also more usefulness. Many resisted his pull, rightly distrustful of another war, another Guile. Many tried to twist him to their selfish ends. But behind others, even tonight, Kip could feel an undue tension, pulling against him.
He wasn’t looking to weave an emperor’s robe for himself, for Orholam’s sake, he was making a simple yoke, that he might heave the Seven Satrapies away from the edge of an abyss.
It was the White King. Koios was at work here in this very room tonight. Kip could feel it.
“With your discovery that the old masters used truly full-spectrum magic, Great Lord Guile,” Lady Proud Hart was saying, “nine colors! not seven! who’d have dared believe it?—with that insight, we can bring art back to life that has not graced this earth with its true beauty in centuries. Yes, yes, the Chromeria will be peeved, but surely art is a demi-creation that brings great glory to the Creator Himself, no? The creation of beauty is worship! Who can deny it?” She was a tiny woman, the foremost expert on Forester antiquities in the world, or so Tisis had told him. She was also very connected and universally loved here. “With you leading the efforts, Conn Guile—oh dear, did I let that slip? Did you know yet that the Divines are planning to confer the title on you tonight? A little present. Unofficially, of course, until the formal—”
Across the room, Ferkudi and Big Leo suddenly shouted, “Nine Kill Naught!” and “Nine Kill Seven!” simultaneously.
For an embarrassingly long moment, Kip didn’t understand why they’d be so rude as to scream during a civilized dinner party.
In one instant, Kip’s greatest dread was that Lady Proud Hart was warming to asking him to repair dozens of fragile, priceless works of art himself. There was no way he wouldn’t destroy half of them if he tried. He was the f’ing Turtle-Bear.
In the next instant, dual cracking noises woke him from a social fear to a physical one, like a man wakened from a fitful sleep by a thief in his room. Lux torches snapped open, Ben-hadad threw one blue and one green torch onto the banquet table, each flaring and burning and spitting magnesium heat, scorching the priceless walnut.
Kip suddenly lurched backward as Cruxer heaved on his shoulders, yanking him and his chair to get him out of any possible line of fire as quickly as possible.
Cruxer suddenly stopped the chair’s skidding feet with his own, pulling the chair hard toward the ground and catapulting Kip into the air.
Kip flipped over backward, only belatedly tucking his knees.
When they’d practiced this, he’d landed on his feet. One time.
Not this time. He crashed onto his hands and knees behind Cruxer.
By the time Kip stood, Cruxer had slammed an oblivious serving girl out of the way and off her feet with a hard shove and planted himself in front of Kip, whose back was now against the wall. Cruxer, with one side of his blue spectacles knocked askew, was staring at the blue burning lux torch on the table and drafting.
The tall bodyguard whirled each hand in circles, building a blue luxin shield, swiping left and right, painting the air itself with crystalline protection.
To not make a stationary target of himself, Kip dodged left and right within the space behind Cruxer, drafting as much off the lux torches as he could while trying to identify a threat.
Ferkudi and Big Leo were barreling through the wide common hall to get to his side. The music of lyre and timbrel and psantria fell silent.
Kip had asked for a small party—which meant (not counting those laboring in the kitchens and stockyards) a hundred lords and ladies and lackeys and lickspittles, thirty-some servants and slaves, fifty men-at-arms (who, on Cruxer’s insistence, were allowed no more armament than a table knife), and a dozen performers.
All of them were shrinking back from the center of the room and the high table. Some of the men-at-arms were covering their charges with their own bodies or hauling them toward the doors. Other men-at-arms were still stupefied like blinking heifers, too dull to do the only work for which they’d been hired.
A hundred people in the room, and not one whom Kip could see as a threat.
In a far corner of the room, the petite Winsen had jumped up on a servant’s sideboard to get a view of the whole room, his bow already strung, arrow nocked but not drawn, its point sweeping left and right with Winsen’s gaze.
Then Kip’s