failure. A new life’s been handed to me on a plate. Gavin Guile’s son, bastard son, sure, but he hasn’t once treated me like an embarrassment. And I can’t even summon the will to reach out and take this new life. In return for all the good he’s done me, I’m going to humiliate the man who saved my life, who gave me a second chance.
It was like bands of iron were being laid across his chest, and now they tightened, tightened. Kip could barely breathe. His eyes welled with tears. Baby. Failure. Disappointment. His mother’s face, twisted, dangerously high from smoking ratweed laced with ergot: You ruined my life! You’re the worst mistake I ever made. I gave everything and you took it all and gave me nothing! You make me sick, Kip.
Kip, you can throw off those chains. Stop believing those—
“Lies!” the governor shouted. Kip shivered, his skin tingling. The sun was nearly at its zenith. Orholam’s eye pressed down on the land like a physical weight, but to Kip it was a caress. Light, energy, warmth, love, light in dark corners. He looked at the white board, and in the green filtered through his spectacles, he saw one face of Orholam. Kip wouldn’t call it wildness. It was freedom. He wanted to shout, dance for joy, to hell with what anyone thought. There was freedom from all of that, and freedom from the prison of his own head, freedom from the nagging voices of doubt, from the running commentary about everything he saw and did. It was action, and it was as powerful as a redwood springing up in the cracks of a boulder. Life would win. The roots would reach and heave and strain.
Kip could feel those bands of iron around his chest burst asunder. He felt more alive than he had in his whole life. An animal strength and joy.
So this is what they mean by wild.
The yapping governor’s voice shrilled. Kip drew a ball of green luxin into his hand. Just like that? Just by deciding to do it? It seemed too easy. The ball was thick, dense, but flexible to his squeezing fingers. Kip made it bigger, hollow, about twice the size of his own head. Now the flexibility was exaggerated. Soft enough that it wasn’t going to kill anyone.
With the biggest grin on his face, Kip held it in his palms. How had Gavin shot out luxin? Kip had seen Ironfist do it too. He wrinkled his nose. Maybe I just will it.
A tiny part of his mind was protesting: You can’t assault the governor! He’s the governor, for Orholam’s sake. You think his bodyguards are going to appreciate that you don’t really mean to hurt him?
But in the grip of green, words like “governor” were bled of meaning. What was that? What was the difference? The trappings of human rituals and human titles seemed artificial, thin.
Kip willed the ball to shoot out of his hands. Still seated, grinning like a fool, he could feel energy coiling up behind the ball. How long did he let that build before he let it go? Oh well, that felt like long enough. A muffled crack and the ball jetted out of Kip’s hands, fast.
Still seated on the ground, he was blasted ass over elbows.
Rolling to his knees, laughing, Kip looked to see what had happened to the yapping man.
The governor was laid out, and apparently the green luxin ball had bounced around some, because the palanquin was collapsing, two of the slaves tumbling away from it. The palanquin dropped right on top of the governor, and Kip heard him shrieking—but his view was blocked as one of the bodyguards charged Kip, sword out.
Spectacles askew, Kip couldn’t draw any more green, but he still had a good amount in his body. He began drawing another, smaller ball. Too slow, too slow!
The air shimmered between him and the swordsman as he raised his hands. There was a crack from his hands and a tiny green ball shot out, snapping both hands back painfully from the kick.
A wall of blue luxin unfurled between Kip and the swordsman in the blink of an eye. The swordsman’s sword struck the blue wall in midlunge toward the kneeling boy. The blade screeched as it was forced downward, peeling off layers of blue. The swordsman himself smacked bodily into the blue a split second later, grunting. There was a sound like glass cracking, and a high-pitched whine.