Page 96 of While the Dark Remains

I didn’t tell them that afterward Ballast attempted to pull me aside, desperate to speak to me, as he has been ever since that night in his room, that I left him without a word.

I didn’t tell them that there’s to be another performance from Kallias’s Collection tomorrow evening, and I’ll have to watch, stoic and stupid and dying inside.

I make my way to the great hall, where I leap down into the realm of my nightmares and go to visit the children, emptying my pockets of filched treats, giving all my reassurances to their pale and weary faces.

Last of all, I visit Gulla.

She seems to have shrunk since the last time I was here, hollow and gaunt, though her eyes are bright.

Hello, Brynja,she says in her finger speech.

“Hello, Gulla,” I tell her.

I don’t have anything to say, really, I just wanted to be with her. Wanted her to know she isn’t forgotten.

How is my son?she asks me, her white lashes seeming almost to shine in the pulsing glow of the time-glass on the opposite wall.

I shake my head. “Under Kallias’s rule. He claims he wants to save you—to save Daeros, but—”

She sighs and sits with her knees pulled up to her chin.And you, Brynja?

“What about me?” I whisper.

She shakes her head, reaches her hand through the bars of her cage, and gently touches my curls.Are you where you want to be?

“No.”

Why?

I don’t know how to answer that. We study each other in the dim light, and I am weary, weary, of all this.

“When the light returns, I’m going to save you,” I promise her. “I’m going to kill him, and I’m going to save you.”

And after that? What then?

“I don’t know,” I say quietly.

She gives me a tired smile.

There is nothing left to say, so I just sit with her as the night spins on, as the cold floor numbs every part of me, as Rute watches from her cage, high up at the peak of the ceiling, the ghost of what I was, the ghost of who I am.

Chapter Seventeen

Year4200, Month of the Gray Goddess

Daeros—Tenebris

Aelia is having tea with Saga when I return from my morning’s scouting, dusty from the vents and hungry for lunch. Both of them look up mildly as I hop down into the room, used to my random appearances. I stretch out my aching back and cramped legs, then join them at the tea table.

“Brynja, you’re filthy,” says Saga, but makes room for me anyway and hands me a scone. Then she and Aelia go back to conversing about improvements to the orphan house, and how, hopefully, when the treaty is finally signed, some of the war funds can be reallocated there. I listen with only half an ear, trying not to be jealous at their closeness.

Vil bursts into the room not a minute later, his feet bare and hair damp, wearing seemingly little besides a red robe belted tight across his waist—he’s clearly come from the middle of his bath.

Aelia’s face flushes deeper bronze, but he doesn’t have the draw for me he did in Staltoria City. He hasn’t in a long while.

“What is it, Vil?” asks Saga.

He takes a breath, and I register the panic in his eyes. “I’ve been told an ambassadorial party has just arrived from Iljaria.”

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