A dark feeling coiled in his stomach. “Nadiya—”
“Those rings allowed the Antari to do it once,” she went on. “Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they respond only to Antari. Which severely limits their application. I couldn’t modify them, so I had to start from scratch. Here,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
And before he could say no, she wound the gold chain around his wrist. Alucard shivered at the cold weight of the metal on his skin, the way it wrapped against itself, the echo of old chains. He waited, but felt nothing else change.
“How does it work?” he asked, as Nadiya took up the smaller length of chain and wrapped it around her index finger, where it bound to itself, becoming a gold ring.
She said nothing to activate the spell, only flexed her hand, as if admiring the bauble. But as she did, Alucard felt the gold chain tighten around his wrist, and become a cuff, flush with his skin, a band with no beginning and no end.
Nadiya flashed him a performer’s smile. “Let me show you.”
She crooked her fingers, and as she did, Alucard felt something come loose inside him. It was the strangest sensation, a collapsing inward, a weight dropping, if the weight were his lungs, his heart, everything that took up space beneath his skin. A dizzy lightness, a sudden, shocking hollow. And he didn’t know what was missing, what was gone, until the air around Nadiya’s hand began to ripple. Until the teacup rose and the contents spun out and the three elements churned together above her palm—wind, and earth, and water.
Even though Nadiya had only ever been a fire worker.
Those were his elements, his magic, or they had been. Alucard caught his own reflection in a mirrored surface, and saw the air around him bare of color, the blue and green and amber threads of his magic now twining through the air around Nadiya instead, braiding with the red of her power.
He tried to pull the magic back, only to find he couldn’t reach it. There was nothing to grab on to. It simply … wasn’t there.
“Give it back,” he demanded, clawing uselessly at the gold around his wrist.
“That’s the trouble,” she said, eyes trained on the twisting elements above her palm. “It is much easier to take a thing than share it.”
Alucard felt sick. The way he had his first days at sea, when the deck tipped and bobbed beneath his feet. He threw out a hand to steady himself. “Nadiya.”
But she went on, as if she weren’t holding his stolen magic in her hand. “Ideally, the power would go both ways. Shared equally between its users. As you can tell, right now, it’s one-directional.” She looked around the workshop. “Interesting,” she said. “I still can’t see the way you do.”
“Nadiya, stop.” The words came out soft and hoarse, and her attention flicked back to Alucard, as if she’d forgotten him entirely.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, touching the ring, and it unraveled again, the short gold chain dropping into her palm; the elements she’d controlled a moment before now crumbled and fell away. The cuff went slack around Alucard’s wrist, and violently he shook off the adornment, as if it were a snake, the gold rope chiming faintly when it hit the floor.
He could feel his magic pour back in as if he were a vessel, emptied and refilled. It churned with his shock and anger and for a second he was torn between charging the queen, and getting as far away from her as he could.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded as she knelt to retrieve the fallen length of gold.
The queen looked at him, perplexed. “Come now, Alucard,” she said, returning both pieces to the table. “It was only a test.”
“You weren’t the one chained.” He straightened, flexing his fingers, studying the threads of magic in the air above his skin. “You had no right to do that.”
Nadiya sighed, impatient. “I thought it would be easier to demonstrate than to explain.” She took up a narrow piece of chalk and began to make notes on the edge of the cloth. “As I said, it isn’t finished. When I’m done, the spell will always go both ways, to ensure consent.”
“There is a reason power has limits,” he said.
The queen clicked her tongue. “You sound like the Aven Essen. Ezril is always coming down here, lecturing me about the balance of magic, the flow of power. As if all we’re capable of is floating down the stream. Sometimes you have to bend the rules—”
“This isn’t bending, Nadiya. This is binding. And in the wrong hands—”