Not pleasant. Gavin being Gavin, he’d learned pretty much exactly where the line was. Emperor of the Seven Satrapies indeed.
“I’d like you to start allowing the Blackguard to do their jobs, Lord Prism.”
“I meant about the balancing.”
“They train their whole lives to serve us. They risk their lives. And you disappear, every week. We agreed you could travel without them, but only during emergencies.”
Serve us? It’s a little more complicated than that.
“I live dangerous,” Gavin said. They fought about this all the time. Doubtless the White figured that if she didn’t make a show here, he would push for more freedom. Doubtless she was right. Gavin looked at the White flatly. The White looked at Gavin flatly. The Blackguards were very, very quiet.
Is this how you would have handled them, brother? Or would you have simply charmed them into submission? Everything in my life is about power.
“Nothing special today,” the White said. Gavin began.
A Prism, at core, did two things no one else could do. First, Gavin could split light into its component colors without external aids. A normal red drafter could draft only an arc of red, some a wider arc, some a lesser arc. In order to draft, they had to be seeing red—red rocks, blood, a sunset, a desert, whatever. Or, as drafters had learned long ago, they could wear red spectacles, which filtered the sun’s white light to deliver only red. It gave less power, but it was better than being utterly dependent on one’s surroundings.
The same limitations applied to every drafter: monochromes could draft only one color; bichromes could draft two colors. Generally, it was colors that bordered each other, like red and orange, or yellow and green. Polychromes—those who controlled three or more colors—were the rarest, but even they had to draft from the colors they could see. Only the Prism never needed spectacles. Only Gavin could split light within himself.
That was convenient for Gavin, but it didn’t help anyone else. What did help was this: standing atop the Chromeria, light streaming through his eyes, filling his skin with every color in the spectrum, bleeding out of every pore, he could feel the imbalances in magic in all the world.
“To the southeast, like before,” Gavin said. “Deep in Tyrea, likely Kelfing, someone’s using sub-red, and lots of it.” Heat and fire usually meant war magic. It was the first place most non-drafting warlords or satraps went when they wanted to kill people. No subtlety. The amount of sub-red being used in Tyrea meant either they’d been having a quiet war, or the new satrap Rask Garadul had set up his own school to train battle drafters. It wouldn’t be something his neighbors would be happy to learn. The Ruthgari governor who occupied Tyrea’s former capital Garriston definitely wouldn’t be happy to learn it.
In addition to the surfeit of sub-red, more red magic than blue had been used since Gavin last balanced, and more green than orange. The system was self-regulating, initially. If red drafters around the world used too much red, it would begin to get harder for them to draft, and simultaneously easier for the blues. Sealed red luxin would unravel more easily, while sealed blue would seal better. At that level, it was an inconvenience, an annoyance.
Legends spoke of an era before Lucidonius came and brought the true worship of Orholam when the magic centers had been spread throughout the world: green in what was now Ruthgar, red in Atash, and so forth, all worshipping pagan gods and mired in superstition and ignorance. Some warlord had massacred almost all the blues. Within months, they said, the Cerulean Sea had turned to blood, the waters choked of life. Fishermen on every side of the sea had starved. The few surviving blue drafters had heroically worked to bring the balance back by themselves—using so much blue magic that they’d killed themselves. The seas cleared, and the red drafters returned to drafting as before. But this time there were no blue drafters left. Anything using red luxin failed, the seas turned bloody again, famine and disease descended.
And so it went. Nearly every generation huge natural disasters wiped out thousands who believed they’d done something to offend their capricious gods.
Prisms prevented that. Gavin could feel what was out of balance long before there were any physical signs, and fix it by drafting the opposite color. When Prisms failed, as they inevitably did after seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, the Chromeria had to prevent disasters the hard way—in addition to running around putting out fires (sometimes literally), they would send missives throughout the world, perhaps urging blues not to draft unless it was an emergency, and reds to draft more than usual. Because everyone could only draft a finite amount in their lives, that meant hastening the reds to their death, and keeping the blues from doing useful work in all of the Seven Satrapies. So at such times, the Chromeria sought a Prism’s replacement with great fervor. And Orholam was faithful to send a new Prism every generation, or so the teaching went.
Except for Gavin’s generation, when in his ineffable wisdom, Orholam had somehow sent two—and torn the world apart.
Gavin spun in a slow circle, spreading his arms wide and releasing gouts of superviolet light to balance the sub-red, then red to balance blue, then orange to balance green. When the world felt right once more, he stopped.
He turned and smiled at the White. Her expression, as usual, was a cipher. Her Blackguards—every one of whom was a drafter and thus had an idea of how much power Gavin had just handled—looked similarly unimpressed. Or perhaps they were simply habituated. He was the Prism, after all. It was his job to do the impossible. If anything, they relaxed slightly. Their job was to protect the White, even from him, if it came to it.
Gavin was the Prism, and thus ostensibly the emperor of the Seven Satrapies. In reality, his duties were mostly religious. Prisms who became too much more than just figureheads found themselves forcibly retired. Often permanently. The Blackguard would die to protect him from anyone else, but the White was the head of the Chromeria. If it came to it, they’d fight for her, not him. If it did, they knew they would likely all die, but then, that was what they trained for. Even Karris.
Gavin wondered sometimes, if that ever happened, would Karris be the last to try to kill him, or the first?
“Karris?” the White said. “There’s a ship waiting for you, heading for Tyrea. Take this. You can read it once you set sail. When you can, scull the rest of the way. Time is of the essence.” She handed Karris a folded note. It wasn’t even sealed. Either the White trusted Karris not to even open it before her ship sailed, or she knew she’d read it immediately whether it was sealed or not. Gavin thought he knew Karris well, and he didn’t know which she’d do.
Karris took the note and bowed deeply to the White, never even glancing at Gavin. Then she turned and left. Gavin couldn’t help but watch her go, her figure svelte, graceful, powerful, but he kept his glance brief. The White would notice regardless, but if he stared, she’d probably say something.
She waved her hand as Karris disappeared down the stairs, and the rest of the Blackguard withdrew from earshot.
“So, Gavin,” she said, folding her arms. “A son. Explain.”
Chapter 6
Green Bridge was less than a league upstream from Rekton. Kip’s body screamed at him to quit running, but every time he slowed his pace, he imagined the soldiers coming up the opposite side of the river. He had to get there first.