She looked to the bloody cape. “I wish she were a cloak or crown,” she mused. “Something I could shed.”

  “I don’t,” said Lark. “You are changing the world, Kosika.”

  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?”

  Kosika lurched back, felt herself stumble and fall, and—

  She landed with a splash in the tub.

  Chest heaving, water spilling over the sides of the stone bath with the force of her waking. The water was tepid, not yet cold, but she shivered as she climbed out, and fetched her robe, each step like an eerie echo of the ones she’d already made, so that by the time she dressed and climbed the stairs to Holland’s tower, by the time she ducked past the altar and into the chamber beyond, she was sure he would be there, waiting at the desk.

  But the room was empty, the candles unlit.

  The wooden box sat open on the table, just as she’d left it.

  Kosika hurried forward, and dumped the broken shards of the third token back inside before closing the lid. But she didn’t seal it. She told herself it was because the wounds on her hand had finally stopped weeping. She told herself she simply didn’t want to bleed again. She told herself there was no point, when she was the only one who could use the tokens. Whether the things she told herself were true, she left the box unlocked and fled, past the altar and down the stairs and up to the safety of her room.

  Nasi had returned, and was laying out the pieces on the kol-kot board, dinner steaming on a nearby tray. If she noticed that the shards were gone, or that Kosika’s hair was still wet, she said nothing, only asked if she wanted to play. Kosika tried, but her heart and mind kept skittering away, until she flung her pieces down in a fit of pique, and went to bed.

  As she lay there, in the dark, she waited, sure that Holland was waiting for her, just beyond the door of sleep. All night, she tossed and turned, trapped in her tangled sheets, until Nasi abandoned her bed, muttering about the need for peace. Sometime before dawn, sleep finally came for Kosika, but it was shallow and empty, shadows that refused to coalesce into shapes, and she was about to give up and fling herself out of bed, irritable and achy, when she turned over one last time, and sank through the sheets, and dreamed.

  This time, the alcove was dark, the altar candles all snuffed out.

  Behind the statue, the door stood open, and Kosika’s bare feet carried her silently across the stones, and into the room beyond, no longer pitch black, but bathed in morning light. She knew he would be there, but something inside her still lurched at the sight of the Someday King, the Summer Saint, standing by the desk, one hand resting thoughtfully on the now-closed box.

  This time, as Holland’s gaze flicked toward her, Kosika dropped into a bow, one knee touching the cold stone and her eyes on the floor.

  “My king.”

  At first, nothing. Then, the slow tread of boots crossing the floor, a shadow falling over her. She did not look up, but she could see the toe of his boot, the edge of his half-cloak skimming the stones as he knelt before her. She felt the weight of his hand as it came to rest beneath her chin, and guided her face up to meet his.

  Kosika caught her breath.

  She had dreamt of Holland Vosijk before, of course, but in those dreams, he was either the body in the woods, or the altar come to life, a shape more than a man.

  This Holland was different. This Holland had a flush of color in his cheeks, blood running beneath his skin, a chest that rose and fell with his breath. Up close, his white hair—for years she thought it had always been white, until Serak showed her a portrait, and she learned it had in fact been black until the day he died—rose off his cheeks, as if caught in a breeze.

  This Holland’s eyes were not made of gemstones or glass. Up close, the green one was not solid emerald but paler green, shot through with filaments of silver. The black was as smooth and dark and lightless as her own.

  As she studied her king, he studied her, his brow furrowed, but his expression drained of the rage she had imagined, something cautious in its stead.

  “Interesting,” he said, his voice smooth and low.

  His fingers dropped from her chin, and he rose again to his full height. She didn’t, not until he held out his hand, and beckoned her to her feet.

  “Who are you?” he asked, the words curling around her.

  “Kosika,” she said.

  Holland inclined his head. “Kosika,” he echoed. The name had been nothing in her mouth, sounds she’d made a thousand times, but the way he said it, as if it were a spell, made her feel dizzy. She stole another glance at his face, and saw something soften, the line between his brow smooth and the corner of his mouth tense, ever so slightly, as if he were about to smile.

  “I have been waiting for you.”

  He turned, expecting her to follow, but as she took the first step, the room began to thin around them. The edges faded. Her vision narrowed. The last thing she saw was the king glancing back over his shoulder before the dream crumbled.

  She was back in her bed, sunlight spilling in through the open windows, and Nasi bouncing on the edge of the cushions.

