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Chapter One

Skaanda—Staltoria City—the royal palace

“Brynja. Brynja! ”

I jolt awake to find light slanting through a warm chamber. My sheets are silk. The room smells of oranges. Tears drip down my cheeks, and the mad pace of my heart makes the world wheel. I squeeze my eyes shut again to try and block it out.

“Breathe, Brynja.”

A cold glass is pressed into my hands, damp with condensation from the ice that must have slowly melted overnight. I focus on the texture of the glass, on the scent of oranges and the steady voice of my friend. My pulse slows. I open my eyes.

Saga’s gaze meets mine, the memory of our shared horror written all over her face. I’ve clearly pulled her from her own bed—she’s wearing her sleeping shift, and her hair is wrapped up in a swath of purple. There are tears on her cheeks, too. Her hands wrap around the glass just above my own.

I take a shuddering breath, and for a few moments we breathe together, in and out, long and steady.

I remind myself that we are not in Daeros anymore but safe in Skaanda, far out of reach of the cruel king who haunts our sleep.

For now, at least.

Saga sets the glass back on my bedside table. “Breakfast in my room. Five minutes.” Her words are certain, but her voice wobbles. “Then to the training arena.”

Saga is a big believer in working your body until you’re too exhausted for traumatizing memories.

“Thanks for waking me,” I tell her.

She squeezes my hand. “Always. Now hurry and get dressed, will you? I’m starving.”

She slips away through the door that joins our chambers, and I drag myself out of bed.

I stretch, first thing. It’s a habit I haven’t been able to shake, even though it’s been a year and nine months since Saga and I escaped from Kallias’s mountain and I’m not forced to perform anymore.

I broke nearly every bone in my body in order to make it mind me, and the thought of losing my acrobatic skills entirely panics me nearly as much as the idea of facing Kallias again.

“Breakfast!” shouts Saga from the other side of the door, just as I’m pulling on loose trousers and a linen shirt.

I splash water on my face and join her in her room, kneeling with her at the low round table that’s laden with more than enough food for two.

We eat while her maids fuss around her, unwrapping her hair and dabbing the smooth dark skin of her face with cosmetics, no matter that she’ll sweat it all off in the arena.

Saga is the crown princess of Skaanda, and she’s not allowed to appear in public looking like “a disheveled mongoose,” as her mother so lovingly puts it.

She’s regained her composure since waking me, locked her shadows tightly away, and become, at least in appearance, the confident princess she was before Kallias broke her.

She watches me over the table as she sips tea and eats berries, absently swirling her oatcake in a bowl of cream until the soggy pastry breaks apart and the pieces float away. “Brynja,” she says pointedly.

I stare at my own breakfast, not having much of an appetite.

“By the time we reach the mountain, it will have been two years, you know,” she says.

It was a three-month journey from Tenebris to Skaanda; the return trip will take another three months. I brace myself for the argument I’ve heard many times. I take a bite of an oatcake.

“You look completely different,” she goes on. “You have hair now, for one, and you’ve got curves , Brynja! You no longer look skinny enough that a child could snap you in half like a twig, and I swear you’ve grown a couple inches. I doubt your own mother would recognize you.”

I grimace and she does, too, because she didn’t mean to needle at the sore subject of my family.

“Sorry.”

I shake my head. She’s right, though. I’ve changed a lot since we fled from Tenebris—eating proper, hearty meals and not living in a cage will apparently do that to a person.

I have filled out in unexpected places, gained weight and acquired hips; I frequently run into doorframes and furniture because I’m no longer quite sure of the shape of my own body.

“Is that why you don’t want to come?” says Saga softly. “You want to stay and keep looking for them?”

My parents, she means. My brother. I think of the empty house in the tangled streets of Staltoria City.

Saga went there with me, when we first arrived back in Skaanda.

She was heartbroken that I was robbed of the joyful reunion she had had with her own family.

There was nothing in that house but dust and shadows.

“I won’t find my family here,” I reply.

“Why then?”

I stare at her, at a loss for words, as her maids sweep her cloud of black hair back into a headdress and dab cerulean powder on her eyelids.

She’s so much braver than I am, voluntarily revisiting the place of her greatest torment without so much as flinching.

If I told Saga that, though, she’d point out that she was only in Kallias’s Collection for a year, while I was there for eight—nearly half my life—but that doesn’t mean the horror was any less for her.

