The palace was a dazzling spectacle, suspended on a bridge over the river Isle. But there was no magic to the feat. The bulk of its weight was held aloft by four large pillars, sunk into the river floor. Two of those pillars were solid stone, but the other two were hollow. One contained the royal prisons, cells that had once held Cora Taskon, one of the Veskan heirs who’d tried to end the Maresh line, and even once, briefly, Kell Maresh, when the old king jailed him in a fit of pique (Alucard couldn’t blame him).
The other hollow pillar had been given to the queen as a wedding present.
There was a rumor, in some of the London pubs, that the queen of Arnes was in fact a prisoner, held in the sunken chamber against her will. But Nadiya Loreni was no one’s prisoner, and while she did spend most of her nights entombed in the bowels of the soner rast, it was entirely by choice. She had been given splendid rooms in the royal wing—a luxurious bed she rarely slept in, a glittering lounge in which she never entertained—but the various servants and guards had taken to calling this her private chamber.
The hall bore no resemblance to the prisons in the other pillar, nor did it retain any trace of its own past, as a hidden training ground for the Antari prince.
Now it was a series of interconnected chambers, each as wide and open as the great halls above, and filled with just as much treasure. It was an impressive feat, all the size and grandeur of a royal estate, if that estate were windowless and housed at the bottom of the Isle.
Alucard hummed softly as he reached the bottom of the stairs, to let the queen know he was coming. She had scolded him once for sneaking up on her in the middle of a half-formed spell, warned him that if her hands had been less steady, she might have brought the entire palace down on their heads. To this day, he wasn’t sure if she’d been joking.
He made a lazy circle around the chamber. She’d been busy. She was always busy.
There were a dozen surfaces, and every one of them was covered in something; the beginnings of a new device, or the remains of an old one. On one table he even saw a pistol—a weapon he’d recognized only because of Lila Bard’s devotion. Its chamber was open, unloaded, but gilded spellwork was now laced along the barrel. Alucard left it, as he left everything in Nadiya’s workshop, untouched.
In the next room he found her, head bowed over a table, a glass of wine at her elbow and her crown cast off, the golden circlet hanging from a nearby lamp as if it were a tunic, shed in the midst of passion. She was studying her work as if it were a Rasch board in the final motions of the game. The only movement was a ribbon of fire that circled around her fingers, as thin and precise as a healer’s blade.
Her dark hair hung loose, and ended just above her shoulders. She’d come to court with a mane of it, cascading down her back, the kind of locks that men loved and women envied, and her first act as queen had been to hack it off. People gossiped, of course (not that it stopped them from trimming theirs to match). The same ones who shouted that she was a prisoner said that Rhy had cut it in a fit of pique, because he was jealous of her beauty. Others claimed he’d done it because he wanted her and Alucard to be a matching set.
The truth was much simpler—it got in the way of her work.
For Nadiya Loreni, that was reason enough to be rid of it.
Alucard was still humming as he traced the edge of the room, but if the queen heard him, she didn’t bother to look up. He raised his voice a little, adding words to the song.
“I had a love, when I was young, he went to sea, I thought him gone…”
Still Nadiya didn’t stir, and Alucard found himself hoping, not for the first time, that no one ever tried to assassinate the queen. He doubted she would even notice.
“But he came back, when I was grown,” he sang, passing a shelf piled with rejected tokens, earlier versions of the twinned coins that she’d designed to turn a scrying board into a form of long-distance communication. Another held a collection of stoppered bottles, a mortar and pestle, a jar of herbs—the ingredients for the tonic that helped Rhy sleep without rendering his brother useless.
“I had waited, he had known…”
Alucard trailed his fingers through the air above the disembodied pieces of something that looked dangerously like an Inheritor, the device used to contain and pass down a person’s magic. Those were outlawed a century before. The last in existence had been used to capture Osaron. Or so he thought.
“The day he sailed away from me…”
Next to it, a table covered in slivers of metal and sheafs of parchment, each filled with the queen’s tight scrawl, a mixture of notation and spellwork. And there, in an open glass case, sat three silver rings.
“… he took my heart and soul to sea…”
Alucard trailed off. He knew those rings.
They were the same ones worn by the three Antari in their battle against the dark. The rings had bound Holland and Lila and Kell to one another, allowed their magic to be shared between them. But they had also shattered Kell’s power when he didn’t get his off in time. Even now, the magic that wove around them was strange, iridescent light shot through with shadow.
Alucard reached out, and shut the case’s lid.
Then he switched to a louder, bawdier song as he drifted toward the queen.
“The king was made of fire, and the queen was made of ice, and when they went to bed that night, he made her melt not once but twice—”
“So that’s where Ren heard it,” said the queen at last. She blinked, as if drawn from a reverie, and looked up at him, a pair of magnifying glasses balanced on her nose. Behind them, her hazel eyes looked even larger than usual, flecked with gold and green.
“You, Alucard Emery, are a terrible influence.”
“Believe it or not,” he said, pouring himself a drink, “I’ve heard that before.”
He had the glass halfway to his lips when Nadiya made to stop him.
“That’s for cleaning metals.”
Alucard sniffed, and set the glass aside, snagging the glass of wine from her elbow instead. He sank into a plush green chair, utterly at odds with its surroundings. Her sole concession to his frequent visits.
“Do you ever sleep?” he asked.
“And miss these golden hours? No, the night is made for work.”
“Dreamers,” he said, “might disagree.”
“This is how I dream,” she said, gesturing at the table, covered in half-formed spells. “And I could point out that you are also here, awake.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you came to bother me?” But there was no annoyance in her voice.
“What can I say?” he teased. “You’re such good company.”
Nadiya laughed, the sound rare and bright, and Alucard leaned back in the emerald chair and tucked his hands behind his head, and she returned to her work, ignoring him completely.
VII
FIVE YEARS AGO
On the day that Rhy Maresh married Nadiya Loreni, Alucard Emery got very drunk.
He resolved not to be messy about it—he’d long learned to hold his liquor, and to maintain an appearance of charm and ease, despite whatever tumult was roiling within.
The ceremony was held in the Rose Hall, hundreds of ostra and vestra filing in to see their king and his chosen queen.
Alucard had offered to absent himself—had even hoped, perhaps, that the king would spare him—but Rhy insisted he be there. He was, after all, the king’s shadow. His personal guard. So Alucard stood at the bottom of the dais, his face a mask of pleasant cheer as the Aven Essen bound a length of gold rope around their hands.
It shouldn’t have been hard to watch, but it was.
Even though Rhy had done the same in their room the night before, when no one else was there to see. Had dragged Alucard from the bed, and taken the gold sash from his robe, and laced their fingers—Rhy’s hand dark and studded with rings, Alucard’s lighter, the veins scarred silver.
“I bind my life to yours,” Rhy had said, wrapping the sash around their hands, and Alucard had chuckled, but Rhy’s face was set, his voice sober. “I bind my life to yours,” he said again, his gold eyes bright, searching, waiting.
“I bind my life to yours,” answered Alucard.
Rhy wrapped the sash a second time.
“I bind my heart to yours,” he said, only this time his voice carried so much farther, because he was no longer speaking to Alucard. He was standing at the front of the Rose Hall, before the Aven Essen and the gathered crowd.