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On the fourth day after Kell committed regicide in service to the crown, his king sent him back to the scene of the crime.
“I’m well enough to go,” said Kell when asked if he thought he could make the trip safely. It was even true, though he knew that his appearance would undermine this truth. He was still pale and drawn, according to his mirror, with dark circles under his eyes, but that was due to strange and murky dreams that troubled his sleep. The only night he had slept through untroubled had been the first one, when he had been too exhausted to dream. He was tired, but his blood continued to thrum with power. He was Antari, and they were extraordinarily hard to kill, even sheltered flower boys.
Once, he supposed, there may have been more argument about his decision. That was before Astrid Dane ensnared the Maresh family and drove a knife into Rhy’s chest to prove a point to Kell, before the king and queen knew of all the terrible, shameful things Kell had done and how that caused Rhy to be injured.
“Very well,” the king said instead.
“Thank you,” the queen added. Once, she might have touched his cheek with her hand, gazed into his black-on-black eye to divine the truth. Now she simply looked at him, the space between her brows pinched slightly. Kell thought that he deserved this cool distance. He had, through his actions, torn open the delicate deception that suggested that he was family, and caused their beloved son to die. Cool distance was more kindness than he would have given, if their positions were reversed.
He shook his head minutely to dispel the thought. White London would eat him alive if he was not wary. He cut his arm open with the knife he carried, and pulled out one of the coins hanging from a chain around his neck. It was a replacement for the one that Holland had hurled to the cobblestones of Grey London, new and shiny and not marked with his own blood before now. The king had given it to him when he had asked Kell to go, and that solicitude made Kell wary.
Kell clenched his hand around the coin, masking the profiles of the Danes with his blood. “As Travars,” he said, and stepped through to White London.
Ordinarily, Kell couldn’t — wouldn’t — have travelled from the castle in Red London to the fortress in White London. The Danes would have eaten him alive if he had tried. Now, of course, their broken bodies lay on the floor of the courtyard, and their wards were slowly decaying. It wouldn’t be long before the chaos outside reached the fortress, and the combatants realized that they could break into the fortress with even the small magic left to those living in White London.
Kell didn’t plan to be here when that happened. The people of White London were historically very good at killing Antari, and he didn’t plan to test whether they were good students of history. Magical power meant little when confronted with a mob, and Kell had never used his magic in a riot. Holland had, he knew. Another reason Kell was a cosseted hothouse flower.
He walked across the stone floor, the heels of his boots clinking strangely when they struck the white fragments embedded in the stone, and paused for a moment near the stone remains of Astrid Dane. She had not been disturbed since Kell had shattered her petrified body, empowered by his guilt and fury. Kell closed his eyes momentarily at the memory. It was not that he had done it, for Kell had always known that there was little he would not do to protect Rhy. It was that he wanted to do more. He had wanted her to hurt just as Rhy had hurt. He had stabbed her, as she had stabbed Rhy, but it wasn’t enough.
Athos Dane’s body was not rotting, as it would in Red London, but instead desiccating as the mean, hungry air stripped his body of any possible residual magic and vitality. Kell hated him still, for his part. For finding the stone. For marking Holland’s soul, and turning the two Antari against one another. For driving Kell to kill the only other Antari he had known existed.
It was hard to believe that these people had caused so much heartache.
They looked fragile.
Kell gave them a wide berth regardless.
He searched for the key to pass through the wall of the courtyard. As there was no king or queen left to accept his king’s message, he would have to leave it to be claimed by the next ruler. Being accepted as a king or queen of White London meant more than simply declaring yourself to be so. After all, anyone could do that. To be the king or queen, you must claim the heart of the fortress as your own, and have the spell at its centre recognise you as its master. Mastery and dominance was a tenet of White London magic. Until the fortress’ heart was claimed, it lay open to anyone to access; once claimed it was locked to all but one. Or two, in the Dane twins’ case.
Kell had never stepped into the heart of the White London’s fortress before now. He knew how it was usually done, but he had had no interest in claiming White London for his own and had hoped — or, truly, feared — that the Danes would last longer. He quirked his lip in a quarter-smile at this thought: he was sure they had had that hope as well.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a faint, silvery mark ghosted on the wall. He walked over quickly, and pressed his blood-slicked hand against the wall.
He had heard that this spell allowed a person in if they truly desired to claim White London as their own and had power enough to claim the fortress’ heart. It didn’t surprise him, as Red London had something different. Kell overrode the spell and demanded access. That was the other birthright of Antari; the right to command magic, rather than entreat it. The spell gave in to his will, and he stepped through the wall.
The room on the other side was not really on the other side. There was a spell, written by an Antari before the worlds withdrew into themselves, that transported a person to the source. Kell opened his eyes to a bare stone room. The stone underfoot was thankfully devoid of strange white fragments, instead a uniform dirty-white colour. Once, the walls had been pure white, kept that way by the blue-white flame that had burned at the heart of White London.
Red London had the Isle. White London had a half-frozen flame. It flickered weakly against the magic that kept it trapped as Kell watched. It was terrible to look at it beat futilely against the bars of its magical cage.
Kell wondered whether Holland would have felt pity for magic. He doubted it.
He reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved the letter that his king had written. The thick cream of the envelope, ordinary in Red London, appeared opulent and decadent in the grubby miserable heart of White London. It was disquieting how something as simple as an envelope showed how far White London had fallen.
He dropped it on the floor, near the cage of magic, turned and began to go back through the wall. This room had no correlation in his London. He could not return from here.
