She could still see his blood staining his shirt, feel the soft stubble of his nape beneath her fingertips. His hair had just begun to grow out properly, thick and golden. “He wouldn’t tell me who was responsible,” she said. Matthias hadn’t wanted to burden her with that. He’d known she would strike out in her grief. But he should have understood that the mystery of his death would punish her. She’d thought her new mission working with the Hringsa in Fjerda, getting Grisha to freedom, would help ease her grief and her guilt, but she felt no better than she had at the start of it all. “It eats at me.”
“I know that feeling.” Adrik took another sip from his flask and winced at the taste. “Vengeance was all that drove me at the end of the war. I wanted the Darkling to pay for my arm, for the lives of my friends. I wanted him dead.”
“And you got your wish.”
“And yet my arm didn’t grow back. None of my friends came back to life.”
“I could help with that,” Nina said, and was relieved when Adrik laughed his dry, reluctant chuckle. Some Grisha blanched at any mention of her new power. She’d been a Heartrender once, felt the pulse of the world beating along with her heart. Parem had changed her. Nina had felt like a fraud sitting beneath the golden dome in the Little Palace, wearing her red kefta. She could no longer manipulate the living, hear the flow of their blood or the song of their cells. But the dead did her bidding—and she supposed she did their bidding too. She’d come to Gäfvalle, after all.
Nina finished the last of her tea. She could sense Adrik waiting. She knew it was time. Maybe laying Matthias to rest would be the thing to help free her heart from this burden. She only knew she could not go on this way.
She rose. “I’m ready,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t true.
They rode out from camp, following the river.
Tell me a story, Matthias. She needed to hear him now, needed to know some part of him would remain with her. Tell me about your family.
Tell me about yours, Nina. Why did you never speak of them?
Because she’d never known them. She’d grown up in a foundling home not unlike the orphanage at Keramzin. There were no records of Nina’s parents. She was one more child who had arrived without papers or history. Keletchka, as they called it—from the fruit crate. She’d been given the name of one of the home’s patrons and had worn donated clothes that arrived tied up in big sacks and smelling of the chemicals they were boiled in to make sure they were free of lice.
Were you unhappy, Nina?
No, Matthias.
It wasn’t in your nature, even then.
It is now, she thought. Whatever spark had burned in her was no match for this grief.
But back then, she hadn’t been unhappy, despite the chores and the boring lessons and the meals that were mostly cabbage. There had always been noise and company and games to play. She had appointed herself the home’s official greeter, welcoming new arrivals, helping to name the new babies, and offering up her rag doll, Feodora, to anyone who might need a friend on their first night in the dormitories.
Besides, the staff always treated her kindly. Come, little Nina, tell us the news, Baba Inessa would say and seat Nina on a stool in the kitchen, where she could suck on a bread crust and watch the women at their work.
Nina had been just seven years old when she’d met her first tyrant. His name was Tomek, and he changed everything at the foundling home. He wasn’t the tallest or the strongest, he was simply the meanest, willing to strike and bite even the littlest orphans. If someone had a toy, he would break it. When a child was sleeping soundly, he would pinch them awake. He was all manners and dimples when the staff were near, but as soon as they were gone, cruel Tomek would return.
As if they’d just been waiting for a leader, a group of bullies coalesced around him—boys and girls who had always seemed nice enough until they developed a taste for others’ tears. Nina did her best to avoid them, but it was as if Tomek could smell her happiness like smoke from a kitchen fire.
One morning just after the Feast of Sankt Nikolai, Baba Inessa gave Nina an orange to share with the other children. Nina warned them to be silent, but they’d giggled and whooped until of course Tomek had marched over to investigate and snatched it from her hands.
Give it back! she’d shouted as he’d dug his thumbs into the orange’s waxy skin. It’s for everyone!
But Tomek and his friends had just jeered. You’re fat enough already, he’d said, and pushed her so hard she’d fallen on her backside.
Tomek had shoved the whole orange into his mouth and bitten down, laughing as pulp and juice dribbled over his chin. He laughed even harder when, to Nina’s great shame, she started crying.
“Look how red you are,” Tomek said, his mouth still full. “You look like a rotten apple.”
He and his friends crowded around Nina, poking her belly, her arms, her legs. “Look how rotten she is!”
