“Only if the king is strong enough.”
Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.”
Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?”
At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the only one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead.
“You’re an arse,” he muttered, trying to pull away, but his brother’s fingers tightened.
“Don’t let go.”
“Get off,” said Rhy, first playfully, but then, as the fire grew brighter and hotter between his palms, he repeated in earnest, “Stop. You’re hurting me.”
Heat licked his fingers, a white-hot pain lancing through his hands and up his arms.
“Stop,” he pleaded. “Kell, stop.” But when Rhy looked up from the glowing fire to his brother’s face, it wasn’t a face at all. Nothing but a pool of darkness. Rhy gasped, tried to scramble away, but his brother was no longer flesh and blood but stone, hands carved into cuffs around Rhy’s wrists.
This wasn’t right, he thought, it had to be a dream—a nightmare—but the heat of the fire and the crushing pressure on his wrists were both so real, worsening with every heartbeat, every breath.
The flame between them went long and thin, sharpening into a blade of light, its tip pointed first at the ceiling, and then, slowly, horribly, at Rhy. He fought, and screamed, but it did nothing to stop the knife as it blazed and buried itself in his chest.
Pain.
Make it stop.
It carved its way across his ribs, lit his bones, tore through his heart. Rhy tried to scream, and retched smoke. His chest was a ragged wound of light.
Kell’s voice came, not from the statue, but from somewhere else. Somewhere far away and fading. Don’t let go.
But it hurt. It hurt so much.
Stop.
Rhy was burning from the inside out.
Please.
Dying.
Stay.
Again.
*
For a moment, the black gave way to streaks of color, a ceiling of billowing fabric, a familiar face hovering at the edge of his tear-blurred sight, stormy eyes wide with worry.
“Luc?” rasped Rhy.
“I’m here,” answered Alucard. “I’m here. Stay with me.”
He tried to speak, but his heart slammed against his ribs as if trying to break through.
It redoubled, then faltered.
“Have they found Kell?” said a voice.
“Get away from me,” ordered another.
“Everyone out.”
Rhy’s vision blurred.
The room wavered, the voices dulled, the pain giving way to something worse, the white-hot agony of the invisible knife dissolving into cold as his body fought and failed and fought and failed and failed and—
No, he pleaded, but he could feel the threads breaking one by one inside him until there was nothing left to hold him up.
Until Alucard’s face vanished, and the room fell away.
Until the darkness wrapped its heavy arms around Rhy, and buried him.
V
Alucard Emery wasn’t used to feeling powerless.
Mere hours earlier, he’d won the Essen Tasch and been named the strongest magician in the three empires. But now, sitting by Rhy’s bed, he had no idea what to do. How to help. How to save him.
The magician watched as the prince curled in on himself, deathly pale against the tangled sheets, watched as Rhy cried out in pain, attacked by something even Alucard couldn’t see, couldn’t fight. And he would have—would have gone to the end of the world to keep Rhy safe. But whatever was killing him, it wasn’t here.
“What is happening?” he’d asked a dozen times. “What can I do?”
But no one answered, so he was left piecing together the queen’s pleas and the king’s orders, Lila’s urgent words and the echoes of the royal guards’ searching voices, all of them calling for Kell.
Alucard sat forward, clutching the prince’s hand, and watched the threads of magic around Rhy’s body fray, threatening to snap.
Others looked at the world and saw light and shadow and color, but Alucard Emery had always been able to see more. Had always been able to see the warp and weft of power, the pattern of magic. Not just the aura of a spell, the residue of an enchantment, but the tint of true magic circling a person, pulsing through their veins. Everyone could see the Isle’s red light, but Alucard saw the entire world in streaks of vivid color. Natural wells of magic glowed crimson. Elemental magicians were cloaked in green and blue. Curses stained purple. Strong spells burned gold. And Antari? They alone shone with a dark but iridescent light—not one color, but every color folded together, natural and unnatural, shimmering threads that wrapped like silk around them, dancing over their skin.
Alucard now watched those same threads fray and break around the prince’s coiled form.
It wasn’t right—Rhy’s own meager magic had always been a dark green (he’d told the prince once, only to watch his features crinkle in distaste—Rhy had never liked the color).
But the moment he’d set eyes on Rhy again, after three years away, Alucard had known the prince was different. Changed. It wasn’t the set of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, or the new shadows beneath his eyes. It was the magic bound to him. Power lived and breathed, was meant to move in the current of a person’s life. But this new magic around Rhy lay still, threads wrapped tight as rope around the prince’s body.
And each and every one of them shone like oil on water. Molten color and light.
That night, in Rhy’s chamber, when Alucard slid the tunic aside to kiss the prince’s shoulder, he’d seen the place where the silvery threads knitted into Rhy’s skin, woven straight into the scarred circles over his heart. He didn’t have to ask who’d made the spell—only one Antari came to mind—but Alucard couldn’t see how Kell had done it. Normally he could pick apart a piece of magic by looking at its threads, but the strands of the spell had no beginning, no end. The threads of Kell’s magic plunged into Rhy’s heart, and were lost—no, not lost, buried—the spellwork stiff, unshakeable.
And now, somehow, it was crumbling.
The threads snapped one by one under an invisible strain, every broken cord eliciting a sob, a shuddering breath from the half-conscious prince. Every fraying tether—
That’s what it was, he realized. Not just a spell, but a kind of link.
To Kell.
He didn’t know why the prince’s life was bound to the Antari’s. Didn’t want to imagine—though he now saw the scar between Rhy’s trembling ribs, as wide as a dagger’s edge, and the understanding reached him anyway, and he felt sick and helpless—but the link was breaking, and Alucard did the only thing he could.
He held the prince’s hand, and tried to pour his own power into the fraying threads, as if the storm-blue light of his magic could fuse with Kell’s iridescence instead of wicking uselessly away. He prayed to every power in the world, to every saint and every priest and every blessed figure—the ones he believed in and the ones he didn’t—for strength. And when they didn’t answer, he spoke to Rhy instead. He didn’t tell him to hold on, didn’t tell him to be strong.
Instead, he spoke of the past. Their past.
“Do you remember, the night before I left?” He fought to keep the fear from his voice. “You never answered my question.”
Alucard closed his eyes, in part so he could picture the memory, and in part because he couldn’t bear to watch the prince in so much pain.
It had been summer, and they’d been lying in bed, bodies tangled and warm. He’d drawn a hand along Rhy’s perfect skin, and when the prince had preened, he’d said, “One day you will be old and wrinkled, and I will still love you.”
“I’ll never be old,” said the prince with the certainty mustered only by the young and healthy and terribly naive.
“So you plan to die young, then?” he’d teased, and Rhy had given an elegant shrug.
“Or live forever.”
“Oh, really?”