Kell didn’t look at Astrid’s broken fragments, or Athos’ drawn remains, on his return, other than to check that they had not moved. He looked around the courtyard. There was a tree he knew had not been there before, its branches stark and naked against the ash that rested on everything. The tree was stunted and spindly, reaching toward the sky with desperate intensity, unaware of the futility of it’s actions. Once, the tree may have been a source, as he had seen it in all Londons he had visited, but now … he didn’t really know what it was. So much had been lost since the worlds were separated.
Kell sighed. He knew that he was distracting himself, and knew why. He would have to find a way to live with the guilt of knowing that he had caused the death of the person he knew loved him unconditionally. He took a breath, held it as he reached for another of the coins around his neck, this one stamped with King Maxim’s proud profile, and smeared it with drying blood. “As Travars,” he said, and left.
The king and queen were not waiting for him in the reception room when he arrived. Kell supposed he could look for them and give his report immediately. However, he had something far more important to do first. Rhy’s wounds were still making Kell’s chest ache, though the pain had eased over the last few days as the healers did their work. Kell could do better. He knew he could.
He manipulated his left arm with his right hand as he walked rapidly from the reception to Rhy’s room, smiling humourlessly as he felt the familiar burn of a wound reopened. Blood trickled down his wrist and had reached his fingertips by the time he had reached Rhy’s door. He carefully turned the door handle, listening for any sounds in the room, before easing the door open as silently as possible.
Inside, Rhy lay sprawled in his bed, his sheets a tangle around him. Rhy always slept restlessly, as if there was a furnace of energy inside him that couldn’t help but spill out. It was part of why he was so arresting, Kell supposed. He was pleased to see that the line of pain between Rhy’s brows had eased further since yesterday. If it weren’t for the fact that he could feel the burn inside his own chest, Kell would think that Rhy was just sleeping off another one of his wild nights.
Kell closed his eyes. “As Hasari,” he whispered. As Hasari took a while to work. Kell knew this, which was why he was so startled when Rhy made an aggrieved sound in his throat. Kell’s eyes flew open. Had he woken Rhy?
He realised, with a wash of cold shock, that Rhy had never been asleep at all when Rhy opened his eyes and scowled at him. “I don’t want you to do that any more,” said Rhy, with a fierce intensity. “Bad enough that you gave up half your life for me, but not this.”
Rhy had never done this before. Been angry at him, certainly. But he’d never tried to deceive Kell like this. He exhaled shakily, trying to turn it into a laugh. “I can’t get one over you,” he said, trying to keep his tone light.
Rhy’s gaze was intent. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t do that again.” Kell knew how much Rhy hated it when Kell bled for his sake, and that was why Kell did it. Why he would continue to do it. Rhy was going to be a good king, and that meant that Kell would make the difficult choices for him.
“I promise,” said Kell, knowing that it was another promise he would break.
Rhy studied him for a moment, eyes entirely too shrewd, before gesturing towards a chair. “Where did you go today?” he said. “Was it at least somewhere more interesting than here?”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Kell, easing into the chair. “I went to leave a letter to whoever succeeds the Danes.”
“No smuggling?”
“No,” said Kell. “I’m not doing that anymore.”
“So there was some good to this after all!”
“Yes, I suppose there was,” Kell said heavily.
“Don’t mope, you’re not pretty enough for it,” said Rhy. “What did you see over there?”
Kell thought about saying that he wasn’t allowed to talk about the other Londons, which was technically true. He thought about saying how unfair it would be for Rhy to know about the places he could never visit. He thought that maybe if he had warned Rhy about what the other Londons were like, the dangers that they held, Rhy might have been safe.
“There was a tree,” he said instead. “There are things called fixed points, something that is the same in all Londons. A copse of trees, a pub, that kind of thing. But there’s this tree in all the Londons too. You’ve seen it; it’s the one in the courtyard.”
Rhy was listening avidly.
“In one London, it’s guarded by a chain link fence as high as your waist. The tree there’s big enough that you’d barely be able to wrap your arms around it. Here … you know what the one here looks like. But in the London I just visited, it was dying. I could knock it over easily.”
“You could do that for our tree too,” Rhy pointed out.
“So could you if you ever paid attention to your magic lessons,” retorted Kell. “But this was different. I’d never seen it before.”
“What do you think it is?” asked Rhy.
Kell shrugged. “I really don’t know.”
“Leave it with me.”
“What?”
“As I’m banned from even walking to my window without nursemaids,” Rhy declared with a long suffering sigh, “surely no one can complain about my new scholarly bent.”
Kell raised his eyebrows at this. “They may be more surprised to discover you can read.”
Rhy reached behind him to one of the many pillows on his bed, and threw it at Kell with unerring accuracy. Kell caught it and blinked at how hard Rhy had been able to throw the pillow. He must be feeling better. “I suppose you don’t want this back then?” Kell said, the corners of his mouth tilting.
“Yes, I want that back!” Rhy protested. “I’ll get a crick in my neck otherwise.”
“How terrible,” Kell said, and gently tossed the pillow back. It landed beside Rhy with a soft thump. He bowed as sardonically as he could. “If I may take my leave?” he asked, keeping the grin off his face through years of practice.
“Oh, get out of here,” said Rhy, rolling his eyes. “Otherwise you’ll be doing that all day.”
Kell bowed again, more mocking than before, and stepped outside. Once the door was closed, he let his shoulders sag as he exhaled. Rhy offering to help was, in retrospect, entirely expected. It was Kell who was the selfish one, the one who wanted something in exchange. Rhy would offer to help simply because it would help Kell. He should have known, and he shook his head at his own stupidity.
Then, he fixed the fall of his auburn hair so that it settled across his face the way he liked it, steeled himself, and and went to tell the king that his message had been delivered.