A Conjuring of Light Read online

  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.

  Wanted it with a fire that rivaled any need.

  His royal father had a gift for metals, and his mother an easy touch with water, but magic wasn’t like black hair or brown eyes or elevated birth—it didn’t follow the rules of lineage, wasn’t passed down from parent to child. It chose its own course.

  And already at the age of nine, it was beginning to look as though magic hadn’t chosen him at all.

  But Rhy Maresh refused to believe that he’d been passed over entirely; it had to be there, somewhere within him, that flame of power waiting for a well-timed breath, a poker’s nudge. After all, he was a prince. And if magic would not come to him, he’d go to it.

  It was that logic that had brought him here, to the stone floor of the Sanctuary’s drafty old library, shivering as the cold leached through the embroidered silk of his pant legs (designed for the palace, where it was always warm).

  Whenenever Rhy complained about the chill in the Sanctuary, old Tieren would crinkle his brow.

  Magic makes its own warmth, he’d say, which was well and good if you were a magician, but then, Rhy wasn’t.

  Not yet.

  This time he hadn’t complained. Hadn’t even told the head priest he was here.

  The young prince crouched in an alcove at the back of the library, hidden behind a statue and a long wooden table, and spread the stolen parchment on the floor.

  Rhy had been born with light fingers—but of course, being royal, he almost never had to use them. People were always willing to offer things freely, indeed leaping at the ready to deliver, from a cloak on a chilly day to a frosted cake from the kitchens.

  But Rhy hadn’t asked for the scroll; he’d lifted it from Tieren’s desk, one of a dozen tied with the thin white ribbon that marked a priest’s spell. None of them were all that fancy or elaborate, much to Rhy’s chagrin. Instead they focused on utility.

  Spells to keep the food from spoiling.

  Spells to protect the orchard trees from frost.

  Spells to keep a fire burning without oil.

  And Rhy would try every single one until he found a spell that he could do. A spell that would speak to the magic surely sleeping in his veins. A spell that could wake it up.

  A breeze whipped through the Sanctuary as he dug a handful of red lin from his pocket and weighted the parchment to the floor. On its surface, in the head priest’s steady hand, was a map—not like the one in his father’s war room that showed the whole kingdom. No, this was a map of a spell, a diagram of magic.

  Across the top of the scroll were three words in the common tongue.

  Is Anos Vol, read Rhy.

  The Eternal Flame.

  Beneath those words was a pair of concentric circles, linked by delicate lines and dotted with small symbols, the condensed shorthand favored by the spell-makers of London. Rhy squinted, trying to make sense of the scrawl. He had a knack for languages, picking up the airy cadence of the Faroan tongue, the choppy waves made by each Veskan syllable, the hills and valleys of Arnes’s own border dialects—but the words on the parchment seemed to shift and blur before his eyes, sliding in and out of focus.

  He chewed his lip (it was a bad habit, one his mother was always warning him to break because it wasn’t princely), then planted his hands on either side of the paper, fingertips brushing the outer circle, and began the spell.

  He focused his eyes on the center of the page as he read, sounding out each word, the fragments clumsy and broken on his tongue. His pulse rose in his ears, the beat at odds with the natural rhythm of the magic. But Rhy held the spell together, pinned it down with sheer force of will, and as he neared the end a tingling of heat started in his hands; he could feel it trickling through his palms, into his fingers, brushing the circle’s edge, and then …

  Nothing.

  No spark.

  No flame.

  He said the spell once, twice, three more times, but the heat in his hands was already fading, dissolving into an ordinary prickle of numbness. Dejected, he let the words trail off, taking the last of his focus with them.

  The prince sagged back onto the cold stones. “Sanct,” he muttered, even though he knew it was bad form to swear, and worse to do it here.

  “What are you doing?”

