by V. E. Schwab
“What’s wrong?” asked Kell.
Hastra reddened. “It’s my fault she found you,” whispered his former guard. “My fault she took you.”
She. Hastra meant Ojka.
Kell rubbed his eyes. “It’s not,” he said, but the youth just shook his head stubbornly, and Kell couldn’t bear the guilt in his eyes, too close a mirror of his own. He glanced instead at Tieren, who now stood with Lila, her chin in his hand as he tilted her head to see the damage to her eye, not even the hint of surprise in his own.
Alucard Emery still lurked, half in shadow, in the corner beyond the royal bed, his gaze leveled not on Kell or the rest of the room, but on Rhy’s chest as it rose and fell. Kell knew of the captain’s gift, his ability to see the threads of magic. Now Alucard stood, perfectly still, only his eyes following some invisible specter as it wove around the prince.
“Give him time,” murmured the captain, answering a question Kell hadn’t yet asked. Kell took a breath, hoping to say something civil, but Alucard’s attention flicked suddenly to the balcony doors.
“What is it?” asked Kell as the man pushed off the wall, peering out into the red-tinged night.
“I thought I saw something.”
Kell tensed. “Saw what?”
Alucard didn’t answer. He brushed his hand along the glass, clearing the steam. After a moment, he shook his head. “Must have been a trick of the—”
He was cut off by a scream.
Not in the room, not in the palace at all, but overhead.
On the roof. The winner’s ball.
Kell was on his feet before he knew if he could stand. Lila, always the faster, had her knife out, even though no one had seen to her wounds.
“Osaron?” she demanded as Kell surged toward the door.
Alucard was on his heels, but Kell spun, and forced him back with a single, vicious shove. “No. Not you.”
“You can’t expect me to stay—”
“I expect you to watch over the prince.”
“I thought that was your job,” snarled Alucard.
The blow landed, but Kell still barred the captain’s path. “If you go upstairs, you will die.”
“And you won’t?” he challenged.
Behind Kell’s eyes, the image flared, of the darkness swarming in Holland’s eyes. The hum of power. The horror of a curse noose-tight around his neck. Kell swallowed. “If I don’t go, everyone will die.”
He looked to the queen, who opened her mouth and closed it several times as if searching for an order, a protest, but in the end, she said only, “Go.”
Lila hadn’t waited around for permission.
She was halfway up the stairs when he caught her, and he wouldn’t have if not for her injured leg.
“How did he get up there?” muttered Kell.
“How did he get out of Black London?” countered Lila. “How did he cut off your power? How did he—”
“Fine,” growled Kell. “Point taken.”
They shoved past the mounting guards, launching themselves up flight after flight.
“Just so we’re clear,” said Lila. “I don’t care if Holland’s still in there. If I get a chance, I’m not sparing him.”
Kell swallowed. “Agreed.”
When they reached the rooftop doors, Lila grabbed his collar, hauling his face toward hers. Her eyes bore into his, one smooth, the other fractured into shadow and light. Beyond the doors, the scream had stopped.
“Are you strong enough to win?” she asked.
Was he? This wasn’t a tournament magician. Wasn’t even a sliver of magic like Vitari. Osaron had destroyed an entire world. Changed another on a whim.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
Lila flashed a glimmer of a smile, sharp as glass.
“Good,” she answered, pushing open the door. “Only fools are certain.”
* * *
Kell didn’t know what he expected to find on the roof.
Blood. Bodies. A sick version of the stone forest that had once stretched at the feet of White London’s castle, with its petrified corpses.
What he saw instead was a crowd caught between confusion and terror, and at its center, the shadow king. Kell felt the blood drain from his face, replaced by cold hatred for the figure in the middle of the roof—the monster wearing Holland’s skin—as he turned in a slow circle, considering his audience. Surrounded by the most powerful magicians in the world, and not a hint of fear in those black eyes. Only amusement, and the sharp edge of want threaded through it. Standing there, in the center of the marble circle, Osaron seemed the center of the world. Unmovable. Invincible.
The scene shifted, and Kell saw Kisimyr Vasrin lying on the ground at Osaron’s feet. At least—what was left of her. One of the strongest magicians in Arnes, reduced to a scorched black corpse, the metal rings in her hair now melted down to dots of molten light.
“Anyone else?” asked Osaron in that sick distortion of Holland’s voice, silky and wrong and somehow everywhere at once.
The Veskan royals crouched behind their sorcerers, a pair of frightened children cowering in silver and green. Lord Sol-in-Ar, even for his lack of magic, did not retreat, though his Faroan entourage could be seen urging him behind a pillar. At the marble platform’s edge, the rest of the magicians gathered, their elements summoned—flame swirled around fingers, shards of ice held like knives—but no one struck. They were tournament fighters, used to parading around a ring, where the greatest thing at risk was pride.
What had Holland said to Kell, so many months ago?
Do you know what makes you weak?
You’ve never had to be strong.
You’ve certainly never had to fight for your life.
Now Kell saw that flaw in these men and women, their unmasked faces pale with fear.
Lila touched his arm, a knife ready in her other hand. Neither spoke, but neither needed to. In palace balls and tournament games they were mismatched, awkward, but they understood each other here and now, surrounded by danger and death.
