That was when Maxim took him by the hand, and led him down the stairs and through the palace, bare feet sinking into the plush carpet. When they reached the golden doors, Rhy’s heart leapt, half in dread, half in excitement, as his father unlocked the doors.
Memory often bends a thing, makes it even more marvelous. But Rhy’s own memory of the map room paled in comparison to the truth. Rhy had grown two inches that year, but instead of seeming smaller, the map was just as grand, just as sweeping, just as magical.
“This,” said his father sternly, “is not a game. Every ship, every soldier, every bit of stone and glass—the lives of this kingdom hang in the balance of this board.”
Rhy stared in wonder at the map, made all the more magical for his father’s warning. Maxim stood, arms crossed, while Rhy circled the table, examining every facet before turning his attention to the palace.
It was no kettle, no cake tray. This palace shone, a perfect miniature—sculpted in glass and gold—of Rhy’s home.
Rhy stood on his toes, peering into the windows.
“What are you searching for?” asked his father.
Rhy looked up, eyes wide. “You.”
At last, a smile broke through that trimmed beard. Maxim pointed to a slight rise in the cityscape, a plaza two bridges down from the palace where a huddle of stone guards sat on horseback. And at their center, no larger than the rest, was a figure set apart only by the gold band of a crown.
“A king,” said his father, “belongs with his people.”
Rhy reached a hand into the pocket of his bedclothes and pulled out a small figure, a boy prince spun from pure sugar and stolen from his last birthday cake. Now, carefully, Rhy set the figure on the map beside his father.
“And the prince,” he said proudly, “belongs with his king.”
* * *
Rhy screamed, and thrashed, and fought against their grip.
A king belongs with his people.
He begged, and pleaded, and tried to tear free.
A prince belong with his king.
The doors were closed. His father had vanished, swallowed up by wood and stone.
“Your Highness, please.”
Rhy threw a punch, catching Isra hard across the jaw. She let go, and he made it a single step before Sol-in-Ar locked him in a viciously efficient hold, one arm twisted up behind his back.
“Your Highness, no.”
Pain flared through him when he tried to fight, but pain was nothing to Rhy now and he wrenched free, tearing something in his shoulder as he threw his elbow back into the Faroan’s face.
More guards were arriving now, blocking the door as Isra shouted orders through bloodstained teeth.
“Stand aside,” he demanded, voice breaking.
“Your Highness—”
“Stand aside.”
Slowly, reluctantly, the guards stepped away from the doors, and Rhy surged forward, grasping for the handle just before Isra pinned his hand to the wood.
“Your Highness,” she snarled, “don’t you dare.”
A king belongs with his people.
“Isra,” he pleaded. “A prince belongs with his king.”
“Then be with him,” said the guard. “By honoring his last request.”
The weight of Isra’s hand retreated, and Rhy was left alone before the broad wood doors. Somewhere on the other side, so close and yet so far …
He felt something tear inside him, not flesh but something so much deeper. He splayed his hands across the wood. Rhy squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his forehead to the door, his whole body shaking with the urge to throw them open, to run after his father.
He didn’t.
His legs gave way, body sinking to the floor, and if the world had chosen that moment to swallow him whole, Rhy would have welcomed it.
THIRTEEN
A KING’S PLACE
I
Maxim Maresh had forgotten about the fog.
The moment he stepped through the palace wards, he felt Osaron’s poison lacing the air. It was too late to hold his breath. It forced its way in, filling his lungs as the curse whispered through his head.
Kneel before the shadow king.
Maxim resisted the fog’s hypnotic pull, nerves crackling as he forced its hold away, focused instead on the sound of the steel guard marching in his wake and the rippling figure waiting at the base of the palace stairs.
Without a body, the shadow king looked like less like a man and more like smoke trapped within a darkened glass, the presence shifting within its false shell like a trick of the light. Only its eyes seemed solid, the glossy black of polished stone.
Like Kell’s, thought Maxim, and then he revoked the thought. No, not like Kell’s at all.
Kell’s gaze had the warmth of a flame, while Osaron’s eyes were sharp and cold and utterly inhuman.
At the sight of Maxim descending the stairs, the shadow king’s face flickered, mouth twisting into a smile.
“False king.”
Maxim forced his body down step after step as his vision blurred and his skin pricked with the beginnings of fever. When his boots struck the stone of the plaza floor, the twelve men of his final guard fanned out, taking up their places around the two kings like points on a clock. Each drew a steel short sword, its blade spelled to sever magic.
Osaron barely seemed to notice the figures in their steel trappings, the way they moved together like fingers on a hand, the way the shadows bent and swirled around their armor and their blades, never touching.
“Have you come to kneel?” asked the shadow king, the words echoing through Maxim’s skull, ringing against his bones. “Have you come to beg?”
Maxim lifted his head. He wore no armor, no helm, nothing but a single sword at his hip and the gold crown resting in his hair. Still, he looked straight into those onyx eyes and said, “I’ve come to destroy you.”
The darkness chuckled, a sound like low thunder.
“You’ve come to die.”
