“Your power is strong,” said Vir Serak. “But even you have limits.”
“I had to do something,” she said. “We have roused the magic from its sleep, but it is weak. I felt its need. I felt its thirst.”
“That may be,” said Serak, “but there is not enough blood in your veins to water this world.”
Kosika sat up a little straighter.
“Then perhaps,” she said, “we can water it together.”
IV
NOW
The tithe road ended at the Silver Wood.
Around the grove, the people of London stood gathered and waiting, their final bounty in their bandaged hands. It was a bag of seeds, the pouch spelled so that when planted with the rest, no matter the season, the seeds inside would grow. Another reminder of why they made this trek each season, of why they had been asked to bleed.
The crowd seemed somber, and she wondered if word had reached them of the would-be killer in the square, if that was why they bowed their heads so low when their queen went by.
Kosika walked into the waiting woods, and paused, smiling up at the pale trees. Overnight, it seemed, their leaves had turned from green to gold, begun falling in haloes on the ground below.
She made her way to where the third and final altar stood, not deep within the trees, but just inside the forest’s edge, nestled among the silver trunks so that pale wood bled right into pale stone.
The third and final statue of Holland Vosijk stood on a raised block flush with the basin, so that when the bowl was full, as it was now, he seemed to walk atop the blood instead of wading through it. He no longer wore his crown but held it in his hands, his head tipped back, his gaze turned to the canopy, and the waiting sky. A thicket of branches tangled around his cloak, so that he seemed part of the Silver Wood, or it a part of him.
“Once, a servant,” said Kosika, standing before the altar, “then a king.” She drew her knife. “At last, a saint.”
She made a third cut on the inside of her arm, the deepest yet, and watched her blood join the pool until it brimmed, threatening to overtake the edge. She stared down into the surface, waiting for it to smooth, then touched the basin’s glass side and said the words. The altar walls gave way, soaking into the roots of the Silver Wood, the dark stain spreading farther up her once-white cloak.
The third tithe done, the citizens began to turn away, retreating down the path and into the streets, making their way home.
But Kosika lingered, her gaze trained on the trees ahead. A thousand eyes stared back, unblinking, from the narrow trunks, and it was hard to think that she had ever been afraid of this place.
She moved past the statue. Into the woods.
* * *
FOUR YEARS AGO
“Once, there was magic,” Serak began, “and it was everywhere.”
Normally, the alcove burned with candles, but that night, only one was lit, its small, unsteady flame casting jagged shadows onto the walls, and the statue, and the Vir.
“Magic was everywhere, but it was not equal.”
As he spoke, his hand drifted, as it always did, to the seal at his shoulder, the silver cloak clasp, a ring driven through by a bar. It was the same seal that lay on the altar, and she knew now, it was the same one Holland had worn when he served the Danes, the same one Athos burned into his skin to bind him. The Vir wore it to show that they had bound themselves to Holland’s legacy.
“It burned like a hearth fire set in the center of a house, heating one room first, and then the next one, and so on, its warmth and light growing weaker the farther that it must reach. Black London was the first room, the one closest to the flame. And we were the next. And then two more followed after, farther from the heat, but still within the house.”
Serak took a candle and set it on the altar.
“But the flame became too strong, and Black London began to burn.” He took up a lantern. “And instead of standing near a hearth, our world now stood beside a conflagration. And so the worlds decided to close their doors to stop the fire’s spread.” He set a lantern over the candle. “But even after the fire was contained again, the people here were still afraid.”
The lantern had four thin glass walls, all of them open, but as Serak spoke, he began to close the sides.
“We looked out at our magic, and feared it would grow too hot, too hungry.”
He closed the first side.
“And so we trapped it.”
He closed the second.
“We built cages.”
He closed the third.
“We bound it to us.”
He closed the fourth and final wall, trapping the flame within the airless glass.