The Broken Eye (77 page)

That’s me: underwhelming.

He had a sudden memory of telling his grandfather he
liked
to be underestimated. And here was the opposite. “What do you want, Tisis?”

She raised her hands in mock surrender. The movement coincided with her sitting up straighter and rising perilously high in the water, her bare shoulders and chest confirming that she was not wearing a bathing robe. “Kip, we have good reason to hate each other,” she said. “Though I like to think my reasons are more substantial than yours are. I know you think there was some big conspiracy against you at your Threshing, but there wasn’t. We always try to scare people. And when you threw the rope out of the hole, I really thought you weren’t allowed to, so I gave it back. It was an innocent mistake. On the other hand, you killed my father.”

When you put it that way…”Whatever that thing was, it stopped being your father long ago,” Kip said.

“Something it would have been nice to judge for myself, rather than assured that by the man who killed him. Besides, your father and uncle destroyed half the world, I—”

“And your family joined the wrong side to help do it!” Kip said. Man?

“An error we corrected,” Tisis said, her chin drifting up.

“You came out against Dazen? When? After he was killed at Sundered Rock? Brave.”

“I would think of all people, Kip, that you might not be the first to blame a person for what their family did when they were young. You weren’t born yet; I was two. Should I blame you for what your mother did? Because I’ve heard stories—from people who heard them from you. So maybe we should focus on where we are today, and not old fights that we had no part in.”

“That sounds … remarkably sensible,” Kip admitted. It was easier to focus when he was having to dissect her argument, but at the same time, she’d leaned forward and up as her temper got going. He cleared his throat. “Could you, um…” He took his hand and gestured down a smidge.

She looked down, and saw that her nipples were right at the waterline, and the water wasn’t that soapy. “Oh!” She blushed, and with her pale skin, he could tell immediately. She sat lower in the water. “Thanks,” she said. Something touched his naked thigh, and he nearly shot out of the water.

She burst out laughing. “Come on, Kip, as you so pointedly, uh, pointed out, you have seen me naked before. It shouldn’t be a surprise.”

I don’t think that’s how seeing a beautiful woman naked works. “The first time I saw you, I was about go into the Thresher and you looked into my eyes and lectured me about self-control. I thought you’d tear my head off if I dared—and the second time! My grandfather?!”

Her lip twisted. “Believe me, I know I actually owe you for stopping that before it went any further.”

He looked at her and they both burst out laughing.

Her laughter wasn’t seductive; it was hilarious. Full-throated, distinctive, it was the kind of laugh you could pick out of a crowd of thousands, the kind of laugh that snuck out of its cage infrequently and burned the town down when it did, ’cause, hell, it was just going back in the cage again anyway, right? And then she snorted.

They laughed harder, and she blushed and laughed and snorted so hard she ended up trailing off in tears.

They drifted into a companionable silence as Tisis wiped her eyes. She ended up cleaning off the kohl makeup dripping from around her eyes with a little towel. When she was done, Kip stared at her quizzically. Without her makeup on, she didn’t look twenty-five years old like she did with it on. She didn’t look her actual nineteen years. She looked about seventeen. No wonder she wore the makeup.

She was just a teenager like him, and they were both very, very alone here.

“Kip,” she said, “the truth is, my family’s in a bad spot. The False Prism’s War wiped out the other branches of the family. Perversely, that strengthened us, because with all the wealth and lands of our entire clan in my uncle’s hands, we became a major family. I think that your grandfather thinks we’re a threat to him. We proposed that I marry your father Gavin to make an alliance, and we thought your grandfather was going to accept. Instead, Gavin married Karris. It was a slap in our faces. Never explained, never apologized for.”

She had been intending to marry Gavin? And she’d had to go from
that
to putting her hands under the blankets for my grandfather? Now there was a turn of Fortune’s Wheel.

But Kip kept his features carefully blank. There’s a time not to use the Lip.

“I don’t know why, but I fear Andross has decided to let us be destroyed. The war isn’t going well, everyone knows it. Our richest lands are those nearest the Color Prince’s army. We’re afraid the promachos plans to let the Color Prince take our lands and wealth and only stop him after he’s destroyed us. Kip, you have no idea what it feels like to admit this—especially to a Guile—but my family is right on the edge. My mother passed away two years ago. My father’s dead. If it were a will, my older sister Eirene got all the family intelligence, I got all the looks, and all the charisma I should have gotten went to my little cousin Antonius instead. Eirene will continue the family line if she absolutely must, but it would be hell for her, and I won’t do that to her if I can help it.”

“What?” Kip asked. Sure, some women didn’t want to get stuck raising children, but a wealthy family would have slaves for that, wouldn’t they?

A scowl. “I forget you’re not in the gossip circles,” Tisis said. “Her interest in taking any man to bed is about equal to your interest in taking your grandfather to bed.”

“Oh,” Kip said, not understanding. Then, “
Oh!
”

“My cousin Antonius was on his way here to bring orders from my sister. His ship was captured by pirates. They haven’t asked a ransom, which they would, if he were alive.” Her eyes went vacant, her voice an echo of itself. She obviously loved him very much. “That leaves me,” she said. “Kip, our southern plantations and forests
can
be defended. But if they aren’t … those are my people. More than fifty thousand of them. I grew up in those lands. I played banconn in their festival parades. I was taught farming and husbandry and logging in those little towns. I played with little boys and girls there. Many of those little girls I played with have children of their own now. Life moves faster out on the farms. I will do
anything
to save my people.”

Including getting on your back for my grandfather.

“Yes,” she said quietly, reading his mind. “Even that. My virginity for their lives? I’ll take that trade any day.”

For some reason, the statement made Kip deeply ashamed of himself. He’d judged Tisis as if she were merely angling for the attention of the most important man in the room, willing to debase herself even with Andross Guile. Like she was a tramp or a prostitute.

Some of the noble families had made their base on Big Jasper for so long that they had little to no connection to their ancestral holdings. Perhaps the lord or lady would make one trip a year to check how the stewards were keeping things together, but their children were left vying with the children of other nobles for who could throw the most lavish party, who could gamble better or dance better or ride better, with constant talk of who’d bedded whom that morphed into who would marry whom, followed by more gossip of who was carrying on affairs with whom. Or they used some tiny sliver of magical talent to get into the Chromeria, where they ended up doing much the same, with a side of studying. Kip hadn’t been part of those circles despite his pedigree, his time taken up entirely with studies or training.

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.