The words surprised her. So did the light in his eyes.
“He is loyal to you,” mused Holland. She had almost forgotten he was there until he spoke. She half expected Lark to flinch, to jerk at the sound of the voice. But of course, he didn’t hear it. Didn’t see Holland drift forward, fingers gliding along the trunk of the silver tree.
It took all her effort not to shift her attention, let her gaze follow him across the room, so she was grateful when he passed behind Lark, and stopped there, so she was looking at them both.
“Tell me about it. This feast I’m missing.”
“Well,” said Lark, swiping a plum from the tray. “Half the nobles are drunk, and the other half are fools. Two of the Vir are having an affair and terrible at hiding it, and Nasi is flirting with this soldier—Gael, do you know him? Handsome enough but hollow-skulled.”
“Jealous?”
“Well,” he said, rolling the plum between his hands. “I have heard Gael’s a talented lover.”
Kosika snorted into her cider. Lark rambled on, and as he did, she imagined the castle falling away, imagined them sitting on the edge of a city wall, legs swinging over the side as they shared a stolen meal. And then she yawned, and the room snapped back into shape, and Lark rose, and said he should be going.
“My queen,” he said with a bow.
She rose, following him toward the door. He pulled it open, the sounds of celebration wafting up from below. But he stopped on the threshold.
“Almost forgot,” he said, digging in his pocket. He turned, and held out a small black pouch. “Happy birthday.”
She blushed as she took the pouch, turning the contents out into her palm. Dusty white blocks rattled into her hand. Sugar cubes.
“Stole them from the kitchen.”
“The castle kitchen,” she pointed out. “Which belongs to me. You could have simply asked for them.”
“Yes, well, a little girl told me that stolen things taste twice as sweet.”
“I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said, and Lark laughed as if it were a joke.
He left, after that. The door swung shut behind him, silencing the sounds of the party below, and she was alone again with her king.
Kosika looked down at the sugar cubes in her palm, felt Holland’s shadow fall over her.
“Do you remember?” she said.
Holland’s brow furrowed. “Remember what?”
“The day I found you lying in the Silver Wood. I put a sugar cube in your hand.”
He shook his head. “You found my body. But I was no longer there.”
Kosika frowned. “If you weren’t there, how did you choose me?”
His green eye briefly darkened. Silence stretched between them, growing heavier with each passing second until Holland reached out, and brought his hand to rest on her head.
“What matters is that I did.”
She nodded beneath the weight of his palm, and told herself he was right. Of course, he was right. Who was she to question the Summer Saint?
But that night, when he was gone, Kosika lay awake in bed, and turned the sugar cube between her fingers, trying to decipher the shape of the shadow that had crossed his face, until the image bled and she forced the thought from her mind, and gave in, at last, to sleep.
* * *
ONE YEAR AGO
Kosika needed a bath. Needed to scrub every trace of that other world from her skin.
She wanted to be alone, but word had a way of traveling through the castle. (More than once, Kosika had wondered if it was magic, some spell that allowed gossip to go through walls, to move faster than feet.) By the time she reached her chambers, Nasi was there with a pair of servants, perching on the edge of the stone tub in the corner of the room, which brimmed with hot water.
The servants came forward to undress their queen, the way they had a thousand times, but as their fingers reached for the laces at her wrist and throat, Kosika recoiled.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice too loud, too sharp.
The servants flinched, but Nasi scowled. “What’s gotten into you?”
Kosika only shook her head, undoing the laces herself, and Nasi must have motioned for the servants to leave, because a moment later the door sighed closed, and they were alone.
“Where did you go?”
Kosika said nothing as she wrestled with her clothes. Cinders had settled on the shoulders of her white tunic and the tops of her shoes, staining them grey. She felt contaminated. At last she was free, and climbed into the scalding tub, hissing at the heat, plunging even her wounded hand into the bath.
In seconds, the water was no longer clear, but cloudy, stained pink and grey. Nasi watched as Kosika pulled the pins from her hair and flung them aside. Watched as she took up soap and scrubbed her skin raw. Watched, and waited for Kosika to explain, and when she didn’t, Nasi took up a bar of the sweet-smelling soap, and began to wash her hair.
As long as Kosika could remember, she had loved the feeling.
In the months after becoming queen, when the castle was too big and too quiet and she couldn’t sleep, she would lie with her back to Nasi, and the girl would run her fingers through her roots.
She remembered her mother doing it when she was very, very young. But it was such a gentle memory, it must have been a dream.
Now she leaned back, and fell beneath the spell of Nasi’s hand, and when the girl said, “Tell me,” Kosika did.
She told her of Holland’s room behind the altar, of the box and the tokens in it, of the words that came to her, and the world where they led. She expected Nasi to recoil at the mention of Black London, but she didn’t. Her hands never stopped moving.
“What was it like?” she asked quietly.
Kosika stared up at the bones of her ceiling and said the only word that came to mind. “Dead.” She rolled her head, looking to the soiled clothes that lay piled on the floor. “Burn them. To be safe.”
Nasi’s hands disappeared from her hair as she knelt to collect the clothes. She stood, holding them out like an offering. Her eyes narrowed in focus, and her lips moved, and a moment later, the fabric in her hands began to burn. Fire swallowed the beautiful stitching, the silk and leather and laces, filling the room with an acrid smell and a plume of smoke.
But not all of it burned.
As the bundle in her hands collapsed, four shards of blackened glass slipped out, ringing faintly as they hit the stone floor.
Nasi knelt to pick them up, fingers hovering over the tokens.
“Don’t,” said Kosika, but for once, Nasi didn’t listen. She took the largest shard gingerly between her fingers and held it up, peering through the darkened glass at Kosika. And for a moment, only a moment, the eerie black shine, the way it filled her eye, made Nasi look like an Antari herself. And then her hand fell, and she piled the four pieces in her palm, and set them on the low table beside the kol-kot board, and slipped away.
Kosika stayed in the bath until the water went cold.
Then she climbed out, leaving wet footprints on the floor as she fetched a robe, and pulled it tight around her. The window was latched, but she could tell that it was night. The air always felt different in the dark. She dressed herself again, and took up the shards Nasi had stacked on the table, and then she slipped out, down one tower, and up another, back to the alcove at the top of those stairs, and the door beyond. She took a burning candle from the altar, and slipped behind the statue. She would not linger in the old king’s room, would go straight to the desk, return the pieces of the token to the box.
But when the door opened beneath her touch, Kosika gasped.
The room was neither dark nor empty. The candelabra burned, and Holland Vosijk sat at his desk, the box open in his hands. Kosika froze, but his head jerked up as if she’d moved, his white hair rising in a crown, and he looked at her with those eyes, one green, one black, and his face, which she had only seen in death or stone, which had always been a mask of quiet pain, was now contorted into rage, his voice a roll of thunder when his mouth opened.
“What have you done?”