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?”
