“We have, Your Grace,” the engineer says to Talan. “But this veinglows.”
Above the ceiling, I stifle a gasp.Magic.They’ve found a vein of Iljaria magic. Where else could it lead but to the mythical weapon?
“How deep does this vein run?” asks Talan. “How long until you reach the mountain’s heart?”
“I am not certain, Your Grace. Our drills and axes shatter every few feet—”
“Give us two years,” says Kallias. “We can reach the mountain’s heart in two years, can’t we, Basileious?”
“Probably,” says Basileious, and then, at Kallias’s sharp look, corrects himself hastily. “We can.”
Talan frowns. “That is not the timeline my emperor requests.”
“That is the timeline I can offer you.” The king’s eyes lock on the Aeronan’s. “And when it is found, the weapon will first be used to obliterate Skaanda.”
“Careful, Kallias. You overstep yourself. I will make your case to the emperor for the two years, but when the weapon is breached, it will belong to the emperor. He is the one who will decide how to wield it.”
“Your emperor does not rule me,” says the king coldly.
“My emperorownsyou. Do not think to turn him into your enemy—you could not bear the cost of it.”
The king laughs. “I can do what I’ve always done, Talan. Whatever the hell I want.”
He stalks from the room, and fear jolts through me—I’ve lingered far too long. I scurry back through the vents and slip into my cage a heartbeat before Kallias bursts into the great hall and takes his fury out on one of the poor bastards from his Collection. I don’t know who itis, and I don’t want to. I turn my back and shut my eyes, but I can’t close my ears, and I can’t stop my mind from wheeling over all I heard in the council chamber.
After dinner we’re made to perform for the Aeronan dignitaries. Talan sits in his chair with his arms folded tight across his chest, his lips pressed into a thin line. The other Aeronans seem equally unimpressed and uncomfortable with the king’s Collection, though none of them move to stop it. So the king parades us out, one after another. I perch in my parrot’s cage, waiting for my turn to be called.
It’s been a little over a year since Ballast disappeared from Tenebris. The king seems to have forgotten him. Everyone seems to have forgotten him, except, of course, Gulla, who is constantly watching the door of any room she’s in, spelling out his name with her fingers like a prayer. Rhode and Xenia miss Ballast, too, I think, though Rhode is old enough to know not to say anything about her half brother and quick enough to hush Xenia before she says anything, either.
I dread the day when Rhode and Xenia begin to emulate their older siblings, who sneak into the great hall and torment their father’s captives, poking hot irons between the bars or slinging in sacks of excrement. Theron and Alcaeus like to practice knife throwing in here, which means not even my elevated cage exempts me from their cruelty. Once, they brought a crossbow in, sent quarrels hurtling up toward me. I dodged most of them, though one grazed my shin before Nicanor discovered what they were about and hauled them from the room.
He didn’t send the physician in to tend to me—it was Gulla who came, later that night, after I had already performed for the king with a gash in my leg. She spread salve on the wound, bound it up. And she brought me a book to read, which she had done sporadically in the years after Ballast ordered me away from his room. Before Ballast fled from Tenebris, I liked to imagine that she did all those things on his behalf,that he asked her to do them because he still considered me his friend. That was nonsense, of course. A hope to cling to in the long Winter Dark. It was Gulla, and Gulla alone, who offered me these kindnesses.
But that doesn’t keep me from wondering where he is now, if he’s well, if he ever thinks about all the things he left behind. If he’s even alive.
My mind jolts back to the present when the Skaandan singer is brought from her glass cage. The king takes one look at her, frowns, and waves her away before she even opens her mouth. She must be eighteen now, or near it. That’s the age when the king loses interest in us, when we are no longer children, no longer deemed remarkable. I’m five months past my own eighteenth birthday, and though I’m still scrawny and small—thank the gods—I know it’s only a matter of time before the king checks his records, sees my true age, and surrenders me to the Sea of Bones.
He calls me to perform next and I do, leaping from ropes to chains, doing a complicated tumbling passage on the wire that stretches the length of the hall: cartwheels and flips, handstands and somersaults, my stomach lurching as the room tilts upside down and then rights itself again. Then an intricate routine on the aerial silks, followed by a series of swinging bars. Sweat pours down my shaved head and runs into my eyes.
Last is a series of dizzying leaps onto impossibly small platforms. I throw myself across the gaps, vision narrowing to those tiny squares of wood. One, two, three, four, five. Another leap, and my sweaty palms seize the last chain. I slide down it and let go, jerking my body sideways to land on a nearly invisible wire. I teeter for a moment and then tuck my head down and run along the wire as fast as I can.
A heartbeat before the wire ends, I hurl myself forward, fingers stretching, stretching, to one last lonely silk.
For an instant there is nothing beneath me but air and a plummeting drop to my death.
But then the silk tangles in my hand. I grasp it and let go, allowing myself to fall. I count heartbeats. There’s no time for breath.
The floor rushes up to shatter me. I grab the silk at the last moment, catching myself before I collide with the ground. The jolt of it jerks my shoulders so hard it feels like my arms are being ripped out of their sockets.
I hit the floor, ducking my head and somersaulting to land in a perfect bow at the king’s feet.
I’m breathing hard, my whole body shaking and pouring sweat. I don’t dare lift my eyes before the king acknowledges me, so I stare at his feet, slippered in silk and gleaming with diamonds.
I wish I could haul him up onto my wire, push him off, watch him fall. I wish I could give him the end that he deserves.
Fingers grasp my chin, tilt my face up.
“I grow weary with your routine, acrobat,” he says, his voice as brittle as the ice outside his mountain. “Same thing, every time. I’m always hoping you’ll fall, liven things up a bit.”
