The Fragile Threads of Power (Threads of Power, #1)

by V.E. Schwab

Magic is the river that waters all things. It lends itself to life, and in death calls it back, and so the stream appears to rise and fall, when in truth, it never loses a single drop. —TIEREN SERENSE, ninth Aven Essen of the London Sanctuary

Kosika lifted one of the amulets, and wondered if the amplifiers were worth less, or even more, now that the world was waking up. That’s what people called the change. As if the magic had just been sleeping all these years, and the latest king, Holland, had somehow shaken it awake.

Over the last few months, the magic had sprouted up like weeds. Only it never really grew inside the grown-ups—at least, not in the ones who wanted it most. Maybe they’d spent too long trying to force magic to do what they wanted, and it was angry.

Tes didn’t need any of these things to fix a bit of broken magic. All she needed were her eyes. Her eyes, which for some reason saw the world not just in shape and color, but in threads. Everywhere she looked, she saw them.

But Tes couldn’t just see the threads of power. She could touch them. Pluck a string as if it were an instrument and not the fabric of the world. Find the frayed ends of a fractured spell, trace the lines of broken magic and mend them. She didn’t speak the language of spellwork, didn’t need to. She knew the language of magic itself. Knew it was a rare gift, and knew what people did to get their hands on rare things, which was exactly why she maintained the illusion of the shop.

The merchant’s son searched their faces. He was a wind magician by birth but those were common. He had a second, more valuable skill: a keen eye for details, and with it, a knack for spotting lies. His father appreciated the talent because it came in handy when asking sailors about their inventory, how a crate was lost, why a purchase had fallen through, or vanished en route.

A relic of the Tide that fell on London seven years before. The cursed magic that spilled the Isle’s banks. Few people knew that the magic had a name, and it was Osaron. Osaron, the destroyer of Black London. Osaron, the darkness that believed itself a god. Osaron, who corrupted everything and everyone he touched. Most who survived did so by succumbing to his will. Those who fought largely perished, burned alive by the fever raging in their veins. The few who did not fall, who fought the magic and the fever and lived, they alone were marked by the battle, their veins scorched silver in the curse’s wake.

Lila tipped her head back, brown eyes squinting at the sky. A stranger would never know that one of those eyes was real and one was fake. Would never know that the one she’d lost hadn’t been brown at all, but black as pitch, carved out by a two-bit doctor back in London, England—the only London she’d known of, then—when she was just a child. As if it had been a poisoned thing, a spreading rot, and not a sign of strength, a marker of extraordinary power, once-in-a-generation magic. If only she’d been born in this world, the one that worshipped magic, instead of the one that had forgotten it. But she was here now.

“Not everything is a trap.” The words made something tug behind her ribs. At being watched, but more so, at being seen. “Am I that easy to read?” “No,” he said simply. “But I like to think I’m learning.”

And Kell wanted what he always did these days. To prove that even now, without the power that had once defined his life, marked him as Antari and made him the strongest magician in the world, he was still worth something to the Grey Barron, and Lila Bard, to the palace and the empire, and himself.

“What was that for?” she asked. “For warmth,” he said, and they both smiled at the words, the memory drawn like thread between them, between now and that first night when she had done the same to him, and claimed it was for luck. She kissed him again, deeper, hands sliding beneath his coat. Kell leaned in. He loved her. It scared him, but frankly, so did Lila. She always had.

Three months since the battle in Osaron’s makeshift palace. Three months since Holland and Lila and Kell combined their power to fight the dark god back. Three months since Holland had used an Inheritor to contain the demon’s power, and Kell had been caught between the two, and nearly torn apart.

Three months, and he told himself, the longer he waited, the better it would heal. But he could feel the magic pooling just beneath his skin. Waiting to be summoned. Waiting to be used. That was the hardest part. He knew it was there, an untapped well, and every day, he found himself reaching for it, the way he had all his life, only to stop short as he remembered. Remembered the pain, the wrenching, rending agony that had torn through him when he first tried to use his power after they’d won. But it had been three months. Three months, he was sure, was long enough.

