Page 139 of While the Dark Remains

A lone figure, dark against the snow, the sun, but no—not alone. A mass of shapes follows behind, blurring together, a hundred strong, a thousand, too many to count.

The figure leading them blazes with magic, a pillar of blue fire.

Ballast.

I stare as he comes, heart thrumming against my breastbone, all the breath gone out of me.

The sun rises, and Ballast draws nearer, the shapes at his back resolving into an army of beasts: arctic bears and lanky white lions, huge gray wolves and magnificently antlered stags. They are glorious,heis glorious, all of them gleaming in the new sun.

Ballast strides tall and fey, a thick white cloak hung around his shoulders, a jewel blazing bright from his forehead. He wears no patch over his ruined eye, the socket red and scarred against his brown skin.

I stand there waiting, undone by the sight of him. I watch him see me, watch the anger come into his face, the tightness into his frame.

He could kill me with a thought, and suddenly I’m terrified that he will.

He stops a half dozen paces away, cloak whipping about his ankles. I drop to my knees in the snow, bowing my head before the rightful king of Daeros.

“I need your help,” I say to the ground.

He doesn’t answer and I dare to glance up, into his one piercing blue eye. It’s so like his father’s it makes my gut twist.

Behind him the animals pause in their march, the stags blowing and stamping at the ground, their breath curls of fog in the frigid air. The lions crouch on muscular hindquarters, ready to spring, their sleek white bodies turned to gold in the sunlight. The wolves whine and the bears growl and the whole teeming mass of them smells of musk and damp fur. They pulse with heat.

I force myself to hold Ballast’s gaze. I force myself to tell him what I must tell him. “I did what I swore I’d do, all those years ago. I killed your father.”

A hard line comes into his face, but he still doesn’t speak.

I look up at him, heart raging, the snow seeping in through my trousers and freezing my skin. “My brother means to unleash the Yellow Lord and destroy all of Daeros and Skaanda. I need you to help me stop him. Your magic is the only thing strong enough to stand against him. Yours and—” I take a breath. “Yours and mine.”

Still he doesn’t say anything, just stares down at me, jaw tight, cloak snapping in the wind.

“I need you to help me unlock my magic.” My voice shakes. “I need you to make me whole again so we can defeat my brother and bind the Yellow Lord anew. I need you to help me save our people. All of them.”

“You’re a liar, a traitor, a spy.” His voice is harsh and cold and sends a tremor through me. “Why should I believe anything you say?”

I pull something from my pocket and lift my hand into Ballast’s view, unfolding my fingers so he can see the pebbles resting there, blue and shining, washed smooth by the waters of an underground stream. “I almost told you then,” I say softly. “That last day, with the river beside us and the stone at our backs.”Your mouth on mine,I tell him with my eyes,your magic burning inside of me.

His jaw tenses. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

I stare at the pebbles, trying not to think of Ballast’s eye, of everything else we’ve lost since then. “I was afraid I would forsake everything to stay with you, down there in the dark.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His question lingers in the air, and I lift my gaze to his. I don’t know how to tell him that, in my mind, there was too much left undone, that the pull of my people was still too strong, even stronger than him. I don’t feel that now.

“We are the same, you and I,” I say instead. “Yearning for light and yet trapped in the darkness. We’re bound by the same bloodline. The same fate. Down there in the tunnels—me and you—it was real to me, Bal. And I think—I think it was real to you, too.” I take a breath, my outstretched hand trembling with the effort of staying still. “I can’t follow the Iljaria, not with Brandr leading them. Iwon’t. Please help me. Please.”

He considers me, my knees growing numb in the snow. Something in him softens, and he reaches out a hand, closes my fingers over the pebbles again, and pulls me to my feet. For a moment he doesn’t draw away, his fingers rough and warm over mine. Power crackles off him, and my heart rages. I am sorry when he lets go of my hand, puts space between us again. I drop the pebbles back into my pocket.

I glance to the animals behind him, a restless, seething swarm, armed with tooth and horn and claw.

Ballast sighs a little. “I suppose you have a plan?”

I tell him.

---