V.E Schwab - A Darker Shade of Magic

“Stop!” called Kell, but it was too late. The moment the woman’s fingers curled around it, he could see her change, the possession rippling through her in a single drawn-out shiver before her head flicked up at him, mouth drawing into a cold grim smile. She turned on her heel and plunged into the palace.

“Kell!” called Lila, and he spun, taking in the room for the first time as it was, in disarray. The remaining guard lay motionless on the floor, a dagger driven through the visor of his helmet, and Lila crouched over Rhy, her mask lifted and her tangled hands pressing against the prince’s chest. She was covered in blood, but it wasn’t hers. Rhy’s shirt was soaked through.

“Rhy,” said Kell, the word a sob, a shuddering breath as he knelt over his brother. He drew his dagger and slashed his hand, cutting deep. “Hold on, Rhy.” He pressed his wounded palm to the prince’s chest—it was rising and falling in staccato breaths—and said, “As Hasari.”

Heal.

Rhy coughed up blood.

The courtyard below had exploded into activity, voices pouring up through the broken balcony. Footsteps were sounding through the halls, fists banging on the chamber doors, which Kell now saw were scrawled with spellwork. Locking charms.

“We have to go,” said Lila.

“As Hasari,” said Kell again, putting pressure on the wound. There was so much blood. Too much.

“I’m sorry,” murmured Rhy.

“Shut up, Rhy,” said Kell.

“Kell,” ordered Lila.

“I’m not leaving him,” he said simply.

“So take him with us.” Kell hesitated. “You said the magic needs time to work. We can’t wait. Bring him with us if you will, but we need to go .”

Kell swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said, just before forcing himself—and Rhy—to his feet. The prince gasped in pain. “I’m sorry.”

They couldn’t go by the door. Couldn’t parade the wounded prince in front of a palace full of people there to celebrate his birthday. And, somewhere among them, Astrid Dane. But there was a private hall between Rhy’s room and Kell’s, one they’d used since they were boys, and now he half dragged, half carried his brother toward a concealed door, and then through it. He led the prince and Lila down the narrow corridor, the walls of which were covered with an assortment of odd marks—bets and challenges and personal scores kept by tallies, the tasks themselves long forgotten. A trail through their strange and sheltered youth.

Now they left a trail of blood.

“Stay with me,” said Kell. “Stay with me. Rhy. Listen to my voice.”

“Such a nice voice,” said Rhy quietly, his head lolling forward.

“Rhy.”

Kell heard armored bodies break into the prince’s room as they reached his own, and he shut the door to the hall and pressed his bloodied hand to the wood and said, “As Staro.” Seal.

As the word left his lips, metalwork spread out from his fingers, tracing back and forth over the door and binding it shut.

“We can’t keep running from bedroom to bedroom,” snapped Lila. “We have to get out of this palace!”

Kell knew that. Knew they had to get away. He led them to the private study at the far edge of his room, the one with the blood markings on the back of the door. Shortcuts to half a dozen places in the city. The one that led to the Ruby Fields was useless now, but the others would work. He scanned the options until he found the one—the only one—he knew would be safe.

“Will this work?” asked Lila.

Kell wasn’t sure. Doors within worlds were harder to make but easier to use; they could only be created by Antari , but others could— hypothetically —pass through. Indeed, Kell had led Rhy through a portal once before—the day he found him on the boat—but there had been only two of them then, and now there were three.

“Don’t let go,” said Kell. He drew fresh blood over the mark and held Rhy and Lila as closely as he could, hoping the door—and the magic—would be strong enough to lead them all to sanctuary.

XII

SANCTUARY & SACRIFICE

I

The London Sanctuary sat at a bend in the river near the edge of the city, a stone structure with the simple elegance of a temple and an air just as reverent. It was a place where men and women came to study magic as much as worship it. Scholars and masters here spent their lives striving to comprehend—and connect with—the essence of power, the origin, the source. To understand the element of magic. The entity in all, and yet of none.

As a child, Kell had spent as much time in the sanctuary as he had in the palace, studying under—and being studied by—his tutor, Master Tieren, but though he visited now and then, he had not been back to stay in years (not since Rhy began to throw tantrums at Kell’s every absence, insisting that the latter be not only a fixture, but also a family member). Still, Tieren insisted that he would always have a room there, and so Kell had kept the door drawn on his wall, marked by a simple circle of blood with an X drawn through.

The symbol of sanctuary.

Now he and Lila—with a bloody Rhy between them—stumbled through, out of the grandeur and current chaos of the palace and into a simple stone room.

Candlelight flickered against the smooth rock walls, and the chamber itself was narrow and high-ceilinged and sparsely furnished. The sanctuary scorned distraction, the private chambers supplied with only the essential. Kell may have been aven—blessed —but Tieren insisted on treating him as he would any other student (a fact for which Kell was grateful). As such, his room held neither more nor less than any other: a wooden desk along one wall and a low cot along another, with a small table beside it. On the table, burning, as it always burned, sat an infinite candle. The room had no windows and only one door, and the air held the coolness of underground places, of crypts.

A circle was etched into the floor, symbols scrawled around the edges. An enhancing sphere meant for meditation. Rhy’s blood trailed a path across it as Kell and Lila dragged him to the cot and laid him down as gently as possible.

“Stay with me,” Kell kept saying, but Rhy’s quiet “sure” and “all right” and “as you wish” had given way to silence and shallow breaths.

How many As Hasari s had Kell said? The words had once more become a low chant on his lips, in his head, in his heartbeat, but Rhy was not healing. How long until the magic worked? It had to work. Fear clawed its way up Kell’s throat. He should have looked at Astrid’s weapon. Should have paid attention to the metal and the markings on it. Had she done something to block his magic? Why wasn’t it working?

“Stay with me,” he murmured. Rhy had stopped moving. His eyes were closed, and the strain had gone out of his jaw.

“Kell,” Lila said softly. “I think it’s too late.”

“No,” he said, gripping the cot. “It’s not. The magic just needs time. You don’t understand how it works.”

“Kell.”

“It just needs time.” Kell pressed both hands to his brother’s chest and stifled a cry. It neither rose nor fell. He couldn’t feel a heartbeat underneath the ribs. “I can’t …” he said, gasping as if he, too, were starved of air. “I can’t …” Kell’s voice wavered as his fingers tangled in his brother’s bloody shirt. “I can’t give up.”

“It’s over,” said Lila. “There’s nothing you can do.”