“How could I?” My voice cracks, wavers.
He swears at me, and I bite my cheek so hard I taste blood.
“What’s your plan then, Brynja? Because you always have a plan, don’t you?”
My heart races as I look at him. I take a breath. I open my mouth and close it again. “I wanted to tell you. I almost did in the caves—”
“What would that have accomplished? Did you think I would just merrily join your Iljaria plot?”
Hurt pulses sharp because I don’tknowwhat I thought, only that I yearned for him to know every part of me.
His eyes flick past me, to the open cell door, but before he can lunge for it, I’m already through, slamming it shut in his face before he can get out.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He laughs at me, sounding so very like his father that I want to cry again.
“I’ll save you,” I tell him. “If I can.”
He grabs the iron collar from the ground and heaves it at me through the bars. It hits my shoulder, hard, and I choke on a scream because Bronze Lord itburns. I think about how it must’ve felt, locked around Ballast’s throat for hours and hours, and I have to fight not to be sick.
I leave the dungeon without a backward glance, Saga’s shouts and curses still echoing in my ears even when I’m back in my room again.
I spend the rest of the night in the windowsill, staring out at wheeling stars.
Whoever this new Brynja is, I think I hate her.
Ten Years Ago
Year4190, Month of the Bronze Lord
Iljaria—the Prism Master’s house
The window to my father’s office is open again, the summer breeze blowing in, scented with salt water and honeysuckle. I’m sitting in an overlarge chair, my feet not touching the ground, facing my father behind his desk. I broke my shoulder in training a few hours ago, and it’s still knitting itself back together, tingling with the effects of my father’s power but no longer painful.
He says it won’t hurt when he locks away my magic, but I’m afraid he might be lying.
“I won’t—I won’t use it,” I plead, studying my chipped fingernails so I won’t have to meet my father’s piercing eyes. “I haven’t used it, all these months. You can trust me. I won’t betray us.”
“You will betray us in small ways, Brynja,” he tells me. “You aren’t even aware of it, perhaps, but youhaveused your magic, every single day since your training began.”
I bristle with anger, but my father holds up one hand to forestall me. “Magic curls round you when you sleep, little one. You can’t help it, and you certainly can’t stop it. Sometimes, when you’re hurrying home, or attempting a particularly difficult leap, you tell the earth to move for you, the bar to swing for you, the air to shift for you. Not consciously,perhaps, but you still do it. You breathe magic, Bryn. Nothing you can do will ever stop that.”
I sag in the chair, because I know he’s right.
“It won’t hurt,” he says, returning to his original claim. “And it will be over quickly. But we must do it now. Are you ready, Brynja?”
I bite my lip to hold back the tears because I refuse to cry about this. I nod.
He gets up from his chair and comes over to mine. He stands behind me, gathering my mass of white curls and tying them up. The intimacy of this simple gesture startles me—my father has never even hugged me in all my life.
“Close your eyes.”
I do. Color swirls before me, sparks of magic. My father puts his hands on each of my temples, warm and astonishingly gentle, for all the power that seethes beneath his skin.
Suddenly there are needles boring into my skull, a thousand pricks of unbearable, glistering pain. Somewhere outside of myself I’m screaming, but inside my head all I know is magic, boiling and raging, swirling round me, drowning me in bronze and amethyst and cerulean.
It hurts, it hurts somuch, and yet I have no voice, no being. I am trapped in a moment of time, and I think I will die here.
