Page 48 of While the Dark Remains
“We’re here to end all that. To endhim.”
I don’t trust myself to speak. I am all raw nerve, tense and jangling.
“Have you gone to see them yet?” Saga says quietly.
I blink into the dark.
“The children.”
“No. How could I?” My voice is ragged, rough.
“Because it’s part of the plan. And because—it would do you good, Brynja. If you confront your ghosts, maybe they won’t haunt you anymore.”
I see the new acrobat leaping across dizzying space, snatching the aerial silk, spiraling down. I wish I could claw it out of my mind, but I can’t, I can’t. Fear and horror fight to consume me. “What about your ghosts, Saga?”
It’s her turn to be quiet, and I hate myself for making her think of Hilf, of his dying scream, of his broken body and his blood on the floor.
“Why do you think I’m here?” she says.
I thought I’d had my fill of crying, but fresh tears leak out onto my pillow.
Two Years Ago
Year4198, Month of the Black God
The Iljaria Tunnels
I tell Saga the story, because she hasn’t heard it before, one of the stories I read in Ballast’s book: Long ago, the Iljaria lived under these mountains, carving beauty into the earth, raising cities of stone, filling the darkness with light in a place that will never see the sun. But they abandoned the tunnels, sealed up the entrances. Forgot them. And then they went east.
If the stories are to be believed, Saga and I could very well be the first people to set foot here in hundreds of years, stumbling by accident through one of those very entrances.
Now we stare in awe at the vast, echoing cavern beyond our cave. The air is whispering and frigid, our presence as insignificant as pebbles in the ocean. Stalactites gleam and drip above us, phosphorescent and strange, stretching up and up, out of the halo of our light. I wonder if the Iljaria were the ones to carve such lyrical shapes in these underearth shadows, or if these caverns were formed in the beginning, crafted by the First Ones themselves.
And yet for all that, the darkness makes my skin crawl. I get the sense we’re being watched, unseen eyes stripping us down to bone.
“The gods have been kind,” says Saga, soft, reverent. She leans against me, keeping all the weight off her broken foot.
I flinch. “The gods are never kind. Not to me.”
Saga says no word of admonishment, but I see it in her swift glance. “We have a chance now,” she says. “If the tunnels run all the way through the mountains—”
“We have no way of knowing if they do.”
“Do you have a compass, Brynja?”
“Of course I have a compass.” It was one of the first things I stole when I started planning my escape.
Saga grins and puts one hand on my shoulder. “Then we go as far west as we can. We’ll be out of the snow, sheltered from the elements—the tunnels are a gift, Bryn. A divine gift. We can’t squander it.”
I grimace, not remotely sure that we’re safer in these caves than out of them. “And if we run out of food? And if we reach a dead end? And if we can’t get back out of the mountain again?”And if we discover why the Iljaria fled?I didn’t tell Saga quite the whole story.
“Have a little faith. Did you even think we’d get this far?”
“Dragging a one-footed princess past Kallias’s guards through ablizzardin thedark? Absolutely not.”
She throws back her head and laughs at that, and I don’t like how her laughter echoes, eerie and overloud, bouncing off the stones, where anything might hear her.
We sleep a little, by the fire, then nibble rations from the packs and fill our waterskins with melted snow before heading west through the cavern. Saga moves very slowly, her makeshift crutch tapping and her foot dragging on the stone. Every step clearly still pains her, but at least nothing foul is leaking through her bandage anymore.
