The Blood Mirror

The Lightbringer Series Recap

In the empire of the Seven Satrapies, a small number of people are born with the ability to learn to transform light into a physical, tangible product called luxin. Each color of luxin has unique physical and metaphysical properties and innumerable uses, from construction to warfare. Trained at the empire's capital, the Chromeria, these drafters lead lives of privilege, with satrapies and powerful houses vying for their services. In exchange, they agree that once they exhaust their ability to safely use magic—signaled when the halos of their irises are broken by the colors they draft—they will be killed by the emperor, the Prism, in a ceremony on the most holy day of the year: Sun Day. The drafters who have broken the halo (called wights) go mad with the luxin coursing through their bodies. If they run away instead of surrendering, they must be hunted to death. Only the Prism can draft with limitless power, and he or she alone can balance all the colors in the satrapies to prevent the chaotic luxin from overwhelming the lands. Every seven years, or on a multiple of seven years, the Prism also gives up his or her life, and the ruling council appoints a new Prism. If the Prism refuses death, he or she is likewise hunted down.

The current Prism is Gavin Guile.

Book One: The Black Prism

Prism Gavin Guile learns he has an illegitimate son living in a satrapy that's threatening civil war for the second time in fifteen years. But Gavin is actually Dazen Guile in disguise; after the battle that ended the last war and killed his brother, he stole Gavin's identity. Now he has to take responsibility for his brother's bastard. Gavin travels to Tyrea with Karris, his former fiancée and now a member of his elite defensive corps, the Blackguard. They find Kip, his son, in time to save him from a rebellious satrap who is calling himself King Garadul. The king allows them to leave, but takes Kip's knife—the only thing left him by his mother. While Gavin takes Kip back to the Chromeria to begin his magical education, Karris stays in Tyrea to rendezvous with a spy in the king's army.

Karris is captured by the king's forces, and she discovers King Garadul's right hand, a wight who calls himself the Color Prince, is the one fomenting rebellion. He is her brother, whom she'd thought long dead.

Kip tests into the Chromeria's school for drafters and meets a friend from his hometown, Liv Danavis, daughter of one of Dazen's greatest generals. Gavin is focused on killing wights and finding a political solution to the war, but he must also deal with the man he's secretly imprisoned deep beneath the Chromeria: his brother. Gavin's father, Andross, tasks him with going back to Tyrea to stop the rebellion from becoming an empire-wide war and with retrieving the very knife Gavin allowed the king to take when he rescued Kip.

When Gavin, Kip, and Liv arrive at Tyrea's capital, Garriston, they meet Liv's father, former general Corvan Danavis. They realize the city is indefensible, so Gavin begins to draft an entire wall. Gavin has almost completed the wall when a cannonball destroys the gate he'd been drafting. Gavin's forces defend the retreat of Garriston's citizens as they attempt to escape via barges. Kip learns where Karris is and decides to rescue her. Liv follows him, but they are separated when Kip is captured by the Color Prince's forces.

Kip is imprisoned with Karris, and in the chaos of battle they manage to join the army marching toward the city. Kip kills King Garadul, and Liv saves both Kip and Karris by agreeing to join the Color Prince if he'll use his sharpshooting skills to prevent their deaths in battle.

Kip races to meet another threat: he knows a young polychrome, Zymun, has been assigned to assassinate Gavin. He doesn't stop the attack, but Gavin survives when Kip intercedes. Kip takes the dagger Zymun used and realizes it is the same blade his mother gave him. Gavin, Kip, and Karris escape the city on barges with much of the city's civilian population. Gavin is unaware that his brother has escaped the first of multiple prison chambers back at the Chromeria.

Book Two: The Blinding Knife

Gavin negotiates with the Third Eye, a powerful Seer, to get permission for the refugees to build a home on her island. Karris and Gavin build a harbor for the refugee fleet, and Gavin hunts the blue bane, a horror forming in the Cerulean Sea. If he doesn't destroy the bane, an ancient god will be reborn.

