Page 29 of While the Dark Remains
“It’s just a story, Your Highness,” says Pala.
She goes to relieve Leifur of his watch, and I listen to the icy rain, hearing what she didn’t say, what the story said for her.
Death isn’t always the answer.
It isn’t an answer at all.
I wonder if she means Vil’s command to execute Indridi, or Indridi’s taking of her own life. Or maybe she means our entire plot to take over Daeros and eliminate Kallias.
Whatever she means, I sleep badly, and dream of fire, and wake to the sound of Saga weeping.
It gets colder and colder the closer we get to Tenebris. We dig furs out of our packs, don knit hats and wool leggings. Our breath hangs like smoke in the air, and not even our nightly camp stew and steaming tea can warm us all the way through. Dread weighs on me with each ever-shortening day that passes. Soon I will have to face him again. SoonI will have to face everything. The tight-knit party that left Staltoria City all those weeks ago is unraveling, thread by thread.
We pass Daerosian farms and villages, scattered almost stubbornly about on the inhospitable tundra. There’s a city, too—Skógur—with high stone walls and a forest of trees protected inside them. It’s unnatural for trees to grow out here; we lugged wood with us on packhorses from Staltoria City and burned lichen when that ran out. I try to push away the thought of Indridi, who wouldn’t have needed any wood at all to make a fire for us.
We camp outside Skógur City, the peace banner waving from the end of Leifur’s spear, which is driven into the ground in clear sight of anyone passing by. Even armed with the truce flag, though, Pala judged it best not to set foot in the city.
“It was an Iljaria stronghold, once,” says Pala when we’re eating our dinner, the coals of our campfire glowing red.
“They abandoned it when they left the mountain,” Saga guesses.
Pala nods. “The trees still grow because of them, drawn up from the earth by Iljaria powerful with the Green Goddess’s magic. Some say the Green Goddess herself dwells in that forest still. But of course the Daerosians don’t believe in the gods. To them, nothing is sacred. So the forest shrinks year by year, not enough trees planted to replace the ones they cut down.”
Vil utters an oath to his dinner, and a tangle of grief and longing curls down my spine. “We’ll change all that, when Skaanda rules here. When we drive those blasphemous pigs from our shores.”
“Green Goddess make it so,” says Pala. She rises from her place to relieve Leifur of his watch duty, and he comes to join us by the fire. He eats quickly, mechanically, staring into the flames.
I look toward Skógur City, the walls a silhouette against the rising moon. I’m sorry Pala deemed it unsafe. I would have liked to see the ancient forest for myself.
“‘Do not kill,’ the Green Goddess instructs us,” says Leifur unexpectedly. He doesn’t turn his eyes from the fire. It’s clear he’s thinkingof Indridi’s death, though he didn’t carry out Vil’s order of execution in the end. Indridi denied him that choice. That burden. “How does that fit in with the Skaandan philosophy of war?”
“Leave it alone, Leifur,” Vil reprimands.
Leifur hunches in on himself, but Saga turns toward him, ready and willing and, perhaps,relievedto talk about it. “The Brown Goddess says, ‘The earth cries for justice.’ What is justice, if not war?”
“And the Gray Goddess instructs us to ‘respect the dead,’” I put in. “But does that mean she wishes us to kill?”
“Brynja,” says Vil, my name on his lips as soft as a prayer. I can’t look at him. I don’t.
Saga turns her gaze to me. “‘All becomes ashes,’ says the Red God, and the Bronze: ‘You must pay for your own sins.’”
I have read as many of the old texts as Saga, and I’m not about to let her out-quote me. “And the Blue Goddess tells us to ‘be kind to every creature,’ while the White Goddess wishes us to ‘fill the world with music and therefore beauty.’ Neither of those statements can even coexist with war.”
“‘Light was born to kill the dark,’” quotes Vil, bitterly.
“And yet ‘without the darkness,’” Leifur counters, “‘there can never be rest.’”
“Leave it alone,” Vil commands.
Leifur squares his jaw and ducks his head. “I would have killed her,” he says bitterly. Helplessly.
Vil’s face goes tight. “She was a traitor, and you were following my order, and—you didn’t, in the end. She didn’t let you.”
“Your Highness—”
“Enough, Leifur,” says Vil quietly. “It’s over. And if there is any mercy at all in the way that ... it ended—” His eyes are wet. “At least none of us bears the guilt of her soul. If she even had one.” He jerks to his feet and strides into his tent, letting the flap fall shut behind him.
I ache to go after him, to fold myself into his chest, to share the grief that devours us both. But I don’t quite know how, and so I remain sitting there with Saga and Leifur, staring miserably into the fire.
