Page 33

Two Years Ago

The Iljaria Tunnels

Bronze God, I’m hallucinating.

Pain radiates down my spine, the shadow creatures’ poison crawling through my veins.

I squint, but Ballast doesn’t vanish. He’s wearing tan trousers tied about the ankle and knee with strips of leather, a deep-blue shirt that’s ragged around the hem, and a heavy white fur cloak clasped about his shoulders.

His light and dark hair gleams in the torchlight, contrasting sharply with his brown skin, his blue eyes. He mesmerizes me. I can’t stop staring.

The arctic bear lumbers over to him, bowing its head.

“Thank you, Asvaldr,” says Ballast, and bows back.

Asvaldr strides past him, disappearing into the tunnels, while Ballast comes toward us. The torch flares bright.

Saga is tense and frantic beside me, slick with blood, fever and pain and poison raging behind her eyes. I don’t think she really sees Ballast. I don’t think she knows it’s him.

But she screams as he comes near, scrabbles backward among the ancient bones and the bodies of the shadow creatures. She grabs the sword and brandishes it at him, cursing and crying.

He stays just out of reach. “Gray Lady,” he swears softly. “You’re hurt. Let me help you.”

She shrieks at him, her blood leaking onto the stone.

“They’ll come back,” he says. “The monsters will come back. We can’t stay here.”

“Saga,” I say.

She stops screaming.

Ballast flicks his eyes to me and my heart jolts. “Can you walk?”

I nod uncertainly and push to my feet, trying not to fall over.

He hands me the torch and scoops Saga up into his arms so quickly she doesn’t have time to protest. She’s not fully aware of herself, her surroundings.

The fever is taking her, or the monsters’ poison, or both.

Her eyes are glassy and dull. In any other circumstance she would never allow Ballast to touch her.

“Come,” Ballast tells me.

He walks swiftly, like Saga weighs nothing, and I stumble along after him, fighting delirium.

We pass through the cavern and into a stone passage beyond, leaving both Saga’s sword and the Iljaria light I stole from Tenebris to molder with the forgotten bones.

I still have my pack, at least, though it’s ripped and dark with the cave demons’ blood.

Shadows stir and simmer above our heads, but they let us pass unhindered. They are wary, I think, of Ballast’s light, and the arctic bear lurking yet somewhere in the darkness.

The tunnel doesn’t run very straight, and Ballast turns down several branching passageways until at last he steps into a bright cave, a fire burning at the center of it. Smoke curls up through a crack in the stone, escaping out into the wider cavern. There are blankets spread out near the fire.

There are no monsters here.

Saga has gone limp and still in his arms. He lays her down on the blankets and crouches back on his heels. “What happened?” he asks me, without turning. “Where is she hurt?”

She’s hurt everywhere, thanks to the shadow monsters, but I know what he’s asking. “Her foot is broken,” I manage around my dry throat. “The wound is infected.”

He peels back the bandage and swears, with heat. “Violet Lord’s bleeding heart .”

Spots dance before my eyes. The air in the cave feels too warm, too close. Pain and poison rage under my skin, and I am torn between anger and relief, hurt and joy to have him here. “Will the monsters come back?” I whisper.

“Asvaldr bought us time. They will lick their wounds awhile yet.” He brushes his fingers lightly over Saga’s festering foot and begins to speak, strange tripping syllables that spark bright in the air as they leave his mouth.

I feel the silver coolness of his magic, so opposite the oily darkness of the shadow monsters.

It curls out of him and into Saga, making the redness fade, the pus evaporate, the bone withdraw behind her skin.

Tears pool in my eyes. I have never watched him work anything besides his animal magic. I blink and see the lion tearing out Hilf’s throat; I hear Saga’s ragged weeping from behind the glass bars of her cage. And yet Ballast has the hands of a healer.

He keeps up his singsong chant, letting go of Saga’s ankle and placing his hand on her forehead. He leans over her, his magic sparking so strong I can taste it, the barest whisper of ice and honeysuckle nectar on my tongue.

Beneath his touch, the wounds from the shadow monsters close and heal, the poison pulled out of her veins. Her skin resumes its normal color. She begins to breathe evenly.

Only then does Ballast withdraw his hand and finally look over at me. His eyes are guarded. “Hello, Brynja.”

“So you haven’t forgotten me.” This comes out rather more bitterly than I intended.

He winces. “I’d better see to your wounds, too.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

The poison is more stubborn than I am; I feel weak, sick. “Fine,” I grind out. I tug off my coat, my outer shirt, and kneel on the stone in only my shift.

