The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,286

stronger everywhere. All that, grandson, is on you. All that happened so you could go play boy soldier. Then Ironfist showed up and took power, and everyone was frozen again, because no one knew which way he would jump.

“So, Kip, you ask if I’m punishing you? The truth is your punishment. If you’d obeyed me, you may well have been stuck in Rath for a year, but there’d be no need now for you to annul your marriage to Tisis. Nor would I have let Eirene treat you like a hostage, much less a prisoner. Do you really think I’d let the world see a Guile disrespected?”

“If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have . . .” Kip said, but he sounded pathetic.

“And you showed me you were trustworthy when?” Andross asked sharply.

In the last year, Kip had begun to feel that he was a somebody. That he had something to contribute. That he was smart, brilliant even. That he’d done good things.

And he had. But they’d been small things, with no understanding of the big picture.

So now he was the author of his own misery. The identities fell from his too-narrow shoulders, and their drawstrings caught about his neck as they fell, strangling him—Kip the Hero, General Kip, Satrap Kip, King Kip. Everything he’d done had made things worse than if he’d done nothing.

How does grandfather do this? How does this man make all my accomplishments look like shit before my own eyes?

And if he can still do this to me—even if it’s not fair, and I fear that it is—then does that not, in itself, prove that he is better than I? Ten thousand men might follow me to likely death, but Andross can turn a hundred thousand by his will and word alone.

Who, then, is the greater? Who’s smarter? Who’s more worthy to lead?

Andross seemed loathsome because he wasn’t Gavin Guile. But if this loathsome man could and would save a million lives, what made him loathsome? The dying might march into the grave smiling behind Kip’s banners, yet they would still be marching into the grave.

How exactly did that make Kip better than his grandfather?

How we must seem like insects to this man. Kip was a smart man. He knew that now. Without arrogance, without joking self-deprecation. It was a fact. But Andross Guile was as high above him as a man was over dogs.

By chain, or beatings, or simply by voice and with wagging tail and lolling tongue, in the end, Kip would obey him.

He might as well take the offered treat.

“I’ll play,” Kip said, and it was a betrayal, and it was inevitable, and it was freedom. “But there’s a condition.”

Chapter 82

~The Master~

Three years ago. (Age 63.)

“It’s over, dear,” she says. “We were wrong. Join me in the Freeing this year. Maybe we can find forgiveness for our sins together.”

“We just need to hold out,” I say, adjusting my dark spectacles even as the sun sinks low on the horizon. “The world needs us.”

“So we believed,” Felia says quietly.

“The time’s fast approaching. We knew what we were in for. Forty years—that’s only a few more!”

“So we believed,” she says.

“The Lightbringer is to be the greatest man of his era. Who else could it be? Who is greater than I?”

“You are a great man, Andross Guile,” she says calmly.

“You’re patronizing me.”

“Never,” she said, and I believe her.

“You’re mollifying me, then? Why? Are you afraid of me now?”

“It was never your greatness I questioned.”

“That? Again? After all these years?! You think me a monster now?”

Her tone sharpens for the first time: “Do you think me a fool? You think you can hide your eyes from me? Your wife?”

I look away. “Something can surely be done. I’m not finished yet—”

“Take them off!” she snaps.

I remove the dark lenses, revealing my broken halos.

Her jaw tightens first, but then her mouth quivers.

“It’s not—it’s not like they say,” I say. “It’s not madness.”

“Of course you would say that. They all do.”

“BUT IT’S ME!” I roar.

It is exactly the wrong thing to shout when one is a red wight. But she doesn’t shrink. Closes her eyes only for a moment. There is no fear or tension on her face when she regards me.

God. She thinks I might kill her. That I really am mad. And yet she shows no fear.

I cannot imagine such courage.

“It’s me,” I whisper. “I always was special. I always was different. I was meant to do—to, to be . . . but somehow it’s all gone wrong. This