A Conjuring of Light

by V. E. Schwab

  Alucard doubled over, the air rushing from his lungs as knuckles cracked into ribs.

  “Berras,” he said with a gasp. “Listen to—”

  “No. You listen to me, little brother. It’s time to set things straight. I’m the one Father wanted. I’m already the heir of House Emery, but I could be so much more. And I will be, once you’re gone.” His meaty fingers found Alucard’s throat. “There is a new king rising.”

  Alucard had never been one to fight dirty, but he’d spent enough time recently watching Delilah Bard. He brought his hands up swiftly, palm crunching into the base of his brother’s nose. A blinder, she’d called that move.

  Tears and blood spilled down Berras’s face, but he didn’t even flinch. His fingers only tightened around Alucard’s throat.

  “Ber—ras—” gasped Alucard, reaching for glass, for stone, for water. Even he wasn’t strong enough to call an object to hand without seeing it, and with Berras blocking his way, and his vision tunneling, Alucard found himself reaching futilely for anything and everything. The whole house trembled with the pull of Alucard’s power, his carefully honed precision lost in the panic, the struggle for air.

  His lips moved, silently summoning, pleading.

  The walls shook. The windows shattered. Nails jerked free of boards and wood cracked as it peeled up from the floor. For one desperate instant, nothing happened, and then the world came hurtling in toward a single point.

  Tables and chairs, artwork and mirrors, tapestries and curtains, pieces of wall and floor and door all crashed into Berras with blinding force. The massive hands fell away from Alucard’s throat as Berras was driven back by the whirlwind of debris twining around his arms and legs, dragging him down.

  But still he fought with the blind strength of someone severed from thought, from pain, until at last the chandelier came down, tearing long cracks in the ceiling as it fell and burying Berras in iron and plaster and stone. The whirlwind fell apart and Alucard gasped, hands on his knees. All around him, the house still groaned.

  From overhead, nothing. Nothing. And then he heard his sister scream.

  * * *

  He found Anisa in an upstairs room, tucked in a corner with her knees drawn up, her eyes wide with terror. Terror, he soon realized, at something that wasn’t there.

  She had her hands pressed over her ears, her head buried against her knees, whispering over and over, “I’m not alone, I’m not alone, I’m not alone.”

  “Anisa,” he said, kneeling before her. Her face flushed, veins climbing her throat, darkness clouding her blue eyes.

  “Alucard?” Her voice was thin. Her whole body shook. “Make him stop.”

  “I did,” he said, thinking she meant Berras, but then she shook her head and said, “He keeps trying to get in.”

  The shadow king.

  He scanned the air around her, could see the shadows tangling in the green light of her power. It looked like a storm was trapped in the unlit room, the air flickering with mottled light as her magic fought against the intruder.

  “It hurts,” she whispered, curling in on herself. “Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t leave me alone with him.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, lifting his little sister into his arms. “I’m not going anywhere, not without you.”

  The house groaned around them as he carried Anisa through the hall.

  The walls fissured, and the stairs began to splinter beneath his feet. Some deep damage had been done to the house, a mortal wound he couldn’t see but felt with every tremor.

  The Emery Estate had stood for centuries.

  And now it was coming down.

  Alucard had ruined it, after all.

  It took all his strength to hold the structure up around them, and by the time they crossed the threshold, he was dizzy from the effort.

  Anisa’s head lolled against his chest.

  “Stay with me, Nis,” he said. “Stay with me.”

  He mounted his horse with the aid of a low wall, and kicked the beast into motion, riding through the gate as the rest of the estate came tumbling down.

  FOUR

  WEAPONS AT HAND

  I

  White London

  Nasi stood before the platform and did not cry.

  She was nine winters old, for crow’s sake, and had long ago learned to look composed, even if it was fake. Sometimes you had to pretend, everyone knew that. Pretend to be happy. Pretend to be brave. Pretend to be strong. If you pretended long enough, it eventually came true.

