a thin shirt that left lean, muscled arms uncovered despite the cold morning. A pair of red spectacles sat low on his nose.
“Ow, ow.” Kip looked at his skinned palms. His knees were burning too. “No, no I’m not.” He hitched his pants up, wincing as his scraped palms rubbed on the heavy, once-black linen.
“Good, good, because—ah, here. Tell me, are these the same?” Master Danavis put out both of his hands. Both were bright red, filled with luxin from the elbow to his fingers. He turned his arm over so that his light kopi-and-cream-colored skin wouldn’t interfere as much with Kip’s examination. Like Kip, Master Danavis was a half-breed—though Kip had never heard anyone give the drafter any trouble for that, unlike him. In the dyer’s case, he was half Blood Forester, his face marked with a few strange dots they called freckles, and a hint of red in his otherwise normal dark hair. But at least his lighter than normal skin made what he was asking Kip easy.
Kip pointed to a region from the dyer’s forearm to his elbow. “This red changes color here, and this one’s a bit brighter. Can I, uh, talk to you, sir?”
Master Danavis flicked both hands down with disgust and ruby luxin splashed onto ground already splattered a hundred shades of red. The gooey luxin crumpled and dissolved. Most afternoons, Kip came to sweep up the remnants—red luxin was flammable even when it was dust. “Superchromats! It’s one thing for my daughter to be one, but the alcaldesa’s husband? And you? Two men in one town? Wait, what’s wrong, Kip?”
“Sir, there’s ah…” Kip hesitated. Not only was the battlefield forbidden, but Master Danavis had once said that he thought scavenging there was no different than grave robbing. “Have you heard from Liv, sir?” Coward. Three years ago, Liv Danavis had left to be trained at the Chromeria like her father before her. They’d only been able to afford for her to come home at the harvest break her first year.
“Come here, boy. Show me those hands.” Master Danavis grabbed a clean rag and blotted up the blood, dislodging the dirt with firm strokes. Then he uncorked a jug and held the rag over its mouth. He rubbed the brandy-soaked rag over Kip’s palms.
Kip gasped.
“Don’t be a baby,” Master Danavis said. Even though Kip had done odd jobs for the dyer for as long as he could remember, he was still scared of him sometimes. “Knees.”
Grimacing, Kip pulled up one pant leg and propped his foot on a work bench. Liv was two years older than Kip—almost seventeen now. Not even the lack of men in the village had made her look at Kip as anything more than a child, of course, but she had always been nice to him. A pretty girl being nice and only accidentally patronizing was pretty much the best Kip could hope for.
“Let’s just say that not all sharks and sea demons are in the sea. Chromeria’s a tough place for a Tyrean since the war.”
“So you think she might come home?”
“Kip,” Master Danavis said, “is your mother in trouble again?”
Master Danavis had refused to apprentice Kip as a dyer, saying there wasn’t enough work in little Rekton to give Kip a future, and insisting he only was a halfway decent dyer himself because he could draft. He’d been something else before the Prisms’ War, obviously, because he’d been Chromeria trained. That wasn’t cheap, and most drafters were sworn to service to pay the expense. So Master Danavis’s own master must have been killed during the war, leaving him adrift. But few adults talked about those days. Tyrea had lost and everything had gotten bad, that’s all Kip or the other children knew.
Still, Master Danavis paid Kip to do odd jobs and, like half the mothers in town, would give him a meal anytime he wandered by. Even better, he always let Kip eat the cakes the women in town sent, trying to attract the handsome bachelor’s attention.
“Sir, there’s an army on the other side of the river. They’re coming to wipe out the town to make an example of us for defying King Garadul.”
Master Danavis started to say something, then saw that Kip was serious. He said nothing for a moment, then his whole demeanor changed.
He started asking Kip questions rapid-fire: where were they exactly, when was he there, how did he know they were going to wipe out the town, what had the tents looked like, how