She flinched, and knew he saw the truth, in her face, or her mind. Of the day she had used his token to travel, the day her dreams of him had started. And it was as if he himself had forgotten, and now remembered, suddenly, the open box, the missing piece.
What have you done?
His anger rekindled, then, and all the altar candles with it.
“You should not have gone there, Kosika.” She took a step back, but he caught her by the shoulders. “Tell me you took nothing out.” His fingers tightened, until it hurt. The pain felt real. “Tell me.”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I swear.”
Holland let go as quickly as he’d grabbed her, the sudden absence of weight leaving her off-balance. He turned away from her, and the circle of altar lights, and leaned against the alcove wall, shadows washing over his weary face.
“There was nothing to take,” Kosika went on. “No signs of magic. Everything I saw was dead.” But as she said the word, she thought of Serak’s lantern, the wick hissing with smoke as the fire went out.
Magic does not die.
Fear sparked inside her then, fear that she had carried some piece of cursed magic from that place, like mud on the bottom of her shoes.
But Holland shook his head. “You would know.” His mouth was a small, bitter line. “The magic in that place is not subtle. It has a mind and a will of its own.” He studied the altar. “Trust me,” he muttered, and her mind went to the writings in his room.
“The ten days,” she said. “The ten days you vanished from the world. That is where you went.”
Holland did not look at her. “I would have done anything, to see our world restored. And so I did.”
The worthy ruler is the one who understands the price.…
“Black London is the source of all magic,” he said. “It is a wellspring. But every drop comes at a cost.”
He told her, then, what happened in the ten days after the Danes fell, and before he took the throne. How he’d been mortally wounded, forced into Black London. How he’d lain there, lifeblood leeching into the ruined soil. How he would have died, had he not met Osaron—Osaron, the shadow king, the center of the flame that burned the world to ash, now reduced to an ember in an empty world. How he carried that ember out in his own form, to rekindle the magic of their world.
What have I done? Only what I must. Carried a spark out of the darkness to light my candle. Sheltered it with my body. Knowing I would burn.
“In the end,” he said, “it cost me everything.” He looked to the window, open onto the summer night. “But it worked.”
“And Osaron?” she asked, hating the way the word snaked across her tongue.
Holland clenched his teeth. “Osaron wanted what all flames want. To spread unchecked. To burn.” He met her gaze. “But that fire, at least, has been put out. Extinguished with my own.”
And yet, thought Kosika, you are still here.
But she said nothing.
* * *
One night, Holland told her of the other Londons.
Not of the fallen world—he did not like to speak of it—but of the other two, whose tokens she’d seen in the box. The first, and farthest, where magic was forgotten, and the other, closer, where it burned so much brighter than their own. That world, which the Danes had coveted, and so many kings and queens before them, as if its magic was a prize that could be taken back.
He told her of Kell Maresh, the Antari who called that world home. Told her of Delilah Bard, the Antari from the world beyond, who thrived despite its absent magic.
He explained how to travel between the four worlds, spoke of them as if they were doors, not lining the same hall, but set one before another, so that to reach the farthest, she would have to pass through the one that sat between. He taught her these things, as if she had any desire to set foot beyond the boundaries of her own world. But she did not.
“I don’t see the point,” she told him. “Why should I care about the other worlds?”
And for the first time, she saw a shadow of displeasure cross Holland’s face. She flinched from it, afraid that she had angered him. But then the shadow passed, and he only sighed and said, “Perhaps you will not have to.”
But he told her no more stories that night.
And the next, he wasn’t there.
Kosika dreamed of the castle as usual, searched the halls, the throne room, and the tower altar, even traipsed barefoot across the courtyard. But she couldn’t find Holland. Panic bloomed behind her ribs as she called out for her saint, her king, voice echoing through the empty halls, and she began to fear that he was gone, gone for good, that whatever had possessed this past week had been nothing but a strange and fleeting vision. The waiting place, he’d called this space, and it felt empty now, hollow in a way it had never been, and as she searched, the panic grew, and grew, and by the time she woke, it had wound itself around her ribs, made it hard to breathe.