Page 43

Two Years Ago

The Iljaria Tunnels

We leave the Brown Goddess’s hallowed halls, and the cave demons return with a vengeance.

Ballast finds me a sword, which is more effective than my knife, and the three of us spend the better part of each day battling our way through one stone passageway after another.

We’ve passed far out of Asvaldr’s realm, so it’s only Ballast and Saga and me against the shadows.

We sleep in shifts, one of us always awake to guard the others. We walk, fight, eat, sleep. Wake and do it again. Our path winds often near the underground river, and Ballast catches blind fish in nets while Saga and I keep the monsters off him. He smokes the fish in the coals of our fires.

“Do you charm them into your net?” Saga mocks him one day as he settles by the fire with his latest catch. “Do you call them to their deaths and laugh?”

I’m watching the cave entrance, so I don’t look back as he draws his knife, begins to scale and gut the fish.

“No,” he says. “I put out the nets. I thank the fish that swim into them. And I tell them that I’m sorry.”

Saga doesn’t say anything else. When she comes to relieve my watch, I take her place by the fire and notice she’s eaten very little.

We come one day to an abandoned Iljaria city, a massive cavern carved with statues and stone pillars, murals covering the walls, with an ancient well in the center of a flagstone square.

The whole place is illuminated with magic, glowing and golden as the summer sun.

It hurts my eyes until they begin to adjust, and Saga and Ballast stand blinking and tearing on either side of me.

“I have never been here before,” says Ballast. “It feels—”

“Ancient,” I say. “And yet somehow new.”

He nods. “Like the First Ones themselves might step around any corner.”

“There are no shadows,” I realize. “None at all.”

“Because the light touches everything,” says Saga, “every crack, every mote.” And she begins to softly pray.

Slowly, we pace through the cavern. I wonder if it’s the light that’s keeping the cave demons from swarming this place or if it is something else.

All around the cavern there are dwellings carved into the stone.

They’re decorated with brilliant carpets and intricately carved furniture, with shelves of brightly illuminated manuscripts.

There is a half-finished painting on an easel, with jars of opened paint beside it, and a brush that looks to have been only just laid down.

Nothing has been touched by dust or spiders, decay or time.

On one end of the cavern, we come upon a sunken bath around a column of stone pillars, watched over by more statues, with a fountain in the center depicting what can only be the Prism Goddess, water spilling out of her open palms. I kneel and dip my hand into the water; it’s clear and warm.

I blink at the bath, the brimming magic tingling all up the length of my arm.

It’s been weeks since the pool by the hot springs, and all three of us stare at the magical water with open longing.

“You go first, Saga,” I tell her. “Shout when you’re finished.”

She nods her assent, and Ballast and I pace back into the central square. We sit on the edge of the fountain, the water here also clear and flowing.

I study Ballast as I have never seen him before: in dazzling light.

He’s shed his coat, and his sleeves are rolled up to the elbow; his brown arms are a map of scars where his swirls of Iljaria tattoos used to be.

Kallias cut them out with a knife when Ballast was thirteen or so, to make him more Daerosian, but a few overlooked specks of blue remain.

There are scars on Ballast’s jawline, too, and a nick in his right ear along the upper rim.

I remember when Kallias did that—he was in a rage because the dogs had gotten loose in the palace, torn his private chambers all to pieces.

He thought Ballast had done it, but it wasn’t his fault.

It was mine. I had let the dogs out of their cages and sent them hurtling toward the king’s rooms in an act of righteous defiance.

And I hid in my cage while Kallias carved a piece out of Ballast because of it.

Ballast turns toward me, catching me in my scrutiny, and I am struck anew by his eyelashes, which, like his hair, are a mix of black and white.

He reaches out one tentative hand, his fingers brushing the edge of my headscarf.

I tremble, and he mistakes the meaning of it.

He lets his hand fall and sags where he sits.

I don’t know how to tell him that I want him to touch me, that I long for it, a sharp ache beneath my ribs.

