“I’m sure,” she said, striding toward him. “But I have two legs and a passing ability to boil water.” She plucked the empty bottle from his hand and shooed him away from the chest.
“You know,” she went on, drawing the dropper from the hallowsroot, “there are times in life when it serves one to guess, and times when it does not.” Two small beads of liquid disappeared into the bottle. “This is one of the latter. Unless, of course, you like not knowing if you’ll wake.”
“I would prefer it,” he said as she returned the hallowsroot, and reached past the dreamsquick for a bundle of widowswork instead, dropping a leaf into the mortar.
“The king is going through this batch quite quickly.”
“It’s not for him,” admitted Alucard.
Nadiya met his gaze but said nothing, only returned to preparing the tonic. He decided to make himself useful; drifted toward the tray and poured the tea, swiping a spiced cookie from the top of the stack. He placed the cup at her elbow.
“Did you know that the Antari are in residence?” she asked, as if making pleasant conversation.
“Mhmm,” he said around the cookie. Swallowed. Offered nothing else. The queen was brilliant, but her eyes took on a different light when Kell and Lila were around. She called it curiosity. He called it hunger.
“What brings them to London after all this time?” she pressed.
“The Hand,” he said, then continued to wander about the queen’s workshop as he explained about the raid on Maris Patrol’s floating market, and the stolen persalis, and Bard’s certainty that it had been smuggled here to use against the crown. He trailed off as he reached the worktable in the middle of the room.
“What’s this?” he asked, studying the counter.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” the queen called without turning to see. But Alucard was busy trying to make sense of the sight himself.
The three Antari rings were out of their glass box. The wide silver bands sat like weights, pinning the corners of a large black cloth, its surface covered in Nadiya’s slanted hand, the white chalk markings of a spell. The marks were connected, a vast, intricate web of lines, and at their center sat two lengths of chain, both wrought in gold. One was thinner and shorter than the other.
“Oh, that,” said the queen, appearing at his side. She set her tea down on a nearby stack of books, and handed him the sleeping tonic. He slipped it absently into his robe, unable to take his eyes from the work laid out before him.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“Right now? It is a work in progress. One day, perhaps, it will change everything.” Unease prickled beneath his skin as Nadiya took up the thicker chain, held it between her hands as if it were a priestly relic.
“It’s one thing,” she said, “to devise an object that magnifies a user’s magic, as long as that magic is confined to a single element. Two water mages. Two fire workers. Two—or even three—Antari. Something that functions only as an amplifier, allowing one magician to borrow another’s strength. But it is quite another for that magician to borrow a different power. Imagine being able to pair a water worker and an earth mage, or a fire maker and a wind one. Or”—her eyes flicked up to his—“a person without magic, and one who has plenty.”
A dark feeling coiled in his stomach. “Nadiya—”
“Those rings allowed the Antari to do it once,” she went on. “Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they respond only to Antari. Which severely limits their application. I couldn’t modify them, so I had to start from scratch. Here,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
And before he could say no, she wound the gold chain around his wrist. Alucard shivered at the cold weight of the metal on his skin, the way it wrapped against itself, the echo of old chains. He waited, but felt nothing else change.
“How does it work?” he asked, as Nadiya took up the smaller length of chain and wrapped it around her index finger, where it bound to itself, becoming a gold ring.
She said nothing to activate the spell, only flexed her hand, as if admiring the bauble. But as she did, Alucard felt the gold chain tighten around his wrist, and become a cuff, flush with his skin, a band with no beginning and no end.
Nadiya flashed him a performer’s smile. “Let me show you.”
She crooked her fingers, and as she did, Alucard felt something come loose inside him. It was the strangest sensation, a collapsing inward, a weight dropping, if the weight were his lungs, his heart, everything that took up space beneath his skin. A dizzy lightness, a sudden, shocking hollow. And he didn’t know what was missing, what was gone, until the air around Nadiya’s hand began to ripple. Until the teacup rose and the contents spun out and the three elements churned together above her palm—wind, and earth, and water.
Even though Nadiya had only ever been a fire worker.
Those were his elements, his magic, or they had been. Alucard caught his own reflection in a mirrored surface, and saw the air around him bare of color, the blue and green and amber threads of his magic now twining through the air around Nadiya instead, braiding with the red of her power.
He tried to pull the magic back, only to find he couldn’t reach it. There was nothing to grab on to. It simply … wasn’t there.
“Give it back,” he demanded, clawing uselessly at the gold around his wrist.
“That’s the trouble,” she said, eyes trained on the twisting elements above her palm. “It is much easier to take a thing than share it.”
Alucard felt sick. The way he had his first days at sea, when the deck tipped and bobbed beneath his feet. He threw out a hand to steady himself. “Nadiya.”
But she went on, as if she weren’t holding his stolen magic in her hand. “Ideally, the power would go both ways. Shared equally between its users. As you can tell, right now, it’s one-directional.” She looked around the workshop. “Interesting,” she said. “I still can’t see the way you do.”
“Nadiya, stop.” The words came out soft and hoarse, and her attention flicked back to Alucard, as if she’d forgotten him entirely.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, touching the ring, and it unraveled again, the short gold chain dropping into her palm; the elements she’d controlled a moment before now crumbled and fell away. The cuff went slack around Alucard’s wrist, and violently he shook off the adornment, as if it were a snake, the gold rope chiming faintly when it hit the floor.
He could feel his magic pour back in as if he were a vessel, emptied and refilled. It churned with his shock and anger and for a second he was torn between charging the queen, and getting as far away from her as he could.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded as she knelt to retrieve the fallen length of gold.
The queen looked at him, perplexed. “Come now, Alucard,” she said, returning both pieces to the table. “It was only a test.”
“You weren’t the one chained.” He straightened, flexing his fingers, studying the threads of magic in the air above his skin. “You had no right to do that.”
Nadiya sighed, impatient. “I thought it would be easier to demonstrate than to explain.” She took up a narrow piece of chalk and began to make notes on the edge of the cloth. “As I said, it isn’t finished. When I’m done, the spell will always go both ways, to ensure consent.”
“There is a reason power has limits,” he said.
The queen clicked her tongue. “You sound like the Aven Essen. Ezril is always coming down here, lecturing me about the balance of magic, the flow of power. As if all we’re capable of is floating down the stream. Sometimes you have to bend the rules—”
“This isn’t bending, Nadiya. This is binding. And in the wrong hands—”
She waved him off. “In the wrong hands a paring knife can end a man’s life. Shall we ban them from the kitchen?”
Alucard stared at her, aghast. Nadiya Loreni was a brilliant inventor, but she had a kind of tunnel vision when it came to her work. She never seemed to see the danger in it, only the potential. In her mind, power was a neutral force. Alucard wished he could agree.