“Alucard—” started Lila.
“The mist is my doing,” he said, looking between them. “It should give you cover.”
Kell nodded, and then after a moment, offered his hand. Alucard looked at it as if it were a hot iron, but he took it.
“Anoshe,” said Kell.
Lila’s chest tightened at the word. It was what Arnesians said when they parted. Lila said nothing, because good-byes in any language felt like surrenders, and she wasn’t willing to do that.
Even when Alucard wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
Even when he pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“You’re my best thief,” he whispered, and her eyes burned.
“I should have killed you,” she muttered, hating the waver in her voice.
“Probably,” he said, and then, so soft his words were lost to everyone but her, “Keep him safe.”
And then his arms were gone, and Kell was pulling her toward the boat, and the last thing she saw of Alucard Emery was the line of his broad shoulders, his head held high as he stood alone on the deck, facing the fleet.
*
Lila’s boots hit the dinghy floor, rocking it in a way that made Holland grip the side.
The last time she’d been in a boat this small, she’d been sitting in the middle of the sea with her hands tied and a barrel of drugged ale between her knees. That had been a bet. This was a gamble.
The dinghy pushed away, and within moments Alucard’s mist was swallowing the Ghost from view.
“Sit down,” said Kell, taking up an oar.
She did, reaching numbly for the second pole. Holland sat at the back of the little boat, casually rolling up his cuff.
“A little help?” said Lila, and his green eye narrowed at her as he produced a small blade and pressed it to his palm.
Holland brought his bleeding hand to the boat’s side and said a phrase she’d never heard before—As Narahi—and the small craft lurched forward in the water, nearly throwing Kell and Lila from their bench.
Mist sprayed up into her eyes, salty and cold, the wind whipping around her face, but as her vision cleared she realized the dinghy was racing forward, skimming the surface of the water as if propelled by a dozen unseen oars.
Lila looked to Kell. “You didn’t teach me this one.”
His jaw was slack. “I … I didn’t know it.”
Holland gave them both a bland look. “Amazing,” he said dryly. “There are still things you haven’t learned.”
VII
The streets were filled with bodies, but Rhy felt entirely alone.
Alone, he left his home.
Alone, he moved through the streets.
Alone, he climbed the icy bridge that led to Osaron’s palace.
The doors swung open at his touch, and Rhy stilled—he’d half expected to find a grim replica of his own palace, but found instead a specter, a skeletal body hollowed out and filled in again with something less substantial. There were no grand hallways, no staircases leading up to other floors, no ballrooms or balconies.
Only a cavernous space, the bones of the arenas still visible here and there beneath the veneer of shadow and magic.
Pillars grew up from the floor like trees, branching toward a ceiling that gave way here and there to open sky, an effect that made the palace seem at once a masterpiece and a ruin.
Most of the light came from that broken roof, the rest from within, a glow that suffused every surface like fire trapped behind thick glass. Even that thin light was being swallowed up, blotted out by the same black slick he’d seen spreading through the city, magic voiding nature.
Rhy’s boots echoed as he willed himself forward through the vast hall, toward the magnificent throne waiting at its center, as natural and unnatural as the palace around it. Ethereal, and empty.
The shadow king stood several paces to the side, examining a corpse.
The corpse itself was on its feet, held up by ribbons of darkness that ran like puppet strings from head and arms up toward the ceiling. Threads that not only propped the body up, but seemed to be stitching it back together.
It was a woman, he could tell that much, and when Osaron twitched his fingers, the threads pulled tight, lifting her face toward the watery light. Her red hair—redder even than Kell’s—hung lank against her hollow cheeks, and below one closed eye, black spilled down her face as if she’d been weeping ink.
Without a shell, Osaron himself looked as spectral as his palace, a half-formed image of a man, the light shining through him every time he moved. His cloak billowed, caught by some imaginary wind, and his whole form rippled and shuddered, as if it couldn’t quite hold itself together.
“What are you?” said the shadow king, and though he faced the corpse, Rhy knew the words were meant for him.
Alucard had warned Rhy of Osaron’s voice, the way it echoed through a person’s head, snaked through their thoughts. But when he spoke, Rhy heard nothing but the words themselves ringing against stone.
“I am Rhy Maresh,” he answered, “and I am king.”
Osaron’s shadowy fingers slipped back to his sides. The woman slumped a little on her strings.
“Kings are like weeds in this world.” He turned, and Rhy saw a face made of layered shadow. It flickered with emotions, there and gone and there and gone, annoyance and amusement, anger and disdain. “Has this one come to beg, or kneel, or fight?”
“I’ve come to see you for myself,” said Rhy. “To show you the face of this city. To let you know that I am not afraid.” It was a lie—he was indeed afraid, but his fear paled against the grief, the anger, the need to act.
The creature gave him a long, searching look. “You are the empty one.”
Rhy shivered. “I am not empty.”
“The hollow one.”
He swallowed. “I am not hollow.”
“The dead one.”
“I am not dead.”
The shadow king was coming toward him now, and Rhy fought the urge to retreat. “Your life is not your life.”
Osaron reached out a hand, and Rhy stepped back, then, or tried to, only to find his boots bound to the floor by a magic he couldn’t see. The shadow king brought his hand to Rhy’s chest, and the buttons on his tunic crumbled, the fabric parting to reveal the concentric circles of the seal scarred over his heart. Slivers of cold pierced the air between shadow and skin.
“My magic.” Osaron made a gesture, as if to tear the seal away, but nothing happened. “And not my magic.”
Rhy let out a shaky breath. “You have no hold on me.”
A smile danced across Osaron’s lips, and the darkness tightened around Rhy’s boots. Fear grew louder then, but Rhy fought hard to smother it. He was not a prisoner. He was here by choice. Drawing Osaron’s attention, his wrath.
Forgive me, Kell, he thought, leveling his gaze on the shadow king.
“Someone took my body from me once,” he said. “They took my will. Never again. I am not a puppet, and there is nothing you can make me do.”
“You are wrong.” Osaron’s eyes lit up like a cat’s in the dark. “I can make you suffer.”
Cold knifed up Rhy’s shins as the bindings around his ankles turned to ice. He caught his breath as it began to spread, not up his limbs, but around his entire body, a curtain, a column, devouring first his vision of the shadow king and his dead puppet, and then the throne, and finally the entire chamber, until he was trapped inside a shell of ice. Its surface was so smooth, he could see his own reflection, distorted by the warp of the ice as it thickened. Could see the shadow of the creature on the other side. He imagined Osaron grinning.
“Where is the Antari now?” A ghostly hand came to rest against the ice. “Shall we send him a message?”
The column of ice shivered, and then, to Rhy’s horror, it began to grow spikes. He tried to retreat, but there was nowhere to go.
Rhy bit back a scream as the first point pierced his calf.
Pain flared through him, hot and bright, but fleeting.
I am not empty, he told himself as a second spike cut into his side. A muffled cry as another shard drove through his shoulder, sliding in and out of his collar with terrible ease.