The Burning White Read Free Page A

to Karris that Ironfist is alive.
    Corvan and his newlywed wife, the Third Eye, spend their last night together before her assassination by Murder Sharp. She reveals that Kip marches to Dúnbheo to free it, not having seen the White King’s trap.
    Gavin spends months in the black cell, and eventually discovers the dead man there is not a will-casting, but something else entirely. Grinwoody appears sometime later, revealing that he is the Old Man of the Desert and that he will free Gavin if he agrees to sail to White Mist Reef, climb the Tower of Heaven, and kill Orholam—what the Old Man believes is the nexus of magic in the satrapies—using the Blinding Knife. Gavin agrees, places a piece of black luxin that will ensure his obedience over his eye socket, and walks to the ship. It is the
Golden Mean
, captained by none other than Gunner.
    Teia is given a final mission by the Order to test her. She is told to murder someone (Gavin) once he has completed a quest for the Order. If she fails, they will murder her father.
    Karris meets with Andross, who tells her that Ironfist has declared himself king of Paria. She then has to kill Blackguard Gavin Greyling, who broke his halos while out searching for her husband. After his Freeing, Karris orders that the Blackguard is to search for Gavin no more, accepting that he is dead.
    Liv decides to join the White King and realize her full powers as a goddess, seeing that he is preparing to sail the bane to invade the Chromeria.
    Kip and his army successfully free the besieged city of Dúnbheo, at great personal cost to Conn Arthur, who deserts following the battle. Kip deposes the nobles and claims the city for himself and his army. He and Tisis profess their love for each other and are finally able to consummate their marriage. Kip uses every color of luxin to repair an ancient mural in their room, known as
Túsaíonn Domhan
, ‘A World Begins.’

Author’s Note
    Astute readers—or those who accidentally read Author’s Notes—will notice that Teia’s first scenes happen at the same time several characters’ last scenes occurred in
The Blood Mirror
.
    Am I cheating? Retroactively patching up continuity errors?
    Nah. I’d already written these overlapping scenes, and they don’t change what the other characters do, but I decided to pull them from
The Blood Mirror
and put them here instead.
    Why? One of the challenges of writing an epic story over multiple volumes is balancing dramatic unities against one another. The Light-bringer series tells one huge, unified story, but my goal has been for each book to comprise its own story so that both journey and destination satisfy. Sometimes the desires of an individual novel yield to the demands of the whole series—say, when big plot questions are raised in one volume but not answered until several books later. Other times I think an individual novel has the better claim.
    This series certainly doesn’t need more complexity, and thus the vast majority of the scenes
are
presented in chronological order. But what’s a writer to do when a character jumps the gun and gets into her book five problems while the other characters are still wrapping up their book four problems? (In this case, Teia.)
    A strict chronological presentation would interrupt the other characters’ book four finales, and then, when book five came out, what Teia had done mere hours before would have to be reintroduced. Worse, that ordering would undercut our end-of-book satisfaction—that precious, fragile feeling that though this epic journey will continue, we’ve reached a logical base camp.
    Characters warming themselves around a fire and looking up at the mountain peak they’ll attempt tomorrow? That’s a good tease. Characters never stopping hiking and the book simply ending? That’s bad structure.
    In another case here, a character off in the hinterlands has his most interesting scenes occur back-to-back in a single day, while everyone else’s are