Something had hold of her—something with wings, and for a moment Nikolai wondered if somehow the demon had leapt from his very skin. But no, her captor’s wings were vast mechanical marvels of engineering that beat the sky as they rose higher.
Another winged soldier was wheeling toward Nikolai—this one female, black hair bound in a topknot, biceps armored in bands of gray metal. Khergud. The Shu had dared to attack the royal procession.
Tolya and Tamar stepped in front of Nikolai, but the soldier’s target was not the king—she had come for the king’s Heartrender guards. She had come to hunt Grisha. In a single movement the khergud released a metallic net that glittered in the air, then collapsed over the twins with enough weight to knock them to the ground. The khergud dragged them over the earth, gathering speed to lift them skyward.
Nikolai didn’t hesitate. There were times for subtlety and times when there was nothing to do but charge. He ran straight for the khergud, clambering over the struggling bodies of Tolya and Tamar, who grunted as his boots connected. He opened fire with both pistols.
The khergud barely flinched, her skin reinforced with that marvelously effective alloy of Grisha steel and ruthenium. Nikolai would solve that problem later.
He cast his weapons aside but did not let his stride break. He drew his dagger and launched himself onto the khergud’s back. The soldier bucked with the force of a wild horse. Nikolai had read the files. He knew strength and gunpowder were no match for this kind of power. So precision it would have to be.
“I hope some part of you is still flesh and blood,” Nikolai bit out. He
seized the khergud’s collar and aimed the dagger into the notch between the soldier’s jaw and throat, praying for accuracy as he drove the blade home.
The khergud stumbled, losing momentum, trying to dislodge the dagger. Nikolai did not relent, twisting the blade deeper, feeling hot blood spurt over his hand. At last the soldier collapsed.
Nikolai didn’t wait to see Tolya and Tamar free themselves; he was already searching the skies for Zoya and her captor.
They were locked in a struggle high above the earth as Zoya kicked and fought the khergud who had hold of her. The soldier wrapped a massive arm around her throat. He was going to choke her into submission.
Abruptly, Zoya went still—but that was too fast for her to have lost consciousness. Nikolai felt the air around him crackle. The khergud had assumed Zoya was like other Grisha, who couldn’t summon with their arms bound. But Zoya Nazyalensky was no ordinary Squaller.
Lightning crackled over the metal wings of the Shu soldier. He shuddered and shook. The khergud’s body went limp. He and Zoya plummeted to the ground. No no no. Nikolai raced toward them, his mind constructing and casting aside plans. Useless. Hopeless. There was no way to reach her in time. A snarl ripped from his chest. He leapt, the air rushing against his face, and then he had her in his arms. Impossible. The physics wouldn’t permit …
Nikolai glimpsed his own shadow beneath him—too far beneath him, a dark blot bracketed by wings that curled from his own back. The monster is me and I am the monster. He flinched, as if he could somehow escape himself, and watched the monster’s shadow twitch.
“Nikolai?” Zoya was looking at him, and all he saw on her face was terror.
“It’s me,” he tried to say, but only a growl emerged. In the next second a shock was traveling through his body—Zoya’s power vibrating through his bones. He cried out, the sound a ragged growl, and felt his wings curl in on themselves, vanishing.
He was falling. They were both going to die.
Zoya thrust her free arm down, and a cushion of air pillowed beneath them, halting their momentum with a jolt. They rolled off it and hit the ground in a graceless heap. In a breath, she was scrambling away from him, arms raised, blue eyes wide.
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s me,” he repeated, and when he heard the words emerge from his lips, human and whole, he wanted to weep with gratitude. He’d never tasted anything so sweet as language returning to his tongue.
Zoya’s nostrils flared. She turned her attention to the khergud soldier who had attacked her, looming over his body, looking for a place to unleash her fear. The fall should have killed him, but he was already pushing to his feet. Zoya flipped her palms up and thunder boomed, lightning sparking at her fingertips. The strands of her hair writhed like a halo of serpents around her face. She slammed her hands down on the soldier’s chest. He convulsed as his flesh turned red and smoke rose from his torso, his body catching fire as it burned from within.
“Zoya!” shouted Nikolai. He lurched to his feet, but he didn’t dare touch her, not with that kind of current running through her. “Zoya, look at me, damn it.”
She raised her head. Her skin was pale, her eyes wild with rage. For a moment, she didn’t seem to recognize him. Then her lips parted, her shoulders dropped. Zoya pulled her hands away, and the khergud’s charred body collapsed. She sat back on her knees and drew in a long breath.
The smell emanating from the khergud’s roasted corpse was sickly sweet. So much for an interrogation.
Tolya and Tamar had freed themselves from the net. They stood with Yuri, who was trembling so badly Nikolai thought he might be having some kind of seizure. Had the boy never seen combat? It had been a brutal exchange but a brief one, and it wasn’t as if he’d been a target.
