what stays and what fades away

by goldtreesilvertree

Summary:

At seven, Nikolai Lantsov knew that there was nobody more beautiful than his mother, nobody braver than his father, and no better friend than Dominik. At six, Genya Safin began proving him false, and he almost hated her for it.

Or: two children are raised together in the Grand Palace. It changes nothing. It changes everything.

A canon-compliant retelling of the Grishaverse books centred around Genya and Nikolai's relationship.

Notes:

So I haven't written any fic in about 3 years, and I've never written anything for the Grishaverse books, but the build-up to Season 2 has inspired me to fill out the gaps that Leigh Bardugo left between these two. This was intended to be a three-chapter character study, but it's ballooned up to 57k words already, and I'm still writing! So please join me every Thursday to explore my two favourite characters as they grow up and survive all the horrible trauma that the books have in store for them.

Chapter 1: i – the kingdom where nobody dies

At seven, Nikolai Lantsov knew that there was nobody more beautiful than his mother, nobody braver than his father, and no better friend than Dominik. At six, Genya Safin began proving him false, and he almost hated her for it. 

It had begun almost at their first meeting. It was a rare treat, to be brought to his mother’s sitting room for praise rather than to his father’s study for scolding. Afternoons of laughter and cossetting among Queen Tatiana and her ladies sometimes felt like the only moments where his gnawing hunger for something he couldn’t yet name was sated, the part of him that craved attention at any cost lulled by the glow of light that seemed to surround her.  

“ Beautiful , Kolya,” she cooed, cupping her hands around his as he held out the shining dragonfly he’d twisted together from wires and chandelier pendants. “My clever, clever boy!” Her words sank into him like spring sunlight, burning away that gnawing, empty cold, but her next words may as well have been ice water. “You must meet my newest lady, she’ll be a friend for you and your little companion- what was his name again? Genya? Pretty thing, come and meet my littlest prince!”  

His stomach twisted as another child crept out from behind the sofa and into the radiance of his mother’s rare smile. She curtseyed gracefully, murmured a courtly greeting, and might have ducked away again without Queen Tatiana’s hand in her red, red hair. “My own little Grisha, isn’t she lovely?” The Queen’s smile remained unchanged as her eyes slipped from her son to the girl, and Nikolai felt sick with jealousy. The girl was lovely, like a doll or a picture book. Like an illustration of Sankta Anastasia with her bloody-bright hair, not like a real person at all. There were no marks on her shining white dress, and Nikolai suddenly felt grubby and out of place next to her.  

His mother was still speaking, her voice turned coaxing-impatient. “Kolya, won’t you say something to her? Make her feel welcome.” 

“Welcome to Os Alta,” he mumbled, looking down at his feet. This wasn’t how this was meant to happen. She wasn’t meant to be here, in his palace, with his mother. She belonged back in her picture-books, not taking his place.  

His mother stooped, and for a dizzying moment, he thought she might embrace him for his graceful condescension to this cuckoo-child, but instead, she plucked the dragonfly from his hands and placed it in hers. “Prince Nikolai made you this lovely toy to welcome you, won’t you thank him?” 

“Thank you, moi tsarevich ,” the girl echoed, dutifully, sweeping him another perfect curtsey as she held his dragonfly in her hands.  

For a moment, he could only stare between his mother, the strange girl, and the dragonfly, an alien, choking sensation in his chest. Then: “I should get back to my lessons,” he muttered, and leaned up on tiptoe to kiss his mother’s proffered cheek. Passing Genya on his way out, he stumbled, and knocked the dragonfly from her hands, its crystal wings shattering on the stone floor. His mother shrieked, her ladies gasped and murmured, but he was already running back to his tutor, back to Dominik, back to the wing of the palace with no cuckoo-girls in his place. He looked back at the chaos only once. The girl stood unmoving amid the shards of glass, pale and silent. A cut on her hand stained her white dress red. If she cried, he did not see it.  

He could not avoid seeing her again, though. Every time he saw his mother, the Grisha girl was one step behind her, her shadow in miniature, and every time, jealousy gnawed in his chest like an animal. Not that he wanted to cling to his mother’s skirts like a baby, but now her rare golden smiles were poured on dear Genya’s head. Even as he poured more work into lessons, stayed up late reading with a candle, practiced with his training sword until his arms burned, the praise he received did nothing unless he could outdo her, which he never could. Her lessons were in dancing, needlepoint, Small Science, and every day she seemed to grow cleverer and more beautiful in Queen Tatiana’s eyes. It was as though only Nikolai could see how her bloody-bright hair had faded to red-gold, how the amber of her eyes was giving way to green-blue, how her peasant girl freckles were smoothed to doll-like porcelain. How her features were slowly shifting to a mirror of his mother’s, until at a rare family dinner, she exclaimed to his father: “Look at the children, Alexander. They could be twins!” 

Nikolai looked up at his father, jaw set. Look at me, he willed, See me , not her or Vasily, me.   

The Tsar looked up from his plate slowly, as if surprised he had been addressed at all. He looked at his wife first, before his gaze slid away to the far end of the table. For a dizzying moment, Nikolai felt certain his eyes would settle on him, that he’d say something like Of course, Nikolai is growing up as strong and handsome as his brother, or Are you comparing our son to some peasant child?   

Instead, he skimmed past Nikolai without comment, settling on Genya for a long moment. “Such a pretty child,” he said, with a warmth that made her blush rose-pink. He did not take his eyes off of her for the rest of dinner, and Nikolai was fuming by the time he was sent back to his rooms.  

“I hate her!” he raged to Dominik, in the privacy of his bedchamber. “What right does she have to sit at our table like a princess while you have to eat with the servants? She doesn’t belong here, she should be back in the Little Palace with her own kind! If it wasn’t for-“ He stopped himself before he could continue. He knew well enough that any mark he left on Genya would be mended on her skin in moments and branded on Dominik’s for days. It was the only thing that had stopped him pouring his borcht over her head. 

“I know you hate her.” Dominik sounded tired, and Nikolai felt a sting of guilt. In his anger, he’d forgotten to pocket the sweet vatrushka that his friend loved but was never served in the servants’ hall.  

“Don’t you?” he prodded. “She’s treated like royalty, and she hasn’t earned it with anything more than being pretty.” 

“Neither have you, moi tsarevich ,” he teased, and Nikolai elbowed him gently. 

“I’m not pretty ,” he groused, his seven-year-old masculinity affronted. 

“Have you earned being treated like royalty though?” It should have been a teasing retort, but Dominik’s voice was much too gentle. Nikolai fell silent, thinking of Dominik’s brothers and sisters on the farm, who welcomed them both with noisy enthusiasm when they snuck out to visit, always rowdy and hungry and no less deserving than Dominik. Thinking of how the servants’ children avoided playing with him or Dominik when they could, and participated with mute, almost frightened obedience when they couldn’t. Thinking of how he had never seen Genya play with anyone at all. 

“Has anyone?” he muttered, suddenly embarrassed, then: “Do you think she’s lonely?” 

Dominik shrugged. “Even Grisha have feelings, probably.” 

“Do they? I never see her cry, even when she’s hurt.” He would have cried, with a cut that deep on his hand.  

“Do you cry, in front of your parents?” 

“That’s different.” Princes were brave and strong, like Vasily. They laughed or shouted in booming voices. Princes didn’t cry. Babies cried. 

“Is it? Even you don’t want to annoy the King and Queen, and they can’t send you away like they could Genya. Or me.” 

They could if they wanted to. The thought came unbidden, and sank into the pit of his chest with a cold certainty. He did not complain about Genya to Dominik again, but he did watch her with more curiosity than hatred as the court began to pack up to move to the Summer Palace.  

He had been right. Even now, he never saw her cry or complain, and even her laughter seemed more like a display of her beauty than her heart. But Dominik had also been right. No other children approached her, and when the Queen and her ladies were distracted or tired of her, she sat perfectly still, or played with a doll almost as beautiful as her in near-silence. Her dresses remained shining and perfect, never stained or creased by playing or mischief. Much as Nikolai hated to admit it, Genya Safin might have been lonely. 

It was this thought that ruled him when he and Dominik found the wild strawberries. They’d wandered away from the pavilions where the Queen and her favourite courtiers were picnicking, and had found them nestled in a hollow under some trees, tiny and scarlet and perfectly ripe, as red as Genya’s hair had once been. Even for a prince, strawberries were a rare treat, but Nikolai saw how Dominik looked from the strawberries to the Grisha girl, alone and forgotten outside the shade of the tent, threading flowers into garlands in her lap. By unspoken agreement, they gathered berries by the handful and crept over to her. She seemed to ignore them at first, and when she did look up, she was squinting distrustfully.  

“Did you need something, moi tsarevich?” Her voice was polite, but chilly, and Nikolai felt a flare of irritation at the rejection of his peace offering, but swallowed his pride and held out the berries to her in his cupped hands. 

“We picked some strawberries. For you. If you want them.” He tried not to sound petulant, but she was still hesitant as she took one from the pile, as if she thought he would poison her.  

Even her perfect courtly manners couldn’t cover her surprise as she bit down on the sweet summer berries. “They’re good,” she exclaimed, and then, quickly returning to propriety, “May I have another?” 

In response, Nikolai poured his bounty into her hands. “We ate our share,” he lied, and watched in fascination as her careful court manners fell away and she gorged herself on the red, red fruit. It was only when she looked up, juice all over her face, that he noticed the tears trickling down her cheeks.  

“Thank you, moi tsarevich, ” she said, sniffling, and Dominik, who had little sisters, sat down beside her and offered her a grubby handkerchief. “I didn’t mean to...” 

“It’s alright,” Dominik said, gently. “They taste like home, don’t they?”  

Nikolai, feeling suddenly like an intruder, began to back away, but Dominik grabbed his hand with uncharacteristic firmness and yanked him down onto the grass beside them. 

Genya blew her nose before she replied: “They don’t grow here like they did in Caryeva,” she explained. “We weren’t- Madraya and Avva weren’t nobles, or anyone important, but we had horses, and strawberries in summer, and... The Queen is very kind,” she cut herself off, looking at Nikolai, with something like worry on her face. 

“But she’s not your mother,” Dominik said, as if finishing her sentence, and Genya nodded, slowly. “I miss my madraya and avva too, and my brothers and sisters, and even the stupid sheep, even though the palace is beautiful.” 

“Caryeva’s a long way away,” Nikolai said, slowly, “but Vasily likes to go there for the end of the summer, and my mother might go too if we ask. Especially if you ask, Genya. We could visit, like Dominik gets to visit his family.” 

Genya’s eyes widened. “I don’t want the Queen to think I’m ungrateful.” 

Nikolai smiled, lowering his voice. “So we won’t tell her why. It can be our secret, right?” 

Genya’s smile was tentative and imperfect, her face still smeared with tears and strawberry juice, but in that moment, Nikolai had never seen her look so beautiful. 

They did not go to Caryeva at the end of that summer, or any of those that followed – Queen Tatiana did not wish to travel or to give up her darlings into Vasily’s careless custody. Nikolai felt guilty enough for giving Genya false hope of seeing her parents again that for the first three weeks after their return to Os Alta, he made a game of leaving his favourite books and toys in her room, watching her closely to try and divine which ones she preferred. The third time she caught him looking over her shoulder as she leafed through one of his books, she actually rolled her eyes at him, something he’d never imagined his mother’s little courtier doing.  

“You don’t have to follow me around so much. Are you a prince, or a puppy?” 

“I don’t know, are you a Grisha or a kotichka ?” he retorted, sprinkling a handful of leaves over her head in the hopes of provoking an outraged squeak. 

She turned her nose up at him, which only made her look more like an affronted kitten. “You don’t know? Poor little thing! That’s alright, you can be my sobachka.”   

From behind him, Dominik snorted, and Nikolai took the opportunity to throw a second handful of autumn leaves into his face. A brief but vicious battle ensued, in which Nikolai claimed victory at the cost of having hair as red as Genya’s for a week. It was worth it to tease her that he wore the colour better than she did.  

