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

by V.E. Schwab

he jerked his head toward the corner, and she liked that they had a language that didn’t need words.

All she needed were her eyes. Her eyes, which for some reason saw the world not just in shape and color, but in threads.

Curiosity was more danger than a curse. She didn’t survive by asking questions.

Some people cannot see the need for change until it’s done.

Och ans, is farr, ins ol’ach, regh narr. There was no easy way to translate Veskan. It was the kind of language where every word could mean a dozen things, depending on their order and their context. It’s why he’d never managed more than a frail grasp on a handful of phrases. But this one he’d held on to. This one Alucard understood. A head gets lost, but a heart knows home.

Alucard stood there, imagining a life that was not, and had never been, and would never be.

A magician could only manipulate what they could hold. A current from the air, a few inches from the soil, a wave from the sea.

“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.

He loved her. It scared him, but frankly, so did Lila. She always had.

Delilah Bard wasn’t a soft bed on a summer morning. She was a blade in the dark, dazzling, and dangerous, and sharp.

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 had so many different smiles. Some happy and some cruel and some positively wicked, ones full of humor and ones full of hate, and he was still learning how to read them all. But this one he knew, not because it was common, but because it was rare. It was pride.

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.

Antari magic was an incredible thing. It was the only kind of power that was both element and spell. Chaos and order. A drop of blood, a pair of words, and you could turn a man to stone, open a door into another world, mend almost any injury.

When people wanted to make trouble, all they needed was a good excuse.

It was a strange thing, their connection, and pleasure never seemed to carry half as well as pain.

And countless more who survived the night unscathed, not because they were deserving, but because they chose not to fight at all. Untold masses who felt the darkness at their door and simply let it in. “Do not hate them for living,” Alucard had said. But Rhy did. Because in the end, they were cowards and they were rewarded for it. They were weak in the face of evil, and they lived.

Rhy felt small and scared. “How do they do it, then?” “They learn. They err. They try again. They fail. The worst rulers see their country as a game of Rasch, the men and women only pieces on their board. But you—” His hand came to rest on Rhy’s shoulder. “—you will love them. You will bleed with them. You will hurt with them. A piece of you will die with them. The rest of you will live. I do not know if you will be a great king, Rhy Maresh. Only time will tell. But I believe with all my heart that you will be a good one.”

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

Words had two kinds of power—the first in their meaning, the second in how they were said.

They were allowed to know each other as they were now, not as they’d been sometime before.

brow. That was the problem with children. If you did a thing once, you had to be willing to do it again. And again. And again.

What would become of all they’d seen and felt and known and loved? How could he carry their hearts in his, when he knew he would forget the sound of their voices, the weight of their hands? And one day when Kell died, and so did he, what then? After all that bound them, would there truly be no tie beyond the dark?

“How lucky we are,” he said softly, “that after every winter, we are rewarded with a spring.”

But if someone had lit the oil, she could have pulled the burning drop into any shape, transformed it into a raging fire, or a delicate ribbon of flame. She could have turned the water to ice by tugging on its threads, or shaped the earth into a ring. She could have pulled on the strings of the wooden box itself, and turned it into a bracelet, a mug, a sapling. She could see the very fabric of the world, and all the magic in it, and touch each and every string, unravel the patterns, and remake them,

Kosika had wondered if it was magic, some spell that allowed gossip to go through walls, to move faster than feet.)

“There is nowhere you go,” said the Antari to her prince, “that I cannot follow.”

It stopped, and he knew that death had come at last, and it felt wonderful. It felt like his brother’s arms, like Lila’s voice, like floating off to sea.