That hadn’t been a mistake, he knew. Gavin must have realized that if Kip had come in as a bastard from Tyrea and been thrown in among those wolves, they would have torn him apart. That was what the Blackguard training was for. That, and Gavin’s realization that war was coming, and Kip would need as much martial training as possible.

Kip had assumed that Tisis was part of those circles. After all, she was rich and highly talented with green and beautiful. She had to be petty and boring and gossip-mongering to make up for it, right?

It made Kip wonder how people judged Gavin Guile, who was frustratingly Everything Good. Surely they must secretly hate him. Come to think of it, what did people think of Kip, who’d swooped in out of nowhere and taken up the mantle of the foremost family in the Seven Satrapies?

Suddenly, the Blackguard looked like a warm blanket that Kip didn’t ever want to leave. People judged him for himself there, mostly. Some of them even liked him. No one had given him trouble for being Tyrean since he became an inductee. What mattered in his unit was what you were doing to help the unit succeed. Kip hated being judged, but had barely noticed when the judgment of him stopped.

And here was Tisis, ready to sell her body to save her people, and Kip was judging her and calling her whore.

“Orholam have mercy,” he muttered into the water. “Tisis, I’m so sorry for, for everything. For how I treated you. For what I said. It was vile. I’m so, so sorry.”

She blinked rapidly, looked away. “I tried to go back to him, you know? After you left. He wouldn’t take me. Put me out of his room like a…”

Kip said, “He is … not a nice man.” A deep hatred started burning there. It was one thing for Andross to debase Kip, then point out his debasement and laugh at him. It was quite another to see him do it to someone else.

“No,” she laugh-cried. She dabbed an eye with a finger, getting control of herself. “No, he’s not that. You know, the only thing that really surprises me is that he didn’t bed me first. I mean, I already feel pretty gross about myself—‘gross about myself’? Well, you know what I mean. I would have felt a hundred times worse if he’d used me and then cast me off. It seems more like his style. I mean, we’d barely gotten started—sorry, you don’t want to know all that. Maybe he was afraid I’d get pregnant and then he’d have a bastard to worry about.”

No, it wasn’t that. He was playing a different game.

But Kip didn’t say anything.

Hey, she hadn’t said ‘another bastard to worry about,’ so apparently she had some tact.

For the next few minutes, as she recovered, Kip studied her openly. Without the makeup she always wore, she was still intimidatingly beautiful, but this natural beauty was softer, and of course younger, than that icy perfection. He found himself warming to her.

What just happened? Did we just kind of become friends? How did that happen so fast?

Andross Guile, who pissed on everything, had said she would try to seduce Kip. Was that what this was? A very clever seduction? Was she simply playing him?

He couldn’t see it.

Hell, if she was this good and this was all an act, he’d rather be on her side regardless, because if she was this good, no one else was going to stand a chance.

“So, uh, my skin’s getting all pruney,” Kip said. “How do we get out of here gracefully? Ladies first? I mean, it doesn’t matter since I’ve already seen you naked, right?”

She sighed and let herself sink into the water until she was blowing bubbles in it. “So,” she said. She winced.

Kip waited. Nothing. “So?” he prompted.

She bobbed higher and he glanced down through the water, though he didn’t think she noticed. Dammit! And he’d been so high-minded a few moments ago. “So I didn’t just come here because I needed a bath, though I notice you haven’t washed, pruney or not.”

“Oh. Right.” Kip picked up the soap from the edge of the bath. He started soaping up his left shoulder awkwardly.

“So I shared all about my family and the situation I’m in…” Tisis said.

Kip stopped soaping. She expected him to do the same? “Tisis, it’s been really nice talking to you. I mean, really nice. A huge surprise, actually, but a bunch of classes end right around now, and dozens or hundreds of people are going to be heading down here any minute. I don’t think we have time for my whole history.”

They heard the banging of a distant door slamming, and both of them nearly bolted.

“Right,” Tisis said. She licked her lips. “But you are isolated, too, right? I mean, I need friends, you need friends, right? Something solid.”

“Sure, that’d be … nice. I don’t know if it’s possible. Sooner or later, I’m going to get kicked out of the Blackguard, or nicely promoted out of it. You saw. My grandfather hates me. I’ve secured funding to keep on at the Chromeria, but yes, you could say my position is … not strong.” He’d been so assiduously not thinking about it that thinking about it now slapped him in the face.

She exhaled a big breath again. “That’s pretty much what I thought. I have a plan, and I don’t want you to answer now, but I want you to think about it seriously. Come down to the baths next week, same time. The same slave will meet you and bring you back here.”

“Now I’m curious,” Kip said.

She was blushing. “This is not exactly how I’d planned for this to happen…” She took a deep breath, let it out. She bobbed under the water. Scrunched her face as she emerged.

“Why am I the one who feels awkward here?” Kip asked.

“Marry me, Kip.”

A sound like someone was strangling a small animal came from somewhere. Oh, Kip’s throat.

She blushed harder. “Just think about it?”

“What?!”

Then she daintily dashed up the steps out of the bath, snatched Kip’s bathing robe from its hook, and ran tiptoe out of the room. Between her words and her nudity, Kip was speechless.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted finally. “I don’t know how to get out of here! There’s only that one robe!”

Then he realized he, a man, had just shouted—in the women’s baths. Idiot! He jumped out of the water and dashed in the opposite direction from where Tisis had disappeared. Naked turtle-bear coming through!

Chapter 71

In the closest thing to a corner she could find in a circular library, Teia was working on her assignment for Murder Sharp. The man might be an utter horror, but he was also a font of knowledge about paryl. And as far as Teia knew, with Marta Martaens having fled, he was the only source of knowledge about paryl available: there was nothing in even the forbidden libraries about paryl. Damn luxors.

But Murder Sharp dropped the answers to her biggest questions like they were nothing.

“The other colors,” she’d ventured, “they have metaphysical effects.”

“Meta-what?”

Oh, right. Murder Sharp hadn’t gotten his education in the Chromeria. Best not to make it look like she was trying to rub it in. “Like red makes you more prone to anger, and superviolet makes you more logical over time. What does paryl do?”

He’d chuckled. “Haven’t noticed, huh? Maybe you’re special, like me. I’m a bit of a curiosity among paryl drafters.”