Page 71

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Daeros—the tundra

Saga doesn’t trust me. I’m not sure she ever will again, and I can’t blame her. Vil barely looks at me, and I wonder if his love for me died the moment he learned my true heritage. I can’t really blame him, either.

But it still hurts.

I see Saga, Vil, Pala, and Leifur safely into the tunnels, where the Skaandan scout, Aisa, is still waiting. Saga gives a cry of relief, and Vil’s shoulders visibly relax. Leifur and Pala greet her warmly. I feel like the worst kind of outsider. Unacknowledged. Unneeded.

“The army is close,” Aisa tells us, “not more than three days away.”

Vil quickly catches her up on the change in plan, and Aisa flicks her eyes at me, brows raised.

There’s no point in me lingering. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I say quietly.

Saga grits her jaw but doesn’t say anything.

For half a moment Vil meets my gaze. “You had better be, Brynja. Betray us again and I’ll kill you myself.”

My stomach churns with the memory of his pronouncing Indridi’s fate. “I know,” I say.

Then I’m gone, back up the cellar stairs, around a corner, into the safety of a heating vent.

I stop briefly in my room, long enough to finally wash the blood from my hands and change into sturdy trousers, a heavy shift, tall boots. I shrug into a fur-lined coat and bundle supplies into a pack, and then I’m ready.

It’s the twenty-second hour by the mantel time-glass. I don’t know how far Ballast is ahead of me, but if I want to find him, I’m going to have to hurry.

I scramble back into the vent and take the shortest route possible to exit the mountain. Ballast knew the Skaandan army was coming through the tunnels—he wouldn’t have gone that way and risked running into them.

I slip out a side door meant for dumping wastewater and am hit by a sudden onslaught of frigid, stinging wind. I bow my head and trudge into the dark and the snow, pulling up the hood of my coat and cinching it tight.

When I’m a little ways from the mountain, I shut my eyes and feel for the echo of Ballast’s magic, to give me some sense of which direction he’s gone.

I reach, reach, beyond grateful that my sensitivity to magic wasn’t locked away with the rest of my power.

This, above anything, gives me hope that I’ll be able to find it again.

If Ballast can help me, that is.

I reach, reach.

Then—

There.

I catch my breath and open my eyes. For a heartbeat I see a faint spark of blue, bobbing far east beyond the mountain. I blink and it’s gone.

I pull an Iljaria light globe from my pack and lift it high, illuminating my way.

“Wait for me, Ballast,” I whisper, bending my head into the wind and trudging west, wet flakes of snow clinging to my eyelashes. “Wait for me. I’m coming.”

I remember the heat of him, the taste of his magic, and I know very well that needing my own magic back is not the only reason I’m going after him.

I walk on, shoving through deeply mounded snow, pulling my hood tight against the wind. The Iljaria light doesn’t waver, my only companion in the cold dark.

My thoughts drift again and again to the Bronze God, pulling my magic out of me with long silver hooks. I try to reach him in my own mind, but I cannot find him, or he does not wish to be found, and I am left with my panic, driving me onward.

I am terrified that the Iljaria queen will arrive with an army of her own before the Skaandan and Daerosian armies can join forces.

I am terrified that Brandr won’t even wait for the queen and will unleash the Yellow Lord at his own whim.

I’m afraid that Saga and Vil will die thinking I betrayed them again.

And I’m afraid Ballast won’t ever forgive me, and I won’t be able to find him, and that both of us will die all alone in the light of the Yellow Lord’s power.

Violet Lord, I pray. Let me reach Ballast in time.

I trudge onward, uncertain if I’ve been walking for one hour or ten. But I know time is running out.

Soon Brandr will unleash the Yellow Lord, and all will be lost.

It stops snowing after a while, and I glimpse the sparks of Ballast’s magic again. I bow my head into the wind and push on.

The eastern sky begins to glow bit by bit, and it grows so unbearably strong I have to squint against the light. Before my eyes the landscape is illuminated, a wide snowy ridge, with a globe of fire rising beyond.

This isn’t Ballast’s magic.

It’s the sun.

“Yellow Lord,” I whisper.

