The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,110

her office and dishonoring her husband and her old friend—was cheap. If Karris tried to tell the truth, she would shame Ironfist, get Teia killed, and doom the empire.

The Blackguards sometimes repeated an old saying that sounded like bluster from those who didn’t live and die by it. It was what they said when a brother or a sister had to take a battlefield Freeing: Death before dishonor. Now, to those who counted on her, one way or another, no matter what Karris did, she would bring death and dis-honor both.

She sat on the bench and felt as if the world had slipped out of joint.

Ironfist had been a dear friend. A man she’d admired and appreciated for so long in so many ways that what began as a political marriage could become more in time . . . if it weren’t based on deception. If it didn’t shame and dishonor them both.

But how could she say no to him? Acceptance was so obviously the right thing to do on every conceivable level that her rejection would make him lose face. It would seem a profound personal rejection. It would shame him, and he wasn’t only her former friend. He was a king.

Rejecting him had consequences far beyond her.

But how could she not reject him? She was married. To a man she loved. To a man she’d waited for without any hope offered, waited and waited . . . until yesterday. And now she was going to give up on him, again?

Her own happiness was the last thing she could think of. She was the White.

Shortly before she’d died, Orea Pullawr had once asked Karris not to hate her. Karris still didn’t know what for, but apparently there were hard truths in that mysterious bundle of papers the Order had stolen. But maybe the papers were irrelevant now. She understood what Orea had meant.

Not so long ago, Karris wouldn’t have believed it was even possible to do the wrong things for the right reasons. Now she knew she would do things for entirely unselfish reasons, knowing she would regret them bitterly afterward.

She was the White now.

The White didn’t wait for a man to come save her.

The White was the one who came to save.

She didn’t seek her heart’s desire instead of doing her duty; she made it her heart’s desire to seek her duty.

So. ‘ Big-girl pants.’ Thank you, Orea. The burden you left me is heavy, but a White Oak stands strong in the storm.

Karris had until Sun Day. She could search for Gavin until then. If she could produce him, she wouldn’t have to remarry. Couldn’t. If she found him, Gavin would forgive Ironfist’s betrayal, and Ironfist would trust Gavin’s word that his absolution would hold. Peace and alliance were still possible. The rift could be mended. Wounds healed.

She would have to destroy the Order before Sun Day, though. Utterly, if she hoped to live in peace. If they ever hoped to be safe again.

If she failed, when Sun Day came, she would do what she must. What the innocent lives she safeguarded demanded of her. She would keep her mouth shut and marry, thus dishonoring two men, herself, and the office that demanded purity.

But then, once her people were saved?

What moral authority had a White who had stained her robes dark with broken vows? How could that which was white hide a stain?

She wouldn’t try. She wouldn’t heap deceit upon deceit. Her people would live, but having proven herself unable to live with honor . . .

Her mind flashed suddenly to her father. In that horrible fire, the White Oak family had lost not only all her brothers and the estate itself, but also goods worth more than the indebted family could ever repay. Despite her attempt to elope with Dazen, Karris’s engagement to Gavin Guile must have looked like the only way to save the family. Gavin had known it, too, mocking him, talking in front of him in the most disgusting terms about what he was going to do with Karris—who drank herself into a stupor that night, hoping to make herself insensate. The eldest Guile son had done all he’d promised, too. Then he told Karris she wasn’t good enough for him, not smart enough, not pretty enough, too boring, sexually dull. He told her he didn’t care about her family’s lost fortune—but that he could never marry a woman so far beneath himself in every other way. She hadn’t fought him then, not