The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,153

the window that day: anyone else, he would have stopped, but Kip?

The young commander scrubbed his fingers through his short curly hair. “It’s different, right? Up near the top of the Great Chain, the lines get fuzzy. I know the Lightbringer is going to upend everything. You have to obey Orholam, and you have to figure out if following the Chromeria’s will fits with that. Me? I hate that kind of thing. I’m not equipped for that stuff. Not made for it. You decide where Orholam calls us to go. Me? I follow you, unless you do something that outrages the light of conscience Orholam gave me.”

“Or if I put myself in danger,” Kip said.

“Well, I do get to save your dumb ass from yourself, yes,” he said with a short-lived smile. “But that’s not quite the same thing.”

Kip nodded agreement, but his heart ached. How do you save a friend who’s had a trauma burn the wrong lesson onto their heart in words of fire? “Cruxer . . . This rigidity in you, this fear? That’s still the wound. Not the healing. You know that, right?”

“No. It’s not. This is righteousness, and a man must fear he’ll lose his integrity in a world like this or he’ll never keep it.”

“True . . . true,” Kip said. And entirely beside the point. He tried another tack. “There were two brothers. During a siege of an enemy city, they heroically broke through a burning sally port door. The city was taken, but they fell wounded and later shared a room as they convalesced from their burns,” Kip said. “Day after day, they spoke as they were able.

“ ‘Fire’s hot,’ the first observed.

“ ‘Still hot, weeks later,’ the second agreed.

“ ‘Burns are the worst,’ the first said.

“ ‘The absolute worst,’ the second agreed.

“ ‘Bravest thing I ever did,’ the first said.

“ ‘Dumbest thing I ever did,’ the second said.

“The first said, ‘If we’d waited, a defender might’ve extinguished that fire, and many more of our friends would have gotten killed trying to take the city.’

“The second replied, ‘If we’d waited, that burning door might’ve fallen down by itself, and we wouldn’t be here, and no one would have gotten hurt saving us when we fell wounded.’

“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, but we did what we had to, and we did it as well as we could,’ the first said.

“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, so we didn’t really accomplish anything,’ the second replied.

“Which one’s right, Cruxer?” Kip asked.

Chapter 42

Dawn hadn’t yet rolled over in her bed, much less brushed the horizon with groggy fingers to see if her lover still attended her. But despite the darkness, the armor-bearers and bakers and coal-carriers and dung-boys and the egglers and the fletchers were already up, their diurnal labors slowly displacing the stubborn nocturnal revelry of those soon leaving to greet death. The garrulous and the hateful and the inquisitive and the jocular would come later to see them off. Kin and lovers would trail behind, some mothers following for a league or more, unwilling to turn their faces from sons and daughters they might never see again.

Kip had come down from the wall and the mirror and his angry wife to walk from campfire to campfire, clapping shoulders and admiring weapons and offering a ready ear. Being seen, mostly, though it meant even more to those he touched and nodded to and questioned. A hundred times, he’d raised some offered skin, but had let neither beer nor brandy nor more exotic brews beyond his lips.

A hundred times, he saw a man he barely recognized in his people’s eyes, and he didn’t know if he could maintain the image of that hero and yet remain himself.

“There’s a sadness about you,” a logistics officer in her forties said. “You got respect, wealth, position, beautiful wife, friends—whole world in your purse. What’s that about?”

She was one to know sorrow. When she’d refused to hand over the location of her daughter and several of her grandchildren, the Blood Robes had burned her brewery down—after locking two of her other grandchildren inside. The daughter who’d been saved couldn’t forgive her for it, so she’d left it all and joined up.

Kip met her gaze. “I want to lead as well as you all deserve, and I’m afraid I won’t.”

Her eyes widened briefly at his honesty, and he could see her tuck that away to share it with others later.

They would love