Gavin looked at the boy, but Kip seemed suddenly shy.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Gavin said. “You’ll do fine. After all, you’ve got my blood.” He smirked.
Kip looked baffled. “You mean you’re not… saying I’m not your, um, bastard?” Kip himself looked confused with all the negatives.
“No no no. I’m not disavowing you! When I say ‘nephew,’ everyone knows what it means. It’s just more polite. And it pays to be polite where the White is involved.”
Ironfist coughed. He could cough quite pointedly.
Gavin looked at him pointedly in return. Ironfist adjusted his ghotra, his checkered Parian headscarf, as if oblivious.
“But how do people know I’m not really your nephew?” Kip asked. He was still clutching the luxin oar Gavin had drafted for him.
“Because they’ll pause like it’s delicate, and not say your surname. ‘This is Kip, the Lord Prism’s… nephew.’ Not, ‘This is Kip Guile, the Lord Prism’s nephew.’ You see?”
Kip swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
Gavin looked across the waves to the Prism’s tower. He hated being gone overnight. His room slave Marissia would dye the bread and throw it in the chute for the prisoner, and he knew he could trust her. But that was different from doing it himself. He looked back to the frightened boy.
“Do me proud, Kip.”
Chapter 29
Kip watched the Prism head out across the waves with something akin to panic. Gavin was so in control of everything, so fearless, and now he’d left him. With two unfriendly giants.
As Gavin finally disappeared from sight, Kip turned to look at the men. The scarier one, Ironfist, was putting on blue spectacles with large oval lenses wrapped close to his eyes. As Kip watched, the blue luxin filled the man, but it was almost invisible against his coal-black skin. The whites of his eyes already looked blue when you saw them through the blue lenses, so it wasn’t until the skin under his fingernails turned icy blue that Kip was sure he hadn’t just imagined the Blackguard was drafting at all.
“Grab a rope,” Ironfist told his brother. “With the float on it.” Tremblefist disappeared, leaving Kip with his brother.
“I don’t know why you’ve been trusted with this island’s secret,” Ironfist said, “even if you are his… nephew. But now that you know, you’re a guardian of it like the rest of us, you understand?”
“He did it so if I betray him men like you will come kill me for him,” Kip said. Was he never able to keep his mouth shut?
A look of surprise flitted across Ironfist’s face, and was quickly replaced with amusement. “A deep thinker, our friend,” he said. “And a young man with ice water in his veins. How appropriate.”
From the “our friend,” Kip understood that they weren’t even to say the Prism’s name here, not even now, with the wind whipping around them and the possibility of eavesdropping nil. It was that kind of secret.
“The story is you and your master, a scribe, came out on a friend’s boat to… hmm.”
“To study some local fish?” Kip asked.
“Good enough,” Ironfist said. “He didn’t account for the waves and had no skill with boats. He tried to bring you here for shelter. Your dory capsized and he was lost. We pulled you out of the sea.”
“Oh, to account for why he isn’t here if any of the others saw us coming in,” Kip said.
“That’s right. Hold tight.”
Kip was holding a luxin oar up between himself and Ironfist, but he almost didn’t get what the big man meant until too late. With a quick, snapping punch, Ironfist lashed a hand through the luxin and stopped it so close that Kip flinched. He barely even noticed the luxin crumbling to dust in his fingers. He had a sudden urge to urinate.
“I don’t know if you’ve given your sire reason to suspect you,” Ironfist said. “But if you betray him, I’ll tear your arms off and beat you with them.”
“Good thing I’m fat, then,” Kip shot back.
“What?” Incredulous.
“Soft arms.” Kip grinned, thinking Ironfist had been kidding. The stony, flat, willing-to-kill look on the big man’s face made Kip’s grin break and disintegrate like broken luxin.
“That fat’ll make you float, too. Get in the water,” a cold voice behind him said.
Kip flinched. He hadn’t even heard Tremblefist approach. The man was carrying a hollow log with numerous knotted ropes and loops attached. The wood was carved with several handles too, so it would be easy to throw into the sea. A swimmer could then grab for whatever length of rope he needed.