“Suit yourself,” he mumbled, drinking deeply. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “You’re going to run out of hair.”
Fucking useless sack of meat, thought Bex. But he was right—she had been going all night, was down to nine strands, and still the spell had turned up nothing, even when she tried maps that showed not just London but the entire empire.
“People don’t just disappear,” she muttered, half to herself. “She shouldn’t have been able to use the fucking door without the keymark.”
“Must have made a new one,” said Calin, the words half swallowed by encroaching sleep. “While she was fixing it.”
“Maybe,” said Bex, bitter that he’d made a good point.
She shoved up from the table, taking her empty glass and stretching out her stiff neck and throbbing knee—it had been a long night, and unlike Calin, she didn’t take well to having a building dropped on top of her.
Bex made her way over to the bar as dawn began to leak through the windows.
Despite the unwholesome hour, the Saint of Knives never truly closed. After all, it catered to sellswords. Death didn’t sleep, and neither did the hands that ferried it. The owner, Hannis, however, did go to bed, with the strict warning that anyone who tried to leave without paying would be cursed upon exit.
Bex doubted there was actually a spell on the threshold, but decided not to chance it, so she dropped a coin on the counter as she filled her own pint, and strolled the long way back to the table, passing the wooden sculpture of the saint as she did. Every wooden inch was a patchwork of divots and scars from the years the patrons spent throwing knives at his arms, his chest, his head. One hand looked like it was a single solid blow from breaking off.
Calin fancied himself a modern Saint of Knives, she knew. But her fellow sellsword was an idiot, one who didn’t seem to realize that the wooden effigy wasn’t a faithful depiction of the saint. That in the stories—which Bex had actually read one night, whiling away the hours before a job—the Saint of Knives was not in fact scarred by enemy blades. He had made the cuts himself, one for every life he took. If a patron got close enough to the statue, they’d see those faint lines, methodically carved, beneath the hundreds of hacking marks left by drunken fools.
That was the problem, thought Bex. People didn’t even know what they were worshipping.
Take the fucking Hand.
Ask any three members of the Hand why they believed in the cause, and you’d get three different answers.
The king has no power.
The king has too much.
There shouldn’t be a king at all.
Sure, there was the general through line about magic’s disappearance, the myth of this world’s power waning and all that, but it was a crock of shit, as far as Bex could tell, and even if it wasn’t, no one actually cared about sweeping tides and grand patterns, as long as here and now, magic still served them.
No, at the end of the day, what the Hand wanted was change.
And change was an easy thing to want. It was a malleable idea, like molten metal, fluid enough to take on whatever shape the people controlling the Hand deemed most useful. A key. A knife. A crown.
So the Hand would kill the royal family, and for a while, they would be glad, would claim that they had won, until they realized all they’d done was swap the colors flying in the palace halls.
Not that Bex cared.
At the end of the day, the coins they paid her would still spend.
Back at the table, Calin was snoring. His head had fallen back in his sleep, his throat exposed, and her fingers twitched as she entertained the idea of drawing a pretty red line across his neck. But then she’d have to tell the good lord Berras, and the thought was just enough reason to let Calin live.
She kicked his chair, jostling him just enough to make sure he was breathing, then sat back down, cracked her knuckles, and began the finding spell again.
And again.
And again.
Until finally, the spell crackled, and instead of charring black, the burning lock of hair became a single, perfect cinder, and it fell in an X onto the map, leaving a scorched mark at the river’s edge, right where it met the docks. A thin tendril of smoke rose up where the mark burned the parchment.
Bex was on her feet and out the tavern door before it stopped.
Calin could sleep all he pleased.
She had a job to do.
III
It was easy to keep track of Lila Bard.
Tes could simply let the rest of the world blur together and fall away, leaving only the glaring light of the Antari’s power as it burned like a torch against the tapestry of other threads.