A Conjuring of Light

by V. E. Schwab

  “Rhy,” Alucard said, clenching his fists, all playfulness gone. “I didn’t want to leave.”

  “But you did.”

  “If you would only listen—”

  “No.” Rhy was fighting back another deep, internal tremor. The tension between love and loss, holding on and letting go. “I am not a toy anymore. I am not a foolish youth.” He forced the waver from his words. “I am the crown prince of Arnes. The future king of this empire. And if you want another audience with me, a chance to explain yourself, then you must earn it. Go. Bring me back this Inheritor. Help me save my city. Then, Master Emery, I will consider your request.”

  Alucard blinked rapidly, obviously stricken. But after a long moment, he drew himself up to his full height. “Yes, Your Highness.” He turned and crossed the room with steady strides, his boots echoing Rhy’s heart as it pounded in his chest. For the second time, he watched someone precious walk away. For the second time, he held his ground. But he could not help the urge to soften the blow. For both of them.

  “And, Alucard,” he called, when the captain had reached the door. Alucard glanced back, his features pale but set as Rhy said, “Do try not to kill my brother.”

  A small, defiant smile flickered across the captain’s face. Laced with humor, with hope.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  SEVEN

  SETTING SAIL

  I

  No wonder Lila hated good-byes, thought Kell. It would have been so much easier to simply go. His brother’s heart still echoed in his chest as he descended the inner palace stairs, but the threads between them slackened a little with every step. What would it feel like when they were cities apart? When days and leagues stretched between them? Would he still know Rhy’s heart?

  The air went suddenly cold around him, and Kell looked up to find Emira Maresh barring his path. Of course, it had been too simple. After all this, the king would grant him leave, but the queen would not.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, expecting accusations, a rebuke. Instead, the queen’s gaze fell on him, not a glancing blow, but something soft, solid. They were a cyclone of green and gold, those eyes, like leaves caught in a fall breeze. Eyes that had not held his in weeks.

  “You are leaving, then,” she said, the words caught between question and observation.

  Kell held his ground. “I am, for now. The king has given me permission—”

  Emira was already shaking her head, an inward gesture as if trying to clear her own mind. There was something in her hands, a piece of fabric twisted in her grip. “It is poor luck,” she said, holding out the cloth, “to leave without a piece of home.”

  Kell stared at the offering. It was a square of crimson, the kind stitched to children’s tunics, embroidered with two letters: KM.

  Kell Maresh.

  He’d never seen it before, and he frowned, confused by that second initial. He’d never considered himself a Maresh. Rhy’s brother, yes, and once upon a time, their adopted son, but never this. Never family.

  He wondered if it was some kind of peace offering, newly fashioned, but the fabric looked old, worn by someone else’s touch.

  “I had it made,” said Emira, fumbling in a way she rarely did, “when you first came to the palace, but then I couldn’t … I didn’t think it was…” She trailed off, and tried again. “People break so easily, Kell,” she said. “A hundred different ways, and I was afraid … but you have to understand that you are … have always been…”

  This time, when she trailed off, she didn’t have the strength to start again, only stood there, staring down at the swatch of cloth, thumb brushing back and forth across the letters, and he knew this was the moment to reach out, or walk away. It was his choice.

  And it wasn’t fair—he shouldn’t have to choose—she should have come to him a dozen times, should have listened, should have, should have, but he was tired, and she was sorry, and in that moment, it was enough.

  “Thank you,” said Kell, accepting the square of cloth, “my queen.”

  And then, to his surprise, she reached out and placed her other hand against his face, the way she had so many times, when he’d returned from one of his trips, a silent question in her eyes. Are you all right?

  But now, the question altered, Will we be all right?

  He nodded once, leaning into her touch.

  “Come home,” she said softly.

  Kell found her gaze again. “I will.”

  He was the first to pull away, the queen’s fingers slipping from his jaw to his shoulder to his sleeve as he left. I will come back, he thought, and for the first time in a long time, he knew it was the truth.

  * * *

  Kell knew what he had to do next.

  And knew Lila wouldn’t be happy about it.

  He headed toward the royal cells, and was nearly there when he felt the gentle smoothing of his pulse, the blanket of calm around his shoulders that came with the priest’s presence. Kell’s steps faltered but didn’t stop as Tieren fell in step beside him. The Aven Essen said nothing, and the silence dragged like water around Kell’s limbs.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “I’m not running away.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “I’m not doing this because I want to go,” continued Kell. “I would never—” He stumbled over the words—there was a time when he would have, when he had. “If I thought the city would be safer with me in it—”

  “You’re hoping to lure the demon away.” It wasn’t a question.

  At last, Kell’s steps dragged to a stop. “Osaron wants, Tieren. It is his nature. Holland was right about that. He wants change. He wants power. He wants whatever isn’t. We made an offering, and he scorned it, tried to claim my life instead. He doesn’t want what he has, he wants to take what he doesn’t.”

  “And if he chooses not to follow you?”

  “Then you put the city to sleep.” Kell set off again, determined. “Deprive him of every puppet, every person, so that when we return with the Inheritor, he has no choice but to face us.”

