The way everyone gazed at Isaak frightened him. Isaak had been a nobody, a First Army grunt and then a palace guard. In the lower town, people had addressed him with respect or resentment when they saw his uniform. He remembered the pride of putting on the white and gold for the first time, the bizarre experience of people stepping out of his way or offering him a free glass of kvas, while others spat in the street and swore beneath their breath when they saw him and his comrades pass. It had been nothing like this. Had he looked at the king the way these people did—full of open gratitude and admiration? And what about the others, who looked on the king with suspicion and, sometimes, outright fear?
“Why do they stare so?” he whispered. “What do they expect to see?”
“You are no longer one man,” said Tamar. “You are an army. You are the double eagle. You are all of Ravka. Of course people stare.”
“And them?” Isaak said, bobbing his head toward one of the windows where girls had perched themselves, arrayed in their best dresses, hair curled, cheeks and lips pinked. “The king is not … he’s not one for dallying with commoners, is he?”
“No,” said Tolya. “Nikolai is not a man to take advantage of his position.”
“Then what do they hope to accomplish?”
Tamar laughed. “You’ve read the old tales of princes falling in love with commoners and kings taking peasant queens. Nikolai is without a bride. Can you blame them for hoping one of them might catch his eye? That he might not fall instantly and unequivocally in love with a girl’s beauty or the curve of her neck or her auburn hair, as kings in stories are wont to do?”
“You needn’t be quite so good a study of all the lower town has on offer,” said Nadia tartly.
Tamar gave no apology, only flashed a knowing smile that sent the blood rushing to Nadia’s cheeks. “I may peruse the gaudy wares, but I recognize true quality when I see it.”
Now Isaak looked out at the crowded throne room and wondered if he could just run back to the stables, get on that fine white horse, and ride until he was captured or shot at.
Tolya gave the throne the lightest nudge of his toe, and Isaak realized it was his time to speak.
He rose. “My friends—” His voice cracked, and he saw Genya close her eyes as if in pain. He cleared his throat and tried again. “My friends,” he began in Ravkan, repeating himself in Shu, Zemeni, and Fjerdan. “I welcome you to Ravka and thank you for taking this small step toward a peace that I hope will be profitable and fruitful for us all. In this moment, we are not nations; we are friends who will eat together—” Here Isaak paused just as he’d been instructed and let a bit of Nikolai’s rakish grin touch his lips. “And drink together. Let this night mark the start of a new age.” And let me get through dinner without choking on a lamb chop or causing a war.
Isaak nodded, the doors on either side of the throne opened, and the crowd parted to let him pass.
He hadn’t even made it inside the dining room before disaster struck. The footmen threw open the doors, and Isaak, focused on how sweaty his hands had become in his gloves, did what he had been trained to do and had done for years—he stepped aside, slipping into attention, eyes in the middle-focus stare that had been taught to him by his elders along with the method of shining his boots and the proper technique for sewing on a button, since “no servant need be troubled by the likes of us.”
Guards always gave way for those of higher status, and in a palace, almost everyone was of higher status—including many of the more valued servants. But no one was of higher status than the king of Ravka.
Isaak felt the gasp as much as he heard it and had the sudden lurching sensation that the floor had dissolved beneath him, that he would fall and keep falling until he struck hard ground. At which point, Genya would stand above him and kick him with her slippered toe.
“Your Highness?” asked the Shu princess, who would enter the dining room first since her delegation had given their presentations last. She looked almost as panicked as he felt.
Isaak’s first impulse was to search the room for someone, anyone, to help him, to tell him what to do. Don’t panic. Kings don’t panic. But you’re not a king. There’s still time to leap out a window.
He sketched a shallow bow and used the seconds he gained to fix a confident smile on his face. “Tonight, I am first a host and then a king.”
“Of course,” said the princess, though she appeared utterly flummoxed.
The rest of the guests filed past, some of them looking amused, others pleased, others disapproving. Isaak stood there and kept his smile pasted on, his chin lifted as if this were all a test for Ravka’s next queen.
When the last of the foreign dignitaries had filled the hall, Genya and David entered. Genya looked serene, but he could see the strain around the corners of her mouth. David seemed distracted as always.
“No need to worry,” said Genya. “You’re doing marvelously.”
David frowned, his face thoughtful. “So when you said This is a fiasco—”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“But—”
“Be silent, David.”
