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.”
The sky is the color of blood underneath a dead nail as we fly away from the Spires. This time, we are imprisoned, chained belly down to the back of fetid fur saddles like luggage. My eyes water as the wind of the lower troposphere slashes into them. The griffin beats its wings, muscled shoulders rippling, churning the air. We bank sideways and I see the riders tilting their masked faces up to the sky to see the faint light that is Phobos. Little flashes of white and yellow mar the darkening sky as ships overhead battle. I pray silently for Sevro’s safety, for Victra’s and the Howlers.
Words failed with Alia, as Mustang said they would. And now we are bound for Asgard, a gift for the gods to secure the future of her people. That is what she told Sefi. And her silent daughter took my chains and, with the help of Alia’s personal guards, dragged me and Mustang and Holiday to the hangar where her Valkyrie waited.
Now, hours later, we pass over a land created by wrathful gods in their youth. Dramatic and brutal, the Antarctic was designed as punishment and a test for the ancestors of the Obsidians who dared rise against the Golds in the two-hundredth year of their reign. A place so savage less than sixty percent of Obsidians reach adulthood, per Board of Quality Control quotas.
That desperate struggle for life robs them of a chance for culture and societal progress, just as the nomadic tribes of the first Dark Ages were so robbed. Farmers make culture. Nomads make war.
Subtle signs of life freckle the bald waste. Roving herds of auroch. Fires on mountain ridges, glittering from the cracks in the great doors of Obsidian cities that are carved into the rock as they gather supplies and huddle behind their walls on the eve of the long dark of winter. We fly for hours. I fall in and out of sleep, body exhausted. Not having closed my eyes since we shared the pasta with Ragnar in our cozy hole in the belly of that dead ship. How has so much changed so quickly?
I wake to the bellow of a horn. Ragnar is dead. It’s the first thought in my head.
I am no stranger waking to grief.