every other red-blooded woman in the Chromeria has dreamed about it. No matter. You’ll think about it now.”
“You want me to seduce him?!”
“It is the easiest way to be in a man’s room while he’s sleeping. Then if he wakes while you’re rifling through his letters, you can pretend to be jealous and say you’re looking for letters from some other lover. Truth is, we don’t care how you get close to him, but let’s be honest: what do you have to offer the Prism? Witty conversation? Insight? Not so much. On the other hand, you’re pretty for a Tyrean. You’re young, not very bright, uncultured, not powerful, not a scholar or a poet or a singer. If you can get close to him some other way, great. I’m just betting the odds.”
It was the most eviscerating way to be told you were pretty that Liv had ever heard. “Forget it. I’m not going to be your whore.”
“Your piety’s touching, but it’s not whoring if you want to do it, is it? You’ve seen him. He’s gorgeous. So you get a few extra benefits. You can enjoy him, you can bask in every woman’s jealousy, you get everything that we offer—”
“I don’t want anything more from you.”
“You should have thought of that before you signed your contract. But that’s in the past. Liv, if you can get even one private meeting with Gavin Guile, we will set you up as a bichrome. Get close to him, and we’ll make your rewards even richer than that. But spit in my face, and everything in your life can turn to hellstone. I have full power over your contract, and I will use it.”
The offer of setting up Liv as a bichrome seemed awfully generous just for getting one meeting with the Prism, but she saw the logic behind it. A Prism could do what he wanted, but sleeping with a Tyrean monochrome would seem questionable, tasteless. Slumming. A bichrome, on the other hand, at least had some standing. The truth was, the offer was still probably generous, and might make Gavin more suspicious of them, but the prize—having a spy next to the Prism himself—was worth so much that the Ruthgari were willing to risk it. They needed Liv to say yes.
“Besides,” Aglaia said. “If you’re smarter than I think you are, you can find out for yourself who gave the orders to burn Garriston. You could find out who’s responsible for your mother’s death.”
Chapter 31
Gavin had hunted down hundreds of color wights, and this one didn’t feel right.
The madness struck every color wight differently, but blue wights always reveled in order. They loved the hardness of blue luxin. Most eventually tried to remake themselves with it. Every one of them believed they could avoid madness if only they were careful enough, smart enough, and thought through every step. But what was a blue wight doing crossing the reddest desert in the Seven Satrapies?
Rondar Wit had been posted in one of the smaller coastal cities of Ruthgar. Married, four children, and a good relationship with his lord patron, who’d waited two weeks to report Rondar’s disappearance—no one liked to believe that their friend might go mad.
Gavin trudged through the desert. He’d stopped briefly at one of his contacts on the coast, got dressed entirely in red, and armed, and still thought he should reach the wight before dark. Still, he was exhausted. Skimming was fast, but his arms and shoulders and stomach and legs ached. His will felt sapped. He didn’t get lightsick when he drafted too much—but he did get tired and shaky.
Coming near the top of a dune, he stopped so as not to skyline himself and drafted a pair of long lenses. Tracking blues was usually easy because no matter how smart they were, most couldn’t bear to be illogical. If you figured out where they were going, you could guess they would take the most efficient route there. Gavin had no idea where this one was going, but he was following the coast. Unless his objective was nearby, Gavin was going to assume that the giist would continue heading down the coastline, staying far enough from the coast to avoid farms and towns. Of course, this wight had made a mistake, coming in too close from the desert for the sake of speed and access to water, and had been seen by a boy herding the rangy desert cattle the nomads kept. The boy had told his father,