I tilt back my hood and lean into the sunlight, its fingers touching my skin with delicious, impossible warmth. I love the light, beyond welcome after so long a darkness.

I squint against the sunrise, because someone is coming over the ridge.

A lone figure, dark against the snow, the sun, but no—not alone. A mass of shapes follows behind, blurring together, a hundred strong, a thousand, too many to count.

The figure leading them blazes with magic, a pillar of blue fire.

Ballast.

I stare as he comes, heart thrumming against my breastbone, all the breath gone out of me.

The sun rises, and Ballast draws nearer, the shapes at his back resolving into an army of beasts: arctic bears and lanky white lions, huge gray wolves and magnificently antlered stags. They are glorious, he is glorious, all of them gleaming in the new sun.

Ballast strides tall and fey, a thick white cloak hung around his shoulders, a jewel blazing bright from his forehead. He wears no patch over his ruined eye, the socket red and scarred against his brown skin.

I stand there waiting, undone by the sight of him. I watch him see me, watch the anger come into his face, the tightness into his frame.

He could kill me with a thought, and suddenly I’m terrified that he will.

He stops a half dozen paces away, cloak whipping about his ankles. I drop to my knees in the snow, bowing my head before the rightful king of Daeros.

“I need your help,” I say to the ground.

He doesn’t answer and I dare to glance up, into his one piercing blue eye. It’s so like his father’s it makes my gut twist.

Behind him the animals pause in their march, the stags blowing and stamping at the ground, their breath curls of fog in the frigid air.

The lions crouch on muscular hindquarters, ready to spring, their sleek white bodies turned to gold in the sunlight.

The wolves whine and the bears growl and the whole teeming mass of them smells of musk and damp fur. They pulse with heat.

I force myself to hold Ballast’s gaze. I force myself to tell him what I must tell him. “I did what I swore I’d do, all those years ago. I killed your father.”

A hard line comes into his face, but he still doesn’t speak.

I look up at him, heart raging, the snow seeping in through my trousers and freezing my skin.

“My brother means to unleash the Yellow Lord and destroy all of Daeros and Skaanda. I need you to help me stop him. Your magic is the only thing strong enough to stand against him. Yours and—” I take a breath. “Yours and mine.”

Still he doesn’t say anything, just stares down at me, jaw tight, cloak snapping in the wind.

“I need you to help me unlock my magic.” My voice shakes. “I need you to make me whole again so we can defeat my brother and bind the Yellow Lord anew. I need you to help me save our people. All of them.”

“You’re a liar, a traitor, a spy.” His voice is harsh and cold and sends a tremor through me. “Why should I believe anything you say?”

I pull something from my pocket and lift my hand into Ballast’s view, unfolding my fingers so he can see the pebbles resting there, blue and shining, washed smooth by the waters of an underground stream.

“I almost told you then,” I say softly. “That last day, with the river beside us and the stone at our backs.” Your mouth on mine, I tell him with my eyes, your magic burning inside of me .

His jaw tenses. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

I stare at the pebbles, trying not to think of Ballast’s eye, of everything else we’ve lost since then. “I was afraid I would forsake everything to stay with you, down there in the dark.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His question lingers in the air, and I lift my gaze to his. I don’t know how to tell him that, in my mind, there was too much left undone, that the pull of my people was still too strong, even stronger than him. I don’t feel that now.

“We are the same, you and I,” I say instead.

“Yearning for light and yet trapped in the darkness. We’re bound by the same bloodline.

The same fate. Down there in the tunnels—me and you—it was real to me, Bal.

And I think—I think it was real to you, too.

” I take a breath, my outstretched hand trembling with the effort of staying still.

“I can’t follow the Iljaria, not with Brandr leading them. I won’t . Please help me. Please.”

He considers me, my knees growing numb in the snow.

Something in him softens, and he reaches out a hand, closes my fingers over the pebbles again, and pulls me to my feet.

For a moment he doesn’t draw away, his fingers rough and warm over mine.

Power crackles off him, and my heart rages.

I am sorry when he lets go of my hand, puts space between us again. I drop the pebbles back into my pocket.

I glance to the animals behind him, a restless, seething swarm, armed with tooth and horn and claw.

Ballast sighs a little. “I suppose you have a plan?”

I tell him.