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 andmaking 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 ...allof them? Isn’t it enough to drive the Daerosians out? Surely we have no real quarrel with Skaanda anymore.”
Brandr frowns, his earrings flashing in the light. “This land isours, Brynja. All of it. The First Ones gave it to us—Daeros stole it, defiled it. The Skaandans rebelled against the judgment of our ancestors. It isn’t right for them to be here—they’ve endured far longer than they ought to have. Have you been playing at being Skaandan for so long that you feel sympathy for them?”
I bow my head.
A memory flashes through me: my father kneeling beside me where I’d fallen from the wire in the practice arena. Sand was ground hard into my face, and my arm was bent underneath me at an unnatural angle. I didn’t feel the pain yet, just numbness, and shame that I wasn’t better, faster, stronger. That I wasn’t what I needed to be.
My father didn’t heal me immediately, like he usually did. He just frowned and voiced my own thoughts back to me: “You have to be better than this, Brynja. We’re sending you to Kallias in less than a month. You have to bebetter.”
Tears welled in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them from falling. My father looked at me in disgust. “We must sacrifice everything we are for the greater good,” he said sharply. “You must want this, need this,bethis. Your sacrifice will save our people. Never forget that.”
Only then did he heal me, his magic coiling green and white and blue around my arm, knitting the bone back together.
I didn’t understand what he meant, then. I didn’t realize I was sacrificing myself. I thought I was infiltrating an evil king’s court like a hero from a story. I wouldn’t be there long. My family would come for me.
Except they never did.
I do understand his meaning now. Ididsacrifice myself, nearly to the point of death. And that’s what Brandr is talking about. Sacrificing Skaanda and Daeros to restore Iljaria to what it once was.
To erase the defilement of our land.
To bring, at last, true peace.
But I don’t know how peace can come out of death, and it makes me feel sick, down to the deepest part of me.
I follow my brother up the long, long way through the tunnels without another word.
I catch Brandr’s arm as he’s about to head down the main corridor. “There’s something we have to do. Now. Before anything else.”
