“Think,” she whispered to herself.

  This was just another kind of puzzle. A problem to be solved. The entire prison wasn’t warded, only the cell, but unfortunately, the cell was where she was currently housed. Which made things tricky, but not impossible. She studied the lines of the ward that ran overhead, traced the lines of it down the bars.

  Wards were a kind of paradox. After all, they muted magic, but at their core, they were still active spells. That meant, even when they blocked power from being used, they had to make an exception for their own. And if there was a source of working magic, she could take it apart.

  Tes sat up.

  She glanced at the soldiers, who were now sitting on a bench, Vares perched between them, their attention wholly on the occasional movements of the dead owl. Tes turned around, putting her back to them, her attention on the bars at the other side of the cell. She rose and approached the bars, got close enough to study the iron-colored threads that wound around the cell. Sure enough, unlike her magic, which was pinned in place, the power here was flowing.

  Tes reached out her cuffed hands, and rested them against the bars, as if bored. But as her fingers met the steel, she hooked one of those iron threads, and pulled and—

  A spasm tore through her body, the air forced from her lungs as the world went white. The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back on the cell floor, ears ringing. Tes coughed, and curled in against the pain as she tried to breathe.

  “Shouldn’t do that,” said one of the soldiers blandly.

  Tes groaned and sat up. The two men were now feeding Vares bites of sweetcake.

  “Are you hungry, little Kell?” cooed one as the owl clacked its beak, and the crumbs tumbled through.

  Her stomach growled.

  “Excuse me,” she called out to the soldiers. “Could the human get something to eat?”

  They ignored her.

  “Assholes,” muttered Tes.

  She sagged, letting her head rest on her folded arms as she wracked her mind, trying to think of a way out. She was still trying when a pair of boots echoed on the prison stairs.

  Tes looked up, expecting to find Lila Bard, come to continue her interrogation. But when the woman stepped out of the shadows, the lanterns caught on a different face.

  The two soldiers shot to their feet.

  “Mas res,” they said, and Tes realized she was staring at the queen.

  VI

  Kell lay on the sofa, his coat cast off, and a cold cloth over his eyes.

  The pain was receding like a tide, leaving only a weary ache in its wake. He didn’t need to see the king’s chamber to paint the picture in his mind. The slosh of spirits and scrape of glass as Rhy poured a drink from a decanter. Lila’s irritated steps as she paced the floor, each clipped stride a rebuke, the brief muffling of her boots when they crossed from stone to silk and back again.

  “Judging by the soreness in my jaw,” said Rhy, “I’m guessing you’ve had a busy day.”

  “Indeed,” said Kell. “There’s an inn that will need some reconstruction.”

  The doors swung open, and Alucard swept in. “You left me waiting in that ruined shop,” he said. “Gone to fetch something, you said. If a crow hadn’t told me you were here, I’d still be standing around, kicking stones.”

  “Apologies,” said Lila blandly. “I was busy getting my hands on the apprentice from Haskin’s. And the persalis, too.”

  Alucard’s boots stopped abruptly. “You succeeded?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “Where are they, then?”

  “Lila threw the apprentice in a prison cell,” offered Kell.

  “For safekeeping,” she cut in. “As for the persalis, it was, regrettably, destroyed.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Rhy.

  “I watched it burn,” said Lila.

  “A decoy?” asked Alucard.

  Kell could practically hear Lila grind her teeth. “Apparently not. I searched her, to be sure. Found nothing but a dead owl.”

  “Excuse me?” said Rhy and Alucard at the same time.

  “Apparently it’s a pet. It has a blue eye and a black eye and she calls it Vares.”

  “I can’t decide,” said Rhy, “whether that’s charming or creepy.”

  “Both,” said Kell and Lila at the same time.

  “There’s more,” she went on. “She’s like you, Alucard.”

  “Devastatingly handsome?” he asked, pouring a drink. “Utterly charming?”

  “Humble?” added Rhy.

  “She can see magic.”

