I’m numb with grief. Unable to think of anything but how Sevro will react when he hears Ragnar has died. How my nieces and nephews will never braid another bow into the Friendly Giant’s hair. Part of my soul has departed and will never return. He was my protector. He gave so many strength. Now, without him, I cling to the back of a Valkyrie as her griffin rises away from the bloody snow. Even as we soar through the clouds on great beating wings, even as I see the Valkyrie Spires for the first time, I feel no awe. Just numbness.
The spires are a twisting, vertiginous spine of mountain peaks so ludicrous in their abrupt rise from the arctic plains that only a maniacal Gold at the controls of a Lovelock engine with fifty years of tectonic manipulation and a solar system of resources could conspire to create them. Probably just to see if they could. Dozens of stone spires weave together like spiteful lovers. Mist shrouding them. Griffins making nests on their peaks, crows and eagles in the lower reaches. Upon a high rock wall, seven skeletons hang from chains. The ice is stained with blood and the droppings of animals. This is the home of the only race to ever threaten Gold. And we come stained in the blood of its banished prince.
Sefi and her riders searched the crevasse in which Aja fell; they found nothing but boot prints. No body. No blood. Nothing to abate the rage that burns inside Sefi. I think she would have remained over her brother’s body for hours more, had they not heard drums beating in the distance. Eaters who had mustered greater strength and intended to challenge the Valkyrie for possession of the fallen gods.
Wrath stained her face as she stood over Cassius, her axe in hand. He is one of the first Golds she’ll ever have seen without armor. Maybe the first aside from Mustang. And I think, stained with the blood of her brother, she would have killed him there on the snow. I know I would have let her, and so too would have Mustang. But she relented at the urging of her Valkyrie. Clicking her tongue to her riders, sheathing her axe and signaling them to mount. Now Cassius is tied to the saddle of a Valkyrie to my right. The arrow missed his jugular, but death might come for him even without a kiss from Sefi’s axe.
We land in a high alcove cut into the highest reach of a corkscrew spire. Slaves from enemy Obsidian clans, eyes branded into blindness, receive our griffins. Their faces painted yellow for cowardice. Iron doors groan shut behind, sealing us off from the wind. The riders jump from their saddles before we land to help carry Ragnar away from us deeper into the rock city.
There’s a commotion as several dozen armed warriors push their way into the griffin stable and confront Sefi. They gesture wildly at us. Their accents thicker than the Nagal I learned with Mickey’s uploads and my studies at the Academy, but I understand enough to glean that the newer group of warriors is shouting that we should be in chains, and something about heretics. Sefi’s women are shouting back, saying we are friends of Ragnar, and they point feverishly to the Gold of our hair. They don’t know how to treat us, or Cassius, who several of the warriors pull away from us like dogs fighting for scrap meat. The arrow’s still in his neck. Whites of his eyes huge. He reaches for me in terror as the Obsidians drag him across the floor. His hand grasps mine, holds for a moment, and then he’s gone down a torch-lit hall, borne away by half a dozen giants. The rest cluster around us, huge iron weapons in hand, the stink of their furs thick and nauseating. Quieting only when an old stout woman with a hand-shaped tattoo on her forehead pushes through their ranks to speak with Sefi. One of her mother’s warchiefs. She gestures upward toward the ceiling with large hand motions.
“What is she saying?” Holiday asks.
“They’re talking about Phobos. They see the lights from the battle. They think the Gods are fighting. These ones think we should be prisoners, not guests,” Mustang says. “Let them take your weapons.”
“Like hell.” Holiday steps back with her rifle. I grab the barrel and push it down, handing them my razor. “This is bloody spectacular,” she mutters. They shackle our arms and legs with great iron manacles, taking care not to touch our skin or hair, and jerk us toward a tunnel by the Spires guards, away from Sefi’s Valkyrie. But as we go, I catch sight of Sefi watching after us, a strange, conflicted look on her white face.
After being dragged down several dozen dimly lit stairwells, we’re shoved into a windowless cell of carved stone and stifling, smoky air. Seal oil smolders in iron braziers stinging our eyes. I trip on a raised flagstone and fall to the floor. There, I slam my chains against the stone. Feeling the anger. The helplessness. All the things happening so fast, whipping me around, so I can’t tell which way’s up. But I can think long enough to grasp the futility of my actions, my plans. Mustang and Holiday watch me in heavy silence. One day into my grand plan and Ragnar is already dead.
