A Conjuring of Light

by V. E. Schwab

  “And tied to it,” observed Kell.

  Her words were soft at the edges. “Those were the days.…” she said, right before she fell forward. It happened so fast Kell could do nothing but throw his arms around her.

  “Lila?” he asked, first gently, and then more urgently. “Lila?”

  She murmured against his front, something about sharp knives and soft corners, but didn’t rouse, and Kell shot a glance at Hastra, who was still standing there, looking thoroughly embarrassed.

  “What have you done?” demanded Kell.

  “It was just a tonic, sir,” he fumbled, “something for sleep.”

  “You drugged her?”

  “It was Tieren’s order,” said Hastra, chastised. “He said she was mad and stubborn and no use to us dead.” Hastra lowered his voice when he said this, mimicking Tieren’s tone with startling accuracy.

  “And what do you plan to do when she wakes back up?”

  Hastra shrank back. “Apologize?”

  Kell made an exasperated sound as Lila nuzzled—actually nuzzled—his shoulder.

  “I suggest,” he snapped at the young man, “you think of something better. Like an escape route.”

  Hastra paled, and Kell swept Lila up into his arms, amazed at her lightness. She took up so much space in the world—in his world—it was hard to imagine her being so slight. In his mind, she was made of stone.

  Her head lolled against his chest. He realized then that he’d never seen her sleep—without the edge to her jaw, the crease in her brow, the glint in her glare, she looked startlingly young.

  Kell swept through the halls until he reached his room and lowered Lila onto the couch.

  Hastra handed him a blanket. “Shouldn’t you take off her knives?”

  “There’s not enough tonic in the world to risk it,” said Kell.

  He started to drape the blanket over her, then paused, frowning at the holsters that lined Lila’s arms and legs.

  One of them was empty.

  It was probably nothing, he told himself, tucking her in, but the prickle of doubt followed him to his feet, a nagging worry that faded to a whisper as he stepped into the hall.

  Probably nothing, he thought as he sagged against the door and scrubbed the dregs of sleep from his eyes.

  He hadn’t meant to fall asleep earlier, in Rhy’s room, had only wanted a moment of quiet, a second to catch his breath. To steady himself for all that was to come.

  Now he heard someone clear their throat and looked up to see Hastra, one hand still turning a coin over and over between his fingers.

  “Let it go,” said Kell.

  “I can’t,” said the former guard.

  Kell willed the coin from Hastra’s fingers into his. The guard made a small yelp, but didn’t try to take it back.

  Up close Kell saw it wasn’t an ordinary coin. It was of White London make, a wooden disk with the remains of a control spell etched into its face.

  What had Hastra said?

  It’s my fault she found you.

  So this was how Ojka had done it.

  This was why Hastra blamed himself.

  Kell closed his hand over the coin and summoned fire, letting the flames devour the coin. “There,” he said, tipping ash from his palm. He pushed himself off the floor, but Hastra’s gaze stayed, stuck to the tiles.

  “Is the prince truly alive?” he whispered.

  Kell pulled back as if struck. “Of course. Why would you ask—”

  Hastra’s wide brown eyes were tight with worry. “You didn’t see him, sir. The way he was, before he came back. He wasn’t just gone. It was like he’d … been gone. Gone for a long time. Like he’d never come back.” Kell stiffened, but Hastra kept talking, his voice low but urgent, the color high in his cheeks. “And the queen, she wouldn’t leave his body, she kept saying over and over that he would come back, because you would come back, and I know you two have the same scar, I know you’re bound together, somehow, life to life, and, well, I know it’s not my place, I know it’s not, but I have to ask. Is it some cruel illusion? Is the real prince—”

  Kell brought his hand to the guard’s shoulder, and felt the quiver in it, the genuine fear for Rhy’s life. For all his foolishness, these people loved his brother.

  He pointed down the hall.

  “The real prince,” he said firmly, “sleeps beyond that door. His heart beats as strongly in his chest as my heart does in mine, and it will until the day I die.”

