Page 57 of While the Dark Remains
“Then you’ve tried it.”
His mouth goes grim. He still doesn’t take his eyes from the beasts to look at me. “I’ve tried it.”
“Will Saga be all right?” I ask him.
“In time. She just needs to rest while her foot finishes healing. My mother could have helped her more.”
“You held her back from the Gray Goddess herself,” I contradict.
He shrugs, like it’s no great matter, and rubs his thumb along his sword hilt.
“Is that what your mother was teaching you during all those afternoons you spent with her? How to wield magic beyond the power given to you by the Blue Goddess?”
Ballast eyes me at this free admission of spying on him. “Animal magic has always come easiest to me,” he says, “but yes, my mother taught me a little about how to channel it elsewhere. Her patron is the White Lady, her power in her voice. But growing magic, healing magic—that has always been very natural for her, too, and she believes that any Iljaria, no matter their patron, could learn to wield every kind of magic. Though I don’t think all Iljaria are as naturally powerful as my mother.”
I think of Gulla, maimed and silent, teaching me her finger speech as we looked together out into the starry darkness of the Sea of Bones. Of her hands, binding the wound on my leg, bringing me soap and books.
“My father doesn’t realize it, but he didn’t nullify her power.”
I had always suspected this. “When he cut out her tongue.” It’s cruel to say it, but I do anyway.
Ballast flinches.
Out in the passage, the shadow monsters writhe and hiss, flying ever a little nearer to our cave before wheeling away again.
“Youleftyour mother,” I accuse. “You left her withhim.” My chest tightens and I say a little more quietly, “You left me.”
He brandishes the torch at a monster that comes closer than the rest, and it jerks back screaming, horrible eyes glowing red. “Has he hurt her?” Ballast asks, very low. “Has my father hurt her?”
“I don’t know.” Anger writhes inside me. “You said when you were old enough, you were going to kill him. But you didn’t, did you? You ran away.”
“So did you!” Ballast retorts. “You could have killed him, too. What exactly was your plan, to get eaten by ancient monsters down here in the dark?”
“I didn’tplanthis! I’d be nearly home by now if it weren’t for Saga’s foot and the Gray Goddess’s damned blizzard.”
“Home in Skaanda?”
“Yes, ofcourse.”
He turns his head at last to look at me, and there’s tension in every line of his body, in every cell of mine.
One of the monsters takes advantage of his distraction and dives straight toward us. Ballast leaps to his feet with a yell and hews the thing’s head off.
I yelp and jump back to avoid its vile blood.
The rest of the monsters stay away, though they seethe with anger in the tunnel, wings a whir of knotted shadows.
Ballast stands there, panting, sword once again loose in his hand. “I wasn’t brave enough,” he says quietly. “I wasn’t brave enough to kill him.”
“But you could have.”
His eyes go shiny in the light of the torch.
“You could have turned the lion on him, instead of—instead of—” I can’t finish. My mouth floods with the taste of bile.
There is such agony in his face that I want to take my words back, to tell him it’s all right, that I understand better than anyone the cruelty and control his father wields. But itisn’tall right. It doesn’t matter that I understand becauseit isn’t all right.
“You command one of the strongest magics I have ever seen,” I say, “half Iljaria or no. You could have used it to save yourself, your mother. To save us all. But instead you ran. Hid. Left us to our fate.”
