by V. E. Schwab
“Rosenal,” said Lila blandly.
“Tell me we’re ready to sail,” said Kell.
Holland said nothing, but made his way straight toward the hold. Lila watched him go.
I still don’t trust you, she thought.
As if he could feel the weight of her gaze, Holland glanced back over his shoulder.
You do not know me, his gaze seemed to say.
You do not know me at all.
III
“I’ve been thinking about the boy,” said Vor.
They were sitting at a low table in the king’s room, he and Holland, playing a round of Ost. It was a game of strategy and risk, and it was Vortalis’s favorite way to unwind, but no one would play him anymore—the guards were tired of losing the game, and their money—so Holland always ended up across the board.
“Which boy?” he asked, rolling the chips in his palm.
“The messenger.”
It had been two years since that visit, two long years spent trying to rebuild a broken city, to carve a shelter in the storm. Trying—and failing. Holland kept his voice even. “What of him?”
“Do you still have the coin?” asked Vor, even though they both knew he did. It sat in his pocket always, the metal worn from use. They did not speak of Holland’s absences, of the times he disappeared, only to return smelling too sweetly of flowers instead of ash and stone. Holland never stayed, of course. And he was never gone long. He hated those visits, hated seeing what his world could have been, and yet he couldn’t keep himself from going, from seeing, from knowing what was on the other side of the door. He couldn’t look away.
“Why?” he asked now.
“I think it’s time to send a letter.”
“Why now?”
“Don’t play the fool,” said Vor, letting his chips fall to the table. “It doesn’t suit you. We both know the stores are thinning and the days grow shorter. I make laws, and people break them, I make order and they turn it into chaos.” He ran a hand through his hair, fingers snagging on the ring of steel. His usual poise faltered. With a snarl he flung the crown across the room. “No matter what I do, the hope is rotting, and I can hear the whispers starting in the streets. New blood, they call. As if that will fix what is broken, as if shedding enough will bring the magic in this world to heel.”
“And you would fix this with a letter?” demanded Holland.
“I would fix it any way I can,” countered Vor. “Perhaps their world was once like ours, Holland. Perhaps they know a way to help.”
“They’re the ones who sealed us off, who live in splendor while we rot, and you would go begging—”
“I would do anything if I thought it would truly help my world,” snapped Vortalis, “and so would you. That is why you’re here beside me. Not because you are my sword, not because you are my shield, not because you are my friend. You are here with me because we will both do whatever we can to keep our world alive.”
Holland looked hard at the king then, hard, took in the grey threading his dark hair, the permanent furrow between his brows. He was still charming, still magnetic, still smiled when something delighted him, but the act now drew deep lines in his skin, and Holland knew the spells across Vor’s hands weren’t enough to bind the magic anymore.
Holland set a chip on the board, as though they were still playing. “I thought I was here to keep your head on your shoulders.”
Vortalis managed a strained laugh, a farce of humor. “That, too,” he said, and then, sobering: “Listen to me, Holland. Of all the ways to die, only a fool chooses pride.”
A servant entered with a loaf of bread, a bottle of kaash, a pile of thin cigars. Despite the crown, the castle, Vor was still a man of habit.
He took up a tightly rolled paper, and Holland snapped his fingers, offering the flame.
Vor sat back and examined the burning end of the taper. “Why didn’t you want to be king?”
“I suppose I’m not arrogant enough.”
Vor chuckled. “Maybe you’re a wiser man than I am.” He took a long drag. “I’m beginning to think that thrones make tyrants of us all.”
He blew out the smoke, and coughed.
Holland frowned. The king smoked ten times a day, and never seemed to suffer for it.
“Are you well?”
Vor was already waving the question away, but as he leaned forward to pour himself a drink, he put too much weight on the table’s edge and it upset, the Ost chips raining down onto the stone floor as he fell.
“Vortalis!”
