Page 141 of While the Dark Remains
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 toneedit more.”
I grind my jaw and bite back a curse. “But Idoneed 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.”
