There was no point reasoning with them, even if Liv had cared to. Fools who could be our friends at some other time, her father had said. After she finished eating, she put on her yellow spectacles, drafted a few luxin torches that would last for a few days to thank them for the soup and the fruit, asked directions to where the drafters were camped, and then headed out.
No one bothered her on her way. Once a man called out to her as she passed, but the comment dried up on his lips as he saw her colored spectacles—even now, in the darkness, they respected drafters.
The drafters’ tents were separate from everyone else’s—not because they were guarded or staked off, but evidently no one wanted to camp too close to them. Liv slipped her spectacles off, but kept them in hand, in case someone challenged her.
She moved past a wagon surrounded by Mirrormen and painted all violet—odd, but she didn’t slow, she moved with purpose, as if she had orders. It was a trick she’d learned in the Chromeria. If you stood around, some full drafter would find something for you to do. If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.
She passed a number of fires with drafters being served a lavish dinner by cooks and wine or ales by a large number of slaves. The drafters all wore their colors on their wrists in either cloth or metal vambraces or in large bracelets for some of the women. The hem of their cloaks or dresses also echoed the color. Other than that, everyone wore his own style. In general, though, these drafters were much more interested in loudly proclaiming their colors in broad swathes across their clothes than was common at the Chromeria, where a woman might have a single green hairpin to let others know she was a green.
They were a raucous, privileged group, but as Liv watched from the shadows, she saw that the men and women here often glanced to the south—not to the huge pavilion guarded by drafters and Mirrormen alike that Liv assumed was King Garadul’s residence, but to another set of bonfires. She grabbed a pitcher of wine from one of the slaves’ tables and headed over. In the dark, her own apparel didn’t look too different from the slaves’.
What she saw, beyond the forms of the slaves, took her breath away. People—or monsters shaped like people—were talking, drinking, cavorting, drafting.
Nearest to Liv, a circle of blue drafters, half of them wearing blue spectacles, and all filled with blue luxin, tinting their skin in the firelight, were talking with a woman who seemed made of crystal.
For long moments, Liv had no idea what she was seeing. They were drafters, though, obviously, and there was luxin everywhere. Oathbreakers. The mad. The broken. Color wights. Liv could barely take it in.
These were people who’d violated everything Liv had been taught. She caught only fractured details. A broken-haloed eye. The crystalline woman drafting a matrix in the air as the other blues listened. Greens laughing, dancing around one fire, bouncing on unnaturally springy legs, jumping higher than any man Liv had ever seen, doing flips and backflips over each other. A man and a woman, skin permanently green but not yet transformed, were standing, holding each other, grinding their hips together, dancing in a manner so lascivious that—wait, no, the woman’s skirt was bunched around her waist. In full view of everyone, including some cheering drafters, they were actually—
Liv tore her eyes away, her cheeks suddenly hot. A yellow was tossing little luxin balls into the air while a blue shot blue bullets at them, each little target exploding in a flash of light when he connected.
But Liv’s eyes were drawn to the full color wights. Even here, there weren’t many. She’d only heard rumors about such things at the Chromeria. They said almost everyone who broke their halo simply went mad and died—or went mad and killed others, more often. That danger was what made the Pact necessary. Orholam made magic to serve men, and a drafter swore to serve her community. Oathbreakers served only themselves, and they endangered everyone.
But there were always the legends of those who remade themselves. Now, here, Liv was seeing that they weren’t wild tales. Now, here, these drafters were teaching each other how to do it. Liv looked at the crystal blue woman. She was oddly beautiful. Crystal hair,