Maxim’s balance almost faltered, not from fear, but from fever. Delirium. The night danced before his eyes, memories transposing themselves on top of truth. Emira’s body. Rhy’s screams. Pain lanced jaggedly through Maxim’s chest as he resisted the shadow king’s magic. Sickness quickened his heart, Osaron’s curse straining his mind as his own spell strained his body.
“Shall I make your own men kill you?”
Osaron’s hand twitched, but the steel guard circling them did not move. No sword hands lifted to attack. No boots shifted obediently forward.
A frown crossed the shadow king’s face like a passing cloud as he realized the guards weren’t real, only puppets on clumsy strings, the armor nothing but a hollow enchantment, a last effort to spare Maxim’s own men from this grim task.
“What a waste.”
Maxim straightened, sweat sliding down the nape of his neck. “You’ll have to face me yourself.”
With that, the Arnesian king drew his sword, spelled like the others to break the threads of magic, and slashed at the shadowy mass before him. Osaron did not duck or dodge or strike. He did not move at all. He simply parted around Maxim’s blade and re-formed a few feet to the left.
Again, Maxim attacked.
Again, Osaron dissolved.
With every lunge, every swing, Maxim’s fatigue and fever rose, a tide threatening to overtake him.
And then, on the fifth or the sixth or the tenth attack, Osaron finally fought back. This time, when he took shape again, it was inside Maxim’s guard.
“Enough,” said the monster with a flickering grin.
He reached out an insubstantial hand, fingers splayed, and Maxim felt his body stall mid-stride, felt the bones beneath his skin groan and grind, pain lighting up his nerves as he was pinned like a doll against the night.
“So fragile,” chided Osaron.
A twitch of that hand—more fog than fingers—and Maxim’s wrist shattered. His short sword clattered to the ground, the metallic scrape of
metal on stone drowning out his pained gasp.
“Beg,” said the shadow king.
Maxim swallowed. “No, I—”
His collarbone snapped with the vicious crack of a stick over a knee. A strangled scream broke through his clenched teeth.
“Beg.”
Maxim shuddered, his ribs shaking beneath the force of Osaron’s will as it tap-tap-tapped like fingers over his bones.
“No.”
The shadow king was teasing, toying, drawing it out. And Maxim let him, hoping all the while that Rhy was safe inside the palace, far from the windows, far from the door, far from this. His steel guards trembled in their places, gauntlets gripping swords. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
“I am the king … of this empire—”
Something cracked in his chest, and Maxim spasmed, blood rising in his throat.
“This is what passes for a king in this world?”
“My people will never—”
At that, Osaron’s hand—not flesh and bone or smoke at all, but something dense and cold and wrong—wrapped around Maxim’s jaw. “The insolence of mortal kings.”
Maxim looked into the swirling darkness of the creature’s gaze. “The … insolence of … fallen … gods.”
Osaron’s face broke into a terrible smile. “I will wear your body through the streets until it burns.”
In those black eyes, Maxim saw the warped reflection of the palace, the soner rast, the beating heart of his city.
His home.
He pulled the final strings, and the guards finally stepped forward. Twelve faceless men drew their swords.
“I am the head … of the House Maresh,” said Maxim, “… seventh king of that name … and you are not fit … to wear my skin.”
Osaron cocked his head. “We shall see.”
The darkness forced its way in.
It was not a wave, but an ocean, and Maxim felt his will give way beneath the weight of Osaron’s power. There was no air. No light. No surface.
Emira. Rhy. Kell.
The arrows drove deep, the pain an anchor, but Maxim’s mind was already breaking apart, and his body tore further as he pulled with the last of his strength on his steel guards. Gauntlets tightened and a dozen short swords rose into the air, points turning toward the center of their circle as Osaron poured himself like molten metal into the body of Maxim Maresh.
And the king began to burn.
His mind guttered, his life failed, but not before a dozen steel points sang through the air, driving toward the source of their spell.
Toward Maxim’s body.
His heart.
He stopped fighting. It was like setting down a heavy weight, the dazzling relief of letting go. Osaron’s voice laughed through his head, but he was already falling, already gone, when the blades found home.
II
Across the city of London, the darkness began to thin.
The deep gloom drew back, and the shining black pane of the river cracked, giving way, here and there, to violent ribbons of red as Osaron’s hold faltered, slipped.
Maxim Maresh’s body knelt in the street, a dozen swords driven in to the hilt. Blood pooled beneath him in a rich red slick, and for a few long moments, the body did not move. The only sound came from the drip-drip-drip of the dead king’s blood hitting stone, the whistle of wind through the sleeping streets.
And then, after a long moment, Maxim’s corpse rose.
It shuddered, like a curtain in a breeze, and then a sword drew itself free of the ruined chest and clattered to the ground. And then another, and another, one by one until all twelve blades were out, lengths of crimson steel lying in the street. Smoke began to leak in thin tendrils from every wound before drawing together into a cloud, then a shadow, and then, at last, something like a man. It took several tries, the darkness collapsing back into smoke again and again before finally managing to hold its shape, its edges wavering unsteadily as its chest rose and fell in smoldering breaths.
