A Conjuring of Light E-Book

V. E. Schwab

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The precarious equilibrium among the four Londons has reached its breaking point. Once brimming with the red vivacity of magic, darkness casts a shadow over the Maresh Empire, leaving a space for another London to rise. Kell begins to waver under the pressure of competing loyalties. Meanwhile, an ancient enemy returns to claim a crown and a fallen hero is desperate to save a decaying world…

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by V.E. Schwab

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I: World in Ruin

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

II: City in Shadow

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

III: Fall or Fight

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

IV: Weapons at Hand

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

V: Ash and Atonement

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

VI: Execution

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

VII: Setting Sail

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

VIII: Uncharted Waters

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

IX: Trouble

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

X: Blood and Binding

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

XI: Death at Sea

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

XII: Betrayal

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

XIII: A King’s Place

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XIV: ANTARI

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

XV: ANOSHE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Also by V.E. SCHWAB and TITAN BOOKS

A Darker Shade of Magic

A Gathering of Shadows

Vicious

This Savage Song

Our Dark Duet (June 2017)

A CONJURING OF LIGHT

Print edition ISBN: 9781785652448E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652455

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: February 201710 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

V.E. Schwab asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2017 V.E. Schwab

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For the ones who’ve found their way home

Pure magic has no self. It simply is, a force of nature, the blood of our world, the marrow of our bones. We give it shape, but we must never give it soul.

MASTER TIEREN,

head priest of the London Sanctuary

I

Delilah Bard—always a thief, recently a magician, and one day, hopefully, a pirate—was running as fast as she could.

Hold on, Kell, she thought as she sprinted through the streets of Red London, still clutching the shard of stone that had once been part of Astrid Dane’s mouth. A token stolen in another life, when magic and the idea of multiple worlds were new to her. When she had only just discovered that people could be possessed, or bound like rope, or turned to stone.

Fireworks thundered in the distance, met by cheers and chants and music, all the sounds of a city celebrating the end of the Essen Tasch, the tournament of magic. A city oblivious to the horror happening at its heart. And back at the palace, the prince of Arnes—Rhy—was dying, which meant that somewhere, a world away, so was Kell.

Kell. The name rang through her with all the force of an order, a plea.

Lila reached the road she was looking for and staggered to a stop, knife already out, blade pressing to the flesh of her hand. Her heart pounded as she turned her back on the chaos and pressed her bleeding palm—and the stone still curled within it—to the nearest wall.

Twice before Lila had made this journey, but always as a passenger.

Always using Kell’s magic.

Never her own.

And never alone.

But there was no time to think, no time to be afraid, and certainly no time to wait.

Chest heaving and pulse high, Lila swallowed and said the words, as boldly as she could. Words that belonged only on the lips of a blood magician. An Antari. Like Holland. Like Kell.

“As Travars.”

The magic sang up her arm, and through her chest, and then the city lurched around her, gravity twisting as the world gave way.

Lila thought it would be easy or, at least, simple.

Something you either survived, or did not.

She was wrong.

II

A world away, Holland was drowning.

He fought to the surface of his own mind, only to be forced back down into the dark water by a will as strong as iron. He fought, and clawed, and gasped for air, strength leaching out with every violent thrash, every desperate struggle. It was worse than dying, because dying gave way to death, and this did not.

There was no light. No air. No strength. It had all been taken, severed, leaving only darkness and, somewhere beyond the crush, a voice shouting his name.

Kell’s voice—

Too far away.

Holland’s grip faltered, slipped, and he was sinking again.

All he had ever wanted was to bring the magic back—to see his world spared from its slow, inexorable death—a death caused first by the fear of another London, and then by the fear of his own.

All Holland wanted was to see his world restored.

Revived.

He knew the legends—the dreams—of a magician powerful enough to do it. Strong enough to breathe air back into its starved lungs, to quicken its dying heart.

For as long as Holland could remember, that was all he’d wanted.

And for as long as Holland could remember, he had wanted the magician to be him.

Even before the darkness bloomed across his eye, branding him with the mark of power, he’d wanted it to be him. He’d stood on the banks of the Sijlt as a child, skating stones across the frozen surface, imagining that he would be the one to crack the ice. Stood in the Silver Wood as a grown man, praying for the strength to protect his home. He’d never wanted to be king, though in the stories the magician always was. He didn’t want to rule the world. He only wanted to save it.

Athos Dane had called this arrogance, that first night, when Holland was dragged, bleeding and half conscious, into the new king’s chambers. Arrogance and pride, he’d chided, as he carved his curse into Holland’s skin.

Things to be broken.

And Athos had. He’d broken Holland one bone, one day, one order at a time. Until all Holland wanted, more than the ability to save his world, more than the strength to bring the magic back, more than anything, was for it to end.

It was cowardice, he knew, but cowardice came so much easier than hope.

And in that moment by the bridge, when Holland lowered his guard and let the spoiled princeling Kell drive the metal bar through his chest, the first thing he felt—the first and last and only thing he felt—was relief.

That it was finally over.

Only it wasn’t.

It is a hard thing, to kill an Antari.

When Holland woke, lying in a dead garden, in a dead city, in a dead world, the first thing he felt then was pain. The second thing was freedom. Athos Dane’s hold was gone, and Holland was alive—broken, but alive.

