Chapter 49

Gavin hadn't even gotten fully out of his father's apartments when he saw trouble coming. His mother's apartments were right beside his father's, and there was no way he could leave without passing in front of her doors-and her doors were open.

Every time. Every burning time. If his father's windows hadn't all been bolted shut and covered with layers of fabric, Gavin would have jumped out of a window. In fact, it was just during one of these sorts of situations that he'd first drafted a bonnet. Every time he came back from even the shortest trip, it seemed he spent all day meeting with one important person after another. All he did was meet with people-and every one of them had demands of him.

Nonetheless, Gavin turned in as he went past his mother's open doors. The room slave was a young Tyrean girl, judging from her dark eyes and hair and kopi-colored skin. Gavin motioned to her as he passed that she could close the doors behind him. His mother had a talent for training slaves: even a girl barely in her teens like this one would wait attentively and respond to the smallest signal. Of course, Gavin wasn't so much different, was he?

"Mother," Gavin said. She stood as he came close. He kissed her many-ringed fingers, and she laughed and embraced him, as she always did.

"My son," she said. Felia Guile was a handsome woman in her early fifties. She had been a cousin of the Atashian royal family, and in her youth the Atashian noble families rarely married foreigners. Andross Guile, of course, had been a special case. He always was. She had the classic, striking Atashian pairing of olive skin and cornflower blue eyes, though her blue eyes bore a wide halo of dull orange around the iris. She had been an orange drafter-though she wasn't greatly talented, Andross would never have married a woman who couldn't draft. Slim despite her age, Felia was regal, fashionable, comfortable in herself, commanding without being domineering, beautiful, and warm.

He had no idea how she could stand being married to his father.

She flicked two fingers of her left hand, dismissing the room slave without taking her eyes off Gavin. "So, I hear a rumor that you have a… nephew."

Gavin cleared his throat. How fast did word travel in this place, anyway? He looked around the room. The slave was gone. "That's correct."

"A natural son," Felia Guile said, her lips pulling taut momentarily. She would never say "bastard." With her huge palette of facial expressions, she didn't have to. Over the years, orange had made her both more empathetic and more suspicious. With her natural intuition and intelligence, it made her quite formidable.

"That's right. He's a good young man. His name's Kip."

"Fifteen years old?" She didn't say, So you cheated on your fiancee, whom I've been urging you to marry for the last sixteen years. Felia loved Karris. Andross Guile had been dead set against Gavin marrying a woman whose family had nothing, like Karris's, after the war. It was one of the few areas where Gavin's mother had continued to defy his father. Usually when they disagreed, she would let her objections be known with force and eloquence, and then concede to whatever Andross decided. Not a few times, Gavin had seen Andross change his mind after his mother so artfully surrendered. The disagreement over Karris White Oak, however, had involved screaming, shattered porcelain, and tears. Gavin thought sometimes that if he hadn't been present during that fight, Andross would have given in, but the man couldn't lose face in front of anyone, much less his boundary-pushing son.

"He is," Gavin said.

Felia folded her hands and studied his face. "So, is his existence as much of a surprise to you as it is to everyone else, or more?"

A shiver shot down Gavin's spine. His mother was no fool. She was as careful to guard against eavesdroppers as anyone, but she had ways of getting to exactly what she meant. After Sundered Rock, when Gavin had staggered alone out of the magical conflagration, wearing his brother's clothing and his brother's crown and his brother's scars under layers of soot and blood, everyone else had taken him to be Gavin unquestioningly. Despite the age difference, the brothers had been mistaken for twins dozens of times, and their mannerisms were uncannily similar. And Gavin had been careful to emulate his brother's idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and expression. Any differences that had emerged after the war ended had been written off as Gavin having been changed by having to kill his own brother.

But Gavin woke the morning of his first night back at the Chromeria to find his mother sitting on the foot of his bed. Her eyes were red and puffy from weeping, though her cheeks were dry. She'd been careful to do her weeping before he woke.

"Did you think I wouldn't know my own boy?" she had asked. "You're the blood of my blood. Did you think you could deceive even me?"

"I didn't think it would work this long, mother. I expected any of a hundred people to see through this farce, but what else can I do?"

"I understand why you've done what you've done," she said. "I just had braced myself against your death, not your brother's, and now to see you… It's like having to choose which of my remaining sons I'd prefer to die."

"No one's asking that of you."

"Just tell me this," she said. "Is Gavin dead?"

"Yes," he'd said. "I didn't want… He gave me no… I'm sorry."

Her eyes had streamed tears, but she ignored them. "What do you need, Dazen? I've lost both of your brothers; I swear to Orholam I won't lose you."

"Tell them I'm convalescing. Tell them the battle nearly killed me. When the time is right, tell them it changed me. But don't make me look weak."

And so she'd become his only true ally in the Chromeria. And after she left, he'd barred the door and opened the chest where his drugged brother lay, not a foot from where their mother had stood. He studied the unconscious figure minutely, and then himself in a mirror. Taking note of every difference, he set to work. His brother's hair had a cowlick that stuck out whenever he cut it short; the new Gavin would have to wear his hair long so no one noticed this disparity. Gavin was a little shorter than Dazen, and had liked to wear boots with more heel; the new Gavin would wear flatter shoes. He began writing lists of his brother's mannerisms, the way Gavin liked to pop his neck to the left and right. Or was it right and left? Damn it, Dazen didn't even know how to pop his neck. Gavin liked to shave every day, even twice a day, to keep his face smooth; Dazen had shaved a few times a week, finding it too much bother. Gavin always wore a particular scent; Dazen had never bothered. He'd have to send a servant to fetch it. Gavin cared about his clothing and made sure he was at the forefront of every trend; Dazen didn't even know how he did that. He'd need to look into it. Had Gavin plucked his eyebrows? Dear Orholam.

Other changes were harder to make. Dazen had a mole on the inside of one elbow. Grimacing, he sliced it off. It would become a little scar. No one would notice.

His mother helped, coming every day, handkerchief in hand for her silent tears, but back ramrod straight. She pointed out quirks Dazen never would have remembered, like the way his brother stood when he was thinking, and what foods Gavin loved and what he hated.

But the biggest reason for his success had been the real Gavin himself. Gavin had painted Dazen as a False Prism. He'd sworn that Dazen deceived his retainers with parlor tricks that would never convince anyone who wasn't criminal or insane or who stood to benefit by standing with a False Prism. Everyone knew there was only ever one Prism every generation, so they'd believed the old Gavin implicitly. So from their first glance at Dazen's prismatic eyes, they knew he was Gavin. Those who knew better, who knew that Dazen had never needed parlor tricks, who knew he was as much a Prism as Gavin-in other words, Dazen's closest retainers and friends-had been scattered to the four winds after the Battle of Sundered Rock. He'd betrayed them, and if it was a betrayal for the greater good, it still kept him up nights to know that Ilytian pirates were selling his people for slaves in a hundred ports. He drew up his first list of seven great purposes, and he did what he could.