“I am king,” snarled the shadow as the whorls of red in the river vanished, and the mist thickened.
But the nightmare’s hold was not quite as strong as it had been.
Osaron let out a growl of anger as his limbs dissolved, reformed. The spellwork etched into those swords still ran like ice through the veins of his power, stamping out heat and smothering flame. Such a stupid little spell, driven in so deep.
Osaron scowled down at the king’s corpse, finally kneeling before him.
“All men bow.”
Shadowy fingers flicked, once, and the body toppled, lifeless, to the ground.
Insolent mortal, thought the shadow king as he turned and stormed back across the sleeping city and up the bridge and into his palace, fuming as he struggled with every step to hold his shape. When his hand grazed a column, it went straight through as if he were nothing.
But the false king was dead, and Osaron lived on. It would take more than spelled metal, more than one man’s magic, to kill a god.
The shadow king climbed the stairs to his throne and sat, smoking hands curled around the arms of his seat.
These mortals thought they were strong, thought they were clever, but they were nothing but children in this world—Osaron’s world—and he had lived long enough to take their measure.
They had no idea what he was capable of.
The shadow king closed his eyes and opened his mind, reaching past the palace, past the city, past the world, to the very edges of his power.
Just as a tree might know itself, from deepest root to topmost leaf, Osaron knew every inch of his magic. And so he reached, and reached, and reached, grasping in the dark until he felt her there. Or rather, felt what was left of him inside her.
“Ojka.”
Osaron knew, of course, that she was dead. Gone, blown away as all things were in time. He had felt the moment when it happened, even that small death rippling his psyche, the sudden sense of loss pale but palpable.
And yet—Osaron still ran through her. He was in her blood. That blood might no longer flow, but he still lived in it, his will a filament, a thread of wire woven through her straw body. Her consciousness was gone, her own will forfeit, but her form was still a form. A vessel.
And so Osaron filled the silence of her mind, and wrapped his will around her limbs.
“Ojka,” he said again. “Get up.”
III
White London
Nasi always knew when something was wrong.
It was a gut knowing, come from years of watching faces, hands, reading all the little tells a person made before they did a bad thing.
It wasn’t a person going wrong now.
It was a world.
A chill was back in the air, the castle windows frosting at the corners. The king was gone, still gone, and without him, London was getting bad again, getting worse. The world felt like it was unraveling around her, all the color and life bleeding out the way it must have done the first time, all those years ago. Only according to the stories that was slow, and this was quick, like a snake shedding a skin.
And Nasi knew she wasn’t the only one who felt it.
All of London seemed to sense the wrongness.
A few members of the king’s Iron Guard, those still loyal to his cause, were doing their best to keep things from getting out of hand. The castle was under constant watch. Nasi hadn’t been able to sneak out again, so she didn’t have fresh flowers—not that many had survived the sudden chill—to lay near Ojka’s body.
But she came anyway, in part because of the quiet, and in part because the rest of the world was getting scary, and if something happened, Nasi wanted to be near the king’s knight, even if she was dead.
It was early morning—that time before the world woke up all the way, and she was standing beside the woman’s head, saying a prayer, for power, for strength (they were the only prayers she knew). She was running out of words when, on the table, Ojka’s fingers twitched.
Nasi startled, but ev
en as her eyes widened and her heart skipped, she was talking herself down, the way she had done when she was little, and every little shadow had a way of becoming a monster. It could have been a trick of the light, probably was, so she reached out and tentatively touched the knight’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.
Sure enough, Ojka was still cold. Still dead.
And then, abruptly, the woman sat up.
Nasi staggered back as the black cloth tumbled away from Ojka’s face.
She didn’t blink, didn’t turn her head, or even seem to notice Nasi or the death table or the candlelit room. Her eyes were wide and flat and empty, and Nasi remembered the soldiers who used to guard Astrid and Athos Dane, hollowed out and spelled into submission.
Ojka looked like them.
She was real, and yet not real, alive and still very, very dead.
The wound at her neck was there and deep as ever, but now Ojka worked her jaw. When she tried to speak, a low hiss came from her ruined throat. The knight pursed her lips, and swallowed, and Nasi watched as tendrils of shadow and smoke wove over and around her neck, almost like a fresh bandage.
She leapt down from the table, upsetting the vines and bowls that Nasi had laid so carefully around her corpse. They fell to the floor with a clang and a crash.
Ojka had always been so graceful, but now her steps had the stilted quality of a colt, or a puppet, and Nasi backed up until her shoulder hit the pillar. The knight looked straight at the girl, shadows swimming through her pale eye. Ojka didn’t speak, only stared, the drip of spilled water tapping on the stones behind her. Her hand had begun to drift toward Nasi’s cheek when the doors swung open and two members of the Iron Guard stormed in, drawn by the crash.
They saw the dead knight standing upright and froze.
Ojka’s hand fell away from Nasi as she spun toward them with returning grace. The air around her shimmered with magic, something from the table—a dagger—sailing into Ojka’s hand.
The guards were shouting now, and Nasi should have run, should have done something, but she was frozen against the pillar, pinned by something as heavy as the strongest magic.