The Blinding Knife

Chapter 82

“Here’s what I’m curious about,” Teia said as they sat down in Kip’s room. She was tired and her hair was askew from training with Karris White Oak. “I think Aram is the second best fighter in the scrubs.”

“He’s the tall kid, muscular?” Kip asked.

“And fast. And a yellow/green bichrome. He’s gotten some unlucky matchups, but I’m wondering if he’s playing sand spider.”

“Sand spider?” Kip asked. She’d said it like it was a saying he should know.

“Hiding in his hole so he can jump out at exactly the right time. He is a yellow. Maybe he thinks that he’s another Ayrad.”

“When you use one reference I don’t know to explain another I don’t know…” Kip said.

“Ayrad was a Blackguard seventy, eighty years ago now. He entered at the bottom of his class, at forty-nine, and each month at testing, he barely made it into the next month. Forty-nine, to thirty-five, to twenty-eight, to fourteen. And then on the last week, he beat everyone. Turned out he’d taken a vow or something.”

“So on the last week, he fought, what? Fourteen to eleven, eleven to eight, eight to five, five to two, and two to one? Orholam’s balls, that’s a lot of fights. I can’t imagine facing the best guy in the class after having already fought four times.” It was one of the controls that the tests had built in. Someone could technically fight from the last place to the first, but because they had to fight again immediately until they stopped winning fight tokens, the exhaustion piled on-and with each new fight, the challenger would be facing someone who was fresh.

“Kip, Ayrad didn’t skip fighters. He beat all of them. From fourteen, he challenged thirteen, from thirteen, twelve.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s the story.” Teia shrugged. “Karris did almost what you said, until she faced Fisk. She finished third, after four fights. And Fisk barely got her, they say.”

With all his study of magic and history and the cards, Kip almost despaired as he saw that there was another gigantic area of lore that he hadn’t even touched: the histories of the great Blackguards.

Teia picked up Kip’s slate and began writing on it.

“So how did Lucretia Verangheti take it when she lost you?” Kip asked. “I never even heard how the Red got her to give up your title.”

“I don’t know,” Teia said. “I haven’t seen her since then. Don’t want to.” She shrugged, then pointed to the slate quickly. “This is what I think the true ranking of the Blackguard scrubs should be. What do you think?”

There was something about how she’d glossed over her slavery that caught Kip’s attention, but then he got caught up in looking at the slate. Teia had Cruxer at first, Aram at second (second?), herself at twelfth, and Kip at… eighteenth. He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Um, sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could do better than that.”

“You’re apologizing for the wrong thing,” Kip said. “I don’t belong at eighteenth, do I?” He’d put himself around twentieth.

Teia cleared her throat. “You’re a polychrome, Kip. It makes a big difference. Huge, if you use it right.”

Kip scowled. A polychrome. They’d guessed that for a while. A full-spectrum polychrome? That was different. Totally different. And yet, with missing the practicum every day, he didn’t have nearly the skills he should have. In truth, as Teia had told him, if he really was a full-spectrum polychrome, all sorts of things would be different. They wouldn’t let him be a Blackguard unless Gavin intervened-he was too valuable. And they would want him to marry, young. It still wasn’t understood what made drafters, but enough people believed that drafters had children who could draft that the pressure for drafters to have children was intense. And more intense for the more gifted. Unless you got as powerful as Gavin Guile, and you could do whatever you wanted and everyone else could go to hell.

But he didn’t want to think about all that right now. He went back to looking at the rankings. “How’d you even arrive at this?”

“Paying attention? Watching? First you have to take into account that everyone wants to finish as high as possible, but at least in the top fourteen. People also have friends that they don’t want to knock out of the top fourteen, so lots of times people won’t challenge three up from themselves if that’s where their friend is. Because win or lose, either they or their friend will lose their challenge token. That’s less important in the top ten where people will know they’re safe, but people heading for getting kicked out aren’t going to want to ruin their friends’ chances.” She started drawing lines. “Person at the bottom goes first, so they might challenge the weakest person in the three above them. So let’s say Idus at twenty challenges Asmun at eighteen because even though he is allowed to challenge Ziri at seventeen, he thinks he can beat Asmun and not Ziri. If he wins, he moves up and then takes on Winsen, hoping to get lucky. So now the new person at twenty is more likely to challenge Asmun who is now at nineteen, even though that’s only one place up.”

“Why?” Kip asked. The numbers were spinning in his head.

“Because Asmun’s already lost. He’s got no challenge token, so he knows he can’t make it in this season at all. He won’t fight as hard because there’s nothing at stake. See, you have to reshuffle the order every time someone wins, and keep track of who has and who doesn’t have their challenge token. That way you can skip the more difficult fights. But of course, we have to keep in mind that some people will feign weaknesses until the last week so they have an advantage.”

“Like you.” That was why Teia had wanted Kip to take credit for the courier idea.

“Yes, like me.”

