Kosika watched his blood spread across the stones and thought, What a waste. She looked up, and saw Serak’s eyes on her.
An understanding passed between them, and then Serak spoke, loud and clear.
“Kos och var.”
The words were taken up and carried through the hall.
Kos och var. Kos och var. Kos och var.
All hail the queen.
V
RED LONDON
NOW
“How long is this going to take?”
It was after midnight. Tes’s eyes burned and her head ached, and for the last hour she’d been harboring the fragile hope that if she took long enough, the killers might get bored enough to let down their guard and give her a chance to escape.
But the man with the butcher’s block face was still pacing the shop, palming half-fixed pieces of magic, and the woman with the crested braid hadn’t moved from her chair, those flat grey eyes hanging on Tes.
Until Vares twitched.
The owl had been still as—well, a normal skeleton—as if he could sense the danger in the room, but the question had stirred the spellwork in him. He ruffled his bone wings, swiveled his head.
The woman’s eyes flicked sideways. The edge of her mouth quirked into something like a smile. “Kers la?” she asked, reaching toward the owl. He responded by pecking her fingers. Her smile sharpened. “What a clever bit of magic.”
She flexed her hand as she said it, and the metal wire running through the owl shivered.
“Don’t,” said Tes, a single pleading word. And maybe it was the way she said it, or simply the fact that her hands stopped moving, that made the woman let go of the little owl, her gaze dropping back to the box sitting disemboweled on the counter. It was a tangle of magic, a snarl of strings, made messier by the chaos of the surrounding shop, but Tes didn’t dare put on her blotters. She couldn’t afford to narrow her gaze, couldn’t afford to forget the other bodies in the room, even as the headache bloomed.
Despite the audience, Tes didn’t bother masking her power, or pretending to use tools, didn’t bother with anything but her eyes and her hands as she drew her fingers through the air, shaped the spellwork around the box into something she could use.
The man slumped against the door, looking bored. The woman leaned forward in the chair, her fingers rapping on the metal cuff, the only sound in the shop.
“What’s your name?” asked Tes, when she couldn’t bear the quiet. The woman raised a dark brow. “I told you mine,” she added weakly.
The woman’s mouth twitched again. “Bex,” she said, the sound sliding through her teeth. “That walking lump of shit over there is Calin.”
Tes kept her hands moving. “You don’t like him.”
“What gave it away?”
“But you’re here as partners.”
The scarred man—Calin—snorted. “Wouldn’t say that.”
Bex considered her words. “At the moment, we share an employer.”
“I thought assassins worked alone.”
Bex’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a little too sharp,” she mused. “If you’re not careful, it’ll get you cut.” She stood, and stretched, the bones in her neck cracking audibly. “Now do your job, or I’ll do mine.”
Tes surprised herself by bristling at the threat. “Why should I? You’ll kill me either way.”
“Sure,” said Calin, “but if you make it quick, so will we.”
Her boldness cracked, and fear got in.
“Look at it this way,” said Bex, resting her elbows on the counter. “I wasn’t hired to kill you, and I don’t make a habit of doing work for free.”
Tes wanted to believe her—might have, if Bex were there alone—but Calin had the look of a man who’d killed plenty of people, just because he could.
“Don’t worry about him,” said Bex, as if reading her mind. “Worry about me. Worry about that,” she added, pointing to the box on the counter.
So that’s what Tes did.
What, in truth, she’d been doing for hours.
Tes kept her eyes on her hands, forced herself not to glance at the echo of the door that still hovered in the air to Calin’s left, its edges burning. She wondered if they couldn’t see it at all, or simply weren’t looking.
At least they couldn’t see what she was doing.
If they’d been able to see the threads of magic, they would have noticed that she had braided pale gold lines of air upon air upon air together inside the wooden frame. It was a blunt but effective piece of work—one she almost ruined when Calin, having abandoned his place by the door, knocked a giant metal box of scrap to the floor.