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Chapter Fourteen

Daeros—Kallias’s Mountain

Sabotaging digging progress turns out to be harder than I expected.

The broken tools—pickaxes and drill bits—are collected at the end of every day and brought to the smithy, where they’re melted down and reforged. I manage to steal a whole bin of them, but more metal is just brought in from the mines, and not much time is lost.

The workers are housed all together in a dormitory near the servants’ wing of the palace; I lace their food with lobelia, and the whole lot of them get violently ill.

But then soldiers are called up from the barracks to take their places until they recover, and I have made a lot of people really sick for no reason.

I explain all this to Finnur, the Iljaria boy Kallias keeps in his Collection, on one of my visits to the great hall.

I come to see the children every few days, bringing them little treats or gifts, like Gulla used to do for all of us.

But I haven’t been brave enough to speak with Rute, my acrobatic replacement, after our first encounter.

“You’ll have to strengthen the magic that’s protecting whatever the Iljaria buried,” Finnur says when I’ve finished telling him. “It’s the only way to truly delay the digging, and no one will suspect it—they’ll just think the vein is more resilient than they first thought.”

I watch the gangly boy behind iron bars, folding flowers and animals out of the scraps of paper I brought him. His fingers move quickly in the semidarkness of the hall, his white hair seeming almost to glow.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I ask him. “I don’t have any magic.”

He flicks his eyes briefly to me before refocusing on his paper folding. “I’ll do it.”

Unhappiness makes my gut tighten. “Finnur, I can’t take you down there. I can’t even take you out of the hall, not till the army comes.”

He gives a little nod, but I see the disappointment in the slump of his knobby shoulders.

“It’s not that I don’t want to—”

“I know,” he says. He finishes the animal he’s folding, a cat, and lines it up with the others. He grabs another piece of paper. “If you let me out of my cage, I can try and make something here that you can take down into the diggings.”

“You’d really do that?”

His eyes meet mine, and there is a fierceness in him, a power that the iron can’t quench. “Yes.”

I bite my lip. “I’ll have to lock you back in when—”

“I know. I swear I won’t try to escape. I’ll wait with the others.”

I blink back the sudden press of tears. I let him out.

It’s incredible to watch him work his Prism magic, there on the floor just outside his cage.

He closes his eyes and lifts his hands, his fingers moving as if he’s again folding paper and not air.

Four small stones glimmer into being, spinning weightless in front of him.

When he opens his eyes again, they fall; he catches them just before they hit the marble.

Finnur gives me a crooked smile as he offers them to me. I weigh the stones in my palm, heavy and cool.

“Concentrated healing magic,” Finnur explains. “At least, that’s what they’re meant to be. You’ll have to push them into the vein, and they should expand and clot, like a wound scabbing over.”

“Thank you, Finnur,” I say quietly.

He nods but doesn’t reply, his eyes darting around the room. I tense, knowing I don’t have the power—or the heart—to stop him if he chooses to run. But he doesn’t. He just gives me a sad smile and steps back into the cage.

“I’m sorry,” I choke out as I shut and lock the door.

“Come again soon, Brynja,” he says. “I want to know if they work.”

I promise that I will, and he ducks his head and goes back to folding.

I shimmy up the wall to the heating vent and make the mistake of looking over at my old cage. Rute watches me, wrath in her eyes. “You’re no better than him ,” she spits out, “using a child to do a trick for you and then locking him away again.”

Her voice echoes overloud in the arched room. I have no answer for her. I crawl away, cursing at myself to stop crying, but by the time I’m down in the depths of the mountain again, my cheeks are stiff with salt.

I have spied down here often enough now to know there is the briefest period of time between shifts when the digging site is unattended—when one pair of workers leaves with a cart of broken tools, and another pair comes with a cart of fresh ones. A few minutes, no more.

It’s the only chance I have to use Finnur’s magic.

I time it badly today, arriving in the tunnel mere moments after a shift begins, and am forced to wait in a narrow crevasse in the rock for hours. When the workers finally leave with their cart, my muscles are screaming from immobility, but I squeeze out of my hiding spot and pace toward the vein.

My heart pounds as I bring Finnur’s stones up to the pulsing magic, fear of discovery making spots dance before my eyes.

