Page 77 of While the Dark Remains
“I can try.”
“Any word on who Kallias means to name his heir?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
He frowns, dragging his finger around the rim of his own coffee mug. “And Ballast?”
My gut clenches. I didn’t tell Vil about my visit to the infirmary, or of Ballast’s presence in the digging shaft. “What about him?”
“What have you found out? How close is he in his father’s confidences? Is he in the running for heir?”
“I don’t know.”
Vil scowls. “Damn it, Brynja! What have you been doing all night?”
I curse at him and set my mug down so hard coffee splashes over the rim.
His eyes lock hard on mine, and I think again of what Saga told him about what happened in the Iljaria tunnels. But at last he just sighs and reaches for a rag to wipe up the spilled coffee. “Go to bed, Brynja. You look dead on your feet.”
I obey without another word, though I sleep for only a few hours before Saga wakes me with apologies and a pot of tea, to get me ready for the treaty meeting.
Two Years Ago
Year4198, Month of the Ghost God
The Iljaria Tunnels
We leave the Brown Goddess’s hallowed halls, and the cave demons return with a vengeance. Ballast finds me a sword, which is more effective than my knife, and the three of us spend the better part of each day battling our way through one stone passageway after another. We’ve passed far out of Asvaldr’s realm, so it’s only Ballast and Saga and me against the shadows.
We sleep in shifts, one of us always awake to guard the others. We walk, fight, eat, sleep. Wake and do it again. Our path winds often near the underground river, and Ballast catches blind fish in nets while Saga and I keep the monsters off him. He smokes the fish in the coals of our fires.
“Do you charm them into your net?” Saga mocks him one day as he settles by the fire with his latest catch. “Do you call them to their deaths and laugh?”
I’m watching the cave entrance, so I don’t look back as he draws his knife, begins to scale and gut the fish.
“No,” he says. “I put out the nets. I thank the fish that swim into them. And I tell them that I’m sorry.”
Saga doesn’t say anything else. When she comes to relieve my watch, I take her place by the fire and notice she’s eaten very little.
We come one day to an abandoned Iljaria city, a massive cavern carved with statues and stone pillars, murals covering the walls, with an ancient well in the center of a flagstone square. The whole place is illuminated with magic, glowing and golden as the summer sun. It hurts my eyes until they begin to adjust, and Saga and Ballast stand blinking and tearing on either side of me.
“I have never been here before,” says Ballast. “It feels—”
“Ancient,” I say. “And yet somehow new.”
He nods. “Like the First Ones themselves might step around any corner.”
“There are no shadows,” I realize. “None at all.”
“Because the light touches everything,” says Saga, “every crack, every mote.” And she begins to softly pray.
Slowly, we pace through the cavern. I wonder if it’s the light that’s keeping the cave demons from swarming this place or if it is something else.
All around the cavern there are dwellings carved into the stone. They’re decorated with brilliant carpets and intricately carved furniture, with shelves of brightly illuminated manuscripts. There is a half-finished painting on an easel, with jars of opened paint beside it, and a brush that looks to have been only just laid down. Nothing has been touched by dust or spiders, decay or time.
On one end of the cavern, we come upon a sunken bath around a column of stone pillars, watched over by more statues, with a fountain in the center depicting what can only be the Prism Goddess, water spilling out of her open palms. I kneel and dip my hand into the water; it’s clear and warm. I blink at the bath, the brimming magic tingling all up the length of my arm.
It’s been weeks since the pool by the hot springs, and all three of us stare at the magical water with open longing.
