The Blinding Knife recap

Garriston is lost and the Chromeria blames its Prism. While the Color Prince's army marches north out of Tyrea, Kip fights his way through Blackguard training, makes a squad out of the other misfits, and is played against his grandfather Andross across a card table that is never really about cards. The jewelled dagger Kip carries turns out to be an artifact old enough to predate the Chromeria: a knife that can strip a drafter of their magic. Gavin, secretly the brother who stole the Prism's name, loses colours faster than he can conceal, holds the Spectrum together with bluff, and buries his own mother at the ritual that kills drafters at the end of their span. He marries Karris against his father's wishes and sails to fight the rebellion at Ru, where he destroys the vast floating bane of luxin that would have birthed an old god. The victory takes his drafting entirely, and he is pulled from the sea by the pirate Gunner. The satrapies are told their Prism is dead; below the Chromeria, the real Gavin Guile breaks through another wall of his prison.

Previously: in the Seven Satrapies, drafters turn light into luxin and burn out their lives doing it; the Prism alone drafts every colour, and the Chromeria governs magic in his name under an administrator called the White. Sixteen years ago Gavin Guile beat his brother Dazen in the False Prism's War. Kip, a fifteen-year-old from the Tyrean town of Rekton, lost his home and his mother to a rebel king's army, and was left a jewelled dagger and the claim that Gavin Guile was his father. Gavin collected him and installed him at the Chromeria under the cold eye of Andross Guile, head of the family and the Spectrum's Red. When the rebellion marched, Gavin raised a wall of luxin around Garriston in days and still lost the city; he evacuated its people and left them with his old general Corvan Danavis. Kip killed the rebel king with the dagger, which drank the man's magic into one of its seven stones. Liv Danavis went over to the rebellion's new leader, the Color Prince. Two things the world does not know: the man who calls himself Gavin is really Dazen, who took his brother's name and face after the war, and the real Gavin has been alive the whole time in a prison beneath the Chromeria, breaking out of one coloured cell into the next. Each cell he breaks costs the false Prism that colour, and blue is already gone.

The refugees from Garriston are landed on the Jaspers and become somebody else's problem, and the Spectrum sets about blaming Gavin for the loss of a city they refused to help him defend. He returns to a Chromeria where his authority is thinner than it has ever been, his colours are still failing, and the prisoner below has already begun work on the next cell. Kip, now an acknowledged Guile with no standing, is entered for the Blackguard's open trials, the annual scramble in which a few dozen candidates fight for a handful of places. He is heavier, slower and worse trained than everyone he is up against. Andross Guile summons him back to the dark room, and it is made clear that the card game is the price of being tolerated at all.

Kip survives the trials and the training that follows, and the class of recruits sorts itself into squads. He ends up attached to a group of misfits and standouts: Cruxer, the best of them and the one who decides Kip is worth backing; Ben-hadad, who builds things; Ferkudi, who says whatever occurs to him; and Teia, a slave girl for whom a Blackguard place means freedom and who is concealing a talent the Chromeria does not teach. Tremblefist, Ironfist's scarred brother, runs them into the ground. Karris is back on duty and back within reach of Gavin, and neither of them handles it well. Andross keeps Kip at the card table and keeps winning.

The Color Prince's army moves north out of Tyrea toward Atash, gathering wights and unlicensed drafters as it goes, and the Chromeria's answer is committees. Gavin can no longer draft blue at all and is concealing how much else is going. Liv, travelling with the rebellion, is given work that suits her superviolet and pushed to see how far past the Chromeria's limits a drafter can go without becoming a monster; she is not sure the Color Prince is lying about anything, which is the problem. Teia's secret starts to surface: she drafts paryl, an invisible colour beneath the spectrum the Chromeria admits to, useful for exactly the things nobody is supposed to do.

The jewelled dagger is finally identified. It is far older than the Chromeria, dating to the prophet who founded it, and it is a weapon built to take a drafter's magic away and store it. Kip has been carrying an artifact that several very dangerous people have spent lifetimes looking for, and Andross Guile is one of them. Kip also begins to learn what the Nine Kings cards really are: a few of them carry the memories of the people they depict, and a viewer can live them. Meanwhile a young red drafter named Zymun attaches himself to Liv and the rebellion, charming, ruthless and untethered. At the Chromeria, whispers about the Order of the Broken Eye, an old assassins' society the Chromeria insists it destroyed centuries ago, stop sounding like folklore.