I press the first stone into the vein and jerk back as my finger touches the glowing blue, choking back a scream.

The magic has burned me, a glaring red welt on my skin, and pain skitters, sharp and raging.

I’m more careful with the other stones, holding them in a strip of cloth and keeping my fingers well clear of the vein. The fourth one has just been absorbed when I hear the workers coming, boots and cart wheels loud on the stone.

There isn’t time to flee down the tunnel before I’m seen, so I squeeze back into my hiding place for another long wait.

I get to see the fruits of Finnur’s labor, at least: The pickaxes and drill bits break faster; the hole in the vein has closed up.

The workers curse as a fourth axe breaks in as many minutes, and shout down the shaft for assistance.

Another worker comes running up, and she’s sent to find Basileious to inform him that there’s been an unexpected delay.

Ballast is in the council chamber when Vil and I arrive, his ribbon and eye patch both a deep forest green.

He sits on Kallias’s right, face drawn and tired.

There are blisters on his palms because Kallias made him dig in the heart of the mountain again last night, after receiving Basileious’s report of the delay.

But not even Ballast could make much of a dent in Finnur’s magic.

It wrecks me that his blisters and exhaustion are my fault, that I’m here to undo the hurt Kallias has caused, and all I’ve done so far is add to it.

For his part, Kallias is yawning and drinking quite a lot of wine for it being only the fourth hour of the day, his chair tilted back and his feet up on the table.

Lord Seleukos and Lady Eudocia are present, but none of the other governors are. Zopyros, Theron, and Alcaeus are grouped together, with no sign of Lysandra. Aelia and her steward, Talan, sit across from Vil and me, and Aelia greets us with a smile.

Ballast glances over at me and I tense, fixed by his one blue eye. My pulse hammers in my throat, and for half a moment, it feels like we are the only two people in the room.

And then Vil takes my hand in his, and I’m startled back into reality. Ballast looks away.

“Should we begin, Your Majesty?” says Aelia coolly when, after some minutes, Kallias has shown no sign of calling the session to order.

“Ballast,” says Kallias with another yawn. He takes a long swig of wine and turns aside to General Eirenaios and starts telling him about “the girls from last night” in such explicit detail it makes my cheeks heat.

Vil stiffens beside me, and Aelia grows absolutely frigid.

“My father has asked me to lead the meeting this morning,” says Ballast, turning to address the room.

Zopyros, Theron, and Alcaeus look at Ballast with murder in their eyes, but none of them dare object.

“He wishes us to discuss changes to the borders between Skaanda and Daeros.” Ballast unfolds a map on the table, heroically and doggedly ignoring his father’s ongoing topic of conversation.

“We must come to an agreement about the river towns here and here”—he points to each—“as well as the guard posts on the plains, here and here.”

“Skaanda isn’t relinquishing any of those,” snaps Vil. “There’s not a chance in hell.”

“Every one of them was taken from Daeros,” Ballast retorts. “Negotiation is give and take. On both sides.”

“Don’t school me in etymology, you one-eyed bastard!”

I grab his arm. “ Vil. ”

He shuts his mouth.

Ballast’s eye flicks over to me, and I feel sharp and hot with horror. I let go of Vil; his sleeve is rumpled where I gripped him.

For a moment I’m caught in the maelstrom of tension that hangs between the two of them, sucking all the air out of the room and tying my stomach in knots. I want to cry and scream and knock their fool heads together.

“I will remind you,” says Ballast coolly, looking at Vil again, “that you are here on my father’s goodwill. It is in your own best interest to be civil.”

“Now you’re threatening me?” Vil demands, jerking up from his chair.

“I think,” says Aelia, with a dazzling smile, “that we had best move on to other terms and leave the border discussion for another day. Don’t you agree, Your Highnesses?”

It’s something I ought to have said, if I’d had my wits about me. I curse myself.

Ballast nods. Vil slumps back in his seat. I take a long, slow breath.

Kallias’s voice rises in the silence. “While the dark-haired one had the most delightful —”

“Let’s return,” says Aelia hastily, “to the basis of what we all wish the treaty to be: lasting peace between nations. Skaanda showed great faith toward that end with the food shipments, and Daeros in return displayed all it has to offer.”

“Though offered none of it,” Vil says under his breath.

