The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,373

. . like that. His favorite son, catching him in his moment of greatest shame.”

Dazen couldn’t breathe for the longest moment.

“But . . . but, how could he?” Dazen said.

“The murder? The act itself? He didn’t. He made Gavin do it.”

Just when Dazen thought it couldn’t get any worse. It was an uppercut to the chin after a gut punch makes you drop your guard.

Sevastian said, “They didn’t and don’t understand exactly how the Blinding Knife works. What’s necessary. What’s not. They didn’t dare let me die for nothing. Prisms or Prisms-elect were always the ones who’d wielded the blade before. Father told Gavin that this was why we Guiles held high office, that this was what made Guiles worthy of all the power and prestige and riches that flow to us: sacrifice. He told Gavin that if he wanted to be great, he mustn’t shrink from his duty. He told him that they were literally saving not only the Seven Satrapies but the whole world, that all of this rested on Gavin doing what he must.”

And there it was at last. Not only why the real Gavin had changed so, so much after that night.

Here also was why Gavin must have felt betrayed—betrayed by Orholam Himself!—when Dazen had shared with him that his own powers were expanding and expanding. Dazen was a polychrome now, and adding new colors every day! Dazen said what if he could split light, too? Wouldn’t that be amazing? He was just like his big brother, wasn’t it exciting, Gavin?!

How could Gavin feel anything but threatened to his very core by the news? Gavin had murdered Sevastian to get those powers, Sevastian, whom he loved.

Dazen was telling Gavin that he’d been born with them?

Gavin had murdered their beloved little brother for nothing—and, without even knowing what he was implying to his guilty older brother, Dazen was telling Gavin that he was the one who should really be Prism.

. . . Or how had that happened? Dazen thought that he’d remembered . . . Hadn’t he himself killed the White Oaks to take their power? Hadn’t he stolen power with black luxin?

Why was he confused about that? Had he remembered it being that way, or was that something he’d been told? What was wrong with his memory?

His left eye throbbed. He rubbed it.

The pain helped Gavin refocus. It felt oddly good. None of that mattered now, anyway.

The last edge of the sun disappeared from the horizon.

“It really is you, isn’t it?” Gavin said. But he was worried all this was a hallucination. “Karris is going to die if I don’t . . . try, anyway, to kill this—” He waved toward the mirror. “And you, I guess. I don’t know.” He looked at the Blinding Knife in his hand. Could he really use it to kill his own brother a second time, this blade that had stolen both brothers from him, and his father, too? And his mother.

Was he going to use this blade to serve Grinwoody? For some slim hope that that monster back at the Chromeria might spare Karris?

Really?

“Time’s running out. What am I supposed to do?”

“Be Dazen,” Sevastian said.

“I don’t know who that is anymore,” Dazen said.

There was an echo of the little boy Sevastian had been as the man before Dazen turned his palms up helplessly, but then he tossed his head to the side as if very-unsubtly subtly trying to direct Dazen’s attention.

Dazen turned and saw his brother was trying to get him to look at the Great Mirror. He snorted and then shook his head. “Goddammit, Sevastian.”

“Rather the opposite, I hope,” Sevastian said, suddenly serious.

Dazen looked at the Great Mirror. In all the long day of fighting, he’d never had a moment to spare to question the thing. The monument stood impossibly thin and tall, without supports, the wind bothering it not at all: an immense mirror, flawless except for that great crack, with only his experience having touched it and some old Tyrean Empire filigree as evidence that it was a physical thing at all, resting as if weightless on the ground as it did.

He’d only seen glimpses of his own image reflected there. Hadn’t wanted to look longer, maybe.

Now Gavin sneered at his second self. The figure seemed to flicker, seemed to split his head, as if his eyes were sending him opposing visions. He rubbed his right eye, wondering what was wrong with him.

Through his dead eye, through the black seed crystal embedded there, he could see