The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,71

reminded you.”

Because Andross didn’t forget. Andross never forgot. Anything. It was an infuriating reminder that his inhumanity didn’t only make him less than human; all too often, it seemed to make him more.

“You really ought to get a secretary, someone who could be an overseer as well, ideally. As I have in Grinwoody, and Gavin had in, uh, what was her name?”

From a kinder man, the pretense that he’d forgotten might have been interpreted as him trying to bridge the gap between his own perfection and her own . . . not. She should really try interpreting Andross in the best possible light.

“Marissia,” she said curtly. Dammit.

They began walking together toward her chambers. It had a better meeting space than his apartments, and going into his home alone felt like a fly volunteering to scout a spider’s lair.

“Tragic she ran away,” Andross said. “Slaves.”

She hadn’t run away. Andross had paid the Order—the Order!—to kidnap her. Not that Karris could admit she knew that, not without endangering Teia. But it did turn her stomach. Had Andross had a grudge against her husband’s room slave, or had taking her been a way to keep Karris from learning all the things Andross feared Marissia might know? He would’ve interrogated her, and like many, he probably believed that slaves had to be interrogated under torture for their testimony to be trusted. And then he would’ve killed her. Just a bit of property destroyed: the price he had to pay to keep his kidnapping of her secret.

Marissia had been holding a bundle of Orea Pullawr’s papers that the old White had intended for Karris. But Karris still hadn’t figured out any way to learn if Andross had taken them or if the Order had kept them and never even told him about it.

He said, “You did check with your bankers, didn’t you, to see that she didn’t steal more from you? Terrifying that one might be betrayed by someone who slept in the Prism’s very bedchamber, isn’t it?”

He had to remind her of where Marissia had slept, didn’t he? Not just in Gavin’s suite, but so often in his bed.

I knew he’d use this to put me off balance. I’m the White now. Do it like I practiced.

“Gavin shared so much of his life with her,” Karris said. “I’m sure she was simply afraid of what I might do to her without him here. She loved him very much.”

She was actually surprised to find real compassion in her voice. And her heart.

Score one for the new White!

“Loved him? Slaves, always forgetting their place these days,” Andross scoffed, shaking his head as he took a scroll case from his own man Grinwoody.

Yes, I’m sure everyone was well behaved back when you were young.

“It was my failure, not hers,” Karris said instead. “It was no betrayal. I begrudge her nothing, though I admit it hurts that she left without a word. But she took nothing that wasn’t hers.”

“Other than her body.”

“No. Gavin manumitted her,” Karris said.

“Really? When? I wasn’t aware of any papers filed on his behalf.”

“In his will,” Karris said. It was as good a time as any to admit she’d finally accepted the truth about his death that she’d denied for a year. “I’m filing them today.”

Other than a quick upward flash of his eyebrows, though, he gave no indication he’d even heard, no vaunting, no I-told-you-so.

No, that wasn’t true. He said nothing for several minutes. He didn’t point out that the provisions of a will didn’t apply until the deceased was pronounced legally dead, and that Marissia had ‘run away’ many months before that.

Indeed, Karris’s first paranoia had involved suspecting Marissia herself in Gavin’s abduction, but not one of them had panned out. And then Teia had told her what had really happened, and she’d been ashamed.

Karris and Andross stepped past the Blackguards, who’d finished checking the safety of the lift. One of Karris’s attendants was reduced to the servile role of setting the counterweights, as the woman was considered junior to Grinwoody because Andross (as promachos) held the highest absolute rank. Naturally, one of the Blackguards stood at her elbow watching her—one of Karris’s Blackguards, not Andross’s, because while in the Chromeria the Blackguards considered the White the highest-ranking official, behind only the Prism, though the personnel assigned to guard the White and the promachos (and for that matter the Prism and the promachos, too) were all drawn from the same pool. Several of Andross’s Lightguards also attended him, though they pretended not