He could do this. He had to do this. He was Kell Maresh. Antari magician and adopted prince. He had traveled across worlds, been known and feared by the rulers of Grey London, and Red, and White. He had faced Vitari and the darkness it tried to breed inside him, had bested all but Lila in the Essen Tasch, had fought against Holland, and then beside him, had watched the other Antari sacrifice everything he had, everything he was, to save their cities. Holland, who had not survived the battle. But Kell had.

No wonder she had made it here, he thought. Delilah Bard was a force of nature. The world hadn’t simply opened for her. It had been cleaved, parted like skin beneath her knife. She was incredible.

To Lila, Kell had always been a pane of glass tilted toward her just so, so that where others saw only colors and streaks, she saw the truth of it. Of him.

Caring could drown you, if you let it. But it could also help you float.

“We all don clothes that do not fit, and hope we will grow into them. Or at least, grow used to them.”

“Brother,” said Rhy, holding him tight. And unlike the coat, and all the other trappings of Kell’s old life, this one, at least, still fit.

She had gone in his stead, the last Antari with working power, first to Grey London, to make sure Osaron’s remains were still secure in the cellar of the Five Points (they were), and then to White London, to see what had grown in Holland’s wake (imagine her surprise to discover, of all things, a child queen).

Sometimes Tes fixed things. Now and then, she even made them better. But she knew, better than most: anything that could be fixed could be broken again.

“Kosika,” he repeated, his face breaking into a smile. “Do you know what it means?” She shook her head. She hadn’t known a name could mean anything—her mother told her she was named for the jagged stretch of the Kosik itself, which ran along the city’s edge like a wound that wouldn’t heal. But the royal guard looked her in the eyes. “It means little queen.”

“Now the king is dead.” Nasi lifted the figure from the center of the circle, and set it, almost gently, to the side. “And the Vir are trying to hold the peace, but it’s only a matter of time before someone comes along to claim the empty throne by force. But they’re hoping it won’t come to that, not if you take Holland’s place.” Kosika reeled. “Why me?” “Well,” said Nasi, setting another piece—a child—in the circle, “because you are like him. Antari.”

“Kosika,” said a voice, low and smooth. She turned, and there he was, dressed in charcoal, one hand on the post of her bed and the other on the stained cloak, his long fingers as graceful as they’d been when she curled them around the single sugar cube in the Silver Wood. “Hello, Holland.”

WTF!!!!!!!

Tes turned, and saw the telltale shine of Antari magic. It twined through the air, the color of moonlight but twice as bright, so bright it almost blurred the figure at its center. But as the threads shifted and danced, Tes saw the tall woman approaching a ship, whip thin, dark hair cut knife-sharp along a pointed chin. She knew her, at once. Delilah Bard. One of the strongest magicians in the world.

Truth be told, Lila had never spent much time in pleasure gardens. Not that she scorned pleasure—she enjoyed a fine wine, a sharp knife, the things Kell could do with his mouth when he put it to good use—but once a thief, always a thief.

She reached out, and the knife shuddered to a stop, inches from her skin, Bex’s will too weak to counter as her blood pumped onto the floor. “You just don’t want to die,” said Lila, plucking the knife out of the air. “Let me help you.”

Her black curls tumbled into her face as she whispered to it in a soft but constant stream, the way Tes sometimes did with the owl. She was young—four, maybe five, too young for her magic to come in, but Tes thought she could just make out the ghostly glow of light on the air around her, though it was too faint to have a color yet.

Lila went to Kell’s side. She knelt beside his sleeping body, and whispered something in his ear, and if Tes had been standing farther back, she’d never have heard it. But she did. “There is nowhere you go,” said the Antari to her prince, “that I cannot follow.”