The Blood Mirror

“Others, who were much farther away—outside the influence of the black, I believe—reported the explosion. Like the earth screamed. Like creation itself groaned. Like Hellmount blowing up in fire from the stories, a scholar said. They saw something on the horizon, an obsidian sunrise. Maybe it was ash, a scholar guessed, from a new volcano—but there was no ash found later.”

“Stop. Enough.” It was too painful to dwell on. The lies and their cost, the men and drafters dead, undeserving. All those closest to Gavin and Dazen, the guards rushing to preserve them… obliterated by the brothers’ hatred and power.

Now here he was, trapped in his own cell. The cell he had forgotten was the cell in which he would be forgotten.

It would take a miracle to save him. Something never seen.

Perhaps something… mythic?

“Tell me,” Gavin commanded the dead man. “So there’s black luxin. A legend come to life. Is there white, too?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t make sense. There must be a balance.”

“There is a balance. There is pure, white, full-spectrum light—which we split into all the colors of the rainbow, and which we draft in innumerable ways into matter—and there is darkness and black luxin. That is the balance: black against all the colors put together. As there is no forgiveness, only forgetting, white luxin’s a myth, a lie for the desperate and foolish. There is no hope for you, Guile. No escape. There is only the perfection of darkness. There is no white luxin.”

Chapter 62

Ironfist wore a peculiar white gem on his chest. Teia didn’t recognize the stone, which had always been tucked into his tunic, but she did recognize the leather thong from which it hung.

Apart from his size and musculature, it was the only thing about him she recognized. His bare limbs were manacled to the wall at his wrists and elbows, thighs and ankles. An iron strap held his waist flush against the wall. A helmet was bolted directly into the stone and encased his head completely, locking under the chin, the glass over his the eye slits so dark he could probably barely make out shapes as he twisted his head back and forth painfully.

Little wads of cloth had been stuffed into several of the manacles to cushion them. They were bloody. He’d lost weight, too.

How long had he been here?

Teia was so stunned that she almost didn’t move in time when the door opened behind her. The crying slave girl brought in a bucket of water and stood next to the tub awkwardly. Must have been new.

The Nuqaba touched the water. “You took so long it’s fine now. Begone, and see to it I’m not disturbed.”

The girl bobbed down to her knees and backed out to the door, then stopped. “Blessed? Would you like your bathers?”

“What part of ‘not disturbed’ was unclear? Out! Remind me tomorrow to have the captains put stripes on you.”

After the girl left, the Nuqaba rubbed her thigh in evident anguish. Teia saw what she guessed was a musket-ball scar, months old but still red and angry.

“I want you to know, I wasn’t always like this,” the Nuqaba said, though she didn’t look at Ironfist. “Your Prism friend shot me. I almost died. The musket ball is still in my leg, and the pain is… quite something.” She picked up a little cup of a brownish liquid that Teia assumed was tincture of poppy and drained it.

The Nuqaba gritted her teeth against the taste.

“I made it through four broken bones, a broken tooth, innumerable black eyes, and such humiliations as you would scarce believe at the hands of that husband you left me to, and I never once asked for poppy. But maybe I was scared that it would make me lose control, that I would tell him how I wanted to kill him, how I’d been planning it for years. How he reduced me to seducing his men because I knew I’d need help.”

She walked over to him and removed a pin at Ironfist’s throat.

“Turn your head away. I’m going to bathe.”

Ironfist turned his head, and she replaced the pin, locking his head in place.

She stripped off her overrobe and grabbed a pinch of the cut mushrooms on the table. She tucked them into her lip, then limped over to the bath. She got in, slowly, as she spoke. “They all want everything, Harrdun. I had everything arranged, you know? Hanishu would be my satrap, you would be my general. We would secede from the Chromeria and be our own ruling family, like the Guiles. Instead you refuse me? You get Hanishu killed? For the Guiles? You want to go after Gavin’s bastard son and save him? Why do you care less about us than about them? Where’s your loyalty, brother?”

Teia hadn’t even known Ironfist and the Nuqaba were related. At first, she’d thought this was some sort of weird seduction.

The Nuqaba was Ironfist’s sister?

Oh hells.

The jumble of emotions Teia’d felt on seeing him—terror that he was hurt, inexpressible joy that he was alive, determination to release him immediately, fury at this bitch for doing this to him, and relief that he would take care of things from this point if only she could free him—suddenly shattered.

Teia was here to kill Ironfist’s sister. Right in front of him.

He had never spoken of her, but this was the woman he’d kept a portrait of in his chambers. A man like Ironfist didn’t keep a picture of someone he hated.

“Why? Damn you! Speak!” the Nuqaba shouted, and she flung the empty laudanum cup at him. It shattered on the wall, but Ironfist said nothing.

A quick tap sounded on the door, and it opened. The chief eunuch poked his head in. “Blessed?” he asked.

“Out!” she said. “No, wait. Fuck. The prisoner’s gag is still in. Remove it.”

The eunuch went to Ironfist and pulled a different pin in the helmet, and manipulated something Teia couldn’t see. The eunuch then grabbed a few of the larger pieces of the broken cup.

“Leave them. Go to bed. I’ll not need your services for the rest of the night.”

The eunuch bowed. “Blessed, may I summon your bathers?”

“They’re all spies. Good night.”

He sighed. “Blessed, I worry—”

“Good night,” she said. It was a command.

And as the door closed, Teia had her plan.

“Brother?” Haruru said.

“I didn’t know,” Ironfist said, his voice low and rusty with disuse. “I didn’t know he beat you.”