The knowledge that he now had two friends bloomed slowly. Genya’s surprisingly sharp tongue was nothing like Dominik’s gentle understanding, and her careful, reserved nature was almost the opposite of Nikolai’s natural inclination to mischief, but a balance grew between the three of them almost without him noticing. Dominik knew where to find the sweetest fruit in the orchard, but it was Genya who showed them the hidden passage to the kitchen, and Nikolai who charmed the cooks into transforming their stolen apples into delicious sharlotka. During the Feast of Sankt Nikolai, it was Dominik who taught them to play pomdrakon, Nikolai who snatched the raisins from the flames, and Genya who, in exchange for a share of his bounty, healed his scorched fingers with a touch of her own. It was only when the three of them lay in a heap by the fire with flushed cheeks and full bellies that Nikolai realised that the gnawing feeling in his chest had vanished. 

He stretched reluctantly then wriggled out from his position sandwiched between the other two, ignoring their protests. “You haven’t had your presents from me yet!” he said, pulling out two cloth bundles and shoving them into their hands. Dominik blinked in half-asleep bewilderment, but Genya was already untying the clumsy knot with deft, clever movements.  

When she’d revealed its contents, though, she looked confused. “A paintbox? You’re the one with the drawing master, not me.” 

Nikolai leaned over, popping the lid open so that she could see the glowing pigments within. “It’s a special one, from Kirch,” he explained. “You’re always saying you need more colours to practice with, and if you mix a little of these with water, you’ll have as much of any colour as you need.” 

Her smile was real and bright and only a little malevolent, “Are you offering yourself as a test subject, Sobachka?"

He snorted. “You experimented on me already, ask Dominik.” 

Dominik only shook his head like a brown bear waking from hibernation, smiling softly. “Experiment on these,” he said, offering up the army of toy soldiers that he had unwrapped from his bundle. “You can give them keftas , and I’ll have a Second Army to fight with Nikolai’s First.” 

“I’d rather they fight the Shu Han so I could go home,” she grumbled, looking into the fire for a moment. The border dispute was one of the many reasons they’d been given as to why they couldn’t visit Caryeva. 

He nudged her lightly with his elbow. “One day I’ll build you wings like Sankta Vasilka, and you can fly wherever you want,” he said. 

“You couldn’t, you’re not a Fabrikator,” she argued. 

“Neither are most of the people who make rifles or grenades for the war,” he retorted, “but they still manage to make things that would have been impossible a hundred years ago.” 

“And if you had a hundred years to make me a flying machine, I might believe you’d actually finish it,” she teased. 

“You two quarrel like old hens,” Dominik complained, and was rewarded by Nikolai making clucking noises in his ear until Genya hit them both with a pillow.  

In the gardens they built snow forts and staged mock battles, playing at a war that was happening somewhere far away and to other people.  

“I’m Leonid the Clever!” Dominik called out, raining down snow on their heads from the branches of a tree. “Perish beneath my shadows!” 

“I’m Ivan the Golden!” Nikolai shouted back, packing the snow into a wall around the base of the tree. “You’ll never take these walls!” 

“Your walls are nothing to a firebird!” Genya flung herself gracelessly over the packed snow of the fort wall and knocked Nikolai back into the tree so hard that the branches shook, sending Dominik tumbling to the ground.  

“Clumsy firebird,” Nikolai teased, wrapping his arms around her waist as though to wrestle her to the ground. Her face hovered just above his, her red hair falling around them like a curtain “If you were Sankta Vasilka you’d have fallen out of the sky and the sorcerer would have caught you.” Genya put up a half-hearted resistance, but gave up either because she realised Nikolai was not quite stupid enough to dump her into the snow or because Dominik had thrown himself across their legs in a dramatic attitude of agony. She surrendered to being tucked under Nicolai’s arm, and leant her head against his shoulder. 

“Be Sankta Anastasia instead?” Dominik pleaded. “Take pity on a poor peasant’s bruises?” 

“I’d rather turn my hair green than be Sankta Anastasia,” she retorted. “She was an idiot.” 

“In the Istorii Sankt’ya it says she was beautiful, and red-haired-” 

“And kind, unlike Genya,” Nikolai added, and took the sharp elbow to the ribs that comment earned him without wincing. 

“And stupid, just like Nikolai. You wouldn’t catch me bleeding to death for a city of ungrateful peasants.” For all her sharp words, she smoothed a hand over Dominik’s forehead, erasing the graze there as if it were a smudge of dirt. “Why do you like playing Leonid and the Black Heretic? Aren’t they monsters in all the stories you love so much?” 

Dominik looked up at her, brown eyes shifting from dreamy to thoughtful. “The monsters are the ones that live, at the end. The heroes die to make history and the Saints die to become martyrs, but the monsters... you never find out what happens to them. They get to live forever.” He shifted to look at Nikolai. “What about you? Why do you like Ivan the Golden so much?” 

For all that he usually loved attention, something about their focussed gazes made him feel as if they were trying to see into his soul. He shrugged, trying to seem casual. “He helped his people, like kings are supposed to.” 

For some reason, this made Genya and Dominik laugh so hard they shook, and he tried to join their laughter even if he didn’t understand completely. 

“Oh, Nikolai,” Genya giggled, wiping tears from her blue-green eyes. “If only you would be king one day.” 

He shook his head as Dominik hushed her – even for the Queen’s pet Grisha, that was too close to treason. “I’d be as good a king as you’d be a Saint, Genya.” 

“I’d be an excellent Saint,” she retorted, nose in the air. 

“Sankta Genya, patron saint of peasants and puppies?” Dominik suggested.  

That made Nikolai laugh, for all that he hated the nickname she’d given him almost as much as his mother did, and once Nikolai started laughing, the others couldn’t help but follow. They stayed in their kingdom beneath the tree until it grew dark and their wet clothes became icy cold, and crept into their rooms still laughing. Even when he’d been scolded, bathed, and tucked in under layers of furs, part of him still longed for the warmth of Dominik in his lap and Genya under his arm, the three of them forming a chord so perfect his heart overflowed. Part of him would long for it always. 

Chapter 2: ii – awake, awake, you children bold

Summary:

Vasily takes an interest in his brother's education. Nikolai experiments with kvas. Genya comes close to sainthood.

Nikolai was twelve when Vasily finally blessed him with the brotherly attention he’d always sought. He’d come up to the fence during one of the riding lessons he shared with Dominik and Genya, and leant on the paddock’s fence. Nikolai, always eager to show off, stood up in his stirrups and nudged his pony to dance in a circle like a circus horse before trotting up to the fence. Vasily’s applause was slow, maybe sarcastic, but he was smiling, and that was enough to make Nikolai’s heart fill with desperate, clawing hope.  

“You’re outgrowing that pony, Sobachka ,” he teased. There was a mocking note to the way he said the nickname, but it was better than the alternative. “Maybe you’re not such a Nikolai Nothing anymore.”  

He felt himself puff up with pride. “Sasha says that I should have a horse of my own soon!” He could feel his friends watching him, but some instinct told him not to turn around.  

“Does she, now?” Vasily’s tone was arch, like he knew something Nikolai didn’t. “That was exactly why I came to find you. How would you like to come to Caryeva with me this year? All my best horses came from the fair, and it’s time you learned to pick out your own beasts.”  

His heart felt like it was about to beat out of his chest. “You mean it?”  

“Of course!” On his toes, Vasily could still reach to ruffle his hair when he was on horseback. “Now you're becoming a man, I thought I should take a little more interest in your education. A brothers’ adventure, what do you say?”  

Yes. Every part of his soul knew the answer was yes. And yet... some part of him hesitated. “Genya and Dominik would come too?”  

It was the wrong thing to say. Vasily snorted, dismissive. “If I wanted an entourage, I would bring Mother. No, make up your mind, Sobachka , or I’ll change mine.”  

It was too rare a chance to miss. “Of course I’ll come!” he said, hotly, realising only too late that it might be a trap. Vasily thought jokes like that were funny.  

This time, though, he only gave that knowing smile again, and clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Excellent! I’ll let your tutors know, and we’ll be on our way by the end of the week. Have your little valet  pack your things, I’ll order the carriage.”  

He swept off as abruptly as he’d arrived, leaving Nikolai with his heart bursting with excitement. For a moment there was perfect, untempered joy – which shattered beneath the weight of his friends’ faces as he turned to share his happiness with them. Genya was no longer laughing, her glass-smooth courtier’s mask back in place, and Dominik... Dominik looked resigned and weary and older, like he seemed more and more often as the world of the court pressed in on their own private kingdom. The world where they were a prince, a servant, and a Grisha.  

“He’s my brother,” he said, and hated how babyish it sounded beneath his friends’ disapproving gazes.  

Genya wordlessly slid from her saddle and led her pony back towards the stables. Nikolai hunched his shoulders, glancing between her and Dominik, who sighed, and dismounted too.  

“I could try to talk to her?” he offered, as Nikolai joined Jim on the ground.  

Nikolai shook his head. “I’ll make it up to her somehow. Even Genya can’t stay angry at me forever.” He smiled, trying to get Dominik to join him in the joke but the other boy’s answering smile was world-weary, as if there was a weight on his shoulders that none of Nikolai’s jokes or Genya’s pointed witticisms could lift. It had settled there the day his eldest brother had been drafted to the army, when they’d been too late to say goodbye properly. They'd run to catch up with the straggling line of new recruits, taller than them but not by much any more, and Pasha had scooped Dominik up into a hug and swung him round with a grunt, ordering him to “take care of the little ones”. Nikolai had been torn between the embarrassment of intruding on such a private moment, and agonising envy. Vasily had never so much as ruffled his hair before. Dominik’s smiles had become rarer after that, less carefree, and they took on a new significance to Nikolai. Where before, Dominik’s quiet laugh had been the underlying melody of their days together, it was now a rarer prize, and Nikolai stored each instance under his ribs the way a dragon armoured its belly with treasure.   

Genya was changing too, in ways less easy for Nikolai to understand. Every day she grew more beautiful, and more remote. Part of it was her conflicting duties – if she wasn’t disappearing into the Little Palace for a seemingly endless series of lessons and meetings, she was within calling distance of the Queen, and the Queen called on her more and more of late, but even if she claimed to be “too busy for childish games”, there was something deeper than duty to her sudden reserve. She no longer used her Tailoring skills to heal their scrapes, or assist in their pranks, and she’d become tight-lipped about her lessons in Small Science. She seldom attended the rare Lantsov family dinners any more, and when the court dined together, she sat with the Queen’s ladies rather than at the Queen’s right hand, where she and Nikolai had been able to bicker and steal sweets from each other’s plates. It was like she was fading into the picture book painting he’d once thought her, and she would not even tell him or Dominik why. But if he’d suspected her of avoiding him before Vasily invited him to Caryeva, now she might as well have been a ghost. It was the night before they departed before he managed to catch her on the way back from the Little Palace and snatch the pile of books from her arms.  

“Too heavy for a little kotichka like you to carry,” he teased, trying to lure a smile, or failing that, a barbed comment, out of his friend. She wasn’t such a little kotichka any more, in truth. In the past year, she seemed to be growing out of her dresses faster than even his mother could buy them for her. The pretty embroidered sarafan she wore today fit snugly at her waist, but skimmed her calves where once it had reached her ankles. He wondered, foolishly, if it was the cold that was making her snappish.  

“Don’t you have a big brother to follow, Sobachka?” she retorted, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in the insult. “I don’t need you to save me from my studies.”  

“Don’t you? I checked the library yesterday and I could swear you’d disappeared into a book.”   

She rolled her eyes and began to speed up, trying to outpace him despite her shorter legs. “Stop distracting me, Nikolai. I’m already running late, and the Queen will be angry if she has to wait to get ready for the ball tonight.”  

“Mother’s never angry with you!” he countered, frustrated at her flimsy attempt to put him off again . He took a breath, shifted the books against his hip to free up a hand, and caught hers, turning her to face him. “Genya, please,” he said, more gently, “I’ll take a letter for your parents, I’ll find their farm, I’ll even bring them back with me to see what a fine lady you’re becoming. Tell me what it’ll take for us to be friends again, and I’ll do it, I promise.”  

