“Would it be so bad not to go back?”
“And never see my parents? Live like an exile?”
“Are those the choices?”
“I find a way to fit in, or I take vows and live the rest of my life out here, in service to Djel among Women of the Well.” She scowled. “I wish I was an Inferni instead of a Heartrender.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nina said without thinking, her pride bristling. How could anyone want to be a Summoner instead of Corporalki? Everyone knows we’re the best Order. “I mean … why would anyone want to be an Inferni?”
Hanne’s bright eyes flashed as if in challenge. “So I could melt the Ice Court from the inside out. Wash the whole big mess into the sea.”
Dangerous words. And maybe Nina should have pretended to be scandalized. Instead she grinned. “The grandest puddle in the world.”
“Exactly,” said Hanne, returning her smile, that wicked edge curling her lips
Suddenly, Nina wanted to tell Hanne all of it. My friends and I blew a hole in the Ice Court wall! We stole a Fjerdan tank! All Saints, did she want to brag? Nina gave her head a shake. This is a chance to gain her confidence, she told herself. Take it.
She sat down at the desk next to Hanne’s and said, “If you could go anywhere, do anything, what would you choose for yourself?”
“Novyi Zem,” Hanne said instantly. “I’d get a job, make my own money, hire myself out as a sharpshooter.”
“You’re that good?”
“I am,” Hanne said without a hint of hesitation. “I think about it every time I ride out. Just disappearing. Making everyone believe I was lost in a storm or that I was carried away by the river.”
Beastly idea. Come to Ravka. “Then why not do it? Why not just go?”
Hanne stared at her, shocked. “I couldn’t do that to my parents. I couldn’t shame them that way.”
Nina narrowly avoided rolling her eyes. Fjerdans and their honor. “Of course not,” she said swiftly. But she couldn’t help but think of Hanne riding into the clearing, rifle raised, braids loose, a warrior born. There was gold in her, Nina could see it, the shine dimmed by years of being told there was something wrong in the way she was made. Those glimpses of the real Hanne, the Hanne who was meant to be, were driving her to distraction. You’re not here to make a new friend, Zenik, she chastised herself. You’re here for information.
“What if the Wellmother casts you out?” she asked.
“She won’t. My father is a generous donor.”
“And if she catches you flouncing about in men’s trousers?” Nina prodded.
“She won’t.”
“If my friends and I had been less generous, she might have.”
Now Hanne leaned back and grinned with easy confidence. There you are, thought Nina. “It would have been your word against mine. I would have been dressed neatly in my pinafore and back behind the convent walls before you’d knocked on the Wellmother’s door.”
Interesting. Nina put all the condescension she could summon in her tone and said, “Of course you would have.”
Hanne sat up straighter and jabbed her finger into the surface of the desk. “I know every step that creaks in this place. I know just where the cook stashes the key to the west kitchen door, and I have pinafores and changes of clothes stowed everywhere from the chapel to the roof. I don’t get caught.”
Nina held up her hands to make peace. “I just think you might consider more caution.”
“Says the girl teaching me Grisha skills in the halls of Djel.”
“Maybe I have less to lose than you do.”
Hanne raised a brow. “Or maybe you just think you’re better at being bold.”
Try me, thought Nina. But all she said was, “Back to work. Let’s see if you can make my heart race.”
ZOYA HAD SPENT LITTLE TIME IN Kribirsk since the war. There wasn’t much cause, and it held too many bad memories. In the days when Ravka had been split from its western coastline by the Shadow Fold, Kribirsk had served as the last place of safety, a town where merchants and bold travelers outfitted their journeys and where soldiers might spend a final night drinking away their terror or paying for comfort in a lover’s arms before they boarded a sandskiff and were launched into the unnatural darkness of the Fold. Many never returned.
Kribirsk had been a port, but now the dark territory known as the Unsea was gone, and Kribirsk was just another small town with little to offer but a sad history.
Vestiges of the town’s former glory remained—the jail and barracks, the building that had once housed officers of the First Army and where the Triumvirate had first met with Ravka’s new king. But the sprawling encampment of tents and horses and soldiers was no more. It was said you could still find unspent bullets in the dust, and occasionally scraps of silk from the black pavilion where the Darkling had once held court.