Then Nikolai realized …
“You … he …” sputtered Yuri. “Your Highness,” said Tolya.
Nikolai looked down at his hands. His fingers were still stained black, curled into talons. They had torn through his gloves. Nikolai took a deep breath. A long moment passed, then another. At last, the claws receded.
“I know, Yuri,” he said as steadily as he could manage. “Quite a party trick. Are you going to faint?”
“No. Possibly. I don’t know.”
“You’ll be all right. We all will.” The words were so patently untrue that Nikolai had to struggle not to laugh. “I need you to keep silent. Tolya, Tamar, you’re uninjured?” They both nodded. Nikolai forced
himself to look at Zoya. “You’re not hurt?”
She drew in a shuddering breath. She nodded, flexed her fingers, and said, “A few bruises. But the priest …” She bobbed her chin toward where the man lay, blood trickling from his temple into his snowy beard. He’d been knocked unconscious by a piece of Lizabeta’s stone veil.
Nikolai knelt beside him. The priest’s pulse was steady, though he probably had a bad concussion.
“No outcry from the village,” said Tamar as she used her power to check the priest’s vitals. “No alarm. If someone spotted the khergud, they would have come running.”
Hopefully the attack had been far enough from town to avoid drawing notice.
“I don’t want to try to explain soldiers with mechanical wings,” said Nikolai. “We’ll have to hide the bodies.”
“Give them to the roses,” said Tamar. “I’ll send two riders back to get them out after sunset.”
When the corpses were hidden from view in the heaps of Lizabeta’s red roses, they staged the area around the statue to their liking, and then Tamar brought the priest back to consciousness. As always, taking some kind of action helped to ease the tension thrumming through Nikolai. But he knew he couldn’t rely on this illusion of control. It was a balm, not a cure. The monster had come calling in broad daylight. And it had allowed him to save Zoya. Nikolai didn’t know what that meant. He hadn’t commanded the demon. It had pushed to the fore. At least he thought it had. What if it happens again? His mind felt like enemy territory.
The priest came to with a start and then moaned, reaching up to touch his fingers to the growing bulge at his temple.
“You took quite a knock to the head,” said Nikolai gently.
“There were soldiers!” the priest gasped. “In the sky!” Nikolai and Tamar exchanged a staged look of concern. “A man … he came out of the clouds. He had wings! Another came from the cathedral roof.”
“I fear you may have a concussion,” said Nikolai, helping the priest to his feet.
“I saw him! The statue … You see, he smashed the statue, our statue of Sankta Lizabeta!”
“No,” said Nikolai, and pointed to the beam they’d managed to tear lose from the overhang of the cathedral. “Don’t you see the broken
beam? It gave way from the rafters and struck you and the statue. You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
“Miraculous,” said Zoya dryly.
“Brother,” the priest implored Yuri. “Tell me you did not see what I did!”
Yuri tugged at his straggly beard and Nikolai waited. The monk hadn’t stopped staring at him since the khergud attack. At last, Yuri said, “I … I saw nothing without explanation.”
The priest gave a helpless, baffled huff, and Nikolai felt a jab of guilt. “Come,” he said. “If you don’t have a headache, you will soon. Let’s find you help.”
They walked back along the forest path to the town, where many of the locals were still celebrating in the town square, and left the priest to their care.
“I don’t like lying to a priest,” said Tolya as they mounted their horses to ride out to the manse where they would spend the night.
“I agree,” Yuri added quietly.
“The truth would have been harder for him to bear,” said Tamar. “Think how unhappy he would be, constantly looking over his shoulder and thinking something was going to come out of the sky and pluck him from the ground like a hawk seizing a stoat.”
“It’s still a lie,” said Tolya.
“Then you’ll have to perform some kind of penance,” said Nikolai, his exasperation growing. He was grateful to Tolya. He respected the twins’ faith and its importance to them, but he couldn’t worry over Tolya’s conscience when his mind was trying to contend with a Shu attack on the royal procession and a demon that no longer wanted to wait until dark.
“You can start by rubbing my feet,” Zoya told the monk. “That’s hardly an act of holy contrition,” said Yuri. “You’ve never seen her feet,” said Nikolai.
Zoya tossed her hair over her shoulder. “A man once offered to sign over the deed to his summer home in Polvost if I would let him watch as I stepped on a pile of blueberries.”
“And did you?” asked Tamar.
“Of course not. Polvost is a dump.”
“The priest will be fine,” Nikolai reassured Yuri. “And I appreciate your tact.”
“I did what I thought was right,” said the monk, more quiet and
restrained than Nikolai had ever seen him, his jaw tilted at a stubborn angle. “But I expect an explanation, Your Highness.”
“Well,” Zoya said as they watched Yuri trot off ahead of the party, “now what?”