  Rhy looked up and saw his brother standing at the mouth of the alcove, a red cloak around his narrow shoulders. Even at ten and three quarters, Kell’s face had the set of a serious man, down to the furrow between his brows. Kell’s red hair glinted even in the grey morning light, and his eyes—one blue, the other black as night—made people look down, away. Rhy didn’t understand why, but he always made a point of looking his brother in the face, to show Kell it didn’t matter. Eyes were eyes.

  Kell wasn’t really his brother, of course. Even a passing look would mark them as different. Kell was a mixture, like different kinds of clay twined together; he had the fair skin of a Veskan, the lanky body of a Faroan, and the copper hair found only on the northern edge of Arnes. And then, of course, there were his eyes. One natural, if not particularly Arnesian, and the other Antari, marked by magic itself as aven. Blessed.

  Rhy, on the other hand, with his warm brown skin, his black hair and amber eyes, was all London, all Maresh, all royal.

  Kell took in the prince’s high color, and then the parchment spread out before him. He knelt across from Rhy, the fabric of his cloak pooling on the stones around him. “Where did you get this?” he asked, a prickle of displeasure in his voice.

  “From Tieren,” said Rhy. His brother shot him a skeptical look, and Rhy amended, “From Tieren’s study.”

  Kell skimmed the spell and frowned. “An eternal flame?”

  Rhy absently plucked one of the lin from the floor and shrugged. “First thing I grabbed.” He tried to sound as if he didn’t care about the stupid spell, but his throat was tight, his eyes burning. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, skipping the coin across the ground as if it were a pebble on water. “I can’t make it work.”

  Kell shifted his weight, lips moving silently as he read over the priest’s scrawl. He held his hands above the paper, palms cupped as if cradling a flame that wasn’t even there yet, and began to recite the spell. When Rhy had tried, the words had fallen out like rocks, but on Kell’s lips, they were poetry, smooth and sibilant.

  The air around them warmed instantly, steam rising from the penned lines on the scroll before the ink drew in and up into a bead of oil, and lit.

  The flame hovered in the air between Kell’s hands, brilliant and white.

  He made it look so easy, and Rhy felt a flash of anger toward his brother, hot as a spark—but just as brief.

  It wasn’t Kell’s fault Rhy couldn’t do magic. Rhy started to rise when Kell caught his cuff. He guided Rhy’s hands to either side of the spell, pulling the prince into the fold of his magic. Warmth tickled Rhy’s palms, and he was torn between delight at the power and knowledge that it wasn’t his.

  “It isn’t right,” he murmured. “I’m the crown prince, the heir of Maxim Maresh. I should be able to light a blasted candle.”

  Kell chewed his lip—Mother never chided him for the habit—and then said, “There are different kinds of power.”

  “I would rather have magic than a crown,” sulked Rhy.

  Kell studied the small white flame between them. “A crown is a sort of magic, if you think about it. A magician rules an element. A king rules an empire.”

  “Only if the king is strong enough.”

  Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.”

  Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?”

  At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the o
nly one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead.

  “You’re an arse,” he muttered, trying to pull away, but his brother’s fingers tightened.

  “Don’t let go.”

  “Get off,” said Rhy, first playfully, but then, as the fire grew brighter and hotter between his palms, he repeated in earnest, “Stop. You’re hurting me.”

  Heat licked his fingers, a white-hot pain lancing through his hands and up his arms.

  “Stop,” he pleaded. “Kell, stop.” But when Rhy looked up from the glowing fire to his brother’s face, it wasn’t a face at all. Nothing but a pool of darkness. Rhy gasped, tried to scramble away, but his brother was no longer flesh and blood but stone, hands carved into cuffs around Rhy’s wrists.

  This wasn’t right, he thought, it had to be a dream—a nightmare—but the heat of the fire and the crushing pressure on his wrists were both so real, worsening with every heartbeat, every breath.

  The flame between them went long and thin, sharpening into a blade of light, its tip pointed first at the ceiling, and then, slowly, horribly, at Rhy. He fought, and screamed, but it did nothing to stop the knife as it blazed and buried itself in his chest.

