The Burning White (17 page)

There was something about being called stupid by an illiterate that rankled more than it ought to have, but Gavin held back. He said, “You want to know if I’m going to do . . .
his
bidding.” Curse you forever, Grinwoody.

Gavin couldn’t say the name without risking that black jewel shooting through his brain. He didn’t even know if he could talk about his mission to kill Orholam—which Grinwoody thought was simply an impersonal nexus of magic. Grinwoody, at least, thought sticking the Blinding Knife into that nexus would kill all magic in the world.

“I do,” Gunner said. “Seems ya change every time I lay my orisons on ya. Yer name, your face, number of eyeballs and fingers, sometimes your heart. But you were never a quitter, not even when I had you pull that oar. Never gave up. Till now.”

Gunner’s point was something else entirely, but Gavin couldn’t get past how he’d put ‘when I had you pull that oar.’ Oh, yes, let’s do pretend my enslavement was nothing personal, you piece of human—

Then again, maybe it hadn’t been.

As Prism, Gavin’s own murders had fallen like rain on the heads of the just and the unjust alike.

Shit
. There goes my righteous fury. That was the trouble of a consistency in moral affairs: holding yourself up to the measure you judge others by is three clicks past irritating.

So Gavin answered Gunner’s question, answered it without even thinking of what the pirate might want to hear: “I don’t know yet what I’m gonna do, but I reckon before the sucking sand closes over my face, you’ll find me fighting,” Gavin said.

Still standing heedlessly on the cannon, Gunner crossed his arms and stroked his raggedy black beard, eyeing him.

“Funny thing, then,” Gunner said. “Fightin’ only makes you sink faster.”

Ambassador Bram Red Leaf looked like a barrel of fat with little arms poking out. Like so many of the nobles of the Seven Satrapies, he didn’t much resemble the people he was supposed to represent. Here in fair Blood Forest, he was dark-skinned, with light eyes and curly hair, and a sheen of sweat on his forehead despite the coolness of the morning.

Kip couldn’t help but hate him a little. The man was a vision of what Kip would’ve become if he’d never joined the Blackguard.

He waved the man over to stand beside him while he examined his maps again. From all the refugees who’d come here before the siege, Tisis had gathered a wealth of new intelligence for Kip’s maps. In no small part, she was trying to see how she’d missed Koios’s getting around them to take the river with her scouts never hearing of it. Messengers were coming and going constantly, adding new points to the map even now, chatting in quiet voices. Currently, Tisis was working with four drafters and Sibéal Siofra to add points to the map. The pygmy woman wore a fresh demeanor and new clothes to go with it. There was a new self-respect that joined beautifully with her previous professionalism.

“Hello, Ambassador,” Kip said. “Welcome to my humble council.” He didn’t say ‘court.’ Not yet.

“A pleasure to be received so graciously. An excellent day to you, Luíseach.”

The words stopped even Tisis, who met Kip’s gaze quickly.

Maybe if they lived long enough to become an old married couple someday, they’d be able to have whole conversations with a glance. Right now, all they said was simply, ‘What?!’

In a voice that sounded overly casual even to his own ears, Kip said, “I’ve not claimed that title. Why would you claim it for me?”

The man patted his forehead with a handkerchief, but when he spoke, there was no reticence in his voice. “You’re busy saving this satrapy, so I’ll be as direct as people say you are: you let others claim you to be the Luíseach when it serves your purposes, and back off when it seems dangerous. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. Problem with claiming a prophecy is that you have to fulfill all the conditions of it, though, huh?”

“You’ve come to play games,” Kip said. He wondered if this conversation would have been different if they’d held it in the palace’s great hall. As it was, this parlor now held only a few hundred scrolls and tomes, gleaming wood in the natural-unnatural patterns the old joiners here had loved, and only those courtiers closest to him. The Mighty were all here, either on guard, or at the window, or sending or awaiting messages from their other duties—other than Big Leo, who was demonstrating his mastery of the soldier’s art of sleeping anywhere. The big man was sitting at the end of the map table, head back, even as his hands draped protectively over a brace of lamb shanks on a plate in front of him so the servants wouldn’t take them away while he dozed.

