Page 79 of While the Dark Remains

Ballast stares at the floor. I’m still having a hard time remembering how to breathe. “Saga, he—”

“Shut up,” she snaps. “Shutup. Let’s go.”

We do. Neither Ballast nor I take our turn in the magical bath. We shoulder our packs, and he picks up the torch. We take the westward passage out of the Iljaria city, into the waiting embrace of three dozen cave demons. Saga doesn’t look at me as she fights, the monsters’ dark blood immediately undoing the effects of her bath. I’m not sure she’ll ever speak to me again.

I do my best to work through my feelings with my sword.

Chapter Fourteen

Year4200, Month of the Black God

Daeros—Kallias’s Mountain

Sabotaging digging progress turns out to be harder than I expected.

The broken tools—pickaxes and drill bits—are collected at the end of every day and brought to the smithy, where they’re melted down and reforged. I manage to steal a whole bin of them, but more metal is just brought in from the mines, and not much time is lost.

The workers are housed all together in a dormitory near the servants’ wing of the palace; I lace their food with lobelia, and the whole lot of them get violently ill. But then soldiers are called up from the barracks to take their places until they recover, and I have made a lot of people really sick for no reason.

I explain all this to Finnur, the Iljaria boy Kallias keeps in his Collection, on one of my visits to the great hall. I come to see the children every few days, bringing them little treats or gifts, like Gulla used to do for all of us. But I haven’t been brave enough to speak with Rute, my acrobatic replacement, after our first encounter.

“You’ll have to strengthen the magic that’s protecting whatever the Iljaria buried,” Finnur says when I’ve finished telling him. “It’s the only way to truly delay the digging, and no one will suspect it—they’ll just think the vein is more resilient than they first thought.”

I watch the gangly boy behind iron bars, folding flowers and animals out of the scraps of paper I brought him. His fingers move quickly in the semidarkness of the hall, his white hair seeming almost to glow.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I ask him. “I don’t have any magic.”

He flicks his eyes briefly to me before refocusing on his paper folding. “I’ll do it.”

Unhappiness makes my gut tighten. “Finnur, I can’t take you down there. I can’t even take you out of the hall, not till the army comes.”

He gives a little nod, but I see the disappointment in the slump of his knobby shoulders.

“It’s not that I don’t want to—”

“I know,” he says. He finishes the animal he’s folding, a cat, and lines it up with the others. He grabs another piece of paper. “If you let me out of my cage, I can try and make something here that you can take down into the diggings.”

“You’d really do that?”

His eyes meet mine, and there is a fierceness in him, a power that the iron can’t quench. “Yes.”

I bite my lip. “I’ll have to lock you back in when—”

“I know. I swear I won’t try to escape. I’ll wait with the others.”

I blink back the sudden press of tears. I let him out.

It’s incredible to watch him work his Prism magic, there on the floor just outside his cage. He closes his eyes and lifts his hands, his fingers moving as if he’s again folding paper and not air. Four small stones glimmer into being, spinning weightless in front of him. When he opens his eyes again, they fall; he catches them just before they hit the marble.

Finnur gives me a crooked smile as he offers them to me. I weigh the stones in my palm, heavy and cool.

“Concentrated healing magic,” Finnur explains. “At least, that’s what they’re meant to be. You’ll have to push them into the vein, and they should expand and clot, like a wound scabbing over.”

“Thank you, Finnur,” I say quietly.

He nods but doesn’t reply, his eyes darting around the room. I tense, knowing I don’t have the power—or the heart—to stop him if he chooses to run. But he doesn’t. He just gives me a sad smile and steps back into the cage.

“I’m sorry,” I choke out as I shut and lock the door.

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