  “Very well.…” said Tieren.

  “Is this where you tell me to be safe?”

  “Oh,” said the priest, “I think the time for that is gone.”

  They walked together, Kell stopping only when he reached the door that led down into the prison. He brought his hand to the wood, fingers splayed across the surface.

  “I keep wondering,” he said softly, “if all of it is my fault. Where does it start, Tieren?” He looked up. “With Holland’s choice, or with mine?”

  The priest looked at him, eyes bright within his tired face, and shook his head. For once, the old man didn’t seem to have the answer.

  II

  Delilah Bard did not like horses.

  She’d never liked them, not when she only knew them for their snapping teeth, and their flicking tails, and their stomping hooves, and not when she found herself on the back of one, the night racing past so fast it blurred around her, and not now as she watched a pair of silver-scarred guards saddle up three for their ride to the port.

  As far as she was concerned, nothing with so little brain should have so much force.

  Then again, she could say the same about half the tournament magicians.

  “If you look at animals like that,” said Alucard, clapping her on the shoulder, “it’s no wonder they hate you.”

  “Yes, well, then the feeling is mutual.” She glanced around. “No Esa?”

  “My cat dislikes horses almost as much as you do,” he said. “I left her in the palace.”

  “God help them all.”

  “Chatter chatter,” said Jasta in Arnesian, her mane of hair pulled back beneath a traveling hood. “Do you always prattle on in that high tongue?”

  “Like a songbird,” preened Alucard, looking around. “Where’s His Highness?”

  “I’m right here,” said Kell, without rising to the jab. And when Lila turned toward him, she saw why. He wasn’t al
one.

  “No,” she snarled.

  Holland stood a step behind Kell, flanked by two guards, his hands bound in iron beneath a grey half cloak. His eyes met hers, one a dazzling green, the other black. “Delilah,” he said by way of greeting.

  Beside her, Jasta went still as stone.

  Lenos turned white.

  Even Alucard looked uncomfortable.

  “Kers la?” growled Jasta.

  “What is he doing here?” echoed Lila.

  Kell’s brow furrowed. “I can’t leave him in the palace.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I won’t.” And with those two words, she realized it wasn’t only the palace’s safety he was worried about. “He comes with us.”

  “He’s not a pet,” she snapped.

  “See, Kell,” said Holland evenly. “I told you she wouldn’t like it.”

  “She’s not the only one,” muttered Alucard.

  Jasta snarled something too low and slurred for her to hear.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Kell, moving to unlock Holland’s manacles.

  Lila had a knife out before key touched iron. “He stays chained.”

  Holland held up his cuffed hands. “You do realize, Delilah, that these won’t stop me.”

  “Of course not,” she said with a feral grin. “But they’ll slow you down long enough that I can.”

  Holland sighed. “As you wish,” he said, just before Jasta slammed her fist into his cheek. His head snapped sideways and his boots slid back a step, but he didn’t fall.

  “Jasta!” called Kell as the other Antari flexed his jaw and spit a mouthful of blood into the dirt.

  “Anyone else?” asked Holland darkly.

  “I wouldn’t mind a go—” started Alucard, but Kell cut him off.

  “Enough,” he snapped, the ground rumbling faintly with the order. “Alucard, since you volunteered, Holland can ride with you.”

  The captain sulked at the assignment, even as he hauled the chained Antari up onto the horse.

  “Try anything…” he growled.

  “And you’ll kill me?” finished Holland dryly.

  “No,” said Alucard with a vicious smile. “I’ll let Bard have you.”

  Lenos saddled up with Jasta, this pairing just as comical, her massive frame making the sailor seem even smaller and more skeletal. He hinged forward and patted the horse’s flank as Kell swung up into his own saddle. He was infuriatingly elegant on horseback, with the regal posture that only came, Lila expected, from years of practice. It was one of those moments that reminded her—as if she could ever forget—that Kell was in so many ways a prince. She made a mental note to tell him sometime, when she was next particularly cross.

  “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand. And this time, when he pulled her up, he seated her before him instead of behind, one arm wrapping protectively around her waist.

  “Don’t stab me,” he whispered in her ear, and she wished it were full night so no one could see the color rising in her cheeks.

  She cast a last look up at the palace, the dark, distorted echo stretching like a shadow at its side.

  “What if Osaron follows us?” she asked.

  Kell glanced back. “If we’re lucky, he will.”

  “You’ve an odd notion of luck,” said Jasta, kicking her horse into motion.

  Lila’s own mount lurched forward beneath her, and so did her stomach. This is not how I die, she told herself as, in a thunder of hooves and fogging breath, the horses plunged into the night.

  III

  It was a palace fit for a king.

  Fit for a god.

  A place of promise, potential, power.

  Osaron strode through the great hall of his newest creation, his steps landing soundlessly on polished stone. The floor flickered beneath each stride, grass and blossom and ice born with every step, fading behind him like footsteps on sand.

  Columns rose up from the floor, growing more like trees than marble pillars, their stone limbs branching up and out, flowering with dark-hued glass and fall leaves and beads of dew, and in their shining columns he saw the world as it could be. So many possible transformations, such infinite potential.

