Page 41

Two Years Ago

The Iljaria Tunnels

Saga’s foot won’t seem to fully heal. She insists on traveling more and more each day—or what passes for a day down here—and it’s getting worse instead of better. But she won’t hear of resting. She won’t hear of Ballast using his magic on her again, either.

We’ve been traveling the tunnels for days now—I’m not sure how many.

I’ve grown used to Saga and Ballast’s presence.

I know their shapes, their silences, their footsteps.

The world has narrowed to just the three of us, the only souls left in all this unending darkness, save the monsters that continue to haunt our paths—and I’m not sure they count.

Ballast and I haven’t spoken much since that first day. It feels impossible when Saga is here, her hatred radiating off her in nearly visible waves. But he looks at me, often, and there is a warmth growing between us that pricks at my heart. We are friends again, I think. Or something like it.

There comes a day when Saga collapses, cursing, to the stone floor of the tunnel we’re passing through. Ballast lowers his torch to examine her foot and finds it’s infected again. Saga sweats and swears. Ballast glances at me, uneasy.

One of the cave demons dives down from the shadows, and Ballast tosses me his sword—I slay the thing, and it drops reeking and foul right beside Saga. Ballast kicks it away as hard as he can.

“You have to let me try and heal you again, Your Highness,” he says to Saga, all politeness and regret.

She shakes her head, though her jaw is tight and her eyes shift uneasily.

“Then we’ll find a place to rest for the day.”

“No.”

Ballast sighs. “Then I will carry you while Brynja guards us.”

“ No, Gray Goddess Damn You !” Saga screeches at him.

All three of us freeze, staring at each other, and there’s a rustle of many wings over our heads.

“Fine,” Saga grinds out. “Heal me.”

Ballast watches her. “I will have to touch you, Your Highness.”

She huffs out an angry breath, but I don’t miss the tears gleaming in her eyes. “I said heal me .”

He nods and puts one hand on her ankle, then shuts his eyes and starts his singsong magic. I feel it, warm and thick as honey, coiling through the air.

Saga weeps silently as he heals her, her head turned away, her tears dripping down to dampen the stone.

Then Ballast lets go, crouches back on his heels.

She scrambles upright and puts weight on the injured foot. It holds her, and there is no trace of pain in her eyes.

“Better?” says Ballast quietly.

She nods. She doesn’t thank him.

A flurry of cave demons dive at us, shrieking, and we meet them head-on, Ballast with his sword and me with my knife and Saga with her stick. We dispatch them in short order and leave them to rot in a stinking pile.

We go quickly after that, Saga abandoning her walking stick for another sword she finds in the tunnels. She weighs it approvingly in her palm. “Skaanda would have helped drive the monsters from this place,” she says. “The Iljaria were too busy killing us to even ask.”

“Do you think it’s true, Your Highness?” says Ballast from the front. “The accounts of genocide?”

“History doesn’t lie,” Saga snaps. “Unless to make the truth more palatable, and there’s nothing pleasant about children being slaughtered because they were born powerless.”

Ballast has no answer for that.

We walk some hours more before we pass under a massive stone archway that shivers with magic, infused there long ago by some ancient hand. There are words cut into the stone, painted brightly, and they speak of music and protection and peace.

“The demons do not come here,” says Ballast. “These halls were hallowed by the Brown Lady herself. The oldest stories say the Iljaria were not the labyrinth’s first occupants, or even its makers, but that the First Ones formed it in the beginning.”

I read that in Ballast’s book as well. His eyes flick to mine, like he’s remembering, too.

Prayers of awe and thanksgiving trip from Saga’s lips, and her words follow us to our next resting spot, a little room cut into the stone, with a blackened fire ring, waiting wood, and a kettle.

We feast on more fish and heat the kettle for tea, which Ballast has squirreled away in his pack. The atmosphere between the three of us borders on courteous, though Saga still does her level best to not speak to Ballast, or even look at him.

She’s weary from the long walk on her newly healed foot, and falls asleep by the fire shortly after we eat.

