The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,184

in a fire?

Kip continued, “So your goddess is letting me know I can kill you without offending her. She framed the words to deceive you, thinking your greed would drive you here.”

“What a bitch,” Tisis whispered.

“Not even loyal to her own,” Winsen said.

“She didn’t understand loyalty even before she went wight,” Kip said. “So maybe it’s just as well she’s in the enemy’s camp and not ours.” He turned to the man. “I don’t want to murder you. But you’re a problem. So you solve it for me: Winsen’s solution, or you choose to live a slave. We brand the date of next Sun Day on your arm. After that you go free. A year and a couple weeks of servitude, and your oath not to return to the fight.”

“Only a year?” the man asked, suddenly hopeful again. Funny how fast our hopes can shrink.

“Anyone holding you past that date will face death.” If our laws matter at all a year from now.

Kip pursed his lips as the man walked willingly to the blacksmith to be branded.

And that is how I justify becoming a slaver.

Tisis came to his side. “So we’re headed to Apple Grove now? Even though it’s either too late or a trap?”

Kip looked at her, pained.

Chapter 51

The door swung open silently, revealing the profile of a scrawny young scholar scratching a parchment with sure, fluid strokes while he studied a parchment whose fat, twin rolls dominated his desk.

“Are you here to kill me?” Quentin asked, not looking up to see who’d come into his recently locked room.

“No,” Teia grunted, tucking away her picks.

“Then, one moment, please.” He finished the long sentence he’d been writing. Then he used a boar’s-hair brush and soapy water to clean the gold nib of his quill, shook a bit of fine sand on the damp ink, opened a case, and put away all his accoutrements. He grabbed a folded parchment from the box before closing it away.

There was some essential rightness to seeing Quentin with his scrolls and quills. His was a quieter excellence than Kip’s drafting or Cruxer’s flowing through the fighting forms, or Tlatig with her bow, but Teia knew that his mind was doing things that hers could never grasp.

When he looked up and saw Teia, his face showed no surprise.

“Of course it’s you,” he said. “Orholam wants us to be whole, does He not?”

Teia didn’t really want a sermon from a traitor. She tossed her orders on the table. In Karris’s hand they read, ‘Quentin will be your handler, and will serve you in all ways. Trust him absolutely. Don’t get him killed. I have plans for him.’

“What were your orders?” she asked.

“Karris told me the one who came would be my master and maybe even my friend. She said I needed to learn how to have both.”

Teia was suddenly embarrassed for him. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Maybe . . . maybe for a lot of things.”

“I’m not,” he said. “Just for the one thing. Nothing else.”

“ ‘The one thing’? What do you mean?” she asked.

He looked at her, clear-eyed and steady. “Murdering Lucia, of course. But I’m glad I got caught, glad I had to face up to what I’d done and what I’d become. I’m broken now, Teia, but I’ve never been so free. I know for the first time what it is to walk in the light. But never mind me. How may I serve you?”

“I—I have no idea.”

“Then may I offer a suggestion?”

She nodded.

“When I saw my orders, I guessed it would be you, so I already got started.”

“ ‘Started’? On what?”

He smiled, and scooted his papers toward her. She sat, and her blood went cold at the heading of his notes: ‘Mist Walking: Myths/Speculation, Ancient/Modern, & Educated Guesses.’

Her heart stopped. “Did she tell you I . . . ?”

He shook his head. “Paryl. I think early on you must’ve believed it was useless, didn’t you? Otherwise, you’d never have told anyone that you could use it. Hard to explain why you would qualify for Blackguard training if you were a mund, though, one supposes. Anyway, I found that a number of the books with the best information about Mist Walkers weren’t even in the restricted libraries. You have to know which authors to trust, of course, but this hasn’t been the hardest research I’ve done, by any means. Now, with you to tell me which information is true and which is exaggerated, I can winnow out which authors were fabulists or given