Valick, she thought. That was his name.
“You’re a long way from the floating market.” His gaze dropped to the blade in her hand, and her fingers tightened. “Finders keepers,” she added.
And he couldn’t have known what it was, but he obviously did, because he said, “A weapon like that belongs on the Ferase Stras, not on the street.”
Lila cocked a brow. “You came all this way for a knife?”
“No,” said Valick. “I came all this way for you.”
Lila’s gaze narrowed. “If you plan to add me to your collection—”
“You owe Maris a favor,” he cut in. “She’s calling it in.”
A favor. Lila should have known, when Maris offered her the glass black eye, should have paid then and there, given up a year or two of her life and called it even instead of trading for a favor. A favor was just a nice word for a debt, and Lila hated owing. She had been waiting for the old bat to call it in, had begun to wonder, over the years, if she’d forgotten.
Obviously not.
“Well? What does she want?”
Valick held out his other hand. “She’ll tell you herself.” In his palm was a ring. Not black, like the one around her neck, but silver, a small hourglass stamped into its surface. Still, she recognized the queen’s handiwork, and was willing to bet there was a twin ring, on the old woman’s hand.
“We’ll need to find a scrying board,” he began, but Lila was already stepping toward him.
“Nonsense,” she said, nicking her palm with one of her knives. “Waste of perfectly good magic.”
She reached out, closing her fingers over the ring, and Valick’s hand, pinning the metal between their palms. And before he could pull back, she whispered the words into the air, and the whole world shivered and came apart.
XII
Lila Bard stepped out of the darkened road, and into a ship’s cabin, dragging Valick Patrol behind her. The floor rocked a little beneath her boots, the air rumbling with something like thunder. The room was narrow, lantern light spilling over cabinets and chests and across a desk, behind which sat Maris Patrol, captain of the floating market.
The old woman was dressed in a white silk robe, her silver hair loose and flowing down her back. She had a glass of wine in one hand, a book in the other, and a moment before she had obviously been enjoying both. Now, however, she was looking up, and Lila had the rare pleasure of seeing surprise scrawled across the captain’s face, right before it—and the book—snapped shut.
“You absolute fool,” said Maris in Arnesian, as the thunder trailed off. “You do know this ship is warded against magical intrusion.” So that was the source of the crackling air.
“I had a feeling it would work.”
“A feeling,” said the old woman dryly. “You risked my nephew’s life for a feeling.”
“An educated guess, then.” Lila twirled Valick’s ring on her finger. “The palace wards are bound to blood, so the royal family can come and go without a dozen stuffy spells. I figured the Ferase Stras would be the same. And as you can see, your nephew is fine.” She glanced at Valick, whose brown skin had taken on a grey pallor. He looked like he was about to be sick.
“More or less,” she added.
“Not in my room,” snarled Maris, and Valick nodded and bolted, stumbling out into the dark. A gust of cold sea air blew in before the door swung shut. Lila turned to survey the contents of the cabinets. It had been seven years since she’d stood in this very room, seven years since she’d come aboard this ship in search of a way to beat Osaron. She’d been waiting for a chance to come back.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Maris.
“I was invited,” said Lila, holding out the silver ring. Its twin glinted, one of several on the woman’s bony hand.
“That was an invitation to talk,” she said without reaching for the band. “Not visit. I’m sure Valick made that clear.”
“Must have slipped his mind,” said Lila, letting the ring fall onto the table. “I suppose I could ask how you got your hands on a piece of the queen’s craft, but…” She trailed off, gesturing at the ship, whose very purpose was to trade in, and store, risky magic.
“She is a clever thing, isn’t she?” mused Maris. “Of course, Her Majesty did not invent paired magic, but still, an elegant execution of the principle. A mind like that can be a dangerous thing.”
“By all means, take her. Store her in one of the crates on your ship.”
Maris inclined her head. “You don’t like her.”
“I don’t trust her,” said Lila, sinking into the chair opposite the desk. A pale sack lay beside her boot, and it took her a moment to realize it was, in fact, an ancient-looking dog. It was suspiciously still. She toed it gently with her boot, just to make sure that it was breathing. It sighed, and she turned her attention back to Maris. “You look old.”
“I feel older,” she shot back, adding, “what have you done with your eye?”
They both knew she wasn’t talking about the ones currently in Lila’s face, but the one currently back in her cabin, stored in its velvet box, its surface neither brown nor blue but black as pitch. Black as the eye she’d lost to a doctor’s scalpel back in her London, before she’d known about other worlds, or the magic they possessed, let alone the term Antari.
The eye she’d traded for a favor.
“I do wear it, now and then,” she said. “But I’ve found that people are fools. Showing them your power is like showing them your hand at cards. Make them guess at it instead, and they’ll almost always guess wrong.”
The door opened, and Valick returned, looking steadier on his feet. He crossed the room and set the spelled blade on the desk.
“That’s still mine,” said Lila as Maris took up the dagger and eased it from its sheath, studying the pearl surface. She frowned, wrinkles cracking like ice across her skin.
“Do you know what this does?”
“It kills people.”
Maris rolled her eyes. “Ordinary knives kill people. This uses a person’s own magic to destroy them. It taps into the power in their blood and turns it against their body.…”
Lila straightened, interest piqued. She remembered the way the man in the tavern seemed to catch fire from the inside out, just before he turned to ash. She wondered what it might do to a bone magician. Would they come apart like a string of pearls, or collapse like a sack of boneless meat? And what would happen if it skewered an Antari?
“… with a single cut,” finished Maris.
“Right,” said Lila. “So … it’s a knife. And it kills people.”
Maris shook her head. “What a shame that all your power doesn’t come with sense.” She tugged open a drawer in her desk.
“Still mine,” muttered Lila as the blade vanished inside.
“Consider it payment for boarding my ship. Now get out.”
“But I just got here. And you haven’t even said why you called. Unless it was simply to catch up. I know it must get lonely—”
“Out of my chambers. Valick, show Captain Bard to the lower deck. Don’t let her touch anything.”
Lila rose, hands splayed. “Come now. Even I wouldn’t be foolish enough to steal from your ship.”
“Someone was,” said Maris, and before Lila could ask, she emptied her glass and nodded at the door.
Lila made to leave, but halfway out, she glanced back. There was something she had been wanting to ask. Something she had to know. “The strongest magic in the world is on this ship. If there were anything here that could help Kell…” Her voice tightened, betraying her need.
Over the last seven years, they had searched, tried tinctures, tried spells, tried every fucking thing under the sun. And nothing they’d found in the three empires, or any markets, black or hidden or otherwise, had been able to fix what was broken in him.
Eventually, Kell had stopped looking.
But she hadn’t.
“I would pay the price,” she added.