Kip returns to the Chromeria to test into the Blackguard. He befriends a few of his fellow Blackguard candidates, including Teia, a color-blind paryl drafter and a slave. Her owner forces her to steal valuable goods and to spy on Kip. As hard as training is, the new interest his grandfather has taken in him is worse. Andross demands Kip play a card game, Nine Kings, for high stakes.

A librarian, Rea Siluz, introduces Kip to Janus Borig, an artist who creates 'true' Nine Kings cards, which allow drafters to experience history as it happened. But it's not long before Kip finds Janus mortally injured by two assassins. Kip manages to kill both, acquire their magical cloaks, and save Janus's deck of true Nine Kings cards. Kip uses a new deck made by Janus to beat Andross in a game, winning Teia's slave contract. Kip gives the cloaks, the cards, and his mother's knife to his father, who's just returned with Karris. Gavin has destroyed the blue bane and resettled the refugees, so he's ready to manipulate the Spectrum (the ruling council of the Chromeria) into declaring Seers Island a new satrapy and make Corvan Danavis its new satrap.

Karris is given a letter from Gavin's dead mother and learns Gavin has loved her all along. He broke their betrothal so Karris wouldn't have to marry a man she might not love. Karris approaches Gavin that night, but he's already in bed with another woman—a woman he didn't invite. Enraged at losing Karris again, Gavin throws the woman onto his balcony. She tumbles over the railing and falls to her death.

Certain he'll be arrested for the murder, Gavin decides he must free his brother to take his place as Prism. But Gavin realizes his long-imprisoned brother is crazy, so he kills him. Gavin returns from the prison to find the Spectrum has declared war and that his two Blackguards, the only witnesses to the girl's death, have sworn Gavin acted in self-defense, leaving him free to be Prism.

As the trainees continue with their elimination matches, Kip almost enters the Blackguard ranks—but loses at the last moment due to cheating by some of the other trainees. But his friend Cruxer uses a loophole to get Kip in anyway.

Gavin and Karris reconcile and marry just before they go to war against the Color Prince. With the new Blackguard inductees and the Chromeria's forces, they must destroy a green bane that is birthing a new god, Atirat. Liv is still with the Color Prince's army and uses her superviolet skills to help create Atirat.

Kip, Gavin, and Karris kill the god, but lose the city and the satrapy to the Color Prince's forces.

After the battle, Kip realizes that Andross is actually a red wight. As he confronts Andross, he draws the knife his mother gave him and stabs Andross in the shoulder. Gavin tries to stop the two, but can only redirect Kip's knife into his own body. He falls overboard, and Kip jumps after him. The ship sails on, only Andross aware of what truly happened. Gavin is picked up by Gunner, a master cannoneer on a ship they'd earlier destroyed. Kip is rescued by Zymun, who says he is actually Gavin and Karris's long-lost illegitimate son. Gavin wakes to find he is completely color-blind… and a slave rower.

Book Three: The Broken Eye

Adrift in a boat with Zymun, Kip is able to escape before they're press-ganged by pirates. Weeks later, he makes it back to the Chromeria, after surviving the jungle, starvation, and worse.

Because she married the Prism, as soon as she returns to the Chromeria, Karris is stripped of her rank in the Blackguard and given orders to take over the spy network of the White (the head of the Chromeria). Meanwhile, Andross Guile reveals that he has been miraculously healed from being a red wight. With the absence of Gavin Guile and the war under way, the Spectrum swiftly elects him promachos—commander in chief of the Chromeria.

Teia is quickly recruited by Murder Sharp, a skilled paryl assassin for the Order of the Broken Eye. When the Order steals her slave paperwork, and then frames her for murder, Teia finds herself helpless to resist. She struggles to balance her training as a Blackguard inductee with assignments from the Order, but finally confesses everything to Ironfist and the White. They commission her to serve as the Chromeria's spy on the Order, and Karris is assigned as her handler. As Teia continues her initiation into the Order, she discovers that she is a lightsplitter, a rare drafter who can use shimmercloaks (such as the ones Kip recovered) to make herself mostly invisible.

