Page 14

Nine Years Ago

Daeros—Tenebris

Slowly, I explore the mountain palace, every night when the king and all his courtiers are sleeping. I squeeze through heating vents and creep across wood ceilings, learning the layout of the rooms, making a map of them in my head. Now there is hope, beyond my despair.

I know where the king’s council chamber is, the warren of rooms where his wives live, and the connecting warren that houses his children.

I have found a library, a treasury, a dining hall.

There’s a laundry, of course, a kitchen, a wine cellar.

There is an endless maze of corridors, the arched hall that boasts the main entrance.

Side doors lead to gardens that thrive even in winter.

Huge lamps keep the plants growing and the gardens illuminated.

They’re mechanical, the product of some genius like my sister, but they still seem like magic.

Beyond the gardens are the stables, the army encampment, and the road to Garran City, which is the capital of Daeros and lies just north of the mountain.

Every night as I creep my way through the ceilings, I ponder escape.

But every night I return to my iron cage and sleep away the remaining hours until dawn.

Because there are guards at every door. There is no sanctuary in Garran City.

I would die alone on the tundra, long before I ever found my way home.

And if I were caught trying to escape, the king and the Sea of Bones would be my ending.

It is better to wait. To plan. To hope that I’m not truly forgotten.

To pray that someone is coming to rescue me.

One night I slip into my vent as usual, back aching from the steward’s rod, face bruised where the king grabbed my chin, nails digging deep.

He’d been displeased with my performance.

He was displeased with everyone’s performance.

Even Ballast’s. My stomach twists. The king made him call the rats up from the cellars, and the palace cats from their various sleeping corners.

Then the king made Ballast compel the cats to slaughter the rats, until the floor was sticky with blood.

There weren’t any courtiers tonight. Just the king and his foul temper.

He had Ballast beaten, too, when all the rats were dead.

Maybe this is what makes me follow the paths toward the wives’ wing of the palace, wriggling my way through the narrow space until I find myself just above Ballast’s room.

I peer down at him through the knotholes in the wood.

He sits on his bed, which is shabby and plain, drawing patterns in the fog on his window.

There are spots of rat blood on the front of his white shirt, and streaks of his own on the back.

Books are scattered all about the room: on his bed, the floor, his small dressing table.

I think of my studious brother, and my heart wrenches.

I swear I don’t make a noise, but something makes him glance up and see me through the cracks in his ceiling. He has the king’s startlingly blue eyes, Gulla’s square, solemn face. There are tear stains on his warm brown cheeks.

For a moment we stare at each other, and I try not to think of the rats, screeching as they were torn to pieces.

“What’s your name?” he asks me unexpectedly. His light and dark hair is mussed, curls springing out in every direction.

I blink at him, feeling the ache in my shoulders, knowing his are aching, too. “Brynja,” I whisper.

He takes a breath, fiddling with his sheet. “Every time you do your routine,” he says quietly, “I am always afraid you will fall.”

My chest tightens. I tell him my secret: “I am, too.”

He nods and looks to the window again. “You should get out of here, Brynja. Before my father kills you. Before you do fall.”

My heart thumps too hard, and I fight off the sudden press of tears. “Why don’t you leave? Why do you let him ... hurt you? Command you?”

He doesn’t answer and I think of Gulla, teaching me her finger speech while we gaze down into the Sea of Bones.

“Your mother,” I say.

“When I am big enough,” says Ballast viciously, “when I am older and stronger, I’m going to kill him. Then he won’t hurt her anymore.”

I hear what he doesn’t say: Then he won’t hurt me anymore.

“Not if I kill him first.”

He blinks at me, chokes on a laugh. “All right,” he says. “Not if you kill him first.”

There’s nothing to say, after that, so I squirm my way back through the ceilings, wriggle out of the vent, and climb up the chain to my cage.

I lather my head with Gulla’s soap and scrape away at the dark hairs growing from my scalp.

When it’s smooth again, I wrap myself in my blanket and curl up on the sleeping ledge.

But every time I shut my eyes, I see the twisted, bloodied bodies of the rats.

I don’t intend to go and visit Ballast again, but not three evenings later I find myself once more crouched in his ceiling, peering down at him through the knothole.