“You mean now that you’ve cooked an invaluable source of information from the inside out?” There was an edge to his voice that he wasn’t entirely sorry for. It wasn’t like Zoya to make that kind of mistake.
Zoya’s back straightened. “It’s possible I wasn’t entirely in control. I suspect you’re familiar with the sensation.”
Because it wasn’t just the khergud attack that had unsettled her. It was the memory of that night in the bell tower, of another winged monster. One that had shown its claws again today.
“Passingly,” he murmured.
“And I wasn’t talking about the khergud,” said Zoya, pushing past the sudden chill between them. “What are you going to do about the monk?” “I have a few hours to figure out what to tell him. I’ll come up with
something.”
“You do have a gift for the preposterous,” said Zoya, kicking her horse into a gallop. “And this whole cursed country seems to have a taste for it.”
It was long past sunset when at last Nikolai was able to retire from dinner and join the others in the quarters the local governor had provided for them.
The room was clearly the best in the house, and everywhere Nikolai looked there were gestures toward Sankta Lizabeta—the honeycomb floor tiles, roses carved into the mantel, even the walls of the chamber itself had been hollowed into coffers to resemble a great hive. A fire burned in the grate, bathing the sandstone walls in golden light, the cheerful glow somehow inappropriate to the dire events of the day.
Tamar had returned to the cathedral as soon as night fell to retrieve the bodies of the khergud and arrange their transport to the capital for study. Tolya’s reluctance to desecrate a fallen soldier’s body had been considerably diminished by the ambush, and Nikolai felt no qualms at all. His guards had been attacked. Zoya had almost been taken. Besides, some part of him would always be a privateer. If the Shu wanted to wage this kind of war, let them reap the consequences.
Tolya had been ordered to watch the monk and make sure he sent no messages to his followers about what he’d seen. Now Yuri sat before the fire, still looking shaken. Tolya and Tamar played chess at a low table, and Zoya perched on the sill of the window, framed by the casement, as if she were the one who might take flight.
Nikolai shut the door, unsure how to begin. He thought of the Shu soldier’s body cut open on a table. He had seen dissection files, the detailed drawings rendered by Fabrikators and Corporalki. Was that what this problem required? For someone to cut him open and pull him apart? I’d do it gladly, he thought. If this thing could be isolated and excised like a tumor, I’d lie down beneath the scalpel and guide the surgeon’s hand myself.
But the monster was wilier than that.
It was Yuri who spoke first from his place on the floor. “He did this to you, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Nikolai said simply. He’d thought about what lies he might concoct to appease the monk’s fear and curiosity. But in the end, he knew the truth—at least part of it—would work to best advantage. Yuri wanted to believe in Saints, and Saints required martyrdom.
Yet now that the time had come to speak, Nikolai did not want to tell this story. He did not want it to be his story. He’d thought the war was in the past, but it refused to remain there.
He plucked a bottle of brandy from the sideboard, chose a chair, and stretched his legs out in front of the fire. It was a pose of ease and confidence, one he had assumed many times. It felt false.
“During the war,” he said, tugging the gloves from his hands, “I was captured by the Darkling. No doubt you’ve heard that I was tortured by your Starless Saint.”
Yuri’s eyes dropped to the tracery of black lines that spread over Nikolai’s fingers and knuckles. “Korol Rezni,” he said quietly. “King of Scars. I’ve heard the stories.”
“And chalked them up to royal propaganda? A smear campaign against a fallen hero?”
Yuri coughed. “Well—”
“Hand me that brandy,” said Zoya. “I can’t tolerate this degree of stupidity on a clear head.”
Nikolai poured himself a drink before turning over the bottle, but he knew mocking Yuri would do no good. Wasn’t speaking the truth
supposed to be freeing? Some kind of tonic for the soul? In Nikolai’s experience, honesty was much like herbal tea—something well-meaning people recommended when they were out of better options.
“The Darkling had a gift for inflicting misery,” he continued. “He knew pain or imprisonment would be too easy for me to bear. So he used his power to infect me with living darkness. It was my payment for helping the Sun Summoner escape his grasp. I became … I don’t know what exactly I became. Part monster, part man. I hungered for human flesh. I was nearly mindless with the need. Nearly. Enough of my own consciousness still lived on in me that I continued to battle the monster’s impulses and even rallied the volcra to face the Darkling on the Fold.”
At the time, Nikolai hadn’t known if there was any point to fighting on, if he would ever be himself again. He hadn’t even known if the Darkling could be killed. But Alina had managed it, armed with a shadow blade wrapped in the Darkling’s own power and wet with the blood of his own line.
“Before she died, the Sun Summoner slew the Darkling, and the darkness inside me perished with him.” Nikolai took a long swig of his brandy. “Or so I thought.” He’d plummeted to the earth and would have died had Zoya not used the wind to cushion his fall, much as she’d done today. “Several months ago, something began to seize my unconscious mind. Some nights I sleep as well as can be expected—only a lazy monarch rests easy. But on other nights, I become the monster. He controls me completely.”
