Lila had two knives already out, but the palace was empty around them, the hall clear. Tieren’s magic had worked, stripped the monster of his many puppets, but Kell still felt Lila’s nervous tension in his own limbs, saw that same unease reflected again in Holland’s inscrutable face.
There was a wrongness to this place, as if they’d stepped out of London, out of time, out of life entirely, and into somewhere that didn’t quite exist. It was magic without balance, power without rule, and it was dying, every surface slowly taking on the glossy black pall of nature burned to nothing.
But in the center of the vast chamber, Kell felt it.
A pulse of life.
A beating heart.
And then, as Kell’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw Rhy.
His brother hung several feet off the floor, suspended within a web of ice, held up by a dozen sharpened points that drove in and through the prince’s body, their frosted surfaces slick with red.
Rhy was alive, but only because he could not die.
His chest stuttered and heaved, tears frozen on his cheeks. His lips moved, but his words were lost, his blood a broad dark pool beneath him.
Is this yours? Rhy had asked when they were young, and Kell had cut his wrists to heal him. Is all this yours?
Now Rhy’s blood splashed under Kell’s boots, the air metallic in his mouth as he raced forward.
“Wait!” called Lila.
“Kell,” warned Holland.
But if it was a trap, they’d already been caught. Caught the moment they entered the palace.
“Hold on, Rhy.”
Rhy’s lashes fluttered at the sound of Kell’s voice. He tried to raise his head, but couldn’t.
Kell’s hand was already wet with his own blood when he reached his brother’s side. He would have melted the ice with a single touch, a word, if he’d had the chance.
Instead his fingers stopped an inch above the ice, barred by someone else’s will. Kell fought against the magic’s hold as a voice spilled from the shadows behind the throne.
“That is mine.”
The voice came from nowhere. Everywhere. And yet, it was contained. No longer a hollow construction of shadow and magic, but bounded by lips and teeth and lungs.
She walked into the light, red hair rising into the air around her face as if caught up in some imaginary wind.
Ojka.
*
Kell had followed her.
Listened to her lies in the palace courtyard—the words mixing with doubt and anger into something poisonous—and let her lead him through a door in the world and into a trap.
And when he saw Ojka now, he shivered.
*
Lila had killed her.
Faced her in the hall with Kell screaming beyond the door and Rhy dying a world away and no choice but to fight, losing a glass eye before she cut the woman’s throat.
And when she saw Ojka now, she smiled.
*
Holland had made her.
Plucked her from the streets of the Kosik, the alleys that had shaped his own past so many years before, and given her the chance Vortalis had given him, the chance to do more, to be more.
And when he saw Ojka now, he stilled.
II
Ojka, the assassin—
Ojka, the messenger—
Ojka, the Antari—
—wasn’t Ojka anymore.
“My king,” she’d called Holland so many times, but her voice had always been low, sultry, and now it resonated through the hall and in his head, familiar and strange, just as this place was familiar and strange. Holland had faced Osaron in an echo of this palace when the shadow king was nothing but glass and smoke and the dying ember of magic.
And now he faced him again, in his newest shell.
Ojka once had yellow eyes, but now they both shone black. A crown perched in her hair, a dark and weightless ring that thrust up spikes like icicles into the air above her head. Her throat was wrapped in black ribbon, her skin at once luminous with power and unmistakably dead. She never drew breath, and her dark veins stood out on her skin, parched, empty.
The only signs of life, impossibly, came from those black eyes—Osaron’s eyes—which danced with light and swirled with shadows.
“Holland,” said the shadow king, and anger burned in him to hear the monster form the word with Ojka’s lips.
“I killed you,” mused Lila, crouched at Holland’s left side, her knives at the ready.
Ojka’s face contorted with amusement.
“Magic does not die.”
“Let my brother go,” demanded Kell, stepping in front of the other two Antari, his voice imperious, even now.
“Why should I?”
“He has no power,” said Kell. “Nothing for you to use, nothing for you to take.”
“And yet he lives,” mused the corpse. “How curious. All life has strings. So where are his?”
Ojka’s chin tipped up, and the ice spearing Rhy’s body splayed like fingers, drawing from the prince a stifled cry. The color drained from Kell’s face as he fought back a mirrored scream, pain and defiance warring in his throat. The ring sang on Holland’s fingers as their shared power hummed between them, trying to tip toward Kell in his distress.
Holland held it steady.
Ojka’s hands, delicate but strong, rose, palms up. “Have you finally come to beg, Antari? To kneel?” Those swimming black eyes went to Holland. “To let me in?”
“Never again,” said Holland, and it was true, though the Inheritor hung heavy in his pocket. Osaron had a talent for sliding through one’s mind, turning over its thoughts, but Holland had more practice than most at hiding his. He forced his mind away from the device.
“We’ve come to stop you,” said Lila.
Ojka’s hands fell back to her sides. “Stop me?” said Osaron. “You cannot stop time. You cannot stop change. And you cannot stop me. I am inevitable.”
“You,” said Lila, “are nothing but a demon masquerading as a god.”
“And you,” said Osaron smoothly, “will die slowly.”
“I killed that body once,” she countered. “I think I can do it again.”
Holland was still staring at Ojka’s corpse. The bruises on her skin. The cloth wrapped tight around her throat. As if Osaron felt the weight of that gaze, he turned his stolen face toward Holland. “Are you not happy to see your knight?”
Holland’s anger had never burned hot. It was forged cold and sharp, and the words were a whetstone along its edge. Ojka had been loyal, not to Osaron, but to him. She had served him. Trusted him. Looked at him and seen not a god, but a king. And she was dead—like Alox, like Talya, like Vortalis.
“She did not let you in.”
A tip of the head. A rictus grin. “In death, none can refuse.”
Holland drew a blade—a scythe, taken from a body in the square. “I will cut you from that body,” he said. “Even if I have to do it one piece at a time.”
Fire sparked across Lila’s knives.
Blood dripped from Kell’s fingers.
They had shifted slowly around the shadow king, circling, caging.
Just as they’d planned.
*
“No one offers,” instructed Kell. “No matter what Osaron says or does, no matter what he promises or threatens, no one lets him in.”
They were sitting in the Ghost’s galley, the Inheritor between them.
“So we’re just supposed to play coy?” said Lila, spinning a dagger point-down on the wooden table.
Holland started to speak, but the ship gave a sudden sway and he had to stop, swallow. “Osaron covets what he does not have,” he said when the wave of illness had passed. “The goal is not to give him a body, but to force him into needing one.”
“Splendid,” said Lila dryly. “So all we have to do is defeat an incarnation of magic strong enough to ruin worlds.”
Kell shot her a look. “Since when do you shy from a fight?”
“I’m not shying,” she snapped. “I just want to be sure we can win.”
“We win by being stronger,” said Kell. “And with the rings, we just might be.”
“Might be,” echoed Lila.
“Every vessel can be emptied,” said Holland, twisting the silver binding ring around his thumb. “Magic can’t be killed, but it can be weakened, and Osaron’s power might be vast, but it is by no means infinite. When I found him in Black London, he was reduced to a statue, too weak to hold a moving form.”
“Until you gave him one,” muttered Lila.
“Exactly,” said Holland, ignoring the jab.
“Osaron has been feeding on my city and its people,” added Kell. “But if Tieren’s spell has worked, he should be running out of sources.”