The Blood Mirror recap

Blind, powerless and given up for dead, Gavin is imprisoned in the deepest of the cells he built beneath the Chromeria and works his way down through them, forced back through everything the war cost. Above him, Andross Guile has himself made promachos and rules the Seven Satrapies outright, with the murderous Zymun as Prism-elect and Karris holding the White's title without its authority. Teia lives as an assassin of the Order of the Broken Eye, killing to hold a cover nobody can confirm, hunting the Order's hidden master. Kip and Tisis, exiled to the Blood Forest, raise an irregular army out of foresters, ghosts and refugees, break the siege of the city of Dunbheo, and turn a marriage of convenience into a real one. The White King's armies keep taking ground and his banes keep growing, and Aliviana Danavis takes a seed crystal and ascends as Ferrilux, an old god returned. By the end Karris has learned that her husband is Dazen, not Gavin, and Gavin is out of the cells alive with nothing left of what he was.

Previously: the Prism who was lost at Ru was really Dazen Guile, who beat his brother in the False Prism's War, took Gavin's name and office, and kept the real Gavin alive in nested coloured cells beneath the Chromeria. Stripped of every colour destroying the rebellion's bane, he was enslaved, escaped, and made it home only for his father Andross to blind him and lock him in that same prison. No one knows he is alive. Orea Pullawr died and Karris, widowed within weeks of marrying, was raised to the White. Andross produced Zymun as Prism-elect: a charming murderer who is also the son Karris bore and lost before the war. Teia, a Blackguard and the only known paryl drafter, was sent into the Order of the Broken Eye, the assassins' society the Chromeria pretended it had destroyed, and is still inside it with a stolen invisibility cloak and no way to prove her loyalty. Kip, hunted off the Jaspers by his grandfather, fled with his squad and married Tisis Malargos for the alliances it bought. The Color Prince, now calling himself the White King, holds Tyrea and Atash and is growing banes, the floating islands of luxin in which the old gods were said to be seeded. Liv Danavis works for him. Kip still carries the ancient knife that takes a drafter's magic.

Gavin wakes blind in a cell of his own design, fed through a slot, with no magic, no light and no way to tell how long he has been there. The only route he has is down: the cells are stacked, and each one has to be broken through. Above him, the Chromeria is being reorganised around a war it is losing. Karris takes up the White's office and discovers immediately that the Spectrum regards her as an inconvenient appointment rather than a superior. Kip, Tisis and the squad arrive in the Blood Forest, a satrapy already half overrun, and find no army, no chain of command and no obvious reason for anyone there to take orders from a disgraced Guile bastard.

Andross Guile presses the Spectrum to make him promachos, the wartime office that suspends the ordinary government of the satrapies and hands one man everything, and the war gives him all the argument he needs. Karris fights it and loses. Zymun, as Prism-elect, begins testing how far his position lets him go, and it becomes clear he is a danger to his own side and to his mother personally. In the Blood Forest, Kip starts gathering what is left: forest irregulars, refugees, hunters, a few drafters, people with nothing to go back to. Teia takes the Order's work as it is given to her, because refusing a job is how a spy is identified.

The rebellion's leader is Koios White Oak, Karris's own brother, believed burned to death in the fire that destroyed her family's estate before the war and blamed on Dazen Guile. He survived, and the White King's campaign is as much a family reckoning as a revolution. Karris has to run a war against her brother while the office above her is held by her father-in-law. Kip's ragged force starts to look like an army and starts winning small engagements, and Kip discovers he can will-cast, imposing his will through luxin in a way the Chromeria does not teach. His marriage to Tisis is still, awkwardly, a marriage on paper only.

Gavin breaks down into the next cell and the next, and blindness plus isolation stop being separable from memory: the descent forces him back through the war, what he did to win it, and what he did afterwards to keep the name he took. Teia is ordered to kill for the Order in ways she cannot square with anything, and her hunt narrows toward the Old Man of the Desert, the hidden head nobody in the Order has seen. Kip's army moves on Dunbheo, a Blood Forest city under siege by the White King's forces and being sold out from inside by its own council. Andross, now with the power he wanted, begins spending it.

Kip takes Dunbheo. The siege is broken by a combination of irregular warfare, Tisis's negotiating and Kip's willingness to do things no Chromeria-trained drafter would, and the city ends up his, which makes him a lord in fact whether or not anyone confirms it. The Blood Forest starts calling his force by a name. Karris, boxed in politically, turns to the one thing the White really controls, information, and starts pulling on the threads her predecessor left her, including the question of what exactly happened at the end of the False Prism's War. Zymun makes his first serious attempt to remove her.

The White King's armies press on the Blood Forest and his banes keep growing out at sea, each one a vessel for something the old accounts call a god. Liv is at the heart of that work and is offered the last step. Teia, deep enough in the Order to be trusted with its secrets, learns how far its reach goes and how long it has been inside the Chromeria's institutions rather than merely opposed to them. Kip and Tisis stop being allies and become a marriage. Gavin, still descending, runs out of versions of the war he can tell himself and has to account for what he actually did to his brother.

Aliviana Danavis takes a seed crystal at a bane and stops being a drafter at all: she comes out of it as Ferrilux, one of the old gods of superviolet returned to the world in a human body. The White King now has powers on his side that the Chromeria's doctrine says cannot exist. Kip consolidates the Blood Forest and prepares for a war on a scale his irregulars were never built for. Karris closes on the truth she has been circling. Teia is left holding what she has learned with nobody to hand it to, and the Order's plans for the Chromeria enter a new phase.

Karris finds out what her marriage really was. Her husband is Dazen Guile: he killed or replaced his brother at the end of the war, took Gavin's name, face and office, and lied to her and to the whole of the Seven Satrapies for sixteen years. Gavin comes to the bottom of the prison he built and is out of it alive by the close of the book, blind, without a colour to his name, and no longer the man any of the titles refer to. Andross Guile holds the satrapies as promachos with Zymun as his Prism-elect, and Karris keeps the White's title and very little of its power. Teia is beyond recall inside the Order, still hunting its master. Kip ends the book with an army, a liberated city, a name in the Blood Forest and a wife who is now a partner. Facing all of it: a White King who is Karris's own brother, banes still ripening at sea, and a returned god in Ferrilux.

Karris learns what her marriage actually was: the man she married is Dazen Guile, who took his dead brother's name, face and office after the False Prism's War and has been lying to her, and to everyone, for sixteen years. Gavin himself comes to the end of his descent through the cells he built, blind and without magic, and is out of that prison alive by the close of the book, no longer Prism and no longer anyone the satrapies think exists. Andross Guile holds the Chromeria as promachos, with Zymun installed as Prism-elect and Karris as a White with the title but not the power. Teia is further inside the Order of the Broken Eye than anyone can retrieve her from, still hunting its hidden head. Kip finishes the book as a war leader with a real army, a liberated city and a name in the Blood Forest, and with a marriage to Tisis that has become an actual partnership. On the other side, the White King's forces are still growing their banes, and Aliviana Danavis has taken a seed crystal and become something that is not a drafter any more, an old god of superviolet reborn under the name Ferrilux. The last defensible ground in the north is Kip's, the Jaspers are Andross's, and the gods are coming back.