The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,197

guilt over a death he couldn’t stop, Cruxer understood.

If they made it through this damned war, Kip hoped to see that understanding, compassionate side of his dear friend flourish.

Tisis said quietly, “I think sometimes we can all see the future coming, and we can’t help but act, even when we know it’s too little or too late, too feeble. Sometimes we act even though we know it will mean our death,” she said, locking her jade-green eyes with Kip’s. “I don’t think that makes us fools. I think it makes us great.”

And you’re staying with me, Kip thought. Does that make you a fool, or great, or both?

But Kip tore his eyes away from his remarkable bride, who was as undeserved as sunshine on a winter morning.

He saw perhaps the real reason for the Third Eye to send Daimhin: if she’d told him there were orphans for him to care for, he wouldn’t have come. What were orphans to a hunter? But by lying, by telling him there was a massacre he could stop, she could save these orphans as Daimhin revealed a mettle he himself hadn’t known he possessed.

After all, like everyone else, prophets can lie.

“Tell me about this, this clearing, that plinth,” Kip said instead. “You came here for a reason. Or was it merely for the quiet?”

“Ha!” Daimhin said. But he breathed and looked at the sun for a time, and spun his hellstone knife and sheathed it, and jumped off the plinth with the grace of an artist whose body is his brush.

He turned and bowed to the plinth with a gravity that might have been mockery. He was a broken man indeed, teetering at the edge of madness.

“Seven groves, in seven lands,” he said. “Apple, pear, fig, pomegranate, olive, orange, and atasifusta. Blood Forest, Ruthgar, Paria, Abornea, Ilyta, Tyrea, and Atash. Seven cities, seven mirrors, seven colored lenses. They were first meant to be a perfect circle, but compromises were made, so they became a circle as lopsided as our politics. This one had to be this close to the coast because treaties with the pygmies forbade the Tyrean Empire deeper access to the woods.”

A prohibition that obviously hadn’t stuck. Not that that was the point right now.

Daimhin said, “My forefathers were the keepers of this sacred grove, once upon a time. My father brought me here to visit once. Kind of a pilgrimage in our family, though we haven’t lived here for generations. I came here hoping . . . for their understanding? Their forgiveness? Their wisdom? Ha. They failed, too, after all, and let us all be scattered into the deep forest. I hoped . . .” He snorted. “Maybe it was just for the quiet, after all.”

“There was a city here, then?” Kip asked.

“Apple Grove was always small. I think most of the grove cities were. All were close or within a direct line of sight to great cities—Azuria, here, for one. They were intended to be isolated from the city’s politics. As if such a thing is possible. But at least it is harder to capture two fortified positions than just one. It didn’t work as intended, of course. The fort on Ruic Head was constructed solely to house Ru’s Great Mirror, but Satrapah Naveen later moved the Great Mirror into Ru itself to show her power.”

Kip hadn’t been thinking in terms of the ancients when he’d been there, but it was true, the fort of Ruic Head was far too large for what the Chromeria thought it had been. The fort had thick timber walls, but it had been built on stone foundations. Before the relatively recent advent of cannons that could shoot great distances into the bay, there was no function for a fort there. A simple lookout tower would have sufficed. Maybe a lighthouse. There hadn’t been need for an entire fort.

Which was interesting history and all, but if there were big mirrors in all these groves, where was the mirror that had been here?

But Tisis was already going in another direction. “Azuria?” she asked. “I’ve never even heard of a city called that.”

“The pygmies didn’t lose all their wars to the Tyrean Empire,” Daimhin said. “They wiped out the city while it was still being built. Razed it. Crucified everyone in it or fed them to their tygre wolves. My people fled without a fight after that. The ruins of Azuria are over beyond the new wall now, where the White King was. There’s little there now