if she concealed them in these long, flowing sleeves. That left her with her eye caps. The caps, with horizontally streaked lenses of red and green, each fit onto an eye socket, as tight and close to the eye as possible. A thin ridge of sticky red luxin made sure the lenses would stay on her face—and, if she weren’t careful, would rip off half her eyebrow when she removed them. The sticky red luxin was shielded with a little strip of solid yellow luxin that was to be torn off before you stuck the caps onto your eyes.
For all that the eye caps had saved her life a time or three, Karris didn’t like them. Naturally long eyelashes were a nice accessory at the Luxlords’ Ball, but not so much when you had a lens a finger’s breadth from your eye.
Karris hid her caps in plain sight, on a necklace made of chunky multicolored stones, none so clear or interesting as to make the necklace seem valuable. The caps clicked together around one link and blended with all the other stones. Another pair of caps was tucked under her belt buckle.
I’m stalling, she thought.
From where she was now, she had only two choices. She could head down the river and meet up with her contact in Garriston and then come back up the river, or she could try to infiltrate King Garadul’s army on her own. Going down the river would waste time, and she’d still be much too early. There was also the threat of bandits. She assumed her contact would have some good way of circumventing them on the way back up, but that wouldn’t help her as she headed downriver. Going on alone would mean trying to join a hostile army without a proper introduction. And now that Gavin had clashed with King Garadul, the king knew that the Chromeria had already gotten one drafter here, so surely he would be doubly suspicious of anyone else showing up.
In fact, Gavin’s little stunt in Rekton had probably made her work impossible. There were certainly Tyreans as pale as she was, but her accent was wrong, and she was a drafter. To a suspicious camp, everything about her would scream spy. The White’s orders had never factored in the circumstances in which she found herself now. It was like sitting at what you thought was a dignified Parian dinner with its rules, and finding yourself seated with raucous Ilytian pirates feeding you blowfish instead. There were rules for that too, and if you broke them, you’d consume a nice tender morsel that contained a poison that would leave you in agony for ten minutes, at which point it would leave you dead.
And Karris didn’t know the rules here.
Of course, Gavin would just eat the whole damned fish—and somehow, miraculously, it wouldn’t harm him. Everything was effortless for Gavin. He’d never had to work hard for anything. Born with a monumental talent to a scheming rich father, he simply took what he wanted. Even the rules of being a Prism didn’t constrain him—he traveled to and fro about the Seven Satrapies without so much as a Blackguard escort when he didn’t want one. And now he could cross the Cerulean Sea in a few hours. For Orholam’s sake, now he could fly.
Get out of my head, liar. I’m done with you.
The lines didn’t fit. The tiny spoons were gone, and the urums had a thousand tines instead of three. Fine. Karris wasn’t going home. She wasn’t going to wait for some man to come hold her hand and get her into Garadul’s camp. She wasn’t going to fail. There was more than one way to find out what King Garadul’s plans were.
Of course, she didn’t know what those were, but she was going to figure it out. As for now, she remembered something her brother Koios used to say before he’d been killed in the fire: “When you don’t know what to do, do what’s right and do what’s in front of you. But not necessarily what’s right in front of you.”
The town of Rekton had been burned to the ground. There had been one survivor. There might be more, and if there were, they would be in desperate need of help and possibly protection. Those, Karris could provide.
And if it involved lighting some jackass up with a fireball the size of a small house, so much the better.
Chapter 21
They practically flew down the river. Kip had never traveled