A Conjuring of Light

by V. E. Schwab

  Ned yawned, the sense of strangeness already slipping away as he climbed the stairs. Back in his room, he cracked the window despite the cold, and let the sounds of London drift in. But as he crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up, and the world settled into silence, the whispers came again. And as he sank back into that place between waking and sleep, those elusive words finally took shape.

  Let me in, they said.

  Let me in.

  II

  Voices rang out past Holland’s cell just after midnight.

  “You’re early,” said the guard nearest the bars.

  “Where’s your second?” asked the one on the wall.

  “The king needs men on the steps,” answered the interloper, “what with the scarred fellows coming in.” His voice was muffled by his helm.

  “We’ve got orders.”

  “So do I,” said the new guard. “And we’re running thin.”

  A pause, and in that pause, Holland felt a strange thing happen. It was like someone took the air—the energy in the air—and pulled on it. Shallowly. A tug of will. A shifting of scales. A subtle exertion of control.

  “Besides,” the new guard was saying absently, “what would you rather be doing? Staring at this piece of filth, or saving your friends?”

  The balance tipped. The men roused from their places. Holland wondered if the new guard knew what he’d done. It was the kind of magic forbidden in this world, and worshipped in his own.

  The new guard watched the others climb the stairs, and swayed ever so slightly on his feet. When they were gone, he leaned back against the wall facing Holland’s cell, the metal of his armor scraping stone, and drew a knife. He toyed with it absently, fingertips on the tip, tossing and catching and tossing it again. Holland felt himself being studied, and so he studied in return. Studied the way the new guard tipped his head, the speed of his fingers on the knife, the scent of another London wafting in his blood.

  Her blood.

  He should have recognized that voice, even through the stolen helm. Maybe if he’d slept—how long had it been?—maybe if he wasn’t bloody and broken and behind bars. He still should have known.

  “Delilah,” he said evenly.

  “Holland,” she answered.

  Delilah Bard, the Antari of Grey London, set her helmet on the table beneath a hook holding the jailer’s keys. Her fingers danced absently across their teeth. “Your last night…”

  “Did you come to say farewell?”

  She made a humming sound. “Something like that.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  Her gaze flicked toward him, quick and sharp as a sliver of steel. “So are you.” One of her eyes had the glassy sheen that came with too much drink. The other, the false one, had been shattered. It hung together by a shell of glass, but the inside was a starburst of color and cracks.

  Lila’s knife vanished back into its sheath. She pulled off the gauntlets, one by one, and set them on the table, too. Even drunk, she moved with the fluid grace of a fighter. She reminded him of Ojka.

  “Ojka,” she echoed, as if reading his mind.

  Holland stilled. “What?”

  Lila tapped her cheek. “The redhead with the scar and the face leaking black. She did this—tried to drive a knife into my eye—right before I cut her throat.”

  The words were a dull blow. Just a small flame of hope flickering out inside his chest. Nothing left. Ash over embers. “She was following orders,” he said hollowly.

  Lila lifted the keys from their hook. “Yours or Osaron’s?”

  It was a hard question. When had they been different? Had they ever been the same?

  He heard the clang of metal, and Holland blinked to find the cell door falling open, Lila stepping in. She pulled the door shut behind her, snapped the lock back into place.

  “If you came to kill me—”

  “No,” she sneered. “That can wait till morning.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because good people die, and bad people live, and it doesn’t seem very fair, does it, Holland?” Her face crinkled. “Of all the people you could kill, you chose someone who actually mattered to me.”

  “I had to.”

  Her fist hit him like a brick, hard enough to crack his head sideways and make the world go momentarily white. When his vision cleared, she was standing over him, knuckles bleeding.

  She tried to strike him again, but this time Holland caught her wrist.

  “Enough,” he said.

  But it wasn’t. Her free hand swung up, fire dancing across her knuckles, but he caught that, too.

  “Enough.”

  She tried to pull free, but his hands vised tighter, finding the tender place where bones met. He pressed down, and a guttural sound escaped her throat, low and animal.

  “It does nothing to dwell on what’s been taken from you,” he snarled. “Nothing.”

  Over seven years, Holland’s life had been distilled to one desire. To see Athos and Astrid Dane suffer. And Kell had stolen that from him. Stolen the look in Astrid’s eyes as he drove the dagger through her heart. Stolen Athos’s expression as he took him apart piece by piece.

  No one suffers as beautifully as you do.

  Seven years.

  Holland shoved Lila back. She stumbled, her shoulders hitting the bars. For a moment, the cell was filled with only the sounds of ragged breathing as they stared at one another across the narrow space, two beasts caged together.

  And then, slowly, Lila straightened, flexing her hands.

  “If you want your revenge,” he said, “take it.”

  One of us should have it, he thought, closing his eyes. He took a steadying breath and began to count his dead, starting with Alox and ending with Ojka.

  But when he opened his eyes again, Delilah Bard was gone.

  * * *

  They came to collect him just after dawn.

