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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Daeros—the tundra

There isn’t any time to spare. I am not sure when the Iljaria queen will arrive—or if she already has—but Soul’s Rest is over, and I don’t wholly trust my brother to wait for her before unleashing the Yellow Lord. The sooner Ballast and I get back to Tenebris, the better.

Asvaldr lumbers out from amid the host of animals, and bows his head before Ballast, who rubs his neck affectionately and then scrambles up onto the massive bear’s back. Ballast reaches out his hand to pull me up after him, and for a moment I balk, staring.

“He won’t hurt you,” says Ballast. “And it will be faster than walking.”

I take a breath. I let him pull me up and have barely settled in behind him before Asvaldr lopes forward, enormous paws plowing through the snow.

My stomach lurches with every movement and I hold tight to Ballast, my heart thudding against his back, closer to him than I’ve ever been, save by the river in the tunnels.

After a while I grow used to the motion and breathe a little easier, hyperaware of Ballast’s warmth and power, pressed up against him. The rest of the animals follow at a slower pace, growing ever fainter behind us.

This first light of the new year lasts only an hour before the sun begins to sink west again, blue shadows slanting long over the snow. Asvaldr lopes along, seemingly tireless, chasing the light.

I can’t quite parse out Ballast’s mood: He’s been pensive, quiet, since I told him my plan. But the tension seems to ease out of him bit by bit as Asvaldr lumbers across the snow.

“How did you find them all?” I say at last, into Ballast’s shoulder. “The animals?”

It takes him a moment to answer, and I wonder if it’s difficult for him to talk when he’s holding so many creatures to his will, that maybe that’s the reason he’s barely spoken.

“I called Asvaldr, and he called the others. When I asked them, they bound themselves to me, every one. They will fight for me.”

I feel a rush of pride for him. But even if we manage to stop Brandr, the tension between Skaanda and Daeros and Aerona won’t just evaporate. I’ll have my work cut out for me, convincing Ballast and Saga and Vil and Aelia to forge a real, lasting peace.

“Why didn’t you free the others when you left?” I say. “Saga and Vil. Your own siblings.”

He grimaces. “I couldn’t have brought them with me—they would have only gotten in the way. I was going to free them when I got back. When Tenebris was mine.”

I digest this without further comment.

Ballast glances back at me, as if trying to read my thoughts.

I stare at the marks on his neck, left from the iron collar, and I hate myself for not freeing him of it sooner.

“I wondered if it was you,” says Ballast quietly, into the setting sun. “No one could ever forget the girl who nearly brought the mountain crashing down around her with the strength of her anger and her grief.”

I bite my cheek to hold back the tears. Ballast was there that day, when Lilja fell to her death.

“I wondered,” he says, “when my father brought you to Daeros, when he locked you in an iron cage and hung you from the ceiling. I wondered if it was you. Your hair wasn’t white.

You had no magic. And yet. The pattern of your freckles was familiar.

So were your eyes, fierce and dark. And the haughty tilt of your chin. ”

“I wasn’t haughty.”

A laugh huffs out of him. “Yes, you were. But I didn’t understand how it could be you. It didn’t make any sense. But that day I caught you spying on me—”

I flush and am glad he can’t see me.

“You told me your name,” he says. “And it was the same as hers. The girl who almost brought the mountain down. I was beyond glad when you kept coming to see me, those next few months. The time we spent together—it made me feel human, Brynja. I was devastated when my mother told me I had to end it. She was right, but ... I wish it could have gone differently.”

The old pain pricks at my heart.

“But I didn’t forget about you. I watched you for years, and you never gave a hint that you were anything but what you pretended to be.

So I thought I must have imagined it.” He glances back at me, eye catching mine in the last glimmers of light.

“How could you have done it,” he says with quiet agony.

“How could you have put yourself at my father’s mercy, let him debase you, abuse you, torment you, for year after year after year ? How could you bear it, Brynja?”

My throat goes tight as his eye gleams with moisture. And I know the question is not wholly directed at me.

The sun drops below the western horizon; for a little while more, Asvaldr gambols in its afterglow, paw prints silver in the snow. Ballast sends an Iljaria light globe bobbing ahead of us to illuminate our path as the white bear runs on.

“Tell me about your magic,” says Ballast then. “Tell me how it was locked away.”

I do, leaving out nothing: my father, the Bronze God, the chest, the silver hooks, the crack in the stone. I tell him how I can still sense magic, see it, feel it.

