The Blood Mirror

“The list?”

Damn. Caught out. And no joke was possible now, not after the ass he’d already been. “The list of things I, uh, dislike about myself.” Loathe.

“That decides it,” she said.

“Decides what?” Kip asked.

“Reeny is going to be so furious,” Tisis said. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back. Reeny? Oh, her sister Eirene. “But if you can’t run away with your husband, who can you run away with?”

“What?” WHAT?!

“I’m not going home, Kip. I’m going with you. Wherever you go, I’m going.”

“I really don’t—”

“Save your breath. There’s nothing you can say that will change my mind. Try to stop me and our deal’s off.”

“Empty threat?” After all that talk of failing family…

“How about this one, then?” She stepped close and grabbed his crotch through his clothes. “This stays with me. If you choose to leave my presence, you’ll go without it.”

“Oh, come on, it just finally went to sleep.”

“You find threats of me tearing it off arousing?”

“Not when you put it like that.”

“So it’s settled. I’m going,” she said triumphantly.

He pushed her back. “Tisis. This isn’t a game. We’re going to war. You’re no fighter.”

“And you’re no noble,” she said. “But we’ll teach each other.”

“Tisis, it’s different. Nobles won’t kill you—”

“If you believe that, you’re a fool.”

Well, shit. Kip’s very pause was an admission of defeat.

Tisis said, “You don’t know it yet, but you need me as much as I need you.”

She smiled coyly, but at least she didn’t rub in the victory.

“The squad’s not going to like it,” Kip said.

She pointed at him. “Haha! I beat a Guile!”

He hoped his face was a study in Nonplussed Kip. But she only smiled beatifically for a moment, thawing him more than he would admit.

Then her mouth pursed in quick disapproval. “Also, did you really put clean clothes on your dirty body?”

“Yes?”

She clucked in mock horror. “My lord husband, surely you must know, a lady’s perfumed garden ought to be fragrant, but a lord’s—”

“Ah! Fine! I’ll wash!”

Chapter 12

Teia climbed down the tower using the servants’ stairs. Just a little screw you to her tail. The stairs themselves were clogged enough with servants and slaves and discipulae that there wasn’t much purpose to it other than inconveniencing him and giving herself time to think.

She went to the main floor and across to the other stairs, and went down farther still. Commander Fisk had given her an idea.

In a few minutes, she was at the dungeon. Few people were kept here except a couple of drafters immediately before Sun Day. Those who’d broken the halo would be put in rooms of colors safe to them, or blackened rooms for polychromes. With Sun Day just passed, there should be no one here—except whoever was going to be executed tomorrow.

Two of Carver Black’s tower soldiers were stationed in front of a heavy oaken door. As Teia approached, they stood respectfully. The tower soldiers had always had reasonably good relationships with the Blackguards, but with the influx of Andross Guile’s Lightguards, whom they hated, they now treated the Blackguards like dear friends.

“You’re holding the accused for execution tomorrow?” Teia asked.

“Yes, sir,” the elder tower soldier said. He was long past his prime, stiff knees and lots of experience.

He wasn’t being rude at the sight of a petite young girl who—to another tower soldier—might look like the epitome of how far the Blackguard’s standards had fallen. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Through a quirk of protocol, tower soldiers always addressed Blackguards as ‘sir,’ regardless of gender. Apparently it had originated with some gaffe or deliberate insult involving a particularly manly Archer. The Blackguards had turned it back on the tower soldiers, demanding that every one of them be called sir—when Teia had complained to Quentin that language was weird, he had speculated that it was perhaps analogous to how all magisters were called magisters regardless of gender, rather than magistri and magistrae, while the declensions of the nouns for their pupils were retained as ‘discipula,’ ‘discipulus,’ ‘discipulae,’ and ‘discipuli,’ while a mixed group of girls and boys went by the feminine plural ‘discipulae.’

As Quentin had explained to Teia, “Language isn’t weird. People are weird. Language makes sense until people get their phoneme pukers on it.” Teia had no idea what that meant, but she got the gist.

The younger man looked at his officer, obviously unaware of the protocol. “Uh…”

“Later,” the older man said. “How can we help you?”

“I need to interview them,” Teia said.

They looked ready to say no.

“I’m on the execution detail tomorrow, and they’re not telling us anything,” Teia said. “I’ve got to… ascertain in what respects they may present dangers… to the assemblage.”

With soldiers, if you spoke bureaucratese, they’d assume you’d been assigned to do it. All the bullshit orders come dressed in jargon. If you just said what you wanted, they knew it was your own idea.

She switched back to her own tone. “You know what happens if something goes wrong during the execution—it’s on us. With all that’s gone on recently, the Blackguard ain’t takin’ another hit.”

The older soldier looked as if she were asking the impossible and he hated to say no.

“Look,” Teia said. “I’m not even a full Blackguard. I’m doing my vigil tonight. I’ve just been on duty, and after holding vigil all night, my first official detail is watching what everyone tells me is a horrific way to die. Orholam’s Glare is the death they scare drafters with from the moment we first learn we can draft. The Blackguard’s stretched thin to breaking, and it’s all made worse by those Lightguard assholes running my friends off as if they’re traitors. I know this isn’t the normal way of doing things—but what’s been normal about anything recently? You can take all my weapons, do whatever you need. I just need to talk to them so someone can check it off a list. And I’m not going to have my first official act be lying to my commander by telling him I did it if I didn’t. But I don’t want to start my service by failing a simple assignment, either. Can you cut me some slack?”