The Fragile Threads of Power, page 22
“Sorry,” said Nero, slowing long enough to steady the new customer, and then he was gone, and the man was barreling toward her, something bundled against his chest.
“Haskin—” he started.
“—isn’t here,” she said. “But I can help you.” Tes was about to go into her speech, about the clocks and locks and household trinkets, but the words died on her lips when she saw the threads in the air around the man.
They were … decaying.
The man couldn’t be much older than Nero, but he looked awful. At first she thought he must be sick, but she’d seen sick people before, the light in their threads dimming with their health. This was different. Like poison spreading through roots. Or a curse.
She recoiled as he dumped the bundle onto the counter between them.
“Need you—to fix.” He stumbled over the words, his hands shaking as he unwrapped the parcel on the counter, revealing splintered wood and warped metal, not so much an object as a collection of parts. Whatever it was—or had been once—it was very broken.
Tes hesitated. She didn’t want to touch it, in case it was the source of the man’s sickness. She had seen cursed objects before, threads dripping with the oily sheen of tainted magic, the air around them bruised, the strings crumbling with rot. But the threads above the broken thing were splintered, not rotten.
Unlike the customer, who seemed to be getting worse by the moment. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose, and there were bruised hollows beneath his eyes.
“What is it?” she asked, but he wouldn’t say, only muttered the words on her shop door.
“Once broken, soon repaired.”
Tes folded her arms. “You want me to fix a thing, without knowing what it is or what it was meant to do?”
“It’s broken,” he wheezed. “That’s what it is. It’s meant to be whole. Can you fix it or not?”
That was a good question. She’d yet to find something she couldn’t fix, but then, she usually knew how it was meant to work. And yet, in theory at least, the threads would tell her. If she could read the pattern. If she could reconstruct it.
It would be a challenge. But Tes loved a challenge.
She gestured at the mound of parts. “Is this everything?” she asked, and the stranger hesitated.
“Everything you need,” he said, which wasn’t the same thing, but he clearly wasn’t well, and she didn’t need him fainting in her shop.
“I’ll do it,” Tes said. “Eight lin. Half up front.”
The man didn’t argue. He fumbled in his pockets, pulled out a handful of loose coins. They were all lin, red metal printed with a small gold star, and yet he plucked them out of his palm one at a time, holding each coin to the light as if to check its value before setting it on the counter.
Tes produced a black ticket, a gold H on one side and a number on the other, and slid it across the table so she didn’t have to touch him. In case it was the kind of curse that spread.
Her eyes were already drifting back to the parcel, the pieces, her mind racing ahead when he asked, “When will it be ready?”
“When it’s ready,” she said, and then, seeing the fear and panic that swept across his sickly face, she added, “Come back in three days.”
She would know by then if she could fix it, or not.
His head jerked like a puppet’s. “Three—days.” He seemed loath to leave the bundle, broken as it was. He backed away from her, as Nero had done, but there was no ease, no charm, only a cord drawn taut. And then it snapped, and he was gone.
Tes got up and followed in his wake, turning the sign to CLOSED and locking the door, despite the early hour. She scarfed down the remaining dumplings, and brewed a pot of strong black tea, and sat down before the stack of broken parts. She cracked her knuckles, and rolled her neck, and bundled the curls on top of her head.
“Well,” she said to the dead owl at her elbow. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Part Four
THE OPEN DOOR
I
Lila’s luggage hit the floor with a heavy thud.
“You know what I love?” she said, looking around. “You can change the name on the sign and the number of stairs. You can change the color of the walls and the view beyond the window. But no matter how many worlds you cross, a tavern inn is still a tavern inn.” She took a deep breath. “Sawdust and stale ale. Always makes me feel at home.”
Kell turned in a slow circle, taking in their room at the Setting Sun.
“Ir cas il casor,” he said. To each their own.
But in truth, he understood the point.