And stranded.

Trapped in a wounded body in a world with no door at the mercy of another king. But this time, he had a choice.

A chance to set things right.

He’d stood, half dead, before the onyx throne, and spoken to the king carved in stone, and traded freedom for a chance to save his London, to see it bloom again. Holland made the deal, paid with his own body and soul. And with the shadow king’s power, he had finally brought the magic back, seen his world bloom into color, his people’s hope revived, his city restored.

He’d done everything he could, given up everything he had, to keep it safe.

But it still was not enough.

Not for the shadow king, who always wanted more, who grew stronger every day and craved chaos, magic in its truest form, power without control.

Holland was losing hold of the monster in his skin.

And so he’d done the only thing he could.

He’d offered Osaron another vessel.

“Very well …” said the king, the demon, the god. “But if they cannot be persuaded, I will keep your body as my own.”

And Holland agreed—how could he not?

Anything for London.

And Kell—spoiled, childish, headstrong Kell, broken and powerless and snared by that damned collar—had still refused.

Of course he had refused.

Of course—

The shadow king had smiled then, with Holland’s own mouth, and he had fought, with everything he could summon, but a deal was a deal and the deal was done and he felt Osaron surge up—that single, violent motion—and Holland was shoved down, into the dark depths of his own mind, forced under by the current of the shadow king’s will.

Helpless, trapped within a body, within a deal, unable to do anything but watch, and feel, and drown.

“Holland!”

Kell’s voice cracked as he strained his broken body against the frame, the way Holland had once, when Athos Dane first bound him. Broke him. The cage leached away most of Kell’s power; the collar around his throat cut off the rest. There was a terror in Kell’s eyes, a desperation that surprised him.

“Holland, you bastard, fight back!”

He tried, but his body was no longer his, and his mind, his tired mind, was sinking down, down—

Give in, said the shadow king.

“Show me you’re not weak!” Kell’s voice pushed through. “Prove you’re not still a slave to someone else’s will!”

You cannot fight me.

“Did you really come all the way back to lose like this?”

I’ve already won.

“Holland!”

Holland hated Kell, and in that moment, the hatred was almost enough to drive him up, but even if he wanted to rise to the other Antari’s bait, Osaron was unyielding.

Holland heard his own voice, then, but of course it wasn’t his. A twisted imitation by the monster wearing his skin. In Holland’s hand, a crimson coin, a token to another London, Kell’s London, and Kell was swearing and throwing himself against his bonds until his chest heaved and his wrists were bloody.

Useless.

It was all useless.

Once again he was a prisoner in his own body. Kell’s voice echoed through the dark.

You’ve just traded one master for another.

They were moving now, Osaron guiding Holland’s body. The door closed behind them, but Kell’s screams still hurled themselves against the wood, shattering into broken syllables and strangled cries.

Ojka stood in the hall, sharpening her knives. She looked up, revealing the crescent scar on one cheek, and her two-toned eyes, one yellow, the other black. An Antari forged by their hands—by their mercy.

“Your Majesty,” she said, straightening.

Holland tried to rise up, tried to force his voice across their—his—lips, but when speech came, the words were Osaron’s.

“Guard the door. Let no one pass.”

A flicker of a smile across the red slash of Ojka’s mouth. “As you wish.”

The palace passed in a blur, and then they were outside, passing the statues of the Dane twins at the base of the stairs, moving swiftly beneath a bruised sky through a garden now flanked by trees instead of bodies.

What would become of it, without Osaron, without him? Would the city continue to flourish? Or would it collapse, like a body stripped of life?

Please, he begged silently. This world needs me.

“There is no point,” said Osaron aloud, and Holland felt sick to be the thought in their head instead of the word. “It is already dead,” continued the king. “We will start over. We will find a world worthy of our strength.”

They reached the garden wall and Osaron drew a dagger from the sheath at their waist. The bite of steel on flesh was nothing, as if Holland had been cut off from his very senses, buried too deep to feel anything but Osaron’s grip. But as the shadow king’s fingers streaked through the blood and lifted Kell’s coin to the wall, Holland struggled up one last time.

He couldn’t win back his body—not yet—not all of it—but perhaps he didn’t need everything.

One hand. Five fingers.

He threw every ounce of strength, every shred of will, into that one limb, and halfway to the wall, it stopped, hovering in the air.

Blood trickled down his wrist. Holland knew the words to break a body, to turn it to ice, or ash, or stone.

All he had to do was guide his hand to his own chest.

All he had to do was shape the magic—

Holland could feel the annoyance ripple through Osaron. Annoyance, but not rage, as if this last stand, this great protest, was nothing but an itch.

How tedious.

Holland kept fighting, even managed to guide his hand an inch, two.

Let go, Holland, warned the creature in his head.

Holland forced the last of his will into his hand, dragging it another inch.

Osaron sighed.

It did not have to be this way.

Osaron’s will hit him like a wall. His body didn’t move, but his mind slammed backward, pinned beneath a crushing pain. Not the pain he’d felt a hundred times, the kind he’d learned to exist beyond, outside, the kind he might escape. This pain was rooted in his very core. It lit him up, sudden and bright, every nerve burning with such searing heat that he screamed and screamed and screamed inside his head, until the darkness finally—mercifully—closed over him, forcing him under and down.