I don’t know how she can even bear the thought of it.

“We will be perfectly safe, Bryn. Vil will be there with us the whole time, and we won’t be there for too long anyway before the army arrives, and then—”

“I know,” I say wearily. “Daeros will be annexed into Skaanda. The war will end once and for all. We’ll have trade with Aerona, free access to the Altari Forest, and all the Daerosian gems and metals and inventions we could ever want.”

Saga nods. “Kallias won’t hurt anyone ever again. He’ll be tried for his crimes, and executed. His spirit will be doomed to labor outside the gates of paradise for all eternity.”

I gnaw on my lip.

Her face is tight, grim. “If we don’t face our demons, they’ll haunt us forever. Please , Bryn. Say you’ll come. We need you.”

I’m the only one who can move around Kallias’s mountain palace undetected, eight years of experience giving me intimate knowledge of the paths through the false ceilings.

I have access to any room, including the king’s private chambers.

I wouldn’t have to wait for the army to come.

I could kill him in his sleep our first night there, if I wanted.

“Please,” says Saga softly.

I rub at my eyes to make my headache go away. I have endured many things in my twenty years in this world. But I don’t know if being in the same room as Kallias again can ever be one of them.

“I’ll see you in the training arena,” I tell her, and leave my best friend to finish her breakfast.

Knife throwing helps. It’s satisfying to dig my heels into the sand, to hurl blade after blade at the painted targets across the arena and watch them thud into the wood, handles quivering. It helps keep my mind steady, to keep the blinding panic from overwhelming me like a flood.

Saga’s brother, Vilhjalmur, watches from the fence bordering one end of the arena, sword at his hip, the neck of his shirt gaping open.

He’s already had his practice bouts this morning, judging by the sweat glistening on his dark skin.

My face warms. Every inch of him is muscle, finely tuned, like the hunting lions in the royal menagerie.

Vil is two years older than Saga, but he wasn’t the one the oracle chose as Skaanda’s next ruler.

He doesn’t seem to resent her for that, though, or for her sudden reappearance a year and a half ago, when the entire country thought she was dead.

He immediately relinquished the title of heir he’d been given in her absence and resumed the endeavor he’s most passionate about: improving the working conditions on the hundreds of farms, spread all across Skaanda, that are so crucial to feeding the population.

Vil’s the one who concocted the plot to annex Daeros, and he’ll be the one to govern it if the plan is successful. It would more than suit him, I think.

“You’ve improved,” he calls over to me, catching my eye.

I flush anew at the praise but give Vil an impassive nod and throw the last of my knives, then trudge through the sand to collect them. Saga is conspicuously absent, and I would bet a hefty sum it’s intentional.

He joins me at the target, quiet as I pull the knives out. I am overly aware of his proximity, of his heat and his scent: sweat and dust and the citrus-perfumed cream he rubs into his jaw when he shaves.

Vil doesn’t prevaricate, and after weeks of increasingly pointed requests, I don’t expect him to. I like that he doesn’t play games. I respect him for it. “We leave at dawn, Bryn. We can’t do it without you.”

He touches my arm, and I try to ignore the way my skin pricks beneath his fingers. “Of course you can. I drew you maps of the palace layout.”

“Brynja.”

I look up to meet his dark gaze, and it burns through me. He stands head and shoulders taller than me, but he has never once made me feel small. The jewels in his ears glitter in the sun. “I’m not coming,” I say. My words are petulant, unyielding. I trace a circle in the dirt with one foot.

Vil lightly shoves my shoulder. “What do you intend to do all alone in Staltoria City? Rattle about the palace having tea with my parents?”

“I have no intention of presuming upon your family further, Vil. I won’t stay.”

“You’re not presuming. You never have.”

I don’t reply, hunching my shoulders, fighting not to be caught once more in the grip of my nightmare: an iron cage, a cruel king, the fear of falling, so sharp I can taste it.

“Hey.” He tips my chin up with one finger so I’m looking at him again.

He sees the tightness of my jaw, the way I’m so fiercely trying not to cry.

He’s kind enough not to comment on it. “We’re indebted to you, Bryn.

You brought Saga back to us. Without you”—he smooths my cheek with his calloused thumb—“without you, the world would be so much smaller. Don’t shrink it back down to nothing. ”