“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.”