Almost a year she’d lived in the castle, and Kosika still hadn’t learned the whole shape of the place. She knew there were four towers, and that she was in one. She knew her stairs led down and down and down, three landings, and three floors. She knew that on every floor below, there was a four-sided hall that went all the way around, touching the towers and studded with narrow windows that looked out onto the city. She knew the thirteen Vir stayed on the two floors beneath her, and that the bottom floor held the castle proper, with the throne room and half a dozen other halls, and also some of the guards. She knew there was another floor underground, for the kitchens and the castle servants.
She knew, but in the dark sometimes, she still got turned around, so she kept to the halls that bordered each floor, counted to make sure she touched all four sides and ended up back at her own tower. Tonight, she miscounted. Or perhaps she didn’t miscount. Perhaps she heard the whisper, or saw the light ghosting on the stairwell wall, and simply followed it up the tower steps.
When she reached the top, she saw a Vir.
In her mind, the thirteen Vir were like the little kol-kot statues Nasi had used, all of them more or less the same. Some were tall and others short, some dark-skinned and others pale, but in their silver armor and their half-cloaks, the ring pin at their shoulders, they blurred together in her mind, these chosen few, the members of the old king’s original guard.
This Vir stood before a kind of altar, a shrine placed before a door like the one that led to her own rooms. At first, she thought there was a second Vir in front of him, but then she realized it was a statue.
A statue of the old king.
His head was bowed, just like when she found him in the Silver Wood. But here, he was on his feet, a crown resting on his stone temples.
Kosika crept closer and saw that the altar in front of the statue had been draped in a silver cloak, just like the ones the Vir all wore, the same silver ring pin lying at its center. Candles stood around the ring, and she watched as the Vir lit them one by one, then knelt.
She thought of the soldiers in the Silver Wood. The way one of them fell to their knees before the old king’s body. This Vir didn’t fall, but he sank slowly down, and whispered, so softly she couldn’t hear the words, only the breathy sound they made.
When he spoke again, it was to her.
“Os, Kosika,” he said, and she jumped, fingers tensing around the little light in her palm, which went out. The Vir rose and looked at her. His hair was thick and dark, taking over his face like a thicket, from the heavy eyebrows that looked like soot smudged across his brow to the beard that shadowed his jaw.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Making devotions.”
Kosika drifted forward, and studied the statue of the old king. From this angle, she could see the shine of two polished gems set into the stone face, one green, the other black. They stood together for several moments, and the Vir didn’t talk. Kosika felt she shouldn’t either, but questions had always made her tongue itch.
“Who was he?”
“His name,” said the Vir, “was Holland Vosijk.”
“Holland Vosijk,” she echoed. When she said it, she tasted the sugar cube melting on her tongue. Felt grass tickling her fingers. She didn’t know much about the man she’d found in the Silver Wood, only that he had gone to sleep, and something in her had woken up.
“Tell me about him,” she said, and even though she was queen, she added, “please.”
The Vir smiled, his gaze still on the statue.
“Have you heard the story of the Someday King?”
* * *
“Once there was magic,” she told herself. “And it was everywhere…”
Kosika’s fingers trailed along the castle wall as she spoke, reciting the story to the stones, and the grass, and the sky. She could feel the rocks singing beneath her fingers, feel the ground humming under her bare feet, which she knew wasn’t fitting for a queen, but she didn’t care.
She was alone—but of course, she was not alone. She was never alone. A handful of Vir studied her from a balcony. The soldiers watched from atop the wall. Nasi glanced down, now and then, from the nearby tree where she was perched, reading a book on strategy and war.
“Once there was magic,” she began again, “and it was everywhere. But it was not equal…”
Every night for the last month, she’d met Serak—for that was the Vir’s name—at the top of the stairs, and every night, he told her the stories, and every day, she told them to herself, until she knew them all, inside and out. Stories of the time before, and the time after. Of the other three worlds, and what happened when they disappeared behind their doors. Of the way magic was bound, and the way it withdrew. Of the way the world began to wither.