Page 32 of While the Dark Remains
“She will suffer, boy,” snaps the king. “She will be in agony. And she will know you are the reason for it.”
Ballast, Don’t!
Ballast bows his head. For a moment all is still.
Then the lion leaps on Hilf, huge jaws closing around his throat. Hilf’s scream pierces me, sharp as a spear, but it’s cut suddenly short. His neck snaps. His body goes limp. Blood sprays over the floor.
I realize I’m screaming, too, my face wet with tears.
The lion does nothing more. He sits back, docile as a kitten.
The Skaandan singer shrieks in her cage.
Zopyros tries to look as if he’s not going to be sick.
The pool of blood seeps wider.
Iamsick, heaving over my chamber pot.
The king stands from the throne, stepping over Hilf’s body like it doesn’t concern him in the least. He grabs Ballast by the collar. “Think carefully before you defy me again. You are not important to me. Never forget that.”
“Of course I’m important,” says Ballast, voice tight and hard. “I’m the very pinnacle of your Collection, your favorite dancing bear.”
The king hits Ballast so hard he slides across the floor, skidding and falling in Hilf’s blood.
I am sick again, though there is nothing left in my belly but acid. My throat and lips burn with it.
Ballast picks himself up, shaking. He takes a breath that sounds like a sob, and then he walks heavily from the room, red footprints trailing behind him.
I am undone. There is no escape from this horror. No respite. No relief.
The guards remove Hilf’s body. A dozen attendants come to clean the floor, and when they’re finished, there isn’t a speck of blood anywhere, like it never happened. But when I look down, all I see is red.
It’s hardly the sixteenth hour when I let myself out of my cage, shimmy down the chain, and climb up into the vents. I’m being reckless—the king isn’t asleep yet, no one is, and I could get caught, but I don’t care. My body knows the way to his room, though I haven’t followed that path in six years. My heart rages and my gut twists. I have to see him, damn everything else.
But when I slip into his ceiling, the room below is wholly dark. I wait for a while, my pulse frantic. Nothing stirs beneath me; there isn’t even enough light for me to be able to pick apart the shadows.
The recklessness tightens its grip. I work the vent cover free and hop down, fumbling for the Iljaria light globe that he apparently still keeps on his dressing table. I tap the globe, eyes tearing at the sudden yellow light that floods the room.
Ballast isn’t here. The chamber is empty, his bed made, sheets smooth and straight, pillow undented. Except for the bloody shirt slung over the dressing table, I would think that Ballast hasn’t been here in a long while.
I scan the room, trying not to look at the damn shirt. There is a small shelf of books on the back wall that he acquired at some point since I was here last. I run my fingers over the spines, perusing the titles. They are books of Daerosian history, politics, strategy, and warfare, not subjects the Ballast from my childhood would have had any interest in. I want to burn the lot of them.
The volume of Iljaria myths isn’t here, but jammed in the back corner behind a book titledWar for the Thinking Modernis our deck of cards. I know it’s the same because when I take the cards from their box and look through them, I find the Blue Goddess card with the corner torn, just as I remember. I feel it like a kick to the gut.
He’ll come back, I reason. He’ll come back, and then I can finally ask him why he sent me away all those years ago. My eyes go hot anddamp, and I mutter to myself every foul word I know until the urge to cry subsides.
He’ll be back.
I wait for him on the bed with my knees tucked up to my chin. I lay out the cards in a game of Chance, which can be played solo. I try not to think about Hilf, the lion, the pool of blood. I try just to focus on the colors of the cards, drawing them and laying them down, trusting that luck will see me through. It doesn’t, though. I lose the game, and the three I play after.
Ballast doesn’t come. No one comes.
At last, as my eyelids grow very heavy. I put the cards in my pocket, climb up into the vent, and crawl back to my cage.
It isn’t until the morning that I learn Ballast isn’t in Tenebris anymore. He has vanished from the mountain entirely, and the king is livid that his son has run away. Or so he says. But he doesn’t send anyone after Ballast, and I wonder if part of him is relieved. Because surely he’s realized that the scene with Hilf could have played out differently.
Surely he’s realized that Ballast could have set the lion onhim.
