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Chapter Twenty-Two

Daeros—Tenebris

It’s quiet in the heart of the mountain. I feel its breath, sense its pulse. And I stare at the block wrapped with chains and am very, very afraid.

There is no fear in Brandr. He is all strength, power, certainty. The sickly brother I left behind is no more, and I wonder, as I have since we met him on the road to Tenebris, what became of him.

Brandr puts his hands on the chains, and I shudder because they are made of iron, and how is he not burned?

“Is Father really dead?”

His eyes flick to mine, and I read his irritation that I ask him this question here, now. “Yes.”

My throat hurts. “When?”

“About two years ago.”

This doesn’t surprise me. It’s when my hair started turning white again.

I kept it wrapped up when I could, in the caves, in the dark.

I rubbed charcoal into it when Ballast and Saga were sleeping.

And when we finally made it to Skaanda, Indridi helped me dye it, showed me how to hide the roots, how to trace my brows and lashes with staining kohl that Saga wouldn’t perceive.

My stomach twists, and I see Indridi as she died in the dust, wreathed in fire.

“Hush now, sister. Let me concentrate.”

I nod, lacing my fingers together and clenching them in front of me.

Brandr returns his concentration to the iron chain.

He closes his eyes and magic coils out of him, his face tight with power, with pain.

The iron pulses with his Prism magic, blue and bronze and every color between.

My eyes sting and my skin sears and I try not to scream at the pain of it, my breath hissing through tight lips.

One by one, the chain links burst in a spray of yellow sparks and fall away from the block, which I can see now is made of ice. All around me the mountain is screaming, grinding out its terror in rock and dust.

Then all the links are broken. Brandr steps back as a crack appears in the ice block.

It shimmers silver white, then indigo, then a deep, fathomless black. The block bursts apart all at once, fragments exploding outward as an impossible, all-consuming light floods the chamber.

My eyes burn with pain, and I screw them shut. But even still I can see the magic, feel it on my skin, taste it on my tongue. It sears through me, consuming every piece.

I sense Brandr’s Prism magic, slipping silver into my mind, a balm against the power that consumes me from the inside, and I am grateful that he does not let me perish in the light.

I open blurry eyes, and the light has shrunk to a sphere of crackling, pulsing power that hovers in the air where the ice block used to be.

My brother faces the sphere head-on, sweat running down his face, steam coiling off his skin.

He holds his hands out, every sinew straining, and shouts the words of his Prism magic, keeping the sphere of light contained.

Fragments of the iron chain rise spinning into the air, binding together to form an iron collar, marked with whorls of obsidian and gray.

With a word, Brandr flings the collar into the light sphere, and suddenly there is a boy sitting on a stone.

A young boy with pale hair and warm brown skin.

His eyes are the color of mountain ice. His clothes are tattered; his feet are bare.

Chains hang from his ankles, and the iron collar is locked tight around his throat, pulsing in every color of my brother’s Prism magic.

I think of Ballast, of the burns on his neck from his own collar, and I’m gutted that he’s suffering, that I wasn’t able to get it off him before he was dragged away. I swear to myself I will, as soon as I can.

The boy looks from me to Brandr and back again. He snaps his fingers, and little sparks of light dance across his hands.

Brandr takes two steps toward the boy and falls on his knees, bowing his head low to the ground. “My Lord.” Brandr’s voice is thick with emotion.

I don’t have the presence of mind to bow as well. All I can do is stare: at my brother on the floor, at the boy on the stone who I know to be the Yellow Lord, the entity the Skaandans worship as the god of light.

I knew that my ancestors bound him in the mountain centuries ago.

His power was reckless, boundless, destructive.

They couldn’t control it. All they could do was contain him.

And so they locked him in iron and wove him with spells and buried him in the ice.

But he couldn’t survive indefinitely in the darkness.

So they bound him to the sun. Allowed him to draw from its energy and its light three months out of every year.

During Soul’s Rest, the sun is here , burning in the heart of the mountain, sustaining the Yellow Lord. It is here now.

I knew all that. I’ve known all that for years. I just—I just hadn’t expected him to be a child .

Brandr rises to his feet again. “My Lord,” he repeats, “I am humbled to stand in your presence. The Iljaria call upon you once more.”

