Holland staggered to his feet, the cursed steel falling from his fingers, landing among the abandoned Ost chips. It didn’t roll, but splashed softly in the pool of blood. Blood that already slicked Holland’s hands, misted his skin.
“Guards,” he said once, softly, and then, raising his voice in a way he never did, “Guards!”
The room was too still, the castle too quiet.
Holland called again, but no one came. Part of him knew they weren’t coming, but shock was singing him, tangled up with grief, making him clumsy, slow.
He forced himself up, turned from Vor’s body, drawing the blade his king—his friend—had given him the day they stood on the balcony, the day Vor became the Winter King, the day Holland became his knight. Holland left his king and stormed through the doors, into an eerily silent castle.
He called out to the guards again, but of course they were already dead.
Bodies slumped forward on tables and against walls, halls empty and the world reduced to the drip drip drip of blood and wine on pale stone floors. It must have happened in minutes. Seconds. The time it took to light a cigarette, to draw a breath, exhale a plume of cursed smoke.
Holland didn’t see the spell written on the floor.
Didn’t feel the room slow around him until he’d crossed the line of magic, his body dragging suddenly as if through water instead of air.
Somewhere, echoing off the castle walls, someone laughed.
It was a laugh so unlike Talya’s, so unlike Vor’s. No sweetness, no richness, no warmth. A laugh as cold and sharp as glass.
“Look, Athos,” said the voice. “I’ve caught us a prize.”
Holland tried to turn, dragging his body toward the sound, but he was too slow, and the knife came from behind, a barbed blade that sank deep into his thigh. Pain lit his mind like light as he staggered to one knee.
A woman danced at the edges of his sight. White skin. White hair. Eyes like ice.
“Hello, pretty thing,” she said, twisting the knife until Holland actually screamed. A sound that rang out through the too-quiet castle, only to be cut off by a flash of silver, a slash of pain, a whip closing around his throat, stealing air, stealing everything. A swift tug, and Holland was forced forward, onto his hands and knees, his throat on fire. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t spell the blood now dripping to the floor beneath him.
“Ah,” said a second voice. “The infamous Holland.” A pale shape strode forward, winding the handle of the whip around his fingers. “I was hoping you would survive.”
The figure stopped at the edge of the spell, and sank onto his haunches in front of Holland’s buckled form. Up close, his skin and hair were the same white as the woman’s, his eyes the same frigid blue.
“Now,” said the man with a slow smile. “What to do with you?”
*
Alox was dead.
Talya was dead.
Vortalis was dead.
But Holland wasn’t.
He was strapped into a metal frame, his skin fever-hot and his limbs splayed like a moth mid-flight. Blood dripped to the stone floor, a dark red pool beneath his feet.
He could have cast a hundred spells, with all that blood, but his jaw was strapped shut. He’d woken with the vice around his head, teeth forced together so hard the only thing he could manage was a guttural sound, a groan, a sob of pain.
Athos Dane swam in his vision, those cold blue eyes and that curled mouth, a smile lurking beneath the surface like a fish under thin ice.
“I want to hear your voice, Holland,” said the man, sliding the knife under his skin. “Sing to me.” The blade sank deeper, probing for nerves, biting into tendons, slipping between bones.
Holland shuddered against the pain, but didn’t scream. He never did. It was small consolation in the end, some quicksilver hope that if he didn’t break, Athos would give up and simply kill him.
He didn’t want to die. Not in the beginning. For the first few hours—days—he’d fought back, until the metal frame had cut into his skin, until the pool of blood was large enough to see himself in, until the pain became a blanket, and his mind blurred, deprived of food, of sleep.
“Pity,” mused Athos when Holland made no sound. He turned to a table that held, among so many gruesome things, a bowl of ink, and dipped his bloodstained knife, coating the crimson steel black.
Holland’s stomach turned at the sight of it. Ink and blood, these were the stuff of curses. Athos returned to him and splayed a hand over Holland’s ribs, clearly savoring the hitching breath, the stuttering heart, the smallest tells of terror.
“You think you know,” he said quietly, “what I have planned for you.” He lifted the knife, brought the tip to the pale, unbroken skin over Holland’s heart, and smiled. “You have no idea.”
*
When it was done, Athos Dane took a step back to admire his work.
Holland slumped in the metal frame, blood and ink spilling down his ruined chest. His head buzzed with magic, even though some vital part of him had been stripped away.
No, not stripped away. Buried.
“Are you finished?”
The voice belonged to the other Dane. Holland dragged his head up.
Astrid was standing in the doorway behind her brother, arms folded lazily across her front.
Athos, with his sated smile, flicked his blade as if it were a brush. “You cannot rush an artist.”
She clicked her tongue, that icy gaze raking over Holland’s mutilated chest as she drew near, boots clicking sharply over stone.
“Tell me, brother,” she said, playing her cool fingers up Holland’s arm. “Do you think it wise to keep this pet?” She traced a nail along his shoulder. “He might bite.”
“What good is a beast that cannot?”
Athos slid his knife along Holland’s cheek, slicing the leather strap of the vice around his mouth. Pain sang through his jaw as it slackened, teeth aching. Air rushed into his lungs, but when he tried to speak, to summon the spells he’d kept ready on his tongue, they froze in his throat so suddenly he choked on them and nearly retched.
One wrist came free of its cuff, and then another, and Holland staggered forward, his screaming limbs nearly buckling beneath the sudden weight while Athos and Astrid stood there, simply watching.
He wanted to kill them both.
Wanted to, and could not.
Athos had carved the lines of the curse one by one, sunk the rules of the spell into his skin with steel and ink.
Holland had tried to close his mind to the magic, but it was already inside him, burning through his chest, driven like a spike through flesh and mind and soul.
The chains of the spell were stiff, articulated things. They coiled through his head, weighed heavy as iron around every limb.
Obey, they said, not to his mind, his heart—only his hands, his lips.
The command was written on his skin, threaded through his bones.
Athos cocked his head and gestured absently.
“Kneel.”
When Holland made no motion to obey, a block of stone struck him in the shoulders, a sudden, vicious, invisible weight forcing him forward. He fought to keep his feet, and the binding spell crackled through his nerves, ground against his bones.
His vision went white, and something too close to a scream escaped his aching mouth before his legs finally folded, shins meeting the cold stone floor.
Astrid clapped her hands once, pleased.
“Shall we test it?”
A sound, half curse, half cry, rang through the room as a man was dragged in, hands bound behind his back. He was bloody, beaten, his face more broken than not, but Holland recognized him as one of Vor’s. The man staggered, was righted. The moment he saw Holland, something shifted in him. Fell. His mouth opened.
“Traitor.”
“Cut his throat,” instructed Athos.
The words rippled through Holland’s limbs.
“No,” he said hoarsely. It was the first word he’d managed in days, and it was useless, his fingers moving even before his mind could register. Red blossomed at the man’s throat and he went down, his last words drowned in blood.
Holland stared at his own hand, the knife’s edge crimson.
They left they body where it fell.
And brought another in.
“No,” snarled Holland at the sight of him. A boy from the kitchens, hardly fourteen, who looked at him with wide, uncertain eyes. “Help,” he begged.