Page 75 of While the Dark Remains

It’s late when we finally leave Garran City, nearly the nineteenth hour. We take a different route back to the gates to avoid the chaos of the merchants packing up their carts in the main square, and we pass a large stone building that Aelia, who walks near me, explains is the orphan house. My heart seizes. More than one of the children Kallias took for his Collection came from here.

The door to the orphan house creaks open, and a young woman slips out, the lantern she holds illuminating her smooth dark skin and cloud of black hair swept up onto the top of her head. For a moment I freeze, staring, and her eyes catch on mine. I barely stop myself from calling out her name before she ducks her head and hurries past.

I reach our room before Saga does, and I’m waiting for her with my arms crossed when she does eventually appear, the hem of her dirty cloak dragging across the floor.

She sets down her lantern and makes to move past me, but I snatch her arm and haul her over to the couch.

“Sit,” I order, and she does, hunching guiltily.

“What in thehellwere you doing in the orphan house in Garran City?” I demand.

Saga gnaws on her lip, anger sparking in her eyes. There’s a dagger at her hip that I don’t recognize, though I can tell the hilt is one she carved herself: It’s a tree design, with the branches entwining.

“Do you really expect me to sit still all day, waiting for you?” Her voice is hollow, her shoulders tight. “This place is agony for me, Brynja. I know you understand that.” She draws the dagger from its sheath, weighing it in her palms. “I refuse to waste my time here.”

I stare at the dagger, at the old, dark stain on the blade.

“I carved this for him,” says Saga softly. “For Hilf. He wore it into battle, and it was on him when they dragged us to Tenebris. I’ve been searching for something of his since we came here, slipping into storeroom after storeroom, digging through piles of junk and cast-off trinkets. But this—” Tears choke her, and she curses.

“A palace guard was wearing it, and I bribed him to give it to me. He was keeping it, he said, because he hoped one day to kill a Skaandan bastard with their own blade.” She curses again and hurls the dagger across the room, where it rebounds off the stone wall and nearly hits me in the head.

I pick it up. I hand it back to her.

And then she’s weeping uncontrollably, and I go to her, wrap my arms around her, hold her tight.

When she’s calm again, I ask her about the orphan house, and she tells me she’s been going there nearly every day, to occupy her hands and her heart. There is a great need for people to help there, and the children hunger for more than food.

“I would forget all this treaty and spying nonsense and come with you,” I tell her quietly. “If I could.”

She gives me a bitter smile. “I know.”

We kneel on the edge of the Sea of Bones, Saga and I, snow cold and damp on our knees. Stars wheel overhead, and sorrow grips tight, tight.

Hilf has no proper grave to mourn at, so we have come here, to the glacier sea, where bodies are surrendered to the ice. His is down there, somewhere, bones upon bones but not, as so many others are, forgotten.

Saga sings for him, war songs and ballads, a tender love song and a mournful dirge. I pray with her, to the Gray Goddess to keep his soul well, to the Prism Goddess to reward him with riches beyond measure among the heroes of paradise. To the Bronze God, that when Saga goes herself into paradise, Hilf will remember her. I weep with Saga beside the glacier sea as the cold bites deep and snow begins to softly fall.

There comes a quiet step behind us, and I turn to see Ballast there, a lamp in his hand, his face drawn and stricken; he must know why Saga is here, weeping and singing and praying on the edge of the Sea of Bones.

She doesn’t hear him, and for a moment his eye seeks mine. I shake my head at him. I spell to him the sign forgowith my fingers. His jaw hardens at this reminder of his mother, locked in a cage in his father’s hall. He turns. He goes.

We are very late to bed tonight, and Saga drifts off almost at once, but I am far too restless for sleep. There is an agony of confusion inside me, an uncertainty that gnaws down to bone.

I slip up into the vents in an attempt to quiet it, because like Saga, I am not content to be still.

Ballast’s room is a lavish suite that adjoins Kallias’s chambers, meant to house a queen. Kallias never crowned one, so he keeps Ballast here, a dancing bear in a pretty cage.

He isn’t here now, though the evidence of him is: There’s a box of silk ribbons on the dressing table in all different colors, and a smaller box beside it filled with what I recognize with a jolt as eye patches. There’s a half-empty bookcase on one wall, the books scattered all aboutthe room as if thrown in a rage. Medicinal vials crowd his nightstand, at least a dozen of them in various sizes.

I fight back a wave of nausea and go search for Ballast elsewhere.

I find him at last in the infirmary, lying on a narrow bed while the palace physician leans over him. I crouch in the ceiling, staring down through the cracks in the wood and trying very hard not to cry. Ballast’s eye patch and silk ribbon wait for him on a nearby table.

“It is healing well,” comes the physician’s voice as he straightens up again, giving me a brief glimpse of Ballast’s ruined face, his empty eye socket. I press my hand against my mouth.Oh, Bal, what has he done to you?

Ballast sits up, grabbing the patch and tying it on quickly, as if he can’t bear to be without it.

“How is the pain?” asks the physician, turning to grab a vial of medicine from a shelf on the wall.

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