The second time someone tried to kill Holland, he was eighteen, walking home with a loaf of coarse bread in one hand and a bottle of kaash in the other.

The sun was going down, the city taking on another shape. It was a risk, to walk with both hands full, but Holland had grown into his frame, long limbs corded with muscle, shoulders broad and straight. He no longer wore his black hair down over his eye. He no longer tried to hide.

Halfway home, he realized he was being followed.

He didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, didn’t even quicken his pace.

Holland didn’t go looking for fights, but still they came to him. Trailed him through the streets like strays, like shadows.

He kept walking, now, letting the soft clink of the bottle and the steady tread of his boot form a backdrop for the sounds of the alley around him.

The shuffle of steps.

The soft exhale before a weapon’s release.

A blade whistling out of the dark.

Holland dropped the bread and turned, one hand raised. The knife stopped an inch from his throat and hung there in the air, waiting to be plucked. Instead, he twirled his hand and the blade spun on its edge, reversing course. With a flick of his finger, he flung the metal back into the dark, where it found flesh. Someone screamed.

Three more men came out of the shadows. Not by choice—Holland was dragging them forward, their faces contorted as they fought their own bones, his will on their bodies stronger than their own.

He could feel their hearts racing, blood pounding through their veins.

One of the men tried to speak, but Holland willed his mouth shut. He didn’t care what they had to say.

All three were young, though a little older than Holland himself, with tattoos already staining their wrists and lips and temples. Blood and word, the sources of power. He had half a mind to walk away and leave them pinned in the street, but this was the third attack in less than a month, and he was getting tired.

He loosened a single pair of jaws.

“Who sent you?”

“Ros … Ros Vortalis,” stammered the youth through still-clenched teeth.

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the name. It wasn’t even the first time he’d heard the name from one of the would-be killers following him home. Vortalis was a thug from the shal, a nobody trying to carve a piece of power from a place with too little to spare. A man trying to get Holland’s attention in all the wrong ways.

“Why?” he demanded.

“He told us … to bring him … your head.”

Holland sighed. The bread was still on the ground. The wine was beginning to frost. “Tell this Vortalis that if he wants my head, he’ll have to come for it himself.”

With that, he flicked his fingers, and the men went flying backward, just like the knife, slamming into the alley walls with a solid thud. They fell and didn’t get back up, and Holland took up the bread, stepped over their bodies—chests still rising—and continued home.

When he got there, he pressed his palm to the door, felt the locks slide free within the wood, and eased it open. There was a slip of paper on the floor, and he was halfway to it when he heard the padding rush of steps, and looked up just in time to catch the girl. She threw her arms around his neck, and when he spun with the weight of her, the skirts of her dress fanned like petals, the edges stained from dancing.

“Hello, Hol,” she said sweetly.

“Hello, Tal,” he answered.

It had been nine years since Alox attacked him. Nine years trying to survive in a city out for blood, weathering every storm, every fight, every sign of trouble, all the while waiting for something better.

And then, something better came.

And her name was Talya.

Talya, a spot of color in a world of white.

Talya, who carried the sun with her wherever she went.

Talya, so fair that when she smiled, the day grew brighter.

Holland saw her in the market one night.

And next he saw her in the square.

And after that, he saw her everywhere he looked.

She had scars in the corners of her eyes that winked silver in the light, and a laugh that took his breath away.

Who could laugh like that, in a world like this?

She reminded him of Alox. Not the way he’d disappear for hours, or days, come home with blood caking his clothes, but the way her presence could make him forget about the darkness, the cold, the dying world outside their door.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as he set her down.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her temple. “Nothing at all.”

And perhaps that wasn’t strictly true, but there was a startling truth beneath the lie: for the first time in his life, Holland was something like happy.

He stoked the fire with a glance, and Talya pulled him onto the cot they shared, and, then, tearing off pieces of bread and sipping cold wine, she told him the stories of the someday king. Just the way Alox had. The first time, Holland had flinched at the words, but didn’t stop her because he liked the way she told them, so full of energy and light. The stories were her favorite—and so he let her talk.

By the third or fourth telling, he’d forgotten why the stories sounded so familiar.

By the tenth, he’d forgotten that he’d first heard them from someone else.

By the hundredth time, he’d forgotten about that other life.

That night, they lay wrapped in blankets, and she ran her fingers through his hair, and he felt himself drifting from the rhythm of the touch and the heat of the fire.

That was when she tried to cut his heart out.