The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,479

shouldn’t. One of these days that was really going to bite him in the ass. He saw the testing stick on the floor. He’d knocked it down as he fell. He reached over and picked it up.

For an instant, the testing stick’s edge seemed to flash green like a quick wink at sunset. Kip scowled.

He looked at it more closely, but there was no color in the ivory. None.

He pressed his finger on the stick again.

Nothing.

Must have imagined it.

Epilogue 2

The dawn prayers atop the red tower had concluded. The young women and men, discipulae and luxiats both, departed quietly, as was required, allowing those who remained to continue meditating and praying. But the moment their feet touched the stairs, they immediately broke into happy conversation, eager to dive into days full of instruction and labors mental, spiritual, and—as the Jaspers needed workers for repairs and healing—quite physical.

A few worshippers and contemplatives remained, huddled in warm layers against the early morning’s cool wind, hoping to hoard a treasure of quiet calm in their hearts against the chaos of the coming day.

Teia was here on her physicker’s orders, sitting with her father. Every day she was supposed to try to last one minute closer to dawn before shielding her eyes once more behind layers of leather and her pitch-black spectacles. She couldn’t even make it halfway to dawn yet, but it was good to sit beside her father.

Her physicker’s hope was that her contracting pupils would break down the crystals of the lacrimae sanguinis slowly so that the poison might be worked out over months without killing her. In the meantime, contracting against the hard crystal matrices would help her keep her eyes from atrophying so that she wouldn’t be blind when the poison did dissipate. He said ‘when,’ but she’d heard the ‘if’ he was hiding.

What it actually meant was that she felt incredible pain and nausea every day, to the point where sometimes she hoped to die.

Really, they had no idea whether it would work and she’d be rehabilitated, or if they were simply daily tearing open again a wound that would otherwise heal.

Even if it worked, she had a long, long road ahead of her. She most likely would never work for the Blackguard again.

So now she was on the disability dole, like a Blackguard who’d had a limb blown off. Her injuries weren’t visible, weren’t debilitating in the same way, but she was just as useless to the Blackguard. A sudden flash of light—such as, oh, every single time someone drafted, or lit a lantern, even the flash of sunlight on steel—might kill her. Even if it didn’t, it could blind her permanently, and it would definitely incapacitate her as she seized up, vomiting.

So she was forced to wear impossibly dark spectacles and the eye patches over both eyes.

“Baba,” Teia asked, “what are you supposed to do with a bird with broken wings?”

He put his hands on her shoulders, and when he finally spoke, there was a hitch in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. But I would hold her. Just hold her.”

And so he did, embracing her silently, not trying to fix anything. He was not, perhaps, a great man who shook the pillars of the earth, but he was her father, and for today at least, for this hour, his embrace blunted the jagged black edges of her hellstone thoughts.

He held her as she cried, and in some deeply aching, wordless place inside her, just a little, something thawed.

Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “Come on, Baba. We’ve gotta go get ready soon so we can be there when Kip and Tisis get married. Again. Nobles are weird.”

Her father grunted. “So . . . do I have to thank Kip for sending those bandits to find me and save me from the Order before I can punch him in the nose for breaking my little girl’s heart? Or can that wait until afterward?”

“Baba! Don’t you dare! And he didn’t break my heart. I’m fine. And those men aren’t bandits . . . anymore. Daragh’s men were the only ones disreputable-looking enough to get into that neighborhood without raising any eyebrows.”

But they’d barely started heading inside when someone barked from the stairs, “Hey! Shithead!”

“Excuse me?” Teia’s father asked.

“Not you. That stunted little crotch fruit of yours,” Winsen said. “Hey, layabout! Sluggard! The hell you doin’ up here still?”

“What are you talking about?” Teia asked. “This is what I’ ve—”

“Training?” he said as