there was no foreign color shot through those eyes.
The luxlord smiled. “No,” he said, “I’m not a drafter. The Black usually isn’t. My name is Carver Black. Luxlord Black, for most purposes.” The name didn’t sound Atashian, so maybe he was Ilytian, but Kip guessed the man could just as easily have grown up here or anywhere. Obviously, there was a lot of trade and movement among certain nations. Just not Tyrea.
Kip moved to speak, stopped, pointed to his lips.
“Yes,” the luxlord said. “You can speak. We’ll begin momentarily, as soon as Arien is ready.”
“Um, nice to meet you, Luxlord Black. I’m Kip.”
“And you, Magister?” Luxlord Black asked. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, Luxlord,” she said. She sat at the chair, and the Black stood beside the table. Kip came to stand in front of the table himself.
Magister Arien was short and skinny, nervous around the Black, but happy and cute. She looked up at Kip like she wanted him to succeed. He tried not to let her orange eyes disturb him. “Supplicant,” she said, “I’m going to lay out a series of colored tiles, from one tone to another. You will arrange the tiles in order.” She smiled suddenly. “We’ll start easy.”
With that, she opened a bag in her lap, rummaged through the tiles for a bit, and extracted a black tile and a white tile. These she laid at the edges of the table. Then she laid a dozen tiles in various shades of gray in between. Kip quickly moved them into place from lightest to darkest.
Arien said nothing, simply checked the backs of the tiles, made marks on a parchment, and swept the tiles off the table and back into the bag. Then she laid out brown tiles, from a tumbleweed to sepia. This was harder, but Kip swapped tiles quickly once more.
The test was repeated with blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. When Kip got the reds perfect, Arien pulled out a black bag, checked the backs of the tiles carefully—shielding them from Kip’s eyes with a hand as she did so—and lined up another series of reds, except this group had twice as many tiles, so the gradations of color were much much finer. Scarlets, vermilions, strawberry, raspberry, cerise. Kip lined them up and only had trouble with one. The color at the edge of that tile was slightly darker than the color on its face. Finally he put it in its spot by the color on its face.
She flipped the tiles over, and Kip saw that he’d put tile fourteen between tiles nine and ten. Arien winked at him apologetically, as if he’d done better than she expected, despite failing.
“That’s not right,” Kip said.
“Silence!” Luxlord Black said. “I know you don’t know our ways, supplicant, but you will not speak during the testing.”
“But it’s wrong,” Kip said.
“I’m warning you.”
Kip raised his hands in silent protest.
Luxlord Black sighed. “Magister?” he asked. “Usually protests have to be lodged after the test results are finalized, but apparently nothing is going to go according to custom today. A judgment, please?”
Arien flipped the tiles back over as Kip had had them lined up. She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Luxlord, I’m sorry, I’m not a superchromat. I tried to tell you. I can’t tell the difference myself. The key says that the—”
“The key is being challenged.” Luxlord Black scratched an eye with one finger. “Half of women superchromats, and I choose… Never you mind. Go get a superchromat, Magister.”
“Yes, Luxlord,” she said meekly.
She left and the luxlord turned his green eyes to Kip. “Who are you, really? Why are you testing today? Why the special treatment? Where are you from?”
“I’m from Tyrea, sir. King Garadul wiped out my—”
“King? What’s this about?”
The door opened and Magister Arien came in, followed by a woman who looked like a scarecrow. She was almost as tall as Luxlord Black, lean as a rail, with faded brown skin, bones sticking out at sharp angles, wrinkled, her kinky hair white and short with only a few wisps of something darker clinging to the tips, the natural mahogany of her eyes eclipsed by orange and red in jagged starbursts through her irises, reaching almost to the outer edge.
“Mistress Kerawon Varidos, I’m sorry to disturb you,” Luxlord Black said. He shot a look at Arien.
“She was just in the hall; she asked what I was doing,” Arien said defensively.
“Nearly bowled me over. What’s this challenge?” the old woman asked. The tiles were lying face up the way Kip had left