The Yellow Lord blinks at Brandr, the sparks of light still dancing between his fingers. “Remove my bonds, and I will serve you.” His voice is thin and strange, hollow and shifting, like he is born and made of flame.

“In due time, My Lord. For now, I have awakened you. Is that not enough?”

“I have not been sleeping.” The Yellow Lord weaves light like yarn on his fingers. “I have felt every moment of my imprisonment, crushed under the weight of your cursed mountain.”

His words are so like my own thoughts they take the breath out of me.

Brandr isn’t cowed. “You will soon have much to do. I am the Prism Master of the Iljaria. I have unburied you, awakened you, and now I bind you to me.”

He speaks a word in the Old Tongue, and I watch it appear in the air, a rune that shifts from cerulean to green to bronze to yellow, and every other color of the First Ones’ magic.

The Yellow Lord’s collar pulses in answer as Brandr grasps the rune with his hand and, wincing, presses it into his own forehead.

I have heard of these kinds of ancient bindings but have never seen one before; I feel the staggering weight of it, strong enough to call a god to heel.

The Yellow Lord gives my brother a thin smile and inclines his head ever so slightly in acknowledgment of being bound. The chains rattle on his ankles, and his light weaving grows and grows, spilling over his knees and down to the stone floor of the cavern. “And you, girl? Who are you?”

The Yellow Lord fixes his disconcerting gaze steadily on me, and his magic crawls through me like worms. “Your guardian,” I say, my voice echoing oddly in the chamber. “I have watched over you these ten years.”

The Yellow Lord laughs, a hiss through his teeth. “I have never needed a guardian, much less an Iljaria child with no power.”

“We will call for you when we have need of you,” says Brandr, dismissing our exchange with a wave of his hand. “Farewell for now, My Lord.”

He steps from the cavern and I follow, feeling the Yellow Lord’s eyes boring into my back.

With a pulse of magic, Brandr weaves a door back across the opening Kallias made with the pickaxe. He seals it with a disk of liquid black—darkness against light. His hands shake.

“Will it hold him?” I ask.

Brandr takes a deep breath, and I don’t know if this glimpse of his uncertainty comforts or terrifies me.

“He is bound to me, and to our people. It will hold until it is time to unleash his power. I merely had to be sure of him—be sure that he truly still lived. But come, sister. It is time we crawl out of this wretched hole and celebrate our victory.”

He strides toward the tunnel without a backward glance.

I follow, padding along quietly behind him, scrambling to put all my burning questions into words that don’t sound desperate, demanding, accusatory.

“What do you mean to do with him?” I ask at last, though that isn’t the thing I most want to know.

Brandr glances back, an orb of magic bobbing in front of his head to light our way.

“With the Yellow Lord, I mean. Father—Father never told me.” My voice wobbles.

The shock of his death hasn’t had time to dull, but it isn’t sorrow I feel.

I’m not sure what it is. My father honed me into a tool, took away my magic, and sent me to Kallias.

Then, for all I can tell, he forgot about me entirely.

“When Soul’s Rest is over,” Brandr tells me, “when the sun rises again, there will be judgment. The Iljaria will release the Yellow Lord, and his power will consume everyone outside of the mountain—all of Daeros, all of Skaanda. They will pay for what they’ve done to the Iljaria’s sacred land, and when the dust of the Yellow Lord’s vengeance has settled, the Iljaria will rule the continent once more, as is our right. As is our responsibility.”

I think of Skaanda, of the bustling cities and the airy palace, of Saga’s parents and all the people, fiercely loyal to their country, to their gods.

Of our shared ancestry, of their resilience.

I feel Saga’s hands, pressing mine around a cold glass to pull me from my nightmare.

I see Vil, teaching me to throw knives in the arena, bringing me books and making me laugh.

They were a family to me, when I was forgotten by my own family.

“You’re going to kill them all?” My voice is small and steeped in horror.

Brandr stops walking and turns to face me, his magic light bobbing between us; it casts harsh shadows on his face. “It is justice, nothing more. They have defiled our people, our land, for too long. Why do you think our father sent you here? What do you think we’ve been working toward?”

“But ... all of them? Isn’t it enough to drive the Daerosians out? Surely we have no real quarrel with Skaanda anymore.”