She sighed, then, and he was unaccountably reminded of Dominik explaining that the beating he had taken for Nikolai was the price of his lessons at the Palace. “I’m not angry with you, Kolya,” she said, and if her expression softened a fraction, it also ached. “I’d never have been allowed to go to Caryeva, not when I’m needed here, and- I scarcely remember it, anyway. This is my home now.” She smiled at him, and it was bright and dazzling and pretty, but it wasn’t real. It wasn’t the smile of the girl with strawberry juice around her mouth.   

So as she tried to disentangle her fingers from his, he held on. “Genechka, please,” he repeated. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. I can help. I want to help.”  

“I’m fine, Nikolai,” she assured him, then hesitated. She wet her lips, as if the next words she spoke had to be chosen carefully. He held her hand more tightly, certain she was about to confess, ready to pull her into a hug or fight the Sea Whip or build her wings if it would comfort her. Instead, she only said: “Be careful with Vasily, for me? I know he’s your brother, but- he’s not like Dominik.”  

In any other moment, he would have laughed off her concerns, told her she worried like a grandmother, but in this one, he only nodded. “I will, I promise. We’ll be back in Os Alta before you know it.”  

“You better be,” she said, but squeezed his hand. He didn’t let go of hers until they were in sight of the Grand Palace once more.  

There wasn’t another opportunity to say goodbye before they left early the next morning. Caryeva was three days’ ride from the Summer Palace, but only a day and a half in a carriage with Vasily driving, and Nikolai couldn’t resist the urge to hang half out of the window, watching the countryside race by in a blur of pine and heather. Despite Genya’s warning, he couldn’t help but feel like he was finally on the adventure he’d always hoped for when he’d chased after Vasily as a little boy, and his brother’s booming laugh was all the encouragement he needed to drink cup after cup of hot kvas until his head swam, to balance on the roof of the carriage, even to show off how he could stand up on the back of Vasily’s favourite riding horse. Even when he lost his balance and landed on his back in the dirt, his brother slapped him on the back and exclaimed: “Better luck next time, Sobachka!”   

Nikolai feigned a laugh to match his, and tried not to think about how much crueller the nickname sounded on his brother’s lips than on Genya’s or Dominik’s.  

When they reached Caryeva the next day, his head was thumping, and the light hurt his eyes, but Vasily was merrier than ever. “Nikolai Nothing can’t hold his kvas? Never mind, little brother, we’ll make a hardened drinker of you yet,” he said, and Nikolai tried not to wince at how much louder his voice seemed this morning. “Cheer up, Prince Greensick, today, we find you the finest horses at this fair. After mine, of course.”  

For all Vasily’s enthusiasm for the races and gambling tents of Caryeva Fair, to Nikolai, they were the least interesting parts of Caryeva. He was more interested in the colourful tents of the Suli caravans, the acrobats and fortunetellers, the stalls which sold delicate clockwork trinkets from Shu Han, mechanical toys from Kerch, and thick, fluffy furs from Fjerda. Before the races, he followed Vasily loyally from stall to stall, agreeing wholeheartedly with his opinions on what made a fine beast and what was fit only for the knacker’s, but once his brother was ensconced in the stands by the racetrack or in the gambling tent with a pretty serving girl on his knee, his time was his own, and he revelled in the chance to explore a new place without fear of tutors or servants looking for him. His only regret was the absence of his friends, but if Dominik wasn’t here, he couldn’t be harmed by Nikolai’s mischief, and Genya would have hated the grubby inn and the stink of horseshit that hung everywhere. He did ask some of the locals if they knew where he could find the Safin farm, but few people seemed to remember they’d ever lived there. An old woman who ran an inn eventually gave him an answer, though not the one he was hoping for.  

“The Safins? Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in some time. They came into some money after the war started and moved away from the border. Now what did I hear about that... Oh yes, one of their daughters was Grisha, and the Little Palace paid them handsomely to let her go without a fuss. Lucky girl probably sits on silk cushions and eats nothing but pastries,” she said, with an envious sigh.  

“And they never wrote to her, or tried to visit?” Nikolai said, hopefully.  

The innkeeper looked at him pityingly. “What do you think the payment was for? Grisha children belong to the Second Army. Their parents only have keeping of them until they’re found.”   

Nikolai swallowed, but thanked her with a glowing smile and a few extra coins slid across the counter.   

If Vasily spent most of the fair gambling, drinking, and womanising, he did at least take the task he’d set them far more seriously than Nikolai had ever expected.  

“A lord might settle for less, but a prince needs at least three horses,” he explained, walking Nikolai past the edges of an auction where the horses sold for more money than Dominik’s farm was worth. “A rouncey, for travelling, a palfrey for hunts, and a courser, for when you serve in the First Army. The last will be the most expensive, of course, but I won’t begrudge it for my only brother.”  

Three horses seemed like an impossible expense to Nikolai, who’d never bought anything for himself, and had only ever heard Dominik’s family discuss money in any detail, but to Vasily, this seemed like a spree on par with his mother buying dresses for Genya. Nikolai listened attentively to his brother’s lectures on teeth and bloodlines and which breeders had the best stock, and picked out a gentle brown gelding with a surprising turn of speed for Dominik, and a beautiful chestnut mare who’d make Genya look even more like a princess from a storybook. Vasily let him have his way, and opened his coinpurse indulgently for the first two purchases, but for the last, he seemed determined to make the choice himself, and dismissed trader after trader in search of something that Nikolai didn’t quite understand until he’d already made his choice.   

“Now this one is perfect!” he declared, as they stood before a paddock containing a single horse, on the last day of the fair. By now, Nikolai had realised that he’d never have the eye for horseflesh that his brother and father claimed to possess, but even to his inexpert eyes, this horse was an entirely different species to the ponies he’d trained on. It stood taller at the shoulder than any horse he’d ever seen, and its satin-sleek silver hide stretched taut over muscles which bulged like an anatomy textbook, but that was not what disturbed Nikolai. No, he looked at the stallion’s flaring nostrils and wild, rolling eyes, and a chill crept up his spine.   

“So wide-eyed, Sobachka!” Vasily was still talking. “Now this is a warhorse worthy of a prince.” He clapped Nikolai on the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble.  

“It’s a handsome beast,” Nikolai agreed, casually, “but not my favourite I’ve seen today.”  

“Nonsense, little brother!” he retorted. “Who but a prince could ride such a horse? Who else could be worthy of breaking him to saddle?”  

“Exactly!” he agreed, quickly, “A steed like this is worthy only of the Crown Prince, he’d accept no-one less.”  

Vasily tore his gaze away from the horse to narrow his eyes at Nikolai. His voice dropped from affable booming to almost a whisper. “You don’t think you’re worthy of such a noble steed, when your blood is as royal as mine? Why would that be, Sobachka? ”   

The nickname slid between his ribs like a knife, past layers of armour he’d carefully constructed. To Genya, to Dominik, the nickname was a playful joke, but he was old enough to know the meaning it held for the older courtiers. Bastard.  

He raised his jaw, defiant. “I’ll take him,” he said, and Vasily smiled.  

He managed to avoid riding the beast that night, despite the cup after cup of kvas that Vasily called for. By the time they returned to the inn, he was barely able to walk, let alone ride. He vomited harder than he ever had in his life, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he awoke the next morning, the stink of it made him vomit again, and made Vasily’s disgusted expression when he stumbled down to breakfast feel justified.   

“Sankt Ilya’s balls, you look like a rotting plum!” he exclaimed, and Nikolai winced. His face felt puffy, almost bruised.  

“I hate kvas, ” he muttered, his voice still thick with sleep and alcohol.  

“You’ll grow into it,” he dismissed, shoving a steaming bowl of kasha towards him. “Eat up. It’s the last day of the fair and I have my own business to attend, I don’t have time to play nursemaid to you.”  

He ate reluctantly, and tried to look swaggering rather than sickly as he trailed his brother from vendor to vendor, and looked for an opportunity to disappear into the crowds again. When they returned to the carriage, a string of horses and grooms trailing behind, it was almost a relief to be away from the roar of the crowds, the boom of Vasily’s voice, and the ever-present stench of horse, despite the rattle of the wheels like a hammer on his aching head.   

Despite his relief, there was a bitter note to their journey home that went beyond the taste in his mouth. The holiday feeling had faded from their adventure, and Vasily’s good humour had soured to impatience. For his part, Nikolai was eager to be reunited with Dominik, but the thought of seeing Genya again made something twist in his stomach. He hadn’t found her parents, and if the pain in head was anything to go by, he hadn’t taken her advice to heart either.   

She sat away from the royal family at the dinner his mother had arranged to welcome her sons back to court, her space next to his mother filled by some eligible Fjerdan cousin who was more focussed on making calf eyes at Vasily than on her dinner. Nikolai could have told her not to bother – he’d learned in Caryeva that little interested Vasily outside of the stables, and that the pretty wives and daughters of horse traders were more to his taste than the perfumed maidens that Queen Tatiana paraded in front of him.  

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Genya picking at her food too. It shouldn’t have struck him as unusual – his mother showered her with candied plums and cherries in syrup, but there was something about her pale, drawn features that concerned him, and made his kvas taste bitter on his tongue. The distance between her and the Queen worried him too. Genya had been his mother’s shadow and her mirror ever since she had come to the palace, but now the Queen looked through her as if she were nothing more than a pane of glass. It was as though his mother was blind to how threadbare her gowns were becoming, or how blank and tired she seemed behind her doll's smile. It was impossible to think Genya invisible to anyone – even in her faded silk, she glowed like an ember in a darkened room. It was as though being away from her for a few weeks had made her beauty even more striking.  

He was not the only one watching Genya. His father glanced to her several times, ordered the servants to bring her portions of some of his favourite dishes. It was uncharacteristic for King Alexander to pay attention to anything other than hunting and horses, but she’d been almost a daughter to his wife for six years, and even Nikolai knew it was whispered that his parents would have no more children now. His father was not usually a thoughtful man, but perhaps even he could worry for the health of a girl who was almost his child in everything but blood.   

He was distracted by Vasily now, of course, who’d been regaling him with the list of horses they’d purchased. “And the dapple grey?” he asked, when Vasily paused, “Now there’s a handsome courser, but he’ll be a handful to finish training before you start your service, Vasya.”  

Vasily laughed. “Not my handful, moi tsar. I thought it was time Kolya started breaking in his own horses, but little Sobachka isn’t quite man enough for the beast yet.”  

His father snorted. “A son of mine, afraid of a horse? I don’t believe it, Lantsovs have been natural horsemen since the days of Yaromir.”  

Out of the corner of his eye, Nikolai could see his mother’s knuckles whiten around the stem of her glass. He drained his cup of the strangely bitter kvas.  

“ Would you care to bet on that, Father?” Vasily’s eyes were half-open, and the red cast of the candlelight made his smile seem oddly malevolent. “If Kolya gives us a show of horsemanship with the grey after dinner, I’ll give you my best palfrey. If he cries craven, you’ll cover the upkeep for my horses until the Feast of Sankt Nikolai.”   

“That’s a stupid bet!” It was only when everyone at the table turned to look at him that Nikolai realised he’d spoken aloud. His face felt hot, and he felt the urge to cover for his lapse in judgement by continuing: “Everyone knows I can ride, and Avva could buy ten palfreys for what your stables cost to feed.” The childish petname slid off his tongue by accident, and he wanted to slide under the table in embarrassment. Something felt wrong, as if his tongue was running away from him.    

The King’s face was reddening too, but Vasily seemed not to notice as he continued to push: “Then it should be an easy victory for Father, shouldn’t it, Sobachka? Unless you’re too scared to prove yourself a Lantsov, of course.”  

“Don’t tease your brother, Vasily,” his mother said, her voice brittle and cold, but she did not smile at Nikolai, or even look at him.  

“Apologies, Mother," he said, casually, but his eyes were locked with Nikolai’s. “I forgot he was barely out of the nursery. He’s still used to hiding behind your pretty little Grisha’s skirts.”  

