"A pain in my ass. Now go!"

Chapter 5

This was not going to be pretty. The note, the you-have-a-son note, hadn't been sealed. Gavin could pretty much guarantee that the White's people read all of his correspondence. But Karris had laughed after giving him the note, which meant she hadn't. So she didn't know. Yet. But she'd gone to report to the White. Where Gavin was expected.

He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck to one side and then the other, each giving a satisfying little pop, then started walking. His Blackguards fell in step behind him, each carrying a wheellock musket and wearing an ataghan or other weapon. He climbed the stairs to the open roof balcony of the Chromeria. As always, he noticed Karris first. She was short, with a naturally curvy figure now carved into too-hard planes and veins by years of strenuous training. Her hair was long and straight and platinum blonde today. Yesterday it had been pink. Gavin liked it blonde. Blonde usually meant she was in a good mood. Her hair color changes were nothing magical. She just liked to change frequently. Or maybe she figured she stood out so much that she might as well not even try to blend in.

Like the other Blackguards protecting the White, Karris wore fine black trousers and blouse, cut for fighting and plain except for the embroidery of her rank on the shoulder and at the neck in gold thread. Like the others, she carried a slim black ataghan-a slightly forward-curving sword with a single cutting edge for most of its length-and rather than a shield, a metal parrying stick with a punch dagger in the middle. Like the others, she was extensively trained in the use of both, and a number of other weapons. Unlike the others, her skin wasn't the deep black of a Parian or an Ilytian.

Nor was her mood dark, apparently. There was a mischievous little twist to her lips. Gavin raised a brow at her, pretending to be mildly peeved about her earlier prank with the shades in his room, and came to stand before the White.

Orea Pullawr was a shrunken old woman who was taking more and more to the wheeled chair she sat in now. Her Blackguards made sure that every guard rotation had at least one burly man in case she needed to be carried up or down stairs. But despite her physical infirmity, Orea Pullawr hadn't needed to fend off a challenger for the white robe for more than a decade. Most people couldn't even remember her real name; she simply was the White.

"Are you ready?" she asked. Even after all these years, she still had trouble accepting that this wasn't hard for him.

"I'll manage."

"You always do," she said. Her eyes were clear and gray except for two broad arcs of color surrounding each iris, blue on top and green below. The White was a blue/green bichrome, but those arcs of color were washed out in her eyes, desaturated now because she hadn't drafted in so long. But each arc was as thick as possible, extending from the pupil out to the very edge of each iris. If she ever drafted again, she'd break the halo: the color would break through into the whites of each eye, and that would be the end of her. That was why she didn't wear colored spectacles. Unlike other retired drafters, she didn't even continue the pretense of carrying around her unused spectacles to remind everyone of what she once was. Orea Pullawr was the White, and it was enough.

Gavin headed to the dais. Above it, mounted on arcing tracks so it could be adjusted for any time of day or month of the year, a great polished crystal hung. He didn't need it. Never had, but it seemed to make everyone more comfortable to think he required some crutch to handle so much light. He never got lightsick either. Life just wasn't fair. "Any special requests?" he asked.

How exactly the Prism felt the imbalances in the world's magic was still a mystery. Shrouded in religious hokum about the Prism being connected straight to Orholam and therefore all the satrapies, the subject had not even been studied before Gavin became the Prism. Even the White had been quite nearly fearful when she asked about it, and she was as brassy a woman as Gavin had ever met.

Not that they'd made much progress, but long ago he and the White had struck a bargain: she would study him intensely and he would cooperate, and in turn she would allow him to travel without Blackguards dogging his every step. It worked, mostly. Sometimes he couldn't help but tease her, since it seemed they hadn't learned anything in the sixteen years he'd been the Prism. Of course, when he pushed her too far, she'd bring him up here and say she really needed to examine how the light moved through his skin. So he'd balance. In the open air. In the winter. Naked.

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.