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.