“Nonsense!” his father snapped. “No son of mine hides behind Grisha skirts like a coward.”  

Any other time, his father defending his honour would have been welcome attention, precious even, but now it felt like further humiliation. “I’ll ride the stupid horse tomorrow if you’ll let us finish dinner.”  

“Tonight,” Vasily countered, “and I'll even throw in an apology for besmirching your honour. If you’re brave enough to ride him, Sobachka .”  

“I am retiring,” his mother declared, shoving her chair back. “Genya! Bring my powders to my bedchamber. My head aches.”  

Her ladies followed her out of the dining room in a murmuration of silk and velvet, Genya trailing two steps behind them. She did not look at Nikolai as she passed, but he could see her hands clenched tight over her stomach, as they only did when she was afraid.  

The Queen’s departure signalled the end of dinner for everyone. The servants began to clear the dishes, the courtiers began to drift out in groups, and Nikolai fled to the stables. Something felt wrong, not the soft, dreamy wrongness of alcohol, which blurred the sharp edges of the world until it turned his head and stomach, but a new, deeper wrongness. His legs swayed under him as though the corridors were those of a ship at sea, and he could feel his heart hammering in his ears. Dominik caught up with him as he reached the stables and caught hold of his arm, making him stumble. Nikolai leant hard against the other boy’s shoulder, as if he was the only solid thing in the world.  

“What happened?” he said, breathlessly. “Everyone’s saying- you look awful.”  

I feel awful. “ I’m fine. Just thirsty,” he lied. The lanternlight was dazzling, and his eyes hurt. “Vasily got a flea in his breeches about the stupid warhorse he bought me, and then he and father started betting on whether I could ride it.”  

“The grey?” Dominik raised his eyebrows. “He’s only half-trained, and Sasha said he looked like he’d spook at shadows.”  

“Well, I’ll have to figure it out,” he said, distractedly. His tack was hung up on the wall, and he began to gather it up. His hands felt clumsy, as if they were disconnected from his mind somehow. “There has to be a trick to it, or nobody would ride the stupid things.”   

Dominik followed him, but took the saddle from his hands. “The trick is being patient and not trying to ride them too soon. He’ll dump you on your ass, and that’s if you’re lucky.”  

“I have to try, Dominik,” he said, and his friend must have seen the desperation in his face, because he sighed.  

“It’s not a trick, and this is still a stupid idea, but...  if your saddle girth is tight enough, and you don’t try anything harder than hanging on, you might manage. If you let me saddle him, you always rush it.”  

Nikolai threw his arms around his friend on impulse, sending the tack in his arms clattering to the floor. “You’re a true friend, Dominik the Brave.” It was a childish nickname, but it felt right on his tongue, as right as Dominik’s cool cheek against his flushed one, as right as Genya pressed close against his side- no, Genya was with his mother, what was he thinking?  

Dominik wriggled out of his embrace and took hold of his shoulders, pushing him down until he was sat on a haybale. He rummaged around for a few moments before he found a cup one of the grooms must have abandoned and plunged it into a rain barrel. “Drink,” he ordered, pressing it into Nikolai’s hands. “If anyone asks, especially Genya, I did everything I could to stop you.”  

He drained the cup in one long gulp, and had filled and drunk a second before Dominik led the horse up to the mounting block. It didn’t seem nearly as wild as it had at the fair, but the stables were far less busy than a crowded fairground. Maybe he’d misjudged it, but then, Dominik had a way with wild things. He’d tamed Nikolai, after all.   

He rummaged in his pocket and produced in one hand an apple and the other a sweet vatrushka, both stolen from the dining hall in the chaos. He offered the latter to Dominik, and the former to the horse, who nosed the apple briefly before eating it in delicate bites. Its breath was hot on his hand and his face, and he stroked its nose with his other hand. “You’re not so fierce,” he said, more to reassure himself than the horse. “If you help me pull this off, I’ll get you a sack of apples.”  

“And what about my sack of vatrushka?” Dominik said, drily, taking the bridle from Nikolai’s hands as he climbed the mounting block.   

“I’ll buy you a bakery full of them,” he promised. “No, better, I’ll hire a whole new pastry chef just to make them for you.” He swung his leg over the horse’s back, and it danced in place for a few moments, but didn’t try to buck him off.   

Dominik still held the reins, looking up at him with his forehead creased in worry. “I don’t need a pastry chef,” he said, in a low voice. “I need you not to get yourself killed doing this.”  

“You worry too much,” he replied, but he smiled at him as he reached for the reins. After the dim light of the stables, the outer courtyard seemed much too bright, and the edges of the stableyard were crowded with spectators. He could pick out his father and brother high on a balcony, a matching pair in their blue-and-gold cloaks, and part of him wished he was up there with them, included in their Lantsov family portrait. No, focus! he scolded himself, feeling the horse begin to dance and sidestep under him at the crowds’ murmur.   

“Easy, boy,” he soothed him, running a hand through its mane. “You’re alright, they’re just watching.”  

He’d never had Vasily’s easy way with horses, but something in his tone soothed the creature enough to keep it moving forward. They circled the perimeter of the courtyard at an easy trot, then a canter. Nikolai began to feel himself settle into the saddle, his thighs relaxing rather than pressing hard into the horse’s sides. The evening wind picked up, and the courtiers began to dissipate, unwilling to brave the chill to watch a boy ride a horse. He could tell that the horse didn’t like the wind – its pace picked up, as though preparing to gallop, and he began to turn its head back towards the stable door, muttering soothing endearments.   

He didn’t see the cloak slip loose from Vasily’s shoulders until the wind swept it across their path, and by then, it was too late. The horse reared back. His seat slipped. There was something like a scream. Then the stars wheeled above him, and something cracked. Then there was nothing at all.  

*  

Darkness. Pain clawing in the pit of his belly. Someone weeping loudly in another room.  

“Drink.”  

He opens his eyes and lets out a wordless cry. An all-consuming light, a firebird. His eyes flutter shut, patches of red-blue-violet seared onto his lids.   

“Drink,” the voice insists, and he turns his head away. There’s always another trap. The hunter seeks him with snares, but the maiden’s traps are sweet words and sweeter drinks, and he is cleverer than the too-clever fox. She won’t have his hide today.  

“Drink, you idiot puppy!” she orders, a third time, and he cannot resist her, weak as he is. He’s already in the trap, in her power. She holds his nose, pours something bitter down his throat, and darkness takes him.  

*  

He lies on his back in a fortress of snow, the light filtering blue and distant around him. Outside there are other voices, murmuring phrases that have no meaning for him here: “Mad as a hatter, blind as a bat, hot as a hare, dry as a bone...”  

What does he care about hatters and hares, here in his kingdom beneath the fallen snow?  

“Do you think they’ll tell stories about us?” Dominik’s breath is warm in his ear, and Genya’s hair tickles his nose.   

“Of course they will,” he says, because it is true. “Dominik the Brave. Genya the Clever. Nikolai the Handsome.”  

“Genya the Beautiful,” she corrects him, and he snorts.  

“All the Saints in the stories are beautiful. You’ll be the one who’s clever enough to live to the end.”  

“What about me?” Dominik’s voice is low and content, with a hint of laughter at Genya’s preening.   

“Dominik the Brave? Oh, he’s only the greatest general the First Army ever had,” she teases, rolling one of his toy soldiers in Fabrikator purple across Nikolai’s chest. “Ravka’s enemies tremble before him! They say his only fear is Tutor Mitkin in a temper.”  

“Anyone would fear Mitkin in a temper,” Nikolai points out. “Only someone as brave as Dominik could sit in his classes every day. Fjerda has nothing on him.”  

“And how will being handsome help you out, when you have to stop a war or kill a dragon?” she teases.  

“I’ll charm the enemies into making peace, and the dragon will fall madly in love with my good looks and quick wit,” he replies. She laughs, and he feels her laughter in his own ribs, in Dominik’s, so tightly are they pressed together. Their laugher is a perfect chord, melody, harmony, bassline, a lullaby as the dark takes him once more.  

*  

The creak of wood, the clink of a cup.   

A face swims into focus above him, pale and beautiful and surrounded by red, red hair.  

“Sankta Anastasia,” he sighs, and reaches out to touch her cheek. He knows he’s dying, then, because she covers his hand with her own. “Are we going to the Bright Lands?”  

“Not if I can help it.” Her jaw is set, her aspect as fearful as it is lovely. “Drink.” The cup she holds to his lips stinks of iron, and he knows it is her own heart’s-blood.   

He tries to shake his head. “Give it to someone cleverer than me. Someone worthy of it.”  

“I didn’t make it for them. I made it for you.” She rolls her eyes. He didn’t think saints were allowed to do that. “Drink. Your mother’s taken to her bed for three days, and she’s getting tiresome.”  

“I’m already dying, Sankta,” he points out. Is one allowed to argue with saints? “She won’t miss me too much. She has a better son, and a cleverer foster-daughter.”  

The saint laughs, and it’s the saddest sound he’s ever heard. “Drink for Dominik, then,” she says, when she’s caught her breath. “He’s not eating, barely sleeping... I think he blames himself. He’ll never forgive me if I let you die.”  

“You’re a saint. He’ll forgive you anything.” He hesitates, then: “If I drink, you’ll stay with me? Till the end?”  

She sighs, then: “I’ll stay with you until you know me. Now. Drink.”  

He drinks, and this time, when he falls asleep, it’s with the Saint’s hand in his.  

*  

When he woke up, she was still holding his hand, but she was Genya again, Genya in a shining-white kefta that made her hair shine like blood on snow. There was a book in her lap, which she closed hurriedly when she realised he was awake, pulling her hand away from his.  

He smiled at her. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you were worried about a mere otkazat’sya.”   

Her amber gaze was cool and level (since when had her eyes turned back to amber?). “You’ve been unconscious for a month. You broke your skull in two places. Three Healers and an Alkemi worked for hours to keep your brain in your head. I was surprised to hear you had one at all.”  

He raised his eyebrows. “And you’re angry at me on their behalf? I thought the other Corporalki were snobs with the manners of peasants.”  

Her expression stayed cool, unreadable, even as she tilted her head to one side in mock confusion. “Angry at you, moi tsarevich? I’ve been a loyal servant of the Lantsov family since I was six years old. I know my place.” She smoothed her hand over the white silk of her kefta . No other Grisha wore white. None of the nobles wore white. He felt a strange twist in his gut.   

“You’ve never been a servant, Genya,” he said, trying to sit up and reach for her, even as his head span. “My mother raised you, she loves you like a daughter. We’re friends.”  

She looked at him as if he’d told her the sky was green and polka-dotted, pitying, but not surprised. “Princes and servants aren’t friends, any more than otkazat’sya and Grisha.”  

“Dominik and I-”  

“Are a child’s fancy.” She said it without malice, as calmly as if she were stating a fact. “A friend is trusted, a friend’s warnings are listened to. If you ever listened to us, you would not be in this bed today.” She set her book down on the bedside table and got to her feet with a formal bow. “Now that you’re awake, I’ll see that the servants bring you some food. The Healer will come with them, and likely recommend that you rest. I’d suggest you listen to them, but of course, you need not obey the word of a servant girl.”  

She left without another word, quick and silent as a dove. His mind still slow and foggy, he did not even have the chance to call after her that she’d forgotten her book. He picked it up, examined the cover. His book, his Istorii Sankt’ya, with the coloured illustrations he’d loved as a child. She’d shoved a loose page in to mark her place, and he flipped it open. She’d been halfway through the life of Sankt Grigori of the Wood, and the page she’d used to mark her place had been torn from another book, some kind of herbarium or Healer’s workbook.  

Half the page was taken up with a detailed sketch of a plant, with a white, trumpet-shaped flower and a round, spiky seedhead. Beneath the illustration, some ancient scribe had written:   

Datura meloxia, called thorn-apple  

A witch’s herb, commonly used in ointments and potions. Often favoured by the poisoners of Ahmrat Jen, it is toxic in every part. Symptoms of datura poisoning include poor coordination, sensitivity to light, fever, extreme thirst, and delirium. No known antidote.

