Up in her nearby tree, Nasi turned the page. She had heard all the stories by now. Kosika told them to her every night, and when she learned that Nasi had been there, in the castle, that she had met Holland, first as the servant and then as the Someday King himself, well, she had wanted to know everything.
“What was he like?” Kosika asked again now, and Nasi looked up from her book.
“I didn’t know him any better than you.”
“But you saw him…” And Kosika wanted to say alive, but she hadn’t told anyone, even Nasi, of that day in the Silver Wood.
She’d almost told Serak once—for all the stories he’d given her, she didn’t have any of her own. She knew he’d believe her, it wasn’t that, but that encounter felt like something that lived only between her and the dead king. A light cupped in their hands. She wanted to keep it there.
“How did he seem?” she pressed.
Nasi looked off into the distance, as if trying to remember. At last, she offered up a single word. “Lonely.”
She waited for the older girl to say more, but Nasi went back to her book, and Kosika drifted away from the wall and the tree, and took up her story again, reciting it like a prayer, tracing the words as if they were as string, a ribbon, a road. And at some point, Kosika looked up, and realized she had wandered around the side of the castle and was standing at the edge of the statue court.
It was a gruesome sight, a stretch filled by the bound and twisted forms of the kings and queens who’d climbed to the throne, and fallen from it. Serak told her they were only sculpted tributes, but Nasi insisted that they were real people, turned to stone. That the Danes had started the awful court, to make an example of anyone who tried to stand against them. Kosika didn’t know if Nasi was being truthful or just teasing, but she stopped before the twins, Astrid bound on her knees, Athos on his feet, being eaten by a massive snake. She leaned in and wondered if they were in there, caught forever at the edge of death.
There was no statue of Holland in the courtyard yet, but the space had been made, the path changed so that anyone who came through the gate and crossed the court to the palace stairs would be confronted by him.
She looked around. She’d heard some call the statue court a garden, but there were no flowers anywhere. The London air had warmed, and the river no longer froze, but the castle grounds were still sparse, the ground unyielding. Kosika had never seen a garden, not in real life. Only in books, pictures of thick grass and wild blooms, and once, in a painting Serak showed her, a painting of the city, the way it must have been in the times before.
Kosika knelt and pressed her palm to the dark soil, remembering how the ground had felt beneath the old king’s body. Lush as velvet. She knew, now, that Holland’s magic ran through her veins.
She was his heir.
And she wanted a garden.
Kosika had no knife on her, but she searched and found a bit of broken stone around the turned-up earth, brushed away the dirt, and brought it to the inside of her arm. She pushed down, dragged the jagged edge across her skin until blood welled.
It hurt, but it was supposed to hurt. Give, and take—that was the nature of Antari magic.
All she needed was the word. The spells had come to her strangely, not all at once, but one by one, appearing only as she needed them. So far, she had learned the words to open, and to close, to light, and to heal.
To heal—the first Antari spell she’d ever needed. It had spilled out of her as Lark’s blood poured through her fingers. To heal—that must be the one she wanted now. After all, what was she trying to do, if not heal the ground itself?
Something moved at the edge of her sight. Nasi had followed her into the courtyard, her voice drifting between the statues.
“What are you doing?” she called out, but Kosika was focused on the task at hand. She swiped her fingertips along her bleeding arm, and drove both hands deep into the damp, dark soil.
“As Hasari.”
She held her breath, and waited for the spell to work, for the grass to grow, for the flowers to bloom, for the barren earth to change beneath her hands. But nothing happened. And yet, Kosika could feel the pull of magic, feel it being drawn out of her, down into the soil. Her head began to pound.
Something was wrong.
She tried to pull her hands free but her body wouldn’t move, her bones locked in place and her pulse roared in her ears as the world reached up—not the ground but something deeper—and drove a hundred hooks into her—not skin but something deeper—and was too big, it was too big, it felt like being crushed, like her breath and her blood and her life was being squeezed out of her and eaten up and she tried to scream too but nothing came out, and the last thing she saw was the flash of silver armor and the flutter of a half-cloak and a crown of dark hair as Serak put his hands over hers and pulled them from the ground and something tore inside her and everything went black.
* * *
Kosika was back in the Silver Wood.
She had been running, from someone, something, it didn’t matter who, or what, because the moment she plunged between the trees, she knew they wouldn’t chase her here. Knew that she was safe. And yet, her legs kept moving, drawing her deeper into the trees, heart pounding until she realized the pulse she felt wasn’t in her chest. It was beneath her feet. She stopped then, knelt, and sank her hands into the soil, and began to dig, and dig, and dig, until her fingers closed around the beating heart, and Kosika woke up.
She was alone in bed.
It was too big without Nasi in it, even with the pillows piled around her, and she didn’t even remember lying down, but daylight was streaming through the windows, high and bright, and every part of her ached, from her skin down to her bones and deeper still. Ached as if she’d been scooped out of her own flesh and put back, like the soup they made and served in gourds. Her stomach growled at the thought, and even that hurt, and she wondered why.
Kosika tried to sit up, but her limbs felt pinned down beneath the sheets, and a strange fear began to steal across her then, that she was still dreaming, or worse, that she was dead. She pushed at the blankets, desperate to be rid of the weight, and then Vir Serak was there, at her bedside, silver half-cloak swaying.
“Gently, my queen.”
His beard was longer than it had been that morning, and dark shadows pooled beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in days. That was odd.
“What’s wrong?” she croaked.
Her throat was dry, and it took two tries to shape the question, and when she did, the Vir’s dark eyes took on a shine. But when he spoke, it wasn’t to her. She didn’t realize there was anyone else in the room until he turned and said, to someone she couldn’t see, “Tell them she is awake.”
A door opened, and then closed, and then Serak explained, in his storyteller’s voice, what had happened, and that was how she learned that she had been asleep for more than a week. That they didn’t know if she would die, or wake, or be forever trapped between the two. And there was more that Serak wasn’t saying. She could see it in his eyes, or in the lack of them, the way he wouldn’t meet her gaze when he said that the city did not know about her illness, that the Vir had been holding council, trying to decide what to do.
They’d been planning for her death.
And then the door flung open, and Nasi was there, and she wasn’t crying, but Kosika could see she had been, the way her eyes were ringed with red when she flung herself against the bed, and the first thing she said was, “What were you thinking?”
And only then did Kosika remember sinking her hands into the barren earth, remember the horrible pull as the hungry soil ate up everything she had to give.
“I thought I could heal it,” she said, feeling small and foolish as the words came out.
Kosika should have known, when the world didn’t offer up a spell, should have known that its silence was a kind of warning.
“Your power is strong,” said Vir Serak. “But even you have limits.”