  Kell was pulling away when Hastra’s voice drew him back, soft, but insistent. “There is a saying in the Sanctuary. Is aven stran.”

  “The blessed thread,” translated Kell.

  Hastra nodded eagerly. “Do you know what it means?” His eyes brightened as he spoke. “It’s from one of the myths, the Origin of the Magician. Magic and Man were brothers, you see, only they had nothing in common, for each’s strength was the other’s weakness. And so one day, Magic made a blessed thread, and tied itself to Man, so tightly that the thread cut into their skin.…” Here he turned his hands up, flexing his wrists to show the veins, “and from that day, they shared their best and worst, their strength and weakness.”

  Something fluttered in Kell’s chest. “How does the story end?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Hastra said.

  “Not even if they part?”

  Hastra shook his head. “There’s no ‘they’ anymore, Master Kell. Magic gave so much to Man, and Man so much to Magic, that their edges blurred, and their threads all tangled, and now they can’t be pulled apart. They’re bound together, you see, life to life. Halves of a whole. If anyone tried to part them, they’d both unravel.”

  VI

  Alucard knew the Maresh palace better than he should have.

  Rhy had shown him a dozen ways in and out; hidden doors and secret halls, a curtain pulled aside to reveal a stairwell, a door set flush with the wall. All the ways a friend could sneak into a room, or a lover into a bed.

  The first time Alucard had snuck into the palace, he’d been so turned around he’d nearly walked in on Kell instead. He would have, if the Antari had actually been in his rooms, but the chamber was empty, the candlelight dancing over a bed still made, and Alucard had shuddered and slipped back the way he’d come, and fallen into Rhy’s arms several minutes later, laughing with relief until the prince pressed a palm over his mouth.

  Now he raked his mind, trying to remember the nearest escape. If the doors had been made by—or cloaked with—magic, he’d have seen the threads, but the palace portals were simple, wood and stone and tapestry, forcing him to find his way by touch and memory instead of sight.

  A hidden door led from the first floor down into the undercarriage of the palace. Six pillars held the massive structure up, solid bases from which the ethereal arch of the Maresh residence vaulted up against the sky. Six pillars of hollowed rock with a network of tunnels where they met the palace floor.

  It was simply a matter of remembering which one to take.

  He descended into what he thought was the old sanctuary, and found it converted into a kind of training chamber. The concentric circles of a meditation ring were still set into the floor, but the surfaces bore the scorches and stains befitting a sparring hall.

  A lone torch with its enchanted white fire cast the space in shades of grey, and in the colorless haze, Alucard saw weapons scattered on one table and elements on another, bowls of water and sand, shards of stone. Amid them all, a small white flower was growing in a bowl of earth, its leaves spilling over the sides of the pot, a tame thing gone wild.

  Alucard took the stairwell on the opposite side of the room, pausing only when he reached the door at the top. Such a thin line, he thought, between inside and out, safe and exposed. But his family, his crew, waited on the other side. He touched the wood, summoning his strength, and the door opened with a groan onto darkness.

  Darkness, and before it, a web of light.

  Alucard hesitated, face to face with the fa
bric of the priests’ protection spell. It looked like spider silk, but when he passed through, the veil didn’t tear; it simply shuddered, and settled back into shape.

  Alucard stepped forward into the fog, half expecting it to fold around him. And yet, the shadows wicked off his coat, washed up against his boots and sleeves and collar only to fall away, rebuffed. Retreating with every step, but not far, never far.

  His forehead itched, and he remembered Lila’s touch, the streak of blood, now dry, across his brow.

  It was a thin protection, the shadows trying again and again to find their way in.

  How long would it last?

  He pulled his jacket close and quickened his pace.

  Osaron’s magic was everywhere, but instead of the threads of spellwork, Alucard saw only heavy shadow, charcoal streaked across the city, the stark absence of light like spots across his vision. The darkness moved around him, every shadow swaying, dipping, and rolling the way a room did after too many drinks, and woven through it all, the colliding scents of wood fire and spring blossom, snowmelt and poppy, pipe smoke and summer wine. At turns sickly sweet and bitter, and all of it dizzying.

