“Don’t stab me,” he whispered in her ear, and she wished it were full night so no one could see the color rising in her cheeks.

She cast a last look up at the palace, the dark, distorted echo stretching like a shadow at its side.

“What if Osaron follows us?” she asked.

Kell glanced back. “If we’re lucky, he will.”

“You’ve an odd notion of luck,” said Jasta, kicking her horse into motion.

Lila’s own mount lurched forward beneath her, and so did her stomach. This is not how I die, she told herself as, in a thunder of hooves and fogging breath, the horses plunged into the night.

III

It was a palace fit for a king.

Fit for a god.

A place of promise, potential, power.

Osaron strode through the great hall of his newest creation, his steps landing soundlessly on polished stone. The floor flickered beneath each stride, grass and blossom and ice born with every step, fading behind him like footsteps on sand.

Columns rose up from the floor, growing more like trees than marble pillars, their stone limbs branching up and out, flowering with dark-hued glass and fall leaves and beads of dew, and in their shining columns he saw the world as it could be. So many possible transformations, such infinite potential.

And there, at the heart of the great hall, his throne, its base throwing roots, its back surging into crownlike spires, its arms spread like an old friend waiting to be embraced. Its surface shone with an iridescent light, and as Osaron climbed the steps, mounted the platform, took his seat, the whole palace sang with the rightness of his presence.

Osaron sat at the center of this web and felt the strings of the city, the mind of each and every servant tethered to his by threads of magic. A tug here, a tremor there, thoughts carrying like movement along a thousand lines.

In each devoted life, a fire burned. Some flames were dull and small, barely kindling, while others shone bright and hot, and those he summoned now, called them forward from every corner of the city.

Come, he thought. Kneel at my feet like children, and I will raise you. As men. As women. As chosen.

Beyond the palace walls, bridges began to bloom like ice over the river, hands extended to usher them in.

My king, they said, rising from their tables.

My king, they said, turning from their work.

Osaron smiled, savoring the echo of those words, until a new chorus interrupted them.

My king, whispered his subjects, the bad ones are leaving.

My king, they said, the bad ones are fleeing.

The ones who dared to refuse you.

The ones who dare defy you.

Osaron steepled his fingers. The Antari were leaving London.

All of them? he asked, and the echo came.

All of them. All of them. All of them.

Holland’s words came back to him, an unwelcome intrusion.

“How will you rule without a head for your crown?”

Words quickly swallowed by his clamoring servants.

Shall we chase them?

Shall we stop them?

Shall we drag them down?

Shall we bring them back?

Osaron rapped his fingers on the arm of the throne. The gesture made no sound.

Shall we?

No, thought Osaron, his command rippling through the minds of thousands like a vibration along a string. He sat back in his sculpted throne. No. Let them go.

If it was a trap, he would not follow.

He did not need them.

He did not need their minds, or their bodies.

He had thousands.

The first of those he’d summoned was entering the hall, a man striding toward him with a proud jaw and a head held high. He came to a stop before the throne, and knelt, dark head bowed.

“Rise,” commanded Osaron, and the man obeyed. “What is your name?”

The man stood, broad shouldered and shadow eyed, a silver ring in the shape of a feather circling one thumb.

“My name is Berras Emery,” said the man. “How may I serve you?”

IV

Tanek came into sight shortly after dark.

Alucard didn’t like the port, but he knew it well. For three years, it was as close to London as he’d dared to come. In many ways it was too close. The people here knew the name Emery, had an idea of what it meant.

It was here he learned to be someone else—not a nobleman, but the jaunty captain of the Night Spire. Here he first met Lenos and Stross, at a game of Sanct. Here he was reminded, again and again and again, of how close—how far—he was from home. Every time he returned to Tanek, he saw London in the tapestries and trappings, heard it in the accents, smelled it in the air, that scent like woods in spring, and his body ached.

But right now, Tanek seemed nothing like London. It was bustling in a surreal way, oblivious to the danger lurking inland. The berths were filled with ships, the taverns with men and women, the greatest danger a pickpocket or a winter chill.

In the end, Osaron hadn’t taken their halfhearted bait, and so the shadow of his power had ended an hour back, the weight of it lifting like the air after a storm. The strangest thing, thought Alucard, was the way it stopped. Not suddenly, but slowly, over the course of a click, the spellwork tapering so that by the end of its reach, the few people they met had no shadows in their eyes, nothing but a bad feeling, an urge to turn back. Several times they passed travelers on the road who seemed lost, when in fact they’d simply waded to the edge of the spell, and stopped, repelled by a thing they couldn’t name, couldn’t remember.

“Don’t say anything,” Kell had warned when they’d passed the first bunch. “The last thing we need is panic spreading beyond the capital.”