“The three people you killed before the Danes.”
Tension rippled through the air. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It mattered enough for you to keep track,” said Kell.
But Holland’s face had retreated back behind its mask of indifference, and the room filled with silence until it drowned them both.
III
Vortalis had always wanted to be king—not the someday king, he told Holland, but the now king. He didn’t care about the stories. Didn’t buy into the legends. But he knew the city needed order. Needed strength. Needed a leader.
“Everyone wants to be king,” said Vortalis.
“Not me,” said Holland.
“Well, then you’re either a liar or a fool.”
They were sitting in a booth at the Scorched Bone. The kind of place where men could talk of regicide without raising any brows. Now and then the attention drifted toward them, but Holland knew it had less to do with the topic and more to do with his left eye and Vortalis’s knives.
“A pretty pair we make,” the man had said when they first entered the tavern. “The Antari and the Hunter. Sounds like one of those tales you love,” he’d added, pouring the first round of drinks.
“London has a king,” said Holland now.
“London always has a king,” countered Vortalis. “Or queen. And how long has that ruler been a tyrant?”
They both knew there was only one way the throne changed hands—by force. A ruler wore the crown as long as they could keep it on their head. And that meant every king or queen had been a killer first. Power required corruption, and corruption rewarded power. The people who ended up on that throne had always paved the way with blood.
“It takes a tyrant,” said Holland.
“But it doesn’t have to,” argued Vortalis. “You could be my might, my knight, my power, and I could be the law, the right, the order, and together, we could more than take this throne,” he said, setting down his cup. “We could hold it.”
He was a gifted orator, Holland would give him that. The kind of man who stoked passion the way an iron did coals. They had called him the Hunter, but the longer Holland was in his presence, the more he thought of him as the Bellows—he’d told him once, and the man had chuckled, said he was indeed full of air.
There was an undeniable charm about the man, not merely the youthful airs of one who hadn’t seen the worst the world has to offer, but the blaze of someone who managed to believe in change, in spite of it.
When Vortalis spoke to Holland, he always met both eyes, and in that flecked gaze, Holland felt like he was being seen.
“You know what happened to the last Antari?” Vortalis was saying now, leaning forward into Holland’s space. “I do. I was there in the castle when Queen Stol cut his throat and bathed in his blood.”
“What were you doing in the castle?” wondered Holland.
Vortalis gave him a long, hard look. “That’s what you take away from my story?” He shook his head. “Look, our world needs every drop of magic, and we’ve got kings and queens spilling it like water so they can have a taste of power, or maybe just so it can’t rise against them. We got where we are because of fear. Fear of Black London, fear of magic that wasn’t ours to control, but that’s no way forward, only down. I could have killed you—”
“You could have tried—”
“But the world needs power. And men who aren’t afraid of it. Think what London could do with a leader like that,” said Vortalis. “A king who cared about his people.”
Holland ran a finger around the rim of his glass, the ale itself untouched, while the other man drained his second cup. “So you want to kill our current king.”
Vortalis leaned forward. “Doesn’t everyone?”
It was a valid question.
Gorst—a mountain of a man who’d carved his way to the throne with an army at his back and turned the castle into a fortress, the city into a slum. His men rode the streets, taking everything they could, everything they wanted, in the name of a king who pretended to care, who claimed he could resurrect the city even while he drained it dry.
And every week, King Gorst opened throats in the blood square, a tithe to the dying world, as if that sacrifice—a sacrifice that wasn’t even his—could set the world to rights. As if the spilling of their blood was proof of his devotion to his cause.
How many days had Holland stood at the edge of that square, and watched, and thought of cutting Gorst’s throat? Of offering him back to the hungry earth?
Vortalis was giving him a weighted look, and Holland understood. “You want me to kill Gorst.” The other man smiled. “Why not kill him yourself?”
Vortalis had no problem killing—he hadn’t earned his nickname by abstaining from violence—and he was really very good at it. But only a fool walked into a fight without his sharpest knives, Vortalis explained, leaning closer, and Holland was uniquely suited to the task. “I know you’re not fond of the practice,” he’d added. “But there’s a difference between killing for purpose and killing for sport, and wise men know that some must fall so others can rise.”
“Some throats are meant to be opened,” said Holland dryly.
Vortalis flashed a cutting grin. “Exactly. So you can sit around waiting for a storybook ending, or you can help me write a real one.”
Holland rapped his fingers on the table. “It won’t be easy to do,” he said thoughtfully. “Not with his guard.”
“Like rats, those men,” said Vortalis, producing a tightly rolled paper. He lit the end in the nearest lantern. “No matter how many I kill, more scurry out to take their place.”
“Are they loyal?” asked Holland.
Smoke poured from the man’s nostrils in a derisive snort. “Loyalty is either bought or earned, and as far as I can tell, Gorst has neither the riches nor the charm to merit his army. These men, they fight for him, they die for him, they wipe his ass. They have the blind devotion of the cursed.”
“Curses die with their makers,” mused Holland.
“And so we return to the point. The death of a tyrant and a curse-maker, and why you’re so suited for the job. According to one of the few spies I’ve managed, Gorst keeps himself at the top of the palace, in a room guarded on all four sides, locked up like a prize in his own treasure chest. Now, is it true,” Vortalis said, his eyes dancing with light, “that the Antari can make doors?”
*
Three nights later, at the ninth bell, Holland walked through the castle gate, and disappeared. One step took him across the threshold, and the next landed in the middle of the royal chamber, a room brimming with cushions and silks.
Blood dripped from the Antari’s hand, where he still clutched the talisman. Gorst wore so many, he hadn’t even noticed it was missing, pinched by Vortalis’s spy within the castle. Three simple words—As Tascen Gorst—and he was in.
The king sat before a blazing fire, gorging himself on a feast of fowl and bread and candied pears. Across the city, people wasted away, but Gorst’s bones had long been swallowed up by his constant feasting.
Occupied by his meal, the king hadn’t noticed Holland standing there behind him, hadn’t heard him draw his knife.
“Try not to stab him in the back,” Vortalis had advised. “After all, he is the king. He deserves to see the blade coming.”
“You have a very odd set of principles.”
“Ah, but I do have them.”
Holland was halfway to the king when he realized Gorst was not dining alone.
A girl, no more than fifteen, crouched naked at the king’s side like an animal, a pet. Unlike Gorst, she had no distraction, and her head drifted up at the movement of Holland’s steps. At the sight of him, she began to scream.
The sound cut off sharply as he pinned the air in the girl’s lungs, but Gorst was already rising, his massive form filling the hearth. Holland didn’t wait—his knife went whipping toward the king’s heart.
And Gorst caught it.
The king plucked the weapon from the air with a sneer while the girl still clawed at her throat. “Is that all you have?”