King Maxim shook his head. “I’m not doing this to punish you. I’m doing it to protect Rhy.”
“Your Majesty, I’m the one who protects Rhy. If anything were to—”
“But Rhy doesn’t need your protection,” cut in the king, “not anymore. The only way to keep him safe is to keep you safe.” Kell’s mouth went dry. “Come, Kell,” continued the king, “you can’t care that much. I haven’t seen you at the tournament all day.”
Kell shook his head. “That’s not the point. This isn’t—”
“The central arena is visible from the palace balconies. You can watch the tournament from here.” The king set a golden ring the size of his palm on the table. “You can even listen to it.”
Kell opened his mouth, but the protests died on his tongue. He swallowed and clenched his hands. “Very well, sir,” he said, pushing to his feet. “Am I banished from the balls, too?”
“No,” said the king, ignoring the edge in Kell’s voice. “We keep track of all those who come and go. I see no reason to keep you from those, so long as you are careful. Besides, we wouldn’t want our guests to wonder where you were.”
“Of course,” murmured Kell.
As soon as the king was gone, Kell crossed into the small room off the main chamber and shut the door. Candles came to life on the shelf walls, and by their light he could see the back of the door, its wood marked by a dozen symbols, each a portal to another place in London. It would be so easy to go. They could not keep him. Kell drew his knife and cut a shallow line against his arm. When the blood welled, he touched his fingers to the cut, but instead of tracing an existing symbol, he drew a fresh mark on a bare stretch of wood: a vertical bar with two horizontal accents, one on top leading right, one on bottom leading left.
The same symbol he’d made in Kamerov’s tent that morning.
Kell had no intention of missing the tournament, but if a lie would ease the king’s mind, so be it. As far as breaking the king’s trust, it didn’t matter. The king hadn’t trusted him in months.
Kell smiled grimly at the door, and went to join his brother.
VII
WHITE LONDON
Ojka stood beneath the trees, wiping the blood from her knives.
She’d spent the morning patrolling the streets of Kosik, her old stomping ground, where trouble still flared like fire through dry fields. Holland said it was to be expected, that change would always bring unrest, but Ojka was less forgiving. Her blades found the throats of traitors and disbelievers, silencing their dissent one voice at a time. They didn’t deserve to be a part of this new world.
Ojka holstered the weapons and breathed deeply. The castle grounds, once littered with statues, were now filled with trees, each blossoming despite the winter chill. For as long as Ojka could remember, her world had smelled like ash and blood, but now it smelled of fresh air and fallen leaves, of forests and raging fires, of life and death, of sweet and damp and clean, of promise, of change, of power.
Her hand drifted to the nearest tree, and when she placed her palm flat against the trunk she could feel a pulse. She didn’t know if it was hers, or the king’s, or the tree’s. Holland had told her that it was the pulse of the world, that when magic behaved the way it should, it belonged to no one and everyone, nothing and everything. It was a shared thing.
Ojka didn’t understand that, but she wanted to.
The bark was rough, and when she chipped away a piece with her nail, she was surprised to see the wood beneath mottled with the silver threads of spellwork. A bird cawed overhead, and Ojka drew nearer, but before she could examine the tree, she felt the pulse of heat behind her eye, the king’s voice humming through her head, resonant and welcome.
Come to me, he said.
Ojka’s hand fell away from the tree.
* * *
She was surprised to find her king alone.
Holland was sitting forward on his throne, elbows on knees and head bowed over a silver bowl, its surface brimming with twisting smoke. She held her breath when she realized he was in the middle of a spell. The king’s hands were raised to either side of the bowl, his face a mask of concentration. His mouth was a firm line, but shadows wove through both of his eyes, coiling through the black of the left one before overtaking the green of the right. The shadows were alive, snaking through his sight as the smoke did in the bowl, where it coiled around something she couldn’t see. Lines of light traced themselves like lightning through the darkness, and Ojka’s skin prickled with the strength of the magic before the spell finished, the air around her shivered, and everything went still.
The king’s hands fell away from the bowl, but several long moments passed before the living darkness retreated from the king’s right eye, leaving a vivid emerald in its wake.
“Your Majesty,” said Ojka carefully.
He did not look up.
“Holland.”
At that, his head rose. For an instant his two-toned gaze was still strangely empty, his focus far away, and then it sharpened, and she felt the weight of his attention settle on her.
“Ojka,” he said, in his smooth, reverberating way.
“You summoned me.”
“I did.”
He stood and gestured to the floor beside the dais.
That was when she saw the bodies.
There were two of them, swept aside like dirt, and to be fair, they looked less like corpses than like crumbling piles of ash, flesh withered black on bone frames, bodies contorted as if in pain, what was left of hands raised to what was left of throats. One looked much worse than the other. She didn’t know what had happened to them. Wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And yet she felt compelled to ask. The question tumbled out, her voice tearing the quiet.
“Calculations,” answered the king, almost to himself. “I was mistaken. I thought the collar was too strong, but it is not. The people were just too weak.”
Dread spread through Ojka like a chill as her attention returned to the silver bowl. “Collar?”
Holland reached inside the bowl—for an instant, something in him seemed to recoil, resist the motion, but the king persisted—and as he did, shadow spilled over his skin, up his fingers, his hands, his wrists, becoming a pair of black gloves, smooth and strong, their surfaces subtly patterned with spellwork. Protection from whatever waited in the dark.
From the depths of the silver bowl, the king withdrew a circlet of dark metal, hinged on one side, symbols etched and glowing on its surface. Ojka tried to read the markings, but her vision kept slipping, unable to find purchase. The space inside the circlet seemed to swallow light, energy, the air within turning pale and colorless and as thin as paper. There was something wrong with the metal collar, wrong in a way that bent the world around it, and that wrongness plucked at Ojka’s senses, made her feel dizzy and ill.
Holland turned the circlet over in his gloved hands, as if inspecting a piece of craftsmanship. “It must be strong enough,” he said.
Ojka braved a step forward. “You summoned me,” she repeated, her attention flicking from the corpses to the king.
“Yes,” he said, looking up. “I need to know if it works.”
Fear prickled through her, the old, instinctual bite of panic, but she held her ground. “Your Majesty—”
“Do you trust me?”
Ojka tensed. Trust. Trust was a hard-won thing in a world like theirs. A world where people starved for magic and killed for power. Ojka had stayed alive so long by blade and trick and bald distrust, and it was true that things were changing now, because of Holland, but fear and caution still whispered warnings.
“Ojka.” He considered her levelly, with eyes of emerald and ink.