The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,60

avoiding using another ‘aye.’

“Then what’s the pro’lem? They know the deal: Light duty mos’ times, respect e’erwhere, good pay, and when they take the last lonely boat, their family gets a sack o’ gold. They get all that, and in return they gotta obey and they get a short life. Sailors get nothing ’ceptin’ the obedience and short life.”

Putting it like that, it didn’t sound like such a bad deal. Better than working a farm until the arthritis made every move hell, and then working it another ten years, prayin’ you could hold on to life until your sons and daughters could fend for themselves.

Didn’t sound like a bad deal, when you were fifteen years old and forty sounded ancient and they asked you to scrawl your damn idiot signature on the vow.

But it didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were a father who still felt young and you held an infant in your arms who’d already never know her drafter mother, and the Prism who’d killed her first now asked you to hand over the child to some uncaring luxiat so he could slice your heart out, too.

It didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were the man who held the knife and murdered artist kids like Aheyyad Brightwater.

“In all my time as the head of the faith,” Gavin said, “I could never come up with more than two questions that were worth a damn. As it were.”

It sailed over Gunner’s head. In his world, ‘damn’ was for punctuation, not punning. And it wasn’t the full truth anyway. Gavin had a third question, but he didn’t let himself even think it too loudly.

Gavin looked at the great tower of cloud on the horizon, growing ever closer.

“Two questions?” Gunner prompted. “Or did you mean that metty-forcibly?”

“No. I mean, yes? First: is Orholam real? And second: if He is real, is He like we think He is?”

Gunner was looking at him like he wasn’t making sense. “Uh . . . what?”

Gavin tried again. “You and I, Captain, we’ve seen the shit. The real problem with Orholam comes if He is who He says He is.”

“And who else would he be?” Gunner asked. “Hand me that hoo-dad, wouldja?”

Gavin handed him a brush, then other tools, one by one, as Gunner proceeded to happily clean the great cannon on the front quarterdeck.

All his life, he’d kicked against the goads: Tell me I have to do this? I’ll find my own way, and you can go to hell. When the dichotomy was ‘Do I obey Grinwoody or do I defy him?’ given Gavin’s nature, that wasn’t even a choice.

But defying Grinwoody meant either a fast death (say, by blurting out his name while wearing this stabby hellstone eye patch) or a slow one (by accepting failure and death), so Gavin, despairing and defiant but not suicidal, had chosen ‘slow.’

‘Slow’ meant becoming passive. And his whole soul hated that. Sinking into sarcasm is the heart’s last rebellion against a mind choosing helplessness.

Logical step to inexorable step, his answers had marched him into waters that now closed over his head. When your answers lead you logically to despair, you don’t have the wrong answers; you have the right answers—to the wrong questions.

Gavin didn’t want to give Grinwoody what he wanted, but there was no way out. In his current state and situation, Gavin couldn’t outsmart him or outfight him or out-magic him. He couldn’t deny Grinwoody what he wanted.

But that was framing the problem exactly wrong. In truth, it didn’t matter what Grinwoody wanted—it mattered what Gavin wanted.

Gavin didn’t want Grinwoody to win . . . ? Gavin didn’t want to die . . . ?

Divergent as those seemed, both of them were importantly distinct from wanting victory or wanting life.

What do I want?

Odd thing to wonder, here, when he had no power to get it. Before, he’d never asked it in any profound way. His ‘great’ goals for every seven years he served as Prism hadn’t been great in any way. They’d been field dressings on a gaping wound of purposelessness. His housebroken dream had been merely to stay alive, to not be unmasked as a fraud.

Sure, that made sense for a month or two after the war while he healed.

But he’d never become more. Never dreamed more than declawed dreams.

He’d put his brother in the grave, but Dazen had also died at Sundered Rock.

What did Gavin want?

Which Gavin?

Time stretched, as if something were supposed to happen right now—but nothing