  Pretending not to be sad was the hardest, but looking sad made people think you were weak, and when you were already a foot too short and a measure too small, and a girl on top of that, you had to work twice as hard to convince them it wasn’t true.

  So even though the room was empty, save for Nasi and the corpse, she didn’t let the sadness show. Nasi worked in the castle, doing whatever needed to be done, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to be in here. Knew the northern hall was off limits, the private quarters of the king. But the king was missing, and Nasi had always been good at sneaking, and anyway, she hadn’t come to snoop, or steal.

  She’d only come to see.

  And to make sure the woman wasn’t lonely.

  Which Nasi knew was ridiculous, because dead people probably didn’t feel things like cold, or sad, or lonely. But she couldn’t be sure, and if it was her, she would have wanted someone there.

  Besides, this was the only quiet room left in the castle.

  The rest of the place was plunging into chaos, everyone shouting and searching for the king, but not in here. In here, candles burned, and the heavy doors and walls held in all the quiet. In here, at the center of the chamber, on a platform of beautiful black granite, lay Ojka.

  Ojka, laid out in black, hands open at her sides, a blade resting in each palm. Vines, the first things to bloom in the castle gardens, were wound around the platform’s edge, a dish of water at Ojka’s head and a basin of earth at her feet, places for the magic to go when it left her body. A black cloth was draped over her eyes, and her short red hair made a pool around her head. A piece of white linen had been wrapped tight around her neck, but even in death a line of blackish-red stained through where someone had cut her throat.

  Nobody knew what had happened. Only that the king was missing, and the king’s chosen knight was dead. Nasi had seen the king’s prisoner, the red-haired man with his own black eye, and she wondered if it was his fault, since he was missing, too.

  Nasi clenched her hands into fists, and felt the sudden bite of thorns. She’d forgotten about the flowers, wild things plucked from the edge of the castle yard. The prettiest ones hadn’t blossomed yet, so she’d been forced to dig up a handful of pale buds studded with vicious thorns.

  “Nijk shöst,” she murmured, setting the bundle of flowers on the platform, the tail of her braid brushing Ojka’s arm as she leaned forward.

  Nasi used to wear her hair loose so it covered the scars on her face. It didn’t matter that she could barely see through the pale curtain, that she was always tripping and stumbling. It was a shield against the world.

  And then one day Ojka passed her in the corridor, and stopped her, and told her to pull the hair off her face.

  She hadn’t wanted to, but the king’s knight stood there, arms crossed, waiting for her to obey, and so she had, cringing as she tied back the strands. Ojka surveyed her face, but didn’t ask her what had happened, if she’d been born that way (she hadn’t) or caught off-turn in the Kosik (she had). Instead, the woman had cocked her head and said, “Why do you hide?”

  Nasi could not bring herself to answer Ojka, to tell the king’s knight that she hated her scars when Ojka had darkness spilling down one side of her face and a silver line carving its way from eye to lip on the other. When she didn’t speak, the woman crouched in front of her and took her firmly by the shoulders.

  “Scars are not shameful,” said Ojka, “not unless you let them be.” The knight straighten
ed. “If you do not wear them, they will wear you.” And with that, she’d walked away.

  Nasi had worn her hair back ever since.

  And every time Ojka had passed her in the halls, her eyes, one yellow, the other black, had flicked to the braid, and she’d nodded in approval, and everything in Nasi had grown stronger, like a starving plant fed water drop by drop.

  “I wear my scars now,” she whispered in Ojka’s ear.

  Footsteps sounded beyond the doors, the heavy tread of the Iron Guard, and Nasi pulled back hastily, nearly tipping over the bowl of water when she snagged her sleeve on the vines coiled around the platform.

  But she was only nine winters old, and small as a shadow, and by the time the doors opened, she was gone.

  II

  In the Maresh dungeons, sleep eluded Holland.

