“I had to do something,” she said. “We have roused the magic from its sleep, but it is weak. I felt its need. I felt its thirst.”
“That may be,” said Serak, “but there is not enough blood in your veins to water this world.”
Kosika sat up a little straighter.
“Then perhaps,” she said, “we can water it together.”
IV
NOW
The tithe road ended at the Silver Wood.
Around the grove, the people of London stood gathered and waiting, their final bounty in their bandaged hands. It was a bag of seeds, the pouch spelled so that when planted with the rest, no matter the season, the seeds inside would grow. Another reminder of why they made this trek each season, of why they had been asked to bleed.
The crowd seemed somber, and she wondered if word had reached them of the would-be killer in the square, if that was why they bowed their heads so low when their queen went by.
Kosika walked into the waiting woods, and paused, smiling up at the pale trees. Overnight, it seemed, their leaves had turned from green to gold, begun falling in haloes on the ground below.
She made her way to where the third and final altar stood, not deep within the trees, but just inside the forest’s edge, nestled among the silver trunks so that pale wood bled right into pale stone.
The third and final statue of Holland Vosijk stood on a raised block flush with the basin, so that when the bowl was full, as it was now, he seemed to walk atop the blood instead of wading through it. He no longer wore his crown but held it in his hands, his head tipped back, his gaze turned to the canopy, and the waiting sky. A thicket of branches tangled around his cloak, so that he seemed part of the Silver Wood, or it a part of him.
“Once, a servant,” said Kosika, standing before the altar, “then a king.” She drew her knife. “At last, a saint.”
She made a third cut on the inside of her arm, the deepest yet, and watched her blood join the pool until it brimmed, threatening to overtake the edge. She stared down into the surface, waiting for it to smooth, then touched the basin’s glass side and said the words. The altar walls gave way, soaking into the roots of the Silver Wood, the dark stain spreading farther up her once-white cloak.
The third tithe done, the citizens began to turn away, retreating down the path and into the streets, making their way home.
But Kosika lingered, her gaze trained on the trees ahead. A thousand eyes stared back, unblinking, from the narrow trunks, and it was hard to think that she had ever been afraid of this place.
She moved past the statue. Into the woods.
* * *
FOUR YEARS AGO
“Once, there was magic,” Serak began, “and it was everywhere.”
Normally, the alcove burned with candles, but that night, only one was lit, its small, unsteady flame casting jagged shadows onto the walls, and the statue, and the Vir.
“Magic was everywhere, but it was not equal.”
As he spoke, his hand drifted, as it always did, to the seal at his shoulder, the silver cloak clasp, a ring driven through by a bar. It was the same seal that lay on the altar, and she knew now, it was the same one Holland had worn when he served the Danes, the same one Athos burned into his skin to bind him. The Vir wore it to show that they had bound themselves to Holland’s legacy.
“It burned like a hearth fire set in the center of a house, heating one room first, and then the next one, and so on, its warmth and light growing weaker the farther that it must reach. Black London was the first room, the one closest to the flame. And we were the next. And then two more followed after, farther from the heat, but still within the house.”
Serak took a candle and set it on the altar.
“But the flame became too strong, and Black London began to burn.” He took up a lantern. “And instead of standing near a hearth, our world now stood beside a conflagration. And so the worlds decided to close their doors to stop the fire’s spread.” He set a lantern over the candle. “But even after the fire was contained again, the people here were still afraid.”
The lantern had four thin glass walls, all of them open, but as Serak spoke, he began to close the sides.
“We looked out at our magic, and feared it would grow too hot, too hungry.”
He closed the first side.
“And so we trapped it.”
He closed the second.
“We built cages.”
He closed the third.
“We bound it to us.”
He closed the fourth and final wall, trapping the flame within the airless glass.
“But do you know what happens to a fire when it’s trapped?”
Kosika watched the light shiver and shrink.
“It goes out,” she whispered.
“It goes out,” echoed Serak, sadness heavy in his throat. Kosika could not take her eyes from the flame. She watched as the light began to thin, retreating from a tall flame to a short one, from gold to blue, felt a twist of panic as the life retreated down the wick, until it met the pool of wax and—
—died.
A thin tendril of smoke rose from the candle, clouding the lantern. For a moment, they stood in silence in the full dark, and she held her breath, and wondered if the lesson was done. But then, Serak spoke again.
“Here is the difference, Kosika. Magic does not die.”
Serak lifted the lantern off the candle, setting it aside.
“Magic withdraws. It resists.”
He held his own hands out to either side of the extinguished candle, brows furrowing with the effort.
“It grows harder and harder to kindle again, but—”
A small spark. A tiny flash of blue, and then flame slowly returned, small and fragile, but burning. And Serak smiled.
“That is what Holland did for us,” he said, lowering his hands. “What will you do?”
Kosika studied the solitary candle, its light barely reaching the walls.
What will I do? she wondered, and then held out her hand, not toward the single, burning flame, but the hundred darkened candles lining the alcove. She flexed her fingers, and the tapers burst to life, fire spreading in a wave until the entire space blazed with light.
* * *
NOW
No one followed Kosika into the woods.
Not her soldiers, or her Vir. Not Serak, or Lark. Not even Nasi. The Silver Wood was now a sacred site, and no one else was allowed to pass within. Her cloak dragged in her wake, snagging on new growth until her fingers found the clasp. It came free, and the heavy cloth slid from her shoulders, and pooled in her wake, and she continued on, until she found the place where Holland had died.
She knelt, and ran her fingers through the grass that grew, as it always did, beneath the tree, as soft and green as the day she found him.
Even after all these years, she’d never told anyone that she’d been there. The first to find the dead king’s body. Perhaps the Vir would welcome the knowledge, see it as further proof of her claim to magic and the throne. Or perhaps they would say that she’d taken his strength, stolen it from his cooling skin. Kosika didn’t know, and didn’t care. The truth of that day, like the power in her veins, did not belong to them.
Kosika drew her blade, and made a fourth cut along the inside of her arm. A private tithe. Let the red drops fall like rain onto the patch of grass below the tree.
She knew the right spell now. The Antari word she’d wanted in the courtyard the day she nearly died.
As Athera.
To grow.
But she didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The golden leaves shimmered overhead. The roots ran strong and deep below. They had been watered well.
She rose, and hauled the heavy cloak back over her shoulders as, beyond the woods, the drums finally stopped beating. They didn’t end all at once, but trailed off like a slowing pulse, as word spread through the city that the ritual was done.
Part Six
THE STRANDS CONVERGE
I
RED LONDON
There were plenty of things that set Delilah Bard apart.
But perhaps the most important, at least here, in this London, was this.