Kosika tugged on the air, conjuring a gentle breeze, just strong enough to skim the dust away.
She held her breath as she moved through the chamber, aware that she was stepping where he had stepped. Touching surfaces that he had touched. She pried open a set of shutters. This had been his view. She wanted to linger there, but rain was already dappling the windowsill, so she pushed the shutters closed again, as if the contents of the room might melt.
Her fingers skimmed the bed where Holland had slept, the chair where he had sat, her eyes scavenging the room for clues. A grey cloak still hung on the wall. There, on the desk, a note in his own hand, the writing falling sharp and slanted as the storm.
Vortalis once said there are no happy kings.
That the worthy ruler is the one who understands the price of power, and is willing to pay, not with his people’s lives, but with his own.
The greater the power, the higher the price.
To take the throne is meager. To mend the world is dear.
Here is what I know.
I would bind myself again to see this place restored.
I would bend a knee to any king.
The entry ended there. Kosika turned through the stack, finding another.
What have I done? Only what I must.
Carried a spark out of the darkness to light my candle.
Sheltered it with my body.
Knowing I would burn.
And then, on another scrap of paper, a single word.
OSARON.
The letters sent a strange chill over Kosika’s skin. It was familiar, the way Antari magic was familiar, the spells already there beneath her skin, nested in her mind before she knew their shape.
“Osaron,” she whispered. An odd word. Not her native Maktahn. It had the air of magic. She said it again, and this time, the word changed on the way up her throat, twisting into a spell.
“As Osaro.”
The power surged up out of her hands. Shadow billowed through the room, pluming into a sudden, solid darkness that doused the candles and choked the light. Panic gripped Kosika. She conjured wind to banish it, but it was not smoke, and it did not so much as ripple. She conjured fire, felt the heat of it tickling her palm, but she couldn’t see the flame, couldn’t see anything. She felt like she was drowning in this darkness, wanted it gone, but there was no way to end Antari spells, only to counter them, so she searched her mind, desperate for light.
Light.
Light.
Light.
“As Illumae.” The word spilled out, and so did the stark white glow, blooming around her as swiftly as the shadows had, and driving the darkness back. The room returned, the candle flames wavering.
Kosika let out a ragged breath, and fled the chamber, sealing the door in her wake.
But that night, when she stood again with Serak in the alcove, her eyes drifted back to the wood at the statue’s back.
“Tell me of the ten days,” she said.
Ten days—that’s how long had passed between the death of the Danes and Holland’s return to claim the throne. Ten days, and in that time, no one knew where he had gone.
Vir Serak said there were a dozen different myths. Some claimed that he was simply waiting, biding his time. Others said he was wounded in the fight, and needed time to heal, that he’d dragged his body to the Silver Wood, and the roots had wound around his limbs, and magic had seeped back into his veins.
Others still said that he had died.
What have I done?
Kosika chewed her lip. She didn’t understand. She felt she should, but it was like a riddle.
Carried a spark out of the darkness to light my candle.
She thought of Serak’s demonstration with the lantern, the flame snuffed out, and then rekindled.
“… in Black London.”
Kosika’s head snapped back to Serak. “What was that?”
“I said, there is even a version of the tale where Holland went to the burned-out world, and culled an ember from the ashes.” His heavy brow furrowed as he spoke, his eyes thrown into shadow. “But that is blasphemy. Holland Vosijk would never taint our world with such black magic.”
“Of course not,” said Kosika, even as her mind spun over his words.
The greater the power, the higher the price.
I would bend a knee to any king.
Knowing I would burn.
The next day, she returned to Holland’s room.
Stole up the stairs and slipped behind the altar, into his chambers. She returned to his desk, and the papers strewn across it, but this time she looked past them, to a small wooden box. At least, she guessed it was some kind of box. There was no lock, no clasp, only a stained circle on the wood and a thin line showing where a lid might join a base. When she tried to lift it, she could tell it was hollow, could hear the rattle of something inside, but the two halves held firm. Sealed, like the chamber door.
Kosika’s hand went to her pocket. The prick of steel, a bead of blood on the pad of her thumb before she touched the small, stained circle on the wood, as Holland must have done.
“As Orense,” she said, the words rising as they had the day before. Within the circle, the line became a seam, and then it opened.
Inside, she found three coins.
One was silver and stamped with a man’s face, and marks she didn’t know.
GEOR:III. D.G BRITT.REX. F.D. 1820.
The second was red with a gold star cut into its front.
The third was black, and made of stone as slick as glass.
Her fingers hovered for a moment before she reached in, fingers closing around the third, startled by how smooth it was to the touch. She held it to the meager light, could see the candle flicker through it. A new spell rose to her lips, spilled out before she thought to keep it in.
“As Travars.”
And then the room came apart, and she was falling.
First through nothing, and then through the empty space where the castle should have been, the air rushing past her and the ground coming up fast, fast, fast. Kosika threw out her hands, and a wind rose up, the air twisting beneath her, around her. It caught her limbs and slowed her fall—slowed, but didn’t stop—and she landed hard, knees buckling with the impact, hands slamming into packed earth.
One palm stung worse than the other, and when she pulled back she saw why. The black glass token had shattered between her palm and the ground, shards slicing into skin. And yet, her first thought was not the pain, it was that she’d broken something that had once belonged to Holland Vosijk.
She scooped the largest shards back into her pocket, dug out a kerchief and wrapped it around her wounded palm as she got to her feet. And frowned.
The castle was gone.
Instead, she was standing on a road she didn’t know, surrounded by ruined buildings, their corpses slouched, crumbling.
Her heart pounded in her ears, louder than any other sound until she realized, there was no other sound. A horrible quiet hung over everything. The road was empty. No horses, no carts, no signs of life.
“Os?” she called.
There was no answer, not even the echo of her own voice.
It had been raining beyond her castle walls, but the ground here was dry and the air tasted wrong, like cinders on her tongue, and if there was a sun somewhere, it was well hidden, buried behind clouds that hung low and dark as smoke.
Too late, Kosika realized what she’d done, what she’d said, given voice to the spell that let Antari travel between worlds.
She was no longer in London.
Or at least, no longer in hers.
This other London looked wrong. No, not just wrong. Burned. And she knew, then, exactly where she was. Kosika scrambled backward, as if she could simply step out of the city’s reach, brought her sleeve to her mouth, not wanting to breathe in the ashes that hung on the air, stirred up when she broke her fall.
She was in Black London.
The world that burned so bright it ate up all its tinder and burned itself out.