The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,196

spat it up. They didn’t even all die in my arms. There were too many dying for me to even give them that. I thought of giving them the black mercy, but I held out hope that someone would come at the last minute. The Third Eye had sent me to stop the massacre, but I’d failed. I hoped maybe she’d sent someone else to save the children.” He took a deep breath. “But maybe I was the last hope. Or maybe the others failed, too.”

His voice rolled across a vast distance, a messenger telling the facts, but tears rolled, blood and water mixing on his cheek.

“I was so happy when the crying stopped. Not relieved, mind you. Happy. I wept with joy. What kind of a horror could be ‘happy’—”

“That’s not joy,” Kip interrupted. “That’s a breakdown.” The words kind of slipped out, but he also let them.

“Bugger off. You don’t know me,” Daimhin said, eyes coming to hard focus.

“Yes I do,” Kip said. “The day you took your first stag, your hands were shaking so hard that when you cleaned it, your knife punctured its intestines. Your father never told anyone. He didn’t want to shame you in front of the village. But you were ashamed, and your secret shame spurred you to become a better hunter. You expect perfection of yourself, and it’s always been your shame that makes you redouble your efforts. It’s brought you to heights unimaginable to other men . . . but it broke you here.”

Kip could feel his Mighty getting tense even before he saw the white-knuckled grip Daimhin had on his obsidian knife.

Shame is a gorgon. Before you grab her serpentine hair to drag her into the light, remember what her hair is.

“Forgive me,” Kip said. “I know you, but you don’t know me. I shouldn’t have spoken so.” Except it had been on purpose, and the truth lay wriggling in the light like a rainbow trout thumping about the bottom of the boat, gasping in the air when it so wanted to breathe safe water. “The cutting. Tell me about it.”

He knew it was an old pagan ritual way of mourning the dead, but Daragh the Coward had cut himself as bravado and as a mask. The same action might mean something very different in Daimhin Web.

The young man was on a jagged edge, looking as if he wasn’t sure if he should attack Kip or throw himself at his feet or bolt into the forest. Instead, defeated, he sulked. “One for each one dead.”

“But not too deep,” Kip said. The hunter knew exactly how deeply to cut to cause a scar without impeding function.

“I have promises to keep,” Daimhin said, as if it were simple.

“To the other children,” Kip said, understanding him. “You’ve been taking care of them.”

“Not well,” Daimhin spat.

“You’ve made a vow that you’ll take care of them forever.” Kip had thought that the murderers had left the food. It had been Daimhin. “A penance?”

“I made them orphans,” Daimhin said.

Came too late to stop them being made orphans by others. It was very different.

There had to be thirty children here. And this boy—maybe twenty years old? maybe years short of that—hunter and legend though he was, this boy was going to be their mother and father? It was insane.

And yet, war makes insanity a necessity.

“One might suggest . . .” Kip said. Then he wasn’t sure if he should go on. But he bulled ahead. Drag it all into the light. Let the light sort it out, the evil and the good, and the good that had made its concessions to weakness and fallibility and human foibles. “If the Third Eye could see the future, wouldn’t she have known you wouldn’t make it in time to help, even if she asked? Maybe this wasn’t your fault at all.”

“She did ask,” Daimhin Web said. As if it were simple.

“If she asked knowing you’d say no, is it really your fault?”

“She did ask,” Daimhin said.

“Why would she ask if she knew he wouldn’t get here in time?” Cruxer asked quietly, aggrieved. As if the Third Eye had piled guilt atop a boy too sensitive to hold its weight. Hard as he was, and as starkly as he liked to see the world separated into sheep and goats, at times Cruxer could show deep compassion. He could see that Daimhin the Hunter would never be only a hunter any longer. Cruxer, who’d been catapulted from an old life by his