The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,444

leave me now! You promised me that you’d repay me for the years the locusts have eaten. You promised! And I believe. Orea told me, and the Third Eye confirmed it. So you swore it! HE IS MY SON! And you will not let him be dead. You can’t!” she screamed the last. “You can’t, because if he’s dead, then you’re a liar. You can bring him back. I know you can! If you will it, you can give him back to me. And you have to, or your word is good for nothing!”

She was barely keeping her feet.

Gill’s heart lurched. War had broken strong men and indomitable women before, but Karris?

Not his Iron White, please no.

Did she even know how she sounded?

“I don’t care!” Karris shouted at everyone around her as they looked away, embarrassed for her, brokenhearted. “I don’t care how you look at me. You think I’m crazy? I don’t matter! He does.” She pointed ferociously at the kopi seller. “You all think they could kill my Kip? You morons! You think they could kill Kip on Orholam’s Glare? Orholam’s Glare? How could Orholam look on my son with anything but favor? And mercy. And mercy. Please . . .”

“High Lady, he’s dead. Let him go,” Gill said.

Tears streamed down her face. “I failed, don’t you see? Don’t you understand?! I reached the end of myself, and I failed—but Orholam cannot. He cannot. It’s what I do now that matters, right? And I believe. I believe.”

She sank to her knees and took the hand Tisis offered. And together they wept.

“Please,” Karris begged the old man. “Please, tell them. Tell them who you are.”

“Who do you say I am?”

She looked up and through her tears she said, “I say you’re the one who holds the wind in his fists. I say you’re the one who wraps up the oceans in his cloak. I say you’re the one whose every word proves true. I say you’re the Lord of Lights. I say you’re stronger than death, and . . .” She sank farther, lying prostrate, her face on the very cobblestones, stretching her hands toward the old man as if he were unimaginably far away. “I say I’ll praise you, though you slay me.”

Only then did the old man move. He came forward, and he knelt beside her. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you have been very much misled.”

She expelled a breath, so hopelessly that she clearly wished it were her last.

“Shh, shh,” he said, brushing back her hair behind her ear as if soothing a child. “Very much misled about the extent of your failures, and even more so about your own worth, Karris Agapêtê. Be still, child. Be still. For about this at least you are right: your son isn’t dead, only sleeping.”

Karris took a sharp breath, and Gill’s hand convulsed on his spear. What new insult was this? Was the old man mocking her?

But Karris lifted her head, and the hope in her voice as she spoke to the old man hurt Gill most of all. “Then you’ll wake him?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, slinging his pack around and pulling out his little cups, and filling them with his dark, steaming brew. “What do you think kopi is for?”

His eyes twinkled as with many lights. And as he gently poured the drink into Kip’s mouth, suddenly the night lit with incandescence above them all.

Every eye turned to the Prism’s Tower as a great white light from the east hit it, unimaginably pure and bright.

The whole tower lit with color, and then, too, did all the other towers of the Chromeria in turn as every one of the Thousand Stars flared to life throughout Big Jasper—radiating first with white light, then with every color under the sun.

Then, under the control of some masterful hand on the mirror array, the night filled with light. Directed by some great intelligence that could hold a hundred details at once, the Thousand Stars blossomed and turned—here shooting red source, here focused tight and hot enough to burn some unseen enemy, here giving blue or green, here flooding the enemy with light they couldn’t use, and in fifty other places seeking out friendly drafters to give them exactly what light they needed.

Faces turned heavenward, seeing hope brought to their despair and light brought into their darkness. Cheers broke out throughout the square and throughout Big and Little Jasper.

But Gill, after checking for any immediate threat from the outpouring of magic and