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Chapter Thirteen

Daeros—Tenebris

It’s late when we finally leave Garran City, nearly the nineteenth hour.

We take a different route back to the gates to avoid the chaos of the merchants packing up their carts in the main square, and we pass a large stone building that Aelia, who walks near me, explains is the orphan house.

My heart seizes. More than one of the children Kallias took for his Collection came from here.

The door to the orphan house creaks open, and a young woman slips out, the lantern she holds illuminating her smooth dark skin and cloud of black hair swept up onto the top of her head.

For a moment I freeze, staring, and her eyes catch on mine.

I barely stop myself from calling out her name before she ducks her head and hurries past.

I reach our room before Saga does, and I’m waiting for her with my arms crossed when she does eventually appear, the hem of her dirty cloak dragging across the floor.

She sets down her lantern and makes to move past me, but I snatch her arm and haul her over to the couch.

“Sit,” I order, and she does, hunching guiltily.

“What in the hell were you doing in the orphan house in Garran City?” I demand.

Saga gnaws on her lip, anger sparking in her eyes. There’s a dagger at her hip that I don’t recognize, though I can tell the hilt is one she carved herself: It’s a tree design, with the branches entwining.

“Do you really expect me to sit still all day, waiting for you?” Her voice is hollow, her shoulders tight. “This place is agony for me, Brynja. I know you understand that.” She draws the dagger from its sheath, weighing it in her palms. “I refuse to waste my time here.”

I stare at the dagger, at the old, dark stain on the blade.

“I carved this for him,” says Saga softly.

“For Hilf. He wore it into battle, and it was on him when they dragged us to Tenebris. I’ve been searching for something of his since we came here, slipping into storeroom after storeroom, digging through piles of junk and cast-off trinkets.

But this—” Tears choke her, and she curses.

“A palace guard was wearing it, and I bribed him to give it to me. He was keeping it, he said, because he hoped one day to kill a Skaandan bastard with their own blade.” She curses again and hurls the dagger across the room, where it rebounds off the stone wall and nearly hits me in the head.

I pick it up. I hand it back to her.

And then she’s weeping uncontrollably, and I go to her, wrap my arms around her, hold her tight.

When she’s calm again, I ask her about the orphan house, and she tells me she’s been going there nearly every day, to occupy her hands and her heart. There is a great need for people to help there, and the children hunger for more than food.

“I would forget all this treaty and spying nonsense and come with you,” I tell her quietly. “If I could.”

She gives me a bitter smile. “I know.”

We kneel on the edge of the Sea of Bones, Saga and I, snow cold and damp on our knees. Stars wheel overhead, and sorrow grips tight, tight.

Hilf has no proper grave to mourn at, so we have come here, to the glacier sea, where bodies are surrendered to the ice. His is down there, somewhere, bones upon bones but not, as so many others are, forgotten.

Saga sings for him, war songs and ballads, a tender love song and a mournful dirge.

I pray with her, to the Gray Goddess to keep his soul well, to the Prism Goddess to reward him with riches beyond measure among the heroes of paradise.

To the Bronze God, that when Saga goes herself into paradise, Hilf will remember her.

I weep with Saga beside the glacier sea as the cold bites deep and snow begins to softly fall.

There comes a quiet step behind us, and I turn to see Ballast there, a lamp in his hand, his face drawn and stricken; he must know why Saga is here, weeping and singing and praying on the edge of the Sea of Bones.

She doesn’t hear him, and for a moment his eye seeks mine. I shake my head at him. I spell to him the sign for go with my fingers. His jaw hardens at this reminder of his mother, locked in a cage in his father’s hall. He turns. He goes.

We are very late to bed tonight, and Saga drifts off almost at once, but I am far too restless for sleep. There is an agony of confusion inside me, an uncertainty that gnaws down to bone.

I slip up into the vents in an attempt to quiet it, because like Saga, I am not content to be still.

Ballast’s room is a lavish suite that adjoins Kallias’s chambers, meant to house a queen. Kallias never crowned one, so he keeps Ballast here, a dancing bear in a pretty cage.

He isn’t here now, though the evidence of him is: There’s a box of silk ribbons on the dressing table in all different colors, and a smaller box beside it filled with what I recognize with a jolt as eye patches.

There’s a half-empty bookcase on one wall, the books scattered all about the room as if thrown in a rage.

Medicinal vials crowd his nightstand, at least a dozen of them in various sizes.

I fight back a wave of nausea and go search for Ballast elsewhere.

I find him at last in the infirmary, lying on a narrow bed while the palace physician leans over him. I crouch in the ceiling, staring down through the cracks in the wood and trying very hard not to cry. Ballast’s eye patch and silk ribbon wait for him on a nearby table.

“It is healing well,” comes the physician’s voice as he straightens up again, giving me a brief glimpse of Ballast’s ruined face, his empty eye socket. I press my hand against my mouth. Oh, Bal, what has he done to you?

Ballast sits up, grabbing the patch and tying it on quickly, as if he can’t bear to be without it.

“How is the pain?” asks the physician, turning to grab a vial of medicine from a shelf on the wall.

Ballast eases himself off the bed. He stands like a nervous child with his hands behind his back. “It is ... mostly better.”

“And the nightmares?”

Ballast clenches his hands into fists, tension radiating all down his spine. He doesn’t answer.

