Yes, Liv knew it well. A bichrome was expected to be kept in a certain style, or it reflected badly on the sponsor and the sponsoring country. And yellow was so hard to draft well that few who were trained in yellow passed the final examination. So supporting a yellow bichrome was a huge investment, with little possibility of a return. Liv's sponsor had pretended she wasn't a bichrome to save his money. It wasn't fair, but there was no one to speak up for Tyreans.

"Here's your assignment, girl. I've maneuvered things so that your class will be up next for the Prism's personal instruction. Get close to him-"

"You want me to spy on the Prism?" Liv asked. The very notion was nearly… blasphemous.

"Of course we do. He may solicit you for information about his son and this woman Lina. Use that opportunity. Become indispensable to him. Become his lover. Whatever you need to-"

"What? He's twice my age!"

"And that would be horrible-if you were forty years old. You're not. It's not like we're talking about someone old and decrepit. Tell me the truth, you've already dreamed about him tearing off your clothes, haven't you?"

"No, absolutely not!" Really she'd just admired him. Every girl did that. But for Liv, it had been completely abstract. Platonic.

"Oh, a saint you are. Or a liar. I guarantee every other red-blooded woman in the Chromeria has dreamed about it. No matter. You'll think about it now."

"You want me to seduce him?!"

"It is the easiest way to be in a man's room while he's sleeping. Then if he wakes while you're rifling through his letters, you can pretend to be jealous and say you're looking for letters from some other lover. Truth is, we don't care how you get close to him, but let's be honest: what do you have to offer the Prism? Witty conversation? Insight? Not so much. On the other hand, you're pretty for a Tyrean. You're young, not very bright, uncultured, not powerful, not a scholar or a poet or a singer. If you can get close to him some other way, great. I'm just betting the odds."

It was the most eviscerating way to be told you were pretty that Liv had ever heard. "Forget it. I'm not going to be your whore."

"Your piety's touching, but it's not whoring if you want to do it, is it? You've seen him. He's gorgeous. So you get a few extra benefits. You can enjoy him, you can bask in every woman's jealousy, you get everything that we offer-"

"I don't want anything more from you."

"You should have thought of that before you signed your contract. But that's in the past. Liv, if you can get even one private meeting with Gavin Guile, we will set you up as a bichrome. Get close to him, and we'll make your rewards even richer than that. But spit in my face, and everything in your life can turn to hellstone. I have full power over your contract, and I will use it."

The offer of setting up Liv as a bichrome seemed awfully generous just for getting one meeting with the Prism, but she saw the logic behind it. A Prism could do what he wanted, but sleeping with a Tyrean monochrome would seem questionable, tasteless. Slumming. A bichrome, on the other hand, at least had some standing. The truth was, the offer was still probably generous, and might make Gavin more suspicious of them, but the prize-having a spy next to the Prism himself-was worth so much that the Ruthgari were willing to risk it. They needed Liv to say yes.

"Besides," Aglaia said. "If you're smarter than I think you are, you can find out for yourself who gave the orders to burn Garriston. You could find out who's responsible for your mother's death."

Chapter 31

Gavin had hunted down hundreds of color wights, and this one didn't feel right.

The madness struck every color wight differently, but blue wights always reveled in order. They loved the hardness of blue luxin. Most eventually tried to remake themselves with it. Every one of them believed they could avoid madness if only they were careful enough, smart enough, and thought through every step. But what was a blue wight doing crossing the reddest desert in the Seven Satrapies?

Rondar Wit had been posted in one of the smaller coastal cities of Ruthgar. Married, four children, and a good relationship with his lord patron, who'd waited two weeks to report Rondar's disappearance-no one liked to believe that their friend might go mad.

Gavin trudged through the desert. He'd stopped briefly at one of his contacts on the coast, got dressed entirely in red, and armed, and still thought he should reach the wight before dark. Still, he was exhausted. Skimming was fast, but his arms and shoulders and stomach and legs ached. His will felt sapped. He didn't get lightsick when he drafted too much-but he did get tired and shaky.

Coming near the top of a dune, he stopped so as not to skyline himself and drafted a pair of long lenses. Tracking blues was usually easy because no matter how smart they were, most couldn't bear to be illogical. If you figured out where they were going, you could guess they would take the most efficient route there. Gavin had no idea where this one was going, but he was following the coast. Unless his objective was nearby, Gavin was going to assume that the giist would continue heading down the coastline, staying far enough from the coast to avoid farms and towns. Of course, this wight had made a mistake, coming in too close from the desert for the sake of speed and access to water, and had been seen by a boy herding the rangy desert cattle the nomads kept. The boy had told his father, and his father had told everyone, including Gavin's contact.

For a few days, the wight would try to put as much distance between himself and the herders as possible.

So Gavin made guesses, drafting blue to help himself think like one of them. Assuming the blue wight didn't have a horse that the boy hadn't seen-and horses usually hated color wights-a man pushing hard through this desert could only move so fast. Gavin had been through here before, and though he didn't know it intimately, there were a number of points where a man had to decide if he wanted to follow the coastal road or take a trader's route through the Cracked Lands. And there were places where the Cracked Lands were so broken and treacherous that there was no discernible traders' route at all. Gavin wasn't going to choose one or the other. He waited at one of the places where the roads met and diverged.

And waited. He untucked his shirt, pulled it askew, rebuttoned it offset one button, and tucked it back in. And waited. He drafted sub-red into fire crystals to bleed off heat from his body, watching the tiny crystals take shape, crinkle, and then flame out. Every ten minutes, he trudged back high on the great dune to poke his head over and scan the desert.

As the sun descended, he saw the telltale gleam. Aches forgotten, he was again, a circling hawk, waiting for the marmot to step just this far from his hole. He felt the same spasm of black fury that he felt every time. He should kill it, kill it instantly, and not listen to its lies, its justifications, its haughty madness.

No, this time, he needed to listen. First.

This giist's skin was layered with blue luxin. It wasn't just armor: it was a carapace. Chromaturgy changed all men, but blue wights were seduced by the perfections of magic. They sought to trade flesh for luxin. This one had progressed further than most. Talented, then, not to mention meticulous and likely brilliant. It still wore blue pants and shirt, though both were dirty and, uncharacteristically for a blue's personality, torn. So it thought it was almost done with the need for clothing, but either the dangers of exposure in the desert or the possibility of needing just a bit more blue to draft from had convinced the creature to keep its clothing for a little longer. Its face, though, was the true wonder-or horror, depending on how you looked at it.