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Chapter Seven

Daeros—Tenebris

The mountain looms ahead of us in the light of the falling sun.

All the air squeezes from my lungs, and I feel suddenly, wrenchingly ill. I fight the frantic urge to wheel my mount around, to ride far and fast away.

Vil looks sidelong at me. “Breathe, Brynja,” he says softly, knowing exactly what I need to hear. “Just breathe. I’m here with you. We’re all here with you. You can do this.”

My heart jerks and I take a breath, long and slow.

The bloodied truce banner snaps above my head, and my hand feels numb and tight around the metal shaft of Leifur’s spear.

Vil thought it would be easier for me if I had something to hold.

Something to focus on. I try to let it ground me, try to focus on the freezing wind, the crunch of hooves over crusted snow, the long slanting shadows.

“You can do this,” says Vil again.

I almost believe him.

Before we broke camp this morning, Saga did my cosmetics, her work mirroring Indridi’s almost exactly.

She held up a mirror so I could see my face erased of freckles, the kohl around my eyes drawn sharp enough to kill.

Then she crowned me with a jewel-studded gold headdress.

It made me look like a queen, she said, a goddess.

But I feel like that same scared ten-year-old child I used to be, dragged into the maw of Tenebris by a cruel and sadistic king. I shake and tell myself it’s because of the cold.

A company of Daerosians ride out to meet us, their spears flashing orange in the mingled light of the setting sun and the blazing torches they carry with them.

Behind me, Saga utters a quiet curse beneath her shielding veil, and I wonder if she’s realizing anew, as I am, that she isn’t prepared for this. For being here.

Beside me, Vil sits tall in his saddle. An icy wind rattles the buckles on his breastplate. His right hand rests tense on his sword.

I count the beats of my heart as the Daerosians reach us, a dozen soldiers dressed in scale-armor breastplates and fur cloaks.

They’re led by a commander as young as Vil, maybe younger, and I recognize him with a jolt as Kallias’s oldest son, Zopyros.

He’s thin and there’s a hint of color to his cheeks, thanks to his Skaandan mother.

He wears heavy furs that make him seem smaller than he is, and he has steely gray eyes.

There is very little of Ballast in him, and yet for a moment Ballast is all I can think of—the shape of his mouth against mine, the warmth of his fingers cupping my face in the dark.

A shiver coils through me, and I blink through soft and sudden falling snow.

“We’ve had word of your coming,” says Zopyros shortly, jerking his chin at the truce banner.

Breathe, Brynja. Breathe.

“I am Vilhjalmur Stjornu, crown prince of Skaanda,” says Vil, voice pitched deeper than usual. “With me rides my cousin, Princess Astridur Sindri, along with her handmaid and our guards. We come to treat with Kallias of Daeros.”

I can feel Vil’s anger. It sears off him like Indridi’s fire. It’s still strange to hear myself referred to as Astridur, something I will have to get used to, now that we’re here.

Zopyros folds his arms across his chest, wholly unimpressed. “I require a pledge that you mean His Majesty no harm. Those smears of red on your rag mean nothing to me. What will you pledge?”

Vil clenches his jaw, but we both expected and prepared for this.

“I pledge my life,” he says, and strips off his coat without another word, the tooled leather vest he wears leaving his muscled arms bare; snow touches his skin and melts instantly.

He draws a knife, sets it against his left shoulder, presses hard.

Blood pools and I flinch. I lower the truce banner and untie it from Leifur’s spear with numb fingers. I give it to Vil, who presses it against his wound. The fabric soaks up the blood, the lily turning from gold to red. Vil holds the banner out to Zopyros. “The token of my life. Do you accept?”

Snowflakes swirl thicker between our two parties, and Zopyros’s lips seem to be turning blue.

“His Majesty will hear you,” he says. He drapes the truce banner across his mount’s withers.

“You will follow me.” He turns his horse and kicks it toward the snow-shrouded mountain, with his fellow soldiers following and our company just behind.

Vil doesn’t bother to put his coat back on. Blood trickles down his arm. I want to wipe it away, want to bind up his wound. But there is no time for that now.

Behind the snow and the clouds, the brief day has ended. Everything narrows to the orange blur of the torches, bobbing ahead of us. My insides knot tight.