The king was still coughing, a deep, wracking sound, clawing at his chest with both hands as Holland folded over him. On the floor nearby, the cigar still burned. Vor tried to speak, but managed only blood.
“Kajt,” swore Holland as he clutched a shard of glass until it bit into his hand, blood welling as he tore open Vor’s tunic and pressed his palm against the king’s chest, and commanded him to heal.
But the toxin had been too fast, the king’s heart too slow. It wasn’t working.
“Hold on, Vor.…” Holland splayed both hands against his friend’s heaving chest, and he could feel the poison in his blood, because it wasn’t poison after all but a hundred tiny slivers of spelled metal, tearing the king apart from within. No matter how fast Holland tried to heal the damage, the shards made more.
“Stay with me,” the Antari ordered, with all the force of a spell, while he drew the metal shards free, his king’s skin soaking first with sweat and then blood as the metal slivers pierced vein and muscle and flesh before rising in a dark red mist into the air above Vor’s chest.
“As Tanas,” said Holland, closing his fist, and the shards drew together into a cloud of steel before fusing back into a solid piece, cursework scrawled along its surface.
But it was too late.
He was too late.
Beneath the spelled steel, beneath Holland’s hand, the king had gone still. Blood matted his front, flecked his beard, shone in his open, empty eyes.
Ros Vortalis was dead.
Holland staggered to his feet, the cursed steel falling from his fingers, landing among the abandoned Ost chips. It didn’t roll, but splashed softly in the pool of blood. Blood that already slicked Holland’s hands, misted his skin.
“Guards,” he said once, softly, and then, raising his voice in a way he never did, “Guards!”
The room was too still, the castle too quiet.
Holland called again, but no one came. Part of him knew they weren’t coming, but shock was singing him, tangled up with grief, making him clumsy, slow.
He forced himself up, turned from Vor’s body, drawing the blade his king—his friend—had given him the day they stood on the balcony, the day Vor became the Winter King, the day Holland became his knight. Holland left his king and stormed through the doors, into an eerily silent castle.
He called out to the guards again, but of course they were already dead.
Bodies slumped forward on tables and against walls, halls empty and the world reduced to the drip drip drip of blood and wine on pale stone floors. It must have happened in minutes. Seconds. The time it took to light a cigarette, to draw a breath, exhale a plume of cursed smoke.
Holland didn’t see the spell written on the floor.
Didn’t feel the room slow around him until he’d crossed the line of magic, his body dragging suddenly as if through water instead of air.
Somewhere, echoing off the castle walls, someone laughed.
It was a laugh so unlike Talya’s, so unlike Vor’s. No sweetness, no richness, no warmth. A laugh as cold and sharp as glass.
“Look, Athos,” said the voice. “I’ve caught us a prize.”
Holland tried to turn, dragging his body toward the sound, but he was too slow, and the knife came from behind, a barbed blade that sank deep into his thigh. Pain lit his mind like light as he staggered to one knee.
A woman danced at the edges of his sight. White skin. White hair. Eyes like ice.
“Hello, pretty thing,” she said, twisting the knife until Holland actually screamed. A sound that rang out through the too-quiet castle, only to be cut off by a flash of silver, a slash of pain, a whip closing around his throat, stealing air, stealing everything. A swift tug, and Holland was forced forward, onto his hands and knees, his throat on fire. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t spell the blood now dripping to the floor beneath him.
“Ah,” said a second voice. “The infamous Holland.” A pale shape strode forward, winding the handle of the whip around his fingers. “I was hoping you would survive.”
The figure stopped at the edge of the spell, and sank onto his haunches in front of Holland’s buckled form. Up close, his skin and hair were the same white as the woman’s, his eyes the same frigid blue.
“Now,” said the man with a slow smile. “What to do with you?”
* * *
Alox was dead.
Talya was dead.
Vortalis was dead.
But Holland wasn’t.
