The Burning White (34 page)

Kip should have listened. He was flotsam, trash washed down the Umber River, heading for the great cataract below Rekton. He was going to fall, and he was going to take all these people he loved with him.

“I believe,” Big Leo said suddenly. His voice was a low rumble in the half-light.

“What?” Kip asked, turning to the big man, as if the words hadn’t cut his darkness in twain.

But Big Leo didn’t meet his eye, instead searching the darkness for nonexistent threats. His voice rumbled lower. “Nothin’ else to say.”

Kip studied the darkness, but saw nothing. They believe, but I don’t. Maybe I need a bit more of the Guile arrogance.

Can a humble man do great things?

“That obvious, huh?” he asked, faking a grin.

Big Leo pursed his lips and finally met Kip’s gaze. He shook his head slightly. Not that obvious.

“You always measure yourself by them,” Big Leo said.

“Them?”

The warrior looked at him as if trying to determine whether he was being obtuse on purpose or simply by default. “Your father. Your grandfather.”

“Oh.
Them
, them.”

“Breaker?”

“Yeah?”

“Stop talking.”

“Right.”

Big Leo heaved a Big Leo–sized sigh, as if so many words were exhausting him. “Breaker, you got it all backward. I don’t follow you because you’re
almost them
. I follow you because you’re
not
them.”

So it was true: even the perfect man, Gavin Guile, had his detractors.

Find me the perfect man, and I will find you someone who dislikes him. Kip tried not to let the thought show on his face. It was a mental dodge, and it would infuriate his friend. He’d seen Big Leo angry—and it wasn’t something he really wanted directed at himself.

“You know what I like about you?” Big Leo asked.

“Well, I hope more than one thing, but I’m always ready to hear anoth—”

“Words with you are never wasted.”

A clear compliment? “Well, thank you!”

“You know what I hate about you?” Big Leo asked.

And here it had seemed like this was going so well. “Actually,” Kip said, “I’m not that curious to—”

“It always seems like they are.”

“Um. Well, thanks?” You dick. “Thanks for that, uh, deeply felt and oblique set of compliments.”

“I wasn’t done.” Deep dissatisfaction had settled into resignation on Big Leo’s face.

“Oh, I’d love to hear more compliments,” Kip said.

It might have come out a little sarcastic.

“I am done with those.”

I figured. “Go on.”

“My favorite description of the Lightbringer? Says he’ll be a man unmirrored.”

“What’s that even mean?” Kip asked.

“That’s why I like it. It could be almost literal, although poetic. Don’t know what the hell is wrong with prophets. Can’t just say what they mean.”

“I still don’t get it.” And why haven’t I heard all of these things before?

“Unmirrored: like, a man who walks in front of a mirror, and it doesn’t show him.”

Kip had to think about it. Big Leo gave him time. “That person would just be invisible.”

Big Leo sighed. “And who do we know—”

“Oh! Oh, so someone like Teia. Not invisible all the time, necessarily. Someone who can use a shimmercloak. Hmm.”

It occurred to him then that he couldn’t use a shimmercloak.

“Yeah, that would be too bad if that were true, huh?” Big Leo said.

“Since you can’t use a shimmercloak.”

“You’re doing wonders for my confidence, big guy.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Kip, of course, was suddenly very worried.

Big Leo said, “Lightsplitting is supposedly one of the gifts bestowed by Orholam during the installment of a Prism. So those who think you’re the Lightbringer, and who also believe that interpretation, simply think you’ll be installed as Prism sooner or later. Not really a big leap to think the Lightbringer would also be a Prism, eh? But usually—and maybe this is just because these scholars didn’t know about shimmercloaks—usually the phrase is taken as a, uh, what do you call it, idiom. A man unmirrored could be a man unequaled. There’s no one out there exactly like him, right?”

“Sure, that makes sense. It’s pretty good—”

“No, it’s not. It’s a stupid descriptor. It’s redundant. He’s the Light-bringer. Of course he’s unequaled. You don’t need to say he’s the most one-of-a-kind unique Lightbringer out there. In a set of one, he’s the most
one
of the whole set? That makes no sense. There’s just
one
.”

“Prophecies can’t have filler?” Kip asked.

