“Matthias,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Matthias,” she said more loudly. She wanted him to hear her, needed to believe he could. “Oh Saints, I don’t want to leave you here. I don’t want to leave you ever.” But that was not the hero’s eulogy he deserved. She could do this for him. Nina drew a long, shaky breath. “Matthias Helvar was a soldier and a hero. He saved me from drowning. He kept us both alive on the ice. He endured a year in the worst prison in the world for a crime he didn’t commit. He forgave me for betraying him. He fought beside me, and when he could have abandoned me, he turned his back on the only country he’d ever known instead. For that, he was branded a traitor. But he wasn’t. He believed his country could be more than it had been. He lived with honor and died with it too.” Her voice broke and she forced the waver away from it. She wanted to be dignified in this moment. She wanted to give him that. “He wasn’t always a good man, but he had a good heart. A great, strong heart that should have kept beating for years and years.”
Little red bird, let me go.
She wiped the tears from her eyes. This was the first half of her debt paid. She’d brought him home to the land he loved. There should be something to mark this moment, a bell to toll, a choir to sing for him, something so she knew it was time to say her last goodbye.
But you’re not done yet, my love.
“You and your sense of duty,” she said on a bitter laugh.
The whispers rose inside her head. She didn’t want to hear them now, not here.
Listen, Nina.
She did not want to, but she knew she could hide from them no longer—the voices of the dead, calling to her, down the mountain, through the town, over the ice. The voices of women, of girls, anguish in their hearts. Something had happened to them on that hilltop.
Help us, they cried. Hear us at last.
The words were clear now, and they were drowning out Matthias’ voice. Stop, she told them. Leave us alone. Leave me be.
But the dead did not relent. Justice, they demanded, justice.
This was no hallucination. It wasn’t madness either. The chorus was real, and they had brought her here for a reason. Nina had hoped her mission with Adrik and Leoni would be enough to start healing. It hadn’t been. But the girls on the mountain would not be denied.
Justice. They had brought her this far—and they needed her to listen to them, not the echo of a love she could not hold on to.
Nina placed a hand to her heart then as the ache inside her broke, the ice giving way. There was only dark water beneath, the terrible pain of knowing he was truly gone, the awful understanding that she would never hear his voice again.
Because the chorus was real.
But Matthias’ voice was not. It never had been.
“You were never here,” she whispered, the tears coming hard now. “You were never here.” All this time, she had wanted to believe that he was still with her, but it had been her voice all along, talking herself through the silence, forcing herself to do the work of living when all she wanted was to let go.
Goodbye, Matthias.
No one answered. She was alone in the silence.
“WE CAN CALL THEM BACK,” said Genya, pacing before the fire. “It’s not too late. We send messengers and just tell the girls and their families there’s been a change in plans.”
They’d gathered in the war room this morning, and Nikolai had called for coffee instead of tea. He’d developed a taste for it during his university days in Ketterdam. Though, between his exhaustion and the headache that had plagued him since the incident in Balakirev the previous night, he wouldn’t have minded something stronger in his cup.
The incident. What a generous turn of phrase. Tolya had filled him in on every grim detail of his little display in the bell tower. He’d almost murdered one of his most valued generals, one of his only true friends, the person who had helped him to steer this cursed ship of a country for two years, who had kept his secrets and whom he had trusted to do so without question. He had almost killed Zoya.
“We’ll tell them the king is unwell—” continued Genya.
“That is the last thing we tell them,” said Tamar.
“Then we tell them there’s been an outbreak of cholera or a massive sewage leak,” said Tolya.
Tamar threw up her hands. “So our choices are looking indecisive, weak, or like the capital is swimming in excrement?”
Zoya had been silent through the meeting thus far, hovering by the samovar with crossed arms. Keeping her distance. He knew he needed to apologize to her, but for once in his ridiculous life, he was completely at a loss for words. And before he could wrestle with that particular failure, there was the problem of the party he had so cleverly planned—the one the demon within him seemed intent on crashing.
Nikolai took another sip of bitter coffee, hoping it would clear his head. “I think we may have a resource we didn’t have before.”
As if she could read his thoughts, Zoya’s gaze snapped to his. “If you say that hideous flagpole of a monk, I will—”
“Marvel at my ingenuity? Plant a fond kiss upon my cheek? Put up a plaque to my genius?”
