The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,480

if she were as dumb as a bag of rocks. “I know you’ve got a nice gig here, getting fat and fartin’ around with daddy. No disrespect, buddy—though I’m not sure why I oughta respect you. You clearly have none for yourself or you’d not have spawned our navel lint of doom here.”

“Wh-what?” Teia’s father said.

“Teia,” Winsen barked, “vacation’s over!”

“You flea-bitten, pox-eaten son of a whore!” Teia said. “You shitlicking, vomit-slurping, fart—er, sorry, Baba. Winsen, you know—”

“Oh,” Winsen interrupted. “Shit. Right.” Something hit her chest. She snatched it out of the air before it hit the ground. At least she still had her reflexes.

“What’s this?”

“Here, come inside.”

Inside, where it was much darker, Teia examined them in paryl.

They were glasses—no, more like small goggles, barely more than eye caps connected at the bridge of the nose. She shed her dark spectacles and eye patches, keeping her eyes shut tight, and put them on. She frowned. These new eyepieces had wide, curving lenses to preserve her peripheral vision, but otherwise fit tightly to the angles of her face perfectly, with leather cushions blacking out light from the sides or below. But the lenses were clear.

Not helpful.

“What’re these?” Teia asked.

“This is the fun part,” Win said, and he smacked the frames at her temples.

She cried out as tiny spikes stabbed into her skin and the lenses suddenly darkened.

“What are you doing?!” Teia’s father demanded.

“I told ’em we should cut you loose like so much deadwood,” Winsen said, “but Ben-hadad and Breaker been working on this all week. Ferkudi stole materials. Quentin translated some maybe-heretical books. Big Leo covered for everyone. Not that they all don’t have more important stuff to do, in my own humble and disregarded opinion, thank you very much! They copied some ideas from Breaker’s old spectacles, which were supposedly made by Lucidonius himself or whatever. Then they added some new tricks. These’ll darken or lighten almost as fast as your own eyes can dilate or constrict—and you won’t even have to think about it. There’s, ehh, maybe some slightly or totally forbidden will-casting in there, though you won’t hear me telling the tale. They’ll allow you to isolate whatever spectrum you want—including superviolet, which you couldn’t see before, so I guess that’s a bonus? Breaker had to beg Súil to help. She claimed the paryl nearly fried her brain.” Winsen shrugged. “Guess that explains what happened to make you the way you are, using paryl all the time. Anyway, now you can see. Without dying.”

Teia couldn’t breathe. She hadn’t drafted paryl since that night, when she’d used the barest sliver necessary to make the master cloak work—and only for the few moments necessary to attack Liv and later Abaddon. The latter had left her shivering and puking, certain she was going to die. But this . . . Maybe Teia wouldn’t be able to draft the paryl cloud that made her invisible to even sub-red drafters, but she could suddenly—maybe? maybe!—do everything else.

She felt like a champion sprinter going from losing a leg to merely having a limp.

She tried to change the spectrum she was seeing. The goggles worked flawlessly, instantly, dimming and focusing the light so she could see once more.

Dumbstruck, she glanced at her father—and looked away fast.

He was blubbering. Oh hell, she was gonna lose it, too.

“I dunno,” Winsen said, resigned. “I voted against taking you back. But the others said, ‘It isn’t a vote, Winsen. Once you’re one of the Mighty, you’re one of us forever, Winsen.’ Bah!”

Oh, nine hells.

Her boys. Her brothers hadn’t forgotten her. As she’d been blind, they’d seen her. As she’d been in the dark, they’d found her. They’d known. They’d understood. As she’d pulled away, they’d pursued her. They’d all been working to restore her. They’d saved her, body and soul. Her brothers—abrasive, idiotic, absentminded, cranky, wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, steadfast, and self-sacrificing as they were—her brothers had worked tirelessly to make her whole.

—And then they’d sent Winsen to give her the news. He was the worst!

A sharp little laugh burst from her lips. Winsen! Of course it had to be Winsen. Because they couldn’t treat it like it was a big deal.

“Win?” Teia said.

“Yeah?”

“You know, for the longest time I used to think you were an asshole.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “And now?”

“Oh, I still do. I just used to, too.”

Epilogue 3

Dazen waved his empty hands around the corner before he entered the hidden room. “Please don’t shoot,” he said. “It’d feel ridiculous to die now in some