Page 22 of While the Dark Remains

Beyond the gardens are the stables, the army encampment, and the road to Garran City, which is the capital of Daeros and lies just north of the mountain.

Every night as I creep my way through the ceilings, I ponder escape. But every night I return to my iron cage and sleep away the remaining hours until dawn. Because there are guards at every door. There is no sanctuary in Garran City. I would die alone on the tundra, long before I ever found my way home. And if I were caught trying to escape, theking and the Sea of Bones would be my ending. It is better to wait. To plan. To hope that I’m not truly forgotten.

To pray that someone is coming to rescue me.

One night I slip into my vent as usual, back aching from the steward’s rod, face bruised where the king grabbed my chin, nails digging deep. He’d been displeased with my performance. He was displeased witheveryone’sperformance. Even Ballast’s. My stomach twists. The king made him call the rats up from the cellars, and the palace cats from their various sleeping corners. Then the king made Ballast compel the cats to slaughter the rats, until the floor was sticky with blood. There weren’t any courtiers tonight. Just the king and his foul temper. He had Ballast beaten, too, when all the rats were dead.

Maybe this is what makes me follow the paths toward the wives’ wing of the palace, wriggling my way through the narrow space until I find myself just above Ballast’s room. I peer down at him through the knotholes in the wood. He sits on his bed, which is shabby and plain, drawing patterns in the fog on his window. There are spots of rat blood on the front of his white shirt, and streaks of his own on the back. Books are scattered all about the room: on his bed, the floor, his small dressing table. I think of my studious brother, and my heart wrenches.

I swear I don’t make a noise, but something makes him glance up and see me through the cracks in his ceiling. He has the king’s startlingly blue eyes, Gulla’s square, solemn face. There are tear stains on his warm brown cheeks.

For a moment we stare at each other, and I try not to think of the rats, screeching as they were torn to pieces.

“What’s your name?” he asks me unexpectedly. His light and dark hair is mussed, curls springing out in every direction.

I blink at him, feeling the ache in my shoulders, knowing his are aching, too. “Brynja,” I whisper.

He takes a breath, fiddling with his sheet. “Every time you do your routine,” he says quietly, “I am always afraid you will fall.”

My chest tightens. I tell him my secret: “I am, too.”

He nods and looks to the window again. “You should get out of here, Brynja. Before my father kills you. Before youdofall.”

My heart thumps too hard, and I fight off the sudden press of tears. “Why don’tyouleave? Why do you let him ... hurt you? Command you?”

He doesn’t answer and I think of Gulla, teaching me her finger speech while we gaze down into the Sea of Bones.

“Your mother,” I say.

“When I am big enough,” says Ballast viciously, “when I am older and stronger, I’m going to kill him. Then he won’t hurt her anymore.”

I hear what he doesn’t say:Then he won’t hurtmeanymore.

“Not if I kill him first.”

He blinks at me, chokes on a laugh. “All right,” he says. “Not if you kill him first.”

There’s nothing to say, after that, so I squirm my way back through the ceilings, wriggle out of the vent, and climb up the chain to my cage. I lather my head with Gulla’s soap and scrape away at the dark hairs growing from my scalp. When it’s smooth again, I wrap myself in my blanket and curl up on the sleeping ledge. But every time I shut my eyes, I see the twisted, bloodied bodies of the rats.

I don’t intend to go and visit Ballast again, but not three evenings later I find myself once more crouched in his ceiling, peering down at him through the knothole.

It’s quite late, past the twenty-first hour, yet he’s sitting on his bed reading in the yellow glow of an Iljaria light globe. I watch him for a while. Something shifts beside him, and I realize it’s a cat, the same white as his sheets. My stomach wrenches.

“Are you going to come out?” he says softly, turning another page.

I hesitate for only a moment before wriggling through his vent and hopping down into the room. I eye the cat uneasily, but it just stretches again and tucks its paws over its head, purring as it sleeps.

Ballast closes his book and looks up at me. He smiles. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he says. “I’ve blocked the door, just in case.”

I glance over to see that he’s shoved his dressing table up against it; there is no lock. Fear coils through me. “Does ... does he come here?”

Ballast shrugs, but there’s no missing the echo of my terror in his eyes. “Not often.”

Which meanssometimes. I turn to scramble back up into the vent.

“Wait,” he says.

I turn back.

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