Of the many kings and queens who tried to force it back into the world, and failed, because they did not understand: a thing taken by force would always be a pale shadow of something given freely.
Of the challengers who rose, all claiming to be the Someday King, the legendary figure who would call the magic home, and how the magic refused them one by one, because they gave nothing of themselves.
And then, of Holland Vosijk.
Holland, who did not want the throne, but helped his friend Vortalis to it, Vortalis who was slain one night by Astrid and Athos Dane, who captured Holland, and branded him with magic and bound him into service, and made him wear the mark of his own capture on his cloak.
Serak told her of the Danes, how they held the throne for seven years, before they too were killed, and Holland had disappeared, and when he returned it was not as a servant, but as a claimant to the empty throne. How the few who stood against Holland fell like wheat beneath the scythe of his most devoted, Ojka, who was a Vir before they were called Vir, and when he took the throne, how he did not try to force the magic, to bind it to him, it simply came. The river thawed, and the color flooded into the world like a blush into cold cheeks, and all knew, then, that Holland was the Someday King.
Up in her nearby tree, Nasi turned the page. She had heard all the stories by now. Kosika told them to her every night, and when she learned that Nasi had been there, in the castle, that she had met Holland, first as the servant and then as the Someday King himself, well, she had wanted to know everything.
“What was he like?” Kosika asked again now, and Nasi looked up from her book.
“I didn’t know him any better than you.”
“But you saw him…” And Kosika wanted to say alive, but she hadn’t told anyone, even Nasi, of that day in the Silver Wood.
She’d almost told Serak once—for all the stories he’d given her, she didn’t have any of her own. She knew he’d believe her, it wasn’t that, but that encounter felt like something that lived only between her and the dead king. A light cupped in their hands. She wanted to keep it there.
“How did he seem?” she pressed.
Nasi looked off into the distance, as if trying to remember. At last, she offered up a single word. “Lonely.”
She waited for the older girl to say more, but Nasi went back to her book, and Kosika drifted away from the wall and the tree, and took up her story again, reciting it like a prayer, tracing the words as if they were as string, a ribbon, a road. And at some point, Kosika looked up, and realized she had wandered around the side of the castle and was standing at the edge of the statue court.
It was a gruesome sight, a stretch filled by the bound and twisted forms of the kings and queens who’d climbed to the throne, and fallen from it. Serak told her they were only sculpted tributes, but Nasi insisted that they were real people, turned to stone. That the Danes had started the awful court, to make an example of anyone who tried to stand against them. Kosika didn’t know if Nasi was being truthful or just teasing, but she stopped before the twins, Astrid bound on her knees, Athos on his feet, being eaten by a massive snake. She leaned in and wondered if they were in there, caught forever at the edge of death.
There was no statue of Holland in the courtyard yet, but the space had been made, the path changed so that anyone who came through the gate and crossed the court to the palace stairs would be confronted by him.
She looked around. She’d heard some call the statue court a garden, but there were no flowers anywhere. The London air had warmed, and the river no longer froze, but the castle grounds were still sparse, the ground unyielding. Kosika had never seen a garden, not in real life. Only in books, pictures of thick grass and wild blooms, and once, in a painting Serak showed her, a painting of the city, the way it must have been in the times before.
Kosika knelt and pressed her palm to the dark soil, remembering how the ground had felt beneath the old king’s body. Lush as velvet. She knew, now, that Holland’s magic ran through her veins.
She was his heir.
And she wanted a garden.
Kosika had no knife on her, but she searched and found a bit of broken stone around the turned-up earth, brushed away the dirt, and brought it to the inside of her arm. She pushed down, dragged the jagged edge across her skin until blood welled.
It hurt, but it was supposed to hurt. Give, and take—that was the nature of Antari magic.
All she needed was the word. The spells had come to her strangely, not all at once, but one by one, appearing only as she needed them. So far, she had learned the words to open, and to close, to light, and to heal.