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