“Not completely,” said Zoya. “You haven’t taken a human life.”
Nikolai felt a rush of gratitude that she would be the one to speak those words, but he forced himself to add, “That we know of. The attacks are getting worse. They come more frequently. The tonics and even the chains I’ve used to keep them at bay are temporary solutions. It may be only a matter of time before my mind gives itself up to the beast and its hungers. It is possible …” Now the words fought him, poison in his mouth. “It’s possible the beast may overtake me completely and I’ll never be able to return to my human form.”
Silence filled the room, the quiet of a funeral. Why not throw a little more dirt on the coffin? “Today, the monster stepped forward in broad daylight, while I was still awake. That has never happened before.”
“Was it deliberate?” asked Yuri. “Did you choose to—”
“I didn’t choose anything. It simply happened. I think the shock Zoya
sent through my body allowed me to come back to myself.” He took a long sip from his glass. “I can’t have this thing taking hold of me on a battlefield or in the middle of a state function. Ravka’s position is precarious, and so is mine. The people have only just begun to recover from the war. They want stability and leadership, not a monster born of nightmares.”
Peace. A chance to recover, to build their lives without the constant fear of battle, the threat of starvation. On this journey, Nikolai had seen the progress Ravka had made with his own eyes. His country could not afford to go to war again, and he’d done everything to make sure they wouldn’t have to. But if the monster emerged, if Nikolai revealed this dark presence, he might be the very thing that set his country back down the path to violence.
“Perhaps you don’t give the people enough credit,” said Yuri.
“No?” said Zoya from her perch. “The people who still call Grisha witches despite the years they’ve kept this country safe? Who bar them from owning property in their towns—”
“That is illegal,” said Nikolai.
Zoya raised her glass in a mock toast. “I’ll be sure to inform them the next time a Grisha family is driven from their home in the middle of the night.”
“People are always looking for someone to blame for their suffering,” Yuri said earnestly. “Ravka has seen so much strife. It’s only natural that
—”
There was nothing natural about this.
“Yuri,” said Nikolai. “We can debate Ravka’s prejudices another time. I told you we came on this journey to investigate the miracle sites, to consider Sainthood for the Darkling.”
“Was any of that true?”
Nikolai did not intend to answer that question directly.
“The Darkling may deserve to take his place among the Saints, but that can’t happen until I’m rid of this affliction.”
Yuri nodded, then nodded again. He looked down at his bony hands. “But is it something to be rid of?”
Zoya expelled a bitter laugh. “He thinks you’ve been blessed by the Starless Saint.”
Yuri pushed his glasses higher on his long nose. “Blessing and curse
are different words for the same thing.”
“You may well be right,” said Nikolai, forcing himself to find the diplomacy that had always served him well. If you listened to a man’s words, you might learn his wants. The trick was to look into his heart and discover his needs. “But Yuri, the Darkling cannot possibly be considered a Saint until his martyrdom is complete.” Zoya’s eyes narrowed. Nikolai ignored her. He would say what he had to, do what he must to be rid of this sickness. “It was not coincidence that brought you to the palace gates. You were meant to bear witness to the last remnant of the Darkling’s power. You were meant to bring us to the thorn wood. You were meant to free us both.”
“Me?” said Yuri, his voice a bare breath, but Nikolai could see that he wanted to believe. Don’t we all? Who didn’t want to think fate had a plan for him, that his hurts and failures had just been the prologue to a grander tale? To a monk becoming a holy warrior. To a bastard becoming a king. “Me,” repeated Yuri.
Behind him, Zoya rolled her eyes. Neither Tolya nor Tamar looked happy.
“Only you can complete the Darkling’s martyrdom,” said Nikolai. “Will you help me? Will you help him?”
“I will,” said Yuri. “Of course I will. I will take you to the thorn wood.
I will build a holy pyre.”
“Wait just a minute,” Zoya said from her perch. “Are you saying you want to put the king of Ravka on a funeral pyre?”
Yuri blinked. “I mean, one hopes it would simply be a pyre?”
“A comforting and essential distinction,” said Nikolai, though he couldn’t say he was thrilled at the possibility. “Is that what the obisbaya requires?”
Tolya picked up a rook and turned it in his hand. “It isn’t entirely clear, but that seems to be what most of the texts point to.”
“Yes,” said Yuri, intent now. “There’s some suggestion that Sankt Feliks may have in fact been a member of the Priestguard, and there is text for a ritual to be read during the process. Tolya and I have been trying to make sure the language is intact.”
Nikolai’s brows rose. “Sankt Feliks? Wasn’t he spitted on a twig and cooked to death like a holy kebob?”
Tolya set the chess piece down. “Time and translation may have muddied the facts.”
“Let’s hope they were very muddied,” said Nikolai. “Possibly sunk in
a swamp.”
