You’re not to leave until I come get you tomorrow at dawn.”
“But we came across those huge waves instead of waiting, I—I thought we were going straight to the Chromeria.”
“I’m going straight to the Chromeria.”
“While I just sit here all day?”
“When you see what you have to do tomorrow, you’ll be glad you had the rest.” Ironfist moved to leave.
“But, what—what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go get back in the White’s good graces.”
Kip scowled as the door closed. There was a click. He was locked in. “That’s great,” he told the closed door. “I’ll just wait here. I’ve been meaning to catch up on my thumb-twiddling.” Grumbling, he made his way to the olives and cheese. Ten minutes later, he was asleep.
Chapter 33
Karris woke beneath a lean-to constructed of tree branches and a man’s cloak. It was either dusk or dawn. She guessed dawn from the dew on the ground. She examined herself with a soldier’s efficiency, moving each limb and digit experimentally, trying to gauge her own potential for movement, violent or otherwise. All her fingers and toes worked properly, but her entire left side was bruised. She must have not only crashed through the doorframe with her upper body there, but also landed on her left side, because her shin ached, her knee ached, there were gravel scratches on her hip, her breast felt like someone had mistaken it for a sawdust-filled training bag and punched it for an hour, and her shoulder—Orholam, her shoulder. She could breathe without much pain, though, which she hoped meant there weren’t any broken ribs, and she could still move her arm, although it almost made her black out to do so.
Her right side hadn’t escaped undamaged either. She had long gravel scrapes on her right arm and her stomach, probably some to match on her back, and her neck was sore from Orholam knew what. She’d stubbed all the toes of her right foot—didn’t remember doing that either—and her left eye was swollen, not enough to block her vision, but enough to look real pretty. There was also a scratch on her forehead, several attractive lumps on her head, and—what the hell, a cut right on the tip of her nose?
No, not a cut. A pimple. Unbe—A pimple? Now? Orholam hates me.
Every one of her cuts and scratches had been smeared with some kind of ointment that smelled of berries and pine needles. Someone cleared his throat. “There’s more ointment to your right. I tended the more… obvious cuts.”
Which Karris took to mean that Corvan hadn’t stripped her naked.
“Thanks,” she grumbled. “What happened back there?”
“Aside from the obvious?” Corvan asked, his voice flat.
“In the church, downstairs. I’ve never seen red luxin that didn’t burn cleanly. If you drafted it wrong, it should have evaporated, not formed a crust. And what was that thing you were in?” Karris sat up, wincing. Her ankle hurt too. Ow, when had she twisted her ankle? She ignored it, and tried to remember all she knew about Corvan Danavis. He’d been a rebel, of course, but before he’d sided with Dazen, he’d been a scion of one of the great Ruthgari families. For nearly a hundred years, Ruthgar and the Blood Forest had been bound together in peace, the closest of allies. Noble families from Ruthgar had intermarried with the leading families of Blood Foresters, holding lands on either side of the Great River. Other peoples had begun referring to the countries as one, merging the Verdant Plains and the Blood Forest to call the joint country Green Forest. Vician’s Sin had put an end to that, and by a generation before the False Prism’s War, the countries were instead known as the Blood Plains. If one good thing had come from the False Prism’s War, it was that it had given Gavin the clout to finally end the interminable small-scale war constantly simmering between Ruthgar and the Blood Forest.
Corvan was a product of that conflict. Born into a warrior family, with some ungodly number of brothers (eight? ten?), he was, Karris thought she remembered, the last one alive. Karris barely remembered him from before the False Prism’s War. He was just another Ruthgari from old blood left suddenly penniless with little more than the fine weapons he carried and the fine clothes on his back. He’d been a monochrome, too, so his prospects of reclaiming wealth in some other land had been dismal. When the war had started, he’d joined Dazen immediately,