And this time, Holland didn’t try to surface.

This time, he let himself drown.

III

Kell kept throwing himself against the metal cage long after the door slammed shut and the bolt slid home. His voice still echoed against the pale stone walls. He had screamed himself hoarse. But still, no one came. Fear pounded through him, but what scared Kell most was the loosening in his chest—the unhinging of a vital link, the spreading sense of loss.

He could hardly feel his brother’s pulse.

Could hardly feel anything but the pain in his wrists and a horrible numbing cold. He twisted against the metal frame, fighting the restraints, but they held fast. Spell work was scrawled down the sides of the contraption, and despite the quantity of Kell’s blood smeared on the steel, there was the collar circling his throat, cutting off everything he needed. Everything he had. Everything he was. The collar cast a shadow over his mind, an icy film over his thoughts, cold dread and sorrow and, through it all, an absence of hope. Of strength. Give up, it whispered through his blood. You have nothing. You are nothing. Powerless.

He’d never been powerless.

He didn’t know how to be powerless.

Panic rose in place of magic.

He had to get out.

Out of this cage.

Out of this collar.

Out of this world.

Rhy had carved a word into his own skin to bring Kell home, and he’d turned around and left again. Abandoned the prince, the crown, the city. Followed a woman in white through a door in the world because she told him he was needed, told him he could help, told him it was his fault, that he had to make it right.

Kell’s heart faltered in his chest.

No—not his heart. Rhy’s. A life bound to his with magic he no longer had. The panic flared again, a breath of heat against the numbing cold, and Kell clung to it, pushing back against the collar’s hollow dread. He straightened in the frame, clenched his teeth and pulled against his cuffs until he felt the crack of bone inside his wrist, the tear of flesh. Blood fell in thick red drops to the stone floor, vibrant but useless. He bit back a scream as metal dragged over—and into—skin. Pain knifed up his arm, but he kept pulling, metal scraping muscle and then bone before his right hand finally came free.

Kell slumped back with a gasp and tried to wrap his bloody, limp fingers around the collar, but the moment they touched the metal, a horrible pins-and-needles cold seared up his arm, swam in his head.

“As Steno,” he pleaded. Break.

Nothing happened.

No power rose to meet the word.

Kell let out a sob and sagged against the frame. The room tilted and tunneled, and he felt his mind sliding toward darkness, but he forced his body to stay upright, forced himself to swallow the bile rising in his throat. He curled his skinned and splintered hand around his still-trapped arm, and began to pull.

It was minutes—but it felt like hours, years—before Kell finally tore himself free.

He stumbled forward out of the frame, and swayed on his feet. The metal cuffs had cut deep into his wrists—too deep—and the pale stone beneath his feet was slick with red.

Is this yours? whispered a voice.

A memory of Rhy’s young face twisted in horror at the sight of Kell’s ruined forearms, the blood streaked across the prince’s chest. Is this all yours?

Now the collar dripped red as Kell frantically pulled on the metal. His fingers ached with cold as he found the clasp and clawed at it, but still it held. His focus blurred. He slipped in his own blood and went down, catching himself with broken hands. Kell cried out, curling in on himself even as he screamed at his body to rise.

He had to get up.

He had to get back to Red London.

He had to stop Holland—stop Osaron.

He had to save Rhy.

He had to, he had to, he had to—but in that moment, all Kell could do was lie on the cold marble, warmth spreading in a thin red pool around him.

IV

The prince collapsed back against the bed, soaked through with sweat, choking on the metal taste of blood. Voices rose and fell around him, the room a blur of shadows, shards of light. A scream tore through his head, but his own jaw locked in pain. Pain that was and wasn’t his.

Kell.

Rhy doubled over, coughing up blood and bile.

He tried to rise—he had to get up, had to find his brother—but hands surged from the darkness, fought him, held him down against silk sheets, fingers digging into shoulders and wrists and knees, and the pain was there again, vicious and jagged, peeling back flesh, dragging its nails over bone. Rhy tried to remember. Kell—arrested. His cell—empty. Searching the sun-dappled orchard. Calling his brother’s name. Then, out of nowhere, pain, sliding between his ribs, just as it had that night, a horrible, severing thing, and he couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t—

“Don’t let go,” said a voice.

“Stay with me.”

“Stay …”

* * *

Rhy learned early the difference between want and need.

Being the son and heir—the only heir—of the Maresh family, the light of Arnes, the future of the empire, meant that he had never (as a nursery minder once informed him, before being removed from the royal service) experienced true need. Clothes, horses, instruments, fineries—all he had to do was ask for a thing, and it was given.

And yet, the young prince wanted—deeply—a thing that could not be fetched. He wanted what coursed in the blood of so many low-born boys and girls. What came so easily to his father, to his mother, to Kell.

Rhy wanted magic.

Wanted it with a fire that rivaled any need.

His royal father had a gift for metals, and his mother an easy touch with water, but magic wasn’t like black hair or brown eyes or elevated birth—it didn’t follow the rules of lineage, wasn’t passed down from parent to child. It chose its own course.

And already at the age of nine, it was beginning to look as though magic hadn’t chosen him at all.