  Pain.

  Make it stop.

  It carved its way across his ribs, lit his bones, tore through his heart. Rhy tried to scream, and retched smoke. His chest was a ragged wound of light.

  Kell’s voice came, not from the statue, but from somewhere else. Somewhere far away and fading. Don’t let go.

  But it hurt. It hurt so much.

  Stop.

  Rhy was burning from the inside out.

  Please.

  Dying.

  Stay.

  Again.

  For a moment, the black gave way to streaks of color, a ceiling of billowing fabric, a familiar face hovering at the edge of his tear-blurred sight, stormy eyes wide with worry.

  “Luc?” rasped Rhy.

  “I’m here,” answered Alucard. “I’m here. Stay with me.”

  He tried to speak, but his heart slammed against his ribs as if trying to break through.

  It redoubled, then faltered.

  “Have they found Kell?” said a voice.

  “Get away from me,” ordered another.

  “Everyone out.”

  Rhy’s vision blurred.

  The room wavered, the voices dulled, the pain giving way to something worse, the white-hot agony of the invisible knife dissolving into cold as his body fought and failed and fought and failed and failed and—

  No, he pleaded, but he could feel the threads breaking one by one inside him until there was nothing left to hold him up.

  Until Alucard’s face vanished, and the room fell away.

  Until the darkness wrapped its heavy arms around Rhy, and buried him.

  V

  Alucard Emery wasn’t used to feeling powerless.

  Mere hours earlier, he’d won the Essen Tasch and been named the strongest magician in the three empires. But now, sitting by Rhy’s bed, he had no idea what to do. How to help. How to save him.

  The magician watched as the prince curled in on himself, deathly pale against the tangled sheets, watched as Rhy cried out in pain, attacked by something even Alucard couldn’t see, couldn’t fight. And he would have—would have gone to the end of the world to keep Rhy safe. But whatever was killing him, it wasn’t here.

  “What is happening?” he’d asked a dozen times. “What can I do?”

  But no one answered, so he was left piecing together the queen’s pleas and the king’s orders, Lila’s urgent words and the echoes of the royal guards’ searching voices, all of them calling for Kell.

  Alucard sat forward, clutching the prince’s hand, and watched the threads of magic around Rhy’s body fray, threatening to snap.

  Others looked at the world and saw light and shadow and color, but Alucard Emery had always been able to see more. Had always been able to see the warp and weft of power, the pattern of magic. Not just the aura of a spell, the residue of an enchantment, but the tint of true magic circling a person, pulsing through their veins. Everyone could see the Isle’s red light, but Alucard saw the entire world in streaks of vivid color. Natural wells of magic glowed crimson. Elemental magicians were cloaked in green and blue. Curses stained purple. Strong spells burned gold. And Antari? They alone shone with a dark but iridescent light—not one color, but every color folded together, natural and unnatural, shimmering threads that wrapped like silk around them, dancing over their skin.

  Alucard now watched those same threads fray and break around the prince’s coiled form.

  It wasn’t right—Rhy’s own meager magic had always been a dark green (he’d told the prince once, only to watch his features crinkle in distaste—Rhy had never liked the color).

  But the moment he’d set eyes on Rhy again, after three years away, Alucard had known the prince was different. Changed. It wasn’t the set of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, or the new shadows beneath his eyes. It was the magic bound to him. Power lived and breathed, was meant to move in the current of a person’s life. But this new magic around Rhy lay still, threads wrapped tight as rope around the prince’s body.

  And each and every one of them shone like oil on water. Molten color and light.

  That night, in Rhy’s chamber, when Alucard slid the tunic aside to kiss the prince’s shoulder, he’d seen the place where the silvery threads knitted into Rhy’s skin, woven straight into the scarred circles over his heart. He didn’t have to ask who’d made the spell—only one Antari came to mind—but Alucard couldn’t see how Kell had done it. Normally he could pick apart a piece of magic by looking at its threads, but the strands of the spell had no beginning, no end. The threads of Kell’s magic plunged into Rhy’s heart, and were lost—no, not lost, buried—the spellwork stiff, unshakeable.