It’s quite late, past the twenty-first hour, yet he’s sitting on his bed reading in the yellow glow of an Iljaria light globe. I watch him for a while. Something shifts beside him, and I realize it’s a cat, the same white as his sheets. My stomach wrenches.

“Are you going to come out?” he says softly, turning another page.

I hesitate for only a moment before wriggling through his vent and hopping down into the room. I eye the cat uneasily, but it just stretches again and tucks its paws over its head, purring as it sleeps.

Ballast closes his book and looks up at me. He smiles. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he says. “I’ve blocked the door, just in case.”

I glance over to see that he’s shoved his dressing table up against it; there is no lock. Fear coils through me. “Does ... does he come here?”

Ballast shrugs, but there’s no missing the echo of my terror in his eyes. “Not often.”

Which means sometimes . I turn to scramble back up into the vent.

“Wait,” he says.

I turn back.

He rubs at his temples, the blue tattoos on his arms shimmering in the glow of the light globe. “Please stay. Just for a little while.” His voice breaks.

“All right,” I whisper.

Wordlessly, Ballast scoops up the snoozing cat and slides all the way over to the wall, leaving plenty of space for me on the bed.

I sit gingerly on the opposite end, jiggling my knee.

The mattress feels impossibly soft, like it’s made of clouds, or dreams—I have grown somehow used to my iron sleeping ledge.

And it seems I have forgotten how to talk to another human being.

There is a long silence before I manage to say, “Did you call it here? With your magic?”

The cat has settled into his lap and is making little whiffly noises, whiskers twitching.

“No,” he says. “She just found me. Kind of like you.” He gives me half of a smile.

I try not to see the king’s eyes peering at me out of Ballast’s face. I try not to think about the rats. Power hangs on this boy like a coat, and I wonder what would happen if he were ever to truly wield it. “What are you reading?”

“A book of Iljaria myths. From my mother. I’m not sure where she got it.”

I understand without him having to tell me that if his father were to find him with such a book, there would be hell to pay. He scoots it over to me, and I touch the pages with careful fingers.

“You must get bored,” he says.

I turn a page of the book, studying an illustration of the Yellow God battling the Black God on a high mountain peak. The artist was skillful, or perhaps imbued the illustration with magic—the Yellow God’s light seems to glow, the Black God’s darkness seems to writhe and devour.

“Do you get bored?” I counter. I turn another page, this one all text, but written in shimmering colors.

“I have tutors,” he says. “Weapons training. Every day.”

Another difference, then, between us. “I try to sleep. I practice my routine, as best as I can.”

“As best as you can in a cage, you mean.”

My heart pulses faster at the bitterness in his voice. “At night, I’m free.”

“You could be free always. You could leave this cursed mountain. I could help you.”

I gnaw on my cheek. “He’d kill you for that.”

Ballast doesn’t deny this; we both know it’s true. He pets the sleeping cat, and there is anguish in every line of his frame. I shove the book back toward him, and in a blink I am leaping up into the vent.

“Brynja,” he says.

I pause but don’t turn back.

“Come again. Please.”

I pull the vent into place without answering and crawl back through the ceilings, to the great hall and to my cage. I curl up on my sleeping ledge, but I lie there a long, long while, before dark dreams at last find me.

He’s waiting for me the next night, when I hop down from his vent.

He has tea on a scratched wooden tray, and a plate of little round cakes dusted with purple icing sugar.

I sit on one end of the bed and he on the other, the tray in the wide space between us.

We eat and drink without speaking, but the silence is a comfort.

There is a bandage on the left side of his neck, and his white cat is nowhere to be seen.

I hope it’s safe somewhere, but from the slump of Ballast’s shoulders and the red seeping through his bandage, I doubt that it is.

When we’ve finished what amounts to the most dazzling feast I have had since long before the king shut me in an iron cage, Ballast takes out a deck of playing cards. They’re beautiful, Iljaria made, with the usual eleven suits—one for each god except Ghost.

“Would you like to play?” asks Ballast, the first words he’s spoken to me tonight. His voice sounds rough, like he’s been crying or screaming or both.

My gut clenches with hatred and horror. I don’t understand how anyone can be such a monster to their own son. “What game?” There are many that can be played with these cards. I know only a few.

“War,” he says.

I smile. “Isn’t that against Iljaria philosophy?”