“That’s . . . actually a good question.” Big Leo looked troubled. He started to turn away.

“No, wait. What were you going to say before?”

Big Leo stopped and seemed to chew his next words. “How I took it was that it could mean he’s unequaled, or it could mean he’s honest, because every reflection imparts loss and distortion from the original, or it could mean he’s different. He’s
true
. . . in that he is his own self. Every mirror presents a flattened, pale copy, an image of a real thing. So maybe the Lightbringer is simply not like other people. In every set, he’s the odd one, the exception. You know, like maybe he’s the noble who’s not a noble, the bastard who’s not a bastard, the Tyrean who doesn’t quite fit with the Tyreans, the Blackguard who doesn’t quite fit the Blackguards, the unschooled kid who somehow got educated, the poor kid who got rich, the rich kid who doesn’t act rich, the full-spectrum polychrome who’s sort of Chromeria-trained and sort of not trained at all, the guy who’s entitled to the highest horse but barely knows how to ride, yet always somehow gets where he needs to go, and fast.”

I’d like to think ‘barely knows how to ride’ has been mostly remedied in this past year, Kip thought. But he didn’t say it.

His tongue still escaped his control with some regularity, but not as often as it used to.

“And?” Kip asked. Big Leo obviously wanted to know that he had Kip’s full attention.

“Brother, we need the Lightbringer. Desperately. This army, this satrapy,
all
the satrapies, the Chromeria, your friends. We all need
you
to be the Lightbringer, and those of us who stand with you here? We’re betting our lives that you are. And that’s why you’re pissing me off.”

“Huh?”

“You think you were powerful against Daragh the Coward or against Ambassador Red Leaf or with the Divines? You were stronger by far when you saw the Keeper and took pity on her, or when you saw Conn Arthur and showed him even greater pity by showing him none.”

“Sure pissed off Cruxer,” Kip said. The commander had said, ‘You can forgive a man who breaks under a charge once out of weakness, but a man who lies to you day after day after day? He’s not only a coward, he’s
disloyal
. You’re making a huge mistake.’

Big Leo waved it away. “Cruxer’s still a mess over Lucia. He’ll outgrow it. Now, shut up. I’m trying to lecture you.”

“Please, proceed,” Kip said, grinning.

Big Leo held his gaze until Kip’s grin collapsed, then said, “Andross and Gavin couldn’t have done what you did—because they’re men invested in their own greatness. It makes them small next to you. Breaker, you didn’t get this far by being like anyone else. So. If the Lightbringer’s a man unmirrored, why the hell do you keep trying to be a mirror?”

Kip had immediate justifications, defenses, denials—dodges: I didn’t know that stupid prophecy! Who else am I supposed to emulate if not the best and smartest people I know? And last and least true: I’m not trying to be them!

But instead of giving breath to any of it, he nodded, taking receipt of the words, a silent promise to think on them.

But Big Leo kept staring at him.

Big Leo
kept
staring at him.

It got awkward.

“Big Leo, do you want to know what I like about
you
?”

The big man pondered, eyes still locked on Kip.

Then, just as Kip was about to tell him, Big Leo said, “No.”

He walked away.

Eventually, Kip turned back to his stars and his fire and his map, but none of them cast the light he needed.

He went to his room, but he didn’t wake Tisis. He knew he should wake her, to talk, if not to make love. He should share the yoke that had settled heavy on his heart. But there weren’t even two hours until he must wake. He let her lie and told himself it was love.

In the place of rest, instead he dreamed.

He dreamed of Andross Guile.

~The Guile~

40 years ago. (Age 26.)

“I hope my art isn’t boring you?”

Having only recently taken over as the head of my family and thereby made the lord of a house in crisis, my greatest expenditure in coming this deep into the Atashian highlands is in time. And this buffoon—whom I hope to make my father-in-law—is only making things worse. I’ve seen rocks worn down to nubs by the lapping of the sea’s waves more quickly than this man moves us through his art collection.

“No indeed!” I say, and it’s true. The
art
isn’t boring me.

“Just a few more pieces before we return. We simply must get back in time to see the fire dancers begin, young ’Andross. It’s a treasured tradition on these brisk autumn nights!”

