This time, he let himself drown.
III
Kell kept throwing himself against the metal cage long after the door slammed shut and the bolt slid home. His voice still echoed against the pale stone walls. He had screamed himself hoarse. But still, no one came. Fear pounded through him, but what scared Kell most was the loosening in his chest—the unhinging of a vital link, the spreading sense of loss.
He could hardly feel his brother’s pulse.
Could hardly feel anything but the pain in his wrists and a horrible numbing cold. He twisted against the metal frame, fighting the restraints, but they held fast. Spell work was scrawled down the sides of the contraption, and despite the quantity of Kell’s blood smeared on the steel, there was the collar circling his throat, cutting off everything he needed. Everything he had. Everything he was. The collar cast a shadow over his mind, an icy film over his thoughts, cold dread and sorrow and, through it all, an absence of hope. Of strength. Give up, it whispered through his blood. You have nothing. You are nothing. Powerless.
He’d never been powerless.
He didn’t know how to be powerless.
Panic rose in place of magic.
He had to get out.
Out of this cage.
Out of this collar.
Out of this world.
Rhy had carved a word into his own skin to bring Kell home, and he’d turned around and left again. Abandoned the prince, the crown, the city. Followed a woman in white through a door in the world because she told him he was needed, told him he could help, told him it was his fault, that he had to make it right.
Kell’s heart faltered in his chest.
No—not his heart. Rhy’s. A life bound to his with magic he no longer had. The panic flared again, a breath of heat against the numbing cold, and Kell clung to it, pushing back against the collar’s hollow dread. He straightened in the frame, clenched his teeth and pulled against his cuffs until he felt the crack of bone inside his wrist, the tear of flesh. Blood fell in thick red drops to the stone floor, vibrant but useless. He bit back a scream as metal dragged over—and into—skin. Pain knifed up his arm, but he kept pulling, metal scraping muscle and then bone before his right hand finally came free.
Kell slumped back with a gasp and tried to wrap his bloody, limp fingers around the collar, but the moment they touched the metal, a horrible pins-and-needles cold seared up his arm, swam in his head.
“As Steno,” he pleaded. Break.
Nothing happened.
No power rose to meet the word.
Kell let out a sob and sagged against the frame. The room tilted and tunneled, and he felt his mind sliding toward darkness, but he forced his body to stay upright, forced himself to swallow the bile rising in his throat. He curled his skinned and splintered hand around his still-trapped arm, and began to pull.
It was minutes—but it felt like hours, years—before Kell finally tore himself free.
He stumbled forward out of the frame, and swayed on his feet. The metal cuffs had cut deep into his wrists—too deep—and the pale stone beneath his feet was slick with red.
Is this yours? whispered a voice.
A memory of Rhy’s young face twisted in horror at the sight of Kell’s ruined forearms, the blood streaked across the prince’s chest. Is this all yours?
Now the collar dripped red as Kell frantically pulled on the metal. His fingers ached with cold as he found the clasp and clawed at it, but still it held. His focus blurred. He slipped in his own blood and went down, catching himself with broken hands. Kell cried out, curling in on himself even as he screamed at his body to rise.
He had to get up.
He had to get back to Red London.
He had to stop Holland—stop Osaron.
He had to save Rhy.
He had to, he had to, he had to—but in that moment, all Kell could do was lie on the cold marble, warmth spreading in a thin red pool around him.
IV
The prince collapsed back against the bed, soaked through with sweat, choking on the metal taste of blood. Voices rose and fell around him, the room a blur of shadows, shards of light. A scream tore through his head, but his own jaw locked in pain. Pain that was and wasn’t his.
Kell.
Rhy doubled over, coughing up blood and bile.
He tried to rise—he had to get up, had to find his brother—but hands surged from the darkness, fought him, held him down against silk sheets, fingers digging into shoulders and wrists and knees, and the pain was there again, vicious and jagged, peeling back flesh, dragging its nails over bone. Rhy tried to remember. Kell—arrested. His cell—empty. Searching the sun-dappled orchard. Calling his brother’s name. Then, out of nowhere, pain, sliding between his ribs, just as it had that night, a horrible, severing thing, and he couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t—
“Don’t let go,” said a voice.
“Stay with me.”
“Stay …”
* * *
Rhy learned early the difference between want and need.
Being the son and heir—the only heir—of the Maresh family, the light of Arnes, the future of the empire, meant that he had never (as a nursery minder once informed him, before being removed from the royal service) experienced true need. Clothes, horses, instruments, fineries—all he had to do was ask for a thing, and it was given.
And yet, the young prince wanted—deeply—a thing that could not be fetched. He wanted what coursed in the blood of so many low-born boys and girls. What came so easily to his father, to his mother, to Kell.
Rhy wanted magic.