The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,154

him more for it, he knew, but that hadn’t been why he said it. Somewhere, oddly, he’d displaced some essential part of his fear. He wasn’t, perhaps, fully the man they thought he was, but neither was he a fraud.

It also wasn’t quite the whole truth. Tonight felt like a little death; tonight was goodbye—though he couldn’t tell them that. Every hour of surprise that he gained on the White King and separately on his generals at Green Haven was an hour that might mean the difference between victory and defeat. So Kip had to endure this goodbye alone, even while in the company of those he’d come to love.

He joined the fire of some river sailors and longshoremen and asked a question about some intricate knot a man was using. When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything.

Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.

When he understood and asked if that meant you would use that particular knot with these cotton ropes in this kind of application, but only use it with a hemp rope in these other ones, they seemed to think he was a genius.

For a noble anyway, one offered, testing to see how prickly he was.

He laughed, though. “I see I’m not the only bastard here!”

They lit up. It was almost too easy, with men who wanted to like you.

Then he indulged his curiosity and threw a problem at them. “So let’s say I’ve got a stallion. Fully barded. Sixteen hands. Weighs, what, probably nineteen and a half or twenty sevens? Got a wall fifteen paces high, but straight up, sheer. We can get right to the base. What ropes and knots do I use to lift him as quickly as possible to the top of the wall? And how long does it take? Let’s say I’ve got access to hemp ropes and cotton, much as I need. Manpower’s no problem, but time is.”

They peppered him with a few other questions about what other supplies they had available. Pulleys? Nets? In a minute, they’d devised and refined a plan. Their pleasure in demonstrating their mastery told Kip he was on to something he should repeat at the other fires.

“No, no, no,” a young sailor piped up suddenly after they’d all agreed on their answer. “You’re doing it all wrong. I can get that horse to the top of the wall in half that time. We gotta think about this like our brothers the longshoremen here. We got these standard-size boxes, right?” He held his hands out to show how big they were.

“We already talked about that,” one of the longshoreman interjected. “No matter how you lash ’em together, you can’t make a platform or a sling with ’em. Ain’t gonna be strong enough for—”

“So first thing you do is,” the young man continued, his hands still held out to box size, “you cut the horse into pieces this big—”

Both the sailors and the longshoremen busted up laughing, though the longshoremen followed it with cursing at him for his cheek.

“Watch out, boys,” Kip said, standing to go. “With that kind of approach to problem solving, you might have yourselves a future officer there.”

They laughed again, and he moved on, but not before he took the boy’s name. A quick wit’s the flower of a keen mind. The boy might be an officer yet.

After some hours, he gave in to exhaustion. He couldn’t see everyone, and dawn was coming.

But as he made his excuses and said his goodbyes, he was careful not to tell anyone that he’d see them later. With where they were going, he couldn’t guarantee that he would; with where he was going, he could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn’t.

Chapter 43

“Some of you have felt it,” Karris said. “Your leaders in the Magisterium seem, curiously, to lack confidence.” She was addressing a hundred young luxiats in a regular lecture hall. She’d told the magisters she wanted to offer them encouragement in a difficult time.

Instead, what she was telling them might get them all killed, and her with them.

‘I’ve left you a mess. I hope your strong hands will succeed where mine have