Kell nodded, and without a word, Lila slipped thief-smooth into the shadows around the roof’s edge.
“No one?” goaded the shadow king.
He brought a boot to rest on Kisimyr’s remains, and they gave way like ash beneath his step. “For all your strength, you surrender so easily.”
Kell took a single breath and forced himself forward, out of the shelter at the circle’s edge, and into the light. When Osaron saw him, he actually smiled.
“Kell,” said the monster. “Your resilience surprises me. Have you come to kneel before me? Have you come to beg?”
“I’ve come to fight.”
Osaron tipped his head. “The last time we met, I left you screaming.”
Kell’s limbs shook, not with fear but anger. “The last time we met, I was in chains.” The air around him sang with power. “Now I’m free.”
Osaron’s smile widened. “But I have seen your heart, and it is bound.”
Kell’s hands curled into fists. The marble beneath his feet trembled and began to splinter. Osaron flicked his wrist, and the night came crashing down on Kell. It crushed the air from his lungs, forcing him toward his knees. It took all his strength to stay upright under the weight, and after a horrible second he realized it wasn’t the air straining against him—Osaron’s will pressed against his very bones. Kell was Antari. No one had ever managed to will his body against him. Now his joints ground together, his limbs threatening to crack.
“I will see you kneel before your king.”
“No.”
Kell tried again to summon the marble floor, and the stone trembled as will clashed against will. He kept his feet, but realized by the almost bored expression on the other Antari’s face that the shadow king was toying with him.
“Holland,” Kell snarled, trying to subdue the horror. “If you are in there, fight. Please—fight.”
A sour look crossed Osaron’s face, and then something crashed be
hind Kell, armor against wood as more guards barreled onto the roof, Maxim at their center.
The king’s voice boomed through the night. “How dare you set foot in my palace?”
Osaron’s attention flicked to the king, and Kell gasped, suddenly free from the weight of the creature’s will. He staggered a step, already freeing his knife and drawing blood, red drops falling to the pale stone.
“How dare you claim to be king?”
“I have more claim than you.”
Another twitch of those long fingers, and the king’s crown sailed from his head—or it would have if Maxim hadn’t snatched it from the air with terrifying speed. The king’s eyes glowed, as if molten, as he crushed the crown between his hands, and drew it out into a blade. A single, fluid gesture that spoke of days long past, when Maxim Maresh had been the Steel Prince instead of the Golden King.
“Surrender, demon,” he ordered, “or be slain.”
At his back, the royal guards raised their swords, spellwork scrawled along the edges. The sight of the king and his guards seemed to shake the other magicians from their stupor. Some began to retreat, ushering their own royals off the roof or simply fleeing, while a few were bold enough to advance. But Kell knew they were no match. Not the guards, not the magicians, not even the king.
But the king’s appearance had bought Kell something.
An advantage.
With Osaron’s attention still on Maxim, Kell sank into a crouch. His blood had spread in brittle fractures across the stone floor, thin lines of red that reached and wrapped around the monster’s boot.
“As Anasae,” he ordered. Dispel. The words had been enough, once, to purge Vitari from the world. Now, they did nothing. Osaron shot him a pitying glance, shadows twisting in his pitch black eyes.
Kell didn’t retreat. He forced his hands flat. “As Steno,” he ordered, and the marble floor shattered into a hundred shards that rose and hurled themselves at the shadow king. The first one found home, burying itself in Osaron’s leg, and Kell’s hopes rose before he realized his mistake.
He hadn’t gone for the kill.
That first stone blade was the only one to land. With nothing but a look, the rest of the shards faltered, slowed, stopped. Kell pushed with all his force, but his own body was one thing to will, and a hundred makeshift blades another, and Osaron quickly won, turning the stone fragments outward like the spokes on a wheel, the dazzling edges of a sun.
Osaron’s hands drifted lazily up, and the shards trembled, like arrows on taut strings, but before he could unleash them on the guards and the king and the magicians on the roof, something passed through him.
A flinch. A shudder.
The shadows in his eyes went green.
Somewhere deep inside his body, Holland was fighting back.
The fragments of stone tumbled to the ground as Osaron stood frozen, all his attention focused inward.
Maxim saw the chance, and signaled.
The royal guards struck, a dozen men falling on one distracted god.
And for an instant, Kell thought it would be enough.
For an instant—
But then Osaron looked up, flashing black eyes and a defiant smile. And let them come.
“Wait!” shouted Kell, but it was too late.
The instant before the guards fell on the shadow king, the monster abandoned its shell. Darkness poured from Holland’s stolen body, as thick and black as smoke.
The Antari collapsed, and the shadow that was Osaron moved, serpentine, across the roof. Hunting for another form.
Kell spun, looking for Lila, but couldn’t see her through the crowd, the smoke.
And then, suddenly, the darkness turned on him.
No, thought Kell, who had already refused the monster once. He couldn’t fathom another collar. The cold horror of a heartbeat stopping in his chest.
The darkness surged toward him, and Kell took an involuntary step back, bracing himself for an assault that never came. The shadow brushed his blood-streaked fingers, and pulled back, not so much repelled as considering.