But Rhy Maresh refused to believe that he’d been passed over entirely; it had to be there, somewhere within him, that flame of power waiting for a well-timed breath, a poker’s nudge. After all, he was a prince. And if magic would not come to him, he’d go to it.

It was that logic that had brought him here, to the stone floor of the Sanctuary’s drafty old library, shivering as the cold leached through the embroidered silk of his pant legs (designed for the palace, where it was always warm).

Whenenever Rhy complained about the chill in the Sanctuary, old Tieren would crinkle his brow.

Magic makes its own warmth, he’d say, which was well and good if you were a magician, but then, Rhy wasn’t.

Not yet.

This time he hadn’t complained. Hadn’t even told the head priest he was here.

The young prince crouched in an alcove at the back of the library, hidden behind a statue and a long wooden table, and spread the stolen parchment on the floor.

Rhy had been born with light fingers—but of course, being royal, he almost never had to use them. People were always willing to offer things freely, indeed leaping at the ready to deliver, from a cloak on a chilly day to a frosted cake from the kitchens.

But Rhy hadn’t asked for the scroll; he’d lifted it from Tieren’s desk, one of a dozen tied with the thin white ribbon that marked a priest’s spell. None of them were all that fancy or elaborate, much to Rhy’s chagrin. Instead they focused on utility.

Spells to keep the food from spoiling.

Spells to protect the orchard trees from frost.

Spells to keep a fire burning without oil.

And Rhy would try every single one until he found a spell that he could do. A spell that would speak to the magic surely sleeping in his veins. A spell that could wake it up.

A breeze whipped through the Sanctuary as he dug a handful of red lin from his pocket and weighted the parchment to the floor. On its surface, in the head priest’s steady hand, was a map—not like the one in his father’s war room that showed the whole kingdom. No, this was a map of a spell, a diagram of magic.

Across the top of the scroll were three words in the common tongue.

Is Anos Vol, read Rhy.

The Eternal Flame.

Beneath those words was a pair of concentric circles, linked by delicate lines and dotted with small symbols, the condensed shorthand favored by the spell-makers of London. Rhy squinted, trying to make sense of the scrawl. He had a knack for languages, picking up the airy cadence of the Faroan tongue, the choppy waves made by each Veskan syllable, the hills and valleys of Arnes’s own border dialects—but the words on the parchment seemed to shift and blur before his eyes, sliding in and out of focus.

He chewed his lip (it was a bad habit, one his mother was always warning him to break because it wasn’t princely), then planted his hands on either side of the paper, fingertips brushing the outer circle, and began the spell.

He focused his eyes on the center of the page as he read, sounding out each word, the fragments clumsy and broken on his tongue. His pulse rose in his ears, the beat at odds with the natural rhythm of the magic. But Rhy held the spell together, pinned it down with sheer force of will, and as he neared the end a tingling of heat started in his hands; he could feel it trickling through his palms, into his fingers, brushing the circle’s edge, and then …

Nothing.

No spark.

No flame.

He said the spell once, twice, three more times, but the heat in his hands was already fading, dissolving into an ordinary prickle of numbness. Dejected, he let the words trail off, taking the last of his focus with them.

The prince sagged back onto the cold stones. “Sanct,” he muttered, even though he knew it was bad form to swear, and worse to do it here.

“What are you doing?”

Rhy looked up and saw his brother standing at the mouth of the alcove, a red cloak around his narrow shoulders. Even at ten and three quarters, Kell’s face had the set of a serious man, down to the furrow between his brows. Kell’s red hair glinted even in the grey morning light, and his eyes—one blue, the other black as night—made people look down, away. Rhy didn’t understand why, but he always made a point of looking his brother in the face, to show Kell it didn’t matter. Eyes were eyes.

Kell wasn’t really his brother, of course. Even a passing look would mark them as different. Kell was a mixture, like different kinds of clay twined together; he had the fair skin of a Veskan, the lanky body of a Faroan, and the copper hair found only on the northern edge of Arnes. And then, of course, there were his eyes. One natural, if not particularly Arnesian, and the other Antari, marked by magic itself as aven. Blessed.

Rhy, on the other hand, with his warm brown skin, his black hair and amber eyes, was all London, all Maresh, all royal.

Kell took in the prince’s high color, and then the parchment spread out before him. He knelt across from Rhy, the fabric of his cloak pooling on the stones around him. “Where did you get this?” he asked, a prickle of displeasure in his voice.

“From Tieren,” said Rhy. His brother shot him a skeptical look, and Rhy amended, “From Tieren’s study.”

Kell skimmed the spell and frowned. “An eternal flame?”

Rhy absently plucked one of the lin from the floor and shrugged. “First thing I grabbed.” He tried to sound as if he didn’t care about the stupid spell, but his throat was tight, his eyes burning. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, skipping the coin across the ground as if it were a pebble on water. “I can’t make it work.”

Kell shifted his weight, lips moving silently as he read over the priest’s scrawl. He held his hands above the paper, palms cupped as if cradling a flame that wasn’t even there yet, and began to recite the spell. When Rhy had tried, the words had fallen out like rocks, but on Kell’s lips, they were poetry, smooth and sibilant.