He was strapped into a metal frame, his skin fever-hot and his limbs splayed like a moth mid-flight. Blood dripped to the stone floor, a dark red pool beneath his feet.
He could have cast a hundred spells, with all that blood, but his jaw was strapped shut. He’d woken with the vice around his head, teeth forced together so hard the only thing he could manage was a guttural sound, a groan, a sob of pain.
Athos Dane swam in his vision, those cold blue eyes and that curled mouth, a smile lurking beneath the surface like a fish under thin ice.
“I want to hear your voice, Holland,” said the man, sliding the knife under his skin. “Sing to me.” The blade sank deeper, probing for nerves, biting into tendons, slipping between bones.
Holland shuddered against the pain, but didn’t scream. He never did. It was small consolation in the end, some quicksilver hope that if he didn’t break, Athos would give up and simply kill him.
He didn’t want to die. Not in the beginning. For the first few hours—days—he’d fought back, until the metal frame had cut into his skin, until the pool of blood was large enough to see himself in, until the pain became a blanket, and his mind blurred, deprived of food, of sleep.
“Pity,” mused Athos when Holland made no sound. He turned to a table that held, among so many gruesome things, a bowl of ink, and dipped his bloodstained knife, coating the crimson steel black.
Holland’s stomach turned at the sight of it. Ink and blood, these were the stuff of curses. Athos returned to him and splayed a hand over Holland’s ribs, clearly savoring the hitching breath, the stuttering heart, the smallest tells of terror.
“You think you know,” he said quietly, “what I have planned for you.” He lifted the knife, brought the tip to the pale, unbroken skin over Holland’s heart, and smiled. “You have no idea.”
* * *
When it was done, Athos Dane took a step back to admire his work.
Holland slumped in the metal frame, blood and ink spilling down his ruined chest. His head buzzed with magic, even though some vital part of him had been stripped away.
No, not stripped away. Buried.
“Are you finished?”
The voice belonged to the other Dane. Holland dragged his head up.
Astrid was standing in the doorway behind her brother, arms folded lazily across her front.
Athos, with his sated smile, flicked his blade as if it were a brush. “You cannot rush an artist.”
She clicked her tongue, that icy gaze raking over Holland’s mutilated chest as she drew near, boots clicking sharply over stone.
“Tell me, brother,” she said, playing her cool fingers up Holland’s arm. “Do you think it wise to keep this pet?” She traced a nail along his shoulder. “He might bite.”
“What good is a beast that cannot?”
Athos slid his knife along Holland’s cheek, slicing the leather strap of the vice around his mouth. Pain sang through his jaw as it slackened, teeth aching. Air rushed into his lungs, but when he tried to speak, to summon the spells he’d kept ready on his tongue, they froze in his throat so suddenly he choked on them and nearly retched.
One wrist came free of its cuff, and then another, and Holland staggered forward, his screaming limbs nearly buckling beneath the sudden weight while Athos and Astrid stood there, simply watching.
He wanted to kill them both.
Wanted to, and could not.
Athos had carved the lines of the curse one by one, sunk the rules of the spell into his skin with steel and ink.
Holland had tried to close his mind to the magic, but it was already inside him, burning through his chest, driven like a spike through flesh and mind and soul.
The chains of the spell were stiff, articulated things. They coiled through his head, weighed heavy as iron around every limb.
Obey, they said, not to his mind, his heart—only his hands, his lips.
The command was written on his skin, threaded through his bones.
Athos cocked his head and gestured absently.
“Kneel.”
When Holland made no motion to obey, a block of stone struck him in the shoulders, a sudden, vicious, invisible weight forcing him forward. He fought to keep his feet, and the binding spell crackled through his nerves, ground against his bones.
His vision went white, and something too close to a scream escaped his aching mouth before his legs finally folded, shins meeting the cold stone floor.
Astrid clapped her hands once, pleased.
“Shall we test it?”