“I will put a plaque on the palace wall commemorating this date as the morning on which Nikolai Lantsov took leave of his senses. The boy is a lunatic, a zealot. He worships at the feet of the man who started a civil war and murdered half of the Second Army.”
“He worships an ideal. It’s something we’ve all been guilty of at one time or another.”
Zoya turned away, but not before he saw the hurt on her face. Zoya Nazyalensky did not flinch, but the pain had been unmistakable. Nikolai wanted to stop the meeting and just … he didn’t know what exactly, but he did know that the correct response to almost killing someone was not to try to score points off them the next day.
“Then by all means,” said Zoya, “let’s welcome a former member of the Priestguard into the war room and put our future in his grubby hands.”
“Isn’t she lovely when she agrees?” Nikolai asked, and savored Zoya’s scowl. It was so much better than seeing that stark, wounded look and knowing he had caused it. But a moment later, he was kicking himself as Tolya escorted the monk into the war room and Zoya’s grim expression turned to bemusement.
“Your Highness,” said Yuri stiffly. He was so tall he had to duck entering the room, and so slender he looked as if he might turn sideways and get carried away by a draft. “I was warned of your glib tongue. You talk of breaking bread, but I spent last night confined to what amounts to a cell—”
“The Iris Suite? My aunt Ludmilla decorated it herself. Overly fond of the color puce, but cell seems a bit ungenerous.”
“The color is fine. It is the armed guards that offend my sensibility. Is this how you treat all of your guests?”
“Tolya,” whispered Nikolai, “I think he’s calling you bad company.” He leaned back and rested his elbows on the arms of his chair. “Yuri, you have enemies. Those guards were there for your protection.”
Yuri sniffed. “My followers will not stand for this.”
And that was why Nikolai had sent bread, smoked cod, and some very fine kvas to the people camped outside the city, compliments of the crown—men with full bellies complained less. In truth, Nikolai had meant to see to Yuri yesterday, but the afternoon’s business had gotten the better of his time. And as for the night, well, that had certainly gotten the better of him too.
“Yuri, may I introduce—”
“No, you may not. I wish to speak on the matter of the Starless One and—” Abruptly Yuri straightened. His eyes widened and his jaw went slack as he looked around the room and seemed to finally register where he was. He clasped his hands like a soprano about to sing. “Oh,” the monk gasped. “Oh. It’s you. It’s all of you. I …” He turned to the members of the Triumvirate and bowed deeply. “Moi soverenye, it’s an honor.” He bowed a second time. “An absolute honor.” Down he went again. “A dream, really.”
Nikolai suppressed a groan. Just what had he brought upon himself? Zoya and Genya exchanged a baffled glance, and even David looked up from his work long enough to frown in confusion.
“Do stop that,” Zoya said. “You look like an oil derrick.”
“Commander Zoya Nazyalensky,” Yuri said on a strangled breath. “Yesterday … I didn’t realize. I thought you were just—”
“One of the king’s lackeys?” Zoya ignored Yuri’s protests and said, “You do realize every member of this Triumvirate fought against your beloved Starless Saint in the civil war?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” The monk pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his long nose. “I do. But, well, David Kostyk, the great Fabrikator who forged the first amplifier worn by Sankta Alina herself.” David looked at him blankly and returned to his reading. “Zoya Nazyalensky, who was one of the Darkling’s most favored soldiers.” Zoya’s lip curled. “And then, of course, Genya Safin, the First Tailor, who bears the marks of the Darkling’s blessing.”
Genya flinched. “Blessing?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Zoya, already raising her hands either to summon a storm or to wring Yuri’s neck. Tamar reached for her axes. Tolya actually growled.
Nikolai rapped his knuckles against the table. “That’s enough. Everyone, stand down. Yuri, you are trespassing in territory you cannot begin to understand.”
Despite his height, the monk looked like little more than a gawky child who had broken his mother’s favorite vase. “I … Forgive me. I meant no offense.”
Slowly, Genya stood, and silence fell around her. “How old are you, Yuri?”
“Eighteen, moi soverenyi.”
“When I was a year older than you, the Darkling set his monsters on me, creatures born of the power you venerate so much. They had a taste for human flesh. He had to force them to stop.”