The air around them warmed instantly, steam rising from the penned lines on the scroll before the ink drew in and up into a bead of oil, and lit.

The flame hovered in the air between Kell’s hands, brilliant and white.

He made it look so easy, and Rhy felt a flash of anger toward his brother, hot as a spark—but just as brief.

It wasn’t Kell’s fault Rhy couldn’t do magic. Rhy started to rise when Kell caught his cuff. He guided Rhy’s hands to either side of the spell, pulling the prince into the fold of his magic. Warmth tickled Rhy’s palms, and he was torn between delight at the power and knowledge that it wasn’t his.

“It isn’t right,” he murmured. “I’m the crown prince, the heir of Maxim Maresh. I should be able to light a blasted candle.”

Kell chewed his lip—Mother never chided him for the habit—and then said, “There are different kinds of power.”

“I would rather have magic than a crown,” sulked Rhy.

Kell studied the small white flame between them. “A crown is a sort of magic, if you think about it. A magician rules an element. A king rules an empire.”

“Only if the king is strong enough.”

Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.”

Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?”

At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the only one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead.

“You’re an arse,” he muttered, trying to pull away, but his brother’s fingers tightened.

“Don’t let go.”

“Get off,” said Rhy, first playfully, but then, as the fire grew brighter and hotter between his palms, he repeated in earnest, “Stop. You’re hurting me.”

Heat licked his fingers, a white-hot pain lancing through his hands and up his arms.

“Stop,” he pleaded. “Kell, stop.” But when Rhy looked up from the glowing fire to his brother’s face, it wasn’t a face at all. Nothing but a pool of darkness. Rhy gasped, tried to scramble away, but his brother was no longer flesh and blood but stone, hands carved into cuffs around Rhy’s wrists.

This wasn’t right, he thought, it had to be a dream—a nightmare—but the heat of the fire and the crushing pressure on his wrists were both so real, worsening with every heartbeat, every breath.

The flame between them went long and thin, sharpening into a blade of light, its tip pointed first at the ceiling, and then, slowly, horribly, at Rhy. He fought, and screamed, but it did nothing to stop the knife as it blazed and buried itself in his chest.

Pain.

Make it stop.

It carved its way across his ribs, lit his bones, tore through his heart. Rhy tried to scream, and retched smoke. His chest was a ragged wound of light.

Kell’s voice came, not from the statue, but from somewhere else. Somewhere far away and fading. Don’t let go.

But it hurt. It hurt so much.

Stop.

Rhy was burning from the inside out.

Please.

Dying.

Stay.

Again.

* * *

For a moment, the black gave way to streaks of color, a ceiling of billowing fabric, a familiar face hovering at the edge of his tear-blurred sight, stormy eyes wide with worry.

“Luc?” rasped Rhy.

“I’m here,” answered Alucard. “I’m here. Stay with me.”

He tried to speak, but his heart slammed against his ribs as if trying to break through.

It redoubled, then faltered.

“Have they found Kell?” said a voice.

“Get away from me,” ordered another.

“Everyone out.”

Rhy’s vision blurred.

The room wavered, the voices dulled, the pain giving way to something worse, the white-hot agony of the invisible knife dissolving into cold as his body fought and failed and fought and failed and failed and—

No, he pleaded, but he could feel the threads breaking one by one inside him until there was nothing left to hold him up.

Until Alucard’s face vanished, and the room fell away.

Until the darkness wrapped its heavy arms around Rhy, and buried him.

V

Alucard Emery wasn’t used to feeling powerless.

Mere hours earlier, he’d won the Essen Tasch and been named the strongest magician in the three empires. But now, sitting by Rhy’s bed, he had no idea what to do. How to help. How to save him.

The magician watched as the prince curled in on himself, deathly pale against the tangled sheets, watched as Rhy cried out in pain, attacked by something even Alucard couldn’t see, couldn’t fight. And he would have—would have gone to the end of the world to keep Rhy safe. But whatever was killing him, it wasn’t here.

“What is happening?” he’d asked a dozen times. “What can I do?”

But no one answered, so he was left piecing together the queen’s pleas and the king’s orders, Lila’s urgent words and the echoes of the royal guards’ searching voices, all of them calling for Kell.

Alucard sat forward, clutching the prince’s hand, and watched the threads of magic around Rhy’s body fray, threatening to snap.

Others looked at the world and saw light and shadow and color, but Alucard Emery had always been able to see more. Had always been able to see the warp and weft of power, the pattern of magic. Not just the aura of a spell, the residue of an enchantment, but the tint of true magic circling a person, pulsing through their veins. Everyone could see the Isle’s red light, but Alucard saw the entire world in streaks of vivid color. Natural wells of magic glowed crimson. Elemental magicians were cloaked in green and blue. Curses stained purple. Strong spells burned gold. And Antari? They alone shone with a dark but iridescent light—not one color, but every color folded together, natural and unnatural, shimmering threads that wrapped like silk around them, dancing over their skin.

Alucard now watched those same threads fray and break around the prince’s coiled form.

It wasn’t right—Rhy’s own meager magic had always been a dark green (he’d told the prince once, only to watch his features crinkle in distaste—Rhy had never liked the color).