“You can’t find the chest?” he says. “Can’t go back to that place inside your head?”

“I’ve tried, but I can’t seem to get there on my own. The Yellow Lord told me—”

Ballast straightens in surprise. “You spoke with the Yellow Lord?”

“Yes. He told me that my father pitted my magic against itself. So that only my magic can unlock it.”

Ballast twists around on Asvaldr’s back, squinting at me. He puts his fingers on my temples, as my father once did. His skin is rough and warm, and I shut my eyes, heart pounding. His magic slides through me, whisper soft.

But nothing happens.

He withdraws his hands, and I have to restrain myself from yanking them back again.

“I can’t sense anything, Brynja. There is nothing for me to hold on to, nothing for me to pull out. I think the Yellow Lord is right. I think you have to unlock it yourself. No one else can do it for you.”

“But I’ve tried! I can’t do it.”

“Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough.”

Anger sparks inside me, wild and hard. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe you need to want it more. Maybe you need to need it more.”

I grind my jaw and bite back a curse. “But I do need it. It’s the only thing I need!”

Ballast turns forward again. “When we get closer, we’ll try something else.”

I press him for more information, but he won’t elaborate. I finally get tired of asking and snap my mouth shut.

“Did you really let your father take your eye to earn back his trust?” I ask him a while later, Asvaldr still bearing us onward.

Ballast hasn’t said anything about Kallias yet, whether he’s angry at me for killing him, whether he’s glad he’s dead.

I try not to think about him slumped in my cage, his blood slick on my hands.

Ballast’s whole body goes tense, and I regret the question. But he answers me anyway.

“He dared me to do it. He said that if I gave him my eye, he would believe I was earnest in my return. In my repentance.” Ballast’s voice is thick with grief, or perhaps the memory of pain.

Something goes sick and still in my belly.

“I needed him to believe me,” he goes on, quieter now.

“I needed to get myself named heir. Afterward I was going to arrange his assassination and seize the throne. I was going to bring justice back into Daeros. I still mean to. But”—he takes a shaky breath—“it was ... harder ... than I thought it would be.”

I gnaw on my cheek to keep the tears from coming. “I hate that he did that to you.”

“I let him.” Ballast’s voice is thick with emotion.

“He still shouldn’t have done it. Everything was a game to him.”

“You let him play his games with you, too,” says Ballast softly.

I take a breath. “I thought I could win.”

He gives a little huff that could be a laugh or could be a sob. “So did I.”

I think about my own father. He was also playing a game that I conceded to, a carved piece on a board moved about by his shrewd calculation, no regard for my well-being. Both Ballast and I let our fathers take from us, and I ache for everything that we have lost.

“You would make a good king,” I tell him, and find that I mean it.

His jaw goes tight. “I have it in me to be cruel. Like my father.”

I see again the deadness creeping into Kallias’s eyes, the feeling of his lifeblood leaking warm onto my arm. My gut twists.

“So do we all,” I say.

It’s still dark when we come to the edge of the Sea of Bones. I hadn’t realized we had come north at all, let alone quite so far. Asvaldr jerks to a stop, and Ballast leaps down from his back. After a moment, I do the same.

The land plunges down into the frozen valley, where glaciers claw jagged fingers into the moonlit sky, or lie like the massive broken bones the Sea is named for, scattered across the brittle tundra and the frozen lake.

The Sea is miles upon miles wide; I am not sure where we are on the southern edge of it, but we are enough in the middle that it appears to go on forever in three directions.

And in any case, we have taken a detour we can’t afford.

“Why are we here, Ballast?” I ask uneasily.

But Ballast puts his hand on Asvaldr’s giant head and speaks into his ear.

A sudden sound like thunder shakes the earth beneath us.

It’s the rest of the animal army, not nearly as far behind as I thought, racing across the snow in a blur of hooves and claws, spotted fur and antlered heads, wide wings and fierce calls. They surge past us, their tangled scents strong in my nose, snow spraying up in our faces.

“We’ll catch up,” Ballast tells me.

Asvaldr turns around in a circle and flops down in the snow with a grunt. Ballast paces up to the edge of the Sea of Bones. I watch him, but I don’t follow.

“It occurs to me,” says Ballast without looking over his shoulder, “that if you felt threatened enough, your magic might unbind itself to save you.”

I blink at his shoulders, dread squeezing my insides. “What do you mean?”