The sounds of the party faltered around them, and Kosika lowered her voice, the words meant only for the silvered servant.

  “Tell me, Vir Reska,” she said, “what must I do?”

  “Nothing, my queen,” answered the Vir, her voice tight as bowstrings. “You have done more than enough. If you are tired, you must rest. The Vir will host this evening in your stead, and in your honor.”

  Kosika lifted her hand from the Vir’s shoulder.

  “You do that,” she said, turning again toward the stairs.

  The time, everyone had the sense to let her go.

  * * *

  FOUR YEARS AGO

  The doors to the throne room were heavy things.

  It took four guards to guide them open and closed. Or one annoyed Antari.

  It was Nasi who had come to find her that afternoon, to warn her of the Vir.

  “What of them?” Kosika had asked, distracted until she saw the look on Nasi’s face.

  Just as the other girl had never held her tongue, she could not hide her emotions, either. When she smiled, her whole face seemed to be splintering with joy. But when she was mad, her scarred face took on the stiffness of a mask.

  “They’re meeting,” she’d said. “Without you.”

  The throne room doors groaned open on their hinges as they swung wide, announcing Kosika’s arrival. She had seen drawings of a whale, a sea creature large enough to stand within. The throne room reminded her of that, the bone-white pillars, the vaulted ceiling arched like ribs far overhead.

  The queen’s Vir had the decency to look surprised, their voices dropping away mid-sentence as she strode into the vast hall, her small shoes sounding on the floor. That floor. It was rumored that once upon a time, it had been laced with bits of bone. The enemies of Astrid Dane, bleached white and studded in the marble. It was only a rumor, and even if it weren’t, those stones had long since been replaced.

  Right now, she wished they hadn’t been. She would have liked to add some more.

  Kosika’s throne sat in the center of the room, the council’s chairs curved in a loose circle, like hands cupped around the queen. That throne alone sat empty.

  “Your Majesty,” said Vir Patjoric, rising to his feet.

  “Don’t get up,” she said, but they did anyway. She knew it was a sign of deference, but all it did was make Kosika feel even shorter than she was. “It’s my fault for being late.” She took her seat, tucked her legs beneath her to hide the fact they didn’t reach the floor. “Of course, I wouldn’t have been late if someone had told me we were meeting.”

  The Vir exchanged looks, their faces lined with everything from annoyance to discomfort. Thirteen of them, and honestly, aside from Serak, most of the others still bled together in her mind. It wasn’t just the silver half-cloaks they all wore. It was the way they held themselves, the way they sat in their chairs, the way they spoke to her, as if she were a child and not a queen.

  Now, twelve of them looked at each other. Only Serak had the decency to look at her, and seemed about to speak when Vir Patjoric cut in. Patjoric she would always know—after all, he was the one who’d found her.

  “We didn’t want to bother you,” he said, bowing his pale head.

  “Matters of state can be quite boring,” added Vir Reska, who was easy to remember because she had eyes the same shade as the Sijlt, so light they were nearly colorless.

  “I assure you,” said Kosika, “nothing about my city bores me. Now,” she added, sitting back in her throne. “What have I missed?”

  Another Vir cleared his throat. “We were discussing what to do about the other worlds.”

  Kosika frowned. She knew of them, of course. The other rooms in the house, as Serak would say. “What of them?” she asked.

  “Well, there has always been … communication in the past, and—”

  “Has a messenger come to us?”

  “No,” said another Vir. “Not yet. But we think we should go to them.”

  “We,” echoed Kosika. But there was no we. The doors between worlds were closed, and only an Antari could open them again. Only an Antari could step through.

  “I do not see the point,” she said. A murmur went through the Vir like wind through leaves. “You want me to go to this other London? And do what? Deliver mail?”

  “Holland did it.” That, from Vir Patjoric.

  “As a servant,” said Kosika through gritted teeth, “not a king. And only then because the Danes coveted that other world. I think it’s time to focus on our own.”

  Serak met her gaze, and she saw the faintest smile at the corner of his mouth. He approved.

  “It is not worth the risk.” This from Vir Reska. “If Kosika was taken, we would have no Antari and no queen.”

  Kosika did not fail to notice the order Reska had given to those titles.

  “One day,” said a dark-haired Vir named Lastos, “the walls will fall. We should be ready.”

  “All the more reason to focus on our strength instead of theirs,” countered Kosika.

  Vir Lastos sat forward, fingers gripping his chair. “We should know our enemies before we meet them on the field.”

  “Why must they be our enemies?” asked Vir Serak. “Why must they be anything at all?”

  “We are closer to the original seat of power,” said Kosika, “and every day, our world revives a little more.”

  “And what if theirs does, too?” pressed Vir Lastos. “We have no other way of knowing.”

  But Kosika’s attention was no longer on his words. He was the type of man who gestured as he spoke, and she saw that both his hands were bare.

  “Knowledge is always better,” he was saying, but she cut him off.

  “You didn’t tithe, Vir Lastos.”

  He gave a cursory glance down at his hand. “I was busy with affairs of state.” The Vir drew breath, about to dive back into his argument, but Kosika did not let him.

