The Blinding Knife

Chapter 113

Koios White Oak the Color Prince came the next morning to the palace in which he’d installed Liv. He seemed jubilant as he beckoned her to join him on the roof.

Together, they looked out over the city. There were some fires in a few neighborhoods. Fighting still continued in pockets. It would be weeks, probably, until the city was pacified. The Color Prince was offering clemency to those rebels who laid down their arms in the next two days. Those who continued fighting would be subject to retributive rapes, the killing of family members, and all the horrors his men could dream up. He didn’t invent war, he said, and he would do anything to end it quickly. Sharp, quick brutality was better, he said, than tolerating protracted lawlessness.

“Did it work?” Liv asked.

“Birthing Atirat?” the prince asked. “Oh yes. You succeeded marvelously. The failure was Atirat’s own-and Zymun’s. We’ll retake the fort on Ruic Head tomorrow and perhaps we’ll learn what happened. It seems he did capture it, but he must have botched something, because they knew he had it. And then he lost it. If he lives, I don’t expect he’ll come back to camp. You’re free of him.”

That was a relief, though Liv felt weak for feeling it. She’d turned the tide of a battle, and she was afraid of a sniveling teenaged boy?

“There’s more good news,” the prince said. “Aside from your tremendous success and us taking the city. Your father wasn’t fighting for them.”

“I know,” Liv said.

“Has he been in communication with you?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?” Koios White Oak asked.

“Because we won.”

The prince laughed, but Liv could tell her answer peeved him. “Let us hope we never have to test your confidence in his abilities, then. But there’s more. Can you feel it?”

He meant magically. “No. I don’t have your senses,” Liv said.

“The Prism is dead. The colors are free.”

“I don’t understand,” Liv said. She felt sick. Her senses had been shut off as soon as Atirat had taken shape. She’d missed the climax of the battle, and she’d hoped that somehow she’d been wrong, that Kip and Karris and Gavin had lived.

“This…” Koios swept a hand toward the bay. “This was a setback. The bane rise spontaneously, Aliviana. All we need to do is wait, and there will be another. Another blue, another green, another one of every color, now.”

She looked over at him sharply. No wonder he wasn’t very upset.

“It will take time, but they can’t stop us now, Liv. The only trick for us is to make sure that as each bane rises, a drafter we trust is at the center of it.”

“A drafter we trust? You mean that any drafter can…” She’d seen Atirat atop the bane, of course, but-Dervani Malargos?

“Any sufficiently talented drafter, yes. In centuries past, it led to bloodbaths, as every green would tear every other apart, each in their quest to become a god. And then the gods would war with each other. But that time is past.” He smiled magnanimously. He opened a hand, and there was a choker in it with an odd, throbbing black jewel at the center. “I told you that I had a purpose in mind for you, Aliviana, a great purpose befitting the greatest of my superviolets. So tell me, can you now guess what it is?”