“Can you draft a stable solid yellow?”

“On a good day,” Kip said.

“By the time I’m done with you, you’ll have memorized how to make a yellow sword, from memory, within … eh, eight seconds.”

“Three,” Karris said. “At most. By Sun Day.”

For a moment, Kip remembered scrabbling around on the old battlefield at Sundered Rock, looking for the telltale gleam of yellow luxin in the rising sunlight. Solid yellow luxin was the most valuable for resale. Picking through the mud, spitting on rocks and rubbing them clear with an already grubby sleeve, hoping against hope he could pay for dinner tonight instead of relying on charity again and hating himself, and hating his mother, and feeling guilty for it.

It was all different now. He wasn’t sure why, with all the radical changes he’d been through, that somehow this little one struck him.

If I ever lose it all, I could still make a better living than I ever could have imagined back in Rekton, just by drafting bits of yellow luxin to sell.

All the inherited wealth and position were somehow external. But this tiny little thing was somehow his. He would never go back to who he’d been. Couldn’t.

“Four months?” Mistress Phoebe was saying. “Hmm. You have your father’s memory? You as smart as he is?”

“No, and not even close,” Kip said, coming back to the moment, pushing all that self-indulgent nonsense away.

“More modest, at least, not that that’s hard,” Mistress Phoebe said. “Good. It’ll make you work more than he ever did. Us mere mortals work for our bread and board. One hour a day, young Guile.”

“Every other day,” Karris said. “He’s got six other colors to practice, and Blackguard training.”

Kip groaned. Quietly. Karris would let him get away with that much.

“Sad,” Mistress Phoebe said. “I had all sorts of onerous chores I was looking forward to him performing. Looks like it’ll be study only instead.”

And so it had gone, with every color. Kip didn’t know how Karris bullied, blackmailed, or begged, but she got him tutors in every color. She kept him in some of his classes—engineering and a basic history course—but had him skip others. The time for hagiographies would have to be later, she said, if he lived. Without exception, his tutors were excellent. Some of them were the best in their field, like Mistress Phoebe. Others were simply great teachers.

Karris taught him fighting herself, incorporating drafting with the purely mundane fighting that the Blackguard inductees mostly did. She said that once the rest of the nunks did start to incorporate drafting, Kip would either get much better than average or much worse: the others had only one or two types of luxin to figure out how to use in fighting. Kip had seven.

There was too much to learn in a man’s lifetime, she said, and a woman would be weak in body by the time she learned it all. But she’d teach him as much as she could.

And she was a good teacher, despite the handicap of having to teach him drafting while being forbidden to draft herself. She had an uncanny instinct for knowing when he tried to ease up, but she wasn’t cruel.

He could tell that she was figuring out her own new roles, too. When she walked with him from the blue tower workshops into the big practice field where the Blackguards met, he saw a flash of grief in her eyes.

Trainer Fisk saluted her, hand to heart. She moved to salute back, then stopped herself and nodded to him instead, a lady, not a Blackguard.

Kip had a thought before he jogged over to get in line, and blurted it out: “He’s coming back. I swear.”

She didn’t try to deny she’d been thinking about it. “The world isn’t always so merciful, Kip.” She turned and left abruptly, head held high. Something in the rigidity of it told Kip that it was that or collapse.

So unlike his own mother, for whom the least harsh word was an excuse to smoke more haze or drown in a bottle. He wished his mother had been half the woman Karris was.

And that thought led him to Zymun. Orholam’s shit. Kip’s oath, offered so readily, buying what he needed with the coin he didn’t want to keep, was seeming more expensive by the day.

From Andross, who still played him regularly, Kip learned that Karris had disappeared after the war, only coming back to the Chromeria more than a year later.

That hadn’t been uncommon. Families had been destroyed in any of a dozen ways by the war, and many of the old guard hadn’t come back at all after Sundered Rock. Others had been gone for long periods simply trying to repair the damage done to their estates in their respective satrapies, having to hire and train new people to take over from those killed or exiled in the war. The old indolence so many families had been able to afford before the war was simply gone. An absence of a year for the scion of a once-great family had been unremarkable.

Andross said it had taken him a long time to find out what had happened. Karris had stayed with some distant relations in Blood Forest and left the child with them.

She still thought it a secret. But even if Kip were willing to risk Andross’s wrath by breaking his word to him, how do you pull someone’s secret shame out into the light, and then make it worse?

‘That son you thought was secret? Andross knows all about it, and he’s bringing him here. And your son may be more loyal to Andross than anyone. Oh, and he lacks all human decency and emotion except ambition.’ Any way Kip played the conversation, it went downhill fast. And that was before Andross avenged himself.

I’m Kip the Lip, and in this, I’m not able to blurt out the truth.

Andross had looked at him during one of their games and paused. Kip had been plying him for news of the war. The last he’d heard, the Chromeria had lost at Ruic Neck but had won—despite Teia’s scoffing—at Sitara’s Wells and a small town called Amitton. Andross naturally had all the most accurate and timely information available. Andross said, “This is not for sharing, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“We’re losing. We’ll continue to lose for months. The winter storms could sink any ships with reinforcements or matériel we’d send. We’re gathering what we can, and fighting delaying actions, slowing them. It will be after Sun Day before we can bring our full might to bear. We will lose all of Atash, and perhaps a third of Blood Forest, depending.”

“It’s that bad?” Kip asked. Some people were still talking like they expected a quick victory now that the satrapies were united against the threat.

“Worse.” Then Andross had said nothing for a long time.

“What is a man’s oath, Kip?”

He wasn’t looking for an answer.

“What is a man’s oath but his will put into words? If a man puts his words false, and sets will against word, are not both weakened?”

Kip’s skepticism—not about the sentiment, but on the source of it—must have shown, because Andross said, “You will notice, grandson, that though I often misdirect and manipulate—”

“Lie.”

“Yes, lie,” he said as if the difference were a trifle. “But I almost never give an oath. When I do, I uphold it. Utterly. Every people from the moment Orholam gave man the light of reason has known and allowed the petty lies that are as natural as breathing, the words to which no will is attached. And every people has distinguished those from oaths. Vows. The moment of creation itself was a perfect word perfectly wedded to a perfect will.”