by V. E. Schwab
“I don’t need a chaperone.”
“Good thing,” she said, setting off. “I don’t need a prince tripping on my heels.”
Rhy started. “You told my father—”
“That I could you keep alive,” she said, glancing back. “But you don’t need me to.”
Something in Rhy loosened. Because of all the people in his life, his brother and his parents and his guards and even Alucard Emery, Lila was the first—the only—person to treat him like he didn’t need saving.
“Guards,” he called, hardening his voice. “Split up.”
“Your Highness,” started one. “We’re not to lea—”
He turned on them. “We’ve too much ground to cover, and last time I checked, we all had a pair of working eyes”—he shot a look at Lila, realizing his error, but she only shrugged—“so put them to use, and find me my survivors.”
It was a grim pursuit.
Rhy found too many bodies, and worse, the places where bodies should have been but where only a tatter of fabric and a pile of ash were left, the rest blown away by the winter wind. He thought of Alucard’s sister, Anisa, burning from the inside out. Thought of what happened to those who lost their battle with Osaron’s magic. And what of the fallen? The thousands of people who had not fought against the shadow king, but had given in, given way. Were they still in there, prisoners of their own minds? Could they be saved? Or were they already lost?
“Vas ir,” he murmured over the bodies he found, and the ones he didn’t.
Go in peace.
The streets were hardly empty, but he moved through the masses like a ghost, their shadowed eyes passing over him, through him. He walked in gleaming gold, and still they did not notice. He called to them, but they did not answer. Did not turn.
Whatever part of me Osaron could take, it’s already gone.
Did he really believe that?
His boot slid a little on the ground, and, looking down, he saw that a piece of the street had changed, from stone to something else, something glassy and black, like the flowers on the stairs.
He knelt, brushing his gloved hand against the smooth patch. It wasn’t cold. Wasn’t warm, either. Wasn’t wet like ice. It wasn’t anything. Which made no sense. Rhy straightened, perplexed, and kept looking for something, someone, he could help.
Silvers, that’s what some were calling them, those who’d been burned by Osaron’s magic and survived. The priests, it turned out, had discovered a handful already, most rising from the fever beds that lined the Rose Hall.
But how many more waited in the city?
In the end, Rhy didn’t find the first silver.
The silver found him.
The young boy came stumbling toward him out of a house and sank to his knees at Rhy’s feet. Lines danced like light over his skin, his black hair falling over fever-bright eyes. “Mas vares.”
My prince.
Rhy knelt in his armor, scratching the plate as gold met stone. “It’s all right,” he said as the boy sobbed, tears tracing fresh tracks over the silver on his cheeks.
“All alone,” he murmured, breath hitching. “All alone.”
“Not anymore,” said the prince.
He rose and started toward the house, but small fingers caught his hand. The boy shook his head, and Rhy saw the ash dusting the boy’s front, and understood. There was no one else inside the house.
Not anymore.
II
Lila went straight for the night market.
The city around her wasn’t empty. It would have been less chilling if it were. Instead, those who’d fallen under Osaron’s spell moved through the streets like sleepwalkers carrying out remembered tasks while deep within their dreams.
The night market was a shadow of its former self, half of it burned, and the rest carrying on in that dazed and ghostly way.
A fruit vendor hawked winter apples, his eyes swimming with shadows, while a woman carried flowers, their edges frosting black. The whole thing had a haunted air, a sea of puppets, and Lila kept squinting at the air around them as if looking for the strings.
Rhy moved through the city like a specter, but Lila was like an unwelcome guest. The people looked at her when she passed, their eyes narrowing, but the cuts on her palms were still fresh, and the blood kept them at bay, even as their whispers trailed her through the streets.
Scattered throughout the market, as if someone had splashed inky water onto the ground and let it freeze, were patches of black ice. Lila stepped around them with a thief’s sure footing and a fighter’s grace.
She was making her way toward Calla’s familiar green tent at the end of the market when she saw a man pitch a basin of flaming stones into the river. He was broad and bearded, silver scars tracing his hands and throat.
“You couldn’t get me, you monster!” he was screaming. “You couldn’t hold me down.”
The basin hit the river with a crash, rippling the half-frozen water and sending up a plume of hissing steam.
And just like that, the illusion shattered.
The man selling apples and the woman with flowers and every other fallen in the marketplace broke off and turned toward the man, as if waking from a dream. Only they weren’t waking. Instead, it was like the darkness rose inside them, Osaron rousing and turning his head, looking through their eyes. They moved as a single body, one that wasn’t theirs.
“Idiot,” muttered Lila, starting toward him, but the man didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t seem to care.
“Face me, you coward!” he bellowed as part of the nearest tent tore free and lifted into the air beside him.
The crowd hummed in displeasure.
“How dare you,” said a merchant, eyes shining dully as he drew a knife.
“The king will not stand for this,” said a second, twining rope between her hands.
