No. It couldn’t be. Fear was clouding her mind.
The creature’s lips parted. Its teeth gleamed. It seized her hair and yanked her head back as she struggled. It was going to tear her throat out. Its lips brushed the skin of her neck.
A thousand thoughts crowded into her mind. She should have brought a weapon. She shouldn’t have relied on her power. She shouldn’t have believed she wasn’t afraid to die. She shouldn’t have believed that Nikolai would not harm her.
The door to the bell tower slammed open and Tamar was there, Tolya behind her. Tamar’s axes flew. One lodged in the creature’s shoulder, the other in the meat of one of its wings. The thing turned on them, snarling, and Tolya’s hands shot out.
Zoya watched, torn between lingering dread and fascination as the creature’s legs buckled. It growled, then fell silent as Tolya slowed its heart and sent the monster into unconsciousness.
Zoya rose, cradling her dislocated arm, and looked down at the thing on the floorboards as its claws receded, the dark veins retracting and fading, its wings dissolving into shreds of shadow. The king of Ravka lay on the bell tower floor, golden hair disheveled, boyish and bleeding.
“Are you all right?” asked Tamar.
“Yes,” Zoya lied.
Zoya. The sound of his voice in that moment, smooth as glass, neither human nor inhuman. Did that mean that whatever was inside him was not the mindless monster they’d assumed? It hadn’t just been hungry; there had been something vengeful in its desire. Would Nikolai have woken with her blood on his lips?
“You know what this means,” said Tamar.
They couldn’t control him. The palace was no longer safe, and Nikolai was no longer safe in it. And right now, ambassadors, dignitaries, noblemen, and wealthy merchants were packing their best clothes and preparing to travel to Os Alta—to say nothing of the eligible princesses and hopeful noblewomen who accompanied them.
“We’ve invited emissaries from every country to witness this horror,” said Tolya. To watch Nikolai descend into bloodlust, to play audience as a king became more monster than man.
Zoya had given her life to the Second Army, to a dream that they could build something better. She had believed that if her country was strong enough, the world might change for her kind. Now that dream was collapsing. Zoya thought of the stories Nina had told them of the prison at the Ice Court. She thought of the khergud emerging from the skies to steal Grisha from the safety of their lands. She remembered bodies littering the grounds of the Little Palace the night of the Darkling’s attack. She would not let it happen again. She refused.
Zoya took a breath and slammed her shoulder back into place, ignoring the jolt of nausea that came with the pain.
“We find a cure,” she said. “Or Ravka falls.”
“I DON’T LIKE LEAVING LEONI BEHIND,” said Adrik, his solemn voice like the tolling of a particularly forlorn bell. “They’re hardly friendly at the convent, and she doesn’t speak the language.”
Nina and Adrik had made their way out of the valley, the sledge pulled behind their two mounts, a hard wind at their backs. Nina rode sidesaddle, her heavy skirts gathered behind her. She wasn’t much of a rider to begin with, and this concession to Fjerdan sensibilities was one of the most challenging elements of her cover.
As they traveled farther from the town, the whispers rose in her head as if in protest. Now that she knew the dead had brought her to Gäfvalle, the sound seemed to have grown clearer, the high, sweet voices of the lost tugging at her thoughts. She hadn’t told Adrik and Leoni about the graves at the factory yet. The incident by the eastern gate had left her too shaken.
“Leoni will be fine,” said Nina, turning her attention to Adrik. “She’s resourceful and she knows how to lie low. Besides, we’ll be back by midday tomorrow.” Adrik said nothing, and Nina added, “Cosseting her isn’t going to win you any points.”
The chill had made Adrik’s skin rosy beneath his freckles, and he looked a bit like a sulky actor whose cheeks had been rouged for a play. “She’s a soldier under my command. I would never cross that line.”
“She won’t be under your command when this mission is over, Adrik, and it’s obvious she likes you.”
“She does?” He sounded disconsolate over the news. Nina wasn’t fooled.
She adjusted the straps of her pack. “To my great astonishment.”
“You like me too, Zenik. Must be my sunny outlook.”
“Adrik, if the choice is between taking orders from you or Zoya Nazyalensky, you’re always going to win.”
His breath plumed in the cold air. “I used to be completely in love with her.”
“Weren’t we all? Even when she’s slicing you in two with a few well-chosen words, it’s hard to focus on anything but how good she looks doing it.”
“Appalling,” Adrik mused. “I once saw a student set fire to his own hair because he was so busy looking at Zoya. She didn’t even spare him a second glance.”
