“Once there was magic,” she began again, “and it was everywhere. But it was not equal…”

  Every night for the last month, she’d met Serak—for that was the Vir’s name—at the top of the stairs, and every night, he told her the stories, and every day, she told them to herself, until she knew them all, inside and out. Stories of the time before, and the time after. Of the other three worlds, and what happened when they disappeared behind their doors. Of the way magic was bound, and the way it withdrew. Of the way the world began to wither.

  Of the many kings and queens who tried to force it back into the world, and failed, because they did not understand: a thing taken by force would always be a pale shadow of something given freely.

  Of the challengers who rose, all claiming to be the Someday King, the legendary figure who would call the magic home, and how the magic refused them one by one, because they gave nothing of themselves.

  And then, of Holland Vosijk.

  Holland, who did not want the throne, but helped his friend Vortalis to it, Vortalis who was slain one night by Astrid and Athos Dane, who captured Holland, and branded him with magic and bound him into service, and made him wear the mark of his own capture on his cloak.

  Serak told her of the Danes, how they held the throne for seven years, before they too were killed, and Holland had disappeared, and when he returned it was not as a servant, but as a claimant to the empty throne. How the few who stood against Holland fell like wheat beneath the scythe of his most devoted, Ojka, who was a Vir before they were called Vir, and when he took the throne, how he did not try to force the magic, to bind it to him, it simply came. The river thawed, and the color flooded into the world like a blush into cold cheeks, and all knew, then, that Holland was the Someday King.

  Up in her nearby tree, Nasi turned the page. She had heard all the stories by now. Kosika told them to her every night, and when she learned that Nasi had been there, in the castle, that she had met Holland, first as the servant and then as the Someday King himself, well, she had wanted to know everything.

  “What was he like?” Kosika asked again now, and Nasi looked up from her book.

  “I didn’t know him any better than you.”

  “But you saw him…” And Kosika wanted to say alive, but she hadn’t told anyone, even Nasi, of that day in the Silver Wood.

  She’d almost told Serak once—for all the stories he’d given her, she didn’t have any of her own. She knew he’d believe her, it wasn’t that, but that encounter felt like something that lived only between her and the dead king. A light cupped in their hands. She wanted to keep it there.

  “How did he seem?” she pressed.

  Nasi looked off into the distance, as if trying to remember. At last, she offered up a single word. “Lonely.”

  She waited for the older girl to say more, but Nasi went back to her book, and Kosika drifted away from the wall and the tree, and took up her story again, reciting it like a prayer, tracing the words as if they were as string, a ribbon, a road. And at some point, Kosika looked up, and realized she had wandered around the side of the castle and was standing at the edge of the statue court.

  It was a gruesome sight, a stretch filled by the bound and twisted forms of the kings and queens who’d climbed to the throne, and fallen from it. Serak told her they were only sculpted tributes, but Nasi insisted that they were real people, turned to stone. That the Danes had started the awful court, to make an example of anyone who tried to stand against them. Kosika didn’t know if Nasi was being truthful or just teasing, but she stopped before the twins, Astrid bound on her knees, Athos on his feet, being eaten by a massive snake. She leaned in and wondered if they were in there, caught forever at the edge of death.

  There was no statue of Holland in the courtyard yet, but the space had been made, the path changed so that anyone who came through the gate and crossed the court to the palace stairs would be confronted by him.

  She looked around. She’d heard some call the statue court a garden, but there were no flowers anywhere. The London air had warmed, and the river no longer froze, but the castle grounds were still sparse, the ground unyielding. Kosika had never seen a garden, not in real life. Only in books, pictures of thick grass and wild blooms, and once, in a painting Serak showed her, a painting of the city, the way it must have been in the times before.

  Kosika knelt and pressed her palm to the dark soil, remembering how the ground had felt beneath the old king’s body. Lush as velvet. She knew, now, that Holland’s magic ran through her veins.

  She was his heir.

  And she wanted a garden.

  Kosika had no knife on her, but she searched and found a bit of broken stone around the turned-up earth, brushed away the dirt, and brought it to the inside of her arm. She pushed down, dragged the jagged edge across her skin until blood welled.

  It hurt, but it was supposed to hurt. Give, and take—that was the nature of Antari magic.

  All she needed was the word. The spells had come to her strangely, not all at once, but one by one, appearing only as she needed them. So far, she had learned the words to open, and to close, to light, and to heal.

  To heal—the first Antari spell she’d ever needed. It had spilled out of her as Lark’s blood poured through her fingers. To heal—that must be the one she wanted now. After all, what was she trying to do, if not heal the ground itself?

  Something moved at the edge of her sight. Nasi had followed her into the courtyard, her voice drifting between the statues.

  “What are you doing?” she called out, but Kosika was focused on the task at hand. She swiped her fingertips along her bleeding arm, and drove both hands deep into the damp, dark soil.

  “As Hasari.”

  She held her breath, and waited for the spell to work, for the grass to grow, for the flowers to bloom, for the barren earth to change beneath her hands. But nothing happened. And yet, Kosika could feel the pull of magic, feel it being drawn out of her, down into the soil. Her head began to pound.