But I’m restless. Awake. And it seems Ballast is, too.

“Do you want to explore a little?” he asks me.

I glance at Saga, sleeping soundly.

“We’ll be back long before she wakes,” he promises. “We won’t go far.”

My stomach wobbles. I want very much to go exploring with him. I nod. “All right.”

So he picks up the torch, and I follow him farther into the tunnel, which is wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side.

I have to nearly trot to keep up with him, and realize how slowly he’s been going, for Saga’s sake, even with her healed foot.

The torch casts slanting shadows on the stone, and the chill of the tunnel curls around me.

“The torch is magic, isn’t it,” I realize. “It never goes out.”

He gives a huff of a laugh. “Indeed. This way.” He grabs my arm and tugs me into a tunnel on the left.

My pulse jumps, fear slicing unexpectedly through me. I jerk away from him, and he releases me immediately.

His eyes find mine in the torchlight, anguish written all over his face. “I’m sorry. I won’t touch you again.”

For a moment we just stand there, staring at each other.

He never touched me when we were children, always keeping that careful space between us.

I understand why, now. He is perpetually, excruciatingly aware that he is the son of my tormentor; he doesn’t want me to be afraid of him, doesn’t want me to equate him with his father. Yet Kallias hurt him, too.

I take a breath. “You only startled me,” I say lightly.

He nods but doesn’t say anything more, just turns and strides on into the narrowing tunnel, his shoulders tight.

I gnaw on my lip and follow him. Our footsteps echo, strangely loud, and there comes the distant sound of running water.

I blink and see Hilf, his throat ripped out by the lion, blood on the floor.

I see Ballast, stripped to the waist in the great hall, whipped by Nicanor in the sight of us all, to prove that Kallias would not spare even his own son, so imagine what he might do to us?

I see Ballast and me sitting on opposite sides of his bed, the deck of cards spread out between us, cake crumbs on his sheets.

I see Gulla, running into the great hall and begging Kallias to leave Ballast alone, to not hurt him again.

I see Ballast looking up at me through the hole in his ceiling, hear his oath, born of anger and pain: When I am older and stronger, I’m going to kill him.

The sound of running water grows louder. Ballast glances back, his dark-and-light hair glimmering in the torchlight. “Nearly there.”

He leads me down a few more passages before we step into a cavern that stretches far beyond my sight line. Water rushes black over smooth rocks; stalactites drip gleaming droplets into the underground river.

“Beautiful,” I whisper, my voice lost in the echoing roar.

He shouts to be heard over the water: “It runs quieter down a ways!”

So we pace along the river, the spray leaping up to touch my face.

“Here,” says Ballast, leading me down a winding path through the rocks, to where a pool has collected from the river’s runoff.

It’s clear as air: In the light of the torch, I can see all the way to the bottom, crystals flashing blue and green among the silt.

Best of all, when I dip my hand into the water, it’s warm .

“There are hot springs near here,” Ballast explains. He smiles at me and produces a bar of soap from some hidden pocket. “I thought you might like a bath. And don’t worry. The cave demons never come here—this whole stretch of the labyrinth is protected by the Brown Lady.”

I gape at him. I haven’t had a bath—a real bath—in half a lifetime.

Every few months in Kallias’s mountain, Nicanor would drag us from our cages to be cleaned, which meant we stood in a small stone chamber, stripped naked with others of our sex, and were doused with freezing water and scrubbed with brushes so coarse they made us bleed.

But this—

This is a gift.

Violet God’s eyeballs, I might cry.

“You go first,” says Ballast, suddenly awkward. “I’ll wander downstream a bit. Shout if you need me.”

“Thanks,” I say brusquely, to cover my own awkwardness.

He gives me the soap, then wedges the torch between two obliging rocks and walks away.

I pull off my clothes and the filthy scarf that’s still wrapped around my head, then duck into the water. It feels like magic, warm, powerful, safe.

I wash, scrubbing what feels like a mountain’s worth of dirt from my skin, not to mention the blood of the cave monsters caked on my hands.

