How many times had Holland dreamed of sitting on this throne? Of slitting Athos’s throat, driving a blade into Astrid’s heart, and taking back his life. How many times … and yet it hadn’t been his hand at all, in the end.
It had been Kell’s.
The same hand that had driven a metal bar through Holland’s chest, and pushed his dying body into the abyss.
Holland rose to his feet, the rich folds of his cape settling around him as he descended the steps of the dais, coming to a stop before the black reflective pool. The throne room stood empty around him. He’d dismissed them all, the servants and the guards, craving solitude. But there was no such thing, not anymore. His reflection stared up from the glassy surface of the water, like a window in the dark, his green eye a gem floating on the water, his black eye vanishing into the depths. He looked younger, but of course even in youth, Holland had never looked like this. The blush of health, the softness of a life without pain.
Holland stood perfectly still, but his reflection moved.
A tip of the head, the edge of a smile, the green eye devoured in black.
We make a fine king, said the reflection, words echoing in Holland’s head.
“Yes,” said Holland, his voice even. “We do.”
BLACK LONDON
THREE MONTHS AGO
Darkness.
Everywhere.
The kind that stretched.
For seconds and hours and days.
And then.
Slowly.
The darkness lightened into dusk.
The nothing gave way to something, pulled itself together until there was ground, and air, and a world between.
A world that was impossibly, unnaturally still.
Holland lay on the cold earth, blood matted to his front and back where the metal bar had passed through. Around his body, the dusk had a strange permanence to it, no lingering tendrils of daylight, no edge of approaching night. There was a heavy quiet to this place, like shelves beneath long-settled dust. An abandoned house. A body without breath.
Until Holland gasped.
The dusty world shuddered around him in response, as if by breathing, he breathed life into it, set the time stuttering forward into motion. Flecks of dirt—or ash, or something else—that had been hanging in the air above him, the way motes seemed to do when caught in threads of sunlight, now drifted down, settling like snow on his hair, his cheeks, his clothes.
Pain. Everything was pain.
But he was alive.
Somehow—impossibly—he was alive.
His whole body hurt—not just the wound in his chest, but his muscles and bones—as if he’d been lying on the ground for days, weeks, and every shallow breath sent spikes through his lungs. He should be dead. Instead he braced himself, and sat up.
His vision swam for a moment, but to his relief, the pain in his chest didn’t worsen. It remained a heavy ache, pulsing in time with his heart. He looked around and discovered he was sitting in a walled garden, or at least, what might have once been a garden; the plants had long since withered, and what still stood of vine and stem looked ready to crumble to ash at a touch.
Where was he?
Holland searched his memory, but the last image he had was of Kell’s face, set in grim determination even as he struggled against the water Holland had used to bind him, Kell’s eyes narrowing in focus, followed by the spike of pain in Holland’s back, the metal rod tearing through flesh and muscle, shattering ribs and rending the scar on his chest. So much pain, and then surrender, and then nothing.
But that fight had been in another London. This place held none of that city’s floral odor, none of its pulsing magic. Nor was it his London—this Holland knew with equal certainty, for though it shared the barren atmosphere, the colorless palette, it lacked the bitter cold, the scent of ash and metal.
Vaguely, Holland recalled lying in the Stone Forest, numb to everything but the slow fading of his pulse. And after, the drag of the abyss. A darkness he assumed was death. But death had rejected him, delivering him to this place.
And it could only be one place.
Black London.
Holland had stopped bleeding and his fingers drifted absently, automatically, not to the wound but to the silver circle that had fastened his cloak—the mark of the Danes’ control—only to discover it was gone, as was the cloak itself. His shirt was ripped, and the skin beneath, once scarred silver by Athos’s seal, was now a mess of torn flesh and dried blood. Only then, with his fingers hovering over the wound, did Holland feel the change. It had been overshadowed by the shock and pain and strange surroundings, but now it prickled across his skin and through his veins, a lightness he hadn’t felt in seven years.
Freedom.
Athos’s spell had been broken, the binding shattered. But how? The magic was bound to soul, not skin—Holland knew, had tried to cut it away a dozen times—and could only be broken by its caster.
Which could only mean one thing.