Though the darkness of the Fold and the monsters that populated it were gone, the sands were not, and the shifting ground could be tricky for wagons to navigate. Merchants traversing Ravka still came to the drydocks to book passage on sandskiffs, but now guards were hired to protect cargo from marauders and thieves, not from the threat of the flesh-eating volcra that had once terrorized travelers. The monsters had vanished, and all that remained was a long, barren stretch of gray sand, eerie in its emptiness. Nothing could grow in the lifeless terrain that the Darkling’s power had left behind.
The businesses of Kribirsk were the same as they’d always been—inns, brothels, outfitters—there were just fewer of them. Only the church had changed. The simple whitewashed building with its blue dome had once been dedicated to Sankt Vladimir. Now a blazing golden sun hung over the entry, a sign that the building had been reconsecrated to Sankta Alina of the Fold.
It had taken a long time for Zoya to think of Alina as anything other than a rival. She’d resented the orphan girl’s gifts, envied her position with the Darkling. She hadn’t understood what power meant then or the price that any of them would be forced to pay for it. After the war, Alina had chosen a life of peace and anonymity, bought with the charade of her death, but her name and her legend had only grown. Zoya was surprised to find she liked seeing Alina’s name on churches, liked hearing it spoken in prayers. Ravka had given too much of its love to men like the Darkling, the Apparat, even the Lantsov kings. They owed a little of it to an orphan girl with no dress sense.
Though the symbol crowning the church’s entry had changed, its outer walls remained the same. They were covered in the names of the dead, victims of the Darkling’s slaughter of Novokribirsk, Kribirsk’s sister city, the town that had once lain almost directly across the Shadow Fold. Sun and time had faded the painted script so that it would be nearly illegible to anyone who did not hold the names of the lost in their hearts.
One day those words will fade to nothing, Zoya thought. The people who mourned the dead would be gone too. I’ll be gone. Who will remember them then? Zoya knew that if she walked to the southwest corner, she would find the names of Liliyana Garin and her ward. But she would not make that walk, would not trace those clumsy letters with her fingertips.
After all this time, she still had not found an end to her grief. It was a dark well, an echoing place into which she’d once cast a stone, sure that it would strike bottom and she would stop hurting. Instead, it just kept falling. She forgot about the stone, forgot about the well, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Then she would think Liliyana’s name, or her eye would pause on the little boat painted on her bedroom wall, its two-starred flag frozen in the wind. She’d sit down to write a letter and realize she had no one to write to, and the quiet that surrounded her became the silence of the well, of the stone still falling.
No, she would not turn that corner of the church. She would not touch her fingers to those names. Not today. Zoya nudged her horse’s flanks with her heels and turned her mount back toward town.
Zoya, Tamar, and Nikolai took up residence in a boardinghouse inauspiciously named the Wreck, which had been built to look like a large ship run aground. Zoya remembered it bustling with soldiers and merchants in its heyday and the terrible accordion player who had played from morning until night on the stoop to lure travelers from the road. At least he was long gone.
Tolya was billeted across the street with the monk. Together, the twins were too noticeable, and this particular stop on the royal itinerary was being kept a secret. They’d sent the great golden coach and its glittering outriders to Keramzin. There, the party would be welcomed by the couple who ran the orphanage and who they knew could be trusted with the secrets of the crown.
Zoya found her bath lukewarm and the meal of squirrel and stewed turnip unappetizing, but she was too tired to complain. She slept and dreamed of monsters.
In the morning, she woke Nikolai with the red bottle of stimulant, and they settled in his sitting room to tackle the business of the day. Later, they might find an ancient thorn wood buried in the sands, but Ravka required constant attention, and this morning that meant matters of state could not wait.
Zoya spent a few hours going over her correspondence. She sent Genya and David a coded missive with the essentials of the khergud attack and instructions to double the sorties patrolling the skies around Os Alta. The capital was exposed, and she hated to think what might happen if the khergud attacked the Grisha school. Any assault on the Little Palace would be considered an overt act of war, and she doubted the Shu would dare it, but Zoya didn’t intend to take chances.
She sent similar missives to Grisha stationed throughout Ravka, with instructions to be vigilant night and day and requests that their First Army liaisons post additional soldiers in towers and high lookouts. It would have been more expedient to have the Grisha at the outposts make the requests directly, but protocol was protocol. Some part of her would always resent this dance, but these gestures existed to preserve the dignity of the people involved. The Grisha did not want to be vulnerable, and the First Army wanted to maintain their authority.