The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,443

confirmation of something suspected. He saw in her face her last hope for happiness die. It was as if she’d thought, At least I’ll have one good thing, and though it was less than I wanted, I shall make myself be content with this.

And now she’d had that last good thing snatched away and smashed before her eyes.

Gill turned away, telling himself his job was to scan for threats, telling himself that he should give her the dignity of mourning in private, telling himself he was the wrong person to comfort her in this. She should be comforted by a mother, a father, a husband—but she had none of these: they’d all been stolen from her.

Well, then, surely she needed a friend her own age, not him, not a man who worshipped her, who was ten years younger. It would seem presumptuous to even step forward to try to be a comforter. He wasn’t the one who could be that for her—

Suddenly, she keened, and her scream was so incoherent that everyone who heard it understood perfectly.

Eyes turned away, faces filled with shame around the square.

“NO!”

She seemed to almost attack Tisis as she pulled Kip’s body into her own arms. She froze, trembling, muttering her denials under her breath as she stabbed fingers into his neck to feel for the pounding of life there.

Finding none, she stood, Kip’s body sliding limp, gracelessly, out of her lap. She staggered as one drunk.

Her eyes searched the crowd unseeing, wild.

Gill felt a surge of shame. He should guard her in this, too. Protect her somehow from this shame. But he didn’t know what to do. When Gav had died, they’d known what to do for him, how to honor him; Karris had stood with him, somehow. But he had nothing.

She keened again.

He felt sick.

She was the Iron White. They shouldn’t see her like this.

“High Lady . . .” he said quietly.

She shook with her weeping or with rage, the red rising in her against this evil day.

Tisis looked up at her, haunted. “He didn’t try to save himself. Even to the end, he was trying to bring light to us. He was fighting for us. To the very end.”

“No!” Karris shouted, decorum abandoned, spit flying. “This isn’t right! This isn’t happening!”

“High Lady, please . . .”

“You don’t understand! He’s not dead! He’s not dead. Oh, God . . .”

Gill reached a hand out to steady her, but she slapped it away angrily.

“Karris, please, the people—”

“No!” she shouted at him. “Don’t you tell me about—YOU! I know you!”

Suddenly her ire turned on a man in the crowd. An artisan by his dress. He looked familiar, but it took Gill a moment to place him. That was it: the kopi seller from her favorite little stand. Parian by his look, but Ilytian by his accent. Gill couldn’t remember his name or any other connection, though.

Karris quieted as the little man came forward uncertainly. Speaking to the rest of them, she said, “Send everyone to go aid High General Danavis, if he yet lives. If he doesn’t, he’ll have left someone competent in charge.”

“High Lady . . .”

“That’s an order!” she bellowed. “I have work to do.”

Gill waved to the others to go.

Big Leo and his Mighty didn’t move, and Gill didn’t insist.

“You, Jalal. You saved me,” Karris said quietly to the weathered old artisan. “That day those men beat me. Andross’s men. When they beat me to teach me a lesson. I thought . . . but it was you. You carried me back to the Chromeria, didn’t you?”

The old man said, “Who are you, child?”

“Who am I? Who am I?!”

Even to Gill, it seemed a strange question. Was the old man blind?

But Karris. Oh, his beloved High Lady Karris White. His Iron White was edging into hysteria.

Tears spilled down his cheeks and he dashed them away. This was unseemly.

“I’ll tell you who I am,” Karris said, cheeks wet, but with hidden heat like a coal burnt to white ash suddenly breathed upon to glow a sullen red. “I’m the fatherless daughter, the bereaved sister, I’m the widow, I’m the impure White, I’m the leader who failed—but there’s one thing I won’t be. I’m the slip of a girl who’ll run through brick walls, and I won’t be the mother without a son. Because who I am doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong.”

But she barreled ahead. “You carried me through all this. You were there when I was broken down, beaten up. And you will not