“Hey,” Lila said again as the boy gritted his teeth and drew a second line, and then a third. “Stop that.”
She went to catch his wrist, but he stopped cutting the pattern and looked her in the eyes, and said, “Leave.”
For a moment, Lila thought she’d heard him wrong. And then she realized he was speaking English. When she looked down, she saw that he’d carved some kind of symbol into his skin.
“Leave,” he said again. “Now.”
“Get out of my way,” countered Lila.
“I can’t.”
“Boy—” she warned.
“I can’t,” he said again. “I have to guard the door.”
“Or what?” challenged Lila.
“There is no or what.” He pulled aside the collar of his shirt to show a mark, angry and black, scarred into his skin. “He ordered me to guard the door, so I must guard it.”
Lila frowned. The mark was different from Kell’s, but she understood what it must be: some kind of seal. “What happens if you step aside?” she asked.
“I can’t.”
“What happens if I cut you down?”
“I’ll die.”
He said both things with sad and equal certainty. What a mad world, thought Lila.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Beloc.”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough.” There was a proud tilt to his jaw, and a fire in his eyes she recognized. A defiance. But he was still young. Too young for this.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Beloc,” she said. “Don’t make me.”
“I wish I didn’t have to.”
He squared himself to her, holding his sword with both hands, his knuckles white. “You’ll have to go through me.”
Lila growled and gripped her knife.
“Please,” he added. “Please go through me.”
Lila gave him a long hard look. “How?” she said at last.
His brows went up in question.
“How do you want to die?” she clarified.
The fire in his eyes wavered for an instant, and then he recovered, and said, “Quickly.”
Lila nodded. She lifted her knife, and he lowered his sword just a fraction, just enough. And then he closed his eyes and began to whisper something to himself. Lila didn’t hesitate. She knew how to use a knife, how to wound, and how to kill. She closed the gap between them and drove the blade between Beloc’s ribs and up before he’d even finished his prayer. There were worse ways to go, but she still swore under her breath at Athos and Astrid and the whole forsaken city as she lowered the boy’s body to the floor.
She wiped her blade on the hem of her shirt and sheathed the knife as she stepped up to the waiting doors of the throne room. A circle of symbols was etched into the wood, twelve marks in all. She brought her hand to the dial, remembering Kell’s instructions.
“Think of it as a clockface,” he’d said, drawing the motion in the air. “One, seven, three, nine.” Now she drew it with her finger, touching the symbol at the first hour, then drawing her fingertip down and across the circle to the seventh, around and up to the three, and straight through the middle to the nine.
“Are you certain you’ve got it?” Kell had asked, and Lila had sighed and blown the hair out of her eyes.
“I told you, I’m a fast learner.”
At first, nothing happened. And then something passed between her fingers and the wood, and a lock slid within.
“Told you,” she murmured, pushing the door open.
III
Athos was laughing. It was a horrible sound.
The hall around them was in disarray, the hollow guards in a heap, the hangings torn, and the torches scattered on the ground, still burning. A bruise blossomed beneath Kell’s eye, and Athos’s white cloak was singed and flecked with blackish blood.
“Shall we go again?” said Athos. Before the words had even left his lips, a bolt of dark energy shot out like lightning from the front of the king’s shield. Kell threw up his hand, and the floor shot up between them, but he wasn’t fast enough. The electricity slammed into him and hurled him backward into the front doors of the castle hard enough to split the wood. He coughed, breathless and dizzy from the blow, but he had no chance to recover. The air crackled and came alive, and another bolt struck him so hard that the doors splintered and broke, and Kell went tumbling back into the night.
For an instant, everything went black, and then his vision came back, and he was falling.
The air sprang up to catch him, or at least muffle the fall, but he still hit the stone courtyard at the base of the stairs hard enough to crack bone. The royal blade went skittering away several feet. Blood dripped from Kell’s nose to the stones.
“We both hold swords,” chided Athos as he descended the stairs, his white cloak billowing regally behind him. “Yet you choose to fight with a pin.”