He had kept a room of his own here once, years before. It had been a respite—from palace life, and the weight of the king’s attention—but also a place to keep the things he’d picked up on his travels.
And no wonder it felt familiar to Lila as well. After all, nearly a decade ago, Lila had lived in a room on this very spot, albeit in another world. The Setting Sun stood in the same place as the Stone’s Throw in Grey London, the Scorched Bone in White.
Fixed points. That’s how Kell had always thought of them, those rare places where the worlds perfectly lined up, so that what existed physically in one also existed in another, as if called into being by the echo. A bridge at the same bend in the river. A well on the same hill. A tavern on the same corner.
In those places, the walls between the worlds were thin—at least they had always felt that way to him—and as Kell stood in the center of the floor, he imagined that if he looked up, he would see the pale ribs of the Scorched Bone; that if he took a step, the boards would groan over Ned Tuttle’s head; imagined he could feel those other places, the rain beyond the windows, the chill beneath the door, the shadow of something at the edge of his senses. Kell shivered, sure that he could feel—
A latch scraped free, dragging his attention back to the little room.
Lila had flung the window open. Beyond the peaked rooftops and carriage-filled roads, the Isle’s red glow reflected up against the low clouds as day faded into night. Somewhere in the port, the Grey Barron rocked in the gentle tide, tethered in its berth.
Kell fell back onto the bed, wincing as his body struck the stiff pallet. “And to think,” he muttered, “we chose this over the palace.”
Lila rested her boot on the wooden chest. “You could stay in the palace.”
“I could,” he said. Then, tucking his hands behind his head, “You could stay on the ship.”
“I could,” she said.
“So why don’t you?”
Lila looked up at the ceiling, and he thought she would tell the truth, then, spill the words she hated to say, the ones he needed to hear, that her place was with him as his was with her. But she only shrugged and said, “I can’t stand to be on a stationary ship, chained like a beast to the dock. Makes me feel trapped.” She turned toward the bed, cocking her head as her gaze raked over him.
“This reminds me,” she said, “of the night we met. Do you remember?”
“When you robbed me, and then used the stolen magic to conjure a double who tried to kill you?” Kell crossed his ankles. “How could I forget?”
She waved her hand. “I meant after the robbery, and before the spell. When I bound you to a bed.” A glint in her eye. “Just like this one.”
“Lila, don’t,” he said, but it was too late. The wood was already peeling away from the frame. He tried to sit up, but it wrapped around his wrists like fingers, and forced him back against the narrow cot.
Lila Bard smiled, and sank onto the edge of the bed.
“Let me go,” warned Kell, but her hand settled on his chest, the gesture firm, fingers splayed, as if laying claim to the body beneath. She met his gaze, and he couldn’t believe he’d ever thought those eyes a matching set. One was vivid, alive, the other flat. The difference between an open window and a locked door.
She leaned down until her hair grazed his cheek. Until her mouth hovered over his. His chest rose and fell beneath her palm.
“Let me go,” he said again, his voice dropping low. And this time, she did. But when the binds crumbled from his wrists, Kell didn’t pull away. He reached up, threading his fingers through her hair.
“Why didn’t you stay on the ship?” he asked again, because now and then, it was not enough to dance around the truth. He wanted to hear her say it. Even if she did not wear the ring. He wanted to know that she chose to be here, with him.
Lila held his gaze so long he could have counted the shards of light in her good eye. And then, at last, almost grudgingly, she said, “Because the bed would feel empty. Without you in it.”
Kell felt his mouth tug into a smile. But before he could savor the words, she was up again, and across the narrow room, a knife in one hand and a slip of paper in the other.
“Get changed,” she said. “I doubt Kay would be welcome at court.”
Kell rolled up to his feet. He went to the basin and filled it from a pitcher. The water came out warm, thanks to a spell etched into the spout, and Kell washed his face, and ran a wet hand through his copper hair. He smelled strongly of salt and sea, and had no doubt Rhy would comment on it.
