Page 34 of While the Dark Remains
Blood pools and I flinch. I lower the truce banner and untie it from Leifur’s spear with numb fingers. I give it to Vil, who presses it against his wound. The fabric soaks up the blood, the lily turning from gold to red. Vil holds the banner out to Zopyros. “The token of my life. Do you accept?”
Snowflakes swirl thicker between our two parties, and Zopyros’s lips seem to be turning blue. “His Majesty will hear you,” he says. He drapes the truce banner across his mount’s withers. “You will follow me.” He turns his horse and kicks it toward the snow-shrouded mountain, with his fellow soldiers following and our company just behind.
Vil doesn’t bother to put his coat back on. Blood trickles down his arm. I want to wipe it away, want to bind up his wound. But there is no time for that now.
Behind the snow and the clouds, the brief day has ended. Everything narrows to the orange blur of the torches, bobbing ahead of us. My insides knot tight.
What if Saga is wrong, and Kallias recognizes me as the little acrobat who never dared to stand up to him? What if this gamble of mine gets me and Saga and the rest of us killed, neatly trapping the Skaandan army in the tunnels like rats?
“The gods are with us, Brynja,” murmurs Saga from behind me. “Skaanda over self. Gods over glory.”
“Gods over glory,” I echo.
And then the mountain rushes up to devour us.
The gates of Tenebris’s grand front entrance are made of huge stone slabs, guarded by gargoyle figures carved of dark stone: They’re creatures from a nightmare, with wide black wings and hooked beaks and too many faces. They have eyes that gleam red and seem to watch youwhen you look at them—more remnants of Iljaria magic. But this is a dark magic, the kind that stings like needles under skin. The gargoyles are said to have been crafted by the Black God and blessed by the Gray Goddess, commanded to kill anyone who did not have leave to enter the mountain. I am not sure if it’s true, or if it’s just a story, but I don’t doubt the gargoyles have the power to bring death, if they so choose, or if they were commanded.
Kallias brought me this way ten years ago, and I shudder as I pass between the statues, as I feel them peering into my insides and realize my childhood memory of them is somehow less horrific than their awful reality. I breathe a little easier when we’ve left them behind and the awful stinging sensation fades.
We come into a wide stone courtyard, where Zopyros and the other soldiers dismount, and the rest of us follow suit. Pale-faced boys and girls in blue robes and fur caps appear to whisk the horses out through a side gate.
Zopyros orders us to relinquish our weapons, and we hand them over, Vil even offering up three of his six hidden knives. I am nervous without my own daggers, though there is a tiny, needle-sharp blade concealed in my headdress for emergencies. Zopyros nods his begrudging approval, and leads us across the courtyard to the tall arched doors set into the palace proper. They’re made of a lacquered dark wood and painted with swirls of silver that seem to move and twist in the torchlight. One of the doors creaks open, pulled by some unseen servant, and my heart leaps nearly out of my chest.
Zopyros steps inside, followed by Vil. I should be next, but my feet refuse to move. My throat closes up, my vision blurs, my knees shake. Then, a hand in mine, squeezing tight for half a heartbeat before letting go again. Saga. Here with me. Feeling it, too.
She’s the only reason I find the courage to take that last step, into the mountain.
Then I’m finally here.
Right back where I started.
Nicanor meets us just inside the entrance hall, a high, narrow room that traces the curve of the mountain, the ceiling bare stone. I am startled to find that the king’s steward seems smaller than I remember him. He’s the one who locked us into our cages, who brought us slop barely fit for pigs, who beat us when Kallias was in a bad mood, or a capricious one. And yet Nicanor is just a pale, sour man of about fifty, with limp brown hair and dull eyes. Unimportant. Unremarkable.
He dismisses Zopyros, who strides off into the palace proper, and then informs us that though the king is busy at present, entertaining the newly arrived envoy from Aerona, he has issued us a dinner invitation. Vil and I exchange glances—we’d discussed the possibility of an Aeronan envoy at Tenebris, so it’s not wholly unexpected, but it does make things a little more complicated. We’ll have to tread carefully. We’re not equipped to take on the empire, not yet at any rate.
Nicanor snaps his fingers and an elegantly dressed servant appears from the corridor, her yellow hair bound in two long plaits that reach nearly to the floor. There’s embroidery around the base of her fur hat. “Show them to their chambers,” Nicanor orders, and then leaves without another word.
The attendant beckons to the hallway, and we follow her, our footsteps softened by intricately woven rugs spread over the cold floor. Bright lights hum from sconces in the walls, no pulse of magic in them, and yet no candle flame or wick and kerosene, either. I study them curiously, spots dancing behind my eyes. I want to point them out to Vil—he would find them utterly fascinating—but then we turn into another corridor, this one lit by ordinary torches, and the moment is lost.
More hallways, more turns. It’s hard to keep track of quite where we are, as I’m used to looking at all this from above, but I’m pretty sure we’re entering the guest wing. We come into a corridor lined with plushblue carpets that glint with gold threads. The walls here are straight and square, carved with precision.
Then we’re at an elegant carved door, images of flowers and birds painted blue and red, eyes glittering with bits of obsidian. No magic here, just exquisite artistry. A pair of those strange lights glow on either side of the door, which the attendant opens. She waves me through, with Saga and Pala on my heels, and I’m relieved when the door closes behind us. Saga pulls me into a tight hug, and we hold on to each other until our breathing grows easier and our heartbeats slow.
The room is warm, furs spread over the floor and silks hung along the walls to keep the mountain chill at bay. There’s a wooden bed piled with pillows to my right, and on the back wall a square window with a sill wide enough for sitting on. It looks out on Garran City. A low archway to the left leads into a washroom with a sunken marble bath. There’s also a dressing table with an ornate mirror, a huge wardrobe, and a door leading to what I assume are anterooms.
Saga paces restlessly around the chamber, running her hand along the silk wall hangings, half-heartedly pulling clothes out of our packs, which lay all in a heap in front of the wardrobe. Pala stands guard at the door, her mouth pressed into a firm line.
Saga is to pose as my handmaiden while we’re here—it will be just me and Vil who go to dinner, and I don’t know if I can bear to leave her in our room. I don’t know how I’ll face Kallias alone.
“I thought I was going to pass out when I saw Nicanor,” says Saga. She chews on her lip. “I shouldn’t have come here.” She collapses onto the floor, and then she’s shaking and gasping for air and I drop down beside her, hold her tight as the panic courses through her body.
“It’s all right,” I whisper, grief and fear clogging my throat. “We’ll get through this. Together. It’s all right, Saga.”
Tears stream down her face. “I thought I was stronger than this. Stronger than him and what he did to me. What he did tous. But I’m not. I’m not.”
“I’m not, either,” I say softly. “No one could be.”
We sit like that for a while, until we’ve both grown relatively calm again. It’s Saga who pulls me to my feet, who shoves me into the bath with stern instructions to scrub all the dirt from the road away.
