The Blinding Knife Read Online Free Page A

day and I didn’t even notice for a while. It’s like looking at a friend’s face and realizing you don’t know her name, Corvan. Blue’s there; it’s close. It’s like the color is on the tip of my eyes. If I don’t concentrate, I don’t even notice it, except that the world seems washed out, flat. But if I concentrate as hard as I can, I can see gray where the blue should be. Exactly the right tone and saturation and brightness, but… gray.”
    Corvan was silent for a long minute, red-haloed eyes squinting. “The timing isn’t right,” he said. “Prisms are supposed to last some multiple of seven years. You should have five years left.”
    “I don’t think what’s happening to me is normal. I was never ordained the Prism. Maybe this is what happens when a natural polychrome doesn’t go through the Spectrum’s ceremony.”
    “I don’t know that that’s quite—”
    “Have you ever heard of any Prism going blind, Corvan? Ever?” The last Prism before Gavin—the real Gavin—had been Alexander Spreading Oak. He’d been a weak Prism, hid in his apartments mostly, had likely been a poppy addict. The matriarch Eirene Malargos hadbeen before him. She’d lasted fourteen years. Gavin had only the barest recollection of her from the Sun Day rituals when he was a young boy.
    “Gavin, most Prisms don’t last sixteen years. Maybe the Spectrum’s ceremony would have made you die
earlier
. If you’d died after seven years or fourteen, you’d never have experienced this. We can’t know.”
    That was one problem with being a fraud. You can’t elicit information about something that’s terribly secret that you should already know. The real Gavin had been initiated as Prism-elect when he was thirteen years old. He had sworn never to speak of it, not even to once-best-friend and brother Dazen.
    It was one oath that, so far as Gavin could tell, each member of the Spectrum had honored. Because in the sixteen years he’d been impersonating his brother, no one had said a word about it. Unless, of course, they had made sidelong references to it—which he never picked up, and thus didn’t respond to, and thus let them know that he valued the secrecy of the ceremony highly and they should, too.
    In other words, he was caught in a trap of his own devising. Again.
    “Corvan, I don’t know what’s happening. I may wake up tomorrow and not be able to draft green, and the next day and not be able to draft yellow. Or maybe I’ve just lost blue and that’s all, but I have lost blue. Best-case scenario, if I manage to stay away from the Chromeria and am absent during every blue ritual, I’ve got one year left—until next Sun Day. There’s no way I could maintain a fraud through the ceremonies, or skip them. If I can’t draft blue by then, I’m dead.”
    Gavin could see Corvan realizing all the consequences. His friend expelled a breath. “Huh. Just when everything was going so well.” He chuckled. “We’ve got fifty thousand refugees that no one is going to want; we’re running low on food; the Color Prince has just had a major victory and will now doubtless gather thousands more heretics to his banners; and now we’re losing our greatest asset.”
    “I’m not dead yet,” Gavin said. He grinned.
    Corvan grinned ruefully back, but he looked sick. “Don’t worry, Lord Prism, I’m the last man who would count you out.” Gavin knew it was true, too. Corvan had accepted disgrace and exile to make Dazen’s defeat look credible. He’d spent the last sixteen years in a backwater village, poor, unknown, quietly keeping an eye on the real Gavin’s bastard, Kip.
    Another problem.
    Corvan looked down, blanched at the height, and gripped the rail tightly again. “What are you going to do?”
    “The more time I spend with drafters, the more likely it is that someone will notice something’s wrong. And if I’m at the Chromeria too long, the White will ask me to balance. If blue goes under red, I might not