“Yes, Lord Prism, of course, this is the guest of honor’s suite. We’ll get—”

“For my servants,” Gavin finished. “Kip, Liv, I trust you can stay out of trouble while I get our accommodations arranged?”

“Yes, of course, my Lord Prism,” Liv said, a formality and maturity in her voice that Kip wasn’t familiar with.

“Start Kip’s drafting lessons. I’ll check up on you after I’m finished with a few things.”

“Of course,” Liv said, curtseying. Kip half-bowed, and instantly felt deeply foolish. He didn’t know how to bow. No one bowed where he grew up.

“Ironfist?” Gavin said.

Ironfist raised an eyebrow—oh, now you want me to go with you?

“Best chance you’ll have to see a pompous Ruthgari governor get kicked out of his rooms. More if you’re lucky. Might even be someone you know.”

The corner of Ironfist’s mouth twitched. “It’s the simple pleasures that make life beautiful, isn’t it?”

Chapter 58

The door closed behind them, and abruptly Kip and Liv were alone, away from the important people and the matters of state. Children once more.

Liv looked at Kip for a long time.

“What?” Kip asked.

“Sometimes it’s really strange to me that you are who you are. A week ago I would have blushed just at seeing Commander Ironfist. Now I’m sitting in the finest rooms in the Travertine Palace—and they’re mine?”

“I’ve given up trying to understand it all,” Kip said. “I think if I stop and think too much—” I’ll become a blubbering baby. “Things will just fall apart.”

In a moment, Liv’s face changed. Her eyes softened, compassion etched on every feature. “You were there. In the village. When it happened.”

“At Green Bridge with Isa and Sanson. And Ram, of course.” He still wanted to sneer at the very thought of Ram, but that seemed cruel and small now. “Ram and Isa were killed. Sanson and I got away. But eventually they killed him too.” Kip’s voice was wooden and distant even in his own ears. He couldn’t even look at Liv. If he saw her compassion, he’d break. He already looked weak and foolish and young and fat in her eyes, a boy to be pitied. He didn’t need to make it worse by crying. “My mother made it out but her skull was smashed. I was with her when she…”

“Oh, Kip, I’m so sorry.”

He pushed that down, pushed it aside. “Anyway, I really do hope your father got out. He was always good to me. In fact, if he hadn’t made me leave when he did, I’d be dead.”

Liv said nothing for a time. Kip couldn’t decide if it was an awkward silence or not. “Kip,” she said finally, “I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to… Things can be really complicated now. With who your father is, and the way things are at the Chromeria… Sometimes things don’t really go the way we want, and we—”

“Am I supposed to have some idea what you’re talking about?” Kip asked. “ ’Cause…”

She opened her mouth and looked at him again. Then he saw the gates come down. “I’m just really glad you made it out, Kip.”

“Thanks,” he said. Thanks for not trusting me enough to say whatever you just wanted to say. “Should we get started?”

She smiled wanly, like she wanted to say more but didn’t know how. “Sure. Come out to the balcony.”

They walked out onto the balcony, which hung literally over the sea. From above, they could hear the muffled voices of men speaking on top of the Travertine Palace. Kip stood looking out at the sea, trying to put himself in a frame of mind to concentrate, and said, “What do I do?”

“To draft you need four things,” Liv said. “Skill, Will—”

“Source, and Still,” Kip said. “Er, sorry, I have picked up a thing or two.”

“Right. So there’s basically modifications and nuances to each of the big four, but that’s where it all starts. Let’s start with source.”

Kip thought that he’d picked up a lot of what she was going to say, but one doesn’t interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny. Liv rummaged through her pack and pulled out a rolled-up green cloth and then a white one.

“We’ll hold off on the color theory as much as we can,” she said. “We know you’ve drafted green. So your source can either be something reflecting green light in the world or you can take something that has green as a component color and look at it through a lens.”

“Huh?” Kip said. So much for this all being a repeat. “What do you mean reflecting green? You mean something green?”

“Something you’ll learn the further you go in the Chromeria is that your experience of a thing and the nature of the thing itself are often different things.”

“Sounds… uh, metaphysical,” Kip said. Hadn’t Gavin said something like that?

“Some take it that way, too, but I’m speaking strictly physically. Look at this.” Liv pulled out another cloth. It was a red spectrum, but instead of flowing smoothly from the deepest to the lightest red, there were parts that took steps back. “When you look at this, Kip, you can tell that it’s off. It generally goes right, but there are subcolors out of sequence. Most men can’t see that. They think it’s right. They can differentiate these four spectral blocks here, but not these blocks inside. It doesn’t matter how hard they try, or how long they study it. Their experience of it is less nuanced than yours or mine. Now, quite honestly, we don’t know if what you and I see is the totality of what is actually there, or if some people from beyond the Great Desert might think we’re as blind as we think the men are who can’t tell this from this.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know. In class, the magisters usually have every boy come to the front and attempt the test, just because so many of the girls who can see the differences can’t believe that everyone else can’t see them too. It’s pretty humiliating. Actually, I think it’s worse for the girls who can’t see it either. The boys aren’t expected to pass. The girls who can’t see it feel awful.” She shook herself. “Tangent. The point to remember, even if you don’t believe it now, is that color doesn’t inhere in a thing. Things reflect or absorb colors from light. You think this cloth is green. It’s not. Really it’s a cloth that absorbs all colors except green.”

“This is us saving color theory for later?” Kip asked lightly.

She paused, then she saw he was teasing and she smiled. “No you don’t, I’m not going to get drawn into more tangents. The point is, light is primary. This cloth, in a dark room, is worthless to you. Obviously, you can take the religious significances pretty deep, but you and I are only going to talk about the physical, not the metaphysical. You can draft green light. There are only a couple of ways for you to do that. The best is to have green things around you. Especially if you have lots of them. Especially if you have lots of different hues and tones available.”

“So, like a forest.”

“Exactly. That’s why before the Unification, the green goddess Atirat was worshipped in Ruthgar and the Blood Forest more than anywhere else. Green drafters flocked to the forests and the Verdant Plains because they were more powerful there than anywhere else. In turn, those lands were dominated by the green virtues and the green vices, either simply because of the sheer amount of green being drafted there or because Atirat was real. Take your pick.”