  The city was something out of a dream.

  London had always been made of sound as much as magic, the music drifting on the air, the singing glass and laughing crowds, the carriages and the bustle of the market.

  The sounds he heard now were all wrong.

  The wind was up, and on it he heard the hooves of guards on horseback, the clank of metal and the multitude of ghostly voices, an echo of words that all broke down before they reached him, forming a terrible music. Voices, or maybe one voice repeating, looping over and under itself until it seemed like a chorus, the words just out of reach. It was a world of whispers, and part of Alucard wanted to lean in, to listen, to strain until he could make out what it was saying.

  Instead, he said the names.

  Names of everyone who needed him and everyone he needed and everyone he couldn’t—wouldn’t—lose.

  Anisa. Stross. Lenos. Vasry. Jinnar. Rhy. Delilah …

  The tournament tents sat empty, the fog reaching inside for signs of life. The streets were abandoned, the citizens forced into their homes, as if wood and stone would be enough to stop the spell. Maybe it would. But Alucard doubted it.

  Down the road, the night market was on fire. A pair of guards worked furiously to put out the blaze, summoning water from the lightless Isle while two more tried to wrangle a group of men and women. The dark magic scrawled itself across their bodies, smudging out Alucard’s vision, engulfing the light of their own energy, blues and greens and reds and purples swallowed up with black.

  One of the women was crying.

  Another was laughing at the flames.

  A man kept making for the river, arms outstretched, while another knelt silently, head tipped back toward the sky. Only the guards’ mounts seemed immune to the magic. The horses snorted and flicked their tails, whinnying and stamping hooves at the fog as if it were a snake.

  Berras and Anisa waited across the river, the Night Spire bobbed in its berth, but Alucard felt himself moving toward the burning market and the guards as a man rushed toward one of them, a metal rod in his hands.

  “Ras al!” called Alucard, ripping the pole from the man’s grip right before it met the guard’s neck. It went skittering away, but the sight of it had given the others an idea.

  Those on the ground began to rise, their movements strangely fluid, almost coordinated, as if guided by the same invisible hand.

  The guard shot toward his horse, but there wasn’t time. They were on him, hands tearing blindly at the armor as Alucard surged toward them. A man was beating the guard’s helmeted head against the stones, saying, “Let him in, let him in, let him in.”

  Alucard tore the man off, but instead of letting go, tumbling away, the man held fast to Alucard’s arm, fingers digging in.

  “Have you met the shadow king?” he asked, eyes wide and swirling with fog, veins edging toward black. Alucard drove his boot into the man’s face, tearing himself free.

  “Get inside,” ordered the second guard, “quickly, before—”

  His voice was cut off by the scrape of metal and the wet sound of a blade finding flesh. He looked down at the royal half sword, his sword, protruding from his chest. As he slumped to his knees, the woman holding the sword’s hilt flashed Alucard a dazzling smile.

  “Why won’t you let him in?” she asked.

  The two guards lay dead on the ground, and now a dozen pairs of poisoned eyes swiveled toward him. Darkness webbed across their skin. Alucard scrambled to his feet and began to back away. Fire was still tearing through the market tents, exposing the metal cords that kept the fabric taut, the steel turning red with heat.

  They came at him in a wave.

  Alucard swore, and flicked his fingers, and the metal snapped free as they fell on him. The cords snaked through the air, first toward his hands, and then, sharply away. It caught the men and women in its metal grip, coiling around arms and legs, but if they felt its bite or burn, it didn’t show.

  “The king will find you,” snarled one as Alucard lunged for the guard’s mount.

  “The king will get in,” said a second, as he swung up and kicked the horse into motion.

  Their voices trailed in his wake.

  “All hail the shadow king.…”

  * * *

  “Berras?” called Alucard as he rode through unlocked gates. “Anisa?”

  His childhood home loomed before him, lit like a lantern against the night.

