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Eleven Years Ago

Daeros—Tenebris

I am not sure who pulls me away from the cliff, only that someone does.

The whole world is shaking, ice flying off the mountain, wind turning to knives that slice across my skin and make blood dribble warm and wet down my neck.

“Brynja. Brynja, Stop .” My father’s voice, bellowing in my ear.

And I realize I am doing it: shaking the world, ripping the mountain apart, killing us all.

I stop.

The mountain settles.

The earth calms.

I blink and see Lilja’s body beside us in the snow. I brought her back up to us in my frantic mind-storm, too late, too little.

Her neck is twisted, her arms and legs bent at odd angles, bone piercing white through her pale skin. Her wings are little more than sticks and rags now, no magic at all pulsing in the ruin of them.

I stare at her. I can’t stop staring.

Somewhere, someone is roaring.

It’s me.

My father cannot heal her. Not even the Prism Master of the Iljaria has the power to bring someone back from the dead.

Yet my parents shout petitions to the Gray Lady anyway.

She doesn’t answer.

Lilja stays dead in the snow.

And King Kallias watches, his blue eyes glittering. Like he isn’t at all surprised.

Year 4189, Month of the Prism Lady

Iljaria—the Prism Master’s house

We stand on the hill outside my parents’ house.

Lilja is dead, dead. White face and white hair, wrapped in a shroud of gray.

The shroud is silk and embroidered with flowers, but it is still a shroud, and she is still dead.

She ought to have lived three centuries or more. All she got was fifteen years.

Father sings the funeral chant as her body rises into the air.

My heart burns with sadness, but my eyes are dry.

Brandr sobs in the chair we brought up the hill for him because he can’t stand for any length of time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know he loved her, too. I hate myself for not including him when I wriggled my way into the trip to Daeros. He didn’t even have that last week with her, like I did.

“We surrender Lilja Eldingar to the stars,” says Father, and he sings the song of unwinding, a magic that is as old as time itself.

Lilja’s body bursts into thousands of glittering sparks: her magic, released from her mortal frame.

And now she’s truly gone.

But it isn’t over.

Because I know to the depths of my soul that somehow the Daerosian king ruined my sister’s wings. That he killed her. And that he must pay.

“Violence is not the birthright of the Iljaria,” my father tells me, a few days after Lilja’s funeral. I’m in his office again, railing to him against the king, but I don’t dare use my magic to manipulate him a second time. “Vengeance does not belong to you.”

“But she shouldn’t have fallen!” I cry.

“No,” he agrees. “She shouldn’t have.” He studies me, clearly weighing whether he ought to tell me something. He runs one large hand through his curly white hair. “There were iron shavings ground into the wood of Lilja’s wings. I have no doubt it was Kallias who put them there.”

I shake with rage, with the horror of it. “Then why must we do nothing?”

His eyes meet mine. “I didn’t say that, little one. I only said that violence is not the answer.”

Hope pulses through me. “What, then?”

Father sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers and peering at me over his white beard. I still can’t comprehend how very old he is, but I know his eyes have seen many, many things.

“You know that the mountain once belonged to our people, that we buried something deep in the heart of it. A mighty power that could alter the very nature of the world.”

I nod, not wanting to even breathe, lest he change his mind about telling me.

“We want it back, but we will not take it by force, and we don’t even know if Kallias is aware of the power, if he is searching for it.

We have long wished to install a permanent ambassador in Kallias’s court to keep an eye on him, but he won’t agree to one because he doesn’t trust us.

We need to send someone he wouldn’t suspect. ”

I blink at him, not understanding. My eyes catch the movement of a bright-yellow bird, winging past the office window, but all I see is Lilja, falling to her death.

“What would you say to being that someone?”

The question jerks me back to the present. “What do you mean?”

“It wouldn’t be easy, Brynja. You might be there for a long time, just waiting, just watching. You couldn’t have any contact with us. You’d have to keep your identity a secret.”

I still don’t understand.

Father gets up from his chair and comes around the desk, kneeling on the floor to bring himself to my eye level.

“You saw the children in Kallias’s Collection.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to be one of those children. To stay in the mountain. To watch Kallias. When the time is right, we will come and take back the mountain for ourselves. We’ll be able to do that without violence because of you, Brynja. You’ll tell us if he’s about to breach the heart of the mountain.”

I am beginning to comprehend what he’s telling me, and something twists deep in my heart. “It will punish him,” I whisper. “It will punish the king for what he did to Lilja.”