  Kell heard the glass stop halfway to Alucard’s mouth. “Really?”

  “And unlike you,” he added, “she can touch it.”

  Kell didn’t need to see Alucard’s face, but he found he wanted to. He dragged the cold cloth from his eyes, and flinched. The sun was sinking beyond the windows, shards of light knifing through the room.

  “How does it feel?” he asked. “To know you’re not the best at something? That there’s someone out there who can actually put that power to good use?”

  Alucard glared at Kell. It was worth opening his eyes for that. It made him feel just the slightest bit better. Until Lila ruined it by saying, “She can heal Kell’s magic.”

  Rhy’s head jerked up.

  Kell sighed, running a hand through his hair. “She didn’t say that.”

  “She didn’t have to. She’s a fixer. She can fix this.” Lila gestured at Kell. “Fix you.”

  “Let it go,” he said wearily.

  “No. You may be content to live like this, but I won’t watch you—”

  “You think I relish my condition?”

  “I think you are resigned to it,” said Lila. “I think you have been burned by magic so badly that now you shy away from any source of heat.”

  “It is not the magic that stops me.” He felt his throat tighten around the words. “I would give anything to be severed from this pain, one way or another. Every day, I pray it will hurt less, that there will come a day when I no longer reach for magic, even though the thought of living without it makes me wish that I were dead.”

  “Then let the girl try and fix it.”

  “I cannot!” he shouted, the words splintering his voice. “I cannot, Lila. Don’t you understand? If it were just my life at stake—but it is not. You seem to forget, I am bound to my brother. If the girl’s work failed, if it went wrong, my life is not the only one that would be forfeit.”

  Lila, at last, said nothing.

  Across the room, Rhy cleared his throat. “If that is what’s stopping you, Kell,” he said, “you have my permission.”

  Alucard looked horrified. He opened his mouth to speak, but Kell cut in first.

  “It’s not permission,” he seethed. “It’s a weight. One you do not wish to hold, so you force it onto me. You might be willing to gamble with your life, but I am not.”

  Alucard crossed his arms. “For once, Kell and I are in agreement. It is not worth the risk.”

  Lila’s gaze raked across the room. He could feel her anger, in the tensing air, in the pressure on the glass, in the flare of the candles.

  “Hang you all,” she muttered, turning on her heel.

  “Don’t leave the palace,” warned Kell.

  Lila raised one hand in a rude gesture, and stormed out.

  The doors banged shut behind her. Kell folded forward in his chair, head falling into his hands.

  He was so very tired.

  The sofa dipped beneath the weight of a new body. Kell didn’t need to lift his head to know it was his brother. A lifetime of sharing space, and he knew the way the air bent around Rhy’s shoulders, long before the ringed fingers settled on his sleeve.

  “We should talk about this.”

  “There is nothing to discuss,” said Kell.

  “If there’s a chance to free you from this—”

  “No.”

  “You would do anything to spare me, Kell,” pressed Rhy. “Why can’t I do the same for you?”

  He dragged his head up, met his brother’s golden eyes. “Because I am not the king.”

  “You are my family. Surely that matters more than any crown.”

  “The two of you,” muttered Alucard, “always competing for the role of martyr. And you,” he snapped at Rhy, “you would do the Hand’s work for them.”

  “At least I know that if I die,” said Rhy, “you will make a handsome king.”

  “And what of Ren?” asked Alucard.

  Rhy’s expression faltered. It was one thing, to be a brother, or a king, another to be a father. Pain flashed like a current beneath his skin. Kell saw it, and squeezed his brother’s knee.

  “There is no need to speak like this. It is my choice, and I have made it. Besides,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, “I am getting quite good with a sword.”

  Rhy blinked, and tried to smile. It didn’t reach his eyes.

  Alucard reached out to the nearest lantern, as if grazing the threads that only he could see. But he frowned as his fingers went straight through. He set down his glass, and started for the door.

  “Where are you going?” asked Rhy.

