The Vir exchanged looks, their faces lined with everything from annoyance to discomfort. Thirteen of them, and honestly, aside from Serak, most of the others still bled together in her mind. It wasn’t just the silver half-cloaks they all wore. It was the way they held themselves, the way they sat in their chairs, the way they spoke to her, as if she were a child and not a queen.
Now, twelve of them looked at each other. Only Serak had the decency to look at her, and seemed about to speak when Vir Patjoric cut in. Patjoric she would always know—after all, he was the one who’d found her.
“We didn’t want to bother you,” he said, bowing his pale head.
“Matters of state can be quite boring,” added Vir Reska, who was easy to remember because she had eyes the same shade as the Sijlt, so light they were nearly colorless.
“I assure you,” said Kosika, “nothing about my city bores me. Now,” she added, sitting back in her throne. “What have I missed?”
Another Vir cleared his throat. “We were discussing what to do about the other worlds.”
Kosika frowned. She knew of them, of course. The other rooms in the house, as Serak would say. “What of them?” she asked.
“Well, there has always been … communication in the past, and—”
“Has a messenger come to us?”
“No,” said another Vir. “Not yet. But we think we should go to them.”
“We,” echoed Kosika. But there was no we. The doors between worlds were closed, and only an Antari could open them again. Only an Antari could step through.
“I do not see the point,” she said. A murmur went through the Vir like wind through leaves. “You want me to go to this other London? And do what? Deliver mail?”
“Holland did it.” That, from Vir Patjoric.
“As a servant,” said Kosika through gritted teeth, “not a king. And only then because the Danes coveted that other world. I think it’s time to focus on our own.”
Serak met her gaze, and she saw the faintest smile at the corner of his mouth. He approved.
“It is not worth the risk.” This from Vir Reska. “If Kosika was taken, we would have no Antari and no queen.”
Kosika did not fail to notice the order Reska had given to those titles.
“One day,” said a dark-haired Vir named Lastos, “the walls will fall. We should be ready.”
“All the more reason to focus on our strength instead of theirs,” countered Kosika.
Vir Lastos sat forward, fingers gripping his chair. “We should know our enemies before we meet them on the field.”
“Why must they be our enemies?” asked Vir Serak. “Why must they be anything at all?”
“We are closer to the original seat of power,” said Kosika, “and every day, our world revives a little more.”
“And what if theirs does, too?” pressed Vir Lastos. “We have no other way of knowing.”
But Kosika’s attention was no longer on his words. He was the type of man who gestured as he spoke, and she saw that both his hands were bare.
“Knowledge is always better,” he was saying, but she cut him off.
“You didn’t tithe, Vir Lastos.”
He gave a cursory glance down at his hand. “I was busy with affairs of state.” The Vir drew breath, about to dive back into his argument, but Kosika did not let him.
“For this, you will make time.”
He waved the words away as if they were a fly. “Very well,” he said. “If it humors the queen. Now back to the matter of the other London—”
“Do it now.”
Kosika had drawn the blade from her hip, and was holding it out to Vir Lastos. He looked at the weapon’s edge, repulsed. “Your Highness?”
“The ground does not stand on ceremony. It will welcome your tithe a day late.”
She waited, but the Vir did not take the offered blade.
“Then let it wait,” he said, “until the next tithing day. They are becoming rather frequent.”
“Lastos,” warned Patjoric, but the Vir pressed on.
“No. First, it was once, then one time a year, now two. At this rate, soon we will be too weak to do anything but bleed.”
“You say weak,” chided Kosika, “but our London grows stronger every day.”
“Do you know why?” he snapped. “Because we have banned binding spells, and scrubbed the worst offenders from our streets. Because we have guilds that bring their goods up and down the Sijlt, now it has thawed, and collect taxes relative to wealth.” He shook his head. “You can choose to tithe in blood and worship men as saints, my queen, but rituals do not sustain this city.”
“You too served Holland,” said Vir Serak scornfully. “You too believed—”
“I believed he was the best we had at hand,” said Vir Lastos. “Not some mythic king.”
“You have seen the trees blooming in the courtyard,” said Vir Talik. “The amount of grain arriving on those barges from up north.”
“Why do you think the Sijlt flows so swiftly now?” interjected Kosika.
Lastos gazed at her with cold, flat eyes. “All that freezes thaws in time. Perhaps it is simply nature.”
“And yet,” she said. “It has yet to thaw in you.”
The Vir’s hands closed into fists, the gesture only half-hidden beneath his cloak. He was not the only one, of course, to still lack magic. Most children these days had elements blooming in them, but a fair number of adults were proving barren soil. Among the Vir, there were still three—Lastos, Reska, and Patjoric—who could not conjure so much as a candle flame.
“Perhaps you are afraid,” Kosika went on. “Perhaps you don’t want to believe that magic has a will, that it is choosing, because that would mean it isn’t choosing you.”
“I would not be so arrogant, little queen.” Those last words, name and title, spat as if they were a seed stuck between his teeth.
Kosika looked down at the blade still in her hand, studying her reflection in the steel. “This castle is made of stone,” she said. “And stone carries sound. I have heard what you call me, when I am not there, Kojsinka.”
Little tyrant.
Vir Lastos blanched, but she could not tell if it was fear or anger that made him pale.
“Do you deny it?” she pressed.
He shook his head. “You are a child. With a child’s knowledge of the world.”
The other Vir stirred, uneasy. Patjoric reached for Lastos’s arm, but he shook it off.
“A little girl content to play at being queen.”
Kosika didn’t stand. It would feel too much like rising to the bait. But she couldn’t stop the air from churning through the hall around her. The stones crunched like grinding teeth. She sat forward on her throne.
“Then you should not have put me here,” she said.
“No,” he said slowly. “We shouldn’t have.”
Lastos looked around the room, waiting for the other Vir to stand with him. Or at least, against her. Kosika thought of the kol-kot board in her room. Nasi had shown her all the ways to lay the pieces out. In more than one arrangement, the priests were strong enough to rule without their king. But that was only a game. And Kosika was not only a queen. She was Antari. The heir to Holland’s power. And the other Vir knew it, even if they did not wish it so.
Patjoric shook his head, and sighed, and Reska kept her eyes on the floor. Talik looked at Lastos as if he’d doomed himself. And slowly, Lastos realized that he had.
“I am called to rule,” said Kosika. “But you are not bound to serve.” She gestured to the throne room doors, still open wide.
He tore the silver mantle from his shoulders with so much force that the circle pin came free and fell, ringing like a bell as it bounced across the floor.
He should have turned and left. Instead, he glared at Kosika and said, “Patjoric should have put you down when he first found you in the street. After all, the best thing Holland Vosijk ever did for us was di—”
He cut off, his voice replaced by the sick crunch of blade on bone. Lastos let out a ragged gasp and looked down to find a length of steel protruding from his chest.
“That is blasphemy,” hissed Serak, who stood like a shadow behind him, his dark eyes black with rage.
The other Vir were on their feet, hands on their swords, and for a moment, the air in the hall felt solid as glass, about to break. But the moment passed, and none came forward. They only watched as Serak withdrew his sword, and Lastos crumpled to the pale stone floor. His mouth opened and closed, but all that escaped was a rattle, and a gasp, and then nothing.