What if Saga is wrong, and Kallias recognizes me as the little acrobat who never dared to stand up to him? What if this gamble of mine gets me and Saga and the rest of us killed, neatly trapping the Skaandan army in the tunnels like rats?

“The gods are with us, Brynja,” murmurs Saga from behind me. “Skaanda over self. Gods over glory.”

“Gods over glory,” I echo.

And then the mountain rushes up to devour us.

The gates of Tenebris’s grand front entrance are made of huge stone slabs, guarded by gargoyle figures carved of dark stone: They’re creatures from a nightmare, with wide black wings and hooked beaks and too many faces.

They have eyes that gleam red and seem to watch you when you look at them—more remnants of Iljaria magic.

But this is a dark magic, the kind that stings like needles under skin.

The gargoyles are said to have been crafted by the Black God and blessed by the Gray Goddess, commanded to kill anyone who did not have leave to enter the mountain.

I am not sure if it’s true, or if it’s just a story, but I don’t doubt the gargoyles have the power to bring death, if they so choose, or if they were commanded.

Kallias brought me this way ten years ago, and I shudder as I pass between the statues, as I feel them peering into my insides and realize my childhood memory of them is somehow less horrific than their awful reality.

I breathe a little easier when we’ve left them behind and the awful stinging sensation fades.

We come into a wide stone courtyard, where Zopyros and the other soldiers dismount, and the rest of us follow suit. Pale-faced boys and girls in blue robes and fur caps appear to whisk the horses out through a side gate.

Zopyros orders us to relinquish our weapons, and we hand them over, Vil even offering up three of his six hidden knives.

I am nervous without my own daggers, though there is a tiny, needle-sharp blade concealed in my headdress for emergencies.

Zopyros nods his begrudging approval, and leads us across the courtyard to the tall arched doors set into the palace proper.

They’re made of a lacquered dark wood and painted with swirls of silver that seem to move and twist in the torchlight.

One of the doors creaks open, pulled by some unseen servant, and my heart leaps nearly out of my chest.

Zopyros steps inside, followed by Vil. I should be next, but my feet refuse to move. My throat closes up, my vision blurs, my knees shake. Then, a hand in mine, squeezing tight for half a heartbeat before letting go again. Saga. Here with me. Feeling it, too.

She’s the only reason I find the courage to take that last step, into the mountain.

Then I’m finally here.

Right back where I started.

Nicanor meets us just inside the entrance hall, a high, narrow room that traces the curve of the mountain, the ceiling bare stone.

I am startled to find that the king’s steward seems smaller than I remember him.

He’s the one who locked us into our cages, who brought us slop barely fit for pigs, who beat us when Kallias was in a bad mood, or a capricious one.

And yet Nicanor is just a pale, sour man of about fifty, with limp brown hair and dull eyes. Unimportant. Unremarkable.

He dismisses Zopyros, who strides off into the palace proper, and then informs us that though the king is busy at present, entertaining the newly arrived envoy from Aerona, he has issued us a dinner invitation.

Vil and I exchange glances—we’d discussed the possibility of an Aeronan envoy at Tenebris, so it’s not wholly unexpected, but it does make things a little more complicated.

We’ll have to tread carefully. We’re not equipped to take on the empire, not yet at any rate.

Nicanor snaps his fingers and an elegantly dressed servant appears from the corridor, her yellow hair bound in two long plaits that reach nearly to the floor. There’s embroidery around the base of her fur hat. “Show them to their chambers,” Nicanor orders, and then leaves without another word.

The attendant beckons to the hallway, and we follow her, our footsteps softened by intricately woven rugs spread over the cold floor.

Bright lights hum from sconces in the walls, no pulse of magic in them, and yet no candle flame or wick and kerosene, either.

I study them curiously, spots dancing behind my eyes.

I want to point them out to Vil—he would find them utterly fascinating—but then we turn into another corridor, this one lit by ordinary torches, and the moment is lost.

More hallways, more turns. It’s hard to keep track of quite where we are, as I’m used to looking at all this from above, but I’m pretty sure we’re entering the guest wing.

We come into a corridor lined with plush blue carpets that glint with gold threads.

The walls here are straight and square, carved with precision.