“What will happen to me now?” There was no fear in his voice. There was nothing at all.
“I assume you will be tried—”
Holland was shaking his head. “No.”
“You’re in no place to make demands.”
Holland sat forward as far as the chains would let him.
“I don’t want a trial, Kell,” he said firmly. “I want an execution.”
IV
The words landed, as Holland knew they would.
Kell was staring at him, waiting for the twist, the turn.
“An execution?” he said, shaking his head. “Your penchant for self-destruction is impressive, but—”
“It’s a matter of practicality,” said Holland, letting his shoulders graze the wall, “not atonement.”
“I don’t follow.”
You never do, he thought bleakly.
“How is it done here?” he asked, a false lightness in his voice, as if they were talking of a meal or a dance, and not an execution. “By blade or by fire?”
Kell stared at him blankly, as if he’d never even seen one.
“I imagine,” said the other Antari slowly, “it would be done by the blade.” So Holland was right, then. “How was it done in your city?”
Holland had witnessed his first execution on his brother’s shoulders. Had followed Alox to the square for years. He remembered the arms forced wide, deep cuts and broken bones and fresh blood caught in basins. “Executions in my London were slow, and brutal, and very public.”
Distaste washed across Kell’s face. “We don’t glorify death with displays.”
The chains rattled as Holland sat forward. “This one needs to be public. Something out in the open where he can see.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Osaron needs a body. He cannot take this world without one.”
“Is that so?” challenged Kell. “Because he’s doing an impressive job of it so far.”
“It’s clumsy, broad strokes,” said Holland dismissively. “This isn’t what he wants.”
“You would know.”
Holland ignored the jab. “There is no glory in a crown he cannot wear, even if he has not realized it yet. Osaron is a creature of potential. He will never be satisfied with what he has, not for long. And for all his power, all his conjuring, he cannot craft flesh and blood. Not that it will stop him from trying, and poisoning every soul in London in search of a pawn or vessel, but none will do.”
“Because he needs an Antari.”
“And he has only three options.”
Kell stiffened. “You knew about Lila?”
“Of course,” said Holland evenly. “I’m not a fool.”
“Fool enough to play into Osaron’s hands,” said Kell through clenched teeth. “Fool enough to call for your own execution. To what end? Reduce his options from three to two, and he still—”
“I plan to give him what he wants,” said Holland grimly. “I plan to kneel and beg and invite him in. I plan to grant him his vessel.” Kell stared in bald disgust. “And then I plan to let you kill me.”
Kell’s disgust turned to shock, then confusion.
Holland smiled, a cold, rueful twitch of the lips.
“You should learn to guard your feelings.”
Kell swallowed, made a thin attempt to mask his features. “As much as I’d like to kill you, Holland, doing so won’t kill him. Or have you forgotten that magic does not die?”
“Perhaps not, but it can be contained.”
“With what?”
“As Tosal.”
Kell flinched reflexively at the sound of a blood command, then paled as the realization dawned. “No.”
“So you do know the spell?”
“I could turn you to stone. It would be a kinder end.”
“I’m not looking for kindness, Kell.” Holland tilted his chin up, attention settling on the cell’s high ceiling. “I’m looking to finish what I started.”
The Antari ran a hand through his copper hair. “If Osaron doesn’t take the bait. If he doesn’t come, then you’ll die.”
“Death comes for us all,” said Holland evenly. “I would simply have mine mean something.”
*
The second time someone tried to kill Holland, he was eighteen, walking home with a loaf of coarse bread in one hand and a bottle of kaash in the other.
The sun was going down, the city taking on another shape. It was a risk, to walk with both hands full, but Holland had grown into his frame, long limbs corded with muscle, shoulders broad and straight. He no longer wore his black hair down over his eye. He no longer tried to hide.
Halfway home, he realized he was being followed.
He didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, didn’t even quicken his pace.
Holland didn’t go looking for fights, but still they came to him. Trailed him through the streets like strays, like shadows.
He kept walking, now, letting the soft clink of the bottle and the steady tread of his boot form a backdrop for the sounds of the alley around him.
The shuffle of steps.
The soft exhale before a weapon’s release.
A blade whistling out of the dark.
Holland dropped the bread and turned, one hand raised. The knife stopped an inch from his throat and hung there in the air, waiting to be plucked. Instead, he twirled his hand and the blade spun on its edge, reversing course. With a flick of his finger, he flung the metal back into the dark, where it found flesh. Someone screamed.
Three more men came out of the shadows. Not by choice—Holland was dragging them forward, their faces contorted as they fought their own bones, his will on their bodies stronger than their own.
He could feel their hearts racing, blood pounding through their veins.
One of the men tried to speak, but Holland willed his mouth shut. He didn’t care what they had to say.
All three were young, though a little older than Holland himself, with tattoos already staining their wrists and lips and temples. Blood and word, the sources of power. He had half a mind to walk away and leave them pinned in the street, but this was the third attack in less than a month, and he was getting tired.
He loosened a single pair of jaws.
“Who sent you?”
“Ros … Ros Vortalis,” stammered the youth through still-clenched teeth.
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the name. It wasn’t even the first time he’d heard the name from one of the would-be killers following him home. Vortalis was a thug from the shal, a nobody trying to carve a piece of power from a place with too little to spare. A man trying to get Holland’s attention in all the wrong ways.
“Why?” he demanded.
“He told us … to bring him … your head.”
Holland sighed. The bread was still on the ground. The wine was beginning to frost. “Tell this Vortalis that if he wants my head, he’ll have to come for it himself.”
With that, he flicked his fingers, and the men went flying backward, just like the knife, slamming into the alley walls with a solid thud. They fell and didn’t get back up, and Holland took up the bread, stepped over their bodies—chests still rising—and continued home.
When he got there, he pressed his palm to the door, felt the locks slide free within the wood, and eased it open. There was a slip of paper on the floor, and he was halfway to it when he heard the padding rush of steps, and looked up just in time to catch the girl. She threw her arms around his neck, and when he spun with the weight of her, the skirts of her dress fanned like petals, the edges stained from dancing.
“Hello, Hol,” she said sweetly.
“Hello, Tal,” he answered.
It had been nine years since Alox attacked him. Nine years trying to survive in a city out for blood, weathering every storm, every fight, every sign of trouble, all the while waiting for something better.
And then, something better came.
And her name was Talya.
Talya, a spot of color in a world of white.
Talya, who carried the sun with her wherever she went.
Talya, so fair that when she smiled, the day grew brighter.
Holland saw her in the market one night.
And next he saw her in the square.
And after that, he saw her everywhere he looked.
She had scars in the corners of her eyes that winked silver in the light, and a laugh that took his breath away.