  His mind drifted, but every time it began to settle, he saw London—his London—as it crumbled and fell. Saw the colors fade back to gray, the river freeze, and the castle … well, thrones did not stay empty. Holland knew this well. He pictured the city searching for its king, heard the servants calling out his name before new blades found their throats. Blood staining white marble, bodies littering the forest as boots crushed everything he’d started like new grass underfoot.

  Holland reached out automatically for Ojka, his mind stretching across the divide of worlds, but found no purchase.

  The prison cell he currently occupied was a stone tomb, buried somewhere deep in the bones of the palace. No windows. No warmth. He had lost track of the number of stairs when the Arnesian guards dragged him in, half conscious, mind still gutted from Osaron’s intrusion and sudden exit. Holland barely processed the cells, all empty. The animal part of him had struggled at the touch of cold metal closing around his wrists, and in response, they’d slammed his head against the wall. When he’d surfaced, everything was black.

  Holland lost track of time—tried to count, but without any light, his mind skipped, stuttered, fell too easily into memories he didn’t want.

  Kneel, whispered Astrid in one ear.

  Stand, goaded Athos in the other.

  Bend.

  Break.

  Stop, he thought, trying to drag his mind back to the cold cell. It kept slipping.

  Pick up the knife.

  Hold it to your throat.

  Stay very still.

  He’d tried to will his fingers, of course, but the binding spell held, and when Athos had returned hours—sometimes days—later, and plucked the blade from Holland’s hand, and given him permission to move again, his body had folded to the floor. Muscles torn. Limbs shaking.

  That is where you belong, Athos had said. On your knees.

  “Stop.” Holland’s growl vibrated through the quiet of the prison, answered only by its echo. For a few breaths, his mind was still, but soon, too soon, it all began again, the memories seeping in through the cold stone and the iron cuffs and the silence.

  The first time someone tried to kill Holland, he was barely nine years old.

  His eye had turned black the year before, pupil widening day by day until the darkness overtook the green, and then the white, slowly poisoning him lash to lid. His hair was long enough to hide the mark, as long as he kept his head down, which Holland always did.

  He woke to the hiss of metal, lunged to the side in time to almost miss the blade.

  It grazed his arm before burying itself in the cot. Holland tumbled to the floor, hitting his shoulder hard, and rolled, expecting to find a stranger, a mercenary, someone marked with the brand of thieves and killers.

  Instead, he saw his older brother. Twice his size, with their father’s muddy green eyes and their mother’s sad mouth. The only blood Holland had left.

  “Alox?” he gasped, pain burning up his injured arm. Bright red drops flecked the floor of their room before Holland managed to press his hand over the weeping wound.

  Alox stood over him, the veins on his throat already edging toward black. At fifteen, he had taken on a dozen marks, all to help bend will and bind escaping magic.

  Holland was on his back on the floor, blood still spilling between his fingers, but he didn’t cry out for help. There was no one to cry out to. Their father was dead. Their mother had disappeared into the sho dens, drowned herself in smoke.

  “Hold still, Holland,” muttered Alox, dragging the blade free of the cot. His eyes were red with drink or spellwork. Holland didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Not because the blade was poisoned, though he feared it was. But because every night he’d dreamed of would-be attackers, given them a hundred names and faces, and none of them had ever been Alox.

  Alox, who told him stories when he couldn’t sleep. Tales of the someday king. The one with enough power to bring the world back.

  Alox, who used to let him sit on makeshift thrones in abandoned rooms and dream of better days.

  Alox, who had first seen the mark in his eye, and promised to keep him safe.

  Alox, who now stood over him with a knife.

  “Vosk,” pleaded Holland now. Stop.

  “It isn’t right,” his brother slurred, intoxicated by the knife, the blood, the nearness of power. “That magic isn’t yours.”

  Holland’s bloody fingers went swiftly to his eye. “But it chose me.”

  Alox shook his head slowly, ruefully. “Magic doesn’t choose, Holland.” He swayed. “It doesn’t belong to those who have. It belongs to those who take.”