  Something was wrong.

  She tried to pull her hands free but her body wouldn’t move, her bones locked in place and her pulse roared in her ears as the world reached up—not the ground but something deeper—and drove a hundred hooks into her—not skin but something deeper—and was too big, it was too big, it felt like being crushed, like her breath and her blood and her life was being squeezed out of her and eaten up and she tried to scream too but nothing came out, and the last thing she saw was the flash of silver armor and the flutter of a half-cloak and a crown of dark hair as Serak put his hands over hers and pulled them from the ground and something tore inside her and everything went black.

  * * *

  Kosika was back in the Silver Wood.

  She had been running, from someone, something, it didn’t matter who, or what, because the moment she plunged between the trees, she knew they wouldn’t chase her here. Knew that she was safe. And yet, her legs kept moving, drawing her deeper into the trees, heart pounding until she realized the pulse she felt wasn’t in her chest. It was beneath her feet. She stopped then, knelt, and sank her hands into the soil, and began to dig, and dig, and dig, until her fingers closed around the beating heart, and Kosika woke up.

  She was alone in bed.

  It was too big without Nasi in it, even with the pillows piled around her, and she didn’t even remember lying down, but daylight was streaming through the windows, high and bright, and every part of her ached, from her skin down to her bones and deeper still. Ached as if she’d been scooped out of her own flesh and put back, like the soup they made and served in gourds. Her stomach growled at the thought, and even that hurt, and she wondered why.

  Kosika tried to sit up, but her limbs felt pinned down beneath the sheets, and a strange fear began to steal across her then, that she was still dreaming, or worse, that she was dead. She pushed at the blankets, desperate to be rid of the weight, and then Vir Serak was there, at her bedside, silver half-cloak swaying.

  “Gently, my queen.”

  His beard was longer than it had been that morning, and dark shadows pooled beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in days. That was odd.

  “What’s wrong?” she croaked.

  Her throat was dry, and it took two tries to shape the question, and when she did, the Vir’s dark eyes took on a shine. But when he spoke, it wasn’t to her. She didn’t realize there was anyone else in the room until he turned and said, to someone she couldn’t see, “Tell them she is awake.”

  A door opened, and then closed, and then Serak explained, in his storyteller’s voice, what had happened, and that was how she learned that she had been asleep for more than a week. That they didn’t know if she would die, or wake, or be forever trapped between the two. And there was more that Serak wasn’t saying. She could see it in his eyes, or in the lack of them, the way he wouldn’t meet her gaze when he said that the city did not know about her illness, that the Vir had been holding council, trying to decide what to do.

  They’d been planning for her death.

  And then the door flung open, and Nasi was there, and she wasn’t crying, but Kosika could see she had been, the way her eyes were ringed with red when she flung herself against the bed, and the first thing she said was, “What were you thinking?”

  And only then did Kosika remember sinking her hands into the barren earth, remember the horrible pull as the hungry soil ate up everything she had to give.

  “I thought I could heal it,” she said, feeling small and foolish as the words came out.

  Kosika should have known, when the world didn’t offer up a spell, should have known that its silence was a kind of warning.

  “Your power is strong,” said Vir Serak. “But even you have limits.”

  “I had to do something,” she said. “We have roused the magic from its sleep, but it is weak. I felt its need. I felt its thirst.”

  “That may be,” said Serak, “but there is not enough blood in your veins to water this world.”

  Kosika sat up a little straighter.

  “Then perhaps,” she said, “we can water it together.”

  IV

  NOW

  The tithe road ended at the Silver Wood.

  Around the grove, the people of London stood gathered and waiting, their final bounty in their bandaged hands. It was a bag of seeds, the pouch spelled so that when planted with the rest, no matter the season, the seeds inside would grow. Another reminder of why they made this trek each season, of why they had been asked to bleed.

  The crowd seemed somber, and she wondered if word had reached them of the would-be killer in the square, if that was why they bowed their heads so low when their queen went by.

  Kosika walked into the waiting woods, and paused, smiling up at the pale trees. Overnight, it seemed, their leaves had turned from green to gold, begun falling in haloes on the ground below.

  She made her way to where the third and final altar stood, not deep within the trees, but just inside the forest’s edge, nestled among the silver trunks so that pale wood bled right into pale stone.

  The third and final statue of Holland Vosijk stood on a raised block flush with the basin, so that when the bowl was full, as it was now, he seemed to walk atop the blood instead of wading through it. He no longer wore his crown but held it in his hands, his head tipped back, his gaze turned to the canopy, and the waiting sky. A thicket of branches tangled around his cloak, so that he seemed part of the Silver Wood, or it a part of him.

  “Once, a servant,” said Kosika, standing before the altar, “then a king.” She drew her knife. “At last, a saint.”

  She made a third cut on the inside of her arm, the deepest yet, and watched her blood join the pool until it brimmed, threatening to overtake the edge. She stared down into the surface, waiting for it to smooth, then touched the basin’s glass side and said the words. The altar walls gave way, soaking into the roots of the Silver Wood, the dark stain spreading farther up her once-white cloak.

