Page 17

Three Years Ago

Daeros—Tenebris

There’s a new girl in the king’s Collection.

I peer down from my cage, watching as the king’s steward drags her into the great hall.

She’s a lot older than the king’s usual acquisitions, near my own age of seventeen.

She has dark skin and a cloud of tightly coiled black hair.

Her clothes are bloodied and torn, and she’s wearing only one shoe.

She shakes but does not cry. There’s a proud tilt to her chin that says she’s not broken yet.

I wonder what she’s lost. I wonder who’s missing her.

Or perhaps no one is. Perhaps she’s like me: wholly forgotten, abandoned to the mountain’s whims.

I shove down the old bitterness and turn my back on her, my cage swaying with the movement.

I remind myself not to care, because that makes it all so much harder.

I made that mistake, early on, with Ballast. I know better now.

It’s easier to feel nothing but loneliness and fear.

That’s what’s kept me alive all this time.

It’s early autumn, so evening light floods still through the glass wall when we’re called upon to perform.

The king arrives with his current favorite wife, Pelagia, a handful of Daerosian nobles, and two of his daughters, ten-year-old Rhode and five-year-old Xenia.

He sets Xenia on his knee as Rhode and the others settle beside him, and then calls for his Collection to begin their performances.

A tiny Skaandan boy the same age as Xenia is first: He is deadly accurate with his throwing knives and can hit extremely small targets from twenty feet away.

The Iljaria boy with the Red God’s power is long gone.

He’s been replaced with another Iljaria named Finnur, who’s about twelve, his white hair curly, his skin a deep brown.

Finnur has the power of the Prism Goddess and can make staggering illusions out of nothing.

Tonight he makes butterflies that flutter about the hall and then burst into colorful sparks and fall shimmering like rain.

Xenia is delighted, laughing and clapping and hopping off her father’s knee to run and chase them. Rhode sits still, wary, tense.

The Skaandan girl is brought out next. She’s been cleaned up and dressed in a purple robe cinched with a simple cord belt. Her feet are bare, her hair unadorned.

The king waves at her impatiently to begin.

She shuts her eyes, clenches her hands into fists, and opens her mouth.

She sings a simple Skaandan melody, but her voice is powerful and raw with feeling.

It fills up the whole room. My throat goes dry and tears prick at my eyes as she switches to a ballad about a king who falls in love with a lowly goat girl.

The goat girl teaches the king humility, and he comes to live with her in her mountain, forsaking his kingdom forever.

The Skaandan girl’s eyes flash as she sings, and I can feel the anger radiating off the king, blistering as fire.

He’s scowling as he waves her away, and I know she’ll be going to bed with bruised shoulders tonight.

If she doesn’t learn how to keep her head down, she’s not going to last here a week.

The king doesn’t call for me to perform tonight, which makes worry gnaw at my bones. If he’s grown bored with me, I won’t last another week. I’ll have to add something to my routine to catch his interest again. Something dangerous.

It’s Ballast the king calls last, and my heart still jerks at the sight of him, despite the fact we haven’t spoken in six years. He’s grown quite tall since then and remains as lean as any of us. He dines at the king’s table but eats very little.

I know because I’ve watched him.

It’s true I have never returned to his room, but I have observed him nearly everywhere else—the library, his father’s council chambers, his mother Gulla’s room.

The only place inside the mountain palace he doesn’t go is the great hall, unless his father summons him like he has tonight.

And when he is here, he never, not even once, looks up.

It’s like our evenings together didn’t happen, like I dreamed them up in the early days of my captivity to have something to hold on to.

Secret evenings with a prince who brought me sweets and books are something, after all, that a child would imagine.

But however abruptly it ended, I know it was real.

I can hardly bear to look at him now, all stiff and blank away down below me.

The king’s steward, Nicanor, hauls in a raging lion, and the king orders Ballast to control it.

The beast calms, almost at once, allowing the king to pet it as if it were a kitten, though the murder in its black eyes is plain to see.

Then the king commands Ballast to put his head in the lion’s open jaws.

He does, the slight shake of Ballast’s hand the only sign that this makes him nervous.

Little five-year-old Xenia, terrified to see her half brother about to be—in her mind—eaten, starts screaming, and the king wheels on her, enraged. He sends Rhode, Xenia, and their mother from the room with a curse.

This effectively ends Ballast’s performance.

He looks to be about to go after Xenia, but the king orders him to stay.

The nobles and Nicanor, with the lion muzzled and on a lead, file out in short order.

I turn my back to the scene below because I know what’s coming and I don’t want to watch.

But I can’t close my ears against the sound of the king striking Ballast across the face three, four, five times, like it was his fault his tiny sister was scared of the damn lion.

Finally, the king sends Ballast away, too.

Relief shivers through me. Ballast’s suffering is over, at least for tonight.

The king stalks up to the glass wall and stares moodily out into the Sea of Bones, the rising moon sending eerie blue shadows skewing across the ice.

There’s something feral in him tonight. Something dangerous.

Usually tormenting his pets appeases him; usually he stalks away and leaves us to lick our wounds alone.

But tonight he curses into the dark, beating his fists against the glass, again and again.

“Where is it?” he roars. “Where is it?” He hisses at the pain in his hands, but it doesn’t stop him from pounding the glass.

The great hall rings with the noise of it, and I am horribly, horribly afraid that his tantrum will result in one or more of us dragged before him, knives across throats, corpses dumped into the Sea of Bones.

But his rage, at last, subsides. He drops his hands, slick now with blood. He stands a moment more, staring out into the glacier valley. His chest heaves. He utters a final, bitter curse and sweeps from the hall, footsteps echoing in his wake.

In the quiet that follows, the Skaandan singer weeps bitterly in her glass cage. I hunch into myself. I try not to listen.

But it’s all I can hear.