The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,116

to ask that, right after we . . . had a moment?”

“Fine, fine, what’s my greatest strength?”

“You have lots of great strengths—”

“No, I’m not hunting for compliments,” Kip said. “It’s what you’ve said before.”

“You mean that you see with your heart? That you have compassion—could you put that away now?—that you have compassion that allows you to understand people, even in moments where another man would be sunk into his own needs and plans.”

“Right! And thank you,” Kip said, getting his own clothes back into place. “So the flip side is my great weakness. I see the small stuff, and I lose the big.”

“The small stuff is the big stuff,” Tisis said.

“With people, yeah. But not as a leader. Hey, you mind if I open the door now?”

“Do I look like I just had amazing sex?” Tisis asked.

Kip hesitated. “This isn’t a trick question, is it?”

“Let me rephrase. Do I look like I just had sex in a closet?”

“Still not tracking.”

“Do I look rumpled, Kip? Do I smell like—”

“No—oh, and yes. You and me both, actually.”

She scowled, then gazed at the green mag torch. She drafted a little. “Okay, fine, now I don’t care.”

“You know, you really shouldn’ t—”

“Please lecture me about how much I’m drafting,” she said sharply.

He shut his mouth. “Pot, meet kettle. Objection withdrawn.”

“Go on, now,” she said, opening the door.

Out in the fuller-spectrum light of the room, she definitely looked like she’d just had sex. Hair not all tucked into her ponytail, cheeks flushed, clothes a bit askew.

“Mirror’s right there,” Cruxer said, otherwise stony-faced. “And General Antonius is here to present tomorrow’s training regimen and the daily report.”

Tisis groaned. For all her earlier bluster, she was mortified when it came to her cousin learning anything about her sex life. They’d grown up together.

The call of a million duties delivered one after another, each somewhat different, and yet always stultifyingly the same, threatened to pull Kip back into their games.

“Ask him to wait,” Kip said.

‘Thank you,’ Tisis mouthed, as Cruxer did so.

Kip sat silent, though.

He was being played. In the clamor of a million needs, he’d lost sight of his adversary. Koios had a plan. Nothing here—or at least very little—was by accident.

The thoughts swirled: an ambassador sweats when he shouldn’t, and then doesn’t when he should. Assassins fail at a job that should have been easy. A drafter wears armor, not to protect herself from her enemies but to protect her friends from herself. A map doesn’t report what it should, and . . . maybe . . .

What if it also did show what it shouldn’t?

Kip walked over to the map table.

He blacked out half a dozen of the blooming lights behind them—refugees’ and scouts’ reports that had come from the Great River behind them, reporting about various events, but that altogether told them the river was open when it actually hadn’t been.

It had only taken six reports to lead them astray, because they didn’t expect more: bandits were enslaving everyone in that area they could grab.

Now he ran the map backward and forward without those six reports, and saw a dark area in the map, right behind them, a shadow that they might otherwise have feared.

Koios had done that.

“These are the bad reports,” Kip said. “These are the refugees who are spies.”

Tisis was standing at the map table with him. “Yeah, these three for sure, and I’m checking into these ones now.”

“They are,” Kip said.

“How do you . . . ?”

But he barely heard her. This darkness on the map had hid an enormous threat. What if there were another?

“Something’s missing,” Kip said. “Something . . . Cruxer, was there ever any emissary from the White King? Someone that the soldiers stopped? Any news of someone being waylaid by angry townspeople?”

“Uh-uh,” Cruxer said.

“Why would there be?” Ben-hadad asked. Kip hadn’t even noticed that Ben had come back into the room. “We just routed them. And then they tried to assassinate you.”

Kip said, “There should be an emissary here to distract and confuse us. To sow discord if any could be sown. Not least, to try to see what condition the city’s in.”

“Koios surely expected you to execute anyone he sent,” Cruxer said. “Lawless men expect lawless treatment.”

Kip shook his head. “He doesn’t mind sacrificing people. It’s something else.”

He looked at the map again. Advanced it. Rolled it all the way back to the battle of Ox Ford, nearly two years ago now. Advanced it again.

The reports lit up, beacons against a night of ignorance,