Page 81 of While the Dark Remains

“Now you’rethreateningme?” Vil demands, jerking up from his chair.

“I think,” says Aelia, with a dazzling smile, “that we had best move on to other terms and leave the border discussion for another day. Don’t you agree, Your Highnesses?”

It’s something I ought to have said, if I’d had my wits about me. I curse myself.

Ballast nods. Vil slumps back in his seat. I take a long, slow breath.

Kallias’s voice rises in the silence. “While the dark-haired one had the mostdelightful—”

“Let’s return,” says Aelia hastily, “to the basis of what we all wish the treaty to be: lasting peace between nations. Skaanda showed great faith toward that end with the food shipments, and Daeros in return displayed all it has to offer.”

“Though offered none of it,” Vil says under his breath.

The conversation limps on, Lord Seleukos and Lady Eudocia discussing trade options with Vil, who seems to finally remember he’s trying to ingratiate himself to these people, and keeps a better check on his temper. Vil and Lady Eudocia are conferring about a possible tour of the Bone City when Kallias jerks his feet off the table and settles his chair on the floor with a suddenthump.

We all look over at him, and I’m startled to find that he no longer seems drunk. “I have decided to name an heir,” he announces.

Zopyros, Theron, and Alcaeus all sit up very straight.

“Who, Father?” says Zopyros, puffing out his chest.

Ballast eyes him uneasily, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

“The naming ceremony will be tomorrow evening,” says Kallias. He smiles his feline smile, and it slithers under my skin and sticks there.

Zopyros sags a bit in his chair but doesn’t repeat his question.

The announcement effectively ends negotiations, and I stand with relief, ready to crawl into bed and sleep the day away. Vil is deep in conversation with Aelia—he won’t need me for a while.

I jump when Kallias grabs my hand. He looks up at me with eyes that are both lazy and cunning. “I have not gotten to know you as well as I would like, Princess Astridur. We will have dinner together, you and I. A private dinner. Not tomorrow evening, of course. The evening after.”

I gape at him. “I couldn’t accept, Your Majesty,” I stammer.

He just grins, showing his teeth. “I look forward to it.”

I extricate my hand and flee into the corridor, pausing for a moment to tilt my head back against the wall in an effort to slow my raging pulse.

“Br—Astridur?”

I turn to see Ballast standing there, hands nervous about the trim of his shirt. Veins of red run through the white of his eye, and the shadow beneath it is darker than it looked in the council chamber. He smells strongly of medicine and herbs, and I think of him weeping silently onto his pillow, of the vials on his nightstand, of the physician asking him if the pain is better, if the nightmares have gone. This isn’t what he smelled like before, in the caves, in the dark.

Words stick in my throat and I am ill, ill, because he’s here now and I want desperately to fold myself into him but I can’t, because I don’t know what he is, and I don’t know what I am, and everything is wrong.

But the intensity in his one-eyed gaze makes my heart stutter.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says quietly. “It isn’t safe. There are—there are things going on that I can’t explain, but you need to leave. Before everything gets worse. Before—”

“Before you’re named your father’s heir?” I snap. “Are we enemies, Ballast? Is that what we are now?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then what are you warning me about? Yourself? Why in the Gray Goddess’s hell are you back here, bowing and scraping to your father’s will? You could have destroyed him. And yet you’re—you’re sacrificing everything for a wild grab at power?”

“It isn’t like that!”

“Then what is itlike?” I’m shouting and I shouldn’t be. We are hardly in a private part of the palace, and I need to hold my tongue.

His chest heaves, his face stricken with grief or anger or some other emotion caught between. “I’m trying to save them,” he says softly. “I’m trying to save all of them.” His eye seeks mine, begging me to understand.

---