by V. E. Schwab
“What do you want, Kell? An apology?”
He felt his fraying temper finally snap. “What do I want? I want to destroy the demon you’ve unleashed. I want to protect my family. I want to save my home.”
“So did I. I did what I had to—”
“No,” snarled Kell. “When the Danes ruled, they may have forced your hand, but this time, you chose. You chose to set Osaron free. You chose to be his vessel. You chose to give him—”
“Life isn’t made of choices,” said Holland. “It’s made of trades. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have a cost.”
“You traded away my world’s safety—”
Holland strained forward suddenly against his chains, and even though his voice didn’t rise, every muscle in him tightened. “What do you think your London did, when the darkness came? When Osaron’s magic consumed his world, and threatened to take ours with it? You traded away our world’s safety for your own, locked the doors and trapped us between the raging water and the rocks. How does it feel now?”
Kell wrapped his will around Holland’s skull and forced it back against the wall. The slightest clench in Holland’s jaw and the flare of his nostrils were the only signs of pain.
“Hatred is a powerful thing,” continued Holland through gritted teeth. “Hold on to it.”
And in that moment, Kell wanted to. He wanted to keep going, wanted to hear the crack of bone, wanted to see if he could break Holland the way Holland had broken him in White London.
But Kell knew he couldn’t break Holland.
Holland was already broken. It showed, not in the scars, but in the way he spoke, the way he held himself in the face of pain, too well acquainted with its shape and scale. He was a man hollowed out long before Osaron, a man with no fear and no hope and nothing to lose.
For an instant, Kell tightened his grip anyway—in anger, in spite—and felt Holland’s bones groan under the strain.
And then he forced himself to let go.
THREE
FALL OR FIGHT
I
Alucard had been dreaming of the sea when he heard the door open. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was so out of place, at odds with the ocean spray and the summer gulls.
He rolled over, lost for a moment in the haze of sleep, his body aching from the abuse of the tournament and his head full of silk. And then, a step, wooden boards groaning underfoot. The sudden, very real presence of another person in the room. Rhy’s room. And the prince, still unconscious, unarmed, beside him.
Alucard rose in a single, fluid movement, the water from the glass beside the bed rising up and freezing into a dagger against his palm.
“Show yourself.”
He held the shard in a fighting stance, ready to strike as the intruder continued his slow march forward. The room around them was dim, a lamp burning just behind the intruder’s back, casting him in shadow.
“Down, dog,” said an unmistakable voice.
Alucard let out a low curse and slumped back against the side of the bed, heart pounding. “Kell.”
The Antari stepped forward, light illuminating his grim mouth and narrowed eyes, one blue, the other black. But what caught Alucard’s attention, what held it in a vice, was the sigil scrawled over his bare chest. A pattern of concentric circles. An exact replica of the mark over Rhy’s heart, the one woven through with iridescent threads.
Kell flicked his fingers, and Alucard’s frozen blade flew from his hand, melting back into a ribbon of water as it returned to its glass. Kell’s gaze shifted to the bed, sheets rumpled where Alucard had been lying moments before. “Taking your task seriously, I see.”
“Quite.”
“I told you to keep him safe, not cuddle.”
Alucard spread his hands behind him on the sheets. “I’m more than capable of multitasking.” He was about to continue when he registered the pallor of Kell’s skin, the blood staining his hands. “What happened?”
Kell looked down at himself, as if he’d forgotten. “The city is under attack,” he said hollowly.
Alucard suddenly remembered the pillar of dark magic beyond the window, fracturing across the sky. He spun back toward the balcony, and stiffened at the sight. There was no familiar red light against the clouds. No glow from the river below. When he reached for the door, Kell caught his wrist. Fingers ground against bone.
“Don’t,” he ordered in his imperious way. “They’re warding the palace, to keep it out.”
Alucard pulled free, rubbing at the smudge left by Kell’s grip. “It?”
The Antari looked past him. “The infection, or poison, spell, I don’t know…” He lifted a hand, as if to rub his eyes, then realized it was stained and let it fall. “Whatever it is. Whatever he’s done … doing. Just stay away from the doors and windows.”
Alucard looked at him, incredulous. “The city is being attacked, and we’re just going to hole up in the palace and let it happen? There are people out there—”
Kell’s jaw clenched. “We cannot save them all,” he said stiffly. “Not without a plan, and until we have one—”
“My crew’s out there. My family, too. And you expect me to just sit and watch—”
“No,” snapped Kell. “I expect you to make yourself useful.” He pointed at the door. “Preferably somewhere else.”
Alucard’s eyes went to the bed. “I can’t leave Rhy.”
“You’ve done it before,” said Kell.
It was a cheap shot, but Alucard still flinched. “I told the queen I’d—”
“Emery,” cut in Kell, closing his eyes, and it was only then that he realized how close the magician was to falling over. His face was grey, and it looked like sheer will was keeping him on his feet, but he was beginning to sway. “You’re one of the best magicians in this city,” said Kell, wincing as if the admission hurt. “Prove it. Go and help the priests. Help the king. Help someone who needs it. You cannot help my brother any more tonight.”
Alucard swallowed, and nodded. “All right.”
