Page 93 of While the Dark Remains
Saga’s anger roils off her.
“We will hold to our original timeline,” says Vil.
“And the marriage pact?” I demand.
Vil goes a little gray. “You have until the end of Winter Dark to give Kallias an answer—that’s when the army will come. You don’t need to worry about it.”
I scrub my eyes. “And must I endure his advances until then?”
“I won’t let him touch you.”
“He alreadyhas, Vil!”
“Brynja. Please be calm.”
I stare at Vil, and I think that I hate him. He doesn’t understand me, and I realize now that he never has. He’s just using me for his ownpurposes, like everyone else. “Youendure the touch of your tormentor and tell me how easy it is to becalm.”
I’m up from the table and crawling into the heating vent before anyone can stop me.
“Brynja!” Vil cries. “We’re not finished talking! Come down from there. Damn it, Brynja!”
I crawl away as fast as I can, until I can no longer hear him shouting.
Ballast is in his new room, the suite meant to belong to the queen Kallias never crowned. I watch him from the ceiling. He sits on his bed, shoulders hunched and shaking. After a while he unties the ribbon that holds his eye patch, lets it fall to the floor. He jerks up, puts his shoulder against a heavy dresser, shoves it against the door that joins his room to his father’s.
I take that as my cue to wriggle out of his heating vent and drop down to the floor.
He jumps and curses at my sudden appearance, scrabbling frantically for his eye patch, which he ties back on with nervous haste. For a moment the patch doesn’t cover his socket properly, and part of the gaping red wound is visible. Horror knots inside me, not because of his missing eye, but because it so shames him, like he thinks I revile him for it.
He tugs the patch into its proper place then, a shroud over his deep hurt.
I gnaw on my lip. There are cuts on his face that weren’t there before my disastrous private dinner with Kallias, and red leaks through the right shoulder of his shirt.
“What are you doing here, Brynja?” He’s angry, but he’s tired, too; there is pain written in the lines of his face.
My glance flicks to the dresser he pushed against the door. “Does he come in here?” It’s an echo of a question I asked Ballast years ago, when we were children. I see recognition flicker in his eye.
“Not often,” he says. “We’ll hear him in time for you to leave.”
I take a step nearer and he stands there, stone-still, watching me. I study him in the yellow glow of the Iljaria lamps, cataloging his differences, straining to reconcile the Ballast from the caves with the Ballast here before me. I want to close the remaining distance between us, want to lift my hand to his face and trace his hurts and sorrows with my fingertips, smooth them all away. But I don’t quite dare.
“Why have you allowed your father to snare you so neatly in his web?” I ask him quietly.
He is obdurate as marble, no softness at all in the sharp planes of him. “If you want to catch a spider, sometimes you have to pretend to be a fly. I’d think you, of all people, would understand that.”
I flinch. “Youreye, Ballast.”
Muscles jump in his jaw, and he looks past me. “A necessary sacrifice.”
“Like hell it was necessary.”
His eye flicks to mine. “Did you think I would languish down in the tunnels forever? You’re the one who told me to stay in the light.”
“This is not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” he says viciously. “What do you want from me, Brynja? Why the hell are you here? You were free of this place, free of him, free of all of it. You should have gone home. What possessed you to come back?Why Did You Come Back?”
His jaw trembles, and tears spark in his eye. I draw nearer, answering the lodestone pull of him, until there is hardly any space between us at all. Then I do lift my hand and brush one finger gently, gently, over his brow. He shakes and closes his eye.
