thing to do, but that didn’t mean he always did it.
“So she still doesn’t know?”
“No. That’s why I broke our betrothal.”
“Because she was the mostly likely to see through you, or some other reason?” Corvan asked.
“We destroyed her. Dazen burned down her home and the war took the rest. I didn’t realize she had nothing—and I should have. By the time I offered to restore her family’s fortune, it seemed like an insult. She spat on me and disappeared for a year. When she came back, she was different.”
“I noticed. A Blackguard. An astounding achievement. But you didn’t answer my question.”
Though it was getting darker, the streets were comfortably warm, and if anything, the crowds were getting thicker, people lighting lamps outside their own homes or shops. Others were relaxing, drinking on the flat roofs of their houses. It was almost as if doom weren’t impending.
Gavin looked around and made sure his voice was low enough not to carry. “I’ve lied to everyone. I’ve lied so much sometimes I forget who I was. With everything my brother and I did to Karris… I couldn’t—well, shit, she’s seen us both naked, hasn’t she? If anyone would know, she would. It would be the quickest way to destroy everything.”
“True enough, but you were going to say something else,” Corvan said, looking down at his saddle, giving Gavin that shred of privacy.
“I thought about it, you know? How to marry her and still deceive her. Or, failing that, how to show her that she had no choice but to keep my secret. In the end, she was the one thing I wasn’t willing to defile. After I ran away, she fell in love with my brother. If she figured out the truth and decided to destroy me…” Gavin shrugged.
Now Corvan did look him in the eye. “I don’t know whether to admire you all the more, or to be horrified that you’d be so stupid.”
“I usually opt to admire me all the more,” Gavin said, grinning.
Corvan gave a grudging smile, but didn’t laugh.
They rode through the streets as quickly as they could without crushing anyone, and arrived at the Travertine Palace as darkness set in. Ironfist was standing at the gate. Uncharacteristically, he had a huge grin on his face.
“High Lord Prism,” he said. “Dinner awaits.”
Gavin scowled. If Ironfist was grinning, it meant something awkward, unpleasant, or vexing was coming. But he wasn’t going to ask. With that grin, Ironfist would just grin bigger and enjoy being mysterious. Fine. Gavin started walking toward the private dining hall.
“High Lord,” Ironfist interjected. “The great hall.”
It was only a few steps away. Gavin barely had time to think why they might possibly need the great hall for dinner before he was inside the antechamber to the great domed hall.
The great hall of the Travertine Palace, though perhaps only a third the size of the Chromeria’s great hall, was one of the wonders of the old world. The doorways were enormous bulbous horseshoe arches, striped green and white, speaking of the days when half of Tyrea had been a Parian province. Travertine and white marble alternated everywhere: in the chessboard pattern of the floor, in intricate geometric shapes on the walls, and in old Parian runes that decorated the bases of the eight great wooden pillars that supported the ceiling, their layout an eight-pointed star. Each pillar was a full five paces thick—atasifusta, the widest trees in the world—and none narrowed perceptibly before reaching the ceiling. The wood was said to have been the gift of an Atashian king, five hundred years before. Even then it had been precious. Now they were extinct, the last grove cut down during the Prisms’ War. Gavin had never found out who had done that. When he arrived in Ru, the grove was simply gone. His commanders—Dazen’s commanders—had sworn the last trees were standing when they left the city. Gavin’s commanders after the war had sworn the trees were gone when they arrived.
What made the atasifusta unique was that its sap had properties like concentrated red luxin. The trees took a hundred years to reach full size—these giants had been several hundreds of years old when they’d been cut. But after they reached maturity, holes could be drilled in the trunk, and if the tree was large enough, the sap would drain slowly enough to feed flames. These eight giants each bore a hundred twenty-seven holes, the number apparently significant once, but that significance lost. On first look, it appeared that