A few other servants and palace slaves were bringing and taking letters and assisting Tisis with the great map, but it was nowhere near the crowd that would have attended an official audience, had Kip given one.

Come to think of it, a year ago, Kip would have thought
this
was quite a crowd. He was growing accustomed to a life lived before others. It was changing him.

“No games,” Ambassador Red Leaf said. “But we’ve work to do, and rapidly, you and me. I simply wanted to show you I’m not a fool.”

“Many would consider showing your cards immediately to be foolish indeed,” Kip said. My grandfather, for one, the best player of them all.

“Many would. But not you. You have shown yourself capable of wielding the truth like a scalpel, but you prefer to use it as a hammer. You like to shock people into silence by telling truths they can’t believe you’d actually say.”

Kip said nothing. This man thought he was clever. Perhaps he was.

Truth was, Kip was a little unnerved. He’d never been aware of being
studied
before.

“Then let us be direct,” Kip said. “What do you want of me?”

It had been Andross who told him to use the truth like a hammer. Andross, whom Kip could never equal, would have twisted this fat little man before him into knots, and had him thanking him for the pleasure.

“Satrap Willow Bough wants your army.”

“Oh, he does?” Kip asked, all doe-eyed innocence.

“Don’t make me bare my throat for nothing, my lord. I’m trying to avoid wasting your time.”

Kip nodded his head magnanimously, granting the point as a certain someone did when a stupid person made a surprisingly good point. He’d seen that damned nod enough. “What power do you have to negotiate?”

“Total.”

Kip paused for the second time in this brief conversation. He knew to let his arched brows and silence do all the work, but he said, “Meaning . . . ?”

“Total. Without you Green Haven will fall. We’ve sent a hundred messages begging the Chromeria’s help, Ruthgar’s help, the pirate kings’ help, anyone’s help—appealing to treaties, to honor, to greed. We’ve offered anything and everything. In return, we’ve gotten promises, but no one’s coming.” Ambassador Bram Red Leaf cleared his throat. “My good lord Briun Willow Bough is”—despite the few ears here to hear his words, he lowered his voice—“not the most . . . naturally gifted of leaders. But he is sincere. He doesn’t want his people to die. To save his satrapy, he would trade his very life, or if he must, his city.”

“Interesting,” Kip said. “I hadn’t heard he was stupid.”

Ambassador Red Leaf didn’t so much as blink. He didn’t play along like a sycophant would, nor did he rush to his master’s defense.

So he was either disloyal or simply a man capable of holding his tongue.

“Now,” Kip said, “
now
I’m impressed. Forgive the slander. I didn’t mean it.”

“That . . . that was a test?” the man asked.

Kip gave the nod again.

“And like a cur, I didn’t defend him . . .” The fat man’s sweaty upper lip thinned. “Please, please don’t tell him.”

Ah, but just because I
say
the test is over, that doesn’t mean it
is
.

For one wild, inappropriate moment, Kip missed Andross Guile. With that man, Kip was always sprinting to catch up, was always the pupil at the master’s feet. Every victory against him was hard fought and only half a victory at best. What a man Andross Guile could have been. Where had he gone wrong?

“What’s Green Haven’s situation?” Kip asked. It had, oddly, been harder to get solid intel on their allies than on their enemies.

“We have a hundred and ten thousand soldiers, five thousand eight hundred twelve drafters. Of those, honestly, maybe two thousand will be of use in battle. Two hundred pygmies with tygre-wolf mounts from Conn Siofra.”

“Conn Siofra?” Kip asked, shocked. He looked over at Sibéal. He probably shouldn’t have asked that out loud. Too late now. “Is that your father?”

“Little brother,” she said. Kip thought he saw real joy in her pygmy smile. Then she said, “Usurper.”

Well, shit. And now Kip looked ignorant of his own people in front of the ambassador. But it was beside the point. “Other troops?” Kip asked, irritated with himself.

“Twelve hundred cavalry, and a militia led by the woodsmen of forty thousand.”

“And how many of your nearly one hundred sixty thousand have been blooded?” Kip asked. “Ten thousand?”

Bram’s brow wrinkled as if he were trying to figure out some way to pad the total, as Kip’s disgust had made it clear that that was a low number. “If one counts the militias?” the ambassador offered.