  Despite the cold, Alucard’s skin was slick with sweat from riding hard. He’d crossed the Copper Bridge, held his breath for the full stretch as the oily slick of poisoned magic roiled on the surface of the river below. He’d hoped—desperately, dumbly—that the sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t reached the northern bank, but the moment his mount’s hooves touched solid earth, those hopes crumbled. More chaos. The people moved in mobs, the marked from the shal alongside the nobles in their winter fineries, still done up from the last of the tournament balls, all searching out those who hadn’t fallen to the spell, and dragging them under.

  And through it all, the same haunting chant.

  “Have you met the king?”

  Anisa. Stross. Lenos.

  Alucard spurred the horse on.

  Vasry. Jinnar. Rhy. Delilah …

  Alucard swung down from the borrowed horse and hurried up the steps.

  The front door was ajar.

  The servants were gone.

  The front hall sat empty, save for the fog.

  “Anisa!” he called again, moving from the foyer into the library, the library into the dining room, the dining room into the salon. In every room, the lamps were lit, the fires burned, the air stifling with heat. In every room, the low fog twisted around table legs and through chairs, crept the walls like trellis vines. “Berras!”

  “For saints’ sake, be still,” growled a voice behind him.

  Alucard spun to find his older brother, one shoulder tipped against the door. A wineglass hung as it always did from his fingers, and his chiseled face held its usual disdain. Berras, ordinary, impertinent Berras.

  Relief knocked the air from Alucard’s lungs.

  “Where are the servants? Where is Anisa?”

  “Is that how you greet me?”

  “The city is under attack.”

  “Is it?” Berras asked absently, and Alucard hesitated. There was something wrong with his voice. It held a lightness, bordering on amusement. Berras Emery was never amused.

  He should have known then that it was wrong.

  All wrong.

  “It isn’t safe here,” said Alucard.

  Berras shifted forward. “No, it isn’t. Not for you.”

  The light caught his brother’s gaze, snagging on the ropes of fog that shimmered in his eyes, turning them glassy, the beads of sweat beginning to pool in the hollows of his face. Beneath his tan
skin, his veins were edging black, and if Berras Emery had had more than an ounce of magic to start with, Alucard would have seen it winking out, smothered by the spell.

  “Brother,” he said slowly, though the word tasted wrong in his mouth.

  Once, Berras would have knocked the term aside. Now he didn’t even seem to notice.

  “You’re stronger than this,” said Alucard, even though Berras had never been the master of his temper or his moods.

  “Come to claim your laurels?” continued Berras. “One more title to add to the stack?” He lifted his glass and then, discovering it empty, simply let it fall. Alucard caught it with his will before it could shatter against the inlaid floor.

  “Champion,” drawled Berras, ambling toward him. “Nobleman. Pirate. Whore.” Alucard tensed, the last word finding its mark.

  “You think I didn’t know all along?”

  “Stop,” he whispered, the word lost beneath his brother’s steps. In that moment, Berras looked so much like their father. A predator.

  “I’m the one who told him,” said Berras, as if reading his mind. “Father wasn’t even surprised. Only disgusted. ‘What a disappointment,’ he said.”

  “I’m glad he’s dead,” snarled Alucard. “I only wish I could have been in London when it happened.”

  Berras’s look darkened, but the lightness in his voice, a hollow ease, remained.

  “I went to the arena, you know,” he rambled. “I stayed to watch you fight. Every match, can you believe it? I didn’t carry your pennant, of course. I didn’t come to see you win. I just hoped that someone would beat you. That they would bury you.”

  Alucard had learned how to take up space. He had never felt small, except here, in this house, with Berras, and despite years of practice, he felt himself retreating.

  “It would have been worth it,” continued Berras, “to see someone knock that smug look off your face—”

  A muffled sound from upstairs, the thud of a weight hitting the floor.

  “Anisa!” called Alucard, taking his eyes off Berras for an instant.

  It was a foolish thing to do.

  His brother slammed him back into the nearest wall, a mountain of muscle and bone. Growing up without magic, his brother knew how to use his fists. And he used them well.