Athos was laughing. It was a horrible sound.
The hall around them was in disarray, the hollow guards in a heap, the hangings torn, and the torches scattered on the ground, still burning. A bruise blossomed beneath Kell’s eye, and Athos’s white cloak was singed and flecked with blackish blood.
“Shall we go again?” said Athos. Before the words had even left his lips, a bolt of dark energy shot out like lightning from the front of the king’s shield. Kell threw up his hand, and the floor shot up between them, but he wasn’t fast enough. The electricity slammed into him and hurled him backward into the front doors of the castle hard enough to split the wood. He coughed, breathless and dizzy from the blow, but he had no chance to recover. The air crackled and came alive, and another bolt struck him so hard that the doors splintered and broke, and Kell went tumbling back into the night.
For an instant, everything went black, and then his vision came back, and he was falling.
The air sprang up to catch him, or at least muffle the fall, but he still hit the stone courtyard at the base of the stairs hard enough to crack bone. The royal blade went skittering away several feet. Blood dripped from Kell’s nose to the stones.
“We both hold swords,” chided Athos as he descended the stairs, his white cloak billowing regally behind him. “Yet you choose to fight with a pin.”
Kell struggled to his feet, cursing. The king seemed unaffected by the black stone’s magic. His veins had always been dark, and his eyes remained their usual icy blue. He was clearly in control, and for the first time Kell wondered if Holland had been right. If there was no such thing as balance, only victors and victims. Had he already lost? The dark magic hummed through his body, begging to be used.
“You’re going to die, Kell,” said Athos when he reached the courtyard. “You might as well die trying.”
Smoke poured from Athos’s stone and shot forward, the tendrils of darkness turning to glossy black knifepoints as they surged toward Kell. He
threw up his empty hand and tried to will the blades to stop, but they were made of magic, not metal, and they didn’t yield, didn’t slow. And then, the instant before wall of knives shredded Kell, his other hand—the one bound to the stone—flew up, as if on its own, and the order echoed through his mind.
Protect me.
No sooner had the thought formed than it became real. Shadow wrapped around him, colliding with the knife-tipped smoke. Power surged through Kell’s body, fire and ice water and energy all at once, and he gasped as the darkness spread farther beneath his skin and over it, ribboning out from the stone, past his arm and across his chest as the wall of magic deflected the attack and turned it back on Athos.
The king dodged, striking the blades aside with a wave of his stone. Most rained down on the courtyard floor, but one found its mark and buried itself in Athos’s leg. The king hissed and dug the knifepoint out. He cast it aside and smiled darkly as he straightened. “That’s more like it.”
* * *
Lila’s steps echoed through the throne room. The space was cavernous and circular and as white as snow, interrupted only by a ring of pillars around the edges and the two thrones on the platform in the middle, sitting side by side and carved out of a single piece of pale stone. One of the thrones sat empty.
The other one held Astrid Dane.
Her hair—so blond, it seemed colorless—was coiled like a crown around her head, wisps as fine as spider silk falling onto her face, which tipped forward as if she’d dozed off. Astrid was deathly pale and dressed in white, but not the soft whites of a fairytale queen, no velvet or lace. No, this queen’s clothes wrapped around her like armor, tapering sharply along her collar and down her wrists, and where others would have worn dresses, Astrid Dane wore tightly fitted pants that ran into crisp white boots. Her long fingers curled around the arms of the throne, half the knuckles marked by rings, though the only true color on her came from the pendant hanging around her neck, the edges rimmed with blood.
Lila stared at the motionless queen. Her pendant looked exactly like the one Rhy had been wearing in Red London when he wasn’t Rhy. A possession charm.
And by the looks of it, Astrid Dane was still under its spell.
Lila took a step forward, cringing as her boots echoed through the hollow room with unnatural clarity. Clever, thought Lila. The throne room’s shape wasn’t just an aesthetic decision. It was designed to carry sound. Perfect for a
paranoid ruler. But despite the sound of Lila’s steps, the queen never stirred. Lila continued forward, half expecting guards to burst forth from hidden corners—of which there were none—and rush to Astrid’s aid.
But no one came.
Serves you right, thought Lila. Hundreds of guards, and the only one to raise a sword wanted to fall on it. Some queen.
The pendant glittered against Astrid’s chest, pulsing faintly with light. Somewhere in another city, in another world, she had taken another body— maybe the king or queen or the captain of the guard—but here, she was defenseless.
Lila smiled grimly. She would have liked to take her time, make the queen pay—for Kell’s sake—but she knew better than to test her luck. She slid her pistol from its holster. One shot. Quick and easy and over.
She raised the weapon, leveled it at the queen’s head, and fired.
The shot rang out through the throne room, followed instantly by a ripple of light, a rumble like thunder, and a blinding pain in Lila’s shoulder. It sent her staggering back, the gun tumbling from her hand. She gripped her arm with a gasp, cussing roundly as blood seeped through her shirt and coat. She’d been shot.
The bullet had clearly ricocheted, but off of what?