  In truth, he didn’t know the hour, but he could feel the palace stirring overhead, the subtle warming of the world beyond the prison’s pillar. With so many years of cold, he’d learned to sense the smallest shifts in warmth, knew how to mark the passing of a day.

  The guards came and freed Holland from the wall, and for a moment, he was bound by nothing but two hands before they wrapped the chains around his wrists, his shoulders, his waist. The heavy metal was hobbling, and it took all his strength to keep his feet, to climb the stairs, his stride reduced to a halting step.

  “On vis och,” he told himself.

  Dawn to dusk. A phrase that meant two things in his native tongue.

  A fresh start. A good end.

  The guards marched Holland up and through the palace halls, where men and women gathered to watch him pass. They led him out onto a balcony, a large space stripped bare except for a broad wooden platform, freshly constructed, and on it, a block of stone.

  On vis och.

  Holland felt the change as soon as he stepped outside, the prickling magic of the palace wards giving way to nothing but crisp air and light so bright it stung his eyes.

  The sun was rising on a frigid day, and Holland, still stripped to the waist beneath the chains, felt the icy air bite viciously into his skin. But he had long ago learned not to give others the satisfaction of his suffering. And though he knew he stood at the center of a performance—had in fact orchestrated it himself—Holland could not bring himself to shiver and beg. Not in front of these people.

  The king was present, and the prince, as well as four more guards, their foreheads marked with blood, and a handful of magicians, similarly stained—a young, silver-haired man, the wind jostling around his limbs; a pair of dark-skinned twins, their faces set with gems; a blond man built like a wall. There, beside them, his skin scarred by silver lines, stood an almost-familiar man with a blue gem above one eye; an old man in white robes, a drop of crimson on his brow; Delilah Bard, her shattered brown eye catching the light.

  And last—just there, on the pla
tform, beside the stone block—stood Kell, a long sword in his hands, its broad point resting on the ground.

  Holland’s steps must have slowed, because one of the guards drove a gauntlet into his back, forcing him forward, up the two short steps onto the newly built dais. He came to a stop and straightened, looking out at the darkened river beyond the balcony.

  So like Black London.

  Too like Black London.

  “Second thoughts?” asked Kell, gripping the sword.

  “No,” said Holland, staring past him. “Just taking a moment to enjoy the view.”

  His gaze flicked to the young Antari, took in the way he held the sword, one hand around the hilt and the other resting on the blade, pressing down just hard enough to draw a line of blood.

  “If he does not come—” started Holland.

  “I’ll make it quick.”

  “Last time, you missed my heart.”

  “I won’t miss your head,” answered Kell. “But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Holland started to speak but forced the words down.

  They served no purpose.

  Still, he thought them.

  I hope it does.

  The king’s voice thundered through the cold morning.

  “Kneel,” ordered the ruler of Arnes.

  Holland stiffened at the word, his mind stuttering into another day, another life, cold steel and Athos’s smooth voice—but he let the weight of the memories, as well as the present weight of chains, pull him down. He kept his eyes on the river, the darkness moving just beneath the surface, and when he spoke, his voice was low, the words meant not for the crowd on the balcony, or for Kell, but for the shadow king.

  “Help me.”

  The words were nothing but a breath of fog. To the gathered crowd, it might have looked like a prayer, given to whatever gods they thought he worshipped. And in a way, it was.

  “Antari,” said the king, addressing him not by name, or even title, only by what he was, and Holland wondered if Maxim Maresh even knew his given name.

  Vosijk, he almost said. My name is Holland Vosijk.

  But it didn’t matter now.

  “You are guilty of grievous sins against the empire, guilty of practicing forbidden magic, of inciting chaos and ruin, of bringing war.…”

  The king’s words washed around him as Holland tipped his head back toward the sky. Birds flew high overhead, while shadows threaded through the low clouds. Osaron was there. Holland gritted his teeth and forced himself to speak, not to the men around him, not to the king or Kell, but to the presence lurking, listening.

  “Help me.”

  “You are sentenced to death by the blade for your crimes, your body committed to fire.…”

  He could feel the oshoc’s magic weaving through his hair, brushing against his skin, but still it did not come.

  “If you have any words, speak them now, but know that your fate is sealed.”

  He heard a new voice, then, like a vibration in the winter air.

  Beg.

  Holland went still.

  “Have you nothing to say?” demanded the king.

  Beg.

  Holland swallowed, and did something he’d never done, not in seven years of slavery and torture.

  “Please,” he begged, first softly, and then louder. “Please. I will be yours.”

  The darkness laughed but did not come.

  Holland’s pulse began to race, the chains suddenly too tight. “Osaron,” he called out. “This body is yours. This life—what’s left of it—is yours—”

  The guards were on either side of him now, gauntleted fists forcing Holland’s head forward onto the block.

  “Osaron,” he growled, fighting their grip for the first time.

  The laughter continued, ringing through his head.

  “Gods don’t need bodies, but kings do! How will you rule without a head for your crown?”

  Kell was beside him now, both hands on the sword’s hilt.

  “End it,” ordered the king.