But the moment he’d set eyes on Rhy again, after three years away, Alucard had known the prince was different. Changed. It wasn’t the set of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, or the new shadows beneath his eyes. It was the magic bound to him. Power lived and breathed, was meant to move in the current of a person’s life. But this new magic around Rhy lay still, threads wrapped tight as rope around the prince’s body.

And each and every one of them shone like oil on water. Molten color and light.

That night, in Rhy’s chamber, when Alucard slid the tunic aside to kiss the prince’s shoulder, he’d seen the place where the silvery threads knitted into Rhy’s skin, woven straight into the scarred circles over his heart. He didn’t have to ask who’d made the spell—only one Antari came to mind—but Alucard couldn’t see how Kell had done it. Normally he could pick apart a piece of magic by looking at its threads, but the strands of the spell had no beginning, no end. The threads of Kell’s magic plunged into Rhy’s heart, and were lost—no, not lost, buried—the spellwork stiff, unshakeable.

And now, somehow, it was crumbling.

The threads snapped one by one under an invisible strain, every broken cord eliciting a sob, a shuddering breath from the half-conscious prince. Every fraying tether—

That’s what it was, he realized. Not just a spell, but a kind of link.

To Kell.

He didn’t know why the prince’s life was bound to the Antari’s. Didn’t want to imagine—though he now saw the scar between Rhy’s trembling ribs, as wide as a dagger’s edge, and the understanding reached him anyway, and he felt sick and helpless—but the link was breaking, and Alucard did the only thing he could.

He held the prince’s hand, and tried to pour his own power into the fraying threads, as if the storm-blue light of his magic could fuse with Kell’s iridescence instead of wicking uselessly away. He prayed to every power in the world, to every saint and every priest and every blessed figure—the ones he believed in and the ones he didn’t—for strength. And when they didn’t answer, he spoke to Rhy instead. He didn’t tell him to hold on, didn’t tell him to be strong.

Instead, he spoke of the past. Their past.

“Do you remember, the night before I left?” He fought to keep the fear from his voice. “You never answered my question.”

Alucard closed his eyes, in part so he could picture the memory, and in part because he couldn’t bear to watch the prince in so much pain.

It had been summer, and they’d been lying in bed, bodies tangled and warm. He’d drawn a hand along Rhy’s perfect skin, and when the prince had preened, he’d said, “One day you will be old and wrinkled, and I will still love you.”

“I’ll never be old,” said the prince with the certainty mustered only by the young and healthy and terribly naive.

“So you plan to die young, then?” he’d teased, and Rhy had given an elegant shrug.

“Or live forever.”

“Oh, really?”

The prince had swept a dark curl from his eyes. “Dying is so mundane.”

“And how, exactly,” said Alucard, propping himself on one elbow, “do you plan to live forever?”

Rhy had pulled him down, then, and ended their conversation with a kiss.

Now he shuddered on the bed, a sob escaping through clenched teeth. His black curls were matted to his face. The queen called for a cloth, called for the head priest, called for Kell. Alucard clutched his lover’s hand.

“I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry. But I’m here now, so you can’t die,” he said, his voice finally breaking. “Don’t you see how rude that would be, when I’ve come so far?”

The prince’s hand tightened as his body seized.

Rhy’s chest hitched up and down in a last, violent shudder.

And then he stilled.

And for a moment, Alucard was relieved, because Rhy was finally resting, finally asleep. For a moment, everything was all right. For a moment—

Then it shattered.

Someone was screaming.

The priests were pushing forward.

The guards were pulling him back.

Alucard stared down at the prince.

He didn’t understand.

He couldn’t understand.

And then Rhy’s hand slipped from his, and fell back to the bed.

Lifeless.

The last silver threads were losing their hold, sliding off his skin like sheets in summer.

And then he was screaming.

Alucard didn’t remember anything after that.

VI

For a single horrifying moment, Lila ceased to exist.

She felt herself unravel, breaking apart into a million threads, each one stretching, fraying, threatening to snap as she stepped out of the world, out of life—and into nothing. And then, just as suddenly, she was staggering forward onto her hands and knees in the street.

She let out a short, involuntary cry as she landed, limbs shaking, head ringing like a bell.

The ground beneath her palms—and there was ground, so that at least was a good sign—was rough and cold. The air was quiet. No fireworks. No music. Lila dragged herself back to her feet, blood dripping from her fingers, her nose. She wiped it away, red dots speckling the stone as she drew her knife and shifted her stance, putting her back to the icy wall. She remembered the last time she’d been here, in this London, the hungry eyes of men and women starved for power.

A splash of color caught her eye, and she looked up.

The sky overhead was streaked with sunset—pink and purple and burnished gold. Only, White London didn’t have color, not like this, and for a terrible second, she thought she’d crossed into yet another city, another world, had trapped herself even farther from home—wherever that was now.

But no, Lila recognized the road beneath her boots, the castle rising to gothic points against the setting sun. It was the same city, and yet entirely changed. It had only been four months since she’d set foot here, four months since she and Kell had faced the Dane twins. Then it had been a world of ice and ash and cold white stone. And now … now a man walked past her on the street, and he was smiling. Not the rictus grin of the starving, but the private smile of the content, the blessed.

This was wrong.

