The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,265

to me you’ll push back against everything else.”

“Honey,” Kip said, admonishing her, “I’m a Guile. I don’t know how to not fight.”

She grabbed him as he turned to go, her fingernails digging painfully into his arms. “Then you fight. Fight for all of us. I love you.”

Chapter 77

Quentin wasn’t in his room, but Teia was already in the damned tower, so she went looking for him in their old restricted library. She needed to report her failure.

The door was closed. Of course.

She sighed and eased it open, as if the wind had pushed it, peeked quickly, and let it close again.

No one was in sight.

She peeked again, then slipped inside.

The sound of laughter arrested her. Quentin, laughing? With someone else?

First, that was very strange, and then it oddly felt like he was cheating on her.

She ghosted closer, drawing paryl to her fingertips. She didn’t recognize the man as she approached from behind, though. Tall, lanky, with long dark hair, a dark beard, the frame of spectacles over his ears. Baggy sailor’s trousers, but a fine dark tunic, not a luxiat. She streamed paryl out toward him, the light cutting through his clothing to show her what weapons he carried.

It was veritable armory. Large pistols in queer sheaths at his hips, smaller ones on little frames up his sleeves loaded with springs, knives, and a sword-breaker, and two spare sets of spectacles.

This was no visiting scholar.

She felt a sudden sheen of sweat on her upper lip. Had Quentin ratted her out? Was he working with the Order?

“Perfectly safe,” Quentin said. “No one comes here.”

She reached across the room and slipped little blades of paryl into the man’s neck. The paryl illuminated him further as she closed in on him. Some kind of odd, broken-and-repaired contraption encased one knee that had ugly scars around it; maybe an open luxin connection there?

Quentin was laughing along with a wight?

The little holy hypocrite. I thought I knew you, Quentin.

Teia readied a second strike for him.

“You can’t expect the old boys to give up all their secrets without a fight,” the stranger said, tucking a stray bit of hair behind his ears. Or securing his spectacles? There was something about that voice—

The man launched himself backward, staying in his chair as it tipped toward the floor. Before he slammed into the ground, he caught himself with both feet on the underside of the table, even as a mechanical ka-chung rang out. Teia found herself staring into two small pistol barrels that had sprung from the man’s sleeves into his hands even as he hung upside down, tilting in his chair. Her paryl daggers into him had been shattered by his sharp movement. His spectacles glittered with sub-red. But behind everything unfamiliar, behind even the unfamiliar spectacles, were eyes she knew well.

“Oh, hello, Teia,” Ben-hadad said.

He shoved hard against a spring-loaded pistol, resetting it. Then the other.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “First time I’ve actually gotten both of them to work when I wanted. And neither accidentally fired. That would’ve been unfortunate. Oh, this one lost its flint. Of course it did. Again. Could you lift me back up? Little awkward here. Quentin, you gonna just stand there?”

Quentin looked over at Teia helplessly as she shimmered back into visibility. Ben-hadad was not a heavy man, but Quentin was the very antithesis of muscular. He couldn’t lift him by himself.

Teia heaved Ben back to a sitting position.

He stood up and grinned. “Hey, look at me, huh?”

“. . . Yeah . . . I was . . .”

“And holy shit, little Teia, look at you,” Ben-hadad said. “Bet no one calls you ‘little Teia.’ ”

No one talks to me at all.

“No,” she said. “You’re back. You’re back?”

“We’re all back. Come to save the day.”

Was he joking? It wasn’t funny. “I’ll put on my damsel hat. Whaddaya call it?”

“A wimple?” Quentin asked. “Sorry. Don’t mind me. Not even here.”

“No, not to save you, Teia. Shit. We needed you to save us. Can’t think how many times we bitched about you being gone.”

“Yeah?” she asked. There was suddenly something raw in her throat. They were standing close, but neither had moved to embrace. She suddenly thought she was going to cry. “ ‘All of us,’ you said?”

“Yeah, Kip’s back too.”

“No, no, I meant, you’re all back? Everyone? Everyone made it?”

“Oh, oh yeah. We’re all right. Well, except Winsen, but then, he wasn’t all right when we started. In fact, we’ve been trying to arrange for him to take a few good