And then Lark poked her in the side.
“Have you heard the news?” he said. “The king is dead.”
And as soon as she heard the words, she just knew.
Knew that the body she’d found in the Silver Wood the day before, the man slumped against the tree as if asleep, the one with the grass growing beneath his hands, was the king. She knew it in her bones, and in her fingertips where they had touched his, and behind her ribs, an ache like sadness.
She’d gone back to the Silver Wood first thing that morning. By then, the man’s body was gone, but she could still find the right spot because the grass was still there. More than that, it had spread, like a puddle, overnight, and she had lain down on it, in it, the tender blades brushing her cheek. She thought of the soldier sobbing.
“What happened?” she asked, surprised to find her eyes burning, her voice tight.
Lark shrugged. “What always happens to kings, I guess. Someone must have killed him.”
But Kosika knew that wasn’t true. She’d seen him, in those fine-cut clothes, that silver half-cloak, and there had been no blood, no wound. He didn’t look as if he’d been struck down. He’d looked peaceful. A tired body searching for a moment’s rest.
“It’s going to get bad again,” Lark mused, watching as a pair of soldiers passed by below their perch. And he was probably right. It was always bad, after someone killed a king. Even if he hadn’t been killed, and no one came forward to claim they’d done it, there was now an empty throne, and who knew how many people would try to take it. In the end, it would go to the strongest, or the most brutal, and either way, it could take a while.
Kosika closed her eyes, sadness pooling in her chest.
Life had just started to get better. There was warmth in the air. She imagined the cold seeping back in, the magic slipping away again, and shivered.
She dug her fingers into the wall, and it was strange, but she swore the stone was humming faintly beneath her hands. She frowned, pressing her palms flat.
“Do you feel that?” she asked, but Lark wasn’t listening. He was counting out coins on the wall between them, the profit from the amulets she’d found yesterday morning. The sound of the metal clink clink clinking made her stomach turn, but as soon as he was done, Kosika grabbed them—five silver tols. Enough to buy bread and cheese and meat for a week. Enough to feed her mother as well, Kosika thought, before she remembered why she’d been in the Silver Wood. She hadn’t told Lark about that. She knew she’d been lucky to start out with a mother, even a bad one—he didn’t have anyone, and he’d gotten by. She would, too.
Kosika shoved the coins in her pocket, frowning at the way the metal sang against her skin, the silver going warm, almost soft, as if it might melt. She felt a little dizzy, and when Lark hopped down from the wall, and reached back up to help her, she shook her head, and said she’d stay a little longer.
“Oste,” he called over his shoulder, jogging away.
“Oste,” she called back.
They never planned when or where they would meet again. They didn’t have to. He’d come find her, or she’d go find him. Kosika’s gaze drifted over the city, and she started counting the boats on the Sijlt. She’d gotten up to nine before she heard the scream.
Her head whipped around. The sound was close, close enough to make the hair prickle on the back of her neck, to make her skin tighten and her blood tell her to run—not toward the trouble, never toward—but as Kosika hopped down from the wall, another scream split the air, and she knew that voice, even though she’d never heard it in that shape, never heard it so full of pain or terror.
Lark.
She took off in the direction he’d just gone, the same direction of the scream, rounded the corner, the road splitting into three, and even though the voice bounced off the walls, she knew where it was coming from, could feel it, like a string drawn taut between them. She took a sharp right, and there was Lark, fighting with all his strength, even though a chain was wrapped around his wrists. He’d always seemed so big to Kosika, so tall, but he was so much shorter than the two men attacking him, so much smaller than the fist that crashed against his cheek.
“No!” she shouted as his body buckled to the street. One of the men turned toward her, and her heart lurched in her chest as she recognized him from her mother’s house, the rope tattoo on his left hand, his body all gristle and grease.
The collector smiled.
“Well, well,” he said, a second length of metal hanging from one hand.