His black curls tumbled into his gold eyes, his crown tossed onto a nearby cushion, chin resting on his laced fingers. The king was said to have no magic, but she could see the silver threads that bloomed outward from his chest and wound through the air around him.
There was no sign of the queen, at least. That was a mercy, but another man, one whose magic coursed in three different-colored strands, stood at the king’s side, his hair drawn back, revealing storm-drenched eyes. Tes flinched at the sight of him, a sudden, visceral memory of the nobleman in the house. But this man was slighter, and his knuckles bore no scars, though there were delicate lines along his wrists, and up his throat—but she’d seen those marks before, on those who had survived the plague. When he met Tes’s eyes, she saw the jagged lines that coiled in them, like bolts of lightning, and guessed that he was the one who shared her strange gift of sight.
The king cleared his throat. “I see our surgeon has arrived.” He rose, only to sway a little. He closed his eyes, and steadied himself against the back of the chair.
“Apologies,” he said. “We’ve had to kept him drugged, and I fear, what he feels, so do I.”
That was when Tes rounded the sofa, and saw Kell.
The prince was sedated, but not deeply, the strain still showing in his hands, his jaw, his throat.
“Every time he woke,” said the king, his own voice hoarse, “he started screaming.”
Tes could see why. The threads around Kell Maresh were no longer simply frayed, but shattered, torn in places, in others held by a single brittle filament, and as the magic tried to course, it sparked.
Tes drew closer. Copper hair fell across Kell’s face, interrupted by a streak of silver. His coat was gone, his shirt open at the collar, revealing the edge of a blackened brand over his heart—a spell she didn’t recognize—but threads of silver coiled there, flowing in, instead of out, and Tes realized it was the echo of the magic that circled the king, the other half of the silver pattern that bloomed from Rhy Maresh’s chest. Their lives were somehow tethered.
“Can you heal him?” asked the king.
The same question Lila had asked the day before, and Tes felt the same protests rising to her lips. But this time, she bit them back. She had built a persalis from scratch, her hands shaking with poison. Now they hung steady at her sides. If anyone in the empire could do this, it was Tes.
“In theory, yes,” she said. “But you’re bound together, aren’t you?”
The king was said to be unkillable, but he wasn’t. Not really. Every spell had a weakness, and Tes had just uncovered his.
“If Kell dies,” she said, “then so will you.”
The king managed a weary smile. “That is a risk I’m willing to take.” He glanced at the other man as he said it. The other man grimaced, seemed about to speak, then changed his mind, and looked away.
“Do it,” he said under his breath.
“Will you help me?” asked Tes. The man’s head jerked up, and she explained, “I could use a second pair of eyes.”
“There, Alucard,” said the king, sounding oddly cheerful. “Now if I die, it will be at least in part your fault.” Then, to Tes, “What else do you need?”
She pulled her hair up into a pile on her head, and rolled her sleeves. “A cup of tea,” she said, “as strong as you can make it. A pair of blotters,” she went on, “I saw a pair in the queen’s workshop. And last of all”—she turned to Lila Bard—“a thread. From your magic. I need something to mend him with.”
She expected the Antari to protest, but Lila only held out her hand, and said, “Take it.”
Three years ago, Tes had tried to steal a strand of that silver magic, thought she’d be able to pinch a thread and slip away. Now she realized she’d never have been able to. It turned out, it wasn’t like plucking a hair from a passing head. As Tes pulled a thread from the coil in the air around the Antari, it came free, but Lila hissed, and swore in a flourish of High Royal, and even if Tes didn’t understand the words, she got their meaning.
When it was done, Tes took a deep breath, and drew the thread out long between her hands, a single silver wire, bright as moonlight. “Ready?”
Rhy Maresh lowered himself into his chair.
Alucard brought a hand to rest against the king’s shoulder.
But Lila went to Kell’s side. She knelt beside his sleeping body, and whispered something in his ear, and if Tes had been standing farther back, she’d never have heard it. But she did.
“There is nowhere you go,” said the Antari to her prince, “that I cannot follow.”
And then Lila was on her feet, sweeping past them, to the far side of the room. Tes approached. She looked at Kell Maresh, tried to imagine he was not a man, but a vessel, an object brought into her shop.
Once broken, soon repaired, she thought.
And then, she got to work.
Part Twelve
UNRAVELING
I
WHITE LONDON
Everywhere Kosika looked, she saw disaster.
In a cloud of steam, the fall of her castle. In a cup of tea, the ruin of her city.
“All hail the queen,” said a Vir.
But she wasn’t there. Oh, technically she sat in a gilded chair at the center of the table, Nasi to one side and Serak to the other, as the toast was made, and the food heaped onto her plate, but her throne might as well have been absent.
Voices rose and fell, but Kosika did not hear them. Just as she did not feel the wood of the chair beneath her arm, the weight of the crown on her head, or the damp slick on the stone table, where a reckless pour had left a pool of water, even though she’d been dragging her fingers through it for several minutes.
No, as the others ate and drank and spoke of nothing, Kosika was back in the white tent, staring at the crack that scored the air. A weakness in the walls of the world. Her world. The only one she had ever cared about. The only one that mattered, so long as the walls held. But—
“One day the walls will fall,” Vir Lastos had said. “We should know our enemies.”
“Every day, our world revives a little more.”
“And what if theirs does, too?”
Lastos had been cut down that day, for his insolence. But his warning lingered.
Kosika looked down, and saw that she had not been drawing aimless patterns in the water. Her fingertip had made a door. Not just any door—the sides were straight but the top arched into a peak. The door to her own room. And to Holland’s.
Her chair scraped back. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it might as well have been a whip, for how it cut through the hall, silence ringing in its wake.
“My queen,” said Serak, rising with her. “Are you unwell?”
Kosika murmured some excuse, her own voice sounding far away in her ears. Nasi looked to her, was halfway to her feet to follow when Kosika shook her head. Nasi frowned, but sank back into her seat as Kosika escaped the dinner, and the hall.
As she climbed the stairs, she dug her nail into the cut along her thumb, felt the dull lance of pain as it reopened. She went up, and up, and up, to the alcove and the altar. She expected to feel her king fall in step beside her, but she reached the top alone. She took a candle from the table, slipped behind the statue of the Saint, whispered the word into the door, and went inside, the candle in her hand casting unsteady light across the darkened chamber.
She went to the desk, to the small wooden box that sat on top, expecting Holland’s voice to waft toward her as she took it up. But there was only her heart, and her own voice hissing in her head.
Had she been na?ve, to ignore the other worlds so long?
She had no desire to venture out into them.
But what if the walls failed, and they came in?
What if they came for her magic?
How could she fight what she did not know?