized by power, not by affection. It had to be.

Nothing else made sense.

Though she couldn’t have said why, with a dismissive flick of her hands, she healed the wounds that would otherwise kill him.

Then she departed, and she thought of Corvan Danavis no more.

The lock on the door to Andross Guile’s sitting room clicked, and Grinwoody stepped into the darkened room as he had so many thousands of times. He hesitated when he saw Andross sitting in his wing-backed chair.

“Please, sit,” Andross said, lighting a lamp with one finger, gesturing for Grinwoody to sit in the other chair. There was a cocked flintlock pistol on the arm of his own chair. A measure of whiskey was waiting on the table for each of them. Andross had never said ‘please’ to Grinwoody, not in all their years together.

Grinwoody dropped his head, his mouth twitching at a hundred thoughts. Then he took off his servants’ white gloves and tucked them away in a pocket. He sat opposite Andross.