Page 69 of While the Dark Remains
“But there’s so muchpotential.” Vil’s eyes spark, his enthusiasm palpable. “Think of it—”
“Not here, Vil,” I remind him.
He squeezes my arm. “You’re right.” His glance flits nervously away before fixing on me again. “I’m sorry about before.”
I shake my head and try to smile. “It’s fine, Vil. Everything is fine.”
He opens his mouth to say something more, but just then Kallias calls for the whole group of us to follow him in a fur-swathed parade into the main city square, crowded with merchant stalls.
A white marble fountain occupies the middle of the square, water frozen in shining arcs. Pierced tin lanterns hang on poles around the fountain, illuminating the dark with fractured pricks of multicolored light. They are far more beautiful, I think, than Kallias’s harsh electricity.
But the arcs of frozen water make my heart thud against my breastbone: Iljaria magic, the power of the Gray Goddess, who rules death and winter. Garran City used to belong to the Iljaria, just as Tenebris did.
Musicians play near the fountain: an old woman beating a pounding rhythm on a pair of hand drums, a boy wielding an assortment of haunting pitched bells, and a pale-haired girl on a lightning-quick violin. The girl and boy can’t be more than ten, young enough that I inwardly beg them not to play so well, for fear Kallias will take them for his Collection. But today, it seems, he has other things on his mind.
He turns to me with his satisfied-cat smile, smoothly sliding his hand under my elbow. I can feel the heat of him even through my wool sleeve. “Let me show you the delights of Garran City,” he says low into my ear. “I think you will like it even more than the strawberries.”
I set my jaw, tell myself not to shake, not to pull away, not to vomit all over his silver-embroidered furs. But by the mutilated Bronze God, I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this charade.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” says Vil, suddenly beside me again, “but Princess Astridur promised to accompany me this afternoon. Would you allow me to steal her from you?”
Kallias raises his brow at Vil, who is perhaps being too protective of his “cousin.” But mercifully Kallias doesn’t comment on it, just gives a careless shrug and draws his hand back again. “Take my son with you, then. He hasn’t been enough in company of late, and I fear his manners could do with some polishing.” He snaps his fingers at Ballast, who obeys his father’s summons like a dog. It rankles me.
“Father?” he says, taut as a bowstring.
“Show our Skaandan friends the city. Spare no expense. And be sure to have them in the arena by the thirteenth hour, or I’ll take your other eye.”
And then Kallias sweeps past us, hailing Aelia, with Zopyros, Theron, Alcaeus, and Lysandra following him like pathetic furry chickens, while the governors go off in a group of their own.
The tension doesn’t leave Ballast’s frame as his eye sweeps from me to Vil and then back again. I brace myself for Vil to make some cutting remark. He doesn’t, just takes my hand, resolutely threading our fingers together.
I pull my hand free, more than irritated that Vil feels some masculine need to stake a claim to me in front of Ballast.
Vil squares his jaw but doesn’t reach for me again.
“Let’s go,” says Ballast brusquely, and stalks off into the square.
We follow, Vil radiating irritation beside me.
We thread our way through a host of merchant stalls selling food and jewelry and trinkets, books, maps, finely spun linen. There’s a booth displaying small wooden chests, intricately carved, another offering blown glass, and yet another gears and cogs and bits of metal, for crafting clockwork. It makes me think of my sister, and my heart wrenches.
A change comes over Ballast as we go, and it startles me. He stops to speak with every one of the vendors and seems to know most of them. He asks the middle-aged Daerosian woman selling the carved wooden chests if her daughter has recovered from her bout with Gray Fever. He chats with a grizzled old fisherman about the season’s catch and asks his advice on the best-quality fish to purchase and have sent up to Tenebris. He squeezes into a filthy alleyway to retrieve a child’s dropped coin, and as he’s giving it back to her, a young woman about my age slips up to him and tugs on his sleeve.
“Lord Prince, can you come?” she asks him. She’s really pretty, which annoys me.
Ballast glances at me and Vil and then back at the woman. “Of course.”
Vil is getting annoyed at all Ballast’s detours, but we follow him and the woman to a booth at the edge of the fair, where leather goods are displayed on a green table, from belts to boots to satchels.
A boy sits on the ground by the table, cradling a bundle of fur in his arms that I think is a hound pup, or was. It’s mangled and bleeding.
Ballast kneels beside the boy, who wordlessly hands him the pup. The creature, to my shock, still seems to be breathing. Ballast shuts his eyes, and his magic coils out of him, blue and silver, healing as honey. I can still taste the memory of it on my tongue, and I shiver where I stand.
Vil shifts beside me, uneasy in the presence of Ballast’s magic but fascinated, I think, in spite of himself.
The hound pup’s wounds knit together, and he begins to wiggle and yip in Ballast’s arms. The boy gives a joyful shout. The young woman—his sister, I think—smiles. Her eyes well.
“Thank you, Lord Prince,” she says as Ballast gives the pup back to the boy.