Notes:

Some fun facts about this chapter: Nikolai's experiences with kvas are based on my wife's older sister giving her a Smirnoff Ice when she was ten without telling her it was alcoholic, and I'd already written this chapter (including the mention of datura poisoning) before Season 2 even came out, so I am feeling Very Smug right now.

As always, please pass on your comments and thoughts, every single one fills my heart with joy! Find me on Tumblr @lottiesnotebook, and feel free to get in touch with your thoughts, questions, and fic requests there as well.

Chapter 3: iii - the cannon's calling

Summary:

Nikolai gets careless. Genya gives advice. Ravka goes to war.

Notes:

CW: warfare, major character death, implied sexual assault

Nikolai had grown used to invisibility, as a second son, as Dominik’s friend from the palace stables, as the tsarevich Genya looked right through when she couldn’t avoid him. He’d hated it, once, but over the years, invisibility had made him safe, and sometimes, in the quiet of the palace library, or the noise of Dominik’s kitchen, it had even made him happy. But it had also made him careless.  

Vasily had him by the scruff of his neck as he crept in through the half-open window. He tried to twist out of his grip, but his peasant’s shirt was hardwearing linen and choked him rather than ripping away.  

“Already tumbling peasant girls?” His sneer made his handsome face vicious. He released Nikolai’s shirt, wiping his hand on his breeches as if he’d touched something foul. “You’re worse than Father.”  

“No!” he’d exclaimed, then, more quietly. “No. Nothing like that.”  

“Peasant boys, then?” His smirk widened as Nikolai’s cheeks reddened. “I didn’t think your little friend had the nerve, but he always was a dark horse.”  

“It’s not-” He swallowed his denial. Arguing would only make his brother more convinced he was right. “Please, Vasily. Don’t tell anyone.”  

Vasily arched one eyebrow. “Ashamed of your conquest? You could have done better, I’m sure half the pages at court would’ve been up for it.”  

“Dominik will be punished for it,” he pleaded. “He may be sent away. He’s done nothing to you, he’s been loyal, and served the family-”  

“And studied with his betters, and rolled a prince of Ravka in  the fields like a commoner.” Vasily finished for him. “Why should I keep your secret, Sobachka ? Do you even have anything I might want?”  

We’re brothers, he wanted to plead, but instead, he said: “His family would lose their stipend. They may not be able to feed themselves without it.” Vasily’s face might as well have been stone. If it had been a statue, Nikolai would have smashed it. He took a breath, lowered his voice. “Dominik won’t be exempt from the draft next year.”  

It would have been better if he’d been angry, but Vasily’s cruelty had always been a bone-deep chill. “Good. The crown needs soldiers. Maybe he’ll learn his place.”  

Nikolai looked at the brother he had once so adored, whom he had tried to emulate in everything. “You should be ashamed.”  

Vasily was still taller than Nikolai, still outweighed him. He jabbed a finger into Nikolai’s chest and said: “You do not tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, Sobachka. I will be a king, and you will always be Nikolai Nothing.”  

Vasily had spent years sparring with instructors who never pushed him too hard and who always made sure to let the future king win. Nikolai had spent his days roughhousing who had no qualms bloodying the nose of some servant’s brat. Vasily had spend most of his life pretending he did not have a brother. Nikolai had admired his brother long enough to know his weaknesses: Vasily assumed victory was his for the taking. Nikolai had had to fight for it.   

He snatched Vasily’s finger and yanked it back until he felt a crack, then twisted from the hip to sling a punch into his nose. His brother yelped and fell to the floor. He seemed impossibly small.  

“A king never kneels, brother.”  

He left Vasily clutching his bloodied nose and wounded pride, and did not start running until he was sure his footsteps would not be heard. His cold, controlled anger was quickly melting into fear, and for the first time in eight years, he would have to face it alone. He could not trust Vasily. He had never truly trusted his parents. He could not reach Dominik, might never reach him again. That left only one person in the Grand Palace who might understand, who might be able to advise him.   

He knocked frantically at the door to Genya’s chamber, and heard the note of surprise in her call of “Come in?”  

Her eyes widened as she saw him, but he’d already slipped inside and shut the door behind him when she said: “Nikolai? You can’t be here!” There was a note of urgency in her voice, but he had to speak with her, had never needed to speak with anyone more.  

“Genechka, please,” he said, softly, “I know it’s late. I know I’m not your friend – I was never the friend you deserve – but for Dominik’s sake-”  

She bit her lips together, looking distracted- or fearful? He’d lost his knack for reading her every expression, or she’d grown better at concealing them. He didn’t know any more. “What do you need? Be quick.”   

He took a breath, tried to calm himself. “Vasily caught me sneaking back from Dominik’s farm. He said- I think he’ll try to have Dominik sent away. His family will lose their stipend, they’ll go hungry-”  

“And be in the position of thousands of other families across Ravka?” Genya finished, acidly. “If I could fix that, I wouldn’t spend my days running errands for a woman who’s greatest fear is wrinkles.”  

“I don’t need you to fix it,” he retorted, “I know you’re not a miracle worker. I need you to tell me how I fix it.” She stayed quiet for the next few moments, so he continued: “You told me once friends trust each other. There’s nobody in this palace I trust more than you.”  

She gave a bitter, hollow laugh. “Oh, Nikolai. You always did place your trust in those who deserved it least.”  

“Dominik deserved it.”  

She sighed. “Dominik is the exception. He may be beyond saving, but...”  

“But?”  

She smoothed the skirts of her nightgown. “You weren’t born into influence, like Vasily, but you can charm it out of people, I’ve seen you do it. You just need to... direct it better.”  

“What do you mean?”  

“People are like puzzles. Once you see the pieces they are made of, you can charm them, sway them, mould them into a shape you prefer, or channel their passions into the action you desire. The Count Dominik’s family pay their taxes to, the merchants who buy their grain, the commanders who send his brothers to fight... they’re all as susceptible to charm and flattery as anyone else. You just need to know which buttons to press.” Somewhere out in the palace, there was the sound of footsteps, and her lips pressed thin. “Is that enough for you? We don’t have time, Kolya.”   

It had been three years since she’d last called him by that name. He never thought she’d say it again, and, on impulse, he pulled her into an embrace, as if they were children again.  

He felt her flinch, and dropped his arms to his sides, taking two long steps back. “It’s more than enough. Thank you, Genechka. I can’t thank you enough.”  

She shooed him towards the window. “Then don’t try. If you’re quiet, you’ll be able to get into your mother’s sitting room from the balcony, it should be empty now.”  

Halfway out of the window, he turned back to look at her. She stood rigid in the middle of the room, the breeze ruffling the skirts of her nightgown. Her hands were knotted white-knuckled over her stomach.  

“Genya,” he said, quietly, “if you ever need anything- if Vasily, or anyone else is scaring you, you can come to me. I’ll protect you.”  

She gave that same deadened, hollow laugh, but stepped over to the window, and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You can’t save me, Kolya,” she murmured in his ear. “Nobody can.”  

She slammed the window shut between them before he could argue, and he began to creep along the balcony to the other set of windows she had indicated. As he pressed himself close against the wall, he could swear he heard the door to Genya’s room open once again, but he did not dare to look back. He’d asked enough of her tonight.  

If he’d failed to heed her advice before, now it became his gospel. He cultivated charm as his brother did horses, watching his marks carefully to find the best match for their foibles or vanities. His mother craved compliments and gifts, so he showered them upon her, becoming a favourite at her salons with his amusing gossip, playful impressions, and perfectly-cut coats and breeches. His father wanted to feel wise and worldly, so he sought out his advice on hunting and horses, though he cared little for either, and praised him for his astuteness and wit. His father’s cabinet were delighted to answer questions on statecraft, and the commanders of the First and Second Armies responded with pleasure to his letters commending them on their victories and clever strategies. And if he occasionally made requests of his new friends that certain units be moved away from the front, or that a certain farmer be offered a lucrative commission, well, little could be refused to such a charming, dedicated young man. Especially if the young man in question bore the name ‘Lantsov’.  

It was therefore with astonishment that the court reacted when Nikolai declared that, rather than joining his brother in an easy ceremonial commission, he was joining the infantry.  

“My sweet Kolya, toiling on a battlefield?” his mother moaned, and sent Genya running for her smelling salts.   

“It’s not befitting of a prince,” his aunt Ludmilla agreed, her lip curled in distaste.  

“And the court will be so dull without you!” Svetlana Vetrova, one of his mother’s youngest ladies sighed, fluttering her wide brown eyes at him. Behind him, he could practically feel Genya rolling her own eyes. She was the only person in the palace who’d seemed unsurprised by his strange new ambitions.  

“You always did have a taste for grubbing in the dirt,” Vasily commented, sardonically.   

Nikolai-at-fifteen might have flinched, or blushed. Nikolai-now only laughed. “I never did learn strategy well from books,” he said, as though engaging in a battle of wits with Vasily wasn’t a game he’d win every time now. “Field experience is so important, don’t you think? As a military man yourself, I’m sure you’d never trust your unit to a man who’d never seen the battlefield before.”  

Vasily, who’d spent every battle his unit had been in miles from the front and blind drunk, chewed the inside of his cheek and glared at him. “You’ll learn soon enough,” he said, ominously. “Poliznaya’s no nursery.”  

For all his feigned enthusiasm for military service, Nikolai was nervous about entering basic training. He did not want unearned favour, but he was wise enough now to be equally wary of the additional hazing a spoilt princeling might receive from his drafted fellows. His practiced charm could overcome the most reticent of courtiers, but against hunger, grief, or hatred, it might prove useless. Nikolai had not learned four languages to prove useless at this hurdle.   

In the end, though, it wasn’t Nikolai’s charm, wit, or position which saved him the loathing of his squadmates. In the end, it was Dominik.  

If he was nervous about training, his feelings about being reunited with his old friend ( first love ) clawed in his throat and turned his stomach. Dominik must hate him for his betrayal, for his failure to protect him, for his breaking of the promise he’d kept for seven perfect years. His past year of clawing for influence or favours or anything he could use to shield him and his family from Ravka’s cruelty would never, could never be enough to earn back what they had had, what he’d wasted. He’d expected Dominik to greet him with stiff formality, or to look through him entirely. In the scruffy group of raw recruits, Dominik stood out like a bear among starving street dogs, head and shoulders above most of the group. He was taller, and broader than he’d been a year ago, but his dark hair still stood up in chaotic cowlicks without Genya to smooth it, and his dark eyes still held the same soft, sad good humour when they met Nikolai’s. They widened, and he wondered what changes they saw in him since they’d last been together.  

It was five long strides before they collided, and Dominik caught him tight in his arms, and suddenly he was home. Not the endless halls of the Grand Palace, but the sun-and-straw scent of Dominik’s shoulder. They drew back, stared at each other, and began to laugh in a perfect harmony. Even when the drill sergeant yelled for them to come to attention, and they broke apart, their shoulders stayed pressed together, and the hollow in Nikolai’s heart overflowed with light.  

They couldn’t talk properly until the lunch in the mess hall, and Nikolai’s questions spilled out in an endless torrent. How was Dominik’s mother? Had he heard from Pasha and Ludovic before he left? How were Marya and little Oxana, who’d shadowed them around the farm giggling and stealing their tools? Dominik answered with steady good humour: his mother and sisters were well, his brothers had written before he left – Pasha had recently been wounded, but was recovering, and Ludovic had just been promoted to corporal.   

In return, though, Dominik had only one question: “How’s Genya?”  

Nikolai’s smile froze on his lips. “She’s- she seemed well, when I saw her last. She still had all her limbs and her head attached.”  

Dominik pushed his kasha around his plate with his spoon as their fellow recruits fell on their bowls like starving animals. “She’s still avoiding you? I thought without me...”  

“You were never the problem,” Nikolai said, quickly. “I didn’t see- and by the time I understood, it was too late.” He paused, and then added, quietly: “She didn’t even say goodbye when I left.”   

