Page 33 of While the Dark Remains
It’s almost Gods’ Fall, the king crows to his wives, his nobles, his general—anyone who will listen. The world outside the mountain is harsh, conditions unlivable. He doesn’t believe Ballast can survive long on his own, if at all. The tundra will claim him, he says, or the Sea of Bones, or the darkness.
But I don’t believe that. Ballast is stronger than the tundra, the Sea, the dark. Ballast is stronger than almost anything.
He hasn’t so much as looked at me in six years, and yet I am bereft in the wake of his sudden departure. I feel desolate, abandoned.
He left without me. Escaped this living hell.
And I’m still here. Captive. Waiting.
Though I’m no longer really sure what I’m waiting for.
Every night, the Skaandan singer weeps in her cage like her heart has broken, like the world has ended. For her, it has.
I still dream of falling, of my body breaking against the ice in the glacier valley. But now I dream of the lion, too. Of blood leaking over the floor and filling up the Sea of Bones, covering all the world. And I dream of Ballast, weeping bitterly in the dark because the Ghost God card was played against him, and he lost everything.
Part Two
Winter Dark
Chapter Seven
Year4200, Month of the Violet God
Daeros—Tenebris
The mountain looms ahead of us in the light of the falling sun.
All the air squeezes from my lungs, and I feel suddenly, wrenchingly ill. I fight the frantic urge to wheel my mount around, to ride far and fast away.
Vil looks sidelong at me. “Breathe, Brynja,” he says softly, knowing exactly what I need to hear. “Just breathe. I’m here with you. We’re all here with you. You can do this.”
My heart jerks and I take a breath, long and slow. The bloodied truce banner snaps above my head, and my hand feels numb and tight around the metal shaft of Leifur’s spear. Vil thought it would be easier for me if I had something to hold. Something to focus on. I try to let it ground me, try to focus on the freezing wind, the crunch of hooves over crusted snow, the long slanting shadows.
“You can do this,” says Vil again.
I almost believe him.
Before we broke camp this morning, Saga did my cosmetics, her work mirroring Indridi’s almost exactly. She held up a mirror so I could see my face erased of freckles, the kohl around my eyes drawn sharp enough to kill. Then she crowned me with a jewel-studded gold headdress. It made me look like a queen, she said, a goddess.
But I feel like that same scared ten-year-old child I used to be, dragged into the maw of Tenebris by a cruel and sadistic king. I shake and tell myself it’s because of the cold.
A company of Daerosians ride out to meet us, their spears flashing orange in the mingled light of the setting sun and the blazing torches they carry with them. Behind me, Saga utters a quiet curse beneath her shielding veil, and I wonder if she’s realizing anew, as I am, that she isn’t prepared for this. For being here.
Beside me, Vil sits tall in his saddle. An icy wind rattles the buckles on his breastplate. His right hand rests tense on his sword.
I count the beats of my heart as the Daerosians reach us, a dozen soldiers dressed in scale-armor breastplates and fur cloaks. They’re led by a commander as young as Vil, maybe younger, and I recognize him with a jolt as Kallias’s oldest son, Zopyros. He’s thin and there’s a hint of color to his cheeks, thanks to his Skaandan mother. He wears heavy furs that make him seem smaller than he is, and he has steely gray eyes. There is very little of Ballast in him, and yet for a moment Ballast is all I can think of—the shape of his mouth against mine, the warmth of his fingers cupping my face in the dark. A shiver coils through me, and I blink through soft and sudden falling snow.
“We’ve had word of your coming,” says Zopyros shortly, jerking his chin at the truce banner.
Breathe, Brynja. Breathe.
“I am Vilhjalmur Stjörnu, crown prince of Skaanda,” says Vil, voice pitched deeper than usual. “With me rides my cousin, Princess Astridur Sindri, along with her handmaid and our guards. We come to treat with Kallias of Daeros.”
I canfeelVil’s anger. It sears off him like Indridi’s fire. It’s still strange to hear myself referred to as Astridur, something I will have to get used to, now that we’re here.
Zopyros folds his arms across his chest, wholly unimpressed. “I require a pledge that you mean His Majesty no harm. Those smears of red on your rag mean nothing to me. What will you pledge?”
Vil clenches his jaw, but we both expected and prepared for this. “I pledge my life,” he says, and strips off his coat without another word, the tooled leather vest he wears leaving his muscled arms bare; snow touches his skin and melts instantly. He draws a knife, sets it against his left shoulder, presses hard.
