The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,23

heart, easing the worry on her brow, and turning her mouth to a smile.

The Order had made her. They were about to learn how well.

One of those masked Blackguards who’d saluted the Old Man of the Desert had moved with a bit of a limp. That was her thread to pull.

Let the haunting begin.

Chapter 7

“On the one hand, I couldn’t be more horrified,” Tisis Guile said, looking out the window in a flowing red summer dress accented with a vibrant green that perfectly matched the emerald luxin in her eyes.

The moment she’d stepped through the living white-oak doorway of the Palace of the Divines two days ago, Tisis had assumed the wardrobe of young royalty and a mien of measured grace and slow eloquence like a favorite pair of old boots. Strangely, the guise had endured without wrinkle or rumple, her cadences and tones and even accent seamless over the long, full days of affectation since they’d arrived.

It had taken Kip several days to realize the persona wasn’t a pretense. Though Tisis absolutely was trying to impress both the nobility and the servants, this was no false face. She had grown up in the corridors of power in Rath and Green Haven and the Chromeria, and only at the last had she had her retinue forcibly limited by Andross Guile.

Far from being a façade, for the first time, Kip was seeing his wife in the full flower of her natural environment.

Thank Orholam he’d first seen her at her weakest. She’d intimidated the hell out of him then, when she’d been vulnerable, isolated, uncertain.

“On the other hand,” she said, letting the curtain fall, “I couldn’t be prouder.”

For this one thing, thank you, Grandpa Guile. You did me a good turn when—well, when you pretty much forced this stunning woman to marry me and made her think it was her own idea.

Kip was really going to have to tell her about that someday.

She noticed his smile slip, but before she could ask anything, Kip said, “Huh? What?”

He’d been staring at decrees and reports and budgets for so long he was drifting. She was horrified about something? Proud?

“What’s going on?” Big Leo asked Tisis, gesturing outside. “Something wrong out there with the queue?”

After word had gotten out about Kip’s magical restorations to Túsaíonn Domhan, everyone wanted to see the masterpiece ceiling functioning as it had been intended, so Kip had simply said whoever wanted to see it could.

That was how he and Tisis ended up sleeping in nondescript guest chambers: his permission had been taken as an order, and now there was a constant line out the door, out the Palace of the Divines, down the steps, and into the square below. People who had far better things to do in this wracked and wretched city were instead waiting hour upon hour to see Kip’s handiwork, even sleeping in line, watched by attentive guards. He and Tisis decided to move to another room rather than expel those who’d waited so long at the end of every day.

“Come see,” Tisis said, not to Kip, though.

The Mighty crowded around the windows, peeking carefully. Except for Winsen, who, with his typical subtlety, pulled the curtain fully back to stare down into the courtyard.

All of them were bored. Kip couldn’t blame them. While they all waited for their only paryl drafter to finish her quiet scans of the room, with her eyes midnight orbs against her true black skin, Kip had things to do. The rest of them didn’t.

Though Kip had never thought of him as the devious sort, Cruxer had been the one to initiate room searches. As it turned out, several other chambers in a row that had been provided for the Mighty’s meetings had been riddled with spy holes.

It wasn’t the only way Kip and his Nightbringers, outwardly hailed as liberators, had been passively resisted, and carefully made to feel unwelcome. The Divines were either not half as clever as they thought, or they believed themselves to be untouchable. Kip hoped they weren’t stupid, but they were treating him like he was, and it was a burr under his saddle.

Regardless, until the woman finished her paryl scans, the Mighty couldn’t talk strategy.

Kip hadn’t appreciated how good Teia was at drafting paryl until Súil had given him a basis for comparison. She was nice, but she needed breaks every few minutes, and even when she was working, she was slow.

He considered taking over the scanning himself, but that would shame her. It would also reveal