“Do you really believe that?”
“Not at all. His serfs will get a taste of money and education and start thinking about building lives and businesses of their own instead of praying for their master’s patronage. But by then it will be too late. Progress is a river. It cannot be called back once it leaps its banks.”
“That wasn’t what I meant anyway,” Zoya said as Tolya led them to the chambers where Nikolai would be lodging. “How do you do this?” She waved a hand from the crown of his golden head to his perfectly polished boots. “Days on the road, bare hours of sleep.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Being drugged every night and playing host to some kind of immortal evil inside you. But still you manage to look fresh and contented. I bet, if the duke had asked, you could have spent another hour playing cards and telling war stories.”
“That’s what the job requires, Zoya. Ruling is not just about military victories. It’s not even about setting fair laws and seeing them enforced. It’s about these moments, the men and women who choose to put their lives and livelihoods in our hands.”
“Just admit that you need to be loved as much as they need to love you.”
“Luckily, I’m very lovable.”
“Less so by the moment. You don’t look remotely fatigued. It’s not normal.”
“I think fatigue suits you, Zoya. The pallor. The shadows beneath your eyes. You look like a heroine in a novel.”
“I look like a woman about to step on your foot.”
“Now, now. You’re managing remarkably well. And the smiling hasn’t killed you yet.”
“Yet.”
Tamar was waiting at the door to Nikolai’s rooms. “Any trouble tonight?” Nikolai asked her. At their previous stop, Tamar had caught a servant skulking about the king’s chambers and digging through his belongings, presumably on his master’s orders.
“Nothing,” she said. “But I’ll do another search of the house just in case and have a look inside the duke’s study later tonight.”
The old duke seemed to have been won over, but if he’d had contact with Nikolai’s opponents in West Ravka or with one of the Lantsov pretenders, they needed to know.
Once Nikolai had removed his boots and settled on the bed beneath a grotesque painting of Sankta Anastasia curing the wasting plague, Zoya pulled the tiny bottle from her pocket.
Nikolai shuddered. “Whatever David and Genya concocted, it feels less like sleep than being punched in the jaw.”
Zoya said nothing. The sedatives they’d given him in the past had been simple potions that had made him softly blurry and often left him snoring before Zoya had departed the room. But with this new brew, Nikolai dropped into unconsciousness in the space of a breath—and he did not look like he was sleeping. His stillness was so complete she found herself pressing her fingers to the hollow beneath his jaw, seeking out the molasses-slow beat of his pulse. Dosing him was like watching him die every night.
“All I know is it’s strong enough to shut you up,” she said. She raised the bottle but kept it just out of reach. “Tell me how you manage it. How do you survive all of this glad-handing and unending performance?”
“You manage it every day at the Little Palace, Zoya. For all your bluster, I know you don’t always feel clever or strong, but you make a good show of it.”
Zoya tossed her hair over one shoulder. “Maybe. But I’m always me. You change like light over water. These moments, these interactions, they only seem to feed you. What’s your secret?”
“The secret …” Nikolai mused. He held out his hand, and she dropped the silver vial into his palm. “I suppose the secret is that I cannot stand being alone.” He uncorked the concoction. “But there are some places no one can go with us.”
He touched the bottle to his tongue, and Zoya snatched it from his hand as he fell backward, plummeting into the dark before his head reached the pillow.
Zoya traveled with the outriders. Sometimes Nikolai rode in the coach with Tolya and Yuri, but mostly he stayed astride one of his white horses, bracketed by his guards, Tamar following a discreet distance away. He did not wear the full military regalia and sash that his father had favored but instead the olive drab coat that was standard-issue for soldiers of the First Army. He’d earned the respect of the military by serving in the infantry before becoming an officer, and the medals he wore pinned to his chest were not ceremonial but battle-won.
In every village and town, Zoya watched as the king worked his particular kind of magic. Even the way he sat his horse changed depending on the crowd he greeted. Sometimes he was relaxed, at ease in the saddle, the sun gilding his hair and gleaming off his perfectly polished boots as he smiled and waved to his beloved subjects. Sometimes he was somber and heroic, standing atop stages and on balconies to address crowds as they prayed in their churches and gathered in their town squares. Though he and Zoya took pains to hide the urgency of their mission, they rode hard each day and never spent more than a single night in any location. They had allotted three weeks for this journey. Whatever they did or didn’t discover on the Fold, they’d be back in the capital to prepare for the festival with time to spare.