His parents and their favourites had gathered in the courtyard, his mother weeping loudly as she threw her arms around his neck. He'd soothed her with a forced smile and a remark that at least he and the other recruits had a queen worth fighting for. His father had slapped him on the back and given some last remark about there still being time to change his mind, and he’d thrown back some witticism about not wanting to disappoint the girls who’d be hoping to join his unit. He’d hung on to the last, hoping childishly she’d appear. He did not see her until his carriage was already on the road. Through the rear window, he caught a flash of red and white, and saw her leaning from a balcony, smaller than a doll. He thought of Sankta Vasilka in her tower, and wondered if she thought of him at all. If she was watching the carriage take him away, or if she hadn’t known ( or cared ) he was leaving at all.  

Being back with Dominik was enough, and his approval opened the ranks of the Twenty-Second Regiment to accept him with something beyond begrudging tolerance. Training together, fighting together, gave him a chance to build a deeper trust than words could even with the squadmates he would never have called friends under other circumstances. His brothers- and sisters-in-arms gave him an acceptance Vasily had never offered. When he vomited after their first battle, it was quiet Shura who offered him her canteen to rinse his mouth out. When their tents were swept away by a flash flood, it was Mitya who begrudgingly shared the bedroll he’d commandeered from supplies. When he took a bullet to the shoulder in a Fjerdan ambush, it was Dominik who pulled him to safety, but it was grumpy, outspoken Privyet, who’d always objected to having a spoiled princeling in his unit, who gave him a handkerchief to bite down on while the medik dug the bullet out.   

As for Dominik... as children, they’d been inseparable. As teenagers, they’d shared their first clumsy kisses. Now, as they grew into soldiers, their bond was something deeper. If the sparks of their childish passion had dampened, they were not missed. Half a lifetime of friendship had left them with a knowledge of the other’s mind so complete that sometimes Dominik seemed to be laughing at his jokes before they left his mouth, or tempering his wilder impulses without needing to say a word. He’d once thought of Dominik as his dearest friend, or his true love. He’d been mistaken both times. He was the other half of his heart. When they were together, for the first time he could remember, he felt almost complete.  

Almost. It was almost enough that he didn’t notice the spaces where Genya should have been. He’d pretend to laugh at a joke when it was her barbed retort he was hearing. When Shura leaned against his shoulder, he’d see vivid red hair instead of bright gold. Lying in the field hospital as he waited for a Healer, he couldn’t help looking for a hint of white among Corporalki red and First Army green. It did not come.  

He did not look for her on the battlefield at Halmhend. He could not imagine a place less suited to her, in the mud and blood and shit and screaming. The shelling overhead broke the sky like thunder, and the flare of rifle-fire cut through the smoke and fog in short, sharp blasts. Close to his ear, he could hear Dominik’s muttered prayers: “Sankt Juris, preserve us. Sankt Nikolai, grant us safety. Sankta Anastasia...”  

Privyet’s voice was low, harsh. “There are no saints here, or they’d have called a retreat an hour ago.”  

Whoever had said there were no atheists in foxholes had never met Privyet. “And give up ground it took us months to win? They’d bury half the First Army in this Saints-damned valley before letting the Fjerdans take it.” Nikolai took a breath, shook himself. Nikolai-the-boy might share in Privyet’s despairing pessimism, but Captain Lantsov had a duty to the Twenty-Second. Desertion had no part of that. “We only have to hold the line until the Second Army take their guns. Then we pull back, let the Fifty-Third clean up whatever’s left, and we’ll be bragging about facing down the Drüskelle themselves before dinner.”  

Footsteps above. Nikolai glanced up enough to see the blue of the uniforms before firing his rifle. The rat-tat-tat deafened him to the sound of their fall. He had not even seen their faces.  

Privyet was shaking his head. “Did they confiscate your brain when they gave you your stripes, moi Kapitan? The Grisha aren’t coming to save us.”  

Nikolai set his jaw, still peering through the scope of his rifle. It was Dominik who spoke next. “It’s hold the line or get shot for desertion. Ravka eats its young, remember, Privyet?” He was echoing Privyet’s own words, but something about his voice took Nikolai back to a fort under the snow. The heroes die to make history, the Saints to become martyrs. War made monsters of all of them.   

Privyet’s face froze mid-retort. Dominik’s weary eyes lit up. They all felt it. The edges of their dugout no longer crumbled as the earth shook. The valley seemed suddenly silent. The Fjerdan guns had stopped.   

The air split with a roar from the Ravkan lines behind them, and a different thunder shook the ground as a wave of the Fifty-Third swept up from behind them. The relief hit Nikolai like a lightning bolt, and he was almost shaking with it as the three of them clambered out of the dugout to join the advancing wave of olive-and-brown. Around them, he could hear battlecries: “ For Ravka! For the Fifty-Third!”   

His hands were tight on his rifle, his gaze fixed on the battlefield ahead, but beside him, he could feel Dominik’s warmth against his side, the steady, banked fire of home. He could taste the end of the campaign, the cheers and weeping of Ravka victorious. The drinking and dancing and debauchery that would remind them that they’d survived. And perhaps, afterwards...  

Gunfire, then screaming. The olive drab coat in front of him exploding in a mist of red. They’d moved too early. They’d moved too early.    

“ Retreat!” he called, but he did not know if anyone heard him in the chaos. The line broke, soldiers of the 53 rd scattering in chaotic, lethal panic. The fire of the guns was interspersed with the whistles of falling shells. “Soldiers of Ravka, to me!”  

A small knot of soldiers began to form around them, looking up at him with filthy, desperate faces. It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, but they obeyed him as he ordered them into a retreat formation, gathering stragglers as they stumbled through the mud, back towards the Ravkan lines. Back to anything resembling safety. There would be no victory today, only bitter silence and licking of wounds if they were lucky, but at least they’d be alive, whatever remnants of the two regiments Nikolai could herd back to safety.  

The shot that hit could have been one of thousands, could have come from Fjerda or Ravka, none of those things mattered in the moment. The only thing that mattered was that Nikolai felt Dominik stumble, and braced him against his side with an arm around his waist. “Keep moving,” he ordered, but felt him slump against him, and, when he didn’t immediately respond, dragged him along with him. The world was blood and smoke and gunpowder and screaming, and the only people he could help were those who were following him. Someone had come up under Dominik’s other arm, helping him move fast enough that they weren’t deadweight on the unit. There was a wet warmth seeping through his uniform jacket, and Dominik wasn’t carrying his own weight, wasn’t making a sound.   

Fifty yards had never felt like such an eternity. His muscles burned, his breath came in harsh gasps. Every step felt insignificant compared to the distance between them and safety. He watched, helpless, as other members of his makeshift unit fell and were caught and carried by their fellows, or staggered on alone, walking wounded. An exploding shell caught the edge of their group, and those that fell to it were left where they lay. There was nobody left to carry them.   

By the time they reached the trench, they’d lost one in four of their number. Privyet was counting heads, barking orders to retrieve more wounded or round up survivors. Nikolai was deaf to him, deaf to the screams and artillery fire. All that mattered was Dominik, laid in the dirt beside him. Dominik, so pale his freckles stood out like stars. Dominik, the front of his uniform black with blood and peppered with bullet holes.  

“ Medik!” Nikolai yelled, and then again when there was no response: “We need a medik here!”  

The trench was full of scrambling, panicked soldiers, but no medik came, no red-clad Corporalnik. A thousand voices were calling out for the same aid, and nobody answered Nikolai’s plea.   

He felt a tug on his sleeve, and looked down at Dominik’s pale face. His brown eyes were half-closed, his hand on Nikolai’s icy. “Stay with me,” he pleaded. “They’ll come soon.”  

Dominik only looked up at him, a smile on his bloodstained lips. “You always were an optimist, moi tsarevich.”  

Nikolai pressed a hand to his cheek, trying to warm him. “I learned that from you, remember?” The boy who thought books were enough to make up for any number of beatings. “Just hold on a little longer? For me? I’ll find a Healer, or Genya-”  

“I’ll do what I can.” He smiled again, and then his expression twisted. He made an awful choking noise, and Nikolai propped him up in his arms until blood bubbled on his lips and his breathing returned. “You’ll take care of my mother? And Marya and Oxana, if- it happens?”  

“As if they were my own,” he promised, holding him close, “but I won’t need to. You’ll be back with them as soon as we’re on furlough.”   

Dominik reached up a chill hand, brushed it against his cheek. “Don’t cry, Kolya,” he said, with implacable gentleness. “Tell me the story you’ll tell Marya and Oxana. The story about Dominik the Brave.”  

He let out a choked sob. “They’ll know their brother was a hero. That he was brave, that he saved everyone here-”  

Dominik shook his head. “That was you, Kolya. Make sure that when you tell them the story, it’s about me.” His voice was getting softer. Nikolai had to bend his head low to hear his next words. “Genya, too. I want her to know, that I died well.” He coughed again, and Nikolai felt blood spatter against his cheek. “Look after her, too? Somebody should.” He took Nikolai’s hand, pressed something into it. A little wooden soldier, red-cloaked, red-haired.  

“I will,” Nikolai promised. “If anything happens to you, I will.”  

He smiled, and relaxed a little, his torso falling back against Nikolai’s knees. Nikolai kept a hand in his hair, supporting his head, making him comfortable in the only way he could. He didn’t think that Dominik would speak again, but when he did, his voice was a distant, pained whisper: “Do you know the story of Andrei Zhirov?”  

“The revolutionary?” Zhirov was one of Privyet’s idols, a radical from the days of Nikolai’s grandfather.  

A grin ghosted over Dominik’s blood-flecked lips. “When they tried to hang him for treason, the rope broke and he rolled into the ditch the soldiers had dug for his grave.”  

Nikolai tried to smile through his tears. “I never heard that story.”  

Dominik nodded. “ This country, Zhirov shouted. They can’t even hang a man right.”  

Nikolai shook his head. “Is that true?”  

“I don’t know,” Dominik replied. Another wet sound came from his chest, and he struggled to breathe for a few ugly moments. “I just know they shot him anyway.”  

Soldiers did not cry. Princes did not weep. Nikolai knew this. But the tears fell anyway. “Dominik the Brave. Hold on a little longer?”  

Dominik squeezed Nikolai’s hand. “Ravka eats her young, Kolya. Don’t forget it.”  

“Not us,” he said. Dominik did not reply. His chest was no longer moving. Nikolai held him closer, willing him to breathe again. “I’ll do better,” he promised, as he had in Mitkin’s classroom when they were children, after Dominik’s first ( only ) beating. “I’ll find a way.”  

But for all his promises, for all the will he poured into his words, Dominik’s chest did not move again. His dark eyes stared through Nikolai’s, up past the smoke-filled sky. Nikolai tried to picture the Bright Lands beyond it, Sankta Vasilka gathering Dominik into her arms and carrying him away with her, but it was not enough when all he wanted was for his heart to beat again.   

He did not know how long it had been when the Squaller found him. Dominik’s body did not grow cold, so close did he hold him. He only knew that the cannons had ceased when he heard her voice, cool and commanding, somewhere over his head, and caught a glimpse of Etherealki blue at the level of his eyes.  

“Major Lantsov.”  

“Captain,” he corrected. It was a long moment before he could tear his eyes away from Dominik, as if looking away was giving up the last hope that he would breathe again.  

“You’re wanted by Command, Major Lantsov,” she said, with a smile. She was beautiful and terrible as an oncoming storm, and none of that mattered as long as Dominik did not breathe. “You brought back the best part of a platoon from that massacre. A battlefield promotion is in order.”  

“Of course.” He did not move to get to his feet for a long moment, until Privyet came over, and gently removed his arms from where they had locked around Dominik’s shoulders.  

“Let him go, moi Kapitan,” he said, with a terrible gentleness. “The Twenty-Second will take care of our own.”  

He got to his feet with some difficulty. His legs were numb from kneeling so long in the mud, and his breeches were stiff with mud and blood. Dominik’s blood. Wordless, he followed the Squaller girl away.  

At eighteen, Nikolai Lantsov left half his heart on the field at Halmhend. The wound would linger the rest of his life.  