“That bad?” whispered Isaak miserably.
Genya offered him a brittle approximation of a smile. “At best, our visitors think Nikolai is eccentric, and at worst insane.”
All over one tiny breach of etiquette? Isaak did his best not to show his distress as he took his seat and the meal began. There were a thousand rules to remember when it came to formal dining, but they’d sidestepped many of them this first night by serving their guests a Ravkan peasant feast, complete with fiddles and dancing.
The evening passed uneventfully, and Isaak thanked all his Saints for it, though there was another tense moment when the Fjerdan ambassador asked after the extradition of Nina Zenik.
Genya was quick to reply that the Grisha girl had been on a trade mission to Kerch for nearly two years.
“An unlikely story,” the ambassador said mulishly.
Genya poked Isaak under the table, and he smiled amiably at the ambassador. “My stomach is too full to digest diplomacy. At least wait for the sorbet.”
At one point Tolya bent his head to Isaak’s ear and muttered, “Eat, Your Highness.”
“Everything tastes like doom,” he whispered.
“Then add salt.”
Isaak managed to chew and swallow a few bites, and soon, to his great amazement, the dinner was over.
The guests dispersed to their chambers, and Tolya and Tamar whisked him down the hall, through the back passages reserved for the king, to the royal quarters.
But just as they were about to enter, Tolya put his huge hand on Isaak’s chest. “Wait.” He scented the air. “Do you smell that?”
Tamar lifted her nose, cautiously approaching the door. “Garlic,” she said. “Arsine gas.” She signaled a guard. “Get a Squaller and David Kostyk. The door is rigged.”
“Poison gas?” asked Isaak as the twins shepherded him away from the king’s chambers.
Tolya clapped him on the back. “Congratulations,” he said with a grim smile. “You must have been convincing if someone’s already trying to kill you.”
NIKOLAI WAS STRUGGLING to acclimate himself to his chambers, to the strange mix of sand and stone. They might have been a well-appointed if antiquated set of rooms in his own palace if not for the lack of color, the uniform texture. It was a place seen distantly through fog. The exception was his bed: an absurdly romantic bower of red roses that he assumed was Elizaveta’s work. He lay down on it, determined to rest, but could not find sleep. If he did, would the monster emerge? Would it try to hunt in this barren place?
Nikolai was deeply tired, and yet it was as if his body had lost any sense of time. It had been late morning when they’d set out for the Fold, but in this permanent twilight, he wasn’t sure if days or hours had passed. He had the sense of time slipping away from him. We don’t eat. We don’t sleep. I don’t remember what it is to sweat or hunger or dream. The Saints—or whatever they were—had been trapped here for hundreds of years. How had they not lost their minds?
Nikolai shut his eyes. Even if he couldn’t sleep, he could attempt to order his mind. The demon gnawed constantly at his sense of control, and the bizarre experience of being plucked out of his reality and thrust into this one wasn’t helping. But he was a king, and he had the future of a country to consider.
Tolya and Tamar had seen Nikolai and Zoya vanish with Yuri in the sandstorm. What would they do? Conduct a search, then create a cover story, stick those junior Squallers somewhere they couldn’t tell tales. The twins would carry word of his disappearance back to Genya and David… . After that, his imagination failed him. What course of action would they choose? If he’d only had the chance to work with Isaak or one of the other candidates for his stand-in, they might have had an option. But to attempt such a thing with so little time to prepare? Well, Nikolai might have been daft enough to attempt it, but Genya and the others were far too sensible to court that kind of disaster.
There was still time to salvage the festival, their leverage with the Kerch, all of it—if the Saints made good on their promises. And if Nikolai survived the Burning Thorn. Then he could at least give Ravka a fighting chance. He’d be himself again. His mind would belong to him alone.
He would have to find a bride immediately, make the alliance Zoya had pushed so hard for. Marriage to a stranger. A performance of civility without true companionship. He would be acting for the rest of his life. He sighed. This place was making him morose.
Nikolai sat up straight. He’d heard a noise outside, a soft snuffling. When he opened the door, he saw nothing—until he looked down: A bear cub was tugging gently at his trousers with shiny little claws. His fur was thick and glossy, and where his back legs should have been, he had two wheels, the spokes of which looked distinctly like finger bones. The effect was both enchanting and bizarre.