Four months, and in that time she’d learned to sense magic, its presence if not its intent. She couldn’t see it, not the way Alucard did, but with every breath she took, she tasted power on the air as if it were sugar, sweet and strong enough that it was cloying. The night air shimmered with it.

What the hell was going on?

And where was Kell?

Lila knew where she was, or at least where she’d chosen to pass through, and so she followed the high wall around a corner to the castle gates. They stood open, winter ivy winding through the iron. Lila dragged to a stop a second time. The stone forest—once a garden filled with bodies—was gone, replaced by an actual stretch of trees, and by guards in polished armor flanking the castle steps, all of them alert.

Kell had to be inside. A tether ran between them, thin as thread, but strangely strong, and Lila didn’t know if it was made by their magic or something else, but it drew her toward the castle like a weight. She tried not to think about what it meant, how much farther she would have to go, how many people she’d have to fight, to find him.

Wasn’t there a locator spell?

Lila wracked her mind for the words. As Travars had carried her between worlds, and As Tascen, that was the way to move between different places in the same world, but what if she wanted to find a person, not a place?

She cursed herself for not knowing, never asking. Kell had told her once, of finding Rhy after he’d been taken as a boy. What had he used? She dragged her memory—something Rhy had made. A wooden horse? Another image sprang to mind, of the kerchief—her kerchief—clenched in Kell’s hand when he first found her at the Stone’s Throw. But Lila didn’t have anything of his. No tokens. No trinkets.

Panic welled, and she fought it down.

So she didn’t have a charm to guide her. People were more than what they owned, and surely objects weren’t the only things that held a mark. They were made of pieces, words … memories.

And Lila had those.

She pressed her still-bloody hand to the castle gate, the cold iron biting at the shallow wound as she squeezed her eyes shut, and summoned Kell. First with the memory of the night they’d met, in the alley when she’d robbed him, and then later, when he’d walked through her wall. A stranger tied to her bed, the taste of magic, the promise of freedom, the fear of being left behind. Hand in hand through one world, and then another, pressed together as they hid from Holland, faced down sly Fletcher, fought the not-Rhy. The horror at the palace and the battle in White London, Kell’s blood-streaked body wrapped around hers in the rubble of the stone forest. The broken pieces of their lives cast apart. And then, returned. A game played behind masks. A new embrace. His hand burning on her waist as they danced, his mouth burning against hers as they kissed, bodies clashing like swords on the palace balcony. The terrifying heat, and then, too soon, the cold. Her collapse in the arena. His anger hurled like a weapon before he turned away. Before she let him go.

But she was here to take him back.

Lila steeled herself again, jaw clenched against the expectation of the pain to come.

She held the memories in her mind, pressed them to the wall as if they were a token, and said the words.

“As Tascen Kell.”

Against her hand, the gate shuddered and the world fell away as Lila staggered through, out of the street and into the pale polished chamber of a castle hallway.

Torches burned in sconces along the walls, footsteps sounded in the distance, and Lila allowed herself the briefest moment of satisfaction, maybe even relief, before realizing Kell wasn’t here. Her head was pounding, a curse halfway to her lips when, beyond a door to her left, she heard a muffled scream.

Lila’s blood went cold.

Kell. She reached for the door’s handle, but as her fingers closed around it, she caught the low whistle of metal singing through air. She cut to the side as a knife buried itself in the wood where Lila had been a moment before. A black cord drew a path from the hilt back through the air, and she turned, following the line to a woman in a pale cloak. A scar traced the other woman’s cheekbone, but that was the only ordinary thing about her. Darkness filled one eye and spilled over like wax, running down her cheek and up her temple, tracing the line of her jaw and vanishing into hair so red—redder than Kell’s coat, redder even than the river in Arnes—it seemed to singe the air. A color too bright for this world. Or, at least, too bright for the world it had been. But Lila felt the wrongness here, and it was more than vivid colors and ruined eyes.

This woman reminded her not of Kell, or even of Holland, but of the stolen black stone from months ago. That strange pull, a heavy beat.

With a flick of the wrist, a second knife appeared in the stranger’s left hand, hilt tethered to the cord’s other end. A swift tug, and the first knife freed itself from the wood and went flying back into the fingers of her right. Graceful as a bird gliding into formation.

Lila was almost impressed. “Who are you supposed to be?” she asked.

“I am the messenger,” said the woman, even though Lila knew a trained killer when she saw one. “And you?”

Lila drew two of her own knives. “I am the thief.”

“You cannot go in.”

Lila put her back to the door, Kell’s power like a dying pulse against her spine. Hold on, she thought desperately and then aloud, “Try and stop me.”

“What is your name?” asked the woman.

“What’s it to you?”

She smiled, then, a murderous grin. “My king will want to know who I’ve—”

But Lila didn’t wait for her to finish.

Her first knife flew through the air, and as the woman’s hand moved to deflect it, Lila struck with the second. She was halfway to meeting flesh when the corded blade came at her and she had to dodge, diving out of the way. She spun, ready to slash again, only to find herself parrying another scorpion strike. The cord between the knives was elastic, and the woman wielded the blades the way Jinnar did wind, Alucard water, or Kisimyr earth, the weapons wrapped in will so that when they flew, they had both the force of momentum and the elegance of magic.

And on top of it all, the woman moved with a disturbing grace, the fluid gestures of a dancer.

