“Holland.”
At that, his head rose. For an instant his two-toned gaze was still strangely empty, his focus far away, and then it sharpened, and she felt the weight of his attention settle on her.
“Ojka,” he said, in his smooth, reverberating way.
“You summoned me.”
“I did.”
He stood and gestured to the floor beside the dais.
That was when she saw the bodies.
There were two of them, swept aside like dirt, and to be fair, they looked less like corpses than like crumbling piles of ash, flesh withered black on bone frames, bodies contorted as if in pain, what was left of hands raised to what was left of throats. One looked much worse than the other. She didn’t know what had happened to them. Wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And yet she felt compelled to ask. The question tumbled out, her voice tearing the quiet.
“Calculations,” answered the king, almost to himself. “I was mistaken. I thought the collar was too strong, but it is not. The people were just too weak.”
Dread spread through Ojka like a chill as her attention returned to the silver bowl. “Collar?”
Holland reached inside the bowl—for an instant, something in him seemed to recoil, resist the motion, but the king persisted—and as he did, shadow spilled over his skin, up his fingers, his hands, his wrists, becoming a pair of black gloves, smooth and strong, their surfaces subtly patterned with spellwork. Protection from whatever waited in the dark.
From the depths of the silver bowl, the king withdrew a circlet of dark metal, hinged on one side, symbols etched and glowing on its surface. Ojka tried to read the markings, but her vision kept slipping, unable to find purchase. The space inside the circlet seemed to swallow light, energy, the air within turning pale and colorless and as thin as paper. There was something wrong with the metal collar, wrong in a way that bent the world around it, and that wrongness plucked at Ojka’s senses, made her feel dizzy and ill.
Holland turned the circlet over in his gloved hands, as if inspecting a piece of craftsmanship. “It must be strong enough,” he said.
Ojka braved a step forward. “You summoned me,” she repeated, her attention flicking from the corpses to the king.
“Yes,” he said, looking up. “I need to know if it works.”
Fear prickled through her, the old, instinctual bite of panic, but she held her ground. “Your Majesty—”
“Do you trust me?”
Ojka tensed. Trust. Trust was a hard-won thing in a world like theirs. A world where people starved for magic and killed for power. Ojka had stayed alive so long by blade and trick and bald distrust, and it was true that things were changing now, because of Holland, but fear and caution still whispered warnings.
“Ojka.” He considered her levelly, with eyes of emerald and ink.
“I trust you,” she said, forcing the words out, making them real, before they could climb back down her throat.
“Then come here.” Holland held up the collar as if it were a crown, and Ojka felt herself recoil. No. She had earned this place beside him. She had earned her power. Been strong enough to survive the transfer, the test. She had proven herself worthy. Beneath her skin, the magic tapped out its strong and steady beat. She wasn’t ready to let go, to relinquish the power and return to being an ordinary cutthroat. Or worse, she thought, glancing at the bodies.
Come here.
This time the command rang through her head, pulled on muscle, bone, magic.
Ojka’s feet moved forward, one step, two, three, until she was standing right before the king. Her king. He had given her so much, and he had yet to claim his price. No boon came without a cost. She would have paid him in deed, in blood. If this was the cost—whatever this was—then so be it.
Holland lowered the collar. His hands were so sure, his eyes so steady. She should have bowed her head, but instead, she held his gaze, and there she found balance, found calm. There she felt safe.
And then the metal closed around her throat.
The first thing she felt was the sharp cold of metal on skin. Surprise, but not pain. Then the cold sharpened into a knife. It slid under her skin, tore her open, magic spilling like blood from the wounds.
Ojka gasped and staggered to her knees as ice shot through her head and down into her chest, frozen spikes splaying out through muscle and flesh, bone and marrow.
Cold. Gnawing and rending, and then gone.
And in its wake—nothing.
Ojka’s doubled over, fingers clamped uselessly around the metal collar as she let out an animal groan. The world looked wrong—pale and thin and empty—and she felt severed from it, from herself, from her king.
It was like losing a limb: none of the pain, but all of the wrongness, a vital piece of her cut away so fast she could feel the space where it had been, where it should be. And then she realized what it was. The loss of a sense. Like sight, or sound, or touch.