He forced himself to cross the chamber, glancing back only once, to see Kell half sinking, half falling into the chair beside the prince’s bed.
* * *
The hall beyond Rhy’s room was strangely empty. Alucard made it to the stairs before he saw the first servants hurrying past, their arms full of cloth and sand and water basins. Not the tools for binding wounds, but the ones needed for making wards.
A guard rounded the corner, his helmet under his arm. There was a line of blood across his forehead, but he didn’t appear wounded, and the mark was too deliberate to be the weary wiping of a brow.
Through a set of wooden doors, Alucard saw the king surrounded by members of his guard, all of them bent over a large map of the city. Runners carried word of new attacks, and with every one, King Maxim placed a black coin atop the parchment.
As Alucard moved through halls, down flights of stairs, he felt like he’d woken from a dream into a nightmare.
Hours before, the palace had brimmed with life. Now the only motions were nervous, halting. The faces masked by shock.
In a trance, his feet found the Grand, the palace’s largest ballroom, and stopped cold. Alucard Emery rarely felt helpless, but now he stood in stunned silence. Two nights before, men and women had danced here in pools of light as music played from the gold dais. Two nights before, Rhy had stood here, dressed in red and gold, the shining centerpiece of the ball. Two nights before, this had been a place of laughter and song, crystal glasses and whispered conversation. Now ostra and vestra huddled together in shock, and white-robed priests stood at every window, hands pressed flat against glass as they wove spells around the palace, shielding it against the poisonous night. He could see their magic, pale and shimmering, as it cast its net over the windows and the walls. It looked fragile compared with the heavy shadows that pushed against the glass, wanting in.
Standing there, at the mouth of the ballroom, Alucard’s ears caught slices of information, too thi
n, and all confused, tangling with one another until he couldn’t pick the news apart, sort the real from the fabulous, the truth from the fear.
The city was under attack.
A monster had come to London.
A fog was poisoning the people.
Invading their minds.
Driving them mad.
It was like the Black Night all over again, they said, but worse. That plague had taken twenty, thirty, and passed by touch. This, it seemed, moved on the air itself. It had taken hundreds, maybe even thousands.
And it was spreading.
The tournament magicians stood in clusters, some speaking in low, urgent tones while others simply stared out through the gallery’s vaulting windows as tendrils of dark fog wrapped around the palace, blotting out the city in streaks of black.
The Faroans gathered around Lord Sol-in-Ar in tight formation as their general spoke in his serpentine tongue, while the Veskans stood in sullen silence, their prince staring into the night, their princess surveying the room.
The queen caught sight of Alucard and frowned, pulling away from the knot of vestra around her.
“Is my son awake?” she said under her breath.
“Not yet, Your Majesty,” he answered. “But Kell is with him now.”
A long silence, and then the queen nodded, once, attention already shifting away.
“Is it true?” he asked. “That Rhy…” He didn’t want to shape the words, didn’t want to give them life and weight. He’d picked up fragments in the chaos of Rhy’s collapse, seen the matching spellwork on Kell’s chest.
Someone has wounded you, he’d said nights before, offering to kiss the seal above the prince’s heart. But someone had done worse than that.
“He will recover now,” she said. “That is what matters.”
He wanted to say something else, to tell her he was worried, too (he wondered if she knew—how much she knew—about his summer with her son, how much he cared), but she was already moving away, and he was left with the words going sour on his tongue.
“All right then, who’s next?” said a familiar voice nearby, and Alucard turned again to see his thief surrounded by palace guards. His pulse quickened until he realized Bard wasn’t in any danger.
The guards were kneeling around her, and Lila Bard of all people was touching each of their foreheads, as if bestowing a blessing. Head bowed, she almost looked like a saint.
If a saint dressed all in black and carried knives.
If a saint blessed using blood.
He went to her as the guards peeled away, each anointed with a line of red.
Up close, Bard looked pale, shadows like bruises beneath her eyes, jaw clenched as she wrapped a cut in linen.
“Keep some of that in your veins, if you can,” he said, reaching out to help her tie the knot.
She looked up, and he stiffened at the unnatural glint in her gaze. The glass surface of her right eye, once a brown that almost matched her left, was shattered.
“Your eye,” he said dumbly.
“I know.”
“It looks…”
“Dangerous?”
“Painful.” His fingertips drifted to the dried blood caught like a tear in the outer corner of the ruined eye, a nick where a knife had grazed the skin. “Long night?”
She let out a single stifled laugh. “And getting longer.”
Alucard’s gaze tracked from the guards’ marked skin to her stained fingers. “A spell?”
Bard shrugged. “A blessing.” He raised a brow. “Haven’t you heard?” she added absently. “I’m aven.”
“You’re certainly something,” he said as a crack snaked up the nearest window and a pair of older priests rushed toward the novice working to ward the glass. He lowered his voice. “Have you been outside?”
