The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,466

Kip busy while everyone else was being announced and seated. Rather than being ushered in a side door at the front, though, in the hush of the hall, the young man came in from the back with Tisis. He walked with his head ducked, trying to be inconspicuous on the long walk up the center aisle, chagrined at being late.

Kip had learned a lot in the last few years, but he could still be charmingly naïve.

He had no nobles under his own authority, and all his own soldiers were outside the great hall, so perhaps he really hadn’t expected anything.

The Blood Foresters stood for him first. Then the Tyreans, who counted him one of their own. His Mighty, seated in the front row as if family, stood, too.

Then, in singles around the hall, drafters stood. They knew what he’d done.

With help, King Ironfist (still ‘king’ technically, until some formalities were worked out) stood. He gave Kip the old Blackguard salute.

All the Blackguards followed suit.

And then everyone stood, from the High Luxiats down.

Dazen and Karris stood late in order to let Kip know that no one was standing because they were following their lead.

The youngest Guile looked humbled, honored, as his eyes went from face to face and he recognized friends young and old. Kip and Tisis embraced Dazen and Karris and took their places beside them.

One of Kip’s Mighty, Winsen, coughed loudly. Suddenly there were gasps throughout the room, and then laughter spread fast on its heels. Those on the platform had to turn around to see it: at the front of the room, next to the staid official banners of Houses Guile and White Oak and Malargos, and Andross’s banners and the Light-bringer’s banner, and the banners for the various satrapies, a very ad hoc, homemade-looking banner unfurled. It appeared to be a child’s drawing of a turtle with a shock of hair on its head and a goofy grin on its face, with big bear claws and wings of fire.

Seeing it, Kip immediately blushed and buried his face in his hands.

The audience roared with laughter and then cheered.

While a steward rushed to take the Turtle-Bear banner down, Kip turned to the Mighty and drew his hand across his throat.

They all made very unconvincing shrugs: ‘Who? Us?’

Dazen couldn’t stop smiling. In some ways, they were still just a bunch of damn kids.

But they loved one another, and that was priceless.

Naturally, Andross Guile waited until the furor had died down, and then waited some more. But once he’d begun, with all the usual pomp and spectacle Dazen expected from such a ceremony—the magic, the music, the processionals, a surprisingly brief prayer by High Luxiat Amazzal—the ascension ceremony was short and to the point.

The Colors and representatives for each of the Seven Satrapies and the six remaining High Luxiats (one had belonged to the Order and was dead) each knelt before Andross and swore their fealty to him as Prism, emperor, and Lightbringer. Everyone else in the hall was allowed to take the oath from their own seats.

Andross had moved fast in these first few days. Indeed, not just fast; he’d moved like a man who’d been making a list for decades of all that would need to be done.

It wasn’t impatience, either. Amid all the work of cleanup and reconstruction and burial and immolation of enemy corpses, there was still the euphoria of their improbable victory. Only the war was on people’s tongues. Lesser stories—such as vast banking families being given ultimatums, and certain troublemakers being thrown in prison, new laws curtailing slavery and the capture of fugitives, restructuring in the Magisterium—these didn’t even need to be hidden: they simply weren’t that interesting in comparison to all else that had happened.

Andross had gathered the Spectrum and High Magisterium and suggested a sentence of death or bereavement (a term he claimed he’d dug up somewhere, but he may have simply invented it) by the Blinding Knife for the Blood Robe drafters and wights who’d been captured. The suggestion was unanimously approved.

Bereavement was, he claimed, what had happened to Gavin when he’d been stabbed with the Blinding Knife and had lost his magical powers but not his life. Andross planned to use the opportunity to figure out the exact mechanics of the blade: Did it matter who held it? Did what the wielder wished to have happen to the condemned change what the blade did?

Karris’s young luxiats—whose ranks were suddenly swelling by the day—were reclaiming lost knowledge, including some from books older