A Darker Shade of Magic

  So Lila had agreed to go by the doors despite her nagging fear that they were traps. It was all a trap. She reached the south stairs and pulled her horned mask down over her eyes before scaling the steps. At the top, the doors gave way without resistance, and again Lila’s gut told her to go, to run the other way, but for the first time in her life, she ignored the warning and stepped inside. The space beyond the doors was dark, but the moment she crossed the threshold, lanterns flared to light, and Lila froze. Dozens of guards lined the walls like living suits of armor. Their heads twisted toward the open door, toward her, and she steeled herself against the impending assault.

  But it never came.

  Kell had told her that White London was a throne taken—and held—by force, and that this type of ascension didn’t usually inspire loyalty. The guards here were clearly bound by magic, trapped under some kind of control spell. But that was the problem with forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do. You had to be so specific. They had no choice but to follow orders, but they probably weren’t inclined to go above and beyond them.

  A slow smile drew across her lips.

  Whatever order King Athos had given his guards, it didn’t seem to extend to her. Their empty eyes followed her as she moved down the hall as calmly as possible. As if she belonged there. As if she had not come to kill their queen. She wondered, as she moved past them, how many wanted her to succeed.

  The halls in the red palace had been labyrinthine, but here there was a simple grid of lines and intersections, further proof that the castle had once been something like a church. One hall gave onto another before putting her out in front of the throne room, just as Kell had said it would.

  But Kell had also said the hall would be empty.

  And it was not.

  A boy stood in front of the throne room door. He was younger than Lila, and thin in a wiry way, and unlike the guards with their empty eyes, his were dark and bruised and feverish. When he saw her coming, he drew his sword.

  “Vösk,” he ordered.

  Lila’s brow furrowed.

  “Vösk,” he said again. “Ös reijkav vösk.”

  “Hey, you,” she said curtly. “Move.”

  The boy started speaking low and urgently in his own language. Lila shook her head and drew the knife with the brass knuckles from its sheath. “Get out of my way.”

  Feeling she had made herself understood, Lila strode forward toward the door. But the boy lifted his sword, put himself squarely in her path, and said, “Vösk.”

  “Look,” she snapped. “I have no idea what you’re saying.…”

  The young guard looked around, exasperated.

  “But I would strongly advise you to go and pretend this interaction never took place and—hey, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The boy had shaken his head and muttered something under his breath, and then he brought his sword to his own arm, and began to cut.

  “Hey,” Lila said again as the boy gritted his teeth and drew a second line, and then a third. “Stop that.”

  She went to catch his wrist, but he stopped cutting the pattern and looked her in the eyes, and said, “Leave.”

  For a moment, Lila thought she’d heard him wrong. And then she realized he was speaking English. When she looked down, she saw that he’d carved some kind of symbol into his skin.

  “Leave,” he said again. “Now.”

  “Get out of my way,” countered Lila.

  “I can’t.”

  “Boy—” she warned.

  “I can’t,” he said again. “I have to guard the door.”

  “Or what?” challenged Lila.

  “There is no or what.” He pulled aside the collar of his shirt to show a mark, angry and black, scarred into his skin. “He ordered me to guard the door, so I must guard it.”

  Lila frowned. The mark was different from Kell’s, but she understood what it must be: some kind of seal. “What happens if you step aside?” she asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “What happens if I cut you down?”

  “I’ll die.”

  He said both things with sad and equal certainty. What a mad world, thought Lila.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Beloc.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough.” There was a proud tilt to his jaw, and a fire in his eyes she recognized. A defiance. But he was still young. Too young for this.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Beloc,” she said. “Don’t make me.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to.”

  He squared himself to her, holding his sword with both hands, his knuckles white. “You’ll have to go through me.”

  Lila growled and gripped her knife.

  “Please,” he added. “Please go through me.”

  Lila gave him a long hard look. “How?” she said at last.

  His brows went up in question.

  “How do you want to die?” she clarified.

  The fire in his eyes wavered for an instant, and then he recovered, and said, “Quickly.”

  Lila nodded. She lifted her knife, and he lowered his sword just a fraction, just enough. And then he closed his eyes and began to whisper something to himself. Lila didn’t hesitate. She knew how to use a knife, how to wound, and how to kill. She closed the gap between them and drove the blade between Beloc’s ribs and up before he’d even finished his prayer. There were worse ways to go, but she still swore under her breath at Athos and Astrid and the whole forsaken city as she lowered the boy’s body to the floor.

  She wiped her blade on the hem of her shirt and sheathed the knife as she stepped up to the waiting doors of the throne room. A circle of symbols was etched into the wood, twelve marks in all. She brought her hand to the dial, remembering Kell’s instructions.

  “Think of it as a clockface,” he’d said, drawing the motion in the air. “One, seven, three, nine.” Now she drew it with her finger, touching the symbol at the first hour, then drawing her fingertip down and across the circle to the seventh, around and up to the three, and straight through the middle to the nine.

  “Are you certain you’ve got it?” Kell had asked, and Lila had sighed and blown the hair out of her eyes.

  “I told you, I’m a fast learner.”

  At first, nothing happened. And then something passed between her fingers and the wood, and a lock slid within.

  “Told you,” she murmured, pushing the door open.

  III

  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 remain
ed 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.

  IV

  Lila’s back hit the pillar hard.