As Athos went to raise the whip, Kell wrapped his fingers around the chains. The blood on his palm was nearly dry, but he grabbed the metal hard enough to reopen the gash.
“As Orense,” he said an instant before the whip cracked through the air, and the chains released Kell just in time for him to dodge the forked silver. He rolled, fetching up the discarded blade, and pressed his bleeding palm to the floor stones, remembering Holland’s attack.
“As Steno,” he said. The floor stone cracked into a dozen sharp shards under his fingers. Kell rose, the jagged pieces rising with him, and when he cast his hand out, they shot forward toward the king. Athos casually held up his hand in response, the stone clutched within, and a shield took shape in front of him, the slivers of rock shattering uselessly against it.
Athos smiled darkly. “Oh, yes,” he said, lowering the shield. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
*
Lila wove through the forest of statues, their heads bowed in surrender, hands up in plea.
She circled the vaulting fortress—it looked like a cathedral, if a cathedral were built on stilts and had no stained glass, only steel and stone. Still, the fortress was long and narrow like a church with one main set of doors on the north side, and three smaller, albeit still impressive, entrances at the south, east, and west sides. Lila’s heart hammered as she approached the south entrance, the path to the stairs lined by stone supplicants.
She would have preferred to scale the walls and go in by an upper window, something more discreet than marching up the stairs, but she had no rope and no hook, and even if she’d had the necessary outfittings for such a jaunt, Kell had warned her against it.
The Danes, he had told her, trusted no one, and the castle was as much trap as it was a king’s seat. “The main doors face north,” he’d said, “I’ll go by those. You enter through the south doors.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“In this place,” he’d answered, “everything is dangerous. But if the doors deny you, at least the fall won’t be as steep.”
So Lila had agreed to go by the doors despite her nagging fear that they were traps. It was all a trap. She reached the south stairs and pulled her horned mask down over her eyes before scaling the steps. At the top, the doors gave way without resistance, and again Lila’s gut told her to go, to run the other way, but for the first time in her life, she ignored the warning and stepped inside. The space beyond the doors was dark, but the moment she crossed the threshold, lanterns flared to light, and Lila froze. Dozens of guards lined the walls like living suits of armor. Their heads twisted toward the open door, toward her, and she steeled herself against the impending assault.
But it never came.
Kell had told her that White London was a throne taken—and held—by force, and that this type of ascension didn’t usually inspire loyalty. The guards here were clearly bound by magic, trapped under some kind of control spell. But that was the problem with forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do. You had to be so specific. They had no choice but to follow orders, but they probably weren’t inclined to go above and beyond them.
A slow smile drew across her lips.
Whatever order King Athos had given his guards, it didn’t seem to extend to her. Their empty eyes followed her as she moved down the hall as calmly as possible. As if she belonged there. As if she had not come to kill their queen. She wondered, as she moved past them, how many wanted her to succeed.
The halls in the red palace had been labyrinthine, but here there was a simple grid of lines and intersections, further proof that the castle had once been something like a church. One hall gave onto another before putting her out in front of the throne room, just as Kell had said it would.
But Kell had also said the hall would be empty.
And it was not.
A boy stood in front of the throne room door. He was younger than Lila, and thin in a wiry way, and unlike the guards with their empty eyes, his were dark and bruised and feverish. When he saw her coming, he drew his sword.
“V?sk,” he ordered.
Lila’s brow furrowed.
“V?sk,” he said again. “?s reijkav v?sk.”
“Hey, you,” she said curtly. “Move.”
The boy started speaking low and urgently in his own language. Lila shook her head and drew the knife with the brass knuckles from its sheath. “Get out of my way.”
Feeling she had made herself understood, Lila strode forward toward the door. But the boy lifted his sword, put himself squarely in her path, and said, “V?sk.”
“Look,” she snapped. “I have no idea what you’re saying.…”
The young guard looked around, exasperated.
“But I would strongly advise you to go and pretend this interaction never took place and—hey, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
The boy had shaken his head and muttered something under his breath, and then he brought his sword to his own arm, and began to cut.