Upon his homecoming, Kip informs the Spectrum and Karris that Gavin is still alive, but avoids implicating Andross in Gavin's accident, which gains him a powerful if untrustworthy ally. He finds himself under Karris's tutelage for drafting and reunites with his old Blackguard squad, the Mighty: Ben-hadad, Big Leo, Teia, Ferkudi, Winsen, Goss, and Daelos. Andross grants the group access to restricted libraries so they can research heretical Nine Kings cards and the Lightbringer, a long-prophesied savior of the satrapies, hoping they'll gain information to win the war. In the process, Kip befriends mousy Quentin Naheed, a luxiat with extraordinary skills as a scholar.

Gavin, now unable to draft any color, spends months as a galley slave on a pirate ship, rowing next to a mad prophet irreverently nicknamed after the deity he serves, Orholam. In the chaos of a sea battle with a ship they're attempting to seize, a young Ruthgari noble, Antonius Malargos, leaps aboard their ship and offers to free the enslaved rowers if they help him break his ship free. They succeed, capturing Gunner and the Blinding Knife in the process, but Antonius takes Gavin to Ruthgar, to be imprisoned by his cousin Eirene. There her ally the Nuqaba of Paria arranges for Gavin to be publicly blinded.

The Mighty discover that everything about heretical cards, and much about the Lightbringer, have been erased from the records. Kip also realizes that the weapon that allows Prisms to be made or unmade is the very knife that stabbed Gavin. When Kip reports to Karris, they have a falling out over a poorly timed joke. Soon afterward, he is approached by Tisis Malargos, Eirene's sister, who proposes marriage to tie their families together. Kip later finds the true Nine Kings cards his father hid. Mistakenly drafting near them, he falls unconscious and enters the Great Library, where he meets the immortal Abaddon. Kip absorbs every one of the cards—except the Lightbringer card. He manages to grab Abaddon's shimmercloak, but dies from drafting so many cards. Teia, however, resuscitates him. Kip then gives Teia the cloak he stole from Abaddon. She later realizes it is the master cloak, and more powerful than any of the other shimmercloaks.

Andross manipulates Kip into confessing that he found both Andross's lost deck and Janus Borig's true cards, but Kip lies, saying they were all blank. Andross tells him to marry Tisis and go to Ruthgar to serve as his spy, while Zymun (who has just come to the Chromeria and announced that he is Karris and Gavin's long-lost son) will serve as Prism for seven years.

Karris receives word about Gavin's location just in time to assemble a small crew to save him—though not in time to save him from being blinded in one eye. When they return together to the Jaspers, where the Chromeria is located, Karris sends him for healing and finds herself at the ceremony for selecting the new White—as the previous White has just died—and that she is a nominee.

Kip and Tisis agree to marry and flee the Chromeria, and the Mighty insist on coming with them. When Zymun orders the newly formed Lightguard to kill them, they fight their way free. Though Goss is killed and Daelos wounded, the rest of the Mighty escape to meet Tisis at the docks. Ironfist's brother, Tremblefist, covers their escape, but is killed in the explosion he sets to prevent the Lightguards' pursuing them. Kip and Tisis wed just before embarking on the ship, and Teia decides to stay at the Chromeria. She will be of more value in the war effort fighting the Order than with Kip.

Though it's supposed to be a random process, Karris sees the White selection has been rigged, but manages to overcome the trickery. She kills two of the other nominees who attempt to kill her, and is declared the new White.

Before Ironfist finds his dying brother, he meets secretly with his uncle: the perfidious Grinwoody, hidden in plain sight as the slave of Andross Guile, is also the Old Man of the Desert, leader of the Broken Eye. Ironfist has been part of the Order for years. He gives Grinwoody the black seed crystal that only the White and the commander of the Blackguard have access to.

Meanwhile, Liv Danavis has been hunting the superviolet seed crystal at the command of the Color Prince. But though the Color Prince tries to make her wear a black luxin choker to keep her under his control, she foils the attempt and captures the seed crystal on her own.

Gavin is kidnapped from the physicians' care on Big Jasper, and wakes in a prison cell.

