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Chapter Six

Daeros—the tundra

The days grow shorter and shorter. There is no more singing on the road.

Vil and I don’t dance anymore. We don’t have the heart for it.

Saga barely speaks, more deeply hurt by Indridi’s betrayal than anyone.

Leifur is snappy and irritable, Vil withdrawn.

In contrast to the rest of us, Pala seems almost cheery.

Saga sticks close to me, always, and as the days slip away and we draw ever nearer to our destination, she starts talking about Indridi. I don’t want to talk. But I can listen.

“She was always evasive about her family,” Saga says one afternoon, the day already darkening and cold with stinging sleet.

“I was only ten when she came to the palace to be my handmaiden; she was thirteen. She was horribly serious at first—I thought she didn’t like me.

But one day she helped me dump sand in Vil’s bed because he was being annoying, and we were fast friends after that.

” The memory sparks a smile that quickly turns sad.

Saga pulls her hood tighter down over her forehead.

I glance ahead to where Vil rides; his shoulders are tight, the grief radiating off him.

“How did Indridi come to be your handmaiden?” I ask, because I feel like Saga is waiting for me to say something.

“Noblemen from all over the country send their sons and daughters to Staltoria City to train as attendants. We can’t take all of them, of course. There’s a rigorous interview process.”

I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. The hood of my cloak is stiff with ice.

“She must have been a good liar,” Saga says, “to make it through the training and the interviews. To be appointed my handmaiden. A damn good liar.”

“Or someone powerful lied for her,” I say.

Saga sniffs and scrubs at her eyes. “Do you think a person should be more loyal to their country or their faith, Brynja?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“Your country sustains your body,” she says. “Your faith sustains your soul.”

I blink thoughtfully into the sleet, the dark. “I guess it all depends on what matters more to you: your body or your soul.”

“Indridi’s country and her faith were the same thing,” says Saga.

“The Iljaria have no faith,” I counter.

“Yes, they do. Their faith is in themselves. In their magic and their long lives and their ancestry. But I still can’t believe—” She takes a breath, clearly fighting fresh tears.

“What can’t you believe, Saga?” I say quietly.

“That the Iljaria would send a child. She was with us for ten years , Brynja.”

I don’t know how to answer. I try not to see Indridi, screaming, fire licking up her hair and smoke curling off her fingers. But I can’t see anything else.

“I suppose when you live for hundreds of years, like the Iljaria do, a decade doesn’t really matter.” Saga gnaws on her lip as she glances over to meet my eyes. “But I bet it mattered to Indridi.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I bet it did.”

Pala tells us a story as we huddle together miserably in the larger tent, barely shielded from the dripping, freezing dark.

I doubt I’m the only one thinking of Indridi’s fire, warm and red and driving back the rain.

Pala doesn’t seem like the type of person to care for stories, but perhaps she has grown tired of the sorrow, the silence, that mark our evening campsites.

“Now the Gray Goddess and the Green Goddess are sisters, but they have never understood one another. The Gray Goddess brings decay wherever she treads; beneath the Green Goddess’s heels, flowers spring up.

They are death and life, each a half of the other, but when they were young, they did not accept that.

“‘There is beauty only in life!’ the Green Goddess would declare, and she would grow her flowers and trees in her sister’s domain, choking out dust and bones.

“‘Life is temporary,’ the Gray Goddess would reply. ‘There is beauty only in the permanence of death.’ And she would rip out her sister’s greenery and turn spring to the depths of winter.

“Now the Green Goddess loved the Violet God, though he did not know it, and the Gray Goddess loved the Ghost God, who stood vigil with her sometimes at graves. The Gray Goddess urged the Green Goddess to tell the Violet God of her feelings, to make him come and stay with her, whatever the cost.

“But when at last the Green Goddess confessed to the Violet God the wish of her heart, he told her with sorrow that his own heart belonged to another, a human.

To spare the Green Goddess further pain, the Violet God bid her a kind farewell, and went to his dwelling place on a high mountain, where he could be alone.

“The Green Goddess wept then, an early spring rain, but she did not regret her words to the Violet God, and she found contentment in the work of her hands, the bringing of life, and growth.

“But the Gray Goddess, seeing all this, was terrified to tell the Ghost God of her feelings, lest he leave her in a similar manner. And so she slew him as he stood with her at a graveside, that she might keep him with her forever.