Much later, after ceremonies and celebrations and burials which he remembered more like dreams than reality, he found himself at a desk with a pen, a stack of paper, and nothing at all to say. The letter to Dominik’s mother had been hard enough – that her son had died bravely, that Ravka was grateful for his service (as if that would ever be enough), that his pension would be paid to her and his sisters (as if money would replace a son, a brother, a friend). This letter, though... It clawed at his throat to put the words on paper when some childish part of him longed for her to be here. Genya would not be soft, or try to ameliorate his grief. But she would weep with him, for Dominik, for the boy who’d picked them sweet apples and taught them pomdrakon. Nobody else had known their Dominik. He stared at the wooden soldier beside his inkwell, the one wrapped in a scarlet kefta that was as bright as the day she had coloured it, and then, reluctantly, picked up his pen and began to write.  

Genya,  

This will not reach you until after the casualty lists, but I still wanted you to hear it from me. Dominik died at Halmhend. He asked told me to take care of his mother, his sisters, and you. He was your friend to the last. I hope you are as proud of him as I am. He said you never answered his letters, but I know you cared for him. I know you did, or you wouldn’t have shown me how to help his family that night.  

Genechka, I know I’ve been a bad friend, and a worse correspondent. I know it’s been years, but if when I return to Os Alta, we could talk again, about Dominik... it would mean a lot, to speak with someone who knew him as I did, and I know you will be mourning him too.  

I don’t know what happened to you us, but if there is ever a way I can help you, know that for Dominik’s sake, I will always be  

Your friend,  

Kolya  

She did not reply. He did not return to Os Alta. They would not see each other again for four years.  

Notes:

We're starting to slide towards Official Canon, so things are only going to get sadder from here, but next week's chapter will have a Surprise Bonus Narrator! Points to the first person to guess who in the comments...

Chapter 4: iv - an equation, heaven-sent

Summary:

David Kostyk knows many things. Genya Safin teaches him some new ones.

David Kostyk knew many things. He could run his hands over a stone, and know if it was born in fire or water, if it was formed of sand or salt or metal, if it hid precious stones or useful minerals or the delicate imprint of some ancient beast. He could touch an object and know, intimately, the invisible components that made it up, their melting-points, their uses to Alkemi or Durast. He could make a plant blossom or fruit, though living matter had always challenged him where to other Durasts it came more naturally. He knew these things because he knew, instinctively, that the world was made of miniscule fragments, which fit together in an infinite number of configurations to form everything around him. It was this, this Small Science, which had held the answers to everything from the earliest days of his childhood. Anything could be understood, once it was broken down to its component pieces. 

Any thing . The living were always harder to piece together than the inanimate, and people... People were complex beyond his understanding, walking worlds contained within soft, fragile bodies that breathed and bled and died and never gave him enough pieces to let him see the whole of them. He could only build theories of understanding from the pieces he had, and sometimes those pieces were... lacking. 

For example, for four years after he’d come to the Little Palace, he had known that the King and Queen had three children: two otkazat’sya princes, and the youngest, a little Grisha princess. He knew she was a princess from the fine gowns she wore to her lessons, from her red-gold hair and features that echoed the Queen’s, from the way she slept in the Grand Palace rather than the Corporalki dormitories. From the way the other children kept their distance from her, as though she were something too precious to risk dirtying with training, practice, or play.  

His theory had been disproved at nine, when he’d asked the Durast instructor, Pyotr, why the Princess took private classes with both the Healer teachers and the Alkemi. Pyotr had laughed, and it hadn’t been unkind, but when the other students joined in his laughter, something in him felt small and stupid, like foil crumpling in open flame. 

“Genya isn’t a princess, David,” Pyotr explained, with the gentle good humour he used to coax the babies into trying their first lessons. “She’s a member of the Queen’s household.” 

“Oh.” David frowned, then asked: “Is she a noble then?” His father was a count, not that such things mattered in the Little Palace, and his eldest sister had gone to join the Queen’s household, though she had been a lot older than Genya. Anfisa was practically grown-up, and fussed over him like he was a baby rather than a Grisha soldier whenever she was allowed to visit.  

Pyotr shook his head. “I don’t believe she is, but you’re right, she is special.” Pyotr seldom made him feel small or stupid, and answered all his questions with the seriousness they deserved, whether they were about Small Science or the less-comprehensible chemistry of living things. He took David’s question, and rolled the answers out before the class like a tapestry, telling them of Grisha who’s powers were unique and unusual, unfolding history from Ilya Morozawa, the Bonesmith, through Baba Anezka, who had made the first mirrors from silver and Grisha glass, to Genya, who could shape features and transform the shades of skin and hair the same way that his students could shape steel, or glass, or fabric.  

The class was alive with chatter now, other students questioning whether they could learn to make amplifiers, like Morozawa, or make a whole orchard ripen in a night, like Sankt Feliks. Pyotr seemed to revel in their excitement, answering their questions or suggesting places they might find further clues to those he could not answer. This was David’s least favourite type of class. The overlapping voices tangled in the air, the individual pieces that made up each question crumbling to dust before he could make them out. He covered his ears, and longed for the intricate silence of stone. Stone remained still, gave him time to recognise and pick apart the individual pieces, never demanded he pull together what his eyes and ears and nose told him to provide an answer before he was ready. His classmates lacked the patience of the inanimate, hated how long it took for words to travel from his ears to his mind to his mouth, and hated more that they could not dismiss him as slow and stupid, when the work that Pyotr collected from his station was always shining-bright and unbreakable.  

Trying to escape the noise which battered against him, David focused on the pebble on the desk in front of him, and began picking it apart into delicate layers of black iron and silver-white quartz. He sank into the task, spreading each layer into a neat square, black-white-black-white across his desk like a chessboard. He did not notice the classroom empty around him, or the lunch bell ring. Nobody came to find him for weapons training. These things did not matter compared to the soothing silence of a stone to unpick. He did not even realise that someone was speaking to him until he felt a hand on his shoulder, and it made him almost leap out of his skin as he spun to face his assailant, catching their wrist as Botkin had hammered into his head. 

His gaze met wide, blue-green eyes, with a ring of amber around the pupil, and he looked away quickly, dropping her wrist like she had burned him. She’d only meant to touch his shoulder, but he felt like she had somehow reached into his soul, like his mother or Anfisa when they tried to understand him. It hurt, too intimate and too distancing all at once.  

She was still talking, he realised, repeating her question: “This is the Durast workshop, isn’t it?” 

“It is,” he muttered, “but class finished a while ago.” An hour? Maybe two? If the bells had rung, he hadn’t heard them, and gauging the time from the light would require looking up and risking eye contact again.  He focused on the edge of her dress instead. Not wool spun with steel, like the keftas he was familiar with, but some other fabric, soft and shining, dyed a pale seafoam green. He wanted to catch it between his fingers, feel its soft and slippery surface, ask it what sort of creature or plant it had sprung from, find what gave it its liquid shine. 

“I’m not looking for class, I’m looking for a Durast.” Her tone was impatient, but he was used to impatience. Few people other than Pyotr had patience for him. “Can you help me?” 

“I’m a Durast,” he replied, though that hadn’t been her question. “I don’t know if I can help you, though. What do you want a Durast for?” 

She shoved a piece of paper at him, and he took it, grateful to have somewhere to look that wasn’t her eyes or the edge of a dress he wasn’t supposed to touch. “Could you make this?” she asked, slightly more politely, “Or help me make it? It’s- a present.” 

The diagram she had sketched was perfect, far more intricate and detailed than the usual briefs that he expected from otkazat’sya commissions. But then, she wasn’t otkazat’sya. She was, according to Pyotr, entirely unique, as talented in her way as the Bonesmith or Baba Anezka had been in theirs. And she was stood in the Durast workshop, asking David to help her make a haircomb. A beautiful haircomb, made of glass infused with lapis, with useful marginalia suggesting how it could be made hollow, to fill with water for live flowers, or decorated with delicate blossoms shaped from crystal and infused with the colours and scents of the real flowers they resembled. He had never thought about adding scent to his creations before, it had never been necessary, but the concept opened a new world before him like a kaleidoscope. It was a beautiful design, as unique as its creator – but the basic shape of the comb was one that David, or any other Durast, could have completed after only six months of training. Hadn’t she been studying for three years? What did they even teach her in those private lessons, if not the basic lessons of glass and metal and pigment? Had nobody ever taught her the silent songs of stone? 

“I could make this,” he answered, slowly, “or I could show you how, if you have time? If you’d want to learn.” 

He could feel her staring at him, and his cheeks began to heat again in response. That was the other beautiful thing about stone and metal – when David observed it, it never stared back at him.   

“You want to teach me?” she said, slowly. No, that wasn’t how she’d said it, she’d said: You want to teach me. Like the idea of David teaching her anything was an improbability, or some kind of practical joke. 

“If you want to learn,” he repeated, in reply. “Pyotr always says that it’s better to try something with someone else than ask them to do it for you. And my mother and sisters – their favourite presents are the ones they know I made them.” 

“Hm.” She did not sound like she believed him, but she did not say no, either. She followed him as he moved over to the supply cabinets, retrieving glass-blowers sand, powdered lapis, a jar of clear quartz fragments. “I’m not a Durast, I don’t work with glass.” 

“You use pigment, though,” he pointed out. He could see it in the gold she had bound into her hair, the turquoise she had used to shade her eyes.  “Have you tried using it on glass? Or metal?” 

She put her nose in the air. “That isn’t Tailor work,” she said, with a pout, “and ladies don’t work with glass and metal. That’s peasant craft.” She was so insistent, and so obviously wrong, that David was reminded of a kitten who’d tumbled off a wall and was pretending it had meant to do that. The image made her a little less intimidating, and him a little braver.  

“What about fabric, then? Or flowers?” he pressed her. “Flowers might be easier for you, they’re living things, like people are.” 

She chewed on her lip, then said, begrudging: “I brighten up the queen’s flowers sometimes. And I’ve added better colours to some of her old dresses.” 

“Then you already know how to do it,” he said, trying to sound like Pyotr: encouraging, but not patronising. “You just haven’t tried it on glass before. I’ll shape the comb, and you can add the colour.” 

He poured the sand into the crucible, and began to heat it until it turned liquid, malleable. He focussed, reaching out to the particles to encourage them to keep their flowing, viscous state even as they cooled from red-hot to glowing-gold to clear. He looked around for the girl, but she was hanging back from the furnace, her hands clenched tight over her stomach. 

“What if I can’t do it?” Her voice was high, uncertain, and David remembered how frightened he’d been the first time Pyotr brought him up to the furnace, as if this was the moment that everyone would realise they’d made a very foolish mistake, and send him home to Duva after all. 

He remembered Pyotr’s words to him then, as clearly as if he’d only just heard them. “I think you know how to already. You’ve always been able to see the pieces that make up the world, or you wouldn’t be able to use the Small Science at all. But if it’s difficult, I’ll help you until you can manage it by yourself, and if you can’t do it, we’ll find something you can do. I’ll be right here, and I won’t let it burn you.” 

He poured the glass out onto the stone tray and began pooling it into a crescent shape, drawing out narrow spindles to form the comb’s teeth. The colour bloomed slowly, like ink spilled in water, and its gradual progress gave the comb a pretty marbled effect. He glanced to the side, and could see Genya’s forehead beaded with sweat, her brow furrowed in intense focus. He knew the strain of fighting his medium all too well – plants had their own will, and resisted his blunt dismantling and reshaping of their natures. He put his hands over hers, as Pyotr did for the little ones, and adjusted the placement of her fingers – too soft, glass needed a firmer hand. She flinched, glanced at him askance, and there was a strange stain of colour in her cheeks when she turned back to the glass. He stepped away, feeling ashamed that he’d made her angry. It happened too often when he tried to help his classmates – no matter how hard he tried to be gentle and soothing, like Pyotr, they found his slow explanations irritating or patronising, did not see or share his excitement in the silent song of their materials.  

“I’ll fetch someone else,” he mumbled. “Keth is better at glasswork than me, he’ll help you.” 

“No!” she said, too quickly, and then: “Stay. The colour’s so inconsistent, how do I get it perfect?” 

He blinked, looking back down at their project. “I think the marbling is pretty.” 

