by V. E. Schwab
The idea of children had always terrified her—they were so small, so fragile, so easily broken. But then came Prince Maxim, with his solid strength, his steel resolve, his kindness like running water under heavy winter snow. She knew what it meant to be a queen, what it entailed, though even then she’d secretly hoped it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen.
But it did.
And for nine months, she’d moved as if cupping a candle in a very strong wind.
For nine months, she’d held her breath, buoyed only by the knowledge that if anyone came for her son, they would have to go through her.
For nine months, she’d prayed to the sources and the nameless saints and the dead Nasaro to lift her curse, or stay its hand.
And then Rhy was born, and he was perfect, and she knew she would spend the rest of her life afraid.
Every time the prince tumbled, every time he fell, she was the one fighting tears. Rhy would spring up with a laugh, rubbing bruises away like dirt, and be off again, charging toward the next catastrophe, and Emira would be left standing there, hands still outstretched as if to catch him.
“Relax,” Maxim would say. “Boys don’t break so easily. Our son will be as strong as forged steel and thick ice.”
But Maxim was wrong.
Steel rusted and ice was only strong until a crack sent it shattering to the ground. She lay awake at night, waiting for the crash, knowing it would come.
And instead came Kell.
Kell, who carried a world of magic in his blood.
Kell, who was unbreakable.
Kell, who could protect her son.
“At first, I wanted to raise you as brothers.”
Emira didn’t know when she had started talking instead of thinking, but she heard her voice echo gently through the prince’s chamber.
“You were so close in age, I thought it would be nice. Maxim had always wanted more than one, but I—I couldn’t bring myself to have another.” She leaned forward. “I worried, you know, that you might not get along; Kell was so quiet and you so loud, like morning and midnight, but you were thick as vines from the start. And it was well enough, when the only danger came from slick stairs and bruised knees. But then the Shadows came and stole you away, and Kell wasn’t there because you two were playing one of your games. And after that, I realized you didn’t need a brother. You needed a guardian. I tried to raise Kell as a ward, then, not a son. But it was too late. You were inseparable. I thought that maybe as you aged, you would drift, Kell to magic, and you to the crown. You’re so different, I hoped that time would carve some space between you. But you grew together instead of apart.…”
A flutter of movement on the bed, the shift of legs against sheets, and she was up, brushing the dark curls from his cheek, whispering, “Rhy, Rhy.”
His fingers curled in the sheets, his sleep growing shallow, restless. A word escaped his lips, little more than an exhale, but she recognized the sound and shape of Kell’s name, before, at last, her son woke up.
III
For a moment, Rhy was caught between sleep and waking, impenetrable darkness and a riot of color. A word sat on his tongue, the echo of something already said, but it melted away, thin as a wafer of sugar.
Where was he?
Where had he been?
In the courtyard, searching for Kell, and then falling, straight through the stone floor and into the dark place, the one that reached for him every time he slept.
It was dark here, too, but the subtle layered dark of a room at night. The red cushions of his bed, with their honeyed trim, were cast in variant shades of grey, the bedsheets mussed beneath him.
Dreams clung to Rhy like cobwebs—dreams of pain, of strong hands holding him up, holding him down, dreams of ice-cold collars and metal frames, of blood on white stone—but he couldn’t hold on to their shape.
His body hurt with the memory of hurting, and he collapsed back against the pillows with a gasp.
“Easy,” said his mother. “Easy.” Tears were spilling down her cheeks, and he reached out to catch one, marveling at the crystal of ice quickly melting in his palm.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen her cry.
“What’s wrong?”
She let out a stifled sound, something caught between a laugh and a sob and verging on hysterical.
“What’s wrong?” she echoed with a shudder. “You left. You were gone. I sat here with your corpse.”
Rhy shivered at that word, the darkness catching, trying to drag his mind back down into the memory of that place without light, without hope, without life.