He comes over to me, carefully examines my back. His nearness makes me shiver. “The wounds aren’t deep,” he says quietly. “But that doesn’t matter, when they’re poisoned.” He takes a breath. “I will have to touch you, to draw the poison out.”

My heart jerks. He has never touched me before. Not even when we were children. We always kept that careful distance between us, him on one end of the bed, me on the other. “All right,” I say.

He puts his hands on my shoulders, starting up his singsong magic again.

I shut my eyes and revel in the sensation, drinking it in, parched, greedy.

The poison pulls out of my veins and my skin knits itself back together, the pain fading to a dull ache.

He withdraws his hands, and I want to snatch them back again.

Ballast won’t quite look at me. “You should rest now,” he says.

I mean to protest. I mean to ask him why he’s here and how he found us, if what he said to me all those years ago was true.

I mean to shout at him and tell him I missed him and dig our deck of cards out of the pack and demand he explain all those evenings we spent together if he really didn’t count me as his friend.

But the weariness overpowers me. I curl up on a blanket he lays out for me and I sleep, swift and dreamless.

When I wake, monsters are wheeling outside of the cave and Ballast guards the entrance, a torch in one hand and a sword in the other. The creatures shrink from the light, but they don’t fly away.

“There’s food by the fire,” says Ballast without turning his head. “And water.”

I drain almost a full waterskin without meaning to, then devour strips of something charred and soft. The flavor is salty and smoky, and it practically melts in my mouth. Fish, I realize. I haven’t had it in so long I forgot what it tasted like, and I’ve never had it prepared like this.

Saga still sleeps on beside the fire, her face relaxed, peaceful, though I know all hell will break loose when she wakes up and realizes who saved her.

I pad hesitantly up to where Ballast sits, keeping a wary eye on the monsters, watchful and tense.

“Will they attack?” I ask him.

“Not at present. They don’t like the light, and they sense Asvaldr lurking near. They know I won’t hesitate to call him.”

“Can’t you order them away?”

“They are creatures of foul magic. Speaking into their minds—their darkness corrupts me. Makes me little more than a beast.”

“Then you’ve tried it.”

His mouth goes grim. He still doesn’t take his eyes from the beasts to look at me. “I’ve tried it.”

“Will Saga be all right?” I ask him.

“In time. She just needs to rest while her foot finishes healing. My mother could have helped her more.”

“You held her back from the Gray Goddess herself,” I contradict.

He shrugs, like it’s no great matter, and rubs his thumb along his sword hilt.

“Is that what your mother was teaching you during all those afternoons you spent with her? How to wield magic beyond the power given to you by the Blue Goddess?”

Ballast eyes me at this free admission of spying on him.

“Animal magic has always come easiest to me,” he says, “but yes, my mother taught me a little about how to channel it elsewhere. Her patron is the White Lady, her power in her voice. But growing magic, healing magic—that has always been very natural for her, too, and she believes that any Iljaria, no matter their patron, could learn to wield every kind of magic. Though I don’t think all Iljaria are as naturally powerful as my mother. ”

I think of Gulla, maimed and silent, teaching me her finger speech as we looked together out into the starry darkness of the Sea of Bones. Of her hands, binding the wound on my leg, bringing me soap and books.

“My father doesn’t realize it, but he didn’t nullify her power.”

I had always suspected this. “When he cut out her tongue.” It’s cruel to say it, but I do anyway.

Ballast flinches.

Out in the passage, the shadow monsters writhe and hiss, flying ever a little nearer to our cave before wheeling away again.

“You left your mother,” I accuse. “You left her with him .” My chest tightens and I say a little more quietly, “You left me.”

He brandishes the torch at a monster that comes closer than the rest, and it jerks back screaming, horrible eyes glowing red. “Has he hurt her?” Ballast asks, very low. “Has my father hurt her?”

“I don’t know.” Anger writhes inside me. “You said when you were old enough, you were going to kill him. But you didn’t, did you? You ran away.”

“So did you!” Ballast retorts. “You could have killed him, too. What exactly was your plan, to get eaten by ancient monsters down here in the dark?”

“I didn’t plan this! I’d be nearly home by now if it weren’t for Saga’s foot and the Gray Goddess’s damned blizzard.”

“Home in Skaanda?”

“Yes, of course .”

He turns his head at last to look at me, and there’s tension in every line of his body, in every cell of mine.