  Wait, thought Holland.

  “Kill him,” said Lila.

  “Be still,” demanded Kell.

  Holland’s vision narrowed to the wood of the platform.

  “Osaron!” he bellowed as Kell’s sword sang upward.

  It never came down.

  A shadow swept over the balcony. One moment the sun was there, and the next, they were plunged into shade, and everyone looked up in time to see the wave of black water crest overhead and come crashing down.

  Holland twisted sideways, still clinging to the stone block as the river slammed onto the platform. One of the guards was knocked over the edge, down into the roiling surf below, while the other held on to Holland.

  The icy torrent knocked the blade from Kell’s hands and sent him backward across the dais, a shard of ice pinning his sleeve to the floor as the guards dove to cover the king and prince. The wave hit the steps between the platform and the balcony and splashed up, swirling first into a column, before its edges smoothed and pulled together into the shape of a man.

  A king.

  Osaron smiled at Holland.

  “Do you see?” he said in his echoing way. “I can be merciful.”

  Someone was moving across the balcony. The silver-haired magician came surging forward, the air like knives around him.

  Osaron didn’t take his eyes off Holland, but he flicked his watery fingers and a spike of ice materialized, launching toward the magician’s chest. The man actually smiled as he spun around the shard, the movement light as air before shattering it with a single sharp gust.

  Silver hair and swirling robes danced again toward Osaron, a blur, and then the magician slashed, one hand surrounded by a blade of wind. Osaron’s watery form parted around the magician’s wrist, then vised closed. The airborne magician slammed to a stop, pinned in the icy core of Osaron’s form. Before he could break free, the shadow king drove his own hand through the magician’s chest.

  His fingers went clean through, icy black points glistening with streams of red.

  “Jinnar!” screamed someone as the wind suddenly died atop the platform, and the magician collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.

  Osaron shook the blood from his fingers as he climbed the steps.

  “Tell me, Holland,” he said. “Do I look in need of a body?”

  Using their distraction, Kell tore the icy shard free of his sleeve and threw it hard at the shadow king’s back. Holland was grudgingly, fleetingly, impressed—but it passed right through Osaron’s watery form. He turned, as if amused, to face Kell.

  “It will take more than that, Antari.”

  “I know,” said Kell, and Holland saw the ribbon of blood swirling in the column of water that formed Osaron’s chest the moment before Kell said, “As Isera.”

  And just like that, Osaron froze.

  It happened in an instant, the shadow king replaced by a statue rendered in ice.

  Holland met Kell’s gaze through the frozen surface of Osaron’s torso.

  He saw it first, relief turning to horror as the dead magician—Jinnar—rose to his feet. His eyes were black—not shadowed, but solid—his skin already beginning to burn with the strength of his new host. And when he spoke, a smooth, familiar voice poured out.

  “It will take more than that,” said Osaron again, silver hair steaming.

  Bodies were rising around him, and Holland understood too late. The wave. The water. “Kell!” he shouted. “The blood marks—”

  He was cut off by a fist as the nearest guard drove a gauntleted hand into his ribs, the crimson smear on his helmet washed away by the first swell of the river. “Kneel before the king.”

  The silver-scarred man and the Maresh prince both surged forward, but Kell stopped them with a jagged slash of his arm, a wall of ice surging up and cutting them off from the platform and Osaron.

  Osaron, who now stood between Holland and Kell in his stolen host, his skin flaking away like curls of burning
paper.

  Holland forced himself up despite the weight of chains. “What a poor substitute you’ve chosen,” he said, drawing the oshoc’s attention as Kell shifted forward, blood dripping from his fingers. “How quickly it crumbles.” His voice was low amid the surge of chaos, dripping with disdain. “It is not a body for a king.”

  “You would still offer yours instead,” mused Osaron. His shell was dying fast, lit by a bloodred glow that cracked along his skin.

  “I do,” said Holland.

  “Tempting,” said Osaron. His black eyes burned inside his skull. In a flash, he was at Holland’s side. “But I’d rather watch you fall.”

  Holland felt the push before he saw the hand, felt the force against his chest and the sudden weight of gravity as the world shifted and the platform disappeared, and the chains pulled him over the edge and down, down, down into the river below.

  III

  Kell saw Holland fall.

  One moment the Antari was there, at the edge, and the next he was gone, plunging down into the river with no magic at hand, only the cold, dead weight of the spelled iron around him. The balcony was chaos, one guard on his knees, fighting the fog, while Lila and Alucard squared off against the animated corpse of Jinnar, who was now nothing more than charred bone.

  There wasn’t time to think, to wonder, to question.

  Kell dove.

  The drop was farther than it seemed.

  The impact knocked the air from Kell’s lungs, jarring his bones, and he gasped as the river closed over him, ice-cold and black as ink.

  Far below, almost out of sight, a pale form sank to the bottom of the tainted water.

  Kell swam down toward Holland, lungs aching as he fought the press of the river—not only the weight of water, but Osaron’s magic, leaching heat and focus as it tried to force its way in.