The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,81

surely go straight to Gill to offer some comfort—and Teia was blocking the aisle, rooted to the floor.

Teeth gritted, tears swimming in her eyes, she lifted her foot. The floor squeaked a protest. She retreated. From the barracks door, she looked back.

It was as if a great weight had been lifted from Gill’s shoulders. He was standing, his face radiant. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me . . .” His face twisted suddenly, a cavalry charge of tears of grief smashing against the shields of a smile, and his last word was a whisper. “. . . alone.”

He wept then, and spoke to his dead little brother, and Teia couldn’t stay, and she couldn’t leave. Like a monster, she eavesdropped, and she knew it was a profound betrayal of those brothers she’d loved.

She was unforgiveable. Irredeemable.

She slowly sank into the sticky shadows of the hall. Her home. Human grief and human love and every species of human bonds and heart connections had floated at her fingertips, sometimes pushing in, sometimes waiting for her to reach out her hands and pull them to her once more. She’d been pushing it all away for the last year, and now as if by long practice her muscles of rejection had grown immensely strong, her humanity flown far from her.

No. No! This wasn’t what she wanted, was it? From the darkness of her shadowy perch in the hall, she only watched as two figures rounded the corner of the tower’s circular hallway into view. Essel and one-handed Trainer Samite fell silent as they approached the double doors of the barracks that they’d each gone through thousands of times.

With her hand hovering short of the door handle, Samite said, “Done this shit too many times this year.”

“But not with a kid Gav’s age,” Essel said.

Through her teeth, Samite addressed only the floor. “I don’t even know Gill that well. It shouldn’t be me.”

“It shouldn’t be you giving him comfort,” Essel agreed. “But right now it’s nobody at all.” Her tone was as soft and near as Teia felt cold and distant. Essel hesitated one moment more, giving Samite a chance, but then, as the trainer failed to marshal her courage as she had never failed in battle, Essel didn’t reproach her. She only said quietly, “I’ll go in now. You can come when you’re ready.”

But then Samite cursed quietly and opened the door. The two veterans disappeared inside together.

It was as if someone had held a long-lens up to each of Teia’s eyes—backward. Every good thing Teia had ever wanted in life suddenly whooshed as far away as Orholam’s Eye was to a woman pulled into the depths of the sea, drowning unseen.

Teia was exactly what she hated and condemned. She was Karris: offering those who deserved the truth a comforting lie instead, telling herself that her profound deception wasn’t a betrayal.

In the hall, she passed a mirror and couldn’t help but seek herself in its eyes.

Framed in a socket of rotting wood, with the tired, tarnished silver eyeshine of an aging nighttime carnivore, the dull, distorted glass revealed nothing where Teia stood—it showed a nullity more profound than darkness. All that was, still was, without her in the frame. Teia’s absence was merely an empty bunk in the barracks, soon filled by another. She wasn’t even a name on the lists of the war dead, a last sound heard a last time as it was read aloud to ears desperate not to hear some other name read out. She wasn’t even one last scribble on a page to be posted publicly and skimmed over by some bereft family wondering if they would never hear any word at all of a lost son. The hole within her that had expanded with every murdered slave now reached beyond every bound of her body.

She was become absence itself.

She was more dead than Gav Greyling, who was still loved, who still had one who spoke to him.

Not so long ago, a fierce and fiery young Blackguard would have filled that mirror. Teia had been—she saw only now—beautifully alive. So, so young. But not less because of it. She’d been vibrant, strong, passionate. Playful.

An afterimage of her own old white-hot smile stole onto Teia’s lips.

Then it cooled, darkened.

Someone had murdered that spirited girl and turned her into a ghost. She could cast the guilt on others for that, but when she examined all the evidence honestly, she could still only see her own hand