But now Tamar picked up the rook. “Feliks’ branches are always shown thick with thorns, not much like an apple bough. It could make a kind of sense,” she said. “If we’re right about the site of the thorn wood.”
“If any part of it remains,” added Zoya.
“If we can find enough of it to build the pyre,” said Tolya.
“Then there’s the small matter of surviving the flames,” said Zoya. “You will,” said Yuri. “You will survive, and the Starless One will
have his true martyrdom.”
“We ride for the Fold tomorrow,” Nikolai said.
“Come, Tolya,” said Yuri, rising, his face lit with fervor. “I have some ideas about the translation of the third passage. We must be ready.”
Tolya shrugged and unbent his massive body. “It’s a kind of poetry.” Nikolai downed the last of his drink. “Isn’t everything?”
Tamar made to follow them from the room, but before she left she turned to Nikolai. In the firelight, her bronze arms glowed umber, the black lines of her sun tattoos stark against her skin.
“I know you said those things because of the effect they would have on the monk, but Tolya and I have never believed in coincidence,” she said. “Too much has happened in our lives for us to think that faith and fate didn’t play their parts. They may be playing their parts now too.” She bowed. “Good night, Your Highness.”
Zoya hopped down from her perch, prepared to dose him for the night. He was pained to find that after the events of the day, he was looking forward to a little oblivion.
“Fate,” Nikolai said as he opened the door to his bedchamber. “Faith. I fear we are in unknown territory, Nazyalensky. I thought you’d raise a louder protest to skewering me.”
“What is there to object to?” Zoya asked, rearranging the chess pieces the twins had left in disarray. “If the thorn wood is gone, our hopes crumble to dust, we return to the palace empty-handed, and we get through this party or summit or whatever you want to call it to the best of our ability.”
Nikolai sat down on the edge of his bed and pulled off his boots. “And if it is there? If fate has been guiding us all along?”
Zoya lifted a brow. “Then you’d best hope fate thinks you’ll make a good king.”
Nikolai had been told hope was dangerous, had been warned of it
many times. But he’d never believed that. Hope was the wind that came from nowhere to fill your sails and carry you home. Whether it was destiny or sheer desperation guiding them onward, at least once they reached the Fold, he would have answers.
“We’ll send a decoy coach to Keramzin,” he said, “and travel in disguise. If we really do intend to dig a pit in the middle of the Fold, I don’t want it done under the Lantsov flag.”
“Do you think the Shu knew who we were? An attack on the king—” “Is an act of war,” finished Nikolai. “But they weren’t after me. I don’t
think they had any idea who we were. They were hunting Grisha, and they found three of you.”
“So far from the borders,” said Zoya, lingering in the bedroom doorway. “I feel like they’re taunting us.”
Nikolai set his boots by the side of the bed. “I owe you an apology.” “You owe me an entire crop of them. Why start now?”
“I meant for the other night in Balakirev. For the bell tower.” He should have said something before, but the shame of hurting her had been more profound than he could have imagined. “Zoya, I’m sorry. For what I did—”
“It wasn’t you,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Don’t be daft.” But she stayed in the doorway.
“We cannot work side by side if you fear me.” “I don’t fear you, Nikolai.”
But how much longer would he be himself?
Zoya crossed to the bed and sat down on the corner. Her elegant fingers made a smooth pleat in the blue silk of her kefta. “I asked how you do it all, but I’ve never asked you why.”
Nikolai wedged himself against the headboard and stretched out his legs, studying her profile. “I suspect for the same reasons you do.”
“I very much doubt that.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to will away his fatigue. It had been a day of too many revelations, but if Zoya was willing to sit here with him alone, in the quiet of this room, and if what he said might heal the breach between them, then he was not going to squander the opportunity.
But how to answer? Why did it matter to him what became of Ravka? Broken, needy, frustrating Ravka. The grand lady. The crying child. The drowning man who would drag you under rather than be saved. This
country that took so much and gave nothing back. Maybe because he knew that he and his country were the same. Nikolai had always wanted more. More attention, more affection, something new. He’d been too much for his tutors, his nannies, the servants, his mother. No one had quite known what to do with him. No matter how they cajoled or what punishments they devised, he could not be still. They gave him books and he read them in a night. He sat through a lesson in physics and then tried to drop a cannonball off the palace roof. He took apart a priceless ormolu clock and reassembled it into a ghastly contraption that whirred and dinged without surcease, and when his mother wept over the ruined heirloom, Nikolai had looked at her with confused hazel eyes and said, “But … but now it tells the date as well as the time!”