Lila squinted at Astrid on her throne and realized that the air around the woman in white wasn’t as empty as it seemed; it rippled in the gunshot’s wake, the direct assault revealing air that shivered and shone, flecked with glassy shards of light. With magic. Lila gritted her teeth as her hand fell from her wounded shoulder (and her torn coat) to her waist. She retrieved her knife, still flecked with Beloc’s blood, and inched closer until she was standing squarely in front of the throne. Her breath bounced against the nearly invisible barrier and brushed back against her own cheeks.
She raised the knife slowly, bringing the tip of the blade forward until it met the edge of the spell. The air crackled around the knifepoint, glinting like frost, but did not give. Lila swore under her breath as her gaze shifted down through the air, over the queen’s body, before landing on the floor at her feet. There, her eyes narrowed. On the stone at the base of the throne were symbols. She couldn’t read them, of course, but the way they wove together, the way they wove around the entire throne and the queen made it clear they were important. Links in the chain of a spell.
And links could be broken.
Lila crouched and brought the blade to the nearest symbol’s edge. She held her breath and dragged the knife along the ground, scratching away at the
marking from her side until she’d erased a narrow band of ink or blood or whatever the spell had been written in (she didn’t want to know).
The air around the throne lost its shimmer and dimmed, and as Lila stood, wincing, she knew that whatever enchantment had been protecting the queen was gone.
Lila’s fingers shifted on her knife.
“Good-bye, Astrid,” she said, plunging the blade forward toward the queen’s chest.
But before the tip could tear the white tunic, a hand caught Lila’s wrist. She looked down to see Astrid Dane’s pale blue eyes staring up at her. Awake. The queen’s mouth drew into a thin, sharp smile.
“Bad little thief,” she whispered. And then Astrid’s grip tightened, and searing pain tore up Lila’s arm. She heard someone screaming, and it took her a moment to realize the sound was coming from her throat.
* * *
Blood streaked Athos’s cheek.
Kell gasped for breath.
The king’s white cloak was torn, and shallow gashes marred Kell’s leg, his wrist, his stomach. Half the statues in the courtyard around them lay toppled and broken as the magic clashed, striking against itself like flint.
“I will take that black eye of yours,” said Athos, “and wear it around my neck.”
He lashed out again, and Kell countered, will to will, stone to stone. But Kell was fighting two fights, one with the king, and the other with himself. The darkness kept spreading, claiming more of him with every moment, every motion. He could not win; at this rate, he would either lose the fight or lose himself. Something had to give.
Athos’s magic found a fissure in Kell’s shadow-drawn shield and hit him hard, cracking his ribs. Kell coughed, tasting blood as he fought to focus his vision on the king. He had to do something, and he had to do it soon. The royal half-sword glittered on the ground nearby. Athos lifted the stone to strike again.
“Is that all you have?” Kell goaded through gritted teeth. “The same, tired tricks? You lack your sister’s creativity.”
Athos’s eyes narrowed. And then he held out the stone and summoned something new.
Not a wall, or a blade, or a chain. No, the smoke coiled around him, shaping itself into a sinister curving shadow. A massive silver serpent with
black eyes, its forked tongue flicking the air as it rose, taller than the king himself.
Kell forced himself to give a low, derisive laugh, even though it hurt his broken ribs. He fetched the royal half-sword from the ground. It was chipped and slick with dust and blood, but he could still make out the symbols running down its metal length. “I’ve been waiting for you to do that,” he said. “Create something strong enough to kill me. Since you clearly cannot do it yourself.”
Athos frowned. “What does it matter, the shape your death takes? It is still at my hand.”
“You said you wanted to kill me yourself,” countered Kell. “But I suppose this is as close as you can come. Go ahead and hide behind the stone’s magic. Call it your own.”
Athos let out a low growl. “You’re right,” he said. “Your death should— and will—be mine.”
He tightened his fingers around the stone, clearly intending to dispel the serpent. The snake, which had been slithering around the king, now stopped its course, but it did not dissolve. Instead, it turned its glossy black eyes on Athos, the way Kell’s mirror image had on Lila in her room. Athos glared up at the serpent, willing it away. When it did not obey his thought, he gave voice to the command.
“You submit to me,” ordered Athos as the serpent flicked its tongue. “You are my creation, and I am your—”
He never had the chance to finish.
The serpent reared back and struck. Its fanged jaws closed over the stone in Athos’s hand, and before the king could even scream, the snake had enveloped him. Its silver body coiled around his arms and chest, and then around his neck, snapping it with an audible crack.
Kell sucked in a breath as Athos Dane’s head slumped forward, the terrifying king reduced to nothing but a rag doll corpse. The serpent uncoiled, and the king’s body tumbled forward to the broken ground. And then the serpent turned its shining black eyes on Kell. It slithered toward him with frightening speed, but Kell was ready.
He drove the royal half-sword up into the serpent’s belly. It pierced the snake’s rough skin, the spellwork on the metal glowing for an instant before the creature’s thrashing broke the blade in two. The snake shuddered and fell, dispelled to nothing but a shadow at Kell’s feet.
A shadow, and in the midst of it, a broken piece of black stone.
