The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,131

Teia suddenly felt what she least expected:

Hope, is that you? Hey! Been a while! Don’t make yourself such a stranger.

She made to speak, letting out a small grunt, but there was still the folio wedged between her teeth. She was careful not to resist Sharp in the slightest. She didn’t even push at the folio with her tongue. His will was supreme.

“Take and read it?” Teia asked around the folio. So you’re not going to kill me right now?

He grunted and then suddenly tore off her blindfold. Dammit!

Something about how her lips had flared to speak had caught his attention. He dropped the folio, unheeded, and held her chin with his left hand. He was fixated. She opened her mouth, docile, and he slid a finger around her teeth, one at a time, his thumb testing each one’s edge.

The thought of biting him barely even flickered at the periphery of her mind, and then guttered out in the wind of fear.

He was transfixed. Lost, like a ratweed addict suffering withdrawals who catches a whiff of that poison he calls his love and salvation.

Murder Sharp never so much as glanced at her eyes. Teia should have drafted then and struck him down, but she didn’t dare.

He leaned close, drawing out his own handkerchief and wiping away the blood carefully.

She should headbutt him in the face. Smash his nose and blind him. No one leaned forward after you broke their nose. He’d throw himself back, and she’d have a few moments to . . .

But she couldn’t. Teia’s nerve failed, and she was just a small girl, weak, utterly in the power of a larger man who was dripping with malice.

The expression on Sharp’s face shifted, though, to the rapt concentration of a professional, intent yet dispassionately weighing the merits and demerits of her teeth against some Form of perfection he carried in his mind.

But his hunger wasn’t gone. It merely stood patient, like a dog salivating at the door, tail wagging, knowing it would soon be fed.

Having somehow rejected her upper teeth as unworthy of further examination, he leaned over her to inspect the inner faces of her lower teeth.

He’d done this before, for Orholam’s sake. Did he not remember?

She couldn’t forget.

A stream of drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She flinched hard, blinking, near gagging.

Murder released her jaw. He stepped back, and dabbed at the slobber on his chin. He seemed suddenly embarrassed, like a man caught with an erection straining his trousers at an inopportune moment.

“What’d you say?” he asked. He was fully in control of himself now. Any opportunity she’d had, she’d squandered.

For a moment, to her shame, she couldn’t even remember. Here was her chance to get some initiative back, and she couldn’ t—“You want me to read it?” she blurted.

“Read?”

“The folio,” she said.

When he spoke again, his voice was old, as if regret had lifted a shovelful of the barren earth of his life, revealing a thick, gritty gray layer in the clay that betrayed an anger vast but long extinguished, as if its fires had consumed a forest of beliefs, trees roaring into red flight with sparks flung from their wingtips until every living thing traded green for red as Teia did, and lost all color as Teia’s life had, and then embers fell from the sky like defiled gray snow, and even that cooled to ashes, and the ash had aged to soil.

“You’re like me, Adrasteia, me in a shitty tin mirror anyway,” he said, grim, lifeless. “Not as strong, not as fast, not as good a drafter. But we’re both paryl drafters, sent as spies, as infiltrators to uproot the Broken Eye once and for all—that’s what my Prism told me. Sayid Talim said my gift made me the only person who could do what had to be done. That I could end centuries of trouble. Surely saving untold numbers of lives was worth everything bad I had to do to get to where I could do what had to be done, right? Whenever I was troubled by the people I had to kill, he said I should think that I was saving a hundred in the long run for each one I killed now. He said it was war. Said we’ve been at war with them since the beginning. He said in war, if you can trade one life for a hundred, you have to take that choice every time.

“He was convincing himself more than me, I think.

“I didn’t want