The only person who could get the young prince to behave was his older brother. Nikolai had worshipped Vasily, who could ride and wield a saber, and who was allowed to sit at state functions long after Nikolai was sent off to bed. Vasily was important. Vasily would be king one day. Everything his brother did, Nikolai wanted to do too. If Vasily rode, Nikolai wanted to ride. When Vasily took fencing lessons, Nikolai begged and pleaded until he was allowed to join. Since Vasily was to study statecraft and geography and military histories, Nikolai insisted he was ready for those lessons too. Nikolai only wanted his brother’s notice. But to Vasily, Nikolai was little more than a constantly gabbling, mop- headed barnacle that insisted on clinging to his royal hull. When Vasily favored Nikolai with a smile or a bit of attention, all was calm waters.
But the more Vasily ignored his little brother, the more Nikolai misbehaved.
Tutors took jobs in the wilds of Tsibeya. My nerves, they said. The quiet will be good for them. Nannies gave up their posts to tend to their ailing mothers on the coast. My lungs, they explained. The sea air will be a tonic. Servants wept, the king raged, the queen took to her bed with her headache powders.
One morning, when he was nine, Nikolai arrived at his classroom feeling very excited about the mouse in a jar that he planned to release in his teacher’s bag, only to discover another chair and desk had been set out, and another boy was sitting in them.
“Come meet Dominik,” said his tutor as the dark-haired boy rose and bowed deeply. “He will be getting a bit of education with you.”
Nikolai was surprised but delighted, as he had no companions his own
age in the palace at all—though he grew increasingly frustrated as Dominik flinched every time Nikolai tried to speak with him.
“You needn’t be so nervous,” Nikolai whispered. “Mitkin is no fun, but he sometimes tells good stories about the old kings and doesn’t leave out the bloody parts.”
“Yes, moi tsarevich.”
“You can call me Nikolai if you like. Or we could come up with new names. You could be Dominik the … I’m not sure. Have you done any heroic deeds?”
“No, moi tsarevich.” “Nikolai.”
“Be silent, boys,” said Mitkin, and Dominik jumped again.
But for once, Nikolai stayed quiet. He was busy devising how he might get Dominik to talk more.
When Mitkin stepped out of the room to retrieve a more detailed globe, Nikolai scurried to the front of the classroom and placed the mouse he’d found roaming the eastern wing beneath the fur hat Mitkin had left on his desk.
Dominik looked utterly terrified, but Nikolai was too excited to take much note.
“Wait until you hear the shriek that Mitkin makes,” Nikolai said. “He sounds like a scandalized teakettle.”
Tutor Mitkin did indeed scream, and Nikolai, who had meant to sit stone-faced, couldn’t restrain his own laughter—until Mitkin told Dominik to come to the front of the room and hold out his hands.
The tutor took a slender birch rod from his desk, and as Nikolai looked on in horror, Mitkin slapped it down on Dominik’s palms. Dominik released a small whimper.
“What are you doing?” Nikolai cried. “You must stop!”
Nikolai called for the guards, shouted down the hallway for help, but Mitkin did not stop. He smacked the rod against Dominik’s hands and forearms ten times, until the boy’s flesh was a mass of red welts, and his face was crumpled and wet with tears.
Mitkin set the rod aside. “Every time you act out or misbehave, Dominik will be beaten.”
“That isn’t right! It isn’t fair—the punishment should be mine!” But no one would raise the rod to a royal prince.
Nikolai protested to his mother, his father, anyone who would listen.
Nobody seemed to care. “If you do as Tutor Mitkin tells you, there will be no more trouble,” said the king.
“I heard that little whelp mewling,” said Vasily. “It’s just a few lashes.
I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss.”
The next day, Nikolai sat quietly in his chair. He broke his silence only once, when Mitkin stepped out of the room.
“I’m sorry for what happened yesterday,” he told Dominik. “I will never let it happen again.”
“It’s what I’m here for, moi tsarevich. Please do not feel badly.” “You’re here to learn to read and write and add sums, and that is all,”
said Nikolai. “I’ll do better. I vow it.”
Nikolai held to his promise. He kept silent every day after that. He did not sneak into the kitchen to steal almond paste. He did not disassemble anything valuable, run through the portrait hall, set any fires. Everyone marveled at the changes wrought in the young prince and applauded Tutor Mitkin for his ingenuity.
What they didn’t know was that, amidst all the quiet and calm, Nikolai and Dominik still somehow managed to become friends. They devised their own code to communicate in their lesson books and built toy boats with working sails that they launched in the abandoned water garden where no one ever ventured. They gave each other titles that changed with every day, some grand—Dominik the Bold, Nikolai the Just, and some less so—Dominik the Farter, Nikolai the Spider Squealer. They learned that as long as they didn’t trouble the calm order of the palace, no one much cared what they did, and that if they appeared to be working hard at their studies, no one bothered to check whether they were memorizing dates or trying to figure out how to build a bomb.
