Kosika watched his blood spread across the stones and thought, What a waste. She looked up, and saw Serak’s eyes on her.
An understanding passed between them, and then Serak spoke, loud and clear.
“Kos och var.”
The words were taken up and carried through the hall.
Kos och var. Kos och var. Kos och var.
All hail the queen.
V
RED LONDON
NOW
“How long is this going to take?”
It was after midnight. Tes’s eyes burned and her head ached, and for the last hour she’d been harboring the fragile hope that if she took long enough, the killers might get bored enough to let down their guard and give her a chance to escape.
But the man with the butcher’s block face was still pacing the shop, palming half-fixed pieces of magic, and the woman with the crested braid hadn’t moved from her chair, those flat grey eyes hanging on Tes.
Until Vares twitched.
The owl had been still as—well, a normal skeleton—as if he could sense the danger in the room, but the question had stirred the spellwork in him. He ruffled his bone wings, swiveled his head.
The woman’s eyes flicked sideways. The edge of her mouth quirked into something like a smile. “Kers la?” she asked, reaching toward the owl. He responded by pecking her fingers. Her smile sharpened. “What a clever bit of magic.”
She flexed her hand as she said it, and the metal wire running through the owl shivered.
“Don’t,” said Tes, a single pleading word. And maybe it was the way she said it, or simply the fact that her hands stopped moving, that made the woman let go of the little owl, her gaze dropping back to the box sitting disemboweled on the counter. It was a tangle of magic, a snarl of strings, made messier by the chaos of the surrounding shop, but Tes didn’t dare put on her blotters. She couldn’t afford to narrow her gaze, couldn’t afford to forget the other bodies in the room, even as the headache bloomed.
Despite the audience, Tes didn’t bother masking her power, or pretending to use tools, didn’t bother with anything but her eyes and her hands as she drew her fingers through the air, shaped the spellwork around the box into something she could use.
The man slumped against the door, looking bored. The woman leaned forward in the chair, her fingers rapping on the metal cuff, the only sound in the shop.
“What’s your name?” asked Tes, when she couldn’t bear the quiet. The woman raised a dark brow. “I told you mine,” she added weakly.
The woman’s mouth twitched again. “Bex,” she said, the sound sliding through her teeth. “That walking lump of shit over there is Calin.”
Tes kept her hands moving. “You don’t like him.”
“What gave it away?”
“But you’re here as partners.”
The scarred man—Calin—snorted. “Wouldn’t say that.”
Bex considered her words. “At the moment, we share an employer.”
“I thought assassins worked alone.”
Bex’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a little too sharp,” she mused. “If you’re not careful, it’ll get you cut.” She stood, and stretched, the bones in her neck cracking audibly. “Now do your job, or I’ll do mine.”
Tes surprised herself by bristling at the threat. “Why should I? You’ll kill me either way.”
“Sure,” said Calin, “but if you make it quick, so will we.”
Her boldness cracked, and fear got in.
“Look at it this way,” said Bex, resting her elbows on the counter. “I wasn’t hired to kill you, and I don’t make a habit of doing work for free.”
Tes wanted to believe her—might have, if Bex were there alone—but Calin had the look of a man who’d killed plenty of people, just because he could.
“Don’t worry about him,” said Bex, as if reading her mind. “Worry about me. Worry about that,” she added, pointing to the box on the counter.
So that’s what Tes did.
What, in truth, she’d been doing for hours.
Tes kept her eyes on her hands, forced herself not to glance at the echo of the door that still hovered in the air to Calin’s left, its edges burning. She wondered if they couldn’t see it at all, or simply weren’t looking.
At least they couldn’t see what she was doing.
If they’d been able to see the threads of magic, they would have noticed that she had braided pale gold lines of air upon air upon air together inside the wooden frame. It was a blunt but effective piece of work—one she almost ruined when Calin, having abandoned his place by the door, knocked a giant metal box of scrap to the floor.
Tes’s hands jumped, and she held her breath, afraid the spell would trigger then and there, but mercifully it didn’t.
“Fucking saints,” muttered Bex. “If only someone would hire me to kill you.”
“Don’t act like you haven’t tried for free,” said Calin, kicking the metal box aside. “I’m as hard to kill as the king himself.”
“I heard he has a spell on him,” said Tes, gingerly attaching the final thread and doing her best impression of someone with plenty of work still to do.
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Bex.
Another box went crashing to the floor, and the woman closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. “If you drop one more fucking thing…” she snarled, but Calin wasn’t listening.
He was staring at the space in front of the shelves, head cocked to one side.
“Kers la?”
Tes followed his gaze, and went cold. He was staring straight at the remains of the door she’d made. He made a cautious circle, squinting at the spot, and though he couldn’t see it fully, not the way she could, he had clearly noticed something—a shimmer in the air, a wrongness.
“Hey Bex,” he said, large hand drifting toward the echo of the spell. “Come see this.”
Tes’s heart pounded as the other killer sighed, rising from her chair. She was out of time, and as soon as Bex turned away from the table, Tes made her move.
She hefted the object she’d been working on, the one that was not, and would never be, a doormaker, and lobbed it into the center of the room. As it fell, Tes grabbed the owl and ducked beneath the counter, curling into a ball around Vares and the bundle of disassembled parts left over from the real doormaker.
The wooden box—which, as she had told the killers, was really only a container for magic—hit the workshop floor of Haskin’s shop and shattered, and as it did, it triggered the wind spell she’d coiled within.
Which exploded out with sudden, violent force.
Tes had never made an elemental bomb before, had no idea if she’d given the magic enough kick, not until the air slammed out, splintering wood and shattering glass and shaking the entire building.
Even the counter, bolted to the floor, groaned beneath the percussive force of the explosion, and in the ringing aftermath she couldn’t hear the assassins, didn’t know where they were, if they’d been killed by the blast or merely rattled.
But Tes knew better than to wait.
She grabbed the bundled doormaker and the dead owl and hurled herself out from behind the counter, toward the back of the room and the curtained doorway that led to her quarters. There she stopped, and looked back, saw the woman, Bex, tangled in the limbs of a buckled metal shelf, the man, Calin, slumped against a far stone wall. But they were both still alive, and already starting to recover.
Tes slammed her hand against the doorframe, and the spell she’d woven there. The first thing she’d ever built in Haskin’s shop, and it wasn’t for a customer, it was for herself, in case she had to run again.
Tes loved the shop, but it was just wood and stone and a painted door, and she didn’t hesitate. She laced her fingers through the threads and pulled, as hard as she could.
Cracks ran out from her hand, shooting across the walls and over the ceiling and through the floor. As they did, Tes turned and bolted through the curtain and the narrow quarters at the back of the shop, past the little table and the lofted bed and the life she’d made there, and out the back door, just as the entire building sagged, and the roof caved in, and the whole place came crashing down.
VI