  “I let you sleep as long as I could.”

  Kosika closed her eyes again, trying to hold on to the dregs of her dream, to find her way back, but it was gone, and so was Holland.

  “What a monster you were last night,” Nasi was saying. “I think it’s time you slept alone.”

  She said it gently, clearly expecting some resistance, but Kosika instantly agreed.

  II

  RED LONDON

  NOW

  The first thing Lila noticed was that the world wasn’t moving.

  She’d learned to distrust the absence of motion, the lack of bob and sway that accompanied life aboard a ship. Stillness was not only strange, but dire. It meant something had gone wrong. Before she could even place the wrongness, she was reaching beneath her pillow for the knife she kept there. But the space was empty, and the pillow was silk, and the bed beneath her was too soft, and as her mind finally caught up, it supplied a single word: palace.

  Lila groaned, and rolled over.

  Pale morning light spilled across the bed, and the place where Kell had been lying, dead to the world, the night before. Only now, there was nothing but a tangle of rumpled sheets. Bad enough she’d followed him into the palace. Worse, that he had left her here.

  Lila threw off the covers and got up, wishing she’d barred the door the night before.

  Her jacket lay cast onto a chair, along with her boots, and the handful of blades she’d bothered to shed before collapsing into bed. But the boots had been cleaned, and someone had arranged the knives left to right in descending order of size. She unsheathed one, and checked its edge. Of course. It had been sharpened. And even though no one would be foolish enough, she still found herself touching the knives she kept on even while sleeping—the ones strapped to her thigh, her hip, the small of her back—just to be sure they were still there.

  Lila sighed, and crossed the massive chamber.

  A marble basin sat on a shelf on the far wall, a pitcher beside and a mirror mounted overhead. She poured the water into the bowl, and even though the pitcher had likely been sitting for hours, waiting to be used, the water came out hot. Lila stared at the steam rising from the basin.

  Seven years, and the casual magic of this world still took her by surprise.

  Despite everything, she’d forget, and then she’d see a lantern light itself, a man breathe wind into sails, hot water spill out from a cold pitcher, and her mind would lurch, like a boot catching a crooked cobblestone. Hell, sometimes when she called on her own magic, she was still shocked that it answered.

  She leaned forward, crinkled her nose as the scent of blossoms rose from the basin. Fucking royals, she thought, as she splashed the scented water onto her face, the back of her neck, ran a damp hand through her blunt-edge hair.

  A glint of metal caught her eye, and she glanced up into the mirror over the bowl. Her collar was unlaced, and Kell’s ring had slipped out, and hung swinging on the end of its leather cord, the ship winking in the light. She tucked the black band back inside her tunic, but her gaze lingered on her reflection.

  Two eyes stared back at her, both of them brown, one real, the other glass.

  Unlike the eye she’d traded to Maris, a relic from her life back in Grey London, this one was a perfect match. As far as Lila could tell, she was the only one unsettled by the sight of it. The eerie sameness, the symmetry forged by magic, a glimpse at how she would have looked, if her real eye had not been taken as a child. Back when—as she knew now—Lila had awakened as an Antari.

  She held her own gaze, inclined her head until the light caught on the surface of the glass, interrupting the illusion. The brown eye had a purpose—it helped Lila to blend in, to move unnoticed. But when she was alone, or on the safety of her ship, she never wore it, opting for the black one Maris had given her, the one she would have had if she’d slept aboard the ship, the one that made her smile whenever she caught her reflection in a puddle or a pane of glass.

  She was not smiling now.

  She pushed off the basin, reclaimed her blades, and her boots, and her coat, and set out to find Kell and a cup of strong black tea, not necessarily in that order.

  * * *

  Word had obviously spread that the Antari were in residence.

  None of the guards drew their weapons as Lila emerged from the royal suite, made her way down the hall, descended the stairs. Below, the palace was unfurling, like some giant flower, its petals turning to the sun. Servants bustled, opening doors, adjusting rugs, trading out yesterday’s bouquets before they even began to droop.

  Where, she wondered, did the day-old flowers go?

  Probably into the bath water.

  As Lila moved through the palace, servants stopped, and bowed, frozen like statues in the middle of their work. Two brown eyes or otherwise, they knew what she was, and they looked at her the way they had looked at Kell, their expressions ranging from respect, to reverence, to fear. But unlike Kell, Delilah Bard welcomed their trepidation.