  The third tithe done, the citizens began to turn away, retreating down the path and into the streets, making their way home.

  But Kosika lingered, her gaze trained on the trees ahead. A thousand eyes stared back, unblinking, from the narrow trunks, and it was hard to think that she had ever been afraid of this place.

  She moved past the statue. Into the woods.

  * * *

  FOUR YEARS AGO

  “Once, there was magic,” Serak began, “and it was everywhere.”

  Normally, the alcove burned with candles, but that night, only one was lit, its small, unsteady flame casting jagged shadows onto the walls, and the statue, and the Vir.

  “Magic was everywhere, but it was not equal.”

  As he spoke, his hand drifted, as it always did, to the seal at his shoulder, the silver cloak clasp, a ring driven through by a bar. It was the same seal that lay on the altar, and she knew now, it was the same one Holland had worn when he served the Danes, the same one Athos burned into his skin to bind him. The Vir wore it to show that they had bound themselves to Holland’s legacy.

  “It burned like a hearth fire set in the center of a house, heating one room first, and then the next one, and so on, its warmth and light growing weaker the farther that it must reach. Black London was the first room, the one closest to the flame. And we were the next. And then two more followed after, farther from the heat, but still within the house.”

  Serak took a candle and set it on the altar.

  “But the flame became too strong, and Black London began to burn.” He took up a lantern. “And instead of standing near a hearth, our world now stood beside a conflagration. And so the worlds decided to close their doors to stop the fire’s spread.” He set a lantern over the candle. “But even after the fire was contained again, the people here were still afraid.”

  The lantern had four thin glass walls, all of them open, but as Serak spoke, he began to close the sides.

  “We looked out at our magic, and feared it would grow too hot, too hungry.”

  He closed the first side.

  “And so we trapped it.”

  He closed the second.

  “We built cages.”

  He closed the third.

  “We bound it to us.”

  He closed the fourth and final wall, trapping the flame within the airless glass.

  “But do you know what happens to a fire when it’s trapped?”

  Kosika watched the light shiver and shrink.

  “It goes out,” she whispered.

  “It goes out,” echoed Serak, sadness heavy in his throat. Kosika could not take her eyes from the flame. She watched as the light began to thin, retreating from a tall flame to a short one, from gold to blue, felt a twist of panic as the life retreated down the wick, until it met the pool of wax and—

  —died.

  A thin tendril of smoke rose from the candle, clouding the lantern. For a moment, they stood in silence in the full dark, and she held her breath, and wondered if the lesson was done. But then, Serak spoke again.

  “Here is the difference, Kosika. Magic does not die.”

  Serak lifted the lantern off the candle, setting it aside.

  “Magic withdraws. It resists.”

  He held his own hands out to either side of the extinguished candle, brows furrowing with the effort.

  “It grows harder and harder to kindle again, but—”

  A small spark. A tiny flash of blue, and then flame slowly returned, small and fragile, but burning. And Serak smiled.

  “That is what Holland did for us,” he said, lowering his hands. “What will you do?”

  Kosika studied the solitary candle, its light barely reaching the walls.

  What will I do? she wondered, and then held out her hand, not toward the single, burning flame, but the hundred darkened candles lining the alcove. She flexed her fingers, and the tapers burst to life, fire spreading in a wave until the entire space blazed with light.

  * * *

  NOW

  No one followed Kosika into the woods.

  Not her soldiers, or her Vir. Not Serak, or Lark. Not even Nasi. The Silver Wood was now a sacred site, and no one else was allowed to pass within. Her cloak dragged in her wake, snagging on new growth until her fingers found the clasp. It came free, and the heavy cloth slid from her shoulders, and pooled in her wake, and she continued on, until she found the place where Holland had died.

  She knelt, and ran her fingers through the grass that grew, as it always did, beneath the tree, as soft and green as the day she found him.

  Even after all these years, she’d never told anyone that she’d been there. The first to find the dead king’s body. Perhaps the Vir would welcome the knowledge, see it as further proof of her claim to magic and the throne. Or perhaps they would say that she’d taken his strength, stolen it from his cooling skin. Kosika didn’t know, and didn’t care. The truth of that day, like the power in her veins, did not belong to them.

  Kosika drew her blade, and made a fourth cut along the inside of her arm. A private tithe. Let the red drops fall like rain onto the patch of grass below the tree.

  She knew the right spell now. The Antari word she’d wanted in the courtyard the day she nearly died.

  As Athera.

  To grow.

  But she didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The golden leaves shimmered overhead. The roots ran strong and deep below. They had been watered well.

  She rose, and hauled the heavy cloak back over her shoulders as, beyond the woods, the drums finally stopped beating. They didn’t end all at once, but trailed off like a slowing pulse, as word spread through the city that the ritual was done.

  Part Six

  THE STRANDS CONVERGE

  I

  RED LONDON

  There were plenty of things that set Delilah Bard apart.

  But perhaps the most important, at least here, in this London, was this.

  She didn’t need magic.