The darkness laughed—a sickly sound—and began to draw itself together, to coalesce into a column, and then into a man. Not flesh and blood, but layered shadow, so dense it looked like fluid stone, some edges sharp and others blurred. A crown sat atop the figure’s head, a dozen spires thrust upward like horns, their points faded into smoke.
The shadow king, in his true form.
Osaron drew in a breath, and the molten darkness at his center flared like embers, heat rippling the air around him. And yet he seemed solid as stone. As Osaron considered his hands, the fingers tapering less to fingertips than points, his mouth stretched into a cruel smile.
“It has been a long time since I was strong enough to hold my own shape.”
His hand shot toward Kell’s throat, but was stopped short as steel came singing through the air. Lila’s knife caught Osaron in the side of the head, but the blade didn’t lodge; it passed straight through.
So he wasn’t real, wasn’t corporeal. Not yet.
Osaron spared a glance at Lila, who was already drawing another blade. She slammed to a stop under his gaze, her body clearly straining against his hold, and Kell stole his chance once more, pressing his bloodstained palm to the creature’s chest. But the shape turned to smoke around Kell’s fingers, recoiling from his magic, and Osaron twisted back, annoyance etched across his stone features. Freed once more, Lila reached him, a guard’s short sword in one hand, and swung the weapon in a vicious arc, carving down and across and through his body, shoulder to hip.
Osaron parted around the blade, and then he simply dissolved.
There one moment, and gone the next.
Kell and Lila stared at each other, breathless, stunned.
The guards were hauling an unconscious Holland roughly to his feet, his head lolling as, all around the roof, the men and woman stood as if under a spell, though it might have simply been shock, horror, confusion.
Kell met King Maxim’s eyes across the roof.
“You have so much to learn.”
He spun toward the sound, and found Osaron re-formed and standing, not in the broken center of the roof, but atop the railing at its edge, as if the spine of metal were solid ground. His cloak billowed in the breeze. A specter of a man. A shadow of a monster.
“You do not slay a god,” he said. “You worship him.”
His black eyes danced with dark delight.
“Do not worry. I will teach you how. And in time…”
Osaron spread his arms.
“I will make this world worthy of me.”
Kell realized too late what was about to happen.
He started running just as Osaron tipped backward off the railing, and fell.
Kell sprinted, and got there just in time to see the shadow king hit the water of the Isle far below. His body struck without a splash, and as it broke the surface and sank, it began to plume like spilled ink through the current. Lila pressed against him, straining to see. Shouts were going up over the roof, but the two of them stood and watched in silent horror as the plume of darkness grew, and grew, and grew, spreading until the red of the river turned black.
III
Alucard paced the prince’s room, waiting for news.
He hadn’t heard anything since that single scream, the first shouts of guards in the hall, the steps above.
Rhy’s lush curtains and canopies, his plush carpets and pillows, all created a horrible insulation, blocking out the world beyond and shrouding the room in an oppressive silence.
They were alone, the captain and the sleeping prince.
The king was gone. The priests were gone. Even the queen was gone. One by one they’d peeled away, each casting a glance at Alucard that said, Sit, stay. As if he would have left. He would have gladly abandoned the maddening quiet and the smothering questions, of course, but not Rhy.
The queen had been the last to leave. For several seconds she’d stood between
the bed and the doors, as if physically torn.
“Your Majesty,” he’d said. “I will keep him safe.”
Her face had changed, then, the regal mask slipping to reveal a frightened mother. “If only you could.”
“Can you?” he’d asked, and her wide brown eyes had gone to Rhy, lingering there for a long moment before at last she’d turned and fled.
Something drew his attention to the balcony. Not movement exactly, but a change in the light. When he approached the glass doors, he saw shadow spilling down the side of the palace like a train, a tail, a curtain of glossy black that shimmered, solid, smoke, solid, as it ran from the riverbank below all the way to the roof.
It had to be magic, but it had no color, no light. If it followed the warp and weft of power, he could not see the threads.
Kell had told them about Osaron, the poisonous magic from another London. But how could a magician do this? How could anyone?
“It’s a demon,” Kell had said. “A piece of living, breathing magic.”
“A piece of magic that thinks itself a man?” asked the king.
“No,” he’d answered. “A piece of magic that thinks itself a god.”
Now, staring out at the column of shadow, Alucard understood—this thing wasn’t obeying the lines of power at all. It was stitching them from nothing.
He couldn’t look away.
The floor seemed to tilt, and Alucard felt like he was tipping forward toward the glass doors and the curtain of black beyond. If he could get closer, maybe he could see the threads.…
The captain lifted his hands to the balcony doors, about to push them open, when the prince shifted in his sleep. A soft groan beyond him, the subtle hitch of breath, and that was all it took to make Alucard turn back, the darkness beyond the glass momentarily forgotten as he crossed to the bed.
“Rhy,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”
A crinkle between the prince’s brows. A ghost of strain along his jaw. Small signs, but Alucard clung to them, and brushed the dark curls from Rhy’s brow, trying to brush away the image of the prince desiccating atop the royal sheets.