“As Travars.”
And then the room came apart, and she was falling.
First through nothing, and then through the empty space where the castle should have been, the air rushing past her and the ground coming up fast, fast, fast. Kosika threw out her hands, and a wind rose up, the air twisting beneath her, around her. It caught her limbs and slowed her fall—slowed, but didn’t stop—and she landed hard, knees buckling with the impact, hands slamming into packed earth.
One palm stung worse than the other, and when she pulled back she saw why. The black glass token had shattered between her palm and the ground, shards slicing into skin. And yet, her first thought was not the pain, it was that she’d broken something that had once belonged to Holland Vosijk.
She scooped the largest shards back into her pocket, dug out a kerchief and wrapped it around her wounded palm as she got to her feet. And frowned.
The castle was gone.
Instead, she was standing on a road she didn’t know, surrounded by ruined buildings, their corpses slouched, crumbling.
Her heart pounded in her ears, louder than any other sound until she realized, there was no other sound. A horrible quiet hung over everything. The road was empty. No horses, no carts, no signs of life.
“Os?” she called.
There was no answer, not even the echo of her own voice.
It had been raining beyond her castle walls, but the ground here was dry and the air tasted wrong, like cinders on her tongue, and if there was a sun somewhere, it was well hidden, buried behind clouds that hung low and dark as smoke.
Too late, Kosika realized what she’d done, what she’d said, given voice to the spell that let Antari travel between worlds.
She was no longer in London.
Or at least, no longer in hers.
This other London looked wrong. No, not just wrong. Burned. And she knew, then, exactly where she was. Kosika scrambled backward, as if she could simply step out of the city’s reach, brought her sleeve to her mouth, not wanting to breathe in the ashes that hung on the air, stirred up when she broke her fall.
She was in Black London.
The world that burned so bright it ate up all its tinder and burned itself out.
But if it had ever been a hearth, it seemed long cold, reduced to nothing but cinders. And yet, what had Serak said? Magic does not die. It waits. For what? A spark?
Her gaze flew back to the bloody handprint she’d left on the street. She half expected it to start smoking, to kindle itself into a flame. But nothing happened. The road stretched, silent and empty. It felt like a tomb. Like Holland’s hand when she’d touched it in the Silver Wood that day. Cold and dry and dead.
Kosika shivered and fetched the shard of black glass from her pocket, its edge dotted red.
“As Travars,” she said again.
The world rippled around her, the air tensing.
But then it settled, and she was still standing there, in the unfamiliar road. Fear coiled inside Kosika, then, the sudden, horrible certainty that she was stuck, that whatever magic had brought her here was not strong enough to take her home, that Black London had her now, and would never let her go.
The air hung heavy with ash. It left her dizzy, made it hard to breathe. Kosika fought down another swell of panic.
Either her magic was not strong enough.
Or she wasn’t using it right.
There was no other spell, it would have come to her, but she studied the splintered token in her hand, and thought of the other two coins in the box in Holland’s room. She could guess where they led.
Three worlds.
Three keys.
But there were four, including hers. There had been no key to her own London, but obviously he’d needed one. Kosika turned out her pockets, finding no tokens, only the other shards of the Black London glass, and her arrow-point knife. It had been a gift from Vir Serak, its small handle carved from a branch in the Silver Wood. It already had her blood on it, but she unraveled the kerchief from her wounded palm and swept the blade lightly through the welling red for good measure.
This will work, she assured herself. And then, aloud, “This will work.” She said it as if it were a spell, something willed into being. And then she closed her fingers over the narrow blade and forced that will into the words.
“As Travars,” she said again, and this time, Black London shivered, and came apart like smoke. She didn’t fall so much as lurch, the sudden off-balance sensation of a missed step, and then her feet were on the ground again, not a crumbling road but a polished stone floor.
She was back in the castle, not up in Holland’s tower but the great hall below.