A sound, half curse, half cry, rang through the room as a man was dragged in, hands bound behind his back. He was bloody, beaten, his face more broken than not, but Holland recognized him as one of Vor’s. The man staggered, was righted. The moment he saw Holland, something shifted in him. Fell. His mouth opened.
“Traitor.”
“Cut his throat,” instructed Athos.
The words rippled through Holland’s limbs.
“No,” he said hoarsely. It was the first word he’d managed in days, and it was useless, his fingers moving even before his mind could register. Red blossomed at the man’s throat and he went down, his last words drowned in blood.
Holland stared at his own hand, the knife’s edge crimson.
They left they body where it fell.
And brought another in.
“No,” snarled Holland at the sight of him. A boy from the kitchens, hardly fourteen, who looked at him with wide, uncertain eyes. “Help,” he begged.
Then they brought another.
And another.
One by one, Athos and Astrid paraded the remains of Vor’s life before Holland, instructing him again and again to cut their throats. Every time, he tried to fight the order. Every time, he failed. Every time, he had to look them in their eyes and see the hatred, the betrayal, the anguished confusion before he cut them down.
The bodies piled. Athos watched. Astrid grinned.
Holland’s hand moved on its puppet string.
And his mind screamed until it finally lost its voice.
IV
Lila couldn’t sleep.
The fight kept spinning through her head, dark alleys and sharp knives, her heart racing until she was sure the sound would wake Kell. Halfway through the night she shoved up from the cot, crossed the tiny cabin in two short strides, and sank against the opposite wall, one blade resting on her knee, a small but familiar comfort.
It was late, or early, that dense dark time before the first shreds of day, and cold in the cabin—she pulled her coat down from its hook and shrugged it on, shoving her free hand in her pocket for warmth. Her fingers brushed stone, silver, silver, and she thought of Alucard’s words.
You’ll need a token to enter. Something valuable.
She searched her meager possessions for something precious enough to buy her entrance. There was the knife she’d taken from Fletcher, with its serrated blade and knuckled hilt, and then the o
ne she’d won from Lenos, with its hidden catch that split one blade into two. There was the bloodstained shard of white marble that had once been part of Astrid Dane’s face. And last, a warm and constant weight in the bottom of her pocket, there was Barron’s timepiece. Her only tether to the world she’d left. The life she’d left. Lila knew, with bone-deep certainty, that the knives wouldn’t be enough. That left her key to White London, and her key to Grey. She closed her eyes, clutching the two tokens until it hurt, knowing which was useless, and which would buy her passage.
Behind her eyes, she saw Barron’s face the night she returned to the Stone’s Throw, the smoke from the burning ship still rising at her back. Heard her own voice offering the stolen watch up as payment. She felt the heavy warmth of his hand as he closed her fingers over the timepiece, told her to keep it. She’d left it behind, though, the night she followed Kell, more a token of gratitude than anything, the only good-bye she could manage. But the watch had come back to her at Holland’s hands, stained with Barron’s blood.
It was a part of her past now.
And holding on to it wouldn’t bring him back.
Lila returned the tokens to her coat and let her head fall back against the cabin wall.
On the cot, Kell shifted in his sleep.
Overhead, the muffled sound of someone walking on the deck.
The gentle slosh of the sea. The rock of the ship.
Her eyes were just drifting shut when she heard a short, pained gasp. She jerked forward, alert, but Kell was still asleep. It came again and she was on her feet, knife at the ready as she followed the sound across the narrow corridor to the cabin where they were keeping Holland.
He was on his back on the cot, not chained, not even guarded, and dreaming—badly, it seemed. His teeth were clenched, his chest rising and falling in a staccato way. His whole body shuddered, fingers digging into the thin blanket beneath him. His mouth opened and a breath hitched in his throat. The nightmare wracked him like a chill, but he never made a sound.
Lying there, trapped within his dreams, Holland looked … exposed.
Lila stood, watching. And then she felt herself step into the room.