In Ryevost, where the great earthquake had struck, Nikolai stripped down to his shirtsleeves to work side by side with the men of the town, moving rubble and raising beams. He stood on the site where the great stone seal of Sankt Lubov had split, spewing forth a tide of tiny silver hummingbirds that had circled the town square in a whirring cloud for a fortnight before dispersing. He vowed to build a new church there, paid for with Lantsov gold.
“And where will all the money actually come from?” Zoya asked that night.
“The Kerch? My wealthy new bride? Maybe the Apparat can sell off a fancy altarpiece.”
But she now saw what he had intended when he conceded to the Apparat’s request for new churches. The Apparat would get these houses of worship, more places to lodge his spies and loyalists, but the people would not think of the priest when they said their prayers and heard the church bells chime. They would think of their golden king and whisper of the day he’d come to their village.
“I grew up in a place like this,” Zoya said as they entered the next bleak backwater. “Hopeless. Hungry. Desperation makes people do ugly things, and it is always the girls who suffer first.”
“Is that why you push so hard for the new factories we’re building?”
Zoya gave the barest shrug. “A broad back is needed to lift an axe or move a stone, but it doesn’t take strength to pull a lever or push a button.”
She could sense Nikolai’s scrutiny. “I’ve never known you to have much sympathy for the common people.”
I was common enough once. Liliyana and Lada were common. “It has nothing to do with sympathy. For the Grisha to thrive, we need a strong Ravka.”
“Ah, so you’re just being practical, of course.”
She could hear the skepticism in his voice, and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. But it was hard not to look at these muddy streets, the gray houses with their warped roofs and slanting porches, the tilting spire of the church, and not think of Pachina, the town she’d left behind. She refused to call it home.
“Do you know what changed everything in my village?” She kept her eyes on the road, rutted with holes and broken rocks from the previous night’s rain. “The draft. When the war was so dire that the crown was forced to start taking girls as well as boys to fight.”
“I thought the draft was seen as a curse.”
“For some,” Zoya conceded. “But for others of us it offered an escape, a chance at something other than being someone’s wife and dying in childbirth. When I was little, before my powers emerged, I dreamed of being a soldier.”
“Little Zoya with her bayonet?”
Zoya sniffed. “I always had the makings of a general.” But her mother had seen only the value in her daughter’s beauty. Zoya’s face had been her dowry at the tender age of nine. If not for Liliyana, she would have been bartered away like a new calf. But could she blame her mother? She remembered Sabina’s raw hands, her tired eyes, the gaunt lines of her body—perpetually weary and without hope. And yet, after all these years, Zoya found no scrap of forgiveness for her desperate mother or her weak father. They could rot. She gave her reins a snap.
Zoya and the rest of Nikolai’s party rode through the barley fields and inspected the new armaments factory, endured the singing of a children’s choir, and then had tea with the local council and the choirmaster.
“You should poison the choirmaster for inflicting that atrocity on us,” Zoya grumbled.
“They were adorable.”
“They were flat.”
Zoya was forced to put on a little demonstration of summoning for the local women’s group and resisted the urge to blow the town magistrate’s wig off his head.
At last they were permitted to ride out with the governor and see the great swath of forest that had supposedly been felled in a single night. It was an eerie sight. The smell of sap was heavy in the air, and the trees had fallen in perfect lines all the way to the crest of a hill that overlooked a tiny chapel dedicated to Sankt Ilya in Chains. The trees all lay in the same direction, like bodies laid to rest, as if pointing them west toward the Fold. They’d let Yuri emerge from the coach to stretch his legs and see the supposed miracle site, Tolya towering over him like the one tree that had refused to fall. According to Tolya, they’d begun to piece together a text that might well be the original description of the obisbaya.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Zoya said, watching the skinny monk talk animatedly to a beleaguered-looking Tolya, “that this is all contrivance? That the Apparat and the monk are not enemies at all? That they both wanted you away from the safety of the capital, and that they’ve gotten just that for their trouble?”
“Of course it has,” said Nikolai. “But such displays are beyond even the Apparat’s considerable reach. It pains my pride to say it, but there may be something at work here that’s bigger than both of us.”