Ned went to the front door and threw back the bolt. Outside, the street was empty—it was the darkest hour, that time before the first streaks of dawn—but London was never truly still, not this close to the river, and so he was instantly greeted by the clop-clop of carriages, the distant trills of laughter and song. Somewhere near the Thames, the scrape of a fiddle, and much closer, the sound of a stray cat, yowling for milk or company or whatever stray cats wanted. A dozen sounds that made up the fabric of his city, and when Ned closed the door again, the noises followed him, sneaking in through the crack beneath the door, around the sill. The pressure ebbed, the air in the tavern thinning, the spell broken.
Ned yawned, the sense of strangeness already slipping away as he climbed the stairs. Back in his room, he cracked the window despite the cold, and let the sounds of London drift in. But as he crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up, and the world settled into silence, the whispers came again. And as he sank back into that place between waking and sleep, those elusive words finally took shape.
Let me in, they said.
Let me in.
II
Voices rang out past Holland’s cell just after midnight.
“You’re early,” said the guard nearest the bars.
“Where’s your second?” asked the one on the wall.
“The king needs men on the steps,” answered the interloper, “what with the scarred fellows coming in.” His voice was muffled by his helm.
“We’ve got orders.”
“So do I,” said the new guard. “And we’re running thin.”
A pause, and in that pause, Holland felt a strange thing happen. It was like someone took the air—the energy in the air—and pulled on it. Shallowly. A tug of will. A shifting of scales. A subtle exertion of control.
“Besides,” the new guard was saying absently, “what would you rather be doing? Staring at this piece of filth, or saving your friends?”
The balance tipped. The men roused from their places. Holland wondered if the new guard knew what he’d done. It was the kind of magic forbidden in this world, and worshipped in his own.
The new guard watched the others climb the stairs, and swayed ever so slightly on his feet. When they were gone, he leaned back against the wall facing Holland’s cell, the metal of his armor scraping stone, and drew a knife. He toyed with it absently, fingertips on the tip, tossing and catching and tossing it again. Holland felt himself being studied, and so he studied in return. Studied the way the new guard tipped his head, the speed of his fingers on the knife, the scent of another London wafting in his blood.
Her blood.
He should have recognized that voice, even through the stolen helm. Maybe if he’d slept—how long had it been?—maybe if he wasn’t bloody and broken and behind bars. He still should have known.
“Delilah,” he said evenly.
“Holland,” she answered.
Delilah Bard, the Antari of Grey London, set her helmet on the table beneath a hook holding the jailer’s keys. Her fingers danced absently across their teeth. “Your last night …”
“Did you come to say farewell?”
She made a humming sound. “Something like that.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
Her gaze flicked toward him, quick and sharp as a sliver of steel. “So are you.” One of her eyes had the glassy sheen that came with too much drink. The other, the false one, had been shattered. It hung together by a shell of glass, but the inside was a starburst of color and cracks.
Lila’s knife vanished back into its sheath. She pulled off the gauntlets, one by one, and set them on the table, too. Even drunk, she moved with the fluid grace of a fighter. She reminded him of Ojka.
“Ojka,” she echoed, as if reading his mind.
Holland stilled. “What?”
Lila tapped her cheek. “The redhead with the scar and the face leaking black. She did this—tried to drive a knife into my eye—right before I cut her throat.”
The words were a dull blow. Just a small flame of hope flickering out inside his chest. Nothing left. Ash over embers. “She was following orders,” he said hollowly.
Lila lifted the keys from their hook. “Yours or Osaron’s?”
It was a hard question. When had they been different? Had they ever been the same?
He heard the clang of metal, and Holland blinked to find the cell door falling open, Lila stepping in. She pulled the door shut behind her, snapped the lock back into place.
“If you came to kill me—”
“No,” she sneered. “That can wait till morning.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because good people die, and bad people live, and it doesn’t seem very fair, does it, Holland?” Her face crinkled. “Of all the people you could kill, you chose someone who actually mattered to me.”
“I had to.”
Her fist hit him like a brick, hard enough to crack his head sideways and make the world go momentarily white. When his vision cleared, she was standing over him, knuckles bleeding.
She tried to strike him again, but this time Holland caught her wrist.
“Enough,” he said.
But it wasn’t. Her free hand swung up, fire dancing across her knuckles, but he caught that, too.
“Enough.”
She tried to pull free, but his hands vised tighter, finding the tender place where bones met. He pressed down, and a guttural sound escaped her throat, low and animal.