He shrugged out of his coat, and turned it inside out, from left to right, and so Kay’s black mantle fell away, replaced by one Kell hadn’t worn in months—an elegant red coat, gold buttons running down the front. The edges were trimmed in gold thread and the inside was lined with gold silk, and the whole thing smelled of palace candles and sweet floral soap. It was a coat that belonged to Kell Maresh, famed Antari, prince of Arnes, brother to the king.
It was a coat that no longer felt like it fit.
Technically, of course, it always would. Every one of the coat’s many sides were perfectly tailored to his body. It was in the magic threaded through the garment so that even when Kell’s body broadened at sea, new muscles winding over lean limbs thanks to hours of training with his swords, the coat had let itself out across the back, and drawn in at the waist, shaping itself easily to his new form.
And yet, as the crimson mantle settled on Kell’s shoulders, it felt all wrong.
He felt wrong within it.
In the mirror over the basin, a ghost stared back. Eyes mismatched, and haunted. Jaw hardened and cheeks hollowed. A single pale streak, like a scar, through his copper hair.
Across the room, Lila drove the dagger she was holding into the wall, pinning the slip of paper there. On it was a symbol, one of the first he’d ever done, a simple circle cut through by a cross. A shortcut. Antari magic could take a person to the same place in different worlds, or different places in the same one. But the latter required a marker.
“Remind me again,” said Lila, “why we couldn’t use your brother’s ring?”
A marker—or a token. The first would take you to a place, the other to a person.
“Because,” said Kell, “I know better than to walk in on Rhy unannounced.” It had been nearly a year since their last visit, and they’d made the mistake that time of traveling directly to the king. They had ended up standing in his private chambers, and Kell had seen far more of Alucard Emery than he’d ever wanted to.
Lila shrugged, and set to work, drawing her thumb along the knife’s edge, just deep enough to cut. She used the blood to copy the symbol onto the wall, but he could tell her mind was elsewhere.
“Still thinking of the night we met?”
He’d been joking, but she didn’t laugh. “I think about it often,” she said as her touch whispered against the wall. “When Holland found me, you already had the stone. There was no reason for you to come back.”
“It wasn’t your fight,” said Kell. “He was using you to get to me.”
“Still,” she said. “It only worked because you let it.”
“Yes. I did.” And then, “Good thing you came back for me, too.”
Lila tilted her head, examining her work. “Indeed.”
He paused, leaning on the basin. It must be the room, or the red light of the Isle, but he was feeling nostalgic. “Why did you?”
“Well, I had so much fun with Holland the first time, I thought—”
“Lila.”
She tugged the knife from the wall. “I supposed I owed you. I got away that night because you took my place. I had lost the fight. You know how I hate losing. Turns out I hate it even more when someone else is losing for me. Now,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“No.”
Lila smiled. “Good.”
He joined her at the wall. She tugged at the collar of his coat, then reached up and ruffled his copper hair so it fell in messy curls around his face. Then she took his hand, and placed her other on the symbol.
“As Tascen.”
The world didn’t tear open.
It simply fell away.
It didn’t hurt, not as it did when Kell performed a spell himself, but it felt wrong, as if he were a passenger, dragged along in the wake of someone else’s magic.
Then the world took shape again, and the Setting Sun was gone, replaced by the royal palace. Kell reached out and steadied himself against a tapestried wall, waiting for the shallow wave of dizziness to pass before he followed Lila out of the alcove and into his royal chambers. He looked around, at the bed heaped high with pillows, the golden tray balanced on the sofa’s edge, the balcony giving way to crimson dusk.
Home.
The word rose up like bile. He forced it down.
This room belonged to a different Kell, the one whose coat no longer fit. The one who had sat at a gilded table downstairs, trying to teach Rhy magic, the one for whom it came as easily as air. And standing there, amid the memories, he flinched, because of how badly he wanted to be that Kell again. To have that life back. But it was gone.
