The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,415

day.

How could he face his death with anything but gratitude?

Yet he was still afraid.

He’d seen immortals coming with the bane when that strange wave had passed. Maybe . . . “Rea?” he whispered. “Are you here?”

“Of course I’m here!” the immortal, all invisible, said in his ear.

She was weeping.

That meant she couldn’t stop this.

“Will you . . .”—his voice choked—“will you help me be brave? I don’t feel very brave right now.”

The frame lifted him suddenly into the air.

The mirrors grated on their gears as they began to turn into place.

“Look, and see,” Rea said.

Kip blinked. It wasn’t like looking in paryl or superviolet, but rather more akin to looking through that immense wave that had passed over the Jaspers. It felt like his eyes were only slowly bending into focus, his mortal lenses unaccustomed to seeing this spectrum: what he was seeing was more real than reality.

First, his eyes fell on the normal people of the crowd gathering around the great intersection. They were weirdly, undeniably themselves but different, as if now he could see the whole self. The outward things, such as their beauty or plainness, their clothing, the shape of this nose or that pallid tone of skin all remained, but faded by comparison: This boy shone with goodness. That nursemaid streamed prayers like incense but more real than drafted luxin as she carried her ward toward his home. Others walked in darkness. A butcher hungered for the spectacle of an execution to fill the dark, empty gnashing of his pain. A fisherman radiated casual cruelty, his hands twisted by violence.

But then, in the gaps between the mortal gawkers, he saw others, unencumbered by mortal trappings.

Glassine figures glowed as if lit from above, then slowly resolved into people. People he knew. He saw Luisa Sendina of Rekton, who’d not only fed the addict’s boy: serving up compassion in food, but also speaking to him, listening to him despite the chaos of her own five children. He saw sweet Isabel—Orholam have mercy, she’d been a child!

What was going on?

Then he saw Gaspar Elos, the man who’d gone green wight whom Kip had met that night before the burning of Rekton. He was wight no longer. He stood with folded arms and a little smirk on his lips. He moved a finger to his head, as if tipping a hat that he wasn’t wearing.

Janus Borig appeared decades younger, but still chewing on a long-stemmed pipe, studying him with a portraitist’s intensity. At his gaze meeting hers, she brightened and winked at him. The radiant woman next to her—the Third Eye?—curtsied perfectly in a swirl of golden cloth.

The hulking mass of a shaggy red-bearded man could only be Rónán Arthur, Conn Ruadhán’s twin. He put his hand to his heart in salute.

Felia Guile stood at the back, his grandmother, her back ramrod straight, an apologetic half smile on her lips and her eyes bright.

Goss stood next to Gavin Greyling, each in their blacks. They nodded to him: You got this. You can do it, brother. And then they snapped to attention, saluting him.

Tremblefist appeared—no, not Tremblefist any longer, Hanishu, not in his blacks but in his Old Parian garb, with the frailties and brokenness of life fallen away from his soul. He nodded with fierce approval.

Next was the young commander beside them: Cruxer. Kip felt a flaring of anger at the same time he felt a surge of love and longing and emptiness. Dammit, Cruxer, dammit.

But the anger melted. Here was Cruxer purified, his earthly rigidity gone. Lucia—who’d died for Kip, if accidentally—dear Lucia, whom Cruxer had so loved, stood next to him, and they were at peace.

It had taken Kip until now to understand. These were all the people who’d loved him, who’d already gone on before. They’d gathered, a great cloud of witnesses, to stand for him in his final hour. They’d come so that he wouldn’t die alone.

And then his eyes fell on one thin woman standing off to one side. Mother.

Once, long ago—though he carried the words as if it were yesterday—she’d said to him, ‘You’re nothing. You’re not special. And if anyone really knew you, they’d hate you as much as I do.’

Mother, how much were you hurting when you said those words? How much did you hate yourself afterward for saying them?

For he knew she had.

For he remembered her, on a different night, sober two days and shaking in her vomit-stained blankets, not for the first time. But this time she’d come to his