“Oh hell no,” Kip said. Talk about vast areas of lore he knew nothing about. “No, no, no, this is hopeless. I can’t figure this all out!” He stood up. “No, I’m tired. Forget this-”

“Kip, if you don’t figure this out, you’re not going to make it into the Blackguard. You’re not a good enough fighter, so you need to be smarter than people who are better fighters than you. That is what people admired about Ayrad.”

“The man who defeated all the other fighters in the Blackguard wasn’t admired because he was a good fighter? I find that hard to believe.”

“Kip, he was able to figure out exactly how to finish last every month and still make it in. That means he was figuring exactly who would challenge whom and who would win those fights-every month. If he figured wrong once, he would have failed out early.”

“So he’s admired for losing intelligently? That’s mad.”

“He’s admired for knowing his friends and knowing his enemies and outwitting them all.”

“So what happened to him?” Kip asked.

“He became commander of the Blackguard and saved the lives of four different Prisms over the course of his career-and then someone poisoned him.”

“So he wasn’t perfect,” Kip said grumpily.

“He was perfect for twenty-four years. That’s a lot longer than most of us can even dream.”

“Sorry,” Kip said. He could tell that somehow the dead commander meant a lot to Teia.

“Don’t pout. We’ve got work to do.”

“Hold on, before we do all that, I want you to take your papers. You keep on avoiding this. Look, all you have to do is sign them and we can take them to be registered tomorrow.”

“Kip, don’t be an idiot.”

Kip was so tired he wanted to cry. He lifted his hands helplessly.

“What happens after you free me, Kip?”

“Uh, you’re free?”

“And poor.”

“Didn’t we already talk about this?” Kip asked.

“What happens when a slave gets into the Blackguard, Kip?”

“They’re freed, sort of.”

“They’re purchased, for a fortune. And as soon as a scrub passes the test, their contract goes into escrow until final vows. If you free me now, you get nothing.”

“I don’t want to own you, Teia. It doesn’t feel right. Do you even want to be in the Blackguard?”

“Of course I do!”

“I don’t even know if I should believe you. You can’t tell me that you don’t, can you?”

“What? I’m a slave, not a liar, Kip.”

He scowled. “It’s more complicated than that, and we both know it.”

She looked at him like he was crazy for a long moment, then the facade crumbled. One second she was all breezy confidence and happiness, and the next she looked terribly vulnerable and frightened. “Kip… I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Ever since you said you’d free me. You know that the first thing I felt was angry-at you? Because as soon as you won me, I stopped getting my lessons in how to draft paryl. I’ll get them again, but I’ll have to wait years. Nothing in my life changed except that, and I was mad at you. Stupid, huh? Kip, part of me tells me to take those papers and run to the registrar. To take my freedom while it’s sitting there in front of me. It tells me slave owners are notoriously fickle. Sorry.”

“No offense taken,” Kip mumbled.

“My family’s in debt, Kip. My mother did some bad things, and my father lost everything, including me and my sisters. He was a trader like I said, but his creditors won’t let him go on another voyage because they’re afraid he’ll flee, so he’s stuck working as a day laborer. With what he’s earning now, there’s no way he can pay off what he owes. He can’t afford to buy inventory to trade at home. If I take those papers now, I’m condemning him to poverty, and my sisters to early marriages to the first poor men my father can convince to take them.”

“What happened?” Kip asked.

“Please don’t ask me that.”

But I already did ask-Oh, because she’s my slave, if I insist, she’ll have to answer. Kip said, “Forget it then. Sorry. You have a plan?”

“Hold on to my title for a few more weeks. Then when I go through final vows, you give me a fifth of what the Blackguard pays for me. That way, we both get something-and you’ll need the money as badly as I do. I want to be a Blackguard anyway, Kip. There is nothing in life I want more. This way, the Chromeria pays us for it.”

“That’s… sort of… brilliant,” Kip said.

“And what’s the downside?” she asked.

I don’t get to find out if you like me for me or if you like me because you need the money-until after final vows. But that was purely selfish, wasn’t it? He wanted her to pay for him to feel good about himself.

“See?” she said. “But… I want you to swear something to me, Kip.”

“Anything.”

“Swear that you won’t sell me back to… that you won’t sell me. To anyone. I’ll serve you in our off hours, I don’t care. I’ve been a slave for years, I can do it for a few more weeks, just promise that.”

“I swear to Orholam,” Kip said, “on one condition.”

She looked dubiously at him.

“That you take half of what we get for your contract.”

“Kip, you’re a terrible negotiator.” She grinned, and Kip was struck again by how different she was from Liv. Liv had lived in bitterness over her station, which had been unjust, but it hadn’t been as bad as being a slave. Maybe it was that Liv had seen how close a gloriously easy life had been, so she felt the sting of its loss. Or maybe Teia was simply naturally more positive, but if he had to go through bad and unfair stuff, he hoped that in the future he could be more like Teia and less like Liv. The thought somehow loosened something inside of Kip and he found himself both less angry with Liv and less interested in her. “I accept,” Teia said. “Now, quit grinning… to work!”