Mustang speaks more softly. “Are you all right?”
“What do you think?” I ask bitterly. She says nothing in reply, not the fragile sort of person to take offense and whimper out how she’s just trying to help. She knows the pain of loss well enough. “We need to have a plan,” I say mechanically, trying to force Ragnar out my mind.
“Ragnar was our plan,” Holiday says. “He was the entire sodding plan.”
“We can salvage it.”
“And how the hell you expect to do that?” Holiday asks. “We don’t have weapons anymore. And they don’t exactly look tickled Pink to see us. They’re probably going to eat us.”
“These ones aren’t cannibals,” Mustang says.
“You’re willing to bet your leg on that, missy?”
“Alia is the key,” I say. “We can still convince her. It will be difficult without Ragnar, but that’s the only way. Convince her that he died trying to bring their people the truth.”
“Didn’t you hear him? He said words wouldn’t work.”
“They still can.”
“Darrow, give yourself a moment,” Mustang says.
“A moment? My people are dying in orbit. Sevro is at war, and he’s depending on us to bring him an army. We don’t have the luxury of taking a bloodydamn moment.”
“Darrow…” Mustang tries to interrupt. I keep going, methodically sorting through the options, how we must hunt down Aja, rejoin with the Sons. She puts a hand on my arm. “Darrow. Stop.” I falter. Losing track of where I was, slipping away from the comfort of logic and falling straight into the emotion of it all. Ragnar’s blood is under my nails. All he wanted was to come home to his people and lead them out of darkness like he saw me doing with mine. I robbed him of that choice by leading the attack on Aja. I don’t cry. There isn’t time for it, but I sit there with my head in my hands. Mustang touches my shoulder.
“He smiled in the end,” she says softly. “Do you know why? Because he knew what he was doing was right. He was fighting for love. You’ve made a family of your friends. You always have. It made Ragnar a better man to know you. So you didn’t get him killed. You helped him live. But you have to live now.” She sits next to me. “I know you want to believe the best in people. But think how long it took for you to get through to Ragnar. To win over Tactus or me. What can you do in a day? A week? This place…it’s not our world. They don’t care about our rules or our morality. We will die here if we do not escape.”
“You don’t think Alia will listen.”
“Why would she? Obsidians only value strength. And where is ours? Ragnar even thought he would have to kill his mother. She won’t listen. Do you know the word for surrender in Nagal? Rjoga. The word for subjugation? Rjoga. What’s the word for slavery? Rjoga. Without Ragnar to lead them, what do you think is going to happen if you release them on the Society? Alia Snowsparrow is a blackblooded tyrant. And the rest of the warchiefs are no better. She might even be expecting us. Even if we’ve hacked the Golds’ monitoring systems, the Golds know she’s his mother, then they could have told her to expect him. She could be reporting to them right now.”
When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I’m tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.
Holiday grunts. “Escaping won’t be that easy.”
“Step one,” Mustang says as she slips free of her manacles. She used a little shard of bone to pick the lock.
“Where’d you learn that?” Holiday asks.
“You think the Institute was my first school?” she asks. “Your turn.” She reaches for my manacles. “As I see it, we can rush them when they open the…what’s wrong?”
I’ve pulled my hands back from her. “I’m not leaving.”
“Darrow…”
“Ragnar was my friend. I told him I would help his people. I will not run to save myself. I will not let him die in vain. The only way out is through.”
“The Obsidians…”
“Are needed,” I say. “Without them, I can’t fight Gold Legions. Not even with your help.”
“All right,” Mustang says, not belaboring the point. “Then how do you intend to change Alia’s mind?”
“I think I’ll need your help with that.”
Hours later, we are guided to the center a cavernous throne room built for giants. It’s lit by seal oil lamps that belch out black smoke along the walls. The iron doors slam shut behind us, and we’re left alone before a throne, upon which sits the largest human being I’ve ever seen. She watches us from the far side of the room, more statue than woman. We approach awkwardly in our chains. Boots over the slick black floor till we come before Alia Snowsparrow, Queen of the Valkyrie.
Across her lap lies the body of her dead son.