She shook her head. “Marbled glass has been out of fashion for years. I need it to look like lapis, for the opening of the Lapis Dining Room.”  

David had been invited to work on the panels for the room with some of the older students, and he considered the patterns embossed into the stone some of his finest work so far.  

“I’ll get more pigment,” he said, “We’ll need extra lapis, and obsidian and gold to get the veins right.” He paused, looking at her flushed cheeks and shaking hands. “We can finish the central comb today, and if you bring me flowers tomorrow, we can work on the flowers together then.” 

“You… want me to come back?” She sounded doubtful, as if she wasn’t used to other people wanting her around, which didn’t make sense. The rare times he’d seen her outside the Little Palace, she was at the centre of the Queen’s ladies, or hand-in-hand-in-hand with the younger prince and his friend. David was the kind of person other people didn’t want around, always saying too little or too much and never the right thing at all. 

“Of course,” he said, confused. “It’s your project. You should finish it, if you have time.” 

“Of course,” she repeated his words, an echo and an agreement. “So… tomorrow, then? After luncheon?” 

“Or whenever you’re free,” he added, quickly. “Pyotr won’t mind if I work on an independent project for a morning, especially one with so many potential applications.” 

The idea of adding scent to stone was a beguiling one – the only stone with a smell he could think of was sulphur, which was more of a stench, and one he hated to work with. Scent was an animal or vegetable thing, a signal between living beings that existed beyond the crystalline vibrations of metal, glass, and stone that David understood. It was not a natural complement to his usual projects, but Genya, who sculpted flesh and blood and bone… Genya might understand how to bring the two together, and he could learn from that.  

Long after she left the workshop, he remained, making shards of glass and quartz bloom into lilies in far greater numbers than the comb required. Genya tilted her head when she saw them covering his workbench, a movement that made her look even more like a curious cat. David liked cats. They understood quiet, and asked nothing of him that he could not easily give.  

“How late did you work on these?” she asked, and he shrugged. 

“I don’t know. I wanted to make sure they were what you imagined, but there were too many kinds of lily.” 

He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly worried that the excess of lilies had been a mistake. His worktable overflowed with them: clusters of nodding blue lilies, deep pink stargazers, frilled orange lilies from Shu Han, waterlilies in pastel pinks and blues with hearts of glowing gold, elegant calla lilies with their single petal curved around a central spike. He had just wanted to get it right for once, but nobody’s head could hold up the weight of so many flowers.  

She did not frown, or stare at him. She did not laugh, as though he’d made a child’s mistake. She picked through his prototypes with a critical eye, picking up each to examine in turn, comparing its colour to the comb, before placing it down again, and David felt his shoulders relax. Good. She had understood.  

“This one,” she said, eventually, holding up a nodding blue lily. It was the correct choice, he’d known it as soon as it was complete – the deep blue of its petals and gold of its stamen the perfect complement to the blues and golds of the comb, and he nodded, so that she would know that he knew that.  

Unexpectedly, she added: “What will you do with the others? The ones we don’t use.” 

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Someone will find a use for them, or they’ll be thrown away, or ground down-“ 

“I want them,” she said, quickly. “Would you let me have them? If I can find a use for them?” 

He frowned, not understanding. “ Let you have them?” 

“For hairpins, jewellery- the Queen’s ladies love things like this. Flowers that never fade, you know. Maybe not useful, but better than being ground up.” 

He shook his head, still confused by her unasked-for explanation. “I don’t need to let you have them. They were all for you, anyway.” 

There it was again, that strange pink stain on her cheeks, though she was at least quieter in her annoyance than most of the other students. A girl who was half a princess had probably only asked his permission to be polite, anyway. She slid onto the bench beside him, her side pressed against his. Normally he would shuffle away to give her space and preserve his concentration, but the warmth was so unexpected, and the bench so narrow, that he stayed where he was. He would need to be close to help if she struggled with glasswork again, anyway.  

She’d brought a bouquet of scented lilies from the palace hothouse, and set them on the desk among his imitations. He was satisfied to see that his held up well in comparison, the bloom of colour in their petals still vivid even beside the real thing. 

Here was the difficult part – poisons, potions, perfumes, all those things were Alkemi work, and he studied the lilies with uncertainty, wondering how to draw the scent from them to the quartz imitation. He was silent for a few minutes, his mind pondering the problem as his hands formed more copies of the chosen prototype and passed them to Genya to colour. He felt foolish when he remembered that, unusually, he wasn’t working alone, and had someone to ask he would not be interrupting. 

“Does the Queen ever let you work with her perfumes?” he asked Genya, and felt her startle against his side at his breaking of their comfortable silence.  

“All the time,” she said, quickly. “She says it lasts better when I help her, but that’s because she doesn’t know about Small Science.” 

“Can you show me how it works?” he asked, and held out his wrist when she looked confused.  

She giggled. “You want me to perfume you?”  

“I showed you glasswork. It’s a fair trade isn’t it?” Part of him felt a little affronted by her laughter, but it quieted when she took his hand in both of hers, holding a lily petal to his palm. They were so small, so pale, so soft. Durast hands callused quickly from forge and flame and needle. He’d never felt hands as soft as hers before. A look of concentration flickered across her features, and he watched closely as the petal crumbled into his skin, leaving a momentarily-paler patch against the warm brown. He raised the hand to his nose, and inhaled  the earth-and-honey scent of lily.  

“It’s the same principle as adding colour,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, “but unless your source has a very strong scent, it can be more destructive.” 

He nodded, thoughtful, then plucked another petal from the real flower and held it against his glass one, attempting to put her theory to work. His first few tries left his prototype with a milky tinge to its petals and no discernible scent, and he was beginning to feel frustrated when Genya’s small white hands entered his field of vision, hovering over his. 

“May I?” she requested, and he nodded, surprised she had realised the need to ask. It had taken most of his classmates years to realise that he recoiled from unexpected touches. She worked quickly and efficiently, softening the position of his fingers as he had sharpened herself the day before. “Scent is more delicate than pigment,” she explained, “it takes more coaxing. If you try too hard to force it, it falls to pieces.” 

He frowned, trying to put her advice to work. This time, when the petal crumbled, there was a faint but lingering scent left on the glass, like it was a shard of an old perfume bottle. 

“Can you try and show me again?” He asked, handing it to her. She did so, and he watched the delicate motions over her hands, so similar and yet so different to the ones he had been taught. They were careful strokes, designed for sensitive, delicate tissue, more fragile even than the plants he struggled with. When she was finished, the scent was stronger, and the milky tinge less pronounced. After a few more tries, he could mimic her almost perfectly, and they’d concluded that three petals gave each flower the perfect balance of scent: delicate, but not overpowering. Genya’s flowers were more consistent in their colour, and she wasted fewer petals, but David’s smelled stronger, and in the end, they had enough that Genya pronounced satisfactory between them that the comb was completed by the middle of the afternoon. She put it away carefully in a box lined with wool, and found a larger one to transport the extra flowers in. David helped her carry it back to the Grand Palace, and endured the teasing of the other students about being “soft on the Queen’s pet” with confusion. If anything, he’d been a far more exacting teacher than Pyotr had ever been. 

He was surprised when Genya came back the next week, and the next, until her presence in the workshops became, if not regular, an expected interruption to the pattern of his days. He grew accustomed to the rhythm of her visits, when she’d arrive with a torn or faded gown, a piece of broken jewellery, or, on one memorable occasion, an army of toy soldiers, and settle beside him on the bench, with the simple request of “Show me how to fix it,” and David, to the astonishment of his classmates, would walk her through the process of softening the metal, smoothing the ceramic, persuading the frayed edges of cloth to knit seamlessly back together. Sometimes, it took her days or weeks to grasp a concept, and she practically haunted his desk, but more often, she was so quick that he suspected she had already known how to do whatever he’d been trying to teach her, which made no sense at all. Why would she waste her time pretending to learn concepts she’d already mastered? It was more likely that Pyotr was right, and that some Grisha had more expansive gifts than others. 

He saw her around the Little Palace more and more often that year, attending private tutorials, or coming and going from the Darkling’s study during his rare visits. Growing familiarity was the only reason he could attribute to the number of new things he noticed about her that year – the slow-creeping tint of deepest auburn in her red-gold hair, the amber bleeding into her irises, the two inches of height she’d gained on him, so that all her gowns were now a little too short. How tired and drawn her movements seemed, when she thought she was unobserved. He could do nothing for the last, and if she’d wished to alter the first two, it was her business, but her dresses… she seemed chilly and uncomfortable, and his sisters would have complained of feeling shabby in clothes that fit so poorly. It wasn’t his best work, because he didn’t want anyone to notice, or ask questions, but he could add an inch or a little more ease to the fabric here and there, and if she noticed his work, she did not comment. He did not want her to. Her pride was sharp-edged and sometimes, he suspected, isolating, but it was hers, and he would not rob her of it for the sake of acknowledgement, or worse, gratitude.  

Her edges grew sharper as she shed her pretty dresses for a kefta of white, and the distance between her and the other Grisha grew wider. David began to notice the sniggers when she entered or left the room, a sound he was attuned to because he had once been their target, but he still could not understand their cruelty. His offences may have been accidental, but at least he had done something to warrant their disdain. He’d never seen Genya speak to any of them long enough to cause offence, and she’d  never been rude to him in months of sharing projects and workspace. For all her reserve, nobody could mistake her for uncaring, either. When the younger prince cracked his skull in a riding accident, she stuck to his side like a burr, demanding the most skilled Healers check his injuries and that one of the Alkemi examine him for poisoning. When a name familiar to her had been read out in the casualty lists, she had turned as pale as her kefta and left the hall, and he did not see her again for two weeks. She was neither stupid nor cruel nor heartless, so the distance the other Grisha kept from her remained a mystery to him, however closely he examined the pieces of it. 

He was similarly bewildered by the distance she kept from him, or, more accurately, the lack of it. On quiet afternoons, which grew more and more frequent as the Grisha older than them were moved to the front or the Fold, she would tuck herself into his workbench with a row of perfume bottles and work on them in silence, apparently asking nothing more of him than his presence. He liked those afternoons, because being around Genya was nothing like being around other people, but he also found them distracting, because they raised more mysteries that he did not have all the clues to answer. 

“Why did you need me to teach you Durast work?” he asked, breaking three consecutive afternoons of silence. 

“What?” She looked at him in confusion. That was alright, David was used to confusion.  

“When we made the comb,” he clarified, “you said you’d never worked with glass, metal, or stone, and you only knew a little more about fabric and flowers. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t, ” he emphasised, afraid he had offended her already, “it was that nobody had asked you to try, even though you had lessons with Durast teachers. Why?” 

She frowned. “I didn’t have time for as many lessons as you,” she pointed out. “I had to learn etiquette, history, riding, embroidery, on top of the basics for Corporalki and Durast work that complemented my Tailoring. Is it really so odd they focused on things that advanced skills I already had rather than wasting our limited time on materials I would never use?”  

He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said again. “You’re clever, determined, and your skills are so unique that you could be a second Bonesmith, but your teachers focused on mending dresses and fixing wrinkles? It’s a waste. ” 

He had meant to compliment her, but the hectic flush of her cheeks seemed more angry than flattered.  

“I suppose you think I spend my days smoothing wrinkles and covering grey hairs, like everyone else does?” she snapped, “Just a pretty thing who wastes her time and her learning on an old woman’s vanity?” 

He had never seen her lose her temper before, and it caught him off guard, and made his tongue clumsy and stupid. “No, I never- I like pretty things, Genya!” 

It was the wrong thing to say, he could tell by the way she went rigid, but it was also the truth. He’d liked working on trinkets and jewellery and pretty things with her. He had liked working on her toy soldiers so much that he’d made more toys for the little ones who cried at being away from their parents, even though he didn’t know how to talk to them easily. He loved working on the rare jewellery commissions that came through the Fabrikators’ workshop, and even the Darkling himself had looked at his designs with rare approval. He worked on weapons and keftas and bombs as much as any of the other Fabrikators, and took pride in them because he had to, but