“What are you doing?” Gavin asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you acting like this? You were sane just two seconds ago!”

“You left me!” Kip said. The sense of abandonment made his throat feel tight. It was hard to swallow. He hadn’t even known that was in there, but now he felt horribly exposed, weak, ashamed. It was the prospect of Commander Ironfist leaving forever—just like everyone left him.

“I—what?!”

“You left me here,” Kip said. He was already recoiling from his own stupidity. Gavin had just come back, and Kip was taking this out on him? What had Kip just been saying to Ironfist? That he was an adult? “I’m sorry,” Kip said. “I’ve failed. I haven’t accomplished anything you asked of me.” He couldn’t look at Gavin. “You said I had six months, and the only way I could think of accomplishing anything was to get into the forbidden parts of the libraries, and the only way to that was as a Blackguard. And I haven’t gotten there yet. I don’t think I’m good enough. And I failed with your father, too. He hates me.”

Gavin cursed under his breath. “I wish my mother was here,” he said suddenly. “I’d ask her… Kip, there’s probably nothing you could have done to please my father. Nothing. And that other thing… We got unlucky and the Color Prince moved faster than I thought he would. I still might be able to get around that obstacle we talked about anyway.”

“So everything I’ve been doing is extraneous?”

“Kip, in a very short time you’ve become one of the most important arrows in my quiver. But you’re not the only one. Orholam help me if you were.”

It was a slap to his whiny, fifteen-year-old face. And a well-deserved one.

Gavin cursed again. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I can’t do what I have to do with one weapon, no matter how sharp. Kip, you deserve more of my time, but right now I have about three emergencies to deal with, and my enemies are probably moving fast. Can you wait?”

Emergencies. Important stuff, like saving the world, preventing wars—or maybe winning them—fates of hundreds of thousands in the balance. And Kip wanted him to what? Sit around and talk? Wrestle? Play a card game?

I’m needy. Weak. A distraction from the important things. People could die because of my pathetic whining. Orholam, Kip, be a man.

Kip swallowed and straightened his back. “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

Gavin hesitated. “If it… if it makes any difference, I, I should have taken you with me. I should have taught you personally. I didn’t—I didn’t think of it. I’m not used to thinking of anyone but myself. And… I’m sorry.”

Kip didn’t know what to say.

“How many colors can you draft now?” Gavin asked.

“Sir?” The question seemed out of nowhere.

“Colors?” Gavin insisted.

“Um, four, five? Your father made me wager my right to the practicum, so I haven’t been able to work on it as much as I’d like.”

Gavin frowned. “Tell me what you can do.”

“Only blue and green are stable. Red’s inconsistent. Yellow’s all over the place, and I haven’t drafted sub-red again since Garriston.”

“You know they say the Lightbringer will be a genius of magic.”

“I’m… I’m not that, sir.” He’d said “will.” That meant his father believed that Lucidonius hadn’t been the Lightbringer, that the Lightbringer hadn’t come yet.

“No, you’re not, Kip. Not because you’re not a genius. You may be. Not because you’re not tremendously talented, smart, and gifted, and mentally nimble. You are. You’re not the Lightbringer because there is no Lightbringer. It’s a myth that’s destroyed a thousand boys, and led a hundred thousand men to cynicism and disillusionment. It’s a lie. A lie more tempting the more powerful you are. Like all lies, it destroys those who long entertain it. And that’s why I lied to you.”

“Huh?”

“You’re a polychrome. If you’re angry at me because your test didn’t show that, I deserve your anger. You’re both privileged and despised for your birth, for one parent or the other, depending on who’s hating you at the moment. You’ve got a right to have a chip on your shoulder, but I didn’t want you to become a monster. So I didn’t want you to know how powerful you were going to be. That’s why I falsified your test.”

“Wh-what?” Kip had been denying all the evidence of his expanding colors because of that damned test. He’d been wasting his time practicing the bouncy balls of doom while he could have been working on other colors?

“I don’t apologize for it, Kip. I wanted you to grow up a little. I wanted you to get the measure of yourself before we added the burdens of vast talent onto your new burdens of being the son of the Prism, having everyone you ever knew murdered, and moving to a new home and jumping into social circles you probably never imagined.”

“So why do you get to decide? Because you’re the Prism?”

“Because I’m your father. I had to grow up too fast, and I didn’t do it at all well. You know what it is to start a war when you’re seventeen?”

“I thought you were eighteen.”

“Young, regardless,” Gavin said, but a quick expression leapt across his face, a tightening in his eyes, passing so fast Kip couldn’t read it. “Long time ago, but I remember wanting to be an adult so bad it stuck on my tongue. I wanted people to take me seriously, to care what I thought. To listen to what I said without that amused, tolerant look on their face—‘Here goes the young lord again.’ I’ve been there, Kip, and people died because I didn’t handle it well. Orholam send that the price you have to pay is never so high, but I didn’t want to force you into a position where any mistake you made could get you or others killed.”

Kip glowered. “Well, when you say it like that it all makes sense and stuff.”

Gavin took his cloak off. “Come. Fold those up tight,” he said, pointing to the shimmercloaks. “We’ll talk about them later.”

Father and son folded up the cloaks carefully and bundled them inside Gavin’s cloak. Gavin folded it over his arm nonchalantly. He grabbed the deck box in his hand, concealed again by the cloaks.

“You know,” Kip said, “Janus Borig said I wasn’t going to be the next Prism. Not that I really wanted to. I mean, I want you to be the Prism forever. But…”

“But if you’re not going to be the Prism, and there’s no such thing as the Lightbringer, then that means you’re going to be nothing?” Gavin asked.

“Yes, sir,” Kip said, averting his eyes. “Sounds… awful, huh?”

“Yes,” Gavin said. “Let’s go.”

Kip was a muddle. No Lightbringer? But Janus Borig had said she knew who the Lightbringer was—when she was looking at me. Afterward, when he finally thought about it, Kip had dared to hope that meant…

Exactly what his father had thought Kip would hope it meant. She could have meant, I know who the Lightbringer is… the Lightbringer is no one. Or, the Lightbringer is Lucidonius. Or she could have just been wrong. Right?