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Their father? It sure had felt like it.
    What kind of person would kill her own father?
    No. No! This is to
save
my father. My real father.
    She hoisted her pack to her shoulders and looked around the barracks as if hoping someone would see her, stop her.
    What am I doing? Saying goodbye?
    Pathetic. This is all gone. This is all already gone.
    Besides, her closest remaining friends weren’t even here: Gav and Gill Greyling and Essel and Tlatig were all out on one of the semi-clandestine Gavin Guile search expeditions that so many of the Blackguards had been doing for the last year. The trips weren’t exactly allowed—responsibility for seeking the lost Prism had passed to other hands—but they weren’t exactly forbidden, either.
    Even if Gavin Guile had only been the Blackguards’ professional patron, not their Promachos who had fought for them on the fields of battle and bled for them in the halls of power, earning himself a Blackguard name and all the Blackguards’ devotion; even then, even if it had only been an affront to their pride and not an assault on their love, losing a Prism was an unbearable blot on the Blackguards’ honor.
    Their chief purpose was to protect him, and he’d been kidnapped right under their noses.
    They would do anything to get him back. It’s what a family does.
    The day they’d lost him had been the day everything went north for Teia. Karris had become the White. Zymun became Prism-elect. Commander Ironfist had been fired. Kip and the Mighty had nearly been killed escaping, and Tremblefist had died silencing the cannons to save them.
    Teia had stupidly decided to stay behind. She’d told herself she could do more good here.
    Do good?! Mostly she’d learned to use her magic to murder slaves.
    She wasn’t even
good
at her bad work.
    She’d botched the assassination of Ironfist’s sister so badly that he’d immediately figured out who’d sent her and who she was—Teia was the reason Ironfist had declared himself a king rather than a satrap.
    And now, in his revenge, the Chromeria had lost Paria.
    Out of the original seven satrapies, that left them with only two and a half: Abornea, Ruthgar, and half of Blood Forest.
    The empire had been a seven-legged feast table; now it was a top-heavy end table teetering on two golden legs. The only question was which way it would fall.
    Best for Teia to side with the Order, then. Kingdoms rise and empires fall, but the cockroaches survive.
    And that’s what this next kill for the Old Man meant, when Teia stripped away all her pretenses. It meant siding once and for all with the Order. Not pretending anymore. No longer a double agent, an agent.
    She arrived at Little Jasper’s back docks in the last minutes before dawn, feeling as sere and barren inside as the wind-scoured Red Cliffs.
    Her father wouldn’t want her to buy his life at such a price, but Teia had worried for far too long what other people wanted.
    Though the Old Man hadn’t come right out and said it, Teia’s next kill was Ironfist.
    To guarantee her obedience, the Order held her father hostage. He would leave their company a rich man or not at all.
    ‘This is the pain that will transform you into Teia Sharp,’ the Old Man had said.
    May Orholam—absent or blind or uncaring as He was—send that vile man and all the Order with him to the ninth hell.
    Teia didn’t know how or why, but Ironfist was either on that odd bone-white ship she spied coming into the dock now, or he waited wherever it was sailing next.
    It wasn’t ‘betrayal,’ technically. He’d declared himself a king. That made
him
the traitor.
    And killing a traitor wasn’t wrong . . . Right?
    Ironfist had been like a father to her, but in infiltrating the Blackguard for the Order, he’d betrayed the man who was like a father to them all: savant and savior, paterfamilias and Promachos, godlike Gavin Guile.
    Ironfist had sworn loyalty to Gavin! He’d administered those very oaths to half the rest of the