The captain sat slumped in a tall-backed chair, silver scars and sapphire stud both winking in the light. A glass hung from one hand, and a fluffy white cat named Esa curled beneath his seat, and his eyes were open but far away.
Over at the sideboard, Lila was pouring herself another drink. (Was this her fourth? Rhy felt he wasn’t the one to judge.) However, she was pouring a little too liberally and spilled the last of Rhy’s summer wine onto his inlaid floor. There was a time when he would have cared about the stain, but it was gone, that life. It had fallen between the boards like a bit of jewelry, and now lay somewhere out of reach, vaguely remembered but easily forgotten.
“Steady, Bard.”
It was the first thing Alucard had said in an hour. Not that Rhy had been waiting.
The captain was pale, his thief ashen, and the prince himself was pacing, his armor cast off like a broken shell onto a corner chair.
By the end of the first day, they’d found twenty-four silvers. Most were being kept in the Rose Hall, treated by the priests. But there were more. He knew there were more. There had to be. Rhy wanted to keep looking, to carry the search into the night, but Maxim had refused. And worse, the remaining royal guards had put him under an unyielding watch.
And what troubled Rhy as much as his own confinement when there were souls still trapped in the city was the sight of the rot spreading through London. A blackness like ice on top of the street stones and splashed across the walls, a film that wasn’t a film at all, but a change. Rock and dirt and water all being swallowed up, replaced by something that wasn’t an element at all, a glossy, dark nothing, a presence and an absence.
He’d told Tieren, pointed out a lone spot at the courtyard’s edge, just outside their wards, where the void was spreading like frost. The old man’s face had gone pale.
“Magic and nature exist in balance,” he’d said, brushing fingers through the air above the pool of black. “This is what happens when that balance fails. When magic overwhelms nature.”
The world was decaying, he’d explained. Only instead of going soft, like felled branches on a forest floor, it was going hard, calcifying into something like stone that wasn’t stone at all.
“Would you stand still?” snapped Lila now, watching Rhy pace. “You’re making me dizzy.”
“I suspect,” said a voice from the door, “that’s the wine.”
Rhy turned, relieved to see his brother. “Kell,” he said, trying to summon something like humor as he tipped his glass at the four guards framing the door. “Is this what you feel like all the time?”
“Pretty much,” said Kell, lifting the drink from Lila’s hand and taking a long sip. Amazingly, she let him.
“How maddening,” said Rhy with a groan. And then, to the men, “Could you at least sit down? Or are you trying to look like coats of armor on my walls?”
They didn’t answer.
Kell returned the drink to Lila’s hand and then frowned as he noticed Alucard. His brother pointedly ignored the captain’s presence and poured himself a very large glass. “What are we drinking to?”
“The living,” said Rhy.
“The dead,” said Alucard and Lila at the same time.
“We’re being thorough,” added Rhy.
His attention swung back to Alucard, who was looking out at the night. Rhy realized he wasn’t the only one watching the captain. Lila had followed Alucard’s gaze to the glass.
“When you look at the fallen,” she said, “what do you see?”
Alucard squinted dully, the way he always had when he was trying to picture something. “Knots,” he said simply.
“Care to expand?” said Kell, who knew of the captain’s gift, and cared for it about as much as he cared for the rest of him.
“You wouldn’t understand,” murmured Alucard.
“Maybe if you chose the right words.”
“I couldn’t make them short enough.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Lila. “If you two could stop bickering for a moment.”
Alucard leaned forward in his chair and set the once-more-empty glass on the floor beside his boot, where his cat sniffed it. “This Osaron,” he said, “is siphoning energy from everyone he touches. His magic, it feeds on ours by … infecting it. It gets in among the strings of our power, our life, and gets tangled up in our threads until everything is in knots.”
“You’re right,” said Kell after a moment. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It must be maddening,” said Alucard, “to know I have a power you don’t.”
Kell’s teeth clicked together, but when he spoke, he kept his voice civil, smooth. “Believe it or not, I relish our smallest differences. Besides, I may not be able to see the world the way you do, but I can still recognize an asshole.”
Lila snorted.
Rhy made an exasperated sound. “Enough,” he said, and then, to Kell, “What did our prisoner have to say?”
At the mention of Holland, Alucard’s head snapped. Lila sat forward, a glint in her eyes. Kell downed his drink, wincing, and said, “He’s to be executed in the morning. A public display.”
For a long moment, no one spoke.
And then Lila raised her glass.
“Well,” she said cheerfully, “I’ll toast to that.”
VIII
Emira Maresh drifted through the palace like a ghost.