He missed the room, and the privacy that came with it, but there was something to the missing. He supposed he deserved it. Others had lost far more because of him.
So Kell remained in the royal chambers.
The bed waited on a raised platform, a plush mattress with a sea of pillows, but Kell slumped down into his favorite chair instead. A battered thing by comparison, dragged from one of the palace’s studies, it faced the balcony doors and, beyond, the warm red glow of the Isle. He snapped his fingers, and the lanterns dimmed and then went dark.
Sitting there with only the river’s light, his tired mind drifted, as it invariably did, back to Delilah Bard. When Kell thought of her, she was not one girl, but three: the too-skinny street thief who’d robbed him in an alley, the blood-streaked partner who’d fought beside him, and the impossible girl who’d walked away and never looked back.
Where are you, Lila, he mused. And what kind of trouble are you getting into?
Kell dragged a kerchief from his back pocket: a small square of dark fabric first given to him by a girl dressed as a boy in a darkened alley, a sleight of hand so she could rob him. He’d used it to find her more than once, and he wondered if he could do it again, or if it now belonged more to him than to her. He wondered where it would take him, if it worked.
He knew with a bone-deep certainty that she was alive—had to be alive—and he envied her, envied the fact that this Grey London girl was out there somewhere, seeing parts of the world that Kell—a Red Londoner, an Antari—had never glimpsed.
He put the kerchief away, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to drag him under.
When it did, he dreamed of her. Dreamed of her standing on his balcony, goading him to come out and play. He dreamed of her hand tangling in his, a pulse of power twining them together. He dreamed of them racing through foreign streets, not the London ones they’d navigated, but crooks and bends in places he’d never been, and ones he might never see. But there she was, at his side, pulling him toward freedom.
V
WHITE LONDON
Ojka had always been graceful.
Graceful when she danced. Graceful when she killed.
Sunlight spilled across the stone floor as she spun, her knives licking the air as they arced and dipped, tethered to her hands and to one another by a single length of black cord.
Her hair, once pale, now shone red, a shock of color against her still porcelain skin, bold as blood. It skimmed her shoulders as she twirled, and bowed, a bright streak at the center of a deadly circle. Ojka danced, and the metal kept pace, the perfect partner to her fluid movements, and the entire time, she kept her eyes closed. She knew the dance by heart, a dance she’d first learned as a child on the streets in Kosik, in the worst part of London. A dance she’d mastered. You didn’t stay alive in this city on luck alone. Not if you had any promise of power. The scavengers would sniff it out, slit your throat so they could steal whatever dregs were in your blood. They didn’t care if you were little. That only made you easier to catch and kill.
But not Ojka. She’d carved her way through Kosik. Grown up and stayed alive in a city that managed to kill off everyone. Everything.
But that was another life. That was before. This was after.
Ojka’s veins traced elegant black lines over her skin as she moved. She could feel the magic thrumming through her, a second pulse twined with hers. At first it had burned, so hot she feared it would consume her, the way it had the others. But then she let go. Her body stopped fighting, and so did the power. She embraced it, and once she did, it embraced her, and they danced together, burned together, fusing like strengthened steel.
The blades sang past, extensions of her hands. The dance was almost done.
And then she felt the summons, like a flare of heat inside her skull.
She came to a stop—not suddenly, of course, but slowly—winding the black cord around her hands until the blades snapped against her palms. Only then did her eyes drift open.
One was yellow.
The other was black.
Proof that she had been chosen.
She wasn’t the first, but that was all right. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that the others had been too weak. The first had only lasted a few days. The second had scarcely made it through the week. But Ojka was different. Ojka was strong. She had survived. She would survive, so long as she was worthy.
That was the king’s promise, when he had chosen her.
Ojka coiled the cord around the blades and slid the weapon back into the holster at her hip.
Sweat dripped from the ends of her crimson hair, and she wrung it out before shrugging on her jacket and fastening her cloak. Her fingers traced the scar that ran from her throat up over her jaw and across her cheek, ending just below the king’s mark.
When the magic brought strength to her muscles, warmth to her blood, and color to her features, she feared it would wipe away the scar. She’d been relieved when it didn’t. She’d earned this scar, and every other one she bore.
The summons flared again behind her eyes, and she stepped outside. The day was cold but not bitter, and overhead, beyond the clouds, the sky was streaked across with blue. Blue. Not the frosty off-white she’d grown up with, but true blue. As if the sky itself had thawed. The water of the Sijlt was thawing, too, more and more every day, ice giving way to green-grey water.
Everywhere she looked, the world was waking.
Reviving.
And Ojka’s blood quickened at the sight of it. She’d been in a shop once, and had seen a chest covered in dust. She remembered running her hand across it, removing the film of grey and revealing the dark wood beneath. It was like that, she thought. The king had come and swept his hand across the city, brushed away the dust.
It would take time, he said, but that was all right. Change was coming.
Only a single road stood between her quarters and the castle walls, and as she crossed the street, her gaze flicked toward the river, and the other half of the city beyond. From the heart of Kosik to the steps of the castle. She’d come a long way.
The gates stood open, new vines climbing the stone walls to either side, and she reached out and touched a small purple bud as she stepped through onto the grounds.
Where the Krös Mejkt had once sprawled, a graveyard of stone corpses at the feet of the castle, now there was wild grass, creeping up despite the winter chill. Only two statues remained, flanking the castle stairs, both commissioned by the new king, not as a warning, but as a reminder of false promises and fallen tyrants.
They were likenesses of the old rulers, Athos and Astrid Dane, carved in white marble. Both figures were on their knees. Athos Dane stared down at the whip in his hands, which coiled like a snake around his wrists, his face twisted in pain, while Astrid clutched the handle of a dagger, its blade buried in her chest, her mouth stretched in a soundless, immortal scream.
The statues were grisly, inelegant things. Unlike the new king.
The new king was perfect.
The new king was chosen.
The new king was god.
And Ojka? She saw the way he looked at her with those beautiful eyes, and she knew he saw the beauty in her, too, now, more and more every day.
She reached the top of the stairs and passed through into the castle.