  And there, at the heart of the great hall, his throne, its base throwing roots, its back surging into crownlike spires, its arms spread like an old friend waiting to be embraced. Its surface shone with an iridescent light, and as Osaron climbed the steps, mounted the platform, took his seat, the whole palace sang with the rightness of his presence.

  Osaron sat at the center of this web and felt the strings of the city, the mind of each and every servant tethered to his by threads of magic. A tug here, a tremor there, thoughts carrying like movement along a thousand lines.

  In each devoted life, a fire burned. Some flames were dull and small, barely kindling, while others shone bright and hot, and those he summoned now, called them forward from every corner of the city.

  Come, he thought. Kneel at my feet like children, and I will raise you. As men. As women. As chosen.

  Beyond the palace walls, bridges began to bloom like ice over the river, hands extended to usher them in.

  My king, they said, rising from their tables.

  My king, they said, turning from their work.

  Osaron smiled, savoring the echo of those words, until a new chorus interrupted them.

  My king, whispered his subjects, the bad ones are leaving.

  My king, they said, the bad ones are fleeing.

  The ones who dared to refuse you.

  The ones who dare defy you.

  Osaron steepled his fingers. The Antari were leaving London.

  All of them? he asked, and the echo came.

  All of them. All of them. All of them.

  Holland’s words came back to him, an unwelcome intrusion.

  “How will you rule without a head for your crown?”

  Words quickly swallowed by his clamoring servants.

  Shall we chase them?

  Shall we stop them?

  Shall we drag them down?

  Shall we bring them back?

  Osaron rapped his fingers on the arm of the throne. The gesture made no sound.

  Shall we?

  No, thought Osaron, his command rippling through the minds of thousands like a vibration along a string. He sat back in his sculpted throne. No. Let them go.

  If it was a trap, he would not follow.

  He did not need them.

  He did not need their minds, or their bodies.

  He had thousands.

  The first of those he’d summoned was entering the hall, a man striding toward him with a proud jaw and a head held high. He came to a stop before the throne, and knelt, dark head bowed.

  “Rise,” commanded Osaron, and the man obeyed. “What is your name?”

  The man stood, broad shouldered and shadow eyed, a silver ring in the shape of a feather circling one thumb.

  “My name is Berras Emery,” said the man. “How may I serve you?”

  IV

  Tanek came into sight shortly after dark.

  Alucard didn’t like the port, but he knew it well. For three years, it was as close to London as he’d dared to come. In many ways it was too close. The people here knew the name Emery, had an idea of what it meant.

  It was here he learned to be someone else—not a nobleman, but the jaunty captain of the Night Spire. Here he first met Lenos and Stross, at a game of Sanct. Here he was reminded, again and again and again, of how close—how far—he was from home. Every time he returned to Tanek, he saw London in the tapestries and trappings, heard it in the accents, smelled it in the air, that scent like woods in spring, and his body ached.

  But right now, Tanek seemed nothing like London. It was bustling in a surreal way, oblivious to the danger lurking inland. The berths were filled with ships, the taverns with men and women, the greatest danger a pickpocket or a winter chill.

  In the end, Osaron hadn’t taken their halfhear
ted bait, and so the shadow of his power had ended an hour back, the weight of it lifting like the air after a storm. The strangest thing, thought Alucard, was the way it stopped. Not suddenly, but slowly, over the course of a click, the spellwork tapering so that by the end of its reach, the few people they met had no shadows in their eyes, nothing but a bad feeling, an urge to turn back. Several times they passed travelers on the road who seemed lost, when in fact they’d simply waded to the edge of the spell, and stopped, repelled by a thing they couldn’t name, couldn’t remember.

  “Don’t say anything,” Kell had warned when they’d passed the first bunch. “The last thing we need is panic spreading beyond the capital.”

  A man and woman stumbled past now, arm in arm and laughing drunkenly.

  Word clearly hadn’t reached the port.

  Alucard hauled Holland down from the horse, setting him roughly on the ground. The Antari hadn’t said a word since they’d left, and the silence made Alucard nervous. Bard didn’t talk much either, but hers was a different kind of quiet, present, inquisitive. Holland’s silence hung in the air, made Alucard want to speak just to break it. Then again, maybe it was the man’s magic that set him on edge, silver threads splintering the air like lightning.

  They handed the horses off to a stablehand whose eyes widened at the royal emblem blazoned on the harnesses.

  “Keep your heads down,” said Kell as the boy led the mounts away.

  “We are hardly inconspicuous,” said Holland finally, his voice like rough-hewn rock. “Perhaps, if you unchained me—”

  “Not likely,” said Lila and Jasta, the same words overlapping in different tongues.

  The air had warmed a fraction despite the thickening dark, and Alucard was looking around for the source of that warmth when he heard the approach of armored boots and caught the gleam of metal.

  “Oh, look,” he said. “A welcome party.”

  Whether it was because of the royal horses or the sight of the strange entourage, a pair of soldiers was heading straight toward them.