Chapter 1

Like a house slave sweeping dirt into a pile, Orholam had heaped together all the earth's horrors and sin. Whistling a nursery song, he gathered barbarities and cruelties and outrages as Gavin lay on his back in the center of it all, arms spread, thrashing against his bonds. Dustpan filled to overflowing with creosote sins, Orholam turned toward Gavin for the first time.

As he turned, his face was blinding bright, unknowable, a miasma of razor-edged light, but at the corner of his mouth, his beard twitched with a torturer's glee.

"Servient omnes," Orholam said. All shall serve.

He upended his dustpan over Gavin's face. Gavin screamed, but his words were taken from him like silk torn from the spool in a spider's gut, unwinding until it snapped inside him, leaving him empty and shattered inside. He tried to turn, twist, look away, but his eyes were propped open. There was no escaping the bulbous, congealed ordure schloomping toward his eye.

The whole mass fell. And as it fell, it caught fire and burnt in the air, sizzling, spattering, spitting angrily.

And afire, all the world's sin fell into Gavin's eye and set his orb aflame. The fire sank sizzling into his socket, gases escaping, tssst, like a sigh from a disappointed father at his failure son.

And the fire lodged in his eye, burning, and he screamed for ages past counting, until his throat was raw and tongue was dry, until deserts blew barren sands into snow, and his attempts to shriek faded, and his skin grew hard and cracked, and the burning shard impaled him, pinning him to the world, cooled by temperature's reckoning but not by pain's, and the shard crystallized, and the smoke cleared, and impaling Gavin's blind eye was a black prism.

Gasping, Gavin woke from his dream to find himself in darkness. But his arms jerked hard against iron manacles.

He was shackled to a table, arms extended. The nightmare wasn't over.

The nightmare had just begun.

Chapter 2

Teia lowered the silk noose toward her damnation. Rope spooled out from careful fingers toward the anxious woman quietly working at the desk below. The target was perhaps thirty, wearing a slave's dress, her copper-colored hair pulled up in a simple ponytail. As Teia watched, the woman folded a piece of the luxin-imbued flash paper that all her spies used. She paused and took a sip of an expensive whisky.

Don't look up! Please don't look up.

The woman was Prism Gavin Guile's room slave. She was the White's hidden spymistress. She was Teia's former superior and her mentor. Marissia put down her whisky, and as she sealed the note, she said, "Orholam, forgive me."

Teia was using the shimmercloak that Murder Sharp had given her, but because she was clinging to the ironwork on the ceiling, it hung away from her body, and it didn't hide the dangling noose at all.

But Marissia didn't look up. She put the note aside and pulled out another sheet of thin paper.

As her mentor leaned forward again, Teia dexterously flipped the noose over Marissia's head and then dropped from the ceiling, holding the rope. Draped over a beam above, the noose jerked tight around Marissia's throat and hauled her to her feet. The sharp movement flung her chair backward just as Teia, holding the other end, swung down and forward. The falling chair cracked across Teia's shins a moment before she crashed into Marissia.

Somehow Teia kept from releasing the rope, and she didn't cry out. Marissia was choking, grabbing at her neck, scrambling to get her feet under her.

Amazing how pain shuts down your thinking. If Teia hadn't just gotten her shins destroyed, there were a dozen things she would have done. Instead she clung stupidly to the rope, gasping, tears springing from her eyes, face-to-face with her old superior.

As Marissia regained her feet, Teia saw the problem: she wasn't as heavy as Marissia. Marissia noticed it, too. Though gagging, she grabbed the rope above her head and pulled down with all her strength.

Something shimmered in the corner of Teia's eye, and Murder Sharp became visible as he took quick steps across the carpet. He buried a fist in Marissia's stomach.

Marissia's strangled cough blew spit across Teia's face. The slave woman went slack. In quick motions, Sharp took the noose from Teia, threw a sack over Marissia's head, and bound Marissia's hands behind her back in such a way that any move she made to escape would tighten the noose around her neck.

Master Sharp was gifted with knots.

He forced Marissia to her knees and checked once more that she could breathe—all the fight had gone out of her.

