Kell turned his attention back to the blade, clearly recognizing the make. “Lila,” he muttered. “Should have realized sooner …”
“Miss Bard does not care for me.”
“Not since you killed her only family.”
“The man in the tavern,” said Holland, thoughtfully. “She killed him when she took what wasn’t hers. When she led me to her home. If she’d been a better thief, perhaps he would still be alive.”
“I’d keep that opinion to yourself,” said Kell, “if you want to keep your tongue.”
A long silence. In the end, Holland was the one to break it.
“Have you finished sulking?”
“You know,” snapped Kell, “you’re very good at making enemies. Have you ever tried to make a friend?”
Holland cocked his head. “What use are those?” Kell gestured to the cells. Holland didn’t rise to the bait. He changed course. “What is happening beyond the palace?”
Kell pressed a palm between his eyes. When he was tired, his composure slipped, the cracks on display. “Osaron is free,” he said.
Holland listened, brows drawn, as Kell went on about the blackened river, the poisoned fog. When he was done, he stared at Holland, waiting for some answer to a question he’d never asked. Holland said nothing, and at last Kell made an exasperated sound.
“What does he want?” demanded the young Antari, clearly resisting the urge to pace.
Holland closed his eyes and remembered Osaron’s rising temper, his echo of more, more, more, we could do more, be more.
“More,” he said simply.
“What does that mean?” demanded Kell.
Holland weighed the words before he spoke. “You asked what he wants,” he said. “But for Osaron, it’s not about want so much as need. Fire needs air. Earth needs water. And Osaron needs chaos. He feeds on it, the energy of entropy.” Every time Holland had found steady ground, every time things had begun to settle, Osaron had forced them back into motion, into change, into chaos. “He’s much like you,” he added as Kell paced. “He cannot bear to be still.”
The cogs were turning behind Kell’s eyes, thoughts and emotions flickering across his face like light. Holland wondered if he knew how much he showed.
“Then I must find a way to make him still,” said the young Antari.
“If you can,” said Holland. “That alone won’t stop him, but it will force him to be reckless. And if reckless humans make mistakes, then so will reckless gods.”
“Do you truly believe that he’s a god?”
Holland rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t matter what someone is. Only what they think they are.”
A door ground open overhead, and Holland tensed reflexively, hating the subtle but traitorous rattle of his chains, but Kell didn’t seem to notice.
Moments later a guard appeared at the base of the stairs. Not one of Holland’s attackers, but an older man, temples silver.
“What is it, Staff?” asked Kell.
“Sir,” answered the man gruffly. He held no love for the Antari prince. “The king has summoned you.”
Kell nodded, and turned to leave. He hesitated at the edge of the room. “Do you care so little for your own world, Holland?”
He stiffened. “My world,” he said slowly, “is the only thing I care about.”
“Yet you stay here. Helpless. Useless.” Somewhere deep in Holland, someone—the man he used to be, before Osaron, before the Danes—was screaming. Fighting. He held still, waited for the wave to pass.
“You told me once,” said Kell, “that you were either magic’s master or its slave. So which are you now?”
The screaming died in Holland’s head, smothered by the hollow quiet he’d trained to take its place.
“That’s what you don’t understand,” said Holland, letting the emptiness fold over him. “I have only ever been its slave.”
III
The royal map room had always been off limits.
When Kell and Rhy were young, they’d played in every palace chamber and hallway—but never here. There were no chairs in this room. No walls of books. No hearth fire or cells, no hidden doors or secret passages. Only the table with its massive map, Arnes rising from the surface of the parchment like a body beneath a taut sheet. The map spanned the table edge to edge, in full detail, from the glittering city of London at its center to the very edges of the empire. Tiny stone ships floated on flat seas, and tiny stone soldiers marked the royal garrisons stationed at the borders, and tiny stone guards patrolled the streets in troops of rose quartz and marble.
King Maxim told them that the pieces on this board had consequences. That to move a chalice was to make war. To topple a ship was to doom the vessel. To play with the men was to the play with lives.
The warning was a sufficient deterrent—whether or not it was true, neither Rhy nor Kell dared chance it and risk Maxim’s anger and their own guilt.
The map was enchanted, though—it showed the empire as it was; now the river glistened like a streak of oil; now tendrils of fog thin as pipe smoke drifted through the miniature streets; now the arenas stood abandoned, darkness rising like steam off every surface.
What it didn’t show were the fallen roaming the streets. It didn’t show the desperate survivors pounding on the doors of houses, begging to be let in. It didn’t show the panic, the noise, the fear.
King Maxim stood at the map’s southern edge, hands braced against the table, head bent over the image of his city. To one side stood Tieren, looking like he’d aged ten years in the course of a single night. To the other stood Isra, the captain of the city guard, a broad-shouldered Londoner with cropped black hair and a strong jaw. Women might be rare in the guard, but if someone questioned Isra’s standing, they only did it once.
Two of Maxim’s vestran council, Lord Casin and Lady Rosec, commanded the map’s eastern side, while Parlo and Lisane, the ostra who’d organized and overseen the Essen Tasch, occupied the west. Each and every one of them looked out of place, still dressed for a winner’s ball and not a city under siege.
Kell forced himself up to the map’s northern edge, stopping directly across from the king.
“We cannot make sense of it,” Isra was saying. “There appear to be two kinds of attack, or rather, two kinds of victim.”
“Are they possessed?” asked the king. “During the Black Night, Vitari took multiple hosts, spreading himself like a plague between them.”
“This isn’t possession,” interjected Kell. “Osaron is too strong to take an ordinary host. Vitari ate through every shell he found, but it took hours. Osaron would burn through a shell in seconds.” He thought of Kisimyr on the roof, her body cracking and crumbling under Osaron’s boot. “There’s no point trying to possess them.”
Unless, he thought, they are Antari.
“Then, by saints,” demanded Maxim, “what is he doing?”
“It seems like some kind of sickness,” said Isra.
The ostra, Lisane, shuddered. “He’s infecting them?”
“He is creating puppets,” said Tieren grimly. “Invading their minds, corrupting them. And if that fails …”
“He’s taking them by force,” said Kell.
“Or killing them in the process,” added Isra. “Thinning the pack, weeding out resistance.”
“Any wards?” asked the king, looking to Kell. “Besides Antari blood?”
“Not yet.”
“Survivors?”
A long silence.
Maxim cleared his throat.
“We’ve no word from either House Loreni or House Emery,” started Lord Casin. “Can’t your men be mustered—”
“My men are doing everything they can,” snapped Maxim. Beside him, Isra shot the lord a cold glare.
“We’ve sent scouts to follow the fog’s line,” she continued evenly, “and there is a perimeter to Osaron’s magic. Right now the spell ends seven measures beyond the city’s edge, carving out a circle, but our reports show that it is spreading.”
“He’s drawing power from every life he claims.” Tieren’s voice was quiet, but authoritative. “If Osaron is not stopped soon, his shadow will cover Arnes.”
“And then Faro,” cut in Sol-in-Ar, storming through the doorway. The captain’s hand twitched toward her sword, but Maxim stayed her with a look.