Gavin sets about raising a fleet and an army with money and authority he does not really have, inventing his way around the shortfall as he goes. The Spectrum fights him at every step; Andross manoeuvres to marry his son to a useful house and to control whatever comes next. Karris and Gavin stop pretending about each other. Kip's squad becomes a unit rather than a collection of recruits, and Teia's paryl makes her quietly indispensable and quietly at risk. The Color Prince takes city after city in Atash, and the refugees start arriving faster than the satrapies can lie about it.

The recruits reach their final trials and Kip's squad is confirmed. Reports come back that the rebellion is not merely marching but building something at sea: a vast growing island of luxin the old texts call a bane, the sort of thing the histories say once housed gods. Gavin, whose remaining colours he now counts in single figures, decides the fleet must sail before it finishes forming. Zymun proves how dangerous he is to his own side as well as to the Chromeria's. Kip presses his grandfather across the card table for the one thing Andross will not trade, and starts to understand how much of his own history has been arranged.

Sun Day comes, the Chromeria's central festival, and with it the Freeing: the rite in which drafters who have reached the end of their span kneel before the Prism and are killed by him rather than be allowed to break and become wights. Felia Guile is one of them. She asks for it, and her son performs it, and before she dies she leaves him things about his family and its arrangements that he did not know and cannot now check. The ceremony is also the moment the Order of the Broken Eye chooses to show that it is real and inside the Chromeria's walls. Kip sees the Freeing for what it is, and so does everyone else who has been arguing that the Color Prince is simply wrong.

Gavin marries Karris, publicly and quickly, refusing the match his father had arranged and accepting the cost of that refusal. Then he sails. The bane has finished rising in the sea off Atash, a floating body of luxin large enough to be mistaken for land, and the rebellion is gathered around it: something is being grown inside it, and the old accounts agree on what happens if it is allowed to be born. Gavin's plan requires him to spend colours he no longer has. Kip goes with the fleet. Liv is on the other side of the water, close enough to the thing being made to understand exactly what her side is doing.

The battle is fought around Ru and out over the water. The rebellion's wights and cannon maul the Chromeria's fleet, and the fighting on land goes badly enough that the city cannot be held either. Gavin reaches the bane. Destroying it means putting more into one working than any drafter is built to survive, and he does it anyway, unmaking the island of luxin and the god forming inside it before it can draw breath. Kip is in the fighting and comes out of it alive. When the sea closes over the wreck of the bane, the Prism's magic is simply gone: he cannot draft a single colour, and there is no one left on the water who knows to look for him.

Gunner, a pirate cannoneer with an old grudge against the Prism and an unreliable grip on reality, pulls a half-drowned man out of the sea and keeps him. Gavin Guile, drained, unrecognised and without a scrap of magic, becomes cargo. The Seven Satrapies are told their Prism died at Ru. Karris is a Guile by marriage and a widow by every account she is given; Andross Guile is left with an empty office to fill and a grandson he has not decided what to do with; Kip comes home with the knife, a squad, and the beginning of an idea about what his family has actually done. Liv is too far inside the rebellion to walk back out of it. Beneath the Chromeria the real Gavin Guile breaks another cell wall, and another colour is taken from the brother who put him there.

Gavin marries Karris in defiance of his father's plans for a more profitable match, then sails to meet the rebellion. In the fighting around Ru he destroys the bane, the great floating body of luxin the rebellion had been growing so that an old god could be born back into the world. It costs him everything: when it is over his drafting is gone, and the Prism who could split light into seven colours cannot make one. Half-drowned and unrecognised, he is fished out of the water by the pirate cannoneer Gunner, who keeps him. The Seven Satrapies are left believing their Prism is dead, with a war they are losing, an Andross Guile free to fill the vacancy, and a Chromeria whose next Prism will have to come from somewhere. Karris is a Guile by marriage and a widow by every report she is given. Kip survives, blooded and increasingly unwilling to be managed, and now knows what the jewelled dagger is and roughly what his grandfather wants it for. Liv has gone further into the rebellion than she can walk back from. Below the Chromeria, the real Gavin Guile breaks out of another cell, and another of his brother's colours goes with it.