His mother was still shaking her head. “I thought … I thought he healed a wound. I thought he brought you back. I didn’t realize he was the only thing keeping you here. That you were … that you had really…” Her voice hitched.
“I’m here now,” he soothed, even though part of him still felt caught somewhere else. He was pulling free of that place, moment by moment, inch by inch. “And where is Kell?”
The queen tensed and pulled away.
“What happened?” pressed Rhy. “Is he safe?”
Her face hardened. “I watched you die because of him.”
Frustration hit Rhy in a wave, and he didn’t know if it was only his or Kell’s as well, but the force was rocking. “I am alive again because of him,” he snapped. “How can you hate Kell, after all of this?”
Emira rocked back as if struck. “I do not hate him, though I wish I could. You have a blindness when it comes to each other, and it terrifies me. I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“You don’t have to,” said Rhy, getting to his feet. “Kell has done it for you. He’s given his life, and saints know what else, to save—to salvage—me. Not because I am his prince. But because I am his brother. And I will spend every day of this borrowed life trying to repay him for it.”
“He was meant to be your shield,” she murmured. “Your shelter. You were never meant to be his.”
Rhy shook his head, exasperated. “Kell isn’t the only one you fail to understand. My bond with him didn’t start with this curse. You wanted him to kill for me, die for me, protect me at all costs. Well, Mother, you got your wish. You simply failed to realize that that kind of love, that bond, it goes both ways. I would kill for him, and I would die for him, and I will protect him however I am able, from Faro and Vesk, from White London, and Black London, and from you.”
Rhy went to the balcony doors and threw open the curtains, intending to shower the room in the Isle’s red light. Instead, he was met with a wall of darkness. His eyes went wide, anger dissolving into shock.
“What’s happened to the river?”
IV
Lila rinsed the blood from her hands, amazed that she had any left. Her body was a patchwork of pain—funny, how it still found ways to surprise her—and under that, a hollowness she knew from hungry days and freezing nights.
She stared down into the bowl, her focus sliding.
Tieren had seen to her calf, where Ojka’s knife had gone in; her ribs, where she’d hit the roof; her arm, where she’d drawn blood after blood after blood. And when he was done, he’d touched his fingers to her chin and tipped it up, his gaze a weight, solid but strangely welcome.
“Still in one piece?” he’d asked, and she remembered her ruined eye.
“More or less.”
The room had swayed a little, then, and Tieren had steadied her.
“You need to rest,” he’d said.
She’d knocked his hand away. “Sleep is for the rich and the bored,” she’d said. “I am neither, and I know my limits.”
“You might have known them before you came here,” he lectured, “before you took up magic. But power has its own boundaries.”
She’d brushed him off, though in truth she was tired in a way she’d rarely known, a tired that went down far past skin and muscle and even bone, dragged its fingers through her mind until everything rippled and blurred. A tired that made it hard to breathe
, hard to think, hard to be.
Tieren had sighed and turned to go as she dug the stone shard of Astrid’s cheek from her coat pocket. “I guess I’ve answered the question.”
“When it comes to you and questions, Miss Bard,” said the priest without looking back, “I think we’ve only just begun.”
Another drop of blood hit the water, clouding the basin, and Lila thought of the mirror in the black market at Sasenroche, the way it had nicked her fingers, taken blood in trade for a future that could be hers. On one side, the promise, on the other, the means. How tempting it had been, to turn the mirror over. Not because she wanted what she’d seen, but simply because there was power in the knowing.
Blood swirled in the bowl between her hands, twisting into almost-shapes before dissolving into a pinkish mist.
Someone cleared their throat, and Lila looked up.
She’d nearly forgotten the boy standing by the door. Hastra. He’d led her here, given her a silver cup of tea—which sat abandoned on the table—filled the basin, then taken up his place by the door to wait.
“Are they afraid I’ll steal something, or run away?” she’d asked when it was clear he’d been assigned to mind her.