A dancer with two very sharp blades.

Lila ducked, the first blade biting through the air beside her face. Several strands of dark hair floated to the floor. The weapons blurred with speed, drawing her attention in different directions. It was all Lila could do to dodge the glinting bits of silver.

She’d been in her fair share of knife fights. Had started most of them herself. She knew the trick was to find the guard and get behind it, to force a moment of defense, an opening for attack, but this wasn’t hand-to-hand combat.

How was she supposed to fight a woman whose knives didn’t even stay in her hands?

The answer, of course, was simple: the same way she fought anyone else.

Quick and dirty.

After all, the point wasn’t to look good. It was to stay alive.

The woman’s blades lashed out like vipers, striking forward with sudden, terrifying speed. But there was a weakness: they couldn’t change course. Once a blade flew, it flew straight. And that was why a knife in the hand was better than one thrown.

Lila feinted right, and when the first blade came, she darted the other way. The second followed, charting another path, and Lila dodged again, carving a third line while the blades were both trapped in their routes.

“Got you,” she snarled, lunging for the woman.

And then, to her horror, the blades changed course. They veered midair, and plunged, Lila taking frantic flight as both weapons buried themselves in the floor where she’d been crouched a second earlier.

Of course. A metal worker.

Blood ran down Lila’s arm and dripped from her fingers. She’d been fast, but not quite fast enough.

Another flick of a wrist, and the knives flew back into the other woman’s hands. “Names are important,” she said, twirling the cord. “Mine is Ojka, and I have orders to keep you out.”

Beyond the doors, Kell let out a scream of frustration, a sob of pain.

“My name is Lila Bard,” she answered, drawing her favorite knife, “and I don’t give a damn.”

Ojka smiled, and attacked.

When the next strike came, Lila aimed not at flesh, or blade, but the cord between. Her knife’s edge came down on the stretched fabric and bit in—

But Ojka was too fast. The metal barely grazed the cord before it snapped back toward the fighter’s fingers.

“No,” growled Lila, catching the material with her bare hand. Surprise flashed across Ojka’s face, and Lila let out a small, triumphant sound, right before pain lanced up her leg as a third blade—short and viciously sharp—buried itself in her calf.

Lila gasped, staggered.

Blood speckled the pale floor as Lila pulled the knife free and straightened.

Beyond that door, Kell screamed.

Beyond this world, Rhy died.

Lila didn’t have time for this.

She dragged her knives together and they sparked, caught fire. The air seared around her, and this time when Ojka threw her blade, the burning edges of Lila’s own met the length of cord, and the fire caught. It wicked along the tether, and Ojka hissed as she pulled herself back. Halfway to her hand, the cord snapped, and the knife faltered, missing its return to her fingers. A dancer, off cue. The assassin’s face burned with anger as she closed the distance to her opponent, now armed with only a single blade.

Despite that, Ojka still moved with the terrifying grace of a predator, and Lila was so focused on the knife in the woman’s hand that she forgot the room was filled with other weapons for a magician to use.

Lila dodged a flash of metal and tried to leap back, but a low stool caught her behind the knees and she stumbled, balance lost. The fire in her hands went out, and the red-haired woman was on her before she hit the floor, blade already arcing down toward her chest.

Lila’s arms came up to block the knife as it slashed down, their hilts crashing together in the air above her face. A wicked smile flashed across Ojka’s lips as the weapon in her hand suddenly extended, metal thinning into a spike of steel that drove toward Lila’s eyes—

Her head snapped sideways as metal struck glass and the sound of a sharp crack reverberated through her skull. The knife, having skidded off her false eye, made a deep scratch across the marble floor. A droplet of blood ran down her cheek where the blade had sliced skin, a single crimson tear.

Lila blinked, dismayed.

The bitch had tried to drive a knife through her eye.

Fortunately, she’d picked the wrong one.

Ojka stared down, caught in an instant of confusion.

And an instant was all Lila needed.

Her own knife, still raised, now slashed sideways, drawing a crimson smile across the woman’s throat.

Ojka’s mouth opened and closed in a mimicry of the parted skin at her neck as blood spilled down her front. She fell to the floor beside Lila, fingers wrapped around the wound, but it was wide and deep—a killing blow.

The woman twitched and stilled, and Lila shuffled backward out of the spreading pool of blood, pain still singing through her wounded calf, her ringing head.

She got to her feet, cupping one hand against her shattered eye.

Her lost second blade jutted from a sconce, and she pried it free, trailing a line of blood in her wake as she stumbled over to the door. It had gone quiet beyond. She tried the handle, but found it locked.

There was probably a spell, but Lila didn’t know it, and she was too tired to summon air or wood or anything else, so instead she simply summoned the last of her strength and kicked the door in.

VII

Kell stared up at the ceiling, the world so far above, and getting farther with every breath.

And then he heard a voice—Lila’s voice—and it was like a hook, wrenching him back to the surface.

He gasped and tried to sit up. Failed. Tried again. Pain shuddered through him as he got to one knee. Somewhere far away, he heard the crack of a boot on wood. A lock breaking. He made it to his feet as the door swung open, and there she was, a shadow traced in light, and then his vision slid away and she became a blur, rushing toward him.