Alia glares down at us. She is as colossal as Ragnar, but ancient and wicked, like the oldest tree of some primeval forest. The kind that drinks the soil and blocks the sun for lesser trees and watches them wither and yellow and die and does nothing but reach her branches higher and dig her roots deeper. The wind has armored her face in dead skin and calluses. Her hair is stringy and long, the color of dirty snow. She sits on a cushion of furs stacked inside the rib cage of the skeleton of what must have been the largest griffin ever Carved. The griffin’s head screams silently down at us from above her. The wings spread against the stone wall, ten meters across. On her head is a crown of black glass. At her feet is her fabled warchest which is locked in times of peace by a great iron device. Her knotty hands are covered in blood.
This is the primal realm, and though I would know what to say to a queen who sits upon a throne, I have no bloodydamn clue what to say to a mother who sits with her own son dead in her lap and looks at me as though I am some worm that’s just slithered up from the taiga.
It seems she doesn’t much care that I’ve lost my tongue. Hers is sharp enough.
“There is a great heresy in our lands against the gods who rule the thousand stars of the Abyss.” Her voice rumbles like that of an old crocodile. But it is not her language, it is ours. HighLingo Aureate. A sacred tongue, known by few in these lands, mostly the shaman who commune with the gods. Spies, in other words. Alia’s fluency startles Mustang. But not me. I know how the low rise under the power of the mighty, and this merely confirms what I’ve long suspected. Slaggin’ Gamma are not the only favored slaves of the worlds.
“A heresy told by wicked prophets with wicked aims. For a summer and a winter it has slithered through us. Poisoning my people and the people of the Dragon Spine and the Blooded Tents and the Rattling Caves. Poisoning them with lies that spit in the eye of our people.” She leans down from her throne, blackheads huge on her nose. Wrinkles deep ravines around pitch eyes.
“Lies that say a Stained son will return and he will bring a man to guide us from this land. A morning star in the darkness. I have sought these heretics out to learn of their whispers, to see if the gods spoke through them. They did not. Evil spoke through them. And so I have hunted the heretics. Broken their bones with my own hands. Peeled their flesh and set them upon the rock of the spires to be eaten as carrion by the fowl of the ice.” The seven bodies who dangled from the chains outside. Ragnar’s friends.
“This I do for my people. Because I love my people. Because the children of my loins are few, and those of my heart many. For I knew the heresy to be a lie. Ragnar, blood of my blood, would never return. To return would mean the breaking of oaths to me, to his people, to the gods who watch over us from Asgard on high.”
She looks down at her dead son.
“And then I woke into this nightmare.” She closes her eyes. Breathes deep and opens them again. “Who are you to bring the corpse of my best born to my spire?”
“My name is Darrow of Lykos,” I say. “This is Virginia au Augustus and Holiday ti Nakamura.” Alia’s eyes ignore Holiday and twitch over to Mustang. Even at nearly two meters, she seems a child in this huge room. “We came with Ragnar as a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Rising.”
“The Rising.” She dislikes the taste of the foreign word. “And who are you to my son?” She eyes my hair with more disdain than a mortal should have for a god. Something deeper is at play here. “Are you Ragnar’s master?”
“I am his brother,” I correct.
“His brother?” She mocks the idea.
“Your son swore an oath of servitude to me when I took him from a Gold. He offered me Stains and I offered him his freedom. Since then he has been my brother.”
“He…” Her voice catches. “Died free?”
The way she says it intones that deeper understanding. One Mustang notes. “He did. His men, the ones you have hanging on the walls outside, would have told you that I lead a rebellion against the Golds who rule over you, who took Ragnar from you as they took your other children. And they would have told you, as well as all your people, that Ragnar was the greatest of my generals. He was a good man. He was—”
“I know my son,” she interrupts. “I swam with him in the ice floes when he was a boy. Taught him the names of the snow, of the storms, and took him upon my griffin to show him the spine of the world. His hands clutched my hair and sang for joy as we rose through the clouds above. My son was without fear.” She remembers that day very differently than Ragnar did. “I know my son. And I do not need a stranger to tell me of his spirit.”
“Then you should ask yourself, Queen, what would make him return here.” Mustang says. “What would make him send his men here, if he would come here himself if he knew it meant breaking his oath to you and your people?”
Alia does not speak as she examines Mustang with those hungry eyes.
