Page 20

Three Years Ago

Daeros—Tenebris

I’m asleep when the doors to the great hall burst open and boots grate harshly on the marble floor.

I jerk myself upright, bleary-eyed, pulse racing.

I glance at the time-glass: It’s only the eighth hour—the king never makes us perform in the middle of the day.

I peer downward, heart pounding in my throat.

Two guards set an ivory throne down in the center of the room.

The king sinks into it. Two more guards drag a Skaandan prisoner between them.

He shakes and sweats; he reeks of blood and bile.

He’s young, perhaps a year older than the new Skaandan singer, and has dark curly hair and liberally freckled skin, like me.

A thin gold chain glints around his neck, and a gold bar in his right ear marks him as a guard of the royal house.

My gut clenches. This is not what happens when the king acquires someone new for his Collection. This is something different.

Below me, in her cage bordered with orange trees, the Skaandan singer shrieks and pounds against the glass.

She’s shouting at the king, shouting to the prisoner, who jerks his head in her direction, a sudden horror in him.

In the space of a heartbeat, he wrenches himself from the guards’ grasp and lunges toward the glass cage, reaching for the singer’s hands between the bars.

They cling to each other, tears pouring down the singer’s face while the young man tilts his head against the bars. His words are soft, but they echo in the vast room, all the way up to my cage: “Promise me you’ll get free of him. Please. Promise me.”

“I love you, Hilf.”

“Promise me!”

“I promise.” The words choke out of her.

Hilf gives her a single, fleeting smile, lifting one hand to smooth his thumb across her cheek and wipe her tears away. “I love you. Don’t worry about me. Remember your promise.”

“Hilf—”

The guards snatch his shoulders and haul him away from the cage.

“ Hilf !”

One of the guards slams his fist into the side of Hilf’s head and he goes limp, gasping for breath. They drag him back before the king, throw him at the king’s feet.

The singer screams his name, over and over, and tears pour down Hilf’s face.

The king sneers at him. “Did you think I’d keep feeding you in my dungeons forever? Did you think someone was coming to rescue you? You have no talent with which to charm me, like your little singer friend.”

In my cage I am shaking hard enough to rattle apart. I wish I had magic. I wish I could stop this. But I don’t. I can’t.

The double doors open again. Nicanor drags Ballast in with him, and my heart plummets like a lead weight. Zopyros, Ballast’s half brother—the king’s oldest son—follows with a muzzled lion on a lead, the one that two months ago so frightened Xenia.

Dread grips me. I blink and see the mangled bodies of the rats from my childhood, hear the echo of Ballast’s ragged, gasping sobs.

Today there’s blood on Ballast’s face, more blood seeping through the back of his shirt.

Rage bursts bright behind my eyes because how dare his father hurt him like that .

He can hardly stand. I want to burst through the bars of my cage and put a knife in the king’s heart.

I want to grab Ballast’s arm and haul him away from here, away from pain and terror and cruelty.

I want to ask him why he told me to stop coming all those years ago, if he truly meant it, or if he was simply afraid of his father.

I look at the king and the lion, at Ballast and the Skaandan prisoner, and the horror cuts deep. I don’t move. I don’t make a sound. Because I can’t stop what’s about to happen, and if I protest in any way it could be me down there instead.

I am a vile, gutless coward. I keep silent.

Below me, Hilf begs for his life and the singer screams and Ballast slumps there in Nicanor’s grasp, an awful blankness crawling into his face.

Zopyros sneers at Ballast, though his hand shakes as he loosens the muzzle from the lion’s mouth. The lion doesn’t move, held in check by Ballast’s will. Zopyros drops the muzzle and lead, and takes a step back.

“Please,” says Hilf. “Please. Spare me.”

The king’s gaze flicks carelessly over him and fixes on Ballast. “Kill him,” he orders.

Bile churns in my gut, rises burning in my throat. Stand up to him, I plead with Ballast in my mind. You don’t have to do this. Please, Ballast. Please. But of course he can’t hear me.

Slowly, Ballast straightens, shaking Nicanor off him. He’s breathing in quick, shallow gasps, and the effort of standing on his own makes him tremble.

“Do it, boy.” The king’s voice is cold and hard. “Or I will kill her. And then I will kill you. I have many sons. I don’t need you.”

Ballast stands there, shaking. Zopyros’s right hand twitches at the hilt of his sword.

Hilf has stopped begging, just looks toward the singer in her cage, who weeps uncontrollably. He mouths something to her. I don’t know what he says, but I feel the love in him, and I see the moment he accepts his fate.

My heart beats, beats. Everything inside me is screaming. Please, Ballast. Don’t.

“She will suffer, boy,” snaps the king. “She will be in agony. And she will know you are the reason for it.”

Ballast, Don’t!

Ballast bows his head. For a moment all is still.