"Not good," Master Sharp said, turning back to Teia. He was a lean man with sharp features, orange-red hair, and a short beard the color of fire. His most remarkable features, though, were his teeth and his too-big, too-frequent smile, which he flashed now joylessly, from mere habit. Usually the teeth he revealed with that smile were too white and too perfect. On most hunts, he wore dentures made of predators' teeth. But today, perhaps because his mission wasn't to kill anyone, he wore dentures of beaver teeth—a full, disconcerting mouth of big, wide, flat incisors. They barely fit in his mouth.

"Not very good at all. But you kept her from destroying any of the papers," he continued, "so I'll accept it."

"You were here the whole time?" Teia asked. She set the chair back upright to give herself a moment of not looking at the monster who was now her master. She massaged her aching shins. Orholam have mercy, those beaver teeth made her skin crawl.

"This is too important for me to let you bungle it. She was some kind of secretary for the Prism. Who knows what she has access to?"

Secretary? So the Order didn't know what Marissia really was. Why, then, was it kidnapping her?

And why kidnapping? Teia had thought that the Order only killed people.

Not that it wouldn't murder Marissia later.

Handing Teia the noose, Murder Sharp strode to the window to look down at the islands. Even from where she was, Teia could see a thick curl of black smoke rising to greet the morning sun.

Earlier this morning, their trainer Tremblefist had blown the black powder stores beneath the cannon tower so Kip and the rest of the Mighty could escape by sea. He'd probably given his life doing it. The squad had gotten away while Teia had chosen to stay here. And now she was doing this.

She was a fool.

"We're lucky," Sharp said. "The few Blackguards who weren't already on the parade route have abandoned their posts to get down to that tower. Still, no time to waste. You watch her. Break her neck if she screams."

He shook his head at that last part. He'd said that for Marissia's benefit. He made a fist and mimed hitting her stomach. Knock the wind out of her if she screams, he meant.

Why he hadn't just gagged her, Teia didn't know, but she didn't ask. She'd learned not to push the mercurial assassin. Sometimes he had deeper plans. Sometimes he didn't think of the obvious. But he never liked being questioned, and there was no upside to Teia appearing too smart.

Sharp scooped all the papers off the table and into a sack. He opened drawers and grabbed every paper with writing on it, and thumbed through all the blank pages to make sure nothing was hidden from him.

Then he was off, searching the rest of the room.

Marissia gave two sharp little tugs on the rope in Teia's hand.

"Shhh," Teia said.

Marissia waited a few moments and tugged again. She wanted to say something.

What was Teia going to tell her? She hadn't known Marissia outside of their work, but she'd felt a kinship and deep respect for the woman. They had both been slaves. Both were spies, and Marissia had risen as high as any slave or spy could.

Marissia had once told Teia that the Order would make her do something terrible. 'Let it be on my head—but do it,' she'd said.

But there was no way she could have guessed that the something terrible would be her own kidnapping and likely murder.

Another tug. Master Sharp had ducked into the slave's closet off the main room, out of sight and earshot. "He's gone. Only for a moment," Teia whispered.

"Third drawer, left side," Marissia whispered. "Halfway back, straight up. Push hard. Quick!"

Master Sharp had left the drawer open, so Teia had only to take one step and stoop. The surface felt flat, but as Teia pushed hard on it, she felt something snap with a slight chalky scent of broken blue luxin, and a tiny section of the wood sank in. A folded piece of parchment dropped into her hand.

Teia stepped back into place, stashing the parchment in a pocket. "Got it," she whispered.

"Tug when you need me—"

Master Sharp stepped back in. "What's she saying?"

"Um? What?" Teia said. For one terrifying moment, her mind went blank. "Oh, she's trying to bribe me." Teia said it like she was bored.

Staring at her hard, Master Sharp ran a freakishly long pink tongue over those horrid wide teeth. "I took a bribe…" He smacked his lips. "Once. Had no plan to let the man go, of course, and killed him as soon as I got the coin." Sharp tucked a package of documents tied with red or green ribbon into his sack. Teia was color-blind, so she could tell only that it was one or the other. "No harm, right? The Old Man… disagreed. Emphatically."