  “For this, you will make time.”

  He waved the words away as if they were a fly. “Very well,” he said. “If it humors the queen. Now back to the matter of the other London—”

  “Do it now.”

  Kosika had drawn the blade from her hip, and was holding it out to Vir Lastos. He looked at the weapon’s edge, repulsed. “Your Highness?”

  “The ground does not stand on ceremony. It will welcome your tithe a day late.”

  She waited, but the Vir did not take the offered blade.

  “Then let it wait,” he said, “until the next tithing day. They are becoming rather frequent.”

  “Lastos,” warned Patjoric, but the Vir pressed on.

  “No. First, it was once, then one time a year, now two. At this rate, soon we will be too weak to do anything but bleed.”

  “You say weak,” chided Kosika, “but our London grows stronger every day.”

  “Do you know why?” he snapped. “Because we have banned binding spells, and scrubbed the worst offenders from our streets. Because we have guilds that bring their goods up and down the Sijlt, now it has thawed, and collect taxes relative to wealth.” He shook his head. “You can choose to tithe in blood and worship men as saints, my queen, but rituals do not sustain this city.”

  “You too served Holland,” said Vir Serak scornfully. “You too believed—”

  “I believed he was the best we had at hand,” said Vir Lastos. “Not some mythic king.”

  “You have seen the trees blooming in the courtyard,” said Vir Talik. “The amount of grain arriving on those barges from up north.”

  “Why do you think the Sijlt flows so swiftly now?” interjected Kosika.

  Lastos gazed at her with cold, flat eyes. “All that freezes thaws in time. Perhaps it is simply nature.”

  “And yet,” she said. “It has yet to thaw in you.”

  The Vir’s hands closed into fists, the gesture only half-hidden beneath his cloak. He was not the only one, of course, to still lack magic. Most children these days had elements blooming in them, but a fair number of adults were proving barren soil. Among the Vir, there were still three—Lastos, Reska, and Patjoric—who could not conjure so much as a candle flame.

  “Perhaps you are afraid,” Kosika went on. “Perhaps you don’t want to believe that magic has a will, that it is choosing, because that would mean it isn’t choosing you.”

  “I would not be so arrogant, little queen.” Those last words, name and title, spat as if they were a seed stuck between his teeth.

  Kosika looked down at the blade still in her hand, studying her reflection in the steel. “This castle is made of stone,” she said. “And stone carries sound. I have heard what you call me, when I am not there, Kojsinka.”

  Little tyrant.

  Vir Lastos blanched, but she could not tell if it was fear or anger that made him pale.

  “Do you deny it?” she pressed.

  He shook his head. “You are a child. With a child’s knowledge of the world.”

  The other Vir stirred, uneasy. Patjoric reached for Lastos’s arm, but he shook it off.

  “A little girl content to play at being queen.”

  Kosika didn’t stand. It would feel too much like rising to the bait. But she couldn’t stop the air from churning through the hall around her. The stones crunched like grinding teeth. She sat forward on her throne.

  “Then you should not have put me here,” she said.

  “No,” he said slowly. “We shouldn’t have.”

  Lastos looked around the room, waiting for the other Vir to stand with him. Or at least, against her. Kosika thought of the kol-kot board in her room. Nasi had shown her all the ways to lay the pieces out. In more than one arrangement, the priests were strong enough to rule without their king. But that was only a game. And Kosika was not only a queen. She was Antari. The heir to Holland’s power. And the other Vir knew it, even if they did not wish it so.

  Patjoric shook his head, and sighed, and Reska kept her eyes on the floor. Talik looked at Lastos as if he’d doomed himself. And slowly, Lastos realized that he had.

  “I am called to rule,” said Kosika. “But you are not bound to serve.” She gestured to the throne room doors, still open wide.

  He tore the silver mantle from his shoulders with so much force that the circle pin came free and fell, ringing like a bell as it bounced across the floor.

  He should have turned and left. Instead, he glared at Kosika and said, “Patjoric should have put you down when he first found you in the street. After all, the best thing Holland Vosijk ever did for us was di—”

  He cut off, his voice replaced by the sick crunch of blade on bone. Lastos let out a ragged gasp and looked down to find a length of steel protruding from his chest.

  “That is blasphemy,” hissed Serak, who stood like a shadow behind him, his dark eyes black with rage.

  The other Vir were on their feet, hands on their swords, and for a moment, the air in the hall felt solid as glass, about to break. But the moment passed, and none came forward. They only watched as Serak withdrew his sword, and Lastos crumpled to the pale stone floor. His mouth opened and closed, but all that escaped was a rattle, and a gasp, and then nothing.

  Kosika watched his blood spread across the stones and thought, What a waste. She looked up, and saw Serak’s eyes on her.

  An understanding passed between them, and then Serak spoke, loud and clear.

  “Kos och var.”

  The words were taken up and carried through the hall.

  Kos och var. Kos och var. Kos och var.

  All hail the queen.

  V

  RED LONDON

  NOW

  “How long is this going to take?”