  With that, Alox brought the knife down.

  “Vosk!” begged Holland, bloody hands outstretched.

  He caught the blade, pushing back with every ounce of strength, not on the weapon itself but on the air, the metal. It still bit in, blood ribboning down his palms.

  Holland stared up at Alox, pain forcing the words across his lips.

  “As Staro.”

  The words surfaced on their own, rising from the darkness of his mind like a dream suddenly remembered, and with them, the magic surged up through his torn hands, and around the blade, and wrapped around his brother. Alox tried to pull away, but it was too late. The spell had rolled over his skin, turning flesh to stone as it spread over his stomach, climbed his shoulders, wrapped around his throat.

  A single gasp escaped, and then it was over, body to stone in the time it took a drop of blood to hit the floor.

  Holland lay there beneath the precarious weight of his brother’s statue. With Alox frozen on one knee, Holland could look his brother in the eyes, and he found himself staring up into his brother’s face, his mouth open and his features caught between surprise and rage. Slowly, carefully, Holland slid free, inching his body out from beneath the stone. He got to his feet, dizzy from the sudden use of magic, shaking from the attack.

  He didn’t cry. Didn’t run. He simply stood there, surveying Alox, searching for the change in his brother as if it were a freckle, a scar, something he should have seen. His own pulse was settling and something else, something deeper, was beginning to steady, too, as if the spell had turned part of himself to stone as well.

  “Alox,” he said, the word barely an exhale as he reached out and touched his brother’s cheek, only to recoil from the hardness. His fingers left a rust-red smear against the marble face.

  Holland leaned forward to whisper in his brother’s stone ear.

  “This magic,” he said, putting his hand on Alox’s shoulder, “is mine.”

  He pushed, letting gravity tip the statue until it fell and shattered on the floor.

  Footsteps sounded on the prison stairs, and Holland straightened, his senses snapping back to the cell. At first, he assumed the visitor would be Kell, but then he counted the footfalls—three sets.

  They were speaking Arnesian, running the words together so Holland couldn’t catch them all.

  He forced himself still as the lock ground free and his cell door swung open. Forced himself not to lash out when an enemy hand wrapped around his jaw, pinning his mouth shut.

  “Let’s see … eyes…”
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  Rough fingers tangled in his hair and the blindfold came free, and for an instant, the world was gold. Lantern light cast haloes over everything before the man forced his face up.

  “Should we carve…”

  “Doesn’t look … to me.”

  They weren’t wearing armor, but all three had the stature of palace guards.

  The first let go of Holland’s jaw and started rolling up his sleeves.

  Holland knew what was coming, even before he felt the vicious pull on the chains, shoulders straining as they hauled him to his feet. He held the guard’s eyes, right up until the first punch landed, a brutal blow between his collar and his throat.

  He followed the pain like a current, tried to ground it.

  It really was nothing he hadn’t felt before. Athos’s cold smile surfaced in Holland’s mind. The fire of that silver whip.

  No one suffers …

  He staggered as his ribs cracked.

  … as beautifully as you.

  Blood filled Holland’s mouth. He could have spat it in their faces and used the same breath to turn them to stone, leave them broken on the floor. Instead, he swallowed.

  He would not kill them.

  But he would not give them the satisfaction of display, either.

  And then, a glint of steel—unexpected—as a guard drew out a knife. When the man spoke, it was in the common tongue of kings.

  “This is from Delilah Bard,” he said, driving the dagger toward Holland’s heart.

  Magic rose in him, sudden and involuntary, the dampening chains too weak to stop the flood as the knife plunged toward his bare chest. The guard’s body slowed as Holland forced his will against metal and bone. But before he could stop the blade, it flew from the guard’s hand, out of Holland’s own control, and landed with a snap against Kell’s palm.

  The guard spun, shock quickly replaced by fear as he took in the man at the base of the stairs, the black coat blending into shadow, the red hair glinting in the light.

  “What is this?” asked the other Antari, his voice sharp.