And then another sound, much closer; this one she recognized as the clatter of hooves, and Tes looked up just in time to see a horse and cart barreling toward her in the dark.
The driver yanked on the reins and the horse reared, turning hard, and the cart wheel broke, and the whole thing began to fall toward Tes and the doormaker on the ground. Her limbs came to life, and she swept up the box and dove out of the way just before the cart crashed down, splintering wood and spilling crates into the street where she’d just been.
Somehow, Tes kept moving. She half stumbled, half ran, trying to put distance between herself and the crash, made it half a block before the pain in her side dragged her to a stop. She sagged to the curb beneath an awning, one hand on the doormaker and the other on her wounded side. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think, but her thoughts were sluggish, slow to answer. She opened her eyes. Her vision was slipping, darkness creeping in, or so she thought, until she realized why the night light looked so strange.
There were no threads.
Not in the rain, which should have shimmered with strands of pale blue light.
Not in the lamps, which should have been shot through with tendrils of yellow.
Not in the road itself, which should have been woven with strands of earthy green.
In fact, the only threads she could see were the ones coiled around the doormaker, or spilling down her front, each drop burning with a filament of crimson light that faded moments after it fell.
A world without magic.
It might have been a nice reprieve, if she weren’t dying.
No, she told herself. Not dying. Not yet. She could fix this. Tes was very good at fixing broken things. Admittedly, she did it using magic, and there was no magic here, and she was a person, not a thing, but she was hurt, and hurt was a kind of broken, and she could fix it. She had to.
The owl in her pocket was fluttering nervously, and she was glad, at least, that he still worked. Glad she wasn’t alone. Even if the movement of skeletal wings against her wounded front hurt enough to make her stifle a sob.
She needed to stop the blood, she knew that much. Close the wound. Quiet the pain. The streets were lined with shops. Perhaps one had something she could use. It seemed like a lot of work.
Tes wanted to close her eyes again. To rest. Just for a moment.
Instead, she took a deep breath, and got to her feet.
* * *
Calin leaned against the alley wall, picking his nails.
“Why the fuck are you just standing there?” said a grating voice.
Still alive, then, he thought, as Bex stormed down the alley toward him. And they said he was hard to kill. She was bleeding from two or three places, and favoring one leg. It wasn’t as good as dead, but he’d take what he could get.
“We have a problem,” said Calin.
“Where is she?” demanded Bex.
“Gone.”
“And you didn’t go after her?”
“Couldn’t,” he said. “She closed the door.” He nodded at the faint scar in the air as he said it. He might not have even noticed the echo of it in the dark, if he hadn’t seen the door with his own eyes, the place where it had come—and gone.
“So she did have it.” Bex tried to hide her surprise, but Calin saw it, memorized the arch of her eyebrow, the slight part of her lips. One day when I kill you, you’ll make that face for me. His mouth twisted at the thought, but Bex was already kneeling on the alley floor, unrolling a city map.
“What are you doing?”
“That lying little bitch owes me a finger,” she said, drawing a series of marks on the map. Calin had never bothered much with spells. The way he saw it, you could be decent at a lot of things, but only great at a few. He’d rather spend his energy on killing. Plus, a spell like this took the fun out of the hunt. And yet, as he stood in the alley, waiting for Bex or a better idea, he admitted, if only to himself, that a finding spell came in handy at a time like this.
He watched her pull the knotted lock of hair from her pocket, the one she’d cut from the girl’s head, and tug free a strand, dropping it into the center of the map. She said a few words and the marks and the hair caught fire, turned to cinder. This was the part, he guessed, where the cinders were supposed to point the way, to draw a line from them to the girl.
But they didn’t. They just sat there, waiting for a light breeze to blow them away.
“Anesh?” he asked, impatient.
Bex kept her eyes on the map, but he saw her shoulders tighten, hackles raising the way they did whenever she was mad. Normally he would have savored it, but his head was beginning to ache where it had met the shop wall, and he’d lost a perfectly good knife.
Bex was muttering to herself.
“Well?” he asked again.
Bex sighed. “For once in your life, you’re right about something,” she said. “We do have a problem.” She looked up. “According to this map, the girl’s not here.”
“Obviously,” he said, gesturing at the empty alley, but Bex was already shaking her head.
“She’s not just not here, you mindless lump of coal.” Bex swept the ash from the map. “She’s nowhere. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”
“Maybe you’re just shit at spells,” offered Calin. “Or maybe I killed her.”
He had seen the knife go in, right before the door slammed shut.
Bex shot him a dark look. “Let’s hope, for both our sakes, you aren’t that stupid.” She stood, staring down at the blank map for a long moment. “Fuck this,” she muttered, shoving past him. As she did, she made a half-hearted attempt to slide a dagger between his ribs.
Calin knocked the blade away.
“Where are you going?” he asked, trailing her out of the alley.
“We’re going,” she said, “to tell the boss.”
VII
WHITE LONDON
Everyone had the sense to let the queen go, except, of course, for Nasi, who trailed her up the spiral stone stairs until the hall below was out of sight.
Kosika wasn’t in the mood. “Go back,” she said as she passed the first landing. “I’d hate for you to miss the party.”
“You did not have to scare Reska like that,” said Nasi. “It was petulant, and small.”
Kosika rounded on her friend, the air tightening around them both. She hadn’t even meant to conjure it—lately things had begun to follow the shape of her mood, the curve of her temper. Nasi stiffened, sensing the change, but unlike the Vir, she didn’t retreat. Instead she continued up the steps, stopping on the one just below so they stood eye to eye. She studied the queen’s face. “Why are you so mad?”
Kosika’s gaze dropped to the stairs, the sounds of revelry rising from below. “The people down there are opportunists, following the current. Half of them knelt to the Danes before they knelt to me.”
Nasi shrugged. “If you punished every soul who bent their head as evil passed, there would be no one left to follow you. But there is a difference between fear and devotion.”
“Devotion,” muttered Kosika, sagging against the wall. “Forgive me if I’m in no mood to be paraded through the castle like a puppet.”
Nasi quirked a brow. “Last I checked, you had no strings. You cut them all away.”
“Then why do they still treat me like a doll?”
“They treat you like a queen,” countered Nasi, huffing in exasperation. “That is what you are. The symbol of their strength. The power that restored the world.”
“It is Holland Vosijk’s power. They should pray to him.”
“Holland Vosijk is dead,” said Nasi grimly. “And you are not.” She stepped close, laid a hand on the shoulder of Kosika’s bloodstained cloak. “You resent them because they do not live and breathe the stories of the Summer Saint, as you do. But they do not follow the Saint. They follow you. As far as they’re concerned, you are the reason the crops grow in their fields. You are the reason they can summon wind into their sails.” Nasi rolled her free hand, and a flame bloomed in the air. “You are the reason they can call fire to their hearths.” Her fingers closed, and the flame went out. “You are their queen, and tonight they celebrate, but today they bled, because you willed it.”
“They bled because it serves them.”