When he was twelve, Nikolai asked for extra reading in chemistry and Kaelish history and retired to the library every afternoon for hours of quiet study. In fact, the reading and essays took him little time at all, and as soon as he’d sped through them, he would disguise himself in peasant roughspun and sneak out of the palace to visit Dominik’s family in the countryside. He worked in the fields, learned to fix handcarts and farm equipment, to milk cows and gentle horses, and when he was thirteen, he took his first slug of home-brewed spirits from a beaten tin cup.
Each night, he fell into bed exhausted, happy to have occupation for the first time in his life, and in the mornings he presented his teachers with flawless work that made them wonder if perhaps Nikolai would
become a great scholar. As it turned out, the prince was not a bad child; he just had no gift for remaining idle.
He was happy, but he was not blind. Dominik’s family was granted special privileges because of their son’s status at the palace, and still they barely subsisted on the crops they harvested from their farm. He saw the way their neighbors suffered beneath the burdens of taxes from both their king and the dukes who owned their lands. He heard Dominik’s mother weep when her eldest son was taken for the draft, and during a particularly bad winter, he heard them whisper about their neighbor Lusha’s missing child.
“What happened to Lusha’s baby?” Dominik asked.
“A khitka came for it,” his mother replied. But Nikolai and Dominik were not children anymore, and they knew better than to listen to talk of evil forest spirits.
“She drowned it herself,” Dominik told Nikolai the next day. “She had stopped making milk because her family is starving.”
Even so, things might have continued on that way if Vasily hadn’t discovered Nikolai sneaking back into the palace one night. He was fifteen by then, and years of getting away with deception had made him careless.
“Already tumbling peasant girls,” Vasily had said with a sneer. “You’re worse than Father.”
“Please,” Nikolai had begged. “Don’t tell anyone. Dominik will be punished for it. He may be sent away.”
But Vasily did not hold his tongue, and the next day, new guards had been posted at every door, and Dominik was gone, barred from the palace in disgrace.
Nikolai had cornered Vasily in the lapis drawing room. “Do you understand what you’ve done?” he’d asked furiously.
His brother shrugged. “Your friend won’t get to study with his betters, and you won’t get to keep rambling in the fields like a commoner. I’ve done you both a favor.”
“His family will lose their stipend. They may not be able to feed themselves without it.” He could see his own angry face reflected at him in gleaming blue panels veined with gold. “Dominik won’t be exempt from the draft next year.”
“Good. The crown needs soldiers. Maybe he’ll learn his place.” Nikolai looked at the brother he had once so adored, whom he had
tried to emulate in everything. “You should be ashamed.”
Vasily was still taller than Nikolai, still outweighed him. He jabbed a finger into Nikolai’s chest and said, “You do not tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, Sobachka. I will be a king, and you will always be Nikolai Nothing.”
But while Vasily had been sparring with instructors who never pushed him too hard and who always made sure to let the future king win, Nikolai had been spending his days roughhousing with peasants who didn’t know whose nose they were bloodying.
Nikolai snatched Vasily’s finger and twisted. His brother yelped and fell to the floor. He seemed impossibly small.
“A king never kneels, brother.”
He left Vasily clutching his sprained finger and his wounded pride. Again, Nikolai vowed he would make things right with Dominik,
though this time it would be harder. He began by devising ways to funnel money to his friend’s family. But to do more, he would need influence, something his brother possessed simply by virtue of being born first.
Since Nikolai could not be important, he turned his clever mind to the task of becoming charming. His mother was vain, so he paid her compliments. He dressed impeccably in colors that suited her tastes, and whenever he visited her, he made sure to bring her a small gift—a box of sweets, orchids from the hothouse. He pleased her friends with amusing gossip, recited bits of doggerel, and imitated his father’s ministers with startling accuracy. He became a favorite at the queen’s salons, and when he didn’t make an appearance, her ladies were known to exclaim, “Where is that darling boy?”
With his father, Nikolai spoke of hunting and horseflesh, subjects about which he cared nothing but that he knew his father loved. He praised his father’s witty conversation and astute observations and developed a gift for making the king feel both wise and worldly.
He did not stop with his parents. Nikolai introduced himself to the members of his father’s cabinet and asked them flattering questions about statecraft and finance. He wrote to military commanders to commend them on victories and to inquire about the strategies they’d deployed. He corresponded with gunsmiths and shipwrights and applied himself to learning languages—the one thing at which he did not particularly excel—so that he could address them in their own tongues. When Dominik’s other brother was sent to the front, Nikolai used every
bit of sway he had to get him reassigned to a place where the fighting was light. And by then, he had considerable sway.
He did it because he liked learning the puzzle of each person. He did it because it felt good to feel his influence and understanding grow. But above all else, he did it because he knew he needed to rescue his country. Nikolai had to save Ravka from his own family.
As was tradition among noblemen, Vasily accepted his officer’s commission and treated his military service as symbolic. Nikolai joined the infantry. He endured basic training with Dominik at Poliznaya, and they traveled together to their first assignment. Dominik was there when Nikolai took his first bullet, and Nikolai was there when Dominik fell at Halmhend, never to rise again.
