He rubs at his temples, the blue tattoos on his arms shimmering in the glow of the light globe. “Please stay. Just for a little while.” His voice breaks.
“All right,” I whisper.
Wordlessly, Ballast scoops up the snoozing cat and slides all the way over to the wall, leaving plenty of space for me on the bed. I sit gingerly on the opposite end, jiggling my knee. The mattress feels impossibly soft, like it’s made of clouds, or dreams—I have grown somehow used to my iron sleeping ledge. And it seems I have forgotten how to talk to another human being. There is a long silence before I manage to say, “Did you call it here? With your magic?”
The cat has settled into his lap and is making little whiffly noises, whiskers twitching.
“No,” he says. “She just found me. Kind of like you.” He gives me half of a smile.
I try not to see the king’s eyes peering at me out of Ballast’s face. I try not to think about the rats. Power hangs on this boy like a coat, and I wonder what would happen if he were ever to truly wield it. “What are you reading?”
“A book of Iljaria myths. From my mother. I’m not sure where she got it.”
I understand without him having to tell me that if his father were to find him with such a book, there would be hell to pay. He scoots it over to me, and I touch the pages with careful fingers.
“You must get bored,” he says.
I turn a page of the book, studying an illustration of the Yellow God battling the Black God on a high mountain peak. The artist was skillful, or perhaps imbued the illustration with magic—the Yellow God’s light seems to glow, the Black God’s darkness seems to writhe and devour.
“Doyouget bored?” I counter. I turn another page, this one all text, but written in shimmering colors.
“I have tutors,” he says. “Weapons training. Every day.”
Another difference, then, between us. “I try to sleep. I practice my routine, as best as I can.”
“As best as you can in a cage, you mean.”
My heart pulses faster at the bitterness in his voice. “At night, I’m free.”
“You could be free always. You could leave this cursed mountain. I could help you.”
I gnaw on my cheek. “He’d kill you for that.”
Ballast doesn’t deny this; we both know it’s true. He pets the sleeping cat, and there is anguish in every line of his frame. I shove the book back toward him, and in a blink I am leaping up into the vent.
“Brynja,” he says.
I pause but don’t turn back.
“Come again. Please.”
I pull the vent into place without answering and crawl back through the ceilings, to the great hall and to my cage. I curl up on my sleeping ledge, but I lie there a long, long while, before dark dreams at last find me.
He’s waiting for me the next night, when I hop down from his vent. He has tea on a scratched wooden tray, and a plate of little round cakesdusted with purple icing sugar. I sit on one end of the bed and he on the other, the tray in the wide space between us. We eat and drink without speaking, but the silence is a comfort. There is a bandage on the left side of his neck, and his white cat is nowhere to be seen. I hope it’s safe somewhere, but from the slump of Ballast’s shoulders and the red seeping through his bandage, I doubt that it is.
When we’ve finished what amounts to the most dazzling feast I have had since long before the king shut me in an iron cage, Ballast takes out a deck of playing cards. They’re beautiful, Iljaria made, with the usual eleven suits—one for each god except Ghost.
“Would you like to play?” asks Ballast, the first words he’s spoken to me tonight. His voice sounds rough, like he’s been crying or screaming or both.
My gut clenches with hatred and horror. I don’t understand how anyone can be such a monster to their own son. “What game?” There are many that can be played with these cards. I know only a few.
“War,” he says.
I smile. “Isn’t that against Iljaria philosophy?”
His jaw goes tight. “I am only half Iljaria.”
I didn’t mean to upset him, and tell him so.
