She nods; we both know it won’t be enough. We need to get out of the cold, and Saga needs medicine—Saga needs a physician.
But we can’t stop here. Not yet, not yet.
I have her lean on me and we stagger forward, the mountain on our right, the wind spitting snow in our faces.
Saga’s breathing is quick and shallow, and her foot leaks dark liquid onto the frozen ground. I make her get up on my back again, but that just slows our progress. The light wavers in her hand. I’m terrified she’ll pass out.
“Brynja,” she says, her voice a mere thread of sound in the storm. “We should pray.”
“The gods can’t help us out here,” I say tightly.
Saga laughs a little. “Have you lostallyour faith? The gods saw us safely this far. They won’t abandon us now.” And she prays in a singsong voice, her words somehow bright against the darkness. I cling to her prayers without meaning to and find comfort in them.
The bulk of Tenebris melds into the massive mountain range that marches steadily west, nearly all the way to Skaanda. The stories say that inside the mountains twist labyrinthine tunnels, carved by the Iljaria centuries ago. But the Iljaria abandoned the tunnels long before they fled to the east, and the entrances are lost, or hidden.
Still, I keep the mountain on my right, dragging my hand across the stone, searching fruitlessly for a way in. The stone is rough and cuts my fingers, blood trickling down. I’m so cold I don’t feel the pain.
Saga has stopped her praying, and I shake her a little. “Tell me about him,” I say.
“Who?” she whispers.
“Hilf.”
She makes a choked sound and nearly drops the light.
I stumble on, searching desperately for any crack in the stone large enough for us to shelter in for a while, out of the bulk of the storm.
“He was my bodyguard,” she says at last, trembling against me. “It was my double, Njala, who they killed in the skirmish last year. Everyone thought she was me.”
Hence the reports of Saga’s death.
“Hilf was taken prisoner, along with a handful of us. It was my singing voice that saved me. I—I thought it would be better to live, to have a chance to get home again. But I didn’t know that—that—”
“That the king would lock you in a cage like an animal.”
She gnaws on her lip, visibly getting hold of herself. “Why don’t you use his name, Brynja? He’s not—he’s not some faceless king. He’s a murderer, our sadistic, cruel captor. He’s Kallias, and you should name him. Not show him deference. Not give him that power over you.”
“Names have power,” I say quietly, sick to my core.
“Yes. And you should take his away.”
I ponder this as I struggle onward, still scrabbling to find some scar in the mountain. My head is starting to wheel, and the cold numbs every part of me. “Hilf was more than your bodyguard,” I say.
Saga chokes back a sob. “We were in love. We were going to find a way to be together. I would have given everything for him, but instead I was forced to watch as—”
“I know.” I blink and see blood on the marble, hear her feral cries.
She doesn’t say anything more.
I trudge on in silence, exhaustion stealing through me, spots sparking before my eyes.
And then against all hope, my right hand falls away into emptiness. “Saga. The light!”
She hands it to me, and I raise it high. There’s a rift in the stone, crowded with snow and dead scrub. I ease Saga from my back and digas fast as I can, dirt grinding into the cuts on my hands. I dig until the crack is wide enough for both of us to squeeze through. I go first, with Saga, gasping in pain, following after.
We come into a small cavern, shadows stretching long in the light of the Iljaria globe. Saga slumps on the floor while I build a fire with the brush I dug from the crevice. Flames roar to life, heat coiling through the cave. Saga crawls near, and I wrap her in blankets, make her drink a little water, eat a little of the food from our packs.
She’s sweatingso much, and I eye her foot uneasily, fresh blood seeping onto the stone.
