When the Veskan’s blue eyes swung back to Rhy’s, they were flat, steady.
“A death is a death,” said Otto. “I will tell my queen it’s done.”
III
Ned was drooping with fatigue. He hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours in the past three days, and then not at all since the king’s visit. The shadows had stopped sometime before dawn, but Ned didn’t trust the silence any more than he had the sound, so he kept the windows boarded and the door locked, and stationed himself at a table in the center of the room with a glass in one hand and his ceremonial dagger in the other.
His head was beginning to loll when he heard the voices coming from the front step. He stumbled to his feet, nearly overturning the chair as the locks on the tavern door began to move. He watched in abject horror as the three bolts slid free one by one—drawn back by some invisible hand—and then the handle shuddered, the door groaning as it opened inward.
Ned took up the nearly empty bottle in his free hand, wielding it like a bat, oblivious to the last few drops that spilled into his hair and down his collar as two shadows crossed the threshold, their edges rimmed with mist.
He moved to strike, only to find the bottle stripped from his fingers. A second later it struck the wall and shattered.
“Lila,” said a familiar—and exasperated—voice.
Ned squinted, eyes adjusting to the sudden light. “Master Kell?”
The door swung shut again, plunging the room back into a lidded dark as the magician came forward. “Hello, Ned.”
He had his black coat on, the collar turned up against the cold. His eyes shone in their magnetic way, one blue, the other black, but a streak of silver now marred the copper of his hair, and there was a new gauntness to his face, as though he’d been long ill.
Beside him, the woman—Lila—cocked her head. She was rakishly thin, with dark hair that brushed her jaw and trailed across her eyes—one brown, the other black.
Ned stared at her with open awe. “You’re like him.”
“No,” said Kell dryly, striding past him. “She’s one of a kind.”
Lila winked at that. She was holding a small chest between her hands, but when Ned offered to take it from her, she pulled back, setting it instead on the table, one hand resting protectively on its lid.
Master Kell was making a circle of the room, as if looking for intruders, and Ned started, remembering his manners.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “Have you come for a drink? I mean, of course you haven’t just come for a drink, unless you have, and then I’m truly flattered, but …”
Lila made a decidedly unladylike noise, and Kell shot her a look before offering Ned a tired smile. “No, we haven’t come for a drink, but perhaps you’d better pour one.”
Ned nodded, ducking behind the bar to fetch a bottle.
“Bit gloomy, isn’t it?” mused Lila, taking a slow turn.
Kell took in the shuttered windows, the spell book and the ash-strewn floor. “What’s happened here?”
Ned needed no further encouragement. He launched into the story of the nightmares and the shadows and the voices in his head, and to his surprise, the two magicians listened, their drinks untouched, his own glass emptying twice before the tale was done.
“I know it sounds like lunacy,” he finished, “but—”
“But it doesn’t,” said Kell.
Ned’s eyes widened. “Did you see the shadows too, sir? What were they? Some kind of echo? It was dark magic, I’ll tell you that. I did everything I could here, blockaded the pub, burned every bit of sage and tried a dozen different ways to clear the air, but they just kept coming. Until they stopped, quick as you like. But what if they come again, Master Kell? What am I to do?”
“They won’t come again,” said Kell. “Not if I have your help.”
Ned started, certain he’d misheard. He’d dreamed a hundred times of this moment, of being wanted, being needed. But it was a dream. He always woke up. Beneath the counter’s edge, he pinched himself hard, and didn’t wake.
Ned swallowed. “My help?”
And Kell nodded. “The thing is, Ned,” he said, eyes trailing to the chest on the table. “I’ve come to ask a favor.”
* * *
Lila, for one, thought it was a bad idea.
Admittedly, she thought anything involving the Inheritor was a bad idea. As far as she was concerned, the thing should be sealed in stone and locked inside a chest and dropped down a hole to the center of the earth. Instead, it was sealed in stone and locked inside a chest and brought here, to a tavern in the middle of a city without magic.
Entrusted to a man, this man, who looked a bit like a pigeon, with his large eyes and his flitting movements. The strange thing was, he reminded her a little of Lenos—the nervous air, the fawning looks, even if they were geared at Kell instead of her. He seemed to teeter on the line between wonder and fear. She watched as Kell explained the chest’s contents, not entirely, but enough—which was probably too much. Watched as this Ned fellow nodded so fast his head looked hinged, eyes round as a child’s. Watched as the two carried the chest down into the cellar.
They would bury it there.
She left them to it, drifting through the tavern, feeling the familiar creak of boards under her feet. She scuffed her boot on a small, smooth patch of black, the same suspicious slick that lingered in the streets of Red London, places where magic had rotted through. Even with Osaron gone, the damage stayed done. Not everything, it seemed, could be fixed with a spell.