  “To the prison,” he said, straightening his coat. “I for one would like to see this girl, whose power is so much greater than my own.” He stepped out into the hall, but held the door. “Well?” he asked. “Are you coming?”

  VII

  WHITE LONDON

  Kosika woke to laughter.

  It rose like tendrils of smoke through the floor of her room, thin, but impossible to ignore. She tried tossing and turning for several moments before finally flinging off her sheets. It was the middle of the night, but she pulled on a robe and followed the sounds out into the hall. There were no guards. That was odd. She padded barefoot down the tower stairs, the sound growing with each descending step. By the time she reached the third floor, she heard music. By the second, voices. By the first, the chime of glasses and the shuffle of feet.

  The feast day was long over. The celebration should have dimmed by now.

  Instead, it had grown, bloomed into something raucous and bright.

  A hundred lanterns filled the castle hall, which brimmed with bodies, a sea of jewel-toned dresses and capes studded by the silver-clad Vir.

  Kosika strode across the room. Or tried. The crowd should have parted for her, should have bowed, but they did not move. In fact, they seemed to close ranks, and jostle, so that she had to force her way between their limbs like an intruding child.

  A fountain stood in the center of the hall, the sound of its spilling water lost beneath the burble of voices and the tinkling laughter, a statue of Holland looming over the pool, but as Kosika got close, she realized it wasn’t Holland the Servant, or the King, or the Saint. It was Holland, her Holland, and he was not made of stone, though he might as well have been. He did not move, did not look at her, only stood, white hair rising in a crown, and head bowed over a large bowl in his hands. A bowl that spilled wine into the basin below.

  Only it wasn’t wine, of course. It was blood. His blood. It ran in rivers down his arms into the pool, and as she watched, the people dipped their empty glasses in the basin, and drank, drank it all up in single gulping swallows, their mouths stained red.

  “Stop,” she said, but no one listened.

  “STOP,” she shouted, in a voice that should have shattered the glasses in their hands, should have snuffed the lanterns and split the marble floor. But nothing happened. No one seemed to hear. The party continued.

  Kosika staggered back, away from the horrible fountain. Away from the bodies, which parted now, to let her go. Only the Vir turned their heads to watch as she fled the hall, and flung open the castle doors, and surged out into the night.

  She stumbled, body lurching as she missed a step, because the step wasn’t there. The castle was gone. So were the voices and music and laughter. Instead, she stood in the center of the Silver Wood, bare feet sinking into mossy earth.

  It was so quiet. So still. Only the whisper of her breathing, the steady thud of her heart. Only, it wasn’t her heart thudding. The beat came from somewhere beneath her feet. The eye-shaped knots in the trees watched, unblinking, as she sank to her knees and began to dig, fingers clawing at the soft, dark soil.

  She dug and dug and dug, the beating below as steady as a fist against a wooden door, until at last, her fingers found the heart. She swept away the dirt, until it lay exposed in the bed of earth.

  It was soft, and human-sized, and yet, it wasn’t the tender meat of flesh, but something else, not red but silver-white, glowing with the milky shine of the Sijlt. And when it pulsed beneath her hands, she knew it was the heart of the city, of the world. Roots coursed and ran like veins deep into the soil to every side, but they were loose enough to let her lift the heart.

  It beat in time with hers, and as it did, she began to pour her own power into it, felt the magic leave her, and not leave her, because it was still there, in her hands, in the heart that grew brighter and brighter, brighter than the river, brighter than the sun in the sky, and the trees bloomed and the sky grew blue and the ground became a tangle of grass and flower and sapling and fruit.

  And for a moment, she saw her London as it must have been once, as it could be again, if she could feed the heart enough.

  But even as she thought it, the light faltered in her hand, began to dim again.

  “No,” she whispered, tried to pour more power in, but she had nothing left to give, and still, the glow faded, the light ebbed, weakening until it was not a blazing sun but a lantern, a candle, a small and fragile flame. And as it faded, so did the other version of her world.