Nina had been scared, but more than anything, she’d been angry. Curled up on the floor, she’d felt something in her shift, a long, luxurious stretch, like a cat yearning toward a sunbeam. All her breathlessness and fear rushed out of her, and it was as if she could feel Tomek’s lungs as they expanded, contracted. She squeezed her fists tight.
“Look how—” Tomek hiccuped. Then his friends hiccuped. It was funny. At first. They stopped poking Nina. They looked at one another and giggled, the sound broken by startled little huffs.
They kept hiccuping. “It hurts,” said one, rubbing his chest.
“I can’t stop,” said another, bending double.
It went on that way, all of them hiccuping and moaning long into the night, like an assembly of discontented frogs.
Nina found she could do all kinds of things. She could soothe a crying infant. She could ease her own tummy ache. She could make Tomek’s nose run and run and run until his whole shirt was wet with snot. Sometimes she had to stop herself from doing anything too terrible. She didn’t want to be a tyrant too. Only a few months later, the Grisha Examiners had come to the foundling home and Nina had been taken to the Little Palace.
“Goodbye!” she’d called as she’d run through the halls, saying her farewells. “Goodbye! Write me lots of letters, please! And be nice,” she’d warned Tomek.
“She’s a merry child,” Baba Inessa had told the Grisha woman in her red kefta. “Try not to break her of it.”
No one has, Nina. No one ever will.
I’m not so sure, Matthias. War hadn’t done it. Captivity. Torture. But loss was something different, because she saw no end to it, only the far horizon, stretching on and on.
Nina knew the spot as soon as she saw it—a copse of trees by the riverbank, a place where travelers might come to rest and where the water eddied as if the river were resting too. Here, she told herself as she dismounted and untied a shovel and pick from the sledge. Here.
It took her hours to dig. Adrik couldn’t help with the task, but he used his power to keep the wind from tearing at her clothes and to shelter the lantern when the sky began to dim.
Nina wasn’t certain how deep to dig, but she went on until she was sweating in her coat, until her hands blistered, and then until the blisters broke. When she stopped, panting, Adrik did not wait for her signal but began to untie the tarp on the sledge. Nina made herself help him, forced herself to move aside the boxes and gear that hid their true cargo. Here.
Matthias was wrapped in linen specially treated by the Fabrikators at the Little Palace to preserve him from decay, and reinforced by Leoni’s craft. Nina thought of pulling the linen aside, of glimpsing his cherished face one more time. But she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing his features still and cold, his skin gray. It was bad enough that she had the memory of his blood on her hands forever, the wound beneath her palms, his heart going still. Death was supposed to be her friend and ally, but death had taken him just the same. She could at least try to remember him as he’d been.
Awkwardly, Nina and Adrik rolled his body from the edge of the cart. It was huge and heavy. He tumbled into the tomb with a horrible thud.
Nina covered her face with her hands. She had never been more grateful for Adrik’s silence.
Lying in the well of the grave, Matthias’ body looked like a chrysalis, as if he were at the beginning of something, instead of the end. He and Nina had never exchanged gifts or rings; they’d had no possessions they shared. They had been wanderers and soldiers. Even so, she could not leave him with nothing. From her pocket, she drew a slender sprig of ash and let it drift down into the grave, followed by a smattering of withered red petals from the tulips their compatriots had placed on his chest when they bid him goodbye in Ketterdam.
“I know you never cared for sweets.” Her voice wobbled as she let a handful of toffees fall from her hand. They made a hollow patter. “But this way I’m with you, and you can keep them for me when I see you next. I know you won’t eat them yourself.”
She knew what came now. A handful of earth. Another. I love you, she told him, trying not to think of the graceless sound of the soil, like the rattle of shrapnel, like sudden bursts of rain. I loved you.
Her eyes blurred from the tears. She couldn’t see him any longer. The earth rose higher. There would be snow soon, maybe even tonight. It would cover her work, a burial shroud, white and unmarred. And when spring came, the snow would melt and find its way through the soil and carry Matthias’ spirit to the river, to Djel. He would be with his god at last.
“Will you take the sledge back to camp?” she asked Adrik. There were still things she needed to say, but only to Matthias.
Adrik nodded and glanced up at the darkening sky. “Just don’t be too long. A storm’s coming.” Good, she thought. Let the snow come soon. Let it cover our work here.
Nina knelt on the cold ground, listening to the hoofbeats of Adrik’s horse fade. She could hear the rush of the river, feel the damp of the earth through the heavy wool of her skirts. The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive. Fjerdan words. The words of Djel.