The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,63

an exaggeration. The bandit lord had bragged that there was one scar for each kill. It was said that if the killed man hadn’t possessed the skill to cut Daragh as they fought, Daragh cut himself. He bore one scar for each man. Deeper or longer for the men he respected.

He didn’t kill women or children. Or, if one believed the darker rumors, he simply didn’t think they counted enough to deserve their own scars when he did kill them.

Kip was the son of an emperor. He didn’t want to be impressed at the sight of the man who’d strolled into the audience chamber this morning as if he owned it, but there was no denying that Daragh was impressive. Daragh the Coward didn’t just have four hundred seventeen scars covering his arms and cheeks and forehead and fists: every one of his scars was hypertrophic. Hypertrophic scars didn’t spread beyond the original wound like keloid scars did, but they did puff up, thick and red against Daragh’s olive skin, cartilaginous and angry.

Apparently such scars often itched terribly.

Which made the bandit lord’s skin a striped shrine not only to human mortality past, but to one man’s misery past and present.

Kip regarded the bandit with lidded eyes. This wasn’t going to be easy. He knew what he had to do.

Daragh the Coward wore his dark, curly hair in long dreadlocks piled into a tail on top of his head. He tucked his tight breeches into rich knee-high boots. Doubtless in order to better display his mutilated pelt, he wore no tunic, only a leather weapons harness, currently with many empty sheaths and pistol hooks, as the Mighty had resolutely refused his demands to come into Kip’s presence armed.

Kip had been tired of being the center of attention all the time, so he’d expected to feel relieved as the smiling bandit king drew every eye.

Instead, Kip was surprised by how it irked him.

“Your Highness,” Daragh said, making an elegant bow. He was flanked by two muscular men and followed by three more. Kip presumed they were all warrior-drafters.

“ ‘My lord’ will do,” Kip said.

“Ah, but you’re not that, are you?” Daragh said pleasantly.

Really? You’re going to play the shame-me-with-my-past card? Instead of saying anything, though, Kip merely stared at the man, as if monumentally bored by the stupid games this bandit was trying to play.

The moment stretched uncomfortably, and Kip the Lip somehow managed to hold his words like a disciplined line of infantry holding its fire while enemy cavalry charged into range.

Daragh broke first. He was, after all, the one who had requested this meeting. “Not my lord, that is. Not yet, anyway.” He gave a gap-toothed grin, backing off from the other possible implication of his words: that Kip was a bastard.

“You fled from your owner seventeen years ago now,” Kip said. “That’s long enough to learn correct terms of address, even if one were possessed merely of low cunning and not much intelligence.”

With some tightness around his eyes, Daragh the Coward smiled again, and Kip could well imagine him holding that same smile while he slid a dagger into your ribs. “We learn different things in the forests and firths than do the soft-handed boys that weaker men call lords.”

Kip let the jab hit only air. “I should hope you’ve learned quite a lot, or we’re both wasting our time. You see, Daragh . . . or, I’m sorry, my own education was geared more toward drafting and war than rhetoric and finer points of alionymics: do you prefer Master the Coward, or is it always Daragh the Coward . . . ? Seems too long for ordinary daily usage. Just Daragh, perhaps? Dar-Dar?”

It had taken Tisis no small amount of prying to find that old nickname, and that Daragh hated it.

The bandit let it roll past, but wet his lips. “Daragh is fine for my friends.”

Don’t say, ‘You can call me Daragh the Coward.’

“You can call me Daragh the Coward. Or Lord Daragh, if you prefer.”

Kip sighed.

Grandfather, is this how you feel all the time? Playing against stupid people? “Lord? Baron of the Bayou, I suppose? The Earl of the Estuary? The Count Who Can’t?” Kip didn’t give him the time to reply. “Enough pleasantries. I would rather be serving this people, and for your part, Lord Daragh, you would doubtless rather be raping and murdering them, as you do, but we’ve things to discuss, don’t we? The growth of my power has come at the expense of