  And now, somehow, it was crumbling.

  The threads snapped one by one under an invisible strain, every broken cord eliciting a sob, a shuddering breath from the half-conscious prince. Every fraying tether—

  That’s what it was, he realized. Not just a spell, but a kind of link.

  To Kell.

  He didn’t know why the prince’s life was bound to the Antari’s. Didn’t want to imagine—though he now saw the scar between Rhy’s trembling ribs, as wide as a dagger’s edge, and the understanding reached him anyway, and he felt sick and helpless—but the link was breaking, and Alucard did the only thing he could.

  He held the prince’s hand, and tried to pour his own power into the fraying threads, as if the storm-blue light of his magic could fuse with Kell’s iridescence instead of wicking uselessly away. He prayed to every power in the world, to every saint and every priest and every blessed figure—the ones he believed in and the ones he didn’t—for strength. And when they didn’t answer, he spoke to Rhy instead. He didn’t tell him to hold on, didn’t tell him to be strong.

  Instead, he spoke of the past. Their past.

  “Do you remember, the night before I left?” He fought to keep the fear from his voice. “You never answered my question.”

  Alucard closed his eyes, in part so he could picture the memory, and in part because he couldn’t bear to watch the prince in so much pain.

  It had been summer, and they’d been lying in bed, bodies tangled and warm. He’d drawn a hand along Rhy’s perfect skin, and when the prince had preened, he’d said, “One day you will be old and wrinkled, and I will still love you.”

  “I’ll never be old,” said the prince with the certainty mustered only by the young and healthy and terribly naive.

  “So you plan to die young, then?” he’d teased, and Rhy had given an elegant shrug.

  “Or live forever.”

  “Oh, really?”

  The prince had swept a dark curl from his eyes. “Dying is so mundane.”

  “And how, exactly,” said Alucard, propping himself on on
e elbow, “do you plan to live forever?”

  Rhy had pulled him down, then, and ended their conversation with a kiss.

  Now he shuddered on the bed, a sob escaping through clenched teeth. His black curls were matted to his face. The queen called for a cloth, called for the head priest, called for Kell. Alucard clutched his lover’s hand.

  “I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry. But I’m here now, so you can’t die,” he said, his voice finally breaking. “Don’t you see how rude that would be, when I’ve come so far?”

  The prince’s hand tightened as his body seized.

  Rhy’s chest hitched up and down in a last, violent shudder.

  And then he stilled.

  And for a moment, Alucard was relieved, because Rhy was finally resting, finally asleep. For a moment, everything was all right. For a moment—

  Then it shattered.

  Someone was screaming.

  The priests were pushing forward.

  The guards were pulling him back.

  Alucard stared down at the prince.

  He didn’t understand.

  He couldn’t understand.

  And then Rhy’s hand slipped from his, and fell back to the bed.

  Lifeless.

  The last silver threads were losing their hold, sliding off his skin like sheets in summer.

  And then he was screaming.

  Alucard didn’t remember anything after that.

  VI

  For a single horrifying moment, Lila ceased to exist.

  She felt herself unravel, breaking apart into a million threads, each one stretching, fraying, threatening to snap as she stepped out of the world, out of life—and into nothing. And then, just as suddenly, she was staggering forward onto her hands and knees in the street.

  She let out a short, involuntary cry as she landed, limbs shaking, head ringing like a bell.

  The ground beneath her palms—and there was ground, so that at least was a good sign—was rough and cold. The air was quiet. No fireworks. No music. Lila dragged herself back to her feet, blood dripping from her fingers, her nose. She wiped it away, red dots speckling the stone as she drew her knife and shifted her stance, putting her back to the icy wall. She remembered the last time she’d been here, in this London, the hungry eyes of men and women starved for power.