Holland sighed, soft, almost soundless. “Perhaps you are expecting too much.”
Kosika turned toward him. “What do you mean?”
He was quiet for several moments, and though one eye was black and one green, somehow, they both seemed to darken. “Only that you are young, and I am … a shadow of myself. We have done much, and if the city grows no stronger—”
“No,” she snapped.
“It is better than it was.”
“A candle is better than the dark,” she said. “But it is not enough to warm your hands by. Not enough to banish the cold from your hearth. And not enough to light a city.”
Holland considered her. A ghost of a smile flickered across his face. “So stubborn, little queen. But you cannot build a fire like that from will alone.”
Kosika brought the bandage to her arm but paused, considering the three lines. “The other worlds…”
Holland’s mouth tightened. “Do not think of them.”
“You wanted me to, once.”
“I was wrong,” he said simply. “Those worlds have brought ours nothing but strife. Besides, power is not a parcel to be carried home, and so long as the walls stand, and the doors are shut fast, magic will not flow between.” He touched her arm, fingers ghosting hers as they tied the clean bandage around the fresh cuts. “What good does it do, to covet what you cannot have? I have watched kings and queens ruin themselves for less. No,” he said softly. “Let us tend our own flame, and trust that in time, the heat will be enough.”
She studied the place where his hand hovered on her skin, and swore she could feel its weight.
* * *
ONE YEAR AGO
There was a room behind the altar.
Kosika had spent so many nights in the alcove, studying the statue of Holland Vosijk while Serak told her tales, and yet she’d forgotten that the recess stood in a tower identical to hers, and that, behind it, there was a door. She’d forgotten—until one night the candlelight caught on the wood behind the statue, and ever since it was all Kosika could think of, that door, and where it led.
But she knew, of course.
Even before Kosika stole up the tower steps one stormy afternoon, as rain battered the castle walls. Even before she ducked into the alcove, slipped into the narrow gap between the altar and the door. She knew there was only one place it could lead.
To the last king’s chamber.
Holland’s room.
She held her breath, and turned the handle, but the door held firm, didn’t so much as jostle in a lock. Which meant it had been sealed somehow. Like a tomb. Kosika shoved her hand in her pocket, felt the triangle of steel she kept there, the size and shape of an arrowhead. She pressed her thumb to the tip until it broke the skin, blood welling as she pressed her hand to the wood.
The words hummed in her head before she said them.
“As Orense.”
Open.
The door groaned under her hand like a tree in a storm, the splinter of wood and drag of metal. The sound echoed down the tower stairs, and she hissed, waiting a moment to see if anyone would come （there were still times she felt like a child stealing through someone else’s house）， but no one did, and this time, when Kosika pushed against the door, it swung open. She glanced back once over her shoulder, and stepped into the dark.
The windows were shuttered, and only weak light spilled in from the alcove behind her, not enough to see by. But it glanced off the dark metal of a candelabra at the far side of the chamber. Kosika flexed her hand, and the tapers lit.
She looked around.
Holland Vosijk’s room appeared untouched. The space itself was a mirror of her own, the same curved walls, the same vaulted ceiling, the same vast bed, but a film of dust lay over everything, an echo of the pale patina that had clung to London for so many years like frost.
Kosika tugged on the air, conjuring a gentle breeze, just strong enough to skim the dust away.
She held her breath as she moved through the chamber, aware that she was stepping where he had stepped. Touching surfaces that he had touched. She pried open a set of shutters. This had been his view. She wanted to linger there, but rain was already dappling the windowsill, so she pushed the shutters closed again, as if the contents of the room might melt.
Her fingers skimmed the bed where Holland had slept, the chair where he had sat, her eyes scavenging the room for clues. A grey cloak still hung on the wall. There, on the desk, a note in his own hand, the writing falling sharp and slanted as the storm.
Vortalis once said there are no happy kings.
That the worthy ruler is the one who understands the price of power, and is willing to pay, not with his people’s lives, but with his own.