Ballast watches her. “I will have to touch you, Your Highness.”
She huffs out an angry breath, but I don’t miss the tears gleaming in her eyes. “I saidheal me.”
He nods and puts one hand on her ankle, then shuts his eyes and starts his singsong magic. I feel it, warm and thick as honey, coiling through the air.
Saga weeps silently as he heals her, her head turned away, her tears dripping down to dampen the stone.
Then Ballast lets go, crouches back on his heels.
She scrambles upright and puts weight on the injured foot. It holds her, and there is no trace of pain in her eyes.
“Better?” says Ballast quietly.
She nods. She doesn’t thank him.
A flurry of cave demons dive at us, shrieking, and we meet them head-on, Ballast with his sword and me with my knife and Saga with her stick. We dispatch them in short order and leave them to rot in a stinking pile.
We go quickly after that, Saga abandoning her walking stick for another sword she finds in the tunnels. She weighs it approvingly in herpalm. “Skaanda would have helped drive the monsters from this place,” she says. “The Iljaria were too busy killing us to even ask.”
“Do you think it’s true, Your Highness?” says Ballast from the front. “The accounts of genocide?”
“History doesn’t lie,” Saga snaps. “Unless to make the truth more palatable, and there’s nothing pleasant about children being slaughtered because they were born powerless.”
Ballast has no answer for that.
We walk some hours more before we pass under a massive stone archway that shivers with magic, infused there long ago by some ancient hand. There are words cut into the stone, painted brightly, and they speak of music and protection and peace.
“The demons do not come here,” says Ballast. “These halls were hallowed by the Brown Lady herself. The oldest stories say the Iljaria were not the labyrinth’s first occupants, or even its makers, but that the First Ones formed it in the beginning.”
I read that in Ballast’s book as well. His eyes flick to mine, like he’s remembering, too.
Prayers of awe and thanksgiving trip from Saga’s lips, and her words follow us to our next resting spot, a little room cut into the stone, with a blackened fire ring, waiting wood, and a kettle.
We feast on more fish and heat the kettle for tea, which Ballast has squirreled away in his pack. The atmosphere between the three of us borders on courteous, though Saga still does her level best to not speak to Ballast, or even look at him.
She’s weary from the long walk on her newly healed foot, and falls asleep by the fire shortly after we eat.
But I’m restless. Awake. And it seems Ballast is, too.
“Do you want to explore a little?” he asks me.
I glance at Saga, sleeping soundly.
“We’ll be back long before she wakes,” he promises. “We won’t go far.”
My stomach wobbles. I want very much to go exploring with him. I nod. “All right.”
So he picks up the torch, and I follow him farther into the tunnel, which is wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side. I have to nearly trot to keep up with him, and realize how slowly he’s been going, for Saga’s sake, even with her healed foot. The torch casts slanting shadows on the stone, and the chill of the tunnel curls around me.
“The torch is magic, isn’t it,” I realize. “It never goes out.”
He gives a huff of a laugh. “Indeed. This way.” He grabs my arm and tugs me into a tunnel on the left.
My pulse jumps, fear slicing unexpectedly through me. I jerk away from him, and he releases me immediately.
His eyes find mine in the torchlight, anguish written all over his face. “I’m sorry. I won’t touch you again.”
For a moment we just stand there, staring at each other. He never touched me when we were children, always keeping that careful space between us. I understand why, now. He is perpetually, excruciatingly aware that he is the son of my tormentor; he doesn’t want me to be afraid of him, doesn’t want me to equate him with his father. Yet Kallias hurt him, too.