It’s been nearly two months since I last shaved my head, and my hair’s grown, fuzzy against my fingers, not quite long enough for my curls to have made a reappearance.

I consider shaving it again, but I’m done with the Brynja who stayed locked in a cage for eight years, the Brynja so afraid that her hair would catch in chains and silks and cause her to fall.

No. I’ll let it grow. I’ll just keep it wrapped up until it’s a little longer.

That decided, I wash the scarf, too, spreading it out to dry on the stone as I float on my back in the water. For the first time in a long, long time, I feel peace.

“Brynja?” calls Ballast, a little while later.

“Not yet!” I call back, and scramble to get out of the pool. I dress hurriedly, winding the scarf around my head and knotting it at the nape of my neck. “All right!”

Ballast appears, and I wander downstream while he takes his turn, watching luminescent fish dart through dark water.

When he’s finished, we head back to our camp.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “I haven’t had a bath since before—” I falter, and he glances back at me.

“Since before my father,” he says. “I know.”

I take a breath. “Really. Thank you.”

He offers me a soft smile. “It is the very least that I could do.”

He’s wrong, though. Saga is awake when we get back.

She’s sitting against the wall of the cave, her knees pulled up to her chin.

“Where have you been?” Her voice shakes, and I realize with a jolt how afraid she was, waking up to find herself alone.

“I’m sorry, Saga,” I tell her. “There’s an underground river, a pool. I had a bath. I remember the way—I’ll show you.”

Her lips go tight but she nods, so I take her to the pool while Ballast stays behind. I wait with Saga as she slips into the warm water, turning my back to give her privacy. I try not to listen to her sobs.

When she climbs back out of the pool, dripping and shivering, she’s calm again, but her sadness hangs on her like a shroud. She dresses quickly, and we start the walk back.

“He isn’t kind,” she says quietly. “He healed me. He saved us. But he isn’t kind.”

I blink and see Ballast carrying Saga through the tunnels, infinite in his gentleness.

I see his smile in the torchlight as he hands me the soap, see the books and the games he shared with me when we were children.

I hear his voice, broken as he is broken: I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I’m so sorry.

“He killed Hilf.” Her words waver. “He killed Hilf.”

I gnaw on my cheek to keep the tears from coming. “I know, Saga.”

“I will never forgive him,” she whispers. “He deserves to die for what he’s done.”

My stomach twists. “It was Kallias,” I remind her. “Kallias made him.”

“But he didn’t have to do it! He didn’t have to do it and he did and Hilf is gone and—”

She breaks down crying again, and I kneel with her on the stone, numb, hollow.

It takes a few minutes for me to look up and realize that Ballast stands there in the tunnel, torch wavering in his hand. He won’t meet my eyes.

We are all three of us forever changed by Kallias; I think that part of us will always feel like we’re children wandering alone in the dark, even now we’re free of him.

Saga glares at Ballast and pushes to her feet, hanging on to my arm to steady herself. “Could an army come through here?” she asks him, her voice rough and low.

“The Skaandan army, you mean,” says Ballast. “To catch my father unaware in his mountain.”

Saga clenches her jaw. “Yes.”

“It would take a long time for many soldiers to travel these routes—the passages narrow so often. And there are the cave demons to contend with.”

“But it is possible,” says Saga. She snatches at his sleeve and drags him back to our camp, where she pulls a piece of charcoal out of the fire. She nudges it toward him with her foot. “Draw the route,” she orders.

His face tenses, but he doesn’t pick up the charcoal.

“Draw the route,” she repeats. “The route my army will take through the labyrinth.”

“I won’t let Skaanda take my country.”

“But you’ll let your father rule it?” Saga demands.

He flinches. “I have no love for my father.”

She laughs, bitter. “You are your father’s prize hound. What will he do to you, I wonder, when you at last come slinking back to him?”

Ballast recoils as if she’s slapped him. For a long moment they just stare at each other, Saga’s chin trembling, tears of rage dripping down her face.

Then Ballast bows his head and picks up the charcoal and draws a map on the stone.