A servant lay curled at the god’s feet, and Osaron knelt, reached into the man’s chest, and wrapped his fingers around his heart.
“Get up,” he ordered. The man did not move. Osaron tightened his grip, pouring more and more of himself into the shell, until the form simply—fell apart. Useless. Useless. All of them, useless.
The shadow king straightened, ash blowing in the wind as he turned his gaze on that other palace, that seat of redundant royalty, the threads of spellwork spooling from its spires. So they had done this, they had stolen his servants, silenced his voice.
It did not matter.
They could not stop him.
Osaron would conquer this city, this world.
And first, he would tear the palace down himself.
VII
People spoke of love as if it were an arrow. A thing that flew quick, and always found its mark. They spoke of it as if it were a pleasant thing, but Maxim had taken an arrow once, and knew it for what it was: excruciating.
He had never wanted to fall in love, never wanted to welcome that pain, would have happily faked an arrow’s bite.
And then he met Emira.
And for a long time, he thought the arrow had played its cruelest trick, had struck him and missed her. He thought she’d stepped around the point, the way she stepped around so many things she did not like.
He’d spent a year trying to free the barb from his own chest before he realized he didn’t want to. Or maybe, he couldn’t. Another year before he realized she was injured, too.
It had been a slow pursuit, like melting ice. A kinship of hot and cold, of strong forces equally opposed, of those who did not know how to soften, how to soothe, and found the answer in each other.
That arrow’s barb had so long healed. He’d forgotten the pain entirely.
But now.
Now he felt the wound, a shaft driven through his ribs. Scraping bone and lung with every ragged breath, and loss the hand twisting the arrow, trying to rend it free before it killed and doing so much damage in the process.
Maxim wanted to be with her. Not the body laid out in the Rose Hall, but the woman he loved. He wanted to be with her, and instead he stood in the map room across from Sol-in-Ar, forced to bind up a mortal wound, to fight through the pain, because the battle wasn’t yet won.
His spell was beating against the inside of his skull, and he tasted blood with every swallow, and as he lifted the crystal cut glass to his lips, his hand shook.
Sol-in-Ar stood on the other side of the map, the two of them divided by the wide expanse of the Arnesian empire on the table, the city of London rising at its center. Isra waited by the door, head bowed.
“I am sorry for your loss,” said the Faroan lord, because it was a thing that had to be said. Both men knew the words fell short, would always fall short.
The part of Maxim that was king knew it wasn’t right to mourn a single life more than a city, but the part of Maxim that had set the rose on his wife’s heart was still breaking inside.
When was the last time he’d seen her? What was the last thing he’d said? He didn’t know, couldn’t recall. The arrow twisted. The wound ached. He fought to remember, remember, remember.
Emira, with her dark eyes that saw so much, and her lips that guarded smiles as if they were secrets. With her beauty, and her strength, her hard shell around her fragile heart.
Emira, who’d taken down her walls long enough to let him in, who’d built them twice as high when Rhy was born, so nothing could get in. Whose trust he’d fought for, whose trust he’d failed when he promised over and over and over again that he would keep them safe.
Emira, gone.
Those who thought death looked like sleep had never seen it.
When Emira slept, her lashes danced, her lips parted, her fingers twitched, every part of her alive within her dreams. The body in the Rose Hall was not his wife, not his queen, not the mother of his heir, not anyone at all. It was empty, the intangible presence of life and magic and personhood gutted like a candle, leaving only cooling wax behind.
“You knew it was the Veskans,” said Maxim, dragging his mind back to the map room.
Sol-in-Ar’s features were grim, set, the white gold accents on the lord’s face strangely steady in the light. “I suspected.”
“How?”
“I do not have magic, Your Majesty,” Sol-in-Ar answered in slow but even Arnesian, the edges smoothing with his accent, “but I do have sense. The treatise between Faro and Vesk has become strained in recent months.” He gestured at the map. “Arnes sits squarely between our empires. An obstacle. A wall. I have been watching the prince and princess since my arrival, and when Col answered you that he had not sent word to Vesk, I knew that he was lying. I knew this because you housed their gift in the chamber below mine.”
“The hawk,” said Maxim, recalling the Veskans’ offering—a large grey predator—before the Essen Tasch.
Sol-in-Ar nodded. “I was surprised by their gift. A bird like that does not enjoy a cage. The Veskans use them to send missives across the harsh expanses of their territory, and when they are confined, they caw in a low and constant way. The one beneath my room fell silent two days ago.”
“Sanct,” muttered Maxim. “You should have said something.”
Sol-in-Ar raised a single dark brow. “Would you have listened, Your Majesty?”
“I apologize,” said the king, “for distrusting an ally.”
Sol-in-Ar’s gaze was steady, his pale beads pricks of light. “We are both men of war, Maxim Maresh. Trust does not come easily.”
Maxim shook his head and refilled his glass, hoping the liquid would quelch the lingering taste of blood and steady his hands. He hadn’t meant to hold his spell aloft for this long, had only meant to—to see Emira, to say good-bye….
“It has been a long time,” he said, forcing his thoughts back, “since I was at war. Before I was king, I led command at the Blood Coast. That was the nickname my soldiers and I had for the open waters that ran between the empires. That gap of terrain where pirates and rebels and anyone who refused to recognize the peace went to make a little war.”
“Anastamar,” said Sol-in-Ar. “That was our name for it. It means the Killing Strait.”
“Fitting,” mused Maxim, taking a long sip. “The peace was new enough to be fragile, then—though I suppose peace is always fragile—and I had only a thousand men to hold the entire coast. Though I had another title. Not one given by court, or my father, but by my soldiers.”
“The Steel Prince,” said Sol-in-Ar, and then, reading Maxim’s expression: “It surprises you, that the tales of your exploits reach beyond your own borders?” The Faroan’s fingers grazed the edge of the map. “The Steel Prince, who tore the heart from the rebel army. The Steel Prince, who survived the night of knives. The Steel Prince, who slayed the pirate queen.”
Maxim finished his drink and set the glass aside. “I suppose we never know the scale of our life’s stories. Which parts will survive, and which will die with us, but—”
He was cut off by a sudden tremor, not in his limbs, but in the room itself. The palace gave a violent shudder around them, the walls trembling, the stone figures on the map threatening to tip. Maxim and Sol-in-Ar both braced themselves as the tremor passed.
“Isra,” ordered Maxim, but the guard was already moving down the hall. He and Sol-in-Ar followed.
The wards were still weak in the aftermath of the attack, but it shouldn’t have mattered, because everyone beyond the palace doors was asleep.
Everyone—but Osaron.
Now the creature’s voice rumbled through the city, not the smooth, seductive whisper in Maxim’s mind, but an audible, thunderous thing.
“This palace is mine.”
“This city is mine.”
“These people are mine.”
Osaron knew about the spell, must have known too that it was coming from within the walls. If Tieren woke, the enchantment would shatter. The fallen would revive.
It was time, then.