The physician sighs, turning from the shelf and offering Ballast the medicine. “Take it, Your Highness. It will help.”

Ballast nods, and his eye flicks suddenly to the ceiling. I freeze, holding my breath. Surely he can’t see me?

But then he thanks the physician and leaves the infirmary.

He returns to his room, and I follow silently through the vents. I watch as he considers the vial from the physician and then puts it on his nightstand with the others, untasted. He unties his eye patch, takes off his boots, crawls into bed. He curls up on his side, blankets pulled up to his chin.

His weeping is quiet, but it makes his body shake.

I am wrecked by his anguish, sick to my core.

With everything in me I want to go down to him, to crush him close against me, hold him until he stops crying, lend him what comfort I can.

But, Bronze God, I don’t know why he’s here, I don’t know how deeply enmeshed he is in Kallias’s schemes.

And I don’t trust myself to keep my head around him.

If Ballast asked me to, I think I would abandon all my plans, spill every secret, break every promise I’ve ever made.

I can’t bear to watch him like this anymore. I whisper a prayer for him. And then I force myself to crawl away.

The digging never stops, not even during the night.

The workers take it in shifts, the shafts illuminated by Kallias’s electric lamps.

There are no false ceilings down here, no safe hiding places, so it’s taken me a while to creep into the maze, ducking around corners and melting into the shadows as best as I can.

The vein Basileious told Kallias about is impossible to miss, a jagged line of pulsing blue in the rock. It fascinates me.

I watch a pair of workers, a man and a woman, attempt to dig into the vein.

The woman swings a pickaxe at the rock, and when her blade snaps in a burst of red sparks, the man takes his turn with a whirring, grating drill that sits on what looks like an altered mine cart.

But he drills for only a few minutes before the bit breaks and he has to change it for a new one.

The woman swings a fresh pickaxe until it breaks, and they go on and on like that, sweat on their brows, stone dust sticking to their skin.

But for all that, they’re making steady progress, and the vein seems to be growing thin.

Dread twists deep. It’s too soon, far too soon.

We’ve counted on the Skaandan army having the whole of Gods’ Fall—all three winter months of Black, Gray, and Ghost—to make their way through the labyrinth of the Iljaria tunnels and take Daeros unawares.

But if the weapon is found before then, if Kallias seizes it—as I have no doubt he means to—he will be far more powerful than any army, and all this will be for nothing.

I’m about to turn and slip back through the tunnel to report this to Vil and Saga when boots ring out on the stone. I flatten myself against the rock wall, praying that the god of darkness will conceal me.

Kallias sweeps right by my hiding place, flanked by Basileious and Ballast.

I press my nails against the stone, my heart slamming against my rib cage. Ballast looks impossibly weary, his face drawn, the ribbon on his eye patch tied in obvious haste. He stands tense beside his father as Basileious inspects the vein.

The engineer leans close to the pulsing stone but does not touch it with his bare hand. He turns back to Kallias, relief on his pale face. “We are close, Your Majesty. The progress is better than I hoped.”

Kallias gives a clipped nod. “How long?”

“A few weeks,” says Basileious. “No more.”

“Good,” the king says. He glances at Ballast, who tenses.

The two workers have paused with their axes and drill; they step to one side of the chamber, heads bowed.

Kallias dismisses them and shoves an axe into Ballast’s hand. “Dig, boy,” he says. “The blades last longer when an Iljaria holds them. Devils know why.”

And then Kallias turns with a flip of his cloak and strides back down the tunnel, Basileious on his heels.

My chest tightens as Ballast hefts the axe in his hands, as he turns to the vein and swings. He misses, the axe glancing off the bare rock and nearly gouging his shoulder. He tightens his grip, swings again. And then he’s hacking at the vein with reckless abandon, cursing as he works.

I want to go up to him. I want to ask him why Kallias is punishing him, and why in the gods’ names he is doing everything his father tells him to. But it scares me too much, because what if I cannot bear his answer?

So I wind my way back up to the palace proper and go report to Vil.

He’s up, though it’s the twenty-fourth hour. Weariness drags on my bones—I need to sleep, but there isn’t time, not now.

Vil pours me coffee, and I perch on the arm of the couch, sipping slowly. Saga is still in bed, and I don’t have the heart to wake her, not after last night’s vigil at the Sea of Bones. So it’s just Vil and I, with Leifur at the door.

Vil swears quietly when I’ve finished my report. “You’ll have to find a way to delay the digging. Can you do it, Brynja?”

“I can try.”

“Any word on who Kallias means to name his heir?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

He frowns, dragging his finger around the rim of his own coffee mug. “And Ballast?”

My gut clenches. I didn’t tell Vil about my visit to the infirmary, or of Ballast’s presence in the digging shaft. “What about him?”

“What have you found out? How close is he in his father’s confidences? Is he in the running for heir?”

“I don’t know.”

Vil scowls. “Damn it, Brynja! What have you been doing all night?”

I curse at him and set my mug down so hard coffee splashes over the rim.

His eyes lock hard on mine, and I think again of what Saga told him about what happened in the Iljaria tunnels. But at last he just sighs and reaches for a rag to wipe up the spilled coffee. “Go to bed, Brynja. You look dead on your feet.”

I obey without another word, though I sleep for only a few hours before Saga wakes me with apologies and a pot of tea, to get me ready for the treaty meeting.