“But when the Ghost God lay still and cold, the Gray Goddess wept beside him, distraught at what she had done. Her grief shook the foundations of the world. The Green Goddess heard her cries and had compassion for her sister. She knelt beside the Ghost God and sent life into him again. The Gray Goddess rejoiced to be reunited with her love, and from that point on, Gray and Green did not interfere with each other’s powers or wishes ever again. ”

We’re quiet for a bit after the story is over.

“And what did the Ghost God think of all of that?” Saga says moodily. She sits close enough to me that I can feel her shaking. “Did he actually love the Gray Goddess? Did he forgive her for killing him? I would think he’d turn his affection to the Green Goddess instead.”

“It’s just a story, Your Highness,” says Pala.

She goes to relieve Leifur of his watch, and I listen to the icy rain, hearing what she didn’t say, what the story said for her.

Death isn’t always the answer.

It isn’t an answer at all.

I wonder if she means Vil’s command to execute Indridi, or Indridi’s taking of her own life. Or maybe she means our entire plot to take over Daeros and eliminate Kallias.

Whatever she means, I sleep badly, and dream of fire, and wake to the sound of Saga weeping.

It gets colder and colder the closer we get to Tenebris.

We dig furs out of our packs, don knit hats and wool leggings.

Our breath hangs like smoke in the air, and not even our nightly camp stew and steaming tea can warm us all the way through.

Dread weighs on me with each ever-shortening day that passes.

Soon I will have to face him again. Soon I will have to face everything.

The tight-knit party that left Staltoria City all those weeks ago is unraveling, thread by thread.

We pass Daerosian farms and villages, scattered almost stubbornly about on the inhospitable tundra.

There’s a city, too—Skógur—with high stone walls and a forest of trees protected inside them.

It’s unnatural for trees to grow out here; we lugged wood with us on packhorses from Staltoria City and burned lichen when that ran out.

I try to push away the thought of Indridi, who wouldn’t have needed any wood at all to make a fire for us.

We camp outside Skógur City, the peace banner waving from the end of Leifur’s spear, which is driven into the ground in clear sight of anyone passing by. Even armed with the truce flag, though, Pala judged it best not to set foot in the city.

“It was an Iljaria stronghold, once,” says Pala when we’re eating our dinner, the coals of our campfire glowing red.

“They abandoned it when they left the mountain,” Saga guesses.

Pala nods. “The trees still grow because of them, drawn up from the earth by Iljaria powerful with the Green Goddess’s magic.

Some say the Green Goddess herself dwells in that forest still.

But of course the Daerosians don’t believe in the gods.

To them, nothing is sacred. So the forest shrinks year by year, not enough trees planted to replace the ones they cut down. ”

Vil utters an oath to his dinner, and a tangle of grief and longing curls down my spine. “We’ll change all that, when Skaanda rules here. When we drive those blasphemous pigs from our shores.”

“Green Goddess make it so,” says Pala. She rises from her place to relieve Leifur of his watch duty, and he comes to join us by the fire. He eats quickly, mechanically, staring into the flames.

I look toward Skógur City, the walls a silhouette against the rising moon. I’m sorry Pala deemed it unsafe. I would have liked to see the ancient forest for myself.

“‘Do not kill,’ the Green Goddess instructs us,” says Leifur unexpectedly.

He doesn’t turn his eyes from the fire. It’s clear he’s thinking of Indridi’s death, though he didn’t carry out Vil’s order of execution in the end.

Indridi denied him that choice. That burden.

“How does that fit in with the Skaandan philosophy of war?”

“Leave it alone, Leifur,” Vil reprimands.

Leifur hunches in on himself, but Saga turns toward him, ready and willing and, perhaps, relieved to talk about it. “The Brown Goddess says, ‘The earth cries for justice.’ What is justice, if not war?”

“And the Gray Goddess instructs us to ‘respect the dead,’” I put in. “But does that mean she wishes us to kill?”

“Brynja,” says Vil, my name on his lips as soft as a prayer. I can’t look at him. I don’t.

Saga turns her gaze to me. “‘All becomes ashes,’ says the Red God, and the Bronze: ‘You must pay for your own sins.’”

I have read as many of the old texts as Saga, and I’m not about to let her out-quote me. “And the Blue Goddess tells us to ‘be kind to every creature,’ while the White Goddess wishes us to ‘fill the world with music and therefore beauty.’ Neither of those statements can even coexist with war.”