The air shook with the sudden urge for violence, and realization struck Lila like a blow—Osaron gained obedience from the fallen, and energy from the fevered. But he had no use for the ones who’d fought free of his spell. And what he couldn’t use …
Lila ran.
Her injured leg throbbed as she sprinted toward him.
“Look out!” she shouted, her first blade already flying. It caught the nearest attacker in the chest, buried to the hilt, but the merchant’s own knife had left his hand before he fell.
Lila tackled the scarred man to the ground as metal sang over their heads.
The stranger looked up at her in shock, but there wasn’t time. The fallen were circling them, weapons raised. The man slammed a fist into the ground, and a piece of road as wide as a market stall tipped up into a shield.
He raised another makeshift wall and turned, clearly intending to summon a third, but Lila had no desire to be entombed. She dragged the man to his feet, sprinting into the nearest tent before a steel kettle thudded against the heavy canvas side.
“Keep moving,” she called, carving her way through a second tent wall and then a third before the man hauled her to a stop.
“Why did you do that?”
Lila wrenched free. “A thank-you would be nice. I lost my fifth favorite knife out—”
He forced her back against the tent pole. “Why?” he snarled, eyes wide. They were a shocking green, flecked with black and gold.
A swift kick to the ribs with the bottom of her boot, and he went stumbling backward, though not as far as she’d hoped. “Because you were shouting your head off at nothing but shadow and mist. A tip: don’t start a fight like that if you want to live.”
“I didn’t want to live.” His voice shook as he looked down at his silver-scarred hands. “I didn’t want this.”
“A lot of people would love to trade places.”
“That monster took everything. My wife. My father. I fought through it because I thought someone would be waiting for me. But when I woke—when I—” He made a strangled sound. “You should have let me die.”
Lila frowned. “What’s your nam
e?”
“What?”
“You have a name. What is it?”
“Manel.”
“Well, Manel. Dying doesn’t help the dead. It doesn’t find the lost. A lot of people have fallen. But some of us are still standing. So if you want to give up, walk out that curtain. I won’t stop you. I won’t save you again. But if you want to put your second chance to better use, come with me.”
She turned on her heel and slashed the next tent wall, stepping through, only to slam to a stop.
She’d found Calla’s tent.
“What is it?” asked Manel behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“This is the last tent,” she said slowly. “Go out the flap, and head for the palace.”
Manel spat. “The palace. The royals hid inside their palace while my family died. The king and queen sat safe on their thrones while London fell and that spoiled prince—”
“Enough,” snarled Lila. “That spoiled prince is searching the streets for men like you. He’s hunting for the living and burying the dead and doing everything he can to keep one from becoming the other, so you can either help or disappear, but either way, get out.”
He looked at her long and hard, then swore beneath his breath and vanished through the tent’s flap, bells jingling in his wake.
Lila turned her attention back to the empty shop.
“Calla?” she called, hoping the woman was there, hoping she wasn’t. The lanterns that hung in the corners were unlit, the hats and scarves and hoods on the walls casting strange shapes in the dark. Lila snapped her fingers, and the light sparked in her hand, unsteady but bright as she crossed the small tent, searching for any sign of the merchant. She wanted to see the woman’s kind smile, wanted to hear Calla’s teasing words. She wanted Calla to be far, far away, wanted her to be safe.
Something cracked beneath Lila’s boot.
A glass bead, like the ones in the trunk Lila had brought ashore. The box of gold thread and ruby clasps and a dozen other tiny, beautiful things she’d given Calla to pay for the coat, and the mask, and the kindness.
The beads were scattered across the floor in a messy trail that vanished beneath the hem of a second curtain hung near the back of the stall. The light slid beneath, struck gem, and rug, and something solid.
Delilah Bard never read many books.
The few she did had pirates and thieves, and always ended with freedom and the promise of more stories. Characters sailed away. They lived on. Lila always imagined people that way, a series of intersections and adventures. It was easy when you moved through life—through worlds—the way she did. Easy when you didn’t care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head.
Barron had walked into her life and refused to walk back out, and then he’d gone and died and she had to keep remembering that over and over instead of letting him live on in some version without her.
She didn’t want that for Calla.
She didn’t want to look behind the curtain, didn’t want to know the end of this story, but her hand reached out of its own traitorous accord and pulled the fabric back.
She saw the body on the floor.
Oh, thought Lila dully. There she is.
Calla, who had drawn the i’s of Lila’s name into e’s, and always sounded on the verge of laughing.
Calla, who had simply smiled when Lila walked in one night and asked for a man’s coat instead of a woman’s dress.
Calla, who’d thought Lila was in love with a black-eyed prince, even before Lila really had been. Calla, who wanted Kell to be happy just as a man, not as an aven. Who wanted her—Lila—to be happy.
The box of trinkets Lila had once brought home for the merchant now lay open on its side, spilling a hundred spots of light onto the floor around the woman’s head.