“Brother.” She mocks the word again, looking back to me. “I wonder, would you use brothers as you have used my son? Bringing him here. As if he is the key to unlocking the giants of the ice?” She looks around the hall so I see the deeds carved into the stone that stretches the height of fifteen men above us. I’ve never met an Obsidian artisan. They send us only their warriors. “As if you could use a mother’s love against her. This is the way of men. I can smell your ambition. Your plans. I do not know the Abyss, oh, worldly warlord, but I know the ice. I know the serpents that slither in the hearts of men.
“I questioned the heretics myself. I know what you are. I know you descend from a lower creature than us. A Red. I have seen Reds. They are like children. Little elves who live in the bones of the world. But you stole the body of an Aesir, of a Sunborn. You call yourself a breaker of chains, but you are a maker of them. You wish to bind us to you. Using our strength to make you great. Like every man.”
She leans over my dead friend to leer at me and I see what this woman respects, why Ragnar believed he would have to kill her and take her throne, and why Mustang wanted to flee. Strength. And where is mine, she wonders.
“You know many things of him,” Mustang says. “But you know nothing of me, yet you insult me.”
Alia frowns. It’s clear she has no idea who Mustang is, and no wish to anger a true Gold, if, indeed, Mustang is one. Her confidence wavers only a fraction. “I have laid no claims against you, Sunborn.”
“But you have. By suggesting he has evil wishes in store for your people, you too suggest that I collude with him. That I, his companion, am here with the same wicked intentions.”
“Then what are your intentions? Why do you accompany this creature?”
“To see if he was worth following,” Mustang says.
“And is he?”
“I don’t know yet. What I do know is that millions will follow him. Do you know that number? Can you even comprehend it, Alia?”
“I know the number.”
“You asked my intentions,” Mustang says. “I will put it plainly. I am a warlord and Queen like you. My dominion is larger than you can comprehend. I have metal ships in the Abyss that carry more men than you have ever seen. That can crack the highest mountain in two. And I am here to tell you that I am not a god. Those men and women on Asgard are not gods. They are flesh and blood. Like you. Like me.”
Alia rises slowly, bearing her huge son easily in her arms, and walks him to a stone altar and lays him upon it. She pours oil from a small urn onto a cloth and drapes it over Ragnar’s face. Then she kisses the cloth. Looking down at him.
Mustang presses her. “This land cannot hold seed. It is ruled by wind and ice and barren rock. But you survive. Cannibals roam the hills. Enemy clans ache for your land. But you survive. You sell your sons, your daughters to your ‘gods,’ but you survive. Tell me, Alia. Why? Why live when all you live for is to serve. To watch your family wither away? I’ve watched mine go. Each stolen from me one by one. My world is broken. And so is yours. But if you join your arms with mine, with Darrow as Ragnar wanted…we can make a new world.”
Alia turns back to us, beleaguered. Her steps are slow and measured as she comes before us. “Which would you fear more, Virginia au Augustus, a god? Or a mortal with the power of a god?” The question hangs between them, creating a rift words cannot mend. “A god cannot die. So a god has no fear. But mortal men…” She clucks her tongue behind her stained teeth. “How frightened they are that the darkness will come. How horribly they will fight to stay in the light.”
Her corrupt voice chills my blood.
She knows.
Mustang and I realize it at the same terrible moment. Alia knows her gods are mortal. A new fear bubbles up from the deepest part of me. I’m a fool. We traveled all this distance to pull the wool from her eyes, but she’s already seen the truth. Somehow. Some way. Did the Golds come to her because she is queen? Did she discover it herself? Before she sold Ragnar? After? It’s no matter. She’s already resigned herself to this world. To the lie.
“There’s another path,” I say desperately, knowing that Alia made her judgment against us before we ever entered the room. “Ragnar saw it. He saw a world where your people could leave the ice. Where they could make their own destiny. Join me and that world is possible. I will give you the means to take the power that will let you cross the stars like your ancestors, to walk unseen, to fly among the clouds on boots. You can live in the land of your choosing. Where the wind is warm as flesh and the land is green instead of white. All you need to do is fight with me like your son did.”
“No, little man. You cannot fight the sky. You cannot fight the river or the sea or the mountains. And you cannot fight the Gods,” Alia says. “So I will do my duty. I will protect my people. I will send you to Asgard in chains. I will let the Gods on high decide your fate. My people will live on. Sefi will inherit my throne. And I will bury my son in the ice from which he was born.”