The Burning White (54 page)

She slashed with the knife she didn’t even realize she’d drawn. It caught something as he went past, but he popped to his feet. He swept the door closed with a bang, flipped the bar down across it with one hand, and grabbed a blade mounted above it in quick succession.

With the closing of the door, it was suddenly pitch-black inside the single-room house.

It wasn’t the boon it usually would be. Halfcock was a sub-red. Which meant—

Teia checked her paryl cloud, throwing back up the edges that had dissipated in the violence. She didn’t make a shell anymore. She’d gotten better than that. A shell was easier, but fragile; anything could break it, and when it went, she lost all the paryl inside it too.

With one eye dilated to paryl and one merely to sub-red, she could see Halfcock’s puzzlement. His eyes were dilated to sub-red, but he couldn’t see her.

But Halfcock wasn’t a thinker. He was already moving, circling, back against the wall, only out far enough to give his blade space. He spun his blade in an ascending flower.

Flowers looked impressive, but were terrible moves if you were actually fighting. Terrible, that is, unless you were fighting against someone you couldn’t see and you hoped to hit their body by simply covering as much space as possible with your blade in the least time possible.

Intentional or not, that blurring steel, white in her paryl vision, was also a perfect shield against her paryl attacks.

She circled opposite him, keeping low and quiet. He was bleeding from her earlier slash, warmth throbbing bright in the sub-red spectrum down his back. It didn’t look like enough to make him faint soon, though.

His jaw was tight. He was pretty sure that she was still in the room with him, but who could hide from sub-red?

Frustrated, he brought down a descending flower. Spinning a blade in a flower put his hands momentarily in predictable places, and Teia was ready. She grabbed hard for the nerves in his wrists.

The blade escaped from his enervated grip, but by terrible luck it flew right at Teia. It was twisting, sideways, impossible to judge exactly—she blocked with her own short blade, intercepting the blade, but the twisting hilt slapped around into her shoulder.

Harmless. Not even a cut. Flat of the blade.

It didn’t hurt her at all—but it destroyed the paryl cloud, and cost her a full precious second—and her paryl grip on his wrists.

Halfcock lost the blade and as his eyes naturally followed it, he saw heat bloom, the whisper of a figure.

He charged, instantly.

One moment Teia was disengaging from a flying blade, stepping aside, up onto the stuffed feather mattress she’d been avoiding, trying to recover her stance, and the next her entire view was blotted out by a charging warrior three times her size.

Her foot slipped, but she didn’t fall.

Luckier if she had.

She was crushed against the wall.

It drove the wind from her and smacked her neck against a wooden beam in the wall.

They dropped to the bed together. She had only mind to grope for her dagger. But it was gone.

Halfcock had driven his shoulder into her guts, but his face had met the wall with almost as much force.

She looked, hoping to see her dagger sticking out of him somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. She tried to roll free, but his hip was on top of her shin, trapping her.

Levering her other foot against him, and arching her back to press against the wall, she tried to push his weight off her leg.

He rolled with it suddenly, surprising her and snatching her leg with a hand. It sent her flipping over him. She was obviously lighter than he’d expected.

He threw a punch at her leg, but missed. Catching a glimpse of his face, she saw the collision with the wall had made him tighten his eyes from sub-red back to the visible spectra. In the dark, he was momentarily blind.

But vision wasn’t nearly as important when grappling.

She threw a knee into his face, and teeth and blood exploded everywhere.

He roared, falling back on the bed, but the motherfucker did
not
let go of her leg.

Using her trapped foot to brace herself as if she were doing a great sit-up, Teia levered herself upright. She kicked at his kidney, once, twice. He blocked, blocked, trapped her right foot hard against his side, under his arm against his ribs again, and rolled to fling her over him.

But she’d been expecting it.

As he rolled, it freed her foot from the ground, allowing her to spin. She pulled herself down toward him with her trapped left leg, and jump-stomped on his head with her right.

He lost his grip, and she tumbled across the room away from him.

This time she rolled to her feet first.

He shook his head like an enraged bull, snot and sweat and blood and bits of broken teeth streaming from him. He reached one hand out toward the wall, perhaps to steady himself, even as his eyes flared back to sub-red.

Where was all the paryl she’d packed? Had she lost it all?

Then Halfcock plucked Teia’s dagger from where it had been buried in the wall, unseen by her, and his face filled with grim triumph as he saw the warm glow of her small figure against the dark cold.

He crouched to pounce—and dropped like a sack of slops before the pigs as Teia’s last paryl pinched his spine.

She sealed the crystal—important to hold the paryl open while the target dropped, so they don’t break the crystal with their fall. Then she turned her back and limped to the door. She opened it, trying to appear careless, but attuned to any sound in case she’d screwed up anything else.

Fresh, cold, alien paryl filled her lungs. It was power. It was life.

Life was good. Better than the alternative, today. She filled herself full of her monochrome power, then closed the door again. Barred it.

“So, Halfcock,” she said, “let’s talk about the Order.”

“We’re missing something,” Karris said as Andross approached her at her morning forms, and the sweat dripped from her trembling shoulders. But she kept her voice level. The exercise was making her mind sharp once more. “Something that may cost us the war.”

