Now people came to the castle every day, wanting to see her, to touch her, to be blessed. They came, and sometimes the Vir let them through, and sometimes they didn’t. One day, even her mother came, suddenly full of want. Her mother, who’d tried to sell her. She came, and for a moment, Kosika thought it was because she missed her daughter, wanted her back. But she didn’t. She only wanted to be paid. The Vir kept her away after that. Sometimes, when she was falling asleep, she could still hear the coins on their kitchen table going clink clink clink.
Kosika turned away from the window, surprised by how dark the room seemed now with the thin light of the moon at her back. She curled her fingers, and fire ignited in her hand.
It was so easy—as easy as wanting, and she knew how to want. Other people struggled to conjure a flame. She struggled only to contain its size. The fire bloomed, hot and bright, swallowing her fingers, and she held her breath and focused until it shrank back to candlelight, hovering just above her palm. Nasi slept on as she shuffled past the bed, heading for the doors. Most of the floor stones were smooth but a few were patterned, and she liked to play a game, hopping between the marked ones until she reached the other side.
She pressed her ear to the carved surface of the door, listened, and heard nothing, save for the hum of the wood against her palm, inviting her to take it, to bend it, to make it grow. She imagined it coming apart beneath her fingers, braiding itself into tendrils, into limbs, a tree, but she must have imagined it too hard, because the door let out a splintering crack. Kosika jerked her hands away and squeezed her eyes shut and imagined the door as a door and nothing more. And when she opened her eyes again, it was still there.
She pushed it open.
A pair of soldiers stood on the landing beyond, dressed in armor so dark it seemed to swallow the light, making them blend right into the walls. She knew they were there, even if they didn’t move, knew they weren’t going to lurch forward and grab her. She knew—but she still walked a little faster until she was safely past them, and on the stairs.
Almost a year she’d lived in the castle, and Kosika still hadn’t learned the whole shape of the place. She knew there were four towers, and that she was in one. She knew her stairs led down and down and down, three landings, and three floors. She knew that on every floor below, there was a four-sided hall that went all the way around, touching the towers and studded with narrow windows that looked out onto the city. She knew the thirteen Vir stayed on the two floors beneath her, and that the bottom floor held the castle proper, with the throne room and half a dozen other halls, and also some of the guards. She knew there was another floor underground, for the kitchens and the castle servants.
She knew, but in the dark sometimes, she still got turned around, so she kept to the halls that bordered each floor, counted to make sure she touched all four sides and ended up back at her own tower. Tonight, she miscounted. Or perhaps she didn’t miscount. Perhaps she heard the whisper, or saw the light ghosting on the stairwell wall, and simply followed it up the tower steps.
When she reached the top, she saw a Vir.
In her mind, the thirteen Vir were like the little kol-kot statues Nasi had used, all of them more or less the same. Some were tall and others short, some dark-skinned and others pale, but in their silver armor and their half-cloaks, the ring pin at their shoulders, they blurred together in her mind, these chosen few, the members of the old king’s original guard.
This Vir stood before a kind of altar, a shrine placed before a door like the one that led to her own rooms. At first, she thought there was a second Vir in front of him, but then she realized it was a statue.
A statue of the old king.
His head was bowed, just like when she found him in the Silver Wood. But here, he was on his feet, a crown resting on his stone temples.
Kosika crept closer and saw that the altar in front of the statue had been draped in a silver cloak, just like the ones the Vir all wore, the same silver ring pin lying at its center. Candles stood around the ring, and she watched as the Vir lit them one by one, then knelt.
She thought of the soldiers in the Silver Wood. The way one of them fell to their knees before the old king’s body. This Vir didn’t fall, but he sank slowly down, and whispered, so softly she couldn’t hear the words, only the breathy sound they made.
When he spoke again, it was to her.
“Os, Kosika,” he said, and she jumped, fingers tensing around the little light in her palm, which went out. The Vir rose and looked at her. His hair was thick and dark, taking over his face like a thicket, from the heavy eyebrows that looked like soot smudged across his brow to the beard that shadowed his jaw.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Making devotions.”
Kosika drifted forward, and studied the statue of the old king. From this angle, she could see the shine of two polished gems set into the stone face, one green, the other black. They stood together for several moments, and the Vir didn’t talk. Kosika felt she shouldn’t either, but questions had always made her tongue itch.
“Who was he?”
“His name,” said the Vir, “was Holland Vosijk.”
“Holland Vosijk,” she echoed. When she said it, she tasted the sugar cube melting on her tongue. Felt grass tickling her fingers. She didn’t know much about the man she’d found in the Silver Wood, only that he had gone to sleep, and something in her had woken up.
“Tell me about him,” she said, and even though she was queen, she added, “please.”
The Vir smiled, his gaze still on the statue.
“Have you heard the story of the Someday King?”
* * *
“Once there was magic,” she told herself. “And it was everywhere…”
Kosika’s fingers trailed along the castle wall as she spoke, reciting the story to the stones, and the grass, and the sky. She could feel the rocks singing beneath her fingers, feel the ground humming under her bare feet, which she knew wasn’t fitting for a queen, but she didn’t care.
She was alone—but of course, she was not alone. She was never alone. A handful of Vir studied her from a balcony. The soldiers watched from atop the wall. Nasi glanced down, now and then, from the nearby tree where she was perched, reading a book on strategy and war.
“Once there was magic,” she began again, “and it was everywhere. But it was not equal…”
Every night for the last month, she’d met Serak—for that was the Vir’s name—at the top of the stairs, and every night, he told her the stories, and every day, she told them to herself, until she knew them all, inside and out. Stories of the time before, and the time after. Of the other three worlds, and what happened when they disappeared behind their doors. Of the way magic was bound, and the way it withdrew. Of the way the world began to wither.
Of the many kings and queens who tried to force it back into the world, and failed, because they did not understand: a thing taken by force would always be a pale shadow of something given freely.
Of the challengers who rose, all claiming to be the Someday King, the legendary figure who would call the magic home, and how the magic refused them one by one, because they gave nothing of themselves.
And then, of Holland Vosijk.
Holland, who did not want the throne, but helped his friend Vortalis to it, Vortalis who was slain one night by Astrid and Athos Dane, who captured Holland, and branded him with magic and bound him into service, and made him wear the mark of his own capture on his cloak.
Serak told her of the Danes, how they held the throne for seven years, before they too were killed, and Holland had disappeared, and when he returned it was not as a servant, but as a claimant to the empty throne. How the few who stood against Holland fell like wheat beneath the scythe of his most devoted, Ojka, who was a Vir before they were called Vir, and when he took the throne, how he did not try to force the magic, to bind it to him, it simply came. The river thawed, and the color flooded into the world like a blush into cold cheeks, and all knew, then, that Holland was the Someday King.