  The flowers died and the sky went grey and the leaves fell from the trees and the earth turned hard and cold beneath her knees and everything took on a pale and frosted glaze.

  “No,” she pleaded, as the light died in her hands, and the heart stopped beating, and everything fell apart.

  * * *

  Kosika woke with dirt in her hands.

  She blinked for a moment, disoriented by the absence of a bed, the dappled sunlight where a ceiling should have been. She wasn’t in her chamber at all, but lying beneath a tree, its branches dotted by clusters of unripe fruit, and even though the ground beneath her back was hard, she could feel slivers of grass tickling her neck.

  Kosika held up a hand, and saw dark soil sticking to her fingers, where she must have gripped the ground in sleep. Voices wafted toward her, and she sat up and saw Nasi and Lark sitting a few feet away, their heads bowed together over a book. He said something in her ear, the words too soft to reach, but she was close enough to see the way Nasi smiled, the twitch of her lips tugging on her scarred cheek, setting off the tracery of silver lines.

  “It’s rude to whisper,” announced Kosika, brushing the dirt from her palms.

  Nasi cocked her head. “Ruder than it is to wake a sleeping queen?”

  The dream rose up, brushing against her mind, and Kosika wished they had woken her sooner. Besides, she didn’t like the idea of sleeping so exposed—but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She remembered drifting off, feeling full and tired and sun-warmed as a peach.

  A picnic sat between them on a wool blanket, a bowl of cherries and a tray of sandwiches, a paring knife in a block of cheese, and three cups half-filled from a pitcher of tea.

  It had been Lark’s idea, the picnic.

  He’d shown up at her chamber door that morning, while Nasi was somehow beating her at kol-kot, a basket swinging from one hand, and announced it was too fine a day to be inside. Sure enough, sun was streaming in the open window. The weather was always nicer after a tithe. As for the picnic, he’d even dressed the part, trading his soldier’s armor for a fitted tunic and trousers and a pair of polished boots, a violet kerchief tied over the scar at his throat. She wondered if the clothes were his, and when he’d grown into them. He’d caught her looking, and smiled, and Kosika felt herself smiling back, caught herself halfway and rolled her eyes.

  “Shouldn’t you be guarding something?” she’d asked, to which he said that, obviously, he would be guarding her.

  “Is that why you’re dressed like a noble?”

  “I’m in disguise,” he said with a wink.

  And on the short trek from the tower to the castle grounds, he’d told Nasi about the picnics he and Kosika had had when they were kids whenever the sun was out, most of them on rooftops or city walls, the meals cobbled together from stale bread and bruised fruit. Kosika remembered, of course, but these days, those memories felt like they belonged to another girl, another life. One she was all too happy to leave behind.

  The only part she’d wanted to keep, she had.

  Lark lounged in the grass, his long legs crossed at the ankle as he listened to Nasi read from her book. His silver-blond hair was swept off his face, a neat little braid was woven behind his ear. It hadn’t been there when she fell asleep.

  As Nasi read—it wasn’t her book of war, but a poem, and Kosika hated poems, they talked in circles instead of lines, and the cadence always distracted her from the words, and in fact, the poetry was probably what had lured her to sleep in the first place—as Nasi read, Kosika looked up, at the tree, and the sky beyond, the blue interrupted by crisp white clouds.

  The tithe had cast a blush over the city, but how long would it last? She swore she could already feel it fading. It wasn’t enough, nothing she did seemed to last, and she was trying to decide what to do when something hit her on the side of the head.

  It was small, and hard, and it bounced off and landed in the grass. It was, in fact, a cherry.

  Kosika stared at it a moment, and then looked up at her friends, the bowl of fruit clearly in arm’s reach. Nasi, for her part, looked just as stunned by the attack, while Lark was looking pointedly away, as if something incredibly interesting was suddenly happening somewhere beyond the trees.

  Kosika flicked her fingers, and the paring knife rose out of the block of cheese, and drifted almost lazily into her hand.