“You’re right,” says Ballast, to the ancient flagstones. “I always had a choice, and I shouldn’t have let him ... hurt you. Hurt all of you. I should have stopped him. I could have. But I was too afraid of how he might hurt me. Of how he might hurt my mother, even more than he already had.”

“I was unfair before,” I tell him, the music of the fountain echoing in the wide arch of the cavern. “He did hurt you. Over and over. And your ear. The dogs ...” I speak around the lump in my throat, racked with guilt. “That was me.”

He glances over again, a strange expression on his face. “Don’t be sorry about my ear. If not for the dogs, he would have found another reason. He cut off one of my toes because I couldn’t make a snake play a violin.” Ballast gives a bitter, awful laugh.

I feel utterly sick.

But then he shrugs, like it’s no big matter. “Whatever else I was to him, I am my father’s son. I don’t think he would have killed me, if it came down to it. Not like you. Not like all of you. You were expendable. Toys to amuse him and throw away when he got bored.”

He’s right, and I have no reply to that.

“I could have helped you. I could have stopped him, put an end to his damned Collection and saved dozens of lives. But I didn’t because I’m a coward.

” He slams his fist into the edge of the fountain, cursing as his knuckles split and blood beads bright.

He lifts his face to mine, tears gleaming on his cheeks, and runs his uninjured hand through his snow-and-earth hair before turning away again.

My throat hurts, my heart pulsing too fast, too hard.

I want to wipe his tears away; I want to comfort him, to pull him into me and banish his tormented thoughts into the darkness where they belong.

But I don’t know how, or I am not brave enough.

And if Ballast is a coward, I am one, too.

I could have saved him. I could have saved everyone. But I didn’t.

“You are one of the most powerful Iljaria I’ve ever seen,” I tell him quietly.

“You can do whatever you want: Free your mother. Remove your father from his throne.” I study Ballast, his form lanky and taut in unnatural light.

I am struck suddenly by his beauty, enough to steal my breath.

“It isn’t your fault, what happened to me and Saga and all the rest of us.

That was your father’s doing. It wasn’t yours. ”

“I killed a man.” His voice is raw and ragged. “Just because my father told me to.”

My heart tears. “You did it quickly,” I counter, “as mercifully as you could. Your father meant to be cruel, and you denied him that.”

“But he’s still dead.”

I try not to hear Hilf’s cry in my mind, try not to see his blood pooling over the marble.

“Ballast.” His name sticks in my throat, and he looks at me again, his eyes wet and bright. “Hilf would be dead, with or without you.”

He takes a shuddering breath, and I reach out to touch his arm, his scars rough under my skin.

He turns his wrist and grips my fingers like he’s dangling from the edge of a cliff and I’m the only one who can pull him to safety.

I grip him back, so tightly I can feel his heart beating with mine, ragged and wild.

His heat sears me, like I’ve caught hold of an open flame.

I want to pull him closer, but I’m terrified I will be burned.

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” he says frankly, gaze locked hard on mine. “I don’t want you to look at me and see my father.”

“I’m not,” I say. “I don’t.”

His eyes go wet and he lifts his free hand, tracing it ever so lightly over my cheek. I shiver and lean into him. His hand is rough and warm.

“Brynja,” he says quietly, “I—”

“Get away from her!”

I jump nearly through the roof at Saga’s voice, jerking apart from Ballast. Saga stands there, dripping from her bath, eyes blazing with hurt and fury.

My heart is beating too fast, too hard. I can’t seem to catch my breath.

“Don’t touch her,” Saga says to Ballast, low and cold. “Don’t you dare touch her.”

Ballast stares at the floor. I’m still having a hard time remembering how to breathe. “Saga, he—”

“Shut up,” she snaps. “Shut up . Let’s go.”

We do. Neither Ballast nor I take our turn in the magical bath.

We shoulder our packs, and he picks up the torch.

We take the westward passage out of the Iljaria city, into the waiting embrace of three dozen cave demons.

Saga doesn’t look at me as she fights, the monsters’ dark blood immediately undoing the effects of her bath.

I’m not sure she’ll ever speak to me again.

I do my best to work through my feelings with my sword.