spent hardly moving from that chair, his skin loose and spotted already at sixty-five.
“Son, so good of you to come visit. An old man grows lonely.”
“I’m sorry, father. The White keeps me very busy.”
“You shouldn’t be so supine with that wheeled wench. You should arrange for the hag to join the Freeing this year.”
Gavin let that pass without comment. It was an old argument. The White said the same things about Andross, minus the derogation. Gavin sat beside his father and studied him in the eerie superviolet light of his torch.
Despite the absolute darkness of the room, Andross Guile wore blackened spectacles molded tight around his eye sockets. Gavin couldn’t imagine living in utter darkness. He hadn’t even done that to his brother. Andross Guile had been a yellow to sub-red polychrome. Like so many other drafters during the False Prism’s War, he’d pushed himself to his absolute limit. And beyond. He’d fought, of course, for his eldest son. Using too much magic, he’d finally destroyed his body’s defenses against it. But after the war, when so many drafters had taken the Freeing, Andross had instead withdrawn to these rooms. When Gavin had first come to visit Andross here, there had been blue filters set on the windows. With his own power at the opposite end of the spectrum, Andross had felt safe with blue light. Since then, the chirurgeons had told him he needed complete darkness if he was to keep fighting the colors. If he was taking such extreme precautions, he must be very close to the brink indeed.
“I hear you’re trying to start a war,” Andross said.
“I rarely try without succeeding, I’m afraid,” Gavin said. He didn’t bother marveling that his father already knew. Of course Andross Guile knew. The man owned the loyalty or the fear of half of the most powerful women and men in the tower.
“How?”
“I received a letter that I had a natural son in Tyrea. When I arrived, the town was burning. I stumbled across some Mirrormen about to murder a child and I stopped them.”
“Killed them.”
“Yes. The child turned out to be my natural son, and the men turned out to be Rask Garadul’s. He was making an example of the town for refusing to send levies. He claimed a special interest in the boy, but I’m not sure if that was just because he thought it would hurt me.”
“A special interest? I thought he was there to punish the village.”
“He said Kip had stolen something from him.”
“And had he?”
“The boy claimed his mother had given him a jewelry case just before dying from injuries she took during the attack. He didn’t steal it, though.”
“But you have the dagger? Is it the white luxin?”
A chill shot down Gavin’s spine. He’d thought the worst part of this interview would be his father picking through the details of affairs that Gavin hadn’t actually had and thus couldn’t remember. A white luxin dagger? White luxin wasn’t possible, and for Andross Guile to speak about it like this meant he thought that it was. Or knew that it was. That he’d seen such a thing, and that he thought Gavin should know what he was talking about.
His brother had mentioned a dagger too. Gavin’s chest tightened.
If he wasn’t very careful, he was going to ruin his disguise. This was why he avoided his father as much as possible. Andross Guile was one of the few people who would know exactly which memories Gavin would have and which Dazen would have. Others who knew had been alienated or killed during the war. The feeble excuse that the severity of the brothers’ fight to the death had made Gavin forget things would only go so far. Andross, in particular, might forgive him for misremembering things that happened in the run-up to the final battle, but surely Gavin would remember things that had happened years earlier, wouldn’t he?
“I didn’t see the dagger,” Gavin said. “It was in a box. It didn’t even occur to me it might be the white luxin.” White luxin was impossible. Gavin would know. He’d tried to make the mythic material himself—and as a Prism, he would be the one who was able to do it if it could be done at all.
“Idiot boy, I don’t know why I always favored you. Dazen was smarter by half, but I always took your side, didn’t I?”
Gavin looked at the ground and nodded. The first kind word he’d heard from his father about himself in years,