He had become someone else. By necessity, not choice.
And yet, this place called him back. Wrapped its arms around him in a strange embrace, and made promises it couldn’t keep.
Kell went to the bed, ran a hand over the silk pillows. It had been nearly a year since he’d last set foot in this room, and yet, it looked as though he’d only just left. The hearth was clean, and waiting to be lit. Books sat exactly where he’d left them, their covers free of dust. A pitcher of clean water waited by a marble basin. He imagined Rhy giving the orders, imagined servants drawing the curtains back each day, and returning them each night, going through the motions as if his brother might arrive at any moment.
Kell heard the bedroom doors swing open, and turned in time to see Lila vanish into the hall, followed moments later by the sound of armor as bodies scrambled into motion.
“Sanct,” he muttered, hurrying after. He reached the hall, and found three soldiers squaring off, blocking Lila’s way. At the sight of Kell they dropped their swords and sank into a bow, three plated knees striking the floor like bells.
“Well, that’s just rude,” muttered Lila, crossing her arms.
“Mas vares,” said the oldest guard, without looking up.
“Welcome back,” added the second, who looked to be his age.
The youngest of the three had clearly never seen Kell Maresh in the flesh, because he paled, and instead of bowing his head, looked straight at Kell’s eyes, his expression a rigid mix of awe and fear.
“Aven,” the young guard whispered under his breath, a blessing that might as well have been a curse.
Kell gestured for them all to rise, and said, “Where is the king?”
“In his rooms,” said the oldest, before turning to Lila. “Apologies, mas arna,” he added as they stood aside, and Kell could almost hear Lila’s teeth clenching at the term. My lady. The lights in the hall flared brighter.
Kell made it to the door first, knocking before Lila could barge in. Moments later, it swung open, and there stood Alucard Emery, slouched like a cat in the doorway, shirt open and brassy hair hanging loose around his face.
His dark blue eyes raked over Kell, and his mouth twitched into an arrogant smirk.
“I didn’t order this!” he called to the guards over Kell’s shoulder. “Send it back.”
Kell scowled, and it was a good thing then, that magic no longer rushed to meet his mood. Instead, his hand drifted to the blade at his hip as Alucard looked to Lila, the smirk blooming into a genuine smile. “Bard. You can come in.”
And then Rhy was there, pushing his lover aside, and flinging his arms around Kell’s shoulders.
“Brother,” said Rhy, holding him tight. And unlike the coat, and all the other trappings of Kell’s old life, this one, at least, still fit.
II
Rhy Maresh was on top of the world.
At least, that’s how it felt. In truth, he was perched on the sloping roof over his rooms, one leg drawn up, a bottle of silver wine balanced on his knee, and his brother at his side.
If he leaned forward far enough to look down over the edge, he’d be able to see his balcony below, the light spilling out his bedroom doors. If he looked straight out, he could see the entire city, a sprawling sea of glass and wood and stone divided by the brilliant crimson light of the Isle. And if he looked up, he saw only sky. Low clouds stained red, or the orb of the moon, or, on a dark night, the scattered light of stars.
Ask anyone in London, and they would tell you the best views of the city were those that looked onto the arching palace—but that was because they would never see this one.
A spire rose into a gleaming golden peak at his back, and beneath him, the roof splayed out like the bottom of a too-long cloak. It sloped, but gently—a bottle might roll off, but a body wouldn’t—and it was wide enough for two grown men to stretch out, side by side, without their heads touching the spire or their heels grazing air.
One night, when Rhy had been eleven or twelve, he’d persuaded Kell to modify his balcony’s wall, to draw grips out of the stone, handholds that could be hidden by the ivy that flowered on the wall. After that, this spot became their secret, their hidden escape.
Or so they thought, until Maxim Maresh’s voice boomed up from the balcony one night, promising that if the brothers valued their heads, they would climb down at once.
