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Chapter Sixteen

Daeros—Tenebris

“I can’t do this anymore. We have to move our timeline up.”

I sit with Vil, Saga, Pala, and Leifur in my and Saga’s room, heat coiling through the vents, a tray of wine and scones untouched on the low table between us.

“Why can’t we assassinate the king and hold the mountain until the army comes?

” I’m trembling, my head hurting from lack of food, my skin still crawling from Kallias’s touch.

I try not to think about Ballast, hunched on the floor, about what his father might be doing to him for the sin of touching me.

“We’ve been over and over this,” says Vil in an overly gentle tone, like he’s placating a child.

“You saw the barracks, Brynja. The five of us can’t fight off the entire Daerosian army.

We have to stick to our original plan. Wait for our army to arrive.

Then seize Tenebris from within. We only have to last another six weeks. ”

“Even if we did try and take Tenebris now, Ballast won’t let the mountain go quietly,” Saga adds, her jaw tight. “Not now he’s been named heir.”

“Wouldn’t he, though?” I argue. “Wouldn’t anything be better than his father on the throne?”

“You think you know him so well,” Saga snaps. “But Kallias’s blood runs through his veins. He will do everything in his power to hold on to Daeros.”

“Ballast has been meeting with the Daerosian governors,” Vil adds. “He clearly has his own agenda, and I count him every bit as guilty as his father. He’ll be executed along with Kallias, when the time comes.”

My stomach drops, and I bite back a curse. “I never agreed to that.”

“You agreed to be under my authority,” says Vil. “You agreed to trust me.”

“ You promised to keep me safe!” I fairly shriek at him.

“Do you expect Ballast to bow his head and swear fealty to Skaanda?” Saga cuts in.

“Maybe Ballast should be allowed to be king,” I retort. “Annexing Daeros wouldn’t even be necessary if true peace can be struck with Skaanda.”

Saga swears. “Why are you defending him, Brynja?”

“That was never the plan,” says Vil sharply. “And you’re forgetting the weapon.”

“Right. The weapon.” I jerk up from my seat and pace the length of the room, trying to get hold of myself.

Saga’s anger roils off her.

“We will hold to our original timeline,” says Vil.

“And the marriage pact?” I demand.

Vil goes a little gray. “You have until the end of Winter Dark to give Kallias an answer—that’s when the army will come. You don’t need to worry about it.”

I scrub my eyes. “And must I endure his advances until then?”

“I won’t let him touch you.”

“He already has , Vil!”

“Brynja. Please be calm.”

I stare at Vil, and I think that I hate him. He doesn’t understand me, and I realize now that he never has. He’s just using me for his own purposes, like everyone else. “ You endure the touch of your tormentor and tell me how easy it is to be calm .”

I’m up from the table and crawling into the heating vent before anyone can stop me.

“Brynja!” Vil cries. “We’re not finished talking! Come down from there. Damn it, Brynja!”

I crawl away as fast as I can, until I can no longer hear him shouting.

Ballast is in his new room, the suite meant to belong to the queen Kallias never crowned.

I watch him from the ceiling. He sits on his bed, shoulders hunched and shaking.

After a while he unties the ribbon that holds his eye patch, lets it fall to the floor.

He jerks up, puts his shoulder against a heavy dresser, shoves it against the door that joins his room to his father’s.

I take that as my cue to wriggle out of his heating vent and drop down to the floor.

He jumps and curses at my sudden appearance, scrabbling frantically for his eye patch, which he ties back on with nervous haste.

For a moment the patch doesn’t cover his socket properly, and part of the gaping red wound is visible.

Horror knots inside me, not because of his missing eye, but because it so shames him, like he thinks I revile him for it.

He tugs the patch into its proper place then, a shroud over his deep hurt.

I gnaw on my lip. There are cuts on his face that weren’t there before my disastrous private dinner with Kallias, and red leaks through the right shoulder of his shirt.

“What are you doing here, Brynja?” He’s angry, but he’s tired, too; there is pain written in the lines of his face.

My glance flicks to the dresser he pushed against the door. “Does he come in here?” It’s an echo of a question I asked Ballast years ago, when we were children. I see recognition flicker in his eye.

“Not often,” he says. “We’ll hear him in time for you to leave.”

I take a step nearer and he stands there, stone-still, watching me.

I study him in the yellow glow of the Iljaria lamps, cataloging his differences, straining to reconcile the Ballast from the caves with the Ballast here before me.