“It’s so nice to see you taking a break from our labors, daughter,” Andross said, as if the Blackguard training yard were his home, not hers. “Grinwoody was just worrying for your health, wondering if you were pregnant. The weight gain, you understand.”

That shot a bolt of fury through her. She almost lost her balance.

She could hear the smile in his voice. “Naturally, I punished him for such impudence. But I’m so glad to see you returning to the sweat and grime you rose from, like a flame eagle rising from the ashes of its old home—oh dear, pardon, that came out all muddled. I didn’t mean to mention ashes to a White Oak.”

She continued the form. Breath in, foot held above waist height, imagine a smug face for the next strike. She snapped it out, then held the position perfectly.

“I’m beginning to worry about
your
health, father,” Karris said. Don’t say it, Karris. “I know it’s not age. You’re very sharp for your advanced years. But you seem irritable, pissy . . . are you premenstrual perhaps? I know a good masseuse.”

“Oh, I know you do,” Andross said. His voice was ice. “Rhoda works for me, you know. Has a lovely way of turning your neck just so, doesn’t she? Just shy of where you worry it’ll break. Hmm.”

And now her fury stilled. The threat chilled her.

It was pure Andross Guile to try to drive a wedge between Karris and anyone who brought her joy. But as she thought about it, she had a hard time believing Andross would tolerate Rhoda’s insouciant flamboyance, or Rhoda Andross’s icy disapproval. No, Andross was simply aware that the woman worked for Karris, and was trying to make her paranoid.

Karris stopped the form and walked to a hook where her public-appropriate clothes hung, and patted herself with a towel. There were no servants here to fetch her things. Even Andross had come without a slave, leaving Grinwoody behind in an unusual display of respect: the promachos knew how the man’s presence infuriated the Blackguards.

Karris pulled the loose tunic over her head, then called over to Samite, who was leading the exercise, “I’ll make it up tonight. Twice as hard.”

Samite nodded sharply amid her own forms. Her own face was beaded with sweat, not from the exertion but from the concentration. Oddly, the loss of most of her hand sometimes threw off her balance, and she wouldn’t let herself falter.

Karris loved these people. They’d risked so much for her, in the past and now, too. They were helping her reconnect with herself, find her purpose.

And still Andross didn’t ask about what she thought they were missing that would cost them the war. Didn’t seem to care. Perhaps didn’t respect her enough to even remember, much less to ask.

Fine. Be that as it may, regardless of who he is, I am called to be who
I
am.

“I’m sorry, Promachos,” Karris said. “I was out of line. What may I do to make it up to you?”

His eyebrows twitched up. He took off his lightly tinted spectacles that he wore in the darker hours, and squinted at her, pulling a darker pair from his pocket as the sunlight dawned over the wall and onto the topside yard—the lower areas having been yielded to the many hundreds of less experienced drafters needing training in the martial arts. But as Andross squinted at her, the light struck his face full, and Karris thought she glimpsed a cornucopia of colors in them. Red and the sparking of sub-red, of course, but also orange, and yellow, a hint of green? But Karris was certain that Andross’s arc of colors only went from sub-red to yellow.

Odd, but maybe it was a reflection or natural coloration she’d never noticed. “It’s your son,” he said, putting on his dark spectacles. “You’re ignoring him. He’s come to me to complain about it.”

“I’m too busy,” Karris said. Zymun. Ugh.

“Yes, I see that.” He said it as if her work here was worthless play.

“I’ve invited him to join me here. And at other occasions. Events. Duties.”

“But never at dinners anymore,” Andross said. “Or to your solar. Or your study. Or anywhere alone. So he says.”

No games, Karris.

She took a deep breath. “He . . . touches me in ways he shouldn’t.”

“Ways he shouldn’t?”

“You wish me to be explicit?” Karris asked.

“I wouldn’t ask for clarification if I didn’t want it.”

“He touches me in ways that are sexual but that might be construed not to be. Kisses my lips, as a son might, maybe, but for too long, too softly. Wants to nuzzle my neck. Grazes my breasts. Wants to put his head in my lap. Trails his hands up and down my thigh, though I ask him to stop.
Sniffs
while he’s there, as if he expects me to be aroused by it.”

“That’s enough.” The disgust on Andross’s face was stark. Apparently some things were out of bounds even for him. Marvel of marvels.

“Then he begs me not to reject him. Tells me how much it hurts that his own mother would push him away. This, as he strokes the small of my back.”

“Enough. Enough!” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, then said quietly, “Shit.”

“You knew he was like this,” Karris said, heat rising in her.

“Lots of men bother the slave girls and pressure the servants. I’d hoped the endless stream of women happy to climb into his bed would sate his
appetites
.”

“His is not an appetite for sex.”

“Yes, thank you. I see that now.”

“I won’t allow him to be alone with me again,” Karris said.

“You’ll do what you damn well need to!” Andross said.

“I won’t let him be alone with me again,” Karris repeated calmly. “Nor any of my people. And if anyone is found willing to testify against him, he will be brought up on charges.”

“This is why you put out that missive to the servants?”

“You know about that?” Karris asked.

“I thought you were trying to find the rumors so that you could silence them before they cause us embarrassment.”

“Then you thought exactly the opposite of the truth,” Karris said.

“No one’s going to come forward,” Andross said. “They never do. You’re his mother. I’m his grandfather.”