It grazed his arm before burying itself in the cot. Holland tumbled to the floor, hitting his shoulder hard, and rolled, expecting to find a stranger, a mercenary, someone marked with the brand of thieves and killers.
Instead, he saw his older brother. Twice his size, with their father’s muddy green eyes and their mother’s sad mouth. The only blood Holland had left.
“Alox?” he gasped, pain burning up his injured arm. Bright red drops flecked the floor of their room before Holland managed to press his hand over the weeping wound.
Alox stood over him, the veins on his throat already edging toward black. At fifteen, he had taken on a dozen marks, all to help bend will and bind escaping magic.
Holland was on his back on the floor, blood still spilling between his fingers, but he didn’t cry out for help. There was no one to cry out to. Their father was dead. Their mother had disappeared into the sho dens, drowned herself in smoke.
“Hold still, Holland,” muttered Alox, dragging the blade free of the cot. His eyes were red with drink or spellwork. Holland didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Not because the blade was poisoned, though he feared it was. But because every night he’d dreamed of would-be attackers, given them a hundred names and faces, and none of them had ever been Alox.
Alox, who told him stories when he couldn’t sleep. Tales of the someday king. The one with enough power to bring the world back.
Alox, who used to let him sit on makeshift thrones in abandoned rooms and dream of better days.
Alox, who had first seen the mark in his eye, and promised to keep him safe.
Alox, who now stood over him with a knife.
“Vosk,” pleaded Holland now. Stop.
“It isn’t right,” his brother slurred, intoxicated by the knife, the blood, the nearness of power. “That magic isn’t yours.”
Holland’s bloody fingers went swiftly to his eye. “But it chose me.”
Alox shook his head slowly, ruefully. “Magic doesn’t choose, Holland.” He swayed. “It doesn’t belong to those who have. It belongs to those who take.”
With that, Alox brought the knife down.
“Vosk!” begged Holland, bloody hands outstretched.
He caught the blade, pushing back with every ounce of strength, not on the weapon itself but on the air, the metal. It still bit in, blood ribboning down his palms.
Holland stared up at Alox, pain forcing the words across his lips.
“As Staro.”
The words surfaced on their own, rising from the darkness of his mind like a dream suddenly remembered, and with them, the magic surged up through his torn hands, and around the blade, and wrapped around his brother. Alox tried to pull away, but it was too late. The spell had rolled over his skin, turning flesh to stone as it spread over his stomach, climbed his shoulders, wrapped around his throat.
A single gasp escaped, and then it was over, body to stone in the time it took a drop of blood to hit the floor.
Holland lay there beneath the precarious weight of his brother’s statue. With Alox frozen on one knee, Holland could look his brother in the eyes, and he found himself staring up into his brother’s face, his mouth open and his features caught between surprise and rage. Slowly, carefully, Holland slid free, inching his body out from beneath the stone. He got to his feet, dizzy from the sudden use of magic, shaking from the attack.
He didn’t cry. Didn’t run. He simply stood there, surveying Alox, searching for the change in his brother as if it were a freckle, a scar, something he should have seen. His own pulse was settling and something else, something deeper, was beginning to steady, too, as if the spell had turned part of himself to stone as well.
“Alox,” he said, the word barely an exhale as he reached out and touched his brother’s cheek, only to recoil from the hardness. His fingers left a rust-red smear against the marble face.
Holland leaned forward to whisper in his brother’s stone ear.
“This magic,” he said, putting his hand on Alox’s shoulder, “is mine.”
He pushed, letting gravity tip the statue until it fell and shattered on the floor.
*
Footsteps sounded on the prison stairs, and Holland straightened, his senses snapping back to the cell. At first, he assumed the visitor would be Kell, but then he counted the footfalls—three sets.
They were speaking Arnesian, running the words together so Holland couldn’t catch them all.
He forced himself still as the lock ground free and his cell door swung open. Forced himself not to lash out when an enemy hand wrapped around his jaw, pinning his mouth shut.
“Let’s see … eyes …”
Rough fingers tangled in his hair and the blindfold came free, and for an instant, the world was gold. Lantern light cast haloes over everything before the man forced his face up.
“Should we carve …”
“Doesn’t look … to me.”
They weren’t wearing armor, but all three had the stature of palace guards.
The first let go of Holland’s jaw and started rolling up his sleeves.
Holland knew what was coming, even before he felt the vicious pull on the chains, shoulders straining as they hauled him to his feet. He held the guard’s eyes, right up until the first punch landed, a brutal blow between his collar and his throat.
He followed the pain like a current, tried to ground it.
It really was nothing he hadn’t felt before. Athos’s cold smile surfaced in Holland’s mind. The fire of that silver whip.
No one suffers …
He staggered as his ribs cracked.
… as beautifully as you.
Blood filled Holland’s mouth. He could have spat it in their faces and used the same breath to turn them to stone, leave them broken on the floor. Instead, he swallowed.
He would not kill them.
But he would not give them the satisfaction of display, either.
And then, a glint of steel—unexpected—as a guard drew out a knife. When the man spoke, it was in the common tongue of kings.
“This is from Delilah Bard,” he said, driving the dagger toward Holland’s heart.
Magic rose in him, sudden and involuntary, the dampening chains too weak to stop the flood as the knife plunged toward his bare chest. The guard’s body slowed as Holland forced his will against metal and bone. But before he could stop the blade, it flew from the guard’s hand, out of Holland’s own control, and landed with a snap against Kell’s palm.
The guard spun, shock quickly replaced by fear as he took in the man at the base of the stairs, the black coat blending into shadow, the red hair glinting in the light.
“What is this?” asked the other Antari, his voice sharp.
“Master Ke—”
The guard went flying backward and struck the wall between two lanterns. He didn’t fall, but hung there, pinned, as Kell turned toward the other two. Instantly they let go of Holland’s chains, and he half sat, half fell back against the bench, locking his teeth against the jolt of pain. Kell released his hold on the first guard, and the man went crashing to the floor.
The air in the room was frosting over as Kell considered the knife in his hand. He brought the tip of his finger to the point of the blade and pressed down, drawing a single bead of red.
The guards recoiled as one, and Kell glanced up, as if surprised. “I thought you wanted blood sport.”
“Solase,” said the first guard, rising to his feet. “Solase, mas vares.” The others bit their tongues.
“Go,” ordered Kell. “The next time I see any of you down here, you will not leave.”
They fled, leaving the cell door open as they went.
Holland, who had said nothing since the first footsteps drew him from reverie, leaned his head back against the stone wall. “My hero.”
The blindfold hung around his neck, and for the first time since the roof, their eyes met as Kell reached out and swung the cell door closed between them.
He nodded at the stairs. “How many times has that happened?”
Holland said nothing.
“You didn’t fight back.”
Holland’s swollen fingers curled around the chains as if to say, How could I?, and Kell raised a brow as if to say, Those make a difference? Because they both knew the simple truth: a prison could not hold an Antari unless he let it.