“Was it your idea, or his?” demanded Rhy, fighting to keep his voice even, to hold his grief at bay, the way his father did, sadness kept behind a dam.
Cora rose to her feet despite the weight of the manacles. “My brother has a gift for swords, not strategies.” She curled her fingers around the bars, metal sounding against metal like a bell. The cuff slipped down, and again Rhy saw the bruised skin circling her wrist. There was something unnatural about those marks, he realized now, something inhuman.
“That wasn’t your brother, was it?”
She caught him looking, chuckled. “Hawk,” she admitted. “Beautiful birds. Easy to forget that they have claws.”
He could see it now, the curve of talons he’d mistaken for fingers, the prick of the creature’s nails.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” said Cora, and what he hated most was that she sounded sincere. He thought of the night they’d spent together, the way she’d made him feel less alone. The ease of her presence, the realization that she was just a child, a girl pretending, playing at games she didn’t fully understand. Now, he wondered about that innocence, if it had all been an illusion. If he should have been able to tell. If it would have changed anything. If, if, if.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, his resolve threatening to break. She cocked her head, perplexed, like a hooded bird of prey.
“I’m the sixth of seven children. What future is there for me? In what world would I ever rule?”
“You could have killed your own family instead of mine.”
Cora leaned in, that cherubic face pressed against the cell bars. “I thought about it. I suppose one day I might.”
“No, you won’t.” Rhy turned to go. “You’ll never see the outside of this cell.”
“I’m like you,” she said softly.
“No.” He shoved her words away.
“I have hardly any magic,” she pressed on. “But we both know there are other kinds of power.” Rhy’s steps slowed. “There’s charm, cunning, seduction, strategy.”
“Murder,” he said, rounding on her.
“We use what we have. We make what we don’t. We’re truly not so different,” said Cora, gripping the bars. “We both want the same thing. To be seen as strong. The only difference between you and me is the number of siblings standing in our way to the throne.”
“That’s not the only difference, Cora.”
“Does it drive you mad, to be the weaker one?”
He wrapped his hand around hers, pinning them to the bars of the cell. “I am alive because my brother is strong,” he said coldly. “You are alive only because yours is dead.”
VI
Osaron sat on his throne and waited.
Waited for the impostor’s palace to fall.
Waited for his subjects to return.
Waited for word of his victory.
For any word at all.
Thousands of voices had whispered in his head—determined, weeping, crowing, pleading, triumphant—and then, in a single moment, they were gone, the world suddenly still.
He reached out again and plucked the threads, but no one answered.
No one came.
They couldn’t all have perished throwing themselves against the palace wards. Couldn’t all have vanished so easily from his power, from his will.
He waited, wondering if the silence itself was some kind of trick, a ruse, but when it stretched, his own thoughts loud and echoing in the hollow space, Osaron rose.
The shadow king walked toward his palace doors, the smooth dark wood dissolving to smoke before him and taking shape again in his wake, parting as the world should for a god.
Against the sky, the impostor’s palace of stone stood, its wards cracked but not broken.
And there, littering the steps, the banks, the city, Osaron saw the bodies of his puppets, their strings cut.
Everywhere he looked, he saw them. Thousands. Dead.
No, not dead.
But not entirely alive.
Despite the cold, each had the essential glow of life, the faint, steady rhythm of a heart still beating, the sound so soft it couldn’t crack the silence.
That silence, that horrible, deafening silence, so like the world—his world—when the last life had ebbed and all that was left was a shred of power, a withered sliver of the magic that had once been Osaron. He’d paced for days through the dead remains of his city, every inch gone black, until even he had stilled, too weak to move, too weak to do anything but exist, to beat stubbornly on like these sleeping hearts.
“Get up,” he ordered his subjects now.
No one answered.
“Get up,” he screamed into their minds, into their very cores, pulling on every string, reaching into memory, into dream, into bone.
Still, no one rose.
A servant lay curled at the god’s feet, and Osaron knelt, reached into the man’s chest, and wrapped his fingers around his heart.
“Get up,” he ordered. The man did not move. Osaron tightened his grip, pouring more and more of himself into the shell, until the form simply—fell apart. Useless. Useless. All of them, useless.
The shadow king straightened, ash blowing in the wind as he turned his gaze on that other palace, that seat of redundant royalty, the threads of spellwork spooling from its spires. So they had done this, they had stolen his servants, silenced his voice.
It did not matter.
They could not stop him.
Osaron would conquer this city, this world.