  It was after midnight. Tes’s eyes burned and her head ached, and for the last hour she’d been harboring the fragile hope that if she took long enough, the killers might get bored enough to let down their guard and give her a chance to escape.

  But the man with the butcher’s block face was still pacing the shop, palming half-fixed pieces of magic, and the woman with the crested braid hadn’t moved from her chair, those flat grey eyes hanging on Tes.

  Until Vares twitched.

  The owl had been still as—well, a normal skeleton—as if he could sense the danger in the room, but the question had stirred the spellwork in him. He ruffled his bone wings, swiveled his head.

  The woman’s eyes flicked sideways. The edge of her mouth quirked into something like a smile. “Kers la?” she asked, reaching toward the owl. He responded by pecking her fingers. Her smile sharpened. “What a clever bit of magic.”

  She flexed her hand as she said it, and the metal wire running through the owl shivered.

  “Don’t,” said Tes, a single pleading word. And maybe it was the way she said it, or simply the fact that her hands stopped moving, that made the woman let go of the little owl, her gaze dropping back to the box sitting disemboweled on the counter. It was a tangle of magic, a snarl of strings, made messier by the chaos of the surrounding shop, but Tes didn’t dare put on her blotters. She couldn’t afford to narrow her gaze, couldn’t afford to forget the other bodies in the room, even as the headache bloomed.

  Despite the audience, Tes didn’t bother masking her power, or pretending to use tools, didn’t bother with anything but her eyes and her hands as she drew her fingers through the air, shaped the spellwork around the box into something she could use.

  The man slumped against the door, looking bored. The woman leaned forward in the chair, her fingers rapping on the metal cuff, the only sound in the shop.

  “What’s your name?” asked Tes, when she couldn’t bear the quiet. The woman raised a dark brow. “I told you mine,” she added weakly.

  The woman’s mouth twitched again. “Bex,” she said, the sound sliding through her teeth. “That walking lump of shit over there is Calin.”

  Tes kept her hands moving. “You don’t like him.”

  “What gave it away?”

  “But you’re here as partners.”

  The scarred man—Calin—snorted. “Wouldn’t say that.”

  Bex considered her words. “At the moment, we share an employer.”

  “I thought assassins worked alone.”

  Bex’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a little too sharp,” she mused. “If you’re not careful, it’ll get you cut.” She stood, and stretched, the bones in her neck cracking audibly. “Now do your job, or I’ll do mine.”

  Tes surprised herself by bristling at the threat. “Why should I? You’ll kill me either way.”

  “Sure,” said Calin, “but if you make it quick, so will we.”

  Her boldness cracked, and fear got in.

  “Look at it this way,” said Bex, resting her elbows on the counter. “I wasn’t hired to kill you, and I don’t make a habit of doing work for free.”

  Tes wanted to believe her—might have, if Bex were there alone—but Calin had the look of a man who’d killed plenty of people, just because he could.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Bex, as if reading her mind. “Worry about me. Worry about that,” she added, pointing to the box on the counter.

  So that’s what Tes did.

  What, in truth, she’d been doing for hours.

  Tes kept her eyes on her hands, forced herself not to glance at the echo of the door that still hovered in the air to Calin’s left, its edges burning. She wondered if they couldn’t see it at all, or simply weren’t looking.

  At least they couldn’t see what she was doing.

  If they’d been able to see the threads of magic, they would have noticed that she had braided pale gold lines of air upon air upon air together inside the wooden frame. It was a blunt but effective piece of work—one she almost ruined when Calin, having abandoned his place by the door, knocked a giant metal box of scrap to the floor.

  Tes’s hands jumped, and she held her breath, afraid the spell would trigger then and there, but mercifully it didn’t.

  “Fucking saints,” muttered Bex. “If only someone would hire me to kill you.”

  “Don’t act like you haven’t tried for free,” said Calin, kicking the metal box aside. “I’m as hard to kill as the king himself.”

  “I heard he has a spell on him,” said Tes, gingerly attaching the final thread and doing her best impression of someone with plenty of work still to do.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” said Bex.

  Another box went crashing to the floor, and the woman closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. “If you drop one more fucking thing…” she snarled, but Calin wasn’t listening.

  He was staring at the space in front of the shelves, head cocked to one side.

  “Kers la?”

  Tes followed his gaze, and went cold. He was staring straight at the remains of the door she’d made. He made a cautious circle, squinting at the spot, and though he couldn’t see it fully, not the way she could, he had clearly noticed something—a shimmer in the air, a wrongness.

  “Hey Bex,” he said, large hand drifting toward the echo of the spell. “Come see this.”

  Tes’s heart pounded as the other killer sighed, rising from her chair. She was out of time, and as soon as Bex turned away from the table, Tes made her move.

  She hefted the object she’d been working on, the one that was not, and would never be, a doormaker, and lobbed it into the center of the room. As it fell, Tes grabbed the owl and ducked beneath the counter, curling into a ball around Vares and the bundle of disassembled parts left over from the real doormaker.

  The wooden box—which, as she had told the killers, was really only a container for magic—hit the workshop floor of Haskin’s shop and shattered, and as it did, it triggered the wind spell she’d coiled within.