He’d flushed, and after a moment said bashfully, “Bit of both, I think.”
She’d nearly laughed. “Am I a prisoner?” she’d asked, and he’d looked at her with those wide earnest eyes and said, in an English softened by his smooth Arnesian accent, “We are all prisoners, Miss Bard. At least for tonight.”
Now he fidgeted, looking toward her, then away, then back again, eyes snagging now on the reddening pool, now on her shattered eye. She’d never met a boy who wore so much on his face. “Something you want to ask me?”
Hastra blinked, cleared his throat. At last, he seemed to find the nerve. “Is it true, what they say about you?”
“What is it they say?” she asked, rinsing the final cut.
The boy swallowed. “That you’re the third Antari.” It gave her a shiver to hear the words. “The one from the other London.”
“No idea,” she said, wiping her arm with a rag.
“I do hope you’re like him,” the boy pressed on.
“Why’s that?”
His cheeks flushed. “I just think Master Kell shouldn’t be alone. You know, the only one.”
“Last time I checked,” said Lila, “you have another in the prison. Maybe we could start bleeding him instead.” She wrung the rag, red drops falling to the bowl.
Hastra flushed. “I only meant…” He pursed his lips, looking for the words, or perhaps the way to say them in her tongue. “I’m glad that he has you.”
“Who says he does?” But the words had no bite. Lila was too tired for games. The ache in her body was dull but persistent, and she felt bled dry in more ways than one. She stifled a yawn.
“Even Antari need sleep,” said Hastra gently.
She waved the words away. “You sound like Tieren.”
His face lit up as if it were praise. “Master Tieren is wise.”
“Master Tieren is a nag,” she shot back, her gaze drifting again to the reflection in the clouded pool.
Two eyes stared up, one ordinary, the other fractured. One brown, the other just a starburst of broken light. She held her gaze—something she’d never been keen to do—and found that, strangely, it was easier now. As if this reflection were somehow closer to the truth.
Lila had always thought of secrets like gold coins. They could be hoarded, or put to use, but once you spent them, or lost them, it was a beast to get your hands on more.
Because of that, she’d always guarded her secrets, prized them above any take.
The fences back in Grey London hadn’t known she was a street rat.
The street patrols hadn’t known she was a girl.
She herself didn’t know what had happened to her eye.
But no one knew it was fake.
Lila dragged her fingers through the water one last time.
So much for that secret, she thought.
And she was running out of ones to keep.
“What now?” she asked, turning toward the boy. “Do I get to inflict wounds on someone else? Make some trouble? Challenge this Osaron to a fight? Or shall we see what Kell is up to?”
As she ticked off the options, her fingers danced absently over her knives, one of which was missing. Not lost. Simply loaned.
Hastra held the door for her, looking balefully back at the abandoned cup.
“Your tea.”
Lila sighed and took up the silver cup, its contents long cold.
She drank, cringing at the bitter dregs before setting it aside, and following Hastra out.
V
Kell didn’t realize he was looking for Lila, not until he collided with someone who wasn’t her.
“Oh,” said the girl, resplendent in a green-and-silver dress.
He caught her, steadying them both as the Veskan princess leaned into him instead of away. Her cheeks were flushed, as if she’d been running, her eyes glassy with tears. At only sixteen, Cora still had the long-limbed gait of youth and the body of a young woman. When he first saw her, he’d been struck by that contrast, but now, she looked all child, a girl playing dress-up in a world she wasn’t ready for. He still couldn’t believe that this was the one Rhy had been afraid of.
“Your Highness.”
“Master Kell,” she answered breathlessly. “What is going on? They won’t tell us anything, but the man on the roof, and that awful fog, now the people in the streets—I saw them, through the window, before Col pulled me away.” She spoke quickly, her Veskan accent making her trip over every few words. “What will happen to the rest of us?”
She was flush against him now, and he was grateful he’d stopped at his own room to put on a shirt.