Then the lion leaps on Hilf, huge jaws closing around his throat. Hilf’s scream pierces me, sharp as a spear, but it’s cut suddenly short. His neck snaps. His body goes limp. Blood sprays over the floor.

I realize I’m screaming, too, my face wet with tears.

The lion does nothing more. He sits back, docile as a kitten.

The Skaandan singer shrieks in her cage.

Zopyros tries to look as if he’s not going to be sick.

The pool of blood seeps wider.

I am sick, heaving over my chamber pot.

The king stands from the throne, stepping over Hilf’s body like it doesn’t concern him in the least. He grabs Ballast by the collar. “Think carefully before you defy me again. You are not important to me. Never forget that.”

“Of course I’m important,” says Ballast, voice tight and hard. “I’m the very pinnacle of your Collection, your favorite dancing bear.”

The king hits Ballast so hard he slides across the floor, skidding and falling in Hilf’s blood.

I am sick again, though there is nothing left in my belly but acid. My throat and lips burn with it.

Ballast picks himself up, shaking. He takes a breath that sounds like a sob, and then he walks heavily from the room, red footprints trailing behind him.

I am undone. There is no escape from this horror. No respite. No relief.

The guards remove Hilf’s body. A dozen attendants come to clean the floor, and when they’re finished, there isn’t a speck of blood anywhere, like it never happened. But when I look down, all I see is red.

It’s hardly the sixteenth hour when I let myself out of my cage, shimmy down the chain, and climb up into the vents.

I’m being reckless—the king isn’t asleep yet, no one is, and I could get caught, but I don’t care.

My body knows the way to his room, though I haven’t followed that path in six years.

My heart rages and my gut twists. I have to see him, damn everything else.

But when I slip into his ceiling, the room below is wholly dark. I wait for a while, my pulse frantic. Nothing stirs beneath me; there isn’t even enough light for me to be able to pick apart the shadows.

The recklessness tightens its grip. I work the vent cover free and hop down, fumbling for the Iljaria light globe that he apparently still keeps on his dressing table. I tap the globe, eyes tearing at the sudden yellow light that floods the room.

Ballast isn’t here. The chamber is empty, his bed made, sheets smooth and straight, pillow undented. Except for the bloody shirt slung over the dressing table, I would think that Ballast hasn’t been here in a long while.

I scan the room, trying not to look at the damn shirt.

There is a small shelf of books on the back wall that he acquired at some point since I was here last. I run my fingers over the spines, perusing the titles.

They are books of Daerosian history, politics, strategy, and warfare, not subjects the Ballast from my childhood would have had any interest in. I want to burn the lot of them.

The volume of Iljaria myths isn’t here, but jammed in the back corner behind a book titled War for the Thinking Modern is our deck of cards.

I know it’s the same because when I take the cards from their box and look through them, I find the Blue Goddess card with the corner torn, just as I remember. I feel it like a kick to the gut.

He’ll come back, I reason. He’ll come back, and then I can finally ask him why he sent me away all those years ago. My eyes go hot and damp, and I mutter to myself every foul word I know until the urge to cry subsides.

He’ll be back.

I wait for him on the bed with my knees tucked up to my chin.

I lay out the cards in a game of Chance, which can be played solo.

I try not to think about Hilf, the lion, the pool of blood.

I try just to focus on the colors of the cards, drawing them and laying them down, trusting that luck will see me through.

It doesn’t, though. I lose the game, and the three I play after.

Ballast doesn’t come. No one comes.

At last, as my eyelids grow very heavy. I put the cards in my pocket, climb up into the vent, and crawl back to my cage.

It isn’t until the morning that I learn Ballast isn’t in Tenebris anymore.

He has vanished from the mountain entirely, and the king is livid that his son has run away.

Or so he says. But he doesn’t send anyone after Ballast, and I wonder if part of him is relieved.

Because surely he’s realized that the scene with Hilf could have played out differently.

Surely he’s realized that Ballast could have set the lion on him .

It’s almost Gods’ Fall, the king crows to his wives, his nobles, his general—anyone who will listen.

The world outside the mountain is harsh, conditions unlivable.

He doesn’t believe Ballast can survive long on his own, if at all.

The tundra will claim him, he says, or the Sea of Bones, or the darkness.

But I don’t believe that. Ballast is stronger than the tundra, the Sea, the dark. Ballast is stronger than almost anything.

He hasn’t so much as looked at me in six years, and yet I am bereft in the wake of his sudden departure. I feel desolate, abandoned.

He left without me. Escaped this living hell.

And I’m still here. Captive. Waiting.

Though I’m no longer really sure what I’m waiting for.

Every night, the Skaandan singer weeps in her cage like her heart has broken, like the world has ended. For her, it has.

I still dream of falling, of my body breaking against the ice in the glacier valley.

But now I dream of the lion, too. Of blood leaking over the floor and filling up the Sea of Bones, covering all the world.

And I dream of Ballast, weeping bitterly in the dark because the Ghost God card was played against him, and he lost everything.