Odd. It didn’t quite feel like his joy. Kip looked around the room at the seven intense colored lights illuminating the room. How many of those was he passively drafting? Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to be drafting and holding—

The deck in his hand was vibrating. It wasn’t his hand trembling, it was the cards themselves, reacting to something.

Kip flipped the whole deck away from himself, but they escaped from his grasp as he flicked his wrist and jumped toward him like iron filings to a magnet, slapping to bare skin. The rest of the deck hit him in his bare chest, snap-snap-snap, drawn inexorably to his skin. Seven colors—more—roared through Kip, seemed to explode beyond the boundaries of his body. Everything was burning and freezing and piercing.

He was staggering around in a circle, blind, the snap-snap-snap of cards smacking onto the bare skin of his back. He tore at the cards across his chest, and they went tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, resonance points jumping to his fingers. As each card scraped off his hand, another jumped onto his fingers, and another. Too fast, too sticky, and then they weren’t just burning into his fingers. Every card seemed to bore into his skin at many points. He was screaming.

A luminescence bloomed in the room in front of him. A figure filled with glory like light, arresting, impossible to look away from. Rea Siluz, the librarian with the halo of brown hair and the full lips, the woman who’d sent Kip to Janus Borig in the first place. Except now he didn’t think ‘woman’ was the right term for her.

He was falling—

No, he was jumping—no, he was fighting, blazing swords in each hand—no, he was cursing the woman he’d given his satrapy for—no, he was hearing a young Blackguard say, “It’s not incarnitive, sir.”

“It’s real damn close.”

Finer gave a jaunty salute, and leapt off the precipice. The magnificent bastard, he did a somersault on the way—

Kip hit the floor, the impact jarring him back to himself. Rea knelt beside him. “Breaker, I can’t help you in this. Get out or you’ll die.”

The light was scouring flesh from bone, was whittling bone to slivers, was grinding slivers into shavings, grinding shavings into dust.

A wind made of light itself, Orholam’s breath, streamed across what once was Kip and scattered him. Scattered to every corner of the Seven Satrapies, beyond. Scattered him from the present and into the past. Blew him out of time, as Orholam was out of time.

She was becoming a wight, as all the luxiats had warned about for her whole life. She’d broken the halo. She should commit suicide. It was the only option. Else what might she do? The Color Prince was betting she would join him, that she would lose her mind in exactly the way he wanted her to. She bit a tiny hole in her tent, letting through one tiny ray of light. If she used the tiny sapphire her Purple Bear Usef had given her, she should—

Zee Oakenshield blinks to clear her eyes. There are enemy armies on both sides of the Great River. She feels a pang at the sight. It isn’t fear. Regret. Should have tried harder. Shouldn’t have spit those witticisms in Darien Guile’s face. The flush of pleasure at besting one of the smartest men in the world, the laughter of the nobles that day, will be paid for in the blood of common men today—

Her pen scratches precise lines: “Dog. Day 1207. Still no differences in physiology beyond what this researcher originally drafted. No changes in psychology detected, though previous caveats about the limits of studying dogs’ minds stand. Day by day, this researcher’s conviction grows that incarnitive drafting can be done safely—if proper protocols are strictly observed. There is a slippery slope here, but the Chromeria is overly cautious. Luxin properly sealed before implantation is no different, and indeed, much safer! than mundane tools. If—”

He staggers from the burning White Oak manor on Big Jasper, flames licking the sky. His skin is sloughing off. He’s screaming even as the healers come running—

Kip gasps. He retches, but the visions won’t let go. There’s so much power flowing through him, he can’t even see. He screams on a raw throat—or tries. It freezes in his throat, fails.

“Kip, Breaker, listen: your heart has stopped. You haven’t much time. Don’t be stalled or distracted by—”

His eyes don’t close, can’t close, but the images flicker as if he’s blinking.

Gavin opens his eyes to the same yellow hell that has greeted—

Ceres is being a bitch, Gunner thinks to hisself—

She must be the last Blackguard alive—

Orholam, black luxin. Black! It—

The light kills—

She—

Chapter 74

“Strange boy,” Murder Sharp said, a few seconds after Kip left his room. Murder Sharp had dropped his invisibility. He unlaced the front of his mask, as if it made him claustrophobic.

Teia said, “Say one more word about my friend. I dare you.”

Master Sharp’s face twisted like he’d drunk vinegar where he expected wine. “There is a time and place to discipline one’s apprentice. This, sadly, is not it. This”—he waved his hand about—“this is weakness, Adrasteia, and you’re best off without it.”

She tried to mentally make a box and drop every emotion into it. Anything she revealed would be made a weapon against her.

“You can’t protect him. You know that, don’t you?” Master Sharp said. “Not from me. Especially not from me. I wonder, what would you do, if I told you that to prove yourself, you’d have to kill him?”

“Why don’t you order it, and find out?” Teia asked.

“Oooh, iron in you. I like.” He smiled that odd, predatory smile where he seemed to be trying to show all of his perfect teeth at once. “You have something for me?”

Teia threw him the cloak, and handed him the climbing crescents, too.

“Dropped one crescent,” she said. “Had to get out of the White’s apartments fast. Blackguard almost caught me on the balcony.”

“But didn’t.” It was a question.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He searched her then. It was a dispassionate violation, like being stripped naked by a man who preferred boys. It made it better, but not by much. He started with her scalp, jamming fingers through her hair roughly. If she’d spent any time on her hair, she’d be furious, but Archers were too practical for elaborate hairstyles on any but feast days.

“Can’t you do this with paryl?” Teia asked.

“Not foolproof, as I’m sure you know.”

She did? Actually, she didn’t. Holy—

Murder Sharp had just jabbed two fingers hard into her groin. In the front side, and the back side. She was so surprised, so violated, that she didn’t even do anything. And then it was over.

“When I was in Ha—” Murder Sharp stopped. “When I was in prison, you’d be amazed what people would put … where. Puffing haze that smells like … midden? Could never make myself so desperate. Not even to fit in. This one Tyrean hid knives up … well. They searched him rough, cut him all up inside. He didn’t live, but for the longest time, he was the … butt of our jokes.”

Hilarious.

He released her and unrolled the cloak, far enough to check the fox sigil. “Just the one? Gebalyn’s burnt cloak?”