He eased her back gently. “So long as you stay in the palace, you will be safe.”
“Safe,” she echoed, gaze slanting toward the nearest doors, glass panes frosted with winter chill and streaked with shadow. “I think I’d only feel safe,” she added, “with you beside me.”
“How romantic,” said a dry voice, and Kell turned to see Lila leaning against the wall, Hastra a few strides behind. Cora stiffened in Kell’s arms at the sight of them.
“Am I interrupting?” asked Lila.
Cora said “yes” at the same time Kell said “no.” The princess shot him a wounded look, then turned her annoyance on Lila. “Leave,” she ordered in the imperious tone peculiar to royalty and spoiled children.
Kell cringed, but Lila only raised a brow. “What was that?” she asked, strolling forward. She was half a head taller than the Veskan royal.
To her credit, Cora didn’t retreat. “You are in the presence of a princess. I suggest you learn your place.”
“And where is that, Princess?”
“Beneath me.”
Lila smiled at that, one of those smiles that made Kell profoundly nervous. The kind of smile usually followed by a weapon.
“Sa’tach, Cora!” Her brother, Col, rounded the corner, his face tight with anger. At eighteen, the prince had none of his sister’s childlike features, none of her lithe grace. The last traces of youth lingered in his darting blue eyes, but in every other way he was an ox, a creature of brute strength. “I told you to stay in the gallery. This isn’t a game.”
A storm cloud crossed Cora’s face. “I was looking for the Antari.”
“And now you have found him.” He nodded once at Kell, then took his sister’s arm. “Come.”
Despite the difference in size, Cora wrenched free, but that was the sum of her defiance. She shot Kell an embarrassed look, and Lila a venomous one, before following her brother out.
“Don’t kill the messenger,” said Lila when the two were gone, “but I think the princess is trying to get into your”—her gaze trailed Kell up and down—“good graces.”
He rolled his eyes. “She’s just a child.”
“Baby viper
s still have fangs.…” Lila trailed off, swaying on her feet, the gentle rock of a body trying to find balance. She braced herself against the wall.
“Lila?” He reached to steady her. “Have you slept?”
“Not you, too,” she snapped, flicking a hand dismissively at him and then back toward Hastra. “What I need is a stiff drink and a solid plan.” The words tumbled out in their usual acerbic way, but she didn’t look well. Blood dotted her cheekbones, but it was her eyes—again her eyes—that caught him. One warm and brown, the other a burst of jagged lines.
It looked wrong, and yet right, and Kell couldn’t tear his gaze away.
Lila didn’t even try. That was the thing about her. Every glance was a test, a challenge. Kell closed the gap between them and brought his hand to her face, the beat of her pulse and power strong against his palm. She tensed at the touch, but didn’t pull away.
“You don’t look well,” he whispered, his thumb tracing her jaw.
“All things considered,” she murmured, “I think I’m holding my own.…”
Several feet away, Hastra looked like he was trying to melt into the wall.
“Go on,” Kell told him without taking his eyes from Lila. “Get some rest.”
Hastra shifted. “I can’t, sir,” he said. “I’m to escort Miss Bard—”
“I’ll take that charge,” cut in Kell. Hastra bit his lip and retreated several steps.
Lila let her forehead come to rest against his, her face so close the features blurred. And yet, that fractured eye shone with frightening clarity.
“You never told me,” he whispered.
“You never noticed,” she answered. And then, “Alucard did.”
The blow landed, and Kell started to pull away when Lila’s eyelids fluttered and she swayed dangerously.
He braced her. “Come on,” he said gently. “I have a room upstairs. Why don’t we—”
A sleepy flicker of amusement. “Trying to get me into bed?”
Kell mustered a smile. “It’s only fair. I’ve spent enough time in yours.”
“If I remember correctly,” she said, her voice dreamy with fatigue, “you were on top of the bed the entire time.”