On that battlefield, heavy with black smoke and the acrid scent of gunpowder, Nikolai had shouted for a medik, a Grisha healer, anyone to help them. But no one came. He was not a king’s son then, just one more voice crying out in the carnage.
Dominik made Nikolai promise to take care of his family, to make sure his mother knew he’d died well, and then he said, “Do you know the story of Andrei Zhirov?”
“The revolutionary?”
Zhirov had been a radical in Nikolai’s grandfather’s time.
A grin ghosted over Dominik’s blood-flecked lips. “When they tried to hang him for treason, the rope broke and he rolled into the ditch the soldiers had dug for his grave.”
Nikolai tried to smile. “I never heard that story.”
Dominik nodded. “This country, Zhirov shouted. They can’t even hang a man right.”
Nikolai shook his head. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” said Dominik. A wet sound came from his chest as he struggled to breathe. “I just know they shot him anyway.”
Soldiers did not cry. Princes did not weep. Nikolai knew this. But the tears fell anyway. “Dominik the Brave. Hold on a little longer.”
Dominik squeezed Nikolai’s hand. “This country gets you in the end, brother. Don’t forget it.”
“Not us,” he said. But Dominik was already gone.
“I’ll do better,” Nikolai promised, just as he had so many years ago in Mitkin’s classroom. “I’ll find a way.”
He had witnessed a thousand deaths since then. His nightmares had
been plagued by countless other battlefields. And yet it was that promise to Dominik that haunted his waking hours. But how was he to explain any of this to Zoya, still sitting patiently at the corner of the bed, still keeping her distance?
He looked up at the honeycomb ceiling, blew out a long breath. “I think I can fix it,” he said at last. “I’ve always known Ravka is broken, and I’ve seen the way it breaks people in return. The wars never cease. The trouble never stops. But I can’t help believing that somehow, I’ll find a way to outsmart all of the kings who came before and set this country right.” He shook his head and laughed. “It is the height of arrogance.”
“I’d expect no less of you,” Zoya said, but her voice was not cruel. “Why did you send Nina away?”
“What?” The question took him by surprise—even more the rapid, breathless way Zoya had spoken the words, as if forcing them from her lips.
She did not look at him. “We almost lost her before. We barely had her back, and you sent her into danger again.”
“She’s a soldier,” he said. “You made her one, Zoya. Sitting idle in the palace with nothing but her grief to occupy her mind was no good for her.”
“But she was safe.”
“And all of that safety was killing her.” Nikolai watched Zoya carefully. “Can you forgive me for sending her away?”
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t ask you to forgive me for what happened in the bell tower.” “You spoke,” she said slowly. “That night in Balakirev. You said my
name.”
“But—” Nikolai sat up straighter. The beast had never had language before, not when he’d been infected during the war, and as far as he knew, not now that the monster had returned. When the Darkling had infected him, even in the moments when Nikolai was able to push his awareness to the fore, he hadn’t been able to read, hadn’t been able to communicate. It was one of the most painful elements of his transformation. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe my consciousness was trying to find a way through. Today—”
She shook her head. “You didn’t sound like you.” “Well, in that form—”
“You sounded like him.”
He paused. “I’m tempted to say it was fear or your imagination getting the best of you—” She glared at him. “But I’d prefer not to get slapped.” “I know it doesn’t make sense. It might have been the fear or the fight, but I truly believed you wanted to kill me. You weren’t just hungry. You were eager.” Zoya clenched her fists against her thighs. “You liked
frightening me.”
He wanted to say that he wouldn’t have hurt her, that he would have stopped the thing inside him before it could. But he refused to do either of them the dishonor of that lie.
“Is it possible?” he asked instead. “Could the Darkling’s consciousness have somehow survived with his power?”
“I hope not.” She unclenched her fists. “I hope there’s a thorn wood waiting beneath the sands of the Fold. I hope all of this talk of magical rituals and warrior priests turns out to be more than just a fanciful tale. But if there is no cure and if this thing in you is more than just a curse the Darkling left behind, if he’s trying to use you to find a way back to this world …” She looked at him, her blue eyes fierce in the lamplight. He sensed the deep well of loss inside her, the pain she worked so hard to hide. “I will put a bullet in your brain before I let that happen, Nikolai.”
The men who had ruled Ravka had loved power more than they’d ever loved their people. It was a disease. Nikolai knew that, and he’d sworn he would not be that kind of leader, that he would not succumb. And yet, he’d never been sure that when the time came, he could step aside and give up the throne, the thing he’d fought so long and hard for. And if he let himself become more monster than man, it would mean he had failed. So he would put aside his doubt and his desires. He would try to be better. And the woman before him would make sure he protected Ravka. Even from himself.
He took her hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “My ruthless Zoya, I’ll load the gun myself.”
