Page 94 of While the Dark Remains
“You were free,” he whispers. “You were free, and now you’ve put yourself once more at his mercy and I can’t think clearly, can’t adherewholly to my purpose because I’m afraid he will hurt you and I can’t bear it, Brynja. I can bear everything else but not that.”
My heart quavers, and I tilt my forehead against his chest, breathing in the medicinal scent of him, searching for something familiar. His pulse is wild beneath my ear, and his magic crackles around him, power barely contained.
He takes a ragged breath, cups my face with his hands. I look up at him, into his single blue eye. My skin is on fire, and there is no air in my lungs. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
“Brynja,” he says.
“Bal,” I breathe.
And then his mouth is crushed against mine and his fingers are in my hair and my hands are wrapped around his back, tugging him into me. His magic sears my lips and blazes through my veins but I don’t care because I want this, I wanthim, so fiercely I can endure anything. Yet his magic burns and burns, and I am at last forced to pull away from him, gasping.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, realizing. “I’ll hold it back. Brynja—”
But I’m thinking a little clearer now, for all it feels as if my heart is going to shatter like glass. I step back, putting a marked distance between us. He respects it, though he trembles where he stands.
“We can’t do this,” I say past my horribly dry throat.
“Why not?”
I glance at the dresser shoved up against the door, and for a moment we both tense, listening. There is no sound from the other side, but I still don’t feel safe. “Because I can’t trust you, Ballast. We are at cross purposes, you and I.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know why you’re here, Brynja. But I am here to right my father’s wrongs. To save my country from war and starvation and being called to heel by the Aeronan Empire. You told me I was a good person, down there in the dark. I’m here to prove your faith in me.”
“Bal.”
He grimaces, pacing to his dressing table and fiddling with a tray of cloak-pins, sharp enough to kill if you drove one in just the right place.
“The only way to do all that is to take my father off his throne and become king in his stead,” Ballast goes on. “Thatmust be done legitimately, or else the governors would support one of my siblings instead of me, which I can’t risk—I don’t trust any of them to be better than my father.
“I knew that when I returned to Tenebris, the first thing I would have to do was win back my father’s trust. Make him think he still controlled me so that he would name me his heir.” His voice goes quiet as he says, “So I gave him my eye.”
“Bronze God’sheart,” I swear.
He shrugs off the horror of it, and I want to shake him for treating any part of himself as disposable. He doesn’t understand, maybe doesn’t even believe, that he has immense value. It breaks my heart. I fight the impulse to forget everything else and pull him close again.
“Now. Are you going to tell me whyyouare here?” He has closed himself off again, gone distant and cold. His earrings glitter in the light of the Iljaria lamps, and he looks every inch his father’s heir. I remember that’s exactly what he is.
“Skaanda’s resources are growing thin,” I say. “The treaty is the only way to save her.”
Ballast laughs. “What a terrible liar you are. Try again, Brynja.”
“We’re here to annex Daeros into Skaanda and put Vil on the throne.”
He grimaces. “Ah yes. Your Skaandan prince.”
“He’s notmySkaandan prince.”
“He thinks he is. What could have given him that idea?”
I glare at Ballast, and he leans against his dressing table, folding his arms across his chest. He glares right back. “Do you really expect me to willingly relinquish my country to my enemy?”
“Then weareenemies.”
“You’re the one here disguised as an ambassador and pretending to work toward peace. I assume Saga’s army is coming through the labyrinth as we speak?”
I grit my teeth, and that’s his answer.
“Damn it, Brynja.”