Nina fixed Adrik with a contemptuous stare, and in her most disdainful Zoya voice drawled, “Someone throw a bucket on that idiot before he burns down the palace.”
He shuddered. “That was far too convincing.” He consulted his map as they reached a crossroads. “Zoya was nice enough to look at,” he said as he led them farther west. “But there was more to it. She was the only one who treated me the same after I lost my arm.”
“Horribly?”
“She couldn’t have shown me more contempt. Her insults were a lot easier to bear than Nadia constantly fussing over me.”
“That’s what sisters do. I assume. You were just as much of a mother hen when we all came back from the Fold.” They’d both been children really. Nina had been a student at the Grisha school when they were all evacuated to the orphanage at Keramzin. But Adrik had begged to go with his sister, to fight beside the Sun Summoner. He hadn’t been there when the Darkling took Nina and the other students hostage.
“I wasn’t worried about you,” said Adrik. “If you’d all died and I’d been the only one to leave school, can you imagine how tiring it would have been to live with the guilt?”
Nina made herself laugh, but she knew all about guilt. She often wondered why she’d survived so much—capture by the drüskelle, shipwreck, Kaz Brekker’s mad heists, and the ordeal of parem. She was the only known Grisha to have lived through a dose of the drug. What had made that possible? Was it that particular strain of jurda parem? Was it her desire to spite Jarl Brum and his witchhunters by surviving? Chance, fortune, fate. She didn’t know what name to give to it. Sometimes it felt like Matthias had kept her in this world through the sheer force of his will.
I failed you, Matthias. I wasn’t strong enough to save you.
Little red bird, every day you choose the work of living. Every day you choose to go on. There is no failure here, Nina.
“Zoya’s a better leader than I expected,” admitted Adrik. “Even if I’d never tell her so.”
“Can you imagine? You might as well ask her if she wants to snuggle. General Zoya Nazyalensky does not need or want our approval.”
They fell into silence as the sun rose higher in the sky, the sledge rumbling over the ground. If it snowed, they would have to change the runners, but hopefully they would be back to Gäfvalle before the weather turned. It was a meager funeral procession, and Nina couldn’t help but think Matthias deserved more. Something full of pomp and ceremony, a funeral fit for a hero even if his people believed he was a traitor.
I have been made to protect you. Even in death I will find a way.
His voice was too clear now, too strong. Because this was their final parting. Because once Matthias was in the ground, he would belong to Djel.
She wasn’t sure she could do it. She couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning his body to the cold earth, to the dark.
Let me go to my god.
She wished Inej were here beside her, that the Wraith were somewhere in all this silence. Nina longed for her stillness, her kindness. She was grateful to Adrik, but he hadn’t known Matthias. And he didn’t really know Nina either. Not anymore.
When at last they reached the fork of the river, they set up camp, a simple canvas tent lined with animal skins to keep the cold out. They made a fire, watered their horses, and sat down to a plain meal of tea and salt cod that Nina had to force herself to swallow. If anyone passed by, Adrik and Nina planned to say they were on their way to Malsk to show off their wares. The sledge was stocked with plenty of rifle loaders. But Nina doubted they’d have to offer any explanations. Like so much of Fjerda, this place was desolate and empty, the little towns like flowers, unlikely blooms in the snow.
Adrik took a flask from his pocket, poured a small amount of black fluid into a copper cup, and contemplated it skeptically.
“What is that exactly?”
“I just know it’s distilled from pine tar. One of the fishermen said it was good for fighting the cold.” He took a sip and instantly began coughing and pounding his chest. “Saints, that’s disgusting.”
“Maybe they just mean it kills you, so you don’t have to worry about the cold anymore.”
“Or maybe they just like selling overpriced misery to tourists.” He offered her the flask, which Nina was quick to decline. For a while they sat staring at the waters of the river rushing past. At last he said, “You never told me how he died.”
Nina wasn’t certain what to say. Or if she wanted to say anything at all. The specifics of the Ketterdam auction were unknown to most in Ravka even among the Grisha, and Nina doubted Adrik would be thrilled to discover she’d been running with a gang of criminals. “I don’t really know. We were … working together in Ketterdam. The worst of the mission was over. We thought we were all safe. But then Matthias showed up, bleeding. He’d been shot.” He’d found his way to her, despite the fatal wound, despite the pain he was in. For one last kiss, for a final goodbye. “There were drüskelle in the city, and they certainly had their reasons for wanting Matthias dead. But we all had prices on our heads. People were hungry for our blood, and the streets were a holy mess.”