He smiled, too broadly. Something about those teeth twisted Teia's stomach more than when he'd worn a full set of wolves' fangs.

"How much did she offer?" he asked.

Teia froze. There was a hook in that question. Marissia the Prism's room slave might have squirreled away a small fortune. Marissia the spy would have saved a lot more, and with her life on the line, would she not offer a large bribe? But maybe not too large, a spymistress would be smart enough to start small—

Too long, T, don't take too long!

Teia said, "She hadn't mentioned any figures. And I wasn't listening, anyway. I'm not in this for coin." Change the subject, change the subject.

"Why are you, then?" Master Sharp asked.

"Are we really going to have this conversation in front of her?" Teia asked. "Now? You said we needed to—"

"We don't need to worry about her." His voice lowered dangerously. "And don't question me."

Orholam have mercy. That cemented it. If you were in the Order of the Broken Eye, there was only one reason you didn't worry when someone learned your secrets: Marissia was going to die. Teia said, "I'm here for revenge."

"Revenge? On who?"

Teia cocked her head as if it were an odd question. "On all of 'em."

He grinned, this time for real. "You'll get plenty of that. And you'll come to the Crimson Path eventually." The true friendliness should have made him less scary, but any comfort she might have felt was ground to paste between those inhumanly wide teeth.

He walked over to Marissia, still on her knees. "How much would you give us?"

Tremulously, she said, "As much as you want, I swear. I can get access to the Prism's account if we act fast. Please, sir, please." She broke off as if terrified. It twisted Teia's guts because she couldn't tell which was real: Marissia's earlier bravery or her current terror. Maybe both.

"I've changed my mind," Master Sharp said. "If she yells, kill her." Had he forgotten he'd already threatened that?

Or did he actually mean it this time?

Marissia collapsed, sobbing quietly.

"Hmm," Sharp said, standing so close to Teia his sweet breath washed over her face. "How have I never noticed…" As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he pushed her lower lip down with a finger. "You have a beautiful lower left dogtooth." He pushed her lip right and left, examining her teeth as if she were a mare. "No, just the one. Good color on the rest, but boring." He shrugged, smelled his finger, licked off her saliva like a chef tasting soup. "Better. You listened to me about the parsley, didn't you? Add mint, fresh leaves when you can. Tuck them in the gums. Don't chew or you'll get bits in your teeth. Unsightly."

He turned away, and she hoped he didn't notice her tremble.

He said, "I need to check the White's room and make a distraction. Be ready to go quick. If I'm not back in five, untie her, throw her off the balcony as if she suicided, and make your way out the same way we got in." He threw his hood over his head and pulled the laces through the grommets quickly, cinching the mask tight over his nose and mouth, leaving only his eyes clear, and those shadowed under the hood. He turned and began shimmering.

On the back of his gray cloak, the image of a tufted gray owl appeared with its wings spread and talons extended to strike. The image shimmered out of phase with the rest of the cloak, and disappeared last.

The door opened, showing a hallway marked with smoke and pools of blood and scratches and divots in the stone walls from arrows and bullets from the Mighty's battle with the Lightguards earlier. That felt like a lifetime ago. Then the door shut quietly.

Teia instantly shot a wave of paryl gas in an arc where Murder Sharp had been standing to make sure he was really gone. He was.

"Quickly," Teia said, "what do you want me to do?"

Marissia got up on her knees. Her voice was breathy with controlled fear. "Did he take the papers from my desk? Package. All tied together in red ribbon."

"Yes."

Teia could hear the heavy sigh of despair expelled into the hood over Marissia's head. The spymistress said, "Teia, you have to get those papers. I was to keep them safe for Karris."

"What are they?"

"They're the White's instructions for her successor. They have everything Karris needs to know how to rule. Secrets. Plans. Names. There are things in there Karris can't learn any other way."

Oh hell no. How was Teia to steal papers from Murder Sharp? "We weren't sent for the papers, Marissia. We were sent for you. I think Sharp's just grabbing whatever is lying about."