“Yes,” she said, features hardening. “It’s … it’s not … good…” She trailed off. Bard had never been chatty, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her at a loss for words. She took a moment, squinting at the odd gathering that they faced here, and began again, her voice low. “The guards are keeping the people in their homes, but the fog—whatever’s in the fog—is poisonous. Most fall within moments of contact. They aren’t rotting the way they did in the Black Night,” she added, “so it’s not possession. But they’re not themselves, either. And those who fight the hold, they fall to something worse. The priests are trying to learn more, but so far…” She blew out a breath, shifting her hair over her damaged eye. “I caught sight of Lenos in the crowd,” she added, “and he looked all right, but Tav…” She shook her head.
Alucard swallowed. “Has it reached the northern bank?” he asked, thinking of the Emery estate. Of his sister. When Bard didn’t answer, he twisted toward the door. “I have to go—”
“You can’t,” she said, and he expected a reprimand, a reminder there was nothing he could do, but this was Bard—his Bard—and can’t meant something simple. “The guards are on the doors,” she explained. “They’ve strict orders not to let anyone in or out.”
“You never let that stop you.”
The ghost of a smile. “True.” And then, “I could stop you.”
“You could try.”
And she must have seen the steel in his eyes, because the smile flickered and went out. “Come here.”
She tangled her fingers in his collar and pulled his face toward hers, and for a strange, disorienting second he thought she meant to kiss him. The memory of another night flared in his mind—a point made with bodies pressed together, an argument punctuated with a kiss—but now she simply pressed her thumb to his forehead and drew a short line above his brows.
He lifted a hand to his face, but she swatted it away. “It’s supposed to shield you,” she said, nodding at the windows, “from whatever’s out there.”
“I thought that’s what the palace was for,” he said darkly.
Lila cocked her head. “Perhaps,” she said, “but only if you plan to stay inside.”
Alucard turned to go.
“God be with you,” said Bard dryly.
“What?” he asked, confused.
“Nothing,” she muttered. “Just try to stay alive.”
II
Emira Maresh stood in the doorway to her son’s chamber and watched the two of them sleep.
Kell was slumped in a chair beside Rhy’s bed, his coat cast off and a blanket around his bare shoulders, his head resting on folded arms atop the bedsheets.
The prince lay stretched out on the bed, one arm draped across his ribs. The color was back in his cheeks, and his eyelids fluttered, lashes dancing the way they did when he dreamed.
In sleep, they both looked so peaceful.
When they were children, Emira used to slip from room to room like a ghost after they’d gone to bed, smoothing sheets and touching hair and watching them fall asleep. Rhy wouldn’t let her tuck him in—he claimed it was undignified—and Kell, when she’d tried, had only stared at her with those large inscrutable eyes. He could do it himself, he’d insisted, and so he had.
Now Kell shifted in his sleep, and the blanket began to slip from his shoulders. Emira, unthinking, reached to resettle it, but when her fingers brushed his skin, he started and shot upright as if under attack, eyes bleary, face contorted with panic. Magic was already singing across his skin, flushing the air with heat.
“It’s only me,” she said softly, but even as recognition settled in Kell’s face, his body didn’t loosen. His hands returned to his sides, but his shoulders stayed stiff, his gaze landing on her like stones, and Emira’s escaped to the bed, to the floor, wondering why he was so much harder to look at when he was awake.
“Your Majesty,” he said, reverent, but cold.
“Kell,” she said, trying to find her warmth. She meant to go on, meant his name to be the beginning of a question—Where did you go? What happened to you? To my son?—but he was already on his feet, already taking up his coat.
“I didn’t mean to wake y
ou,” she said.
Kell scrubbed at his eyes. “I didn’t mean to sleep.”
She wanted to stop him, and couldn’t. Didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said from the doorway. “I know it’s my fault.”
No, she wanted to say. And yes. Because every time she looked at Kell, she saw Rhy, too, begging for his brother, saw him coughing up blood from someone else’s wound, saw him still as death, no longer a prince at all but a body, a corpse, a thing long gone. But he’d come back, and she knew it was Kell’s spell that had done it.
She had seen now what Kell had given the prince, and what the prince was without it, and it terrified her, the way they were bound, but her son was lying on the bed, alive, and she wanted to cling to Kell and kiss him and say Thank you, Thank you, thank you.
She forgave him nothing.
She owed him everything.
And before she could say so, he was gone.
When the door shut behind him, Emira sank into Kell’s abandoned seat. Words waited in her mouth, unsaid. She swallowed them, wincing as though they scratched on the way down.
She leaned forward, resting one hand gently over Rhy’s.
His skin was smooth and warm, his pulse strong. Tears slid down her cheek and froze as they fell, tiny beads of ice landing in her lap only to melt again into her dress.
“It’s all right,” she finally managed, though she didn’t know if the words were for Kell, or Rhy, or herself.
Emira had never wanted to be a mother.
She’d certainly never planned on being queen.
Before she married Maxim, Emira had been the second child of Vol Nasaro, fourth noble line from the throne behind the Maresh and the Emery and the Loreni.
Growing up, she was the kind of girl who broke things.
Eggs and glass jars, porcelain cups and mirrors.
“You could break a stone,” her father used to tease, and she didn’t know if she was clumsy or cursed, only that in her hands, things always fell apart. It had seemed a cruel joke when her element proved to be neither steel nor wind, but water—ice. Easily made. Easily ruined.