Lord Dariush gives ‘Andross’ the old aspirative at the beginning, so it sounds almost like ‘Handross.’ When I first arrived, Lord Dariush told me he is a casual student of languages, and he loved that my name hearkens back to a rare dialect of Old Parian.

In the full week since then, I’ve deduced that by ‘casual’ he means he’s fluent in six dead tongues, and has done his own translations of several ancient masterpieces. He derides his own efforts as derivative, an idle pastime not worth the parchment he scrawls them on: ‘Still, it keeps me out of trouble. Some hunt fowls, I hunt vowels.’ He’d laughed. I’d chuckled along dutifully.

An affable man, if inclined to laugh at his own jokes. By all reports, he is well loved here.

He is the first obscenely wealthy person I’ve met of whom that is true.

“You do love your traditions here, I’ve noticed. What is this?” The Dariush family has an art collection of wildly mixed quality, a common affliction among the newly rich: astonishing masterpieces cheek-by-jowl with quirky oddities and total garbage likely painted or drawn by family members.

This piece is a very nice facsimile of a Gollaïr. I’ve never liked his work myself. He discovered a technique of imbuing pigments with mildly unstable luxin, making them astonishingly bright—and then used the paints everywhere in his art with no sense of proportion and only moderate skill.

A second-rate natural scientist and a second-rate painter, Gollaïr’s real genius had lain in getting others to believe he was a genius. He had amassed a large entourage, a vast fortune, and a golden reputation.

Then his pupil, Solarch, had shown what one could actually do with the tools Gollaïr had invented.

No Solarchs still survive. It emerged years after his death that Gollaïr had dedicated himself to destroying the young artist in every way. Even Solarch’s eventual suicide had been suspicious, with some saying that perennial bogeyman the Order of the Broken Eye had been hired for the job. Before Solarch’s early death, Gollaïr had secretly, through many different agents, bought up every last one of the young man’s paintings. Then he’d burned them all before the young man’s eyes.

Still, artists being assholes? What else was new?

Later painters had built on his discoveries, so Gollaïr was still considered important, but mostly only to those who cared about the history of art, not the art itself.

Later counterfeiters succeeded in making the luxin pigments stable, and actually made better paints than Gollaïr ever had. So, oddly, the counterfeits lasted longer and now looked much better than any of the originals did. This painting still shone—thus, a counterfeit.

Even if it weren’t a counterfeit, though, I certainly wouldn’t hang his gaudy garbage on my walls.

“You’ve been staring at this one for quite some time,” Lord Dariush said. “I’m so glad. It’s one of the real prizes of my collection. What do you think?”

I really should have divided my time between more paintings if I was going to let my mind wander. He called it ‘one of his real prizes’?

Ugh.

“Is this a Gollaïr?” I ask. Please say you know it’s a counterfeit and you just like it. Bad taste I can deal with.

“Oh yes! An original! You know Gollaïr? Not many people do now.”

Shit
. I only wish I could say it aloud. I dream of the day when I have so much power that my sons may say aloud what they actually think.

I purse my lips. “I’m afraid I don’t like his work at all, actually. My apologies. So much of art is subjective, though.”

“Is it?” Lord Dariush asks.

Please don’t try to convince me this trash is objectively good. I hurry on. “I certainly appreciate its importance, and I’m dazzled that someone could make luxins that still shine, what, two hundred and fifteen years later or something?” It’s the closest I can hint at questioning if he’s certain it’s not a fake. I shouldn’t have done it, but I can’t help myself.

“Sounds about right,” he says.

So he doesn’t know it’s a fake.

A counterfeit, as the prize of his collection. It makes him look a fool, and I’ve come so far and invested so much of my precious time that I don’t want to believe it. I can’t marry into a family of fools.

I won’t do that to my sons or the rest of my line. A man has a duty.

But it just doesn’t fit. Lord Dariush came from nothing and is now one of the three wealthiest people in the world. A bad judge of art I can believe, but a fool? Has he just been the largest fish in an inbred backwater up here?

“You really don’t like it?” he presses.

I flash an awkward acknowledgment. “Maybe my judgment of the work itself is unfairly low because of what they say he did to that young artist—what was his name?” Maybe. And maybe I’d rather not be trapped talking to you out of politeness, old man, and would like to see the woman I
had
intended to make my bride.