He nods. “Yes.”

I take a deep breath. “Am I to live in a cage and perform tricks with my magic?”

“No. For this to work, you must not let on that you have any magic, or even that you’re Iljaria at all.”

I tilt my head. “What do you mean, Father?”

He smiles. “We’re going to turn you into a Skaandan, and we’re going to make you remarkable for something other than magic.” Grief flashes across his face, raw sorrow stitched with rage. “We’re going to make you fly.”

Year 4190, Month of the White Lady

Iljaria—the Prism Master’s house

Every morning, as soon as I wake, I drag myself to the training arena, where my father is already waiting.

He brings in trainers from all around Iljaria, and even a Skaandan woman sworn to secrecy.

They teach me to push myself past my breaking point, again and again and again, until I become strong, and then adequate and then, by the close of the year, remarkable.

I break every bone in my body at least once. I push through my routines with fractured feet and splintered collarbones. I grow to embrace the pain, to use it as a tool instead of a burden.

I learn how to walk wires thinner than my fingers, and when I master that, I learn routines on them.

With the power from her patron, the Brown Lady, my mother erects an enormous arena for my use, with wires thirty feet in the air, silks, rings, swinging platforms—anything and everything my father thinks might help to catch the king’s eye.

Every evening, after a full day of training, I return to my room to find Brandr waiting for me with a stack of books. We have formed a temporary truce, he for a time satisfied to be teaching me things I don’t know. In this area, at least, he is stronger than me.

Brandr educates me about being Skaandan. He finds me a new last name, invents a history for me that is close enough to the truth that it won’t sound false—my mother an architect, my father a mirror maker. He teaches me the Skaandan way to talk about the First Ones, and even teaches me how to curse.

“Stop calling them the Gray Lady and the Yellow Lord and so on,” he says. “Think of them as gods and goddesses, even in your head. Think of yourself as Skaandan, and no one will doubt you.”

So I do. I bury Brynja Eldingar deep in my mind and become Brynja Sindri in truth as well as name.

I am determined to avenge Lilja, to bring honor to my people, to defeat the king. And so I don’t falter. I don’t back down.

Even though every time I shimmy up the wall or do a tumbling passage on the wires, every time I leap across dizzying air to grab the rope or silk or swinging bar waiting for me on the other side—

Every time I fear it might be my last.

Every time, I see Lilja plummeting to her death, her body breaking on the ice.

I am utterly terrified I will meet the same fate.

I have no magic to assist me anymore—I can’t call on the air or the wind to save me. My father has locked my power deep inside me so I won’t betray myself. I am as helpless as if I truly were Skaandan.

Nightmares haunt me. I dream of falling, my body fractured on the rocks.

But I refuse to give up. My parents and Brandr have invested too much in me. And if I don’t go through with my father’s plan, Lilja’s death will never be avenged.

At the close of the year, a little after Brandr and I turn ten, my father declares me ready. “There is only one thing left,” he says. He puts his hands on either side of my head, and his magic slides into me, buzzing across my scalp, twisting hot through my skin.

He withdraws his hands, and I peer into a mirror to see he’s turned my hair from white to dark, my brows and eyelashes, too. I stare and stare, realizing that I am truly no longer myself. That there is no turning back.

Year 4192, Month of the Black Lord

Daeros—Tenebris

Father promises me before I leave that once or twice a year, an ambassador from Iljaria will come and check on me, to get my report on anything regarding the king digging into the mountain.

I count every day of the first year.

The ambassador doesn’t come until I’ve been here two.

He watches the entire Collection perform and later that evening returns to the great hall.

I slip from my cage to speak with him. He doesn’t ask me if I am well, just inquires about Kallias.

I tell him I haven’t heard anything about him digging into the mountain yet. The ambassador frowns and walks away.

I don’t see him again.

Year after year passes. The ambassador doesn’t return. I hear no word of Iljaria at all, not even the barest scrap of news from home.

My father’s last words to me echo forever in my mind, uttered on our hilltop as the sun sank west and the wind blew leaves in my hair.

“You are of the Iljaria, Brynja,” he told me. “You could live three hundred years, perhaps more. Time does not bind us like it binds others. Our kind doesn’t even feel the passing of time—it will be nothing to you. Remember that. And be true to our cause. To our people.”

My father was wrong. I do feel the passing of time, in my iron cage in the king’s mountain. I feel it acutely. Every second, every heartbeat—they pierce me through like swords, and leave me breathless.