The conversation limps on, Lord Seleukos and Lady Eudocia discussing trade options with Vil, who seems to finally remember he’s trying to ingratiate himself to these people, and keeps a better check on his temper.

Vil and Lady Eudocia are conferring about a possible tour of the Bone City when Kallias jerks his feet off the table and settles his chair on the floor with a sudden thump .

We all look over at him, and I’m startled to find that he no longer seems drunk. “I have decided to name an heir,” he announces.

Zopyros, Theron, and Alcaeus all sit up very straight.

“Who, Father?” says Zopyros, puffing out his chest.

Ballast eyes him uneasily, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

“The naming ceremony will be tomorrow evening,” says Kallias. He smiles his feline smile, and it slithers under my skin and sticks there.

Zopyros sags a bit in his chair but doesn’t repeat his question.

The announcement effectively ends negotiations, and I stand with relief, ready to crawl into bed and sleep the day away. Vil is deep in conversation with Aelia—he won’t need me for a while.

I jump when Kallias grabs my hand. He looks up at me with eyes that are both lazy and cunning. “I have not gotten to know you as well as I would like, Princess Astridur. We will have dinner together, you and I. A private dinner. Not tomorrow evening, of course. The evening after.”

I gape at him. “I couldn’t accept, Your Majesty,” I stammer.

He just grins, showing his teeth. “I look forward to it.”

I extricate my hand and flee into the corridor, pausing for a moment to tilt my head back against the wall in an effort to slow my raging pulse.

“Br—Astridur?”

I turn to see Ballast standing there, hands nervous about the trim of his shirt.

Veins of red run through the white of his eye, and the shadow beneath it is darker than it looked in the council chamber.

He smells strongly of medicine and herbs, and I think of him weeping silently onto his pillow, of the vials on his nightstand, of the physician asking him if the pain is better, if the nightmares have gone.

This isn’t what he smelled like before, in the caves, in the dark.

Words stick in my throat and I am ill, ill, because he’s here now and I want desperately to fold myself into him but I can’t, because I don’t know what he is, and I don’t know what I am, and everything is wrong.

But the intensity in his one-eyed gaze makes my heart stutter.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says quietly. “It isn’t safe. There are—there are things going on that I can’t explain, but you need to leave. Before everything gets worse. Before—”

“Before you’re named your father’s heir?” I snap. “Are we enemies, Ballast? Is that what we are now?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then what are you warning me about? Yourself? Why in the Gray Goddess’s hell are you back here, bowing and scraping to your father’s will? You could have destroyed him. And yet you’re—you’re sacrificing everything for a wild grab at power?”

“It isn’t like that!”

“Then what is it like ?” I’m shouting and I shouldn’t be. We are hardly in a private part of the palace, and I need to hold my tongue.

His chest heaves, his face stricken with grief or anger or some other emotion caught between. “I’m trying to save them,” he says softly. “I’m trying to save all of them.” His eye seeks mine, begging me to understand.

But I don’t understand. I think of Gulla, locked in her cage, bruised and alone and forgotten. “Have you even gone to see your mother since you’ve been here?” It’s a cruel question.

His jaw goes hard. “I can’t antagonize my father.”

I scoff. “What’s your game, Ballast? Get yourself named heir, take over from your father, and then what? Start a Collection of your own?”

Something breaks in his face, and I utterly revile myself for saying that to him.

He turns distant, cold.

I take a step toward him. “Ballast. I’m sorry. I know that isn’t you.”

“Do you?” he says. He shows his teeth in an echo of Kallias’s feline smile, and it chills me to my bones.

“You’re better off with your Skaandan prince,” he says, eye glittering, “although I’m not sure anyone believes he’s your cousin.”

My anger flares and I shove past him, but he grabs my wrist. Holds me back.

I look at him, pulse wild. Fear rages through me, fear of him, of his father. Of this mountain and all the secrets buried in the heart of it.

“Don’t interfere,” says Ballast, tone clipped. “If you know what’s best for you, you and your Skaandan prince will leave Tenebris and never come back.”

“He’s not my Skaandan prince,” I practically snarl at him.

For a moment more we stare at each other, his fingers hot through my sleeve.

Then he releases me, and I sweep on down the corridor.

I don’t look back.