Aha. So the commoners in the militias weren’t
worth
counting, despite that Kip’s army—the
only
army to have success against the Blood Robes—was composed of such folk.

These morons.

What would Andross do here? Andross would consolidate power into the only hands that knew what to do with it: his own.

“So rather than giving commissions and better arms to your best fighters, you’ve consigned your only veterans into militias under officers who’ve never lifted a weapon themselves except to impress a lady.”

Kip scrubbed his face. It took a lot to change a culture. Here the poorer sort of nobles—men whose sole patrimony had been their fathers’ swords and the right to carry them—didn’t want to share ranks with lumberjacks and poachers, and wouldn’t until they saw for themselves that those were exactly the men who would keep them alive.

Those lumberjacks and poachers were the kind of men their own fathers and grandfathers had been when they earned those swords.

By the time they learned that truth, though, it would be too late for Blood Forest.

Maybe the White King was on to something. Just burn it down.

It was an idle thought, but a monstrous one.

It was too late to change the Foresters now, with the Blood Robes laying siege to the capital itself.

“How many Blood Robes?” Kip asked.

“Forty thousand, give or take. Maybe four thousand of those are drafters. Maybe two or three hundred wights. At least that many will-casters. I know we outnumber them heartily, but . . .” He patted his forehead again with his handkerchief. It had to be soaked by now. “But you’re the only one who’s been able to stop him anywhere. Everywhere we fight, they roll over us. And all our men know it. You might be the only commander for whom our soldiers would stand.”

“You’ve seen my crowds,” Kip said, waving toward the window. He didn’t need to approach it.

The ambassador nodded. “They are yours indeed.”

Kip said, “What’s to stop me from letting you and the White King smash each other and then marching in, wiping out the remnants of your armies, and declaring myself king?”

The man pursed his wide mouth. It made him look like a frog. The question had clearly already occurred to him. “Your conscience, this people’s loyalty to their own, and our incompetence.”

“Incompetence?” Kip asked. The others were clear.

“Coming in and wiping up the remnants only works if there are only remnants left. If, however, the Blood Robes take Green Haven easily, with few losses of their own, you’d be facing the White King with his experienced troops and competent leaders who would have the advantages of our defenses, our materiel, and our wealth. Right now? With us inside the walls and you outside them, and the Blood Robes exposed, our odds together are better than good. But what are
your
odds if you have to try to take Green Haven by yourself, from them?”

So the man was clever after all.

Most people didn’t even see their own weaknesses so well. Most wouldn’t have been so adept at framing the question in terms of what would be good for Kip, rather than that he simply must help them because, well, he
must
.

“Any deal you make with me is binding, and you have full authority to make treaties? How do I know none will gainsay it afterward?” Kip asked. “You said yourself that you’ve promised everything to everyone.”

“But we’ve given no one this.” Ambassador Red Leaf produced a scroll with a single sentence written on it. He read it aloud: “ ‘On our oaths and holy honor, any deal Bram Red Leaf signs with Kip Guile shall be fully binding on the satraps, lords, and peoples of Blood Forest now and forever.’ ” Below that sentence was a candle’s worth of sealing wax: the Willow Bough seal prominent, surrounded by constellations of every leading clan’s seal and all of the remaining unaffiliated smaller clans’, too.

Kip handed it over to Tisis, who had stopped even pretending to work on her map. She looked at it carefully. “Named, signed, and sealed by the head of each family,” she said. “Every signature that I recognize—and that’s most of them—is correct. And the wording . . . this means exactly what it says.”

The ambassador said nothing. The scroll said it for him. Satrap Briun Willow Bough might be no military leader, but he was clear-eyed about his situation. It was desperate, but he was taking desperate actions without panicking.

It made Kip like the man. It took uncommon strength of character to present yourself to a foreigner, a younger man, and one of dubious birth no less, and say, ‘I’m in desperate straits. Will you please, please help?’

“I’ll be named satrap,” Kip said. “And put in full charge of the armies. I’ll expect the resignations of everyone on the board of electors of the satrap so it can’t be stripped from me in a few months, and I’ll have the power of appointing new ones.”