Calla was lying on her side, her short, round body curled in on itself, one hand beneath her cheek. But the other hand was pressed over her ear, as if trying to block something out, and for a moment, Lila thought—hoped—she was sleeping. Thought—hoped—she could kneel down and shake the woman gently, and she would get up.
Of course, Calla wasn’t a woman anymore. She wasn’t even a body. Her eyes—what was left of those warm eyes—were open, the same ruined shade as the rest of her, the chalky grey of hearth ash after the fire’s gone and cooled.
Lila’s throat closed.
This is why I run.
Because caring was a thing with claws. It sank them in, and didn’t let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn’t break you clean. It was a bone that didn’t set, a cut that wouldn’t close.
It was better not to care—Lila tried not to care—but sometimes, people got in. Like a knife against armor, they found the cracks, slid past the guard, and you didn’t know how deep they were buried until they were gone and you were bleeding on the floor. And it wasn’t fair. Lila hadn’t asked to care about Calla. She hadn’t wanted to let her in. So why did it still hurt this much?
Lila felt the tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Calla.”
She didn’t know why she said it that way, soft, as if a soft voice could wake the dead.
She didn’t know why she said it at all.
But she didn’t have time to wonder. As Lila took a step forward, a gust of winter air cut through the tent, and Calla simply … blew apart.
Lila let out a strangled cry and lunged for the curtain, but it was too late.
Calla was already gone.
Nothing but a collapsing pile of ash, and a hundred bits of silver and gold.
Something folded in Lila, then. She sank to the ground, ignoring the bite of the glass beads where they cut into her knees, fingers digging into the threadbare rug.
She didn’t mean to summon fire.
It wasn’t until the smoke tickled her lungs that Lila realized the tent was catching. Half of her wanted to let it burn, but the rest couldn’t bear the thought of Calla’s store burning away like her life, nothing left. Never to be seen again.
Lila pressed her hands together, smothering the fire.
She wiped the tears away and got up.
III
Kell stood before Holland’s cell, waiting for the man to speak.
He didn’t. Didn’t even raise his gaze to meet Kell’s own. The man’s eyes were fixed on something in the distance, beyond the bars, beyond the walls, beyond the city. A cold anger burned in them, but it seemed directed inward as much as out, at himself and the monster who had poisoned his mind, stolen his body.
“You summoned me,” said Kell at last. “I assumed you had something to say.”
When Holland still didn’t answer, he turned to go.
“One hundred and eighty-two.”
Kell glanced back. “What?”
Holland’s attention was still pointedly somewhere else. “That is the number of people killed by Astrid and Athos Dane.”
“And how many killed by you?”
“Sixty-seven,” answered Holland without hesitation. “Three before I became a slave. Sixty-four before I became a king. And none since.” At last, he looked at Kell. “I value life. I’ve issued death. You were raised a prince, Kell. I watched my whole world wither, day by day, season by season, year by year, and the only thing that kept me going was the hope that I was Antari for a reason. That I could do something to help.”
“I thought the only thing that kept you going was the binding spell branded into your skin.”
Holland cocked his head. “By the time you met me, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of killing Athos and Astrid Dane. And then you took that from me.”
Kell scowled. “I won’t apologize for depriving you of your revenge.”
Holland said nothing. Then, “When I asked you what you would have had me do upon waking in Black
London, you told me that I should have stayed there. That I should have died. I thought about it. I knew that Athos Dane was dead. I could feel that much.” The chains rattled as he reached to tap the ruined branding on his chest. “But I wasn’t. I didn’t know why, but I thought of who’d I’d been, those years before they stripped me down to hate, of what I’d wanted for my world. That’s what drove me home. Not fear of death—death is gentle, death is kind—but the hope that I was still capable of something more. And the idea of being free—” He blinked, as if he’d drifted.
The words rang through Kell’s chest, echoing chords.
“What will happen to me now?” There was no fear in his voice. There was nothing at all.
“I assume you will be tried—”
Holland was shaking his head. “No.”
“You’re in no place to make demands.”
Holland sat forward as far as the chains would let him.
“I don’t want a trial, Kell,” he said firmly. “I want an execution.”
IV
The words landed, as Holland knew they would.
Kell was staring at him, waiting for the twist, the turn.
“An execution?” he said, shaking his head. “Your penchant for self-destruction is impressive, but—”
“It’s a matter of practicality,” said Holland, letting his shoulders graze the wall, “not atonement.”
“I don’t follow.”
You never do, he thought bleakly.
“How is it done here?” he asked, a false lightness in his voice, as if they were talking of a meal or a dance, and not an execution. “By blade or by fire?”
Kell stared at him blankly, as if he’d never even seen one.
“I imagine,” said the other Antari slowly, “it would be done by the blade.” So Holland was right, then. “How was it done in your city?”
Holland had witnessed his first execution on his brother’s shoulders. Had followed Alox to the square for years. He remembered the arms forced wide, deep cuts and broken bones and fresh blood caught in basins. “Executions in my London were slow, and brutal, and very public.”
