The Blinding Knife
Page 43

But there was no answer. Doesn’t care, can’t fix, or doesn’t exist. No matter what, things were not as Liv had believed. It was like having a nice warm cloak of comforting suppositions ripped off her shoulders.
So be it. This was what it was to be an adult, to be a strong woman. Her father had raised her to believe certain things, but her father wasn’t omniscient. He could be wrong. And if he was, Liv wasn’t going to be a moral coward. She would face the world as it was.
She’d once heard an old philosopher quoted in one of her classes: ‘The truth is so dear to me that if Orholam stood on one side and truth on the other, I would turn my back on my creator himself.’
So be it. Fealty to One, that was the Danavis motto. Liv’s fealty would be to the truth.
Simply considering that was scary, terrifying as she thought about the decisions she made all the time based on what was right—which was based on what was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria taught was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria believed about Orholam. Taking out that linchpin?
But at the same time, it was tremendously freeing. She would be strong. This was hard, but she would do it. She wouldn’t shrink from hard truths or embrace comforting delusions. She would be a warrior for truth.
She finished bathing, the impulse to tears forgotten, steel in her spine. And then she ate what the old woman brought her, though it was only a thin broth dotted with a few potatoes.
“It isn’t up to my normal standards, but well, war, you know,” the old woman said, a twinkle in her eye.
Liv laughed.
“After I finish your dresses, I’ll be able to serve you something much better, I promise.”
When she was finished, Liv felt a thousand times better. She thanked the old woman and stepped outside.
Zymun was sitting on a crude bench, tossing little blue disks out of one hand into the air and shooting them with green from the other.
“You were waiting for me the whole time?” Liv asked.
He tossed a blue disk up and blasted it into oblivion, harder than necessary.
“Oh. I forgot about you,” she said. Oops, that didn’t come out quite like she meant it.
“You get away with that shit because you’re beautiful?” Zymun asked. “If so, quit it.”
“You keep saying that. I don’t know if you’re trying to make a backhanded compliment or a stupid forehanded insult.” She wasn’t beautiful. She knew that. On her best day, she could manage a bit of cute. Anyone who said different was trying to get something from her.
Zymun looked like he was going to tear into her, but then his mouth twitched. “ ‘Forehanded insult’?” he asked. “That your own invention?” But he grinned.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” She scowled, feeling stupid. “I thought you weren’t a blue,” she said quickly. He had five colors on his cloak and vambraces, but not blue and not superviolet.
“Not yet,” he said. He drafted another blue disk. Liv could tell the color was off, and in barely more than a second it frayed apart and dissolved. “Hoping I grow into it. It’s so close it’s infuriating. Blue has so many uses. Plus, as nice as it already is to be a five, I can’t help but dream of being a full-spectrum polychrome.”
He was reaching to be a seven-color drafter with exactly the same kind of statements Liv had used a few months ago when she was longing to have her second color recognized. It was never enough, was it? There’s always someone better than you.
Still, if seven colors might be within reach for Zymun, that meant the boy was on another plane altogether.
“Sorry about forgetting,” Liv said, looking at her feet. “I didn’t think I was important enough for you to wait around for me.”
He smiled, and broken nose, black eyes, and all, he was terribly handsome. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Chapter 35
It was strangely freeing to be so busy that he had no time for friends—or his lack thereof. Over the next weeks, Kip spent his mornings in class and working, spent hours more on the Blackguards’ field, and then headed to the library. He got to know the staff, and they him. As often as not, a stack of books was waiting for him—the ones he requested every day, plus whatever ones Rea Siluz thought he might find helpful.
He would find an isolated desk, and not leave for eight or ten hours, depending on when the last librarian left. Every day he scowled at the older students, and stayed late with them a few times—until he was discovered and banned from the library for a week. Students also weren’t allowed to reshelve their own books. Apparently so many had done so incorrectly for so long that it became a nightmare for the librarians. Now, after being read, books were to be deposited at one of the two desks for the purpose on each level of the library. Kip also quickly learned that despite taking up three full levels of the Prism’s Tower, this library was only a small sliver of the total number of books the Chromeria owned. Many more were kept below ground. Dims were not allowed in the secondary libraries, period.
All of which combined to make Kip’s other searches nearly impossible to even begin. He had sworn to avenge his mother—and crushing King Garadul’s head somehow hadn’t made that ache go away. Then he’d sworn to find out if his mother was lying about Gavin Guile. He couldn’t imagine the man had actually raped her, but liar and addict and horror though she was, she still deserved that of her son.
Of greater concern, though, was that he’d sworn to make Klytos Blue step down.
He really had to stop swearing.
The problem with both goals was that he barely knew where to start. He couldn’t exactly ask, “Pardon, can you tell me where the damning evidence about the currently serving Colors and Prisms is kept?” And with his books being checked up on, any wider reading he did want to do had to be done carefully. Kip had found several books of genealogy to learn about Klytos Blue, and then waited until he saw one of the young women who assisted the libraries reshelving books and slid his books into her stacks.
At this rate, he’d never find anything. There was only one shortcut to get to the libraries that might have the information he needed: make it into the Blackguard.
So what had begun as something he attempted to please his father whose ultimate purpose he didn’t understand now became the only possibility. Kip trained and studied and read books in the library and didn’t sleep much, nightmares interrupting his rest every night, until he would crash and sleep for a day or two straight.
There was no punishment for missing class. The Chromeria let the sponsors handle that. It made Sponsor Day deeply unpleasant for those students who loafed. But Kip didn’t have a sponsor. He went to class, though, even when he hated it. To miss would be to disappoint his father, to be a failure.
And then fight day came, the culmination of the month’s training.
Though Kip was clearly the worst in class, by entering at number four he’d made it terribly unlikely that he could fail out this month. But the entire system was designed to force the cream of the class to rise. On testing day, each student was given a fight token. The testing started at the bottom, with the lowest-ranked students given a chance. Number forty-nine would go first. He could only challenge someone within three places, and if he won, he would be awarded that person’s fight token, which he could immediately use again to keep climbing.