I want to close the remaining distance between us, want to lift my hand to his face and trace his hurts and sorrows with my fingertips, smooth them all away. But I don’t quite dare.

“Why have you allowed your father to snare you so neatly in his web?” I ask him quietly.

He is obdurate as marble, no softness at all in the sharp planes of him. “If you want to catch a spider, sometimes you have to pretend to be a fly. I’d think you, of all people, would understand that.”

I flinch. “Your eye , Ballast.”

Muscles jump in his jaw, and he looks past me. “A necessary sacrifice.”

“Like hell it was necessary.”

His eye flicks to mine. “Did you think I would languish down in the tunnels forever? You’re the one who told me to stay in the light.”

“This is not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?” he says viciously. “What do you want from me, Brynja? Why the hell are you here? You were free of this place, free of him, free of all of it. You should have gone home. What possessed you to come back? Why Did You Come Back ?”

His jaw trembles, and tears spark in his eye. I draw nearer, answering the lodestone pull of him, until there is hardly any space between us at all. Then I do lift my hand and brush one finger gently, gently, over his brow. He shakes and closes his eye.

“You were free,” he whispers. “You were free, and now you’ve put yourself once more at his mercy and I can’t think clearly, can’t adhere wholly to my purpose because I’m afraid he will hurt you and I can’t bear it, Brynja. I can bear everything else but not that.”

My heart quavers, and I tilt my forehead against his chest, breathing in the medicinal scent of him, searching for something familiar. His pulse is wild beneath my ear, and his magic crackles around him, power barely contained.

He takes a ragged breath, cups my face with his hands. I look up at him, into his single blue eye. My skin is on fire, and there is no air in my lungs. A muscle jumps in his jaw.

“Brynja,” he says.

“Bal,” I breathe.

And then his mouth is crushed against mine and his fingers are in my hair and my hands are wrapped around his back, tugging him into me.

His magic sears my lips and blazes through my veins but I don’t care because I want this, I want him , so fiercely I can endure anything.

Yet his magic burns and burns, and I am at last forced to pull away from him, gasping.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps, realizing. “I’ll hold it back. Brynja—”

But I’m thinking a little clearer now, for all it feels as if my heart is going to shatter like glass. I step back, putting a marked distance between us. He respects it, though he trembles where he stands.

“We can’t do this,” I say past my horribly dry throat.

“Why not?”

I glance at the dresser shoved up against the door, and for a moment we both tense, listening. There is no sound from the other side, but I still don’t feel safe. “Because I can’t trust you, Ballast. We are at cross purposes, you and I.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know why you’re here, Brynja. But I am here to right my father’s wrongs. To save my country from war and starvation and being called to heel by the Aeronan Empire. You told me I was a good person, down there in the dark. I’m here to prove your faith in me.”

“Bal.”

He grimaces, pacing to his dressing table and fiddling with a tray of cloak-pins, sharp enough to kill if you drove one in just the right place.

“The only way to do all that is to take my father off his throne and become king in his stead,” Ballast goes on. “ That must be done legitimately, or else the governors would support one of my siblings instead of me, which I can’t risk—I don’t trust any of them to be better than my father.

“I knew that when I returned to Tenebris, the first thing I would have to do was win back my father’s trust. Make him think he still controlled me so that he would name me his heir.” His voice goes quiet as he says, “So I gave him my eye.”

“Bronze God’s heart ,” I swear.

He shrugs off the horror of it, and I want to shake him for treating any part of himself as disposable. He doesn’t understand, maybe doesn’t even believe, that he has immense value. It breaks my heart. I fight the impulse to forget everything else and pull him close again.

“Now. Are you going to tell me why you are here?” He has closed himself off again, gone distant and cold. His earrings glitter in the light of the Iljaria lamps, and he looks every inch his father’s heir. I remember that’s exactly what he is.

“Skaanda’s resources are growing thin,” I say. “The treaty is the only way to save her.”

Ballast laughs. “What a terrible liar you are. Try again, Brynja.”

“We’re here to annex Daeros into Skaanda and put Vil on the throne.”

He grimaces. “Ah yes. Your Skaandan prince.”

“He’s not my Skaandan prince.”

“He thinks he is. What could have given him that idea?”

I glare at Ballast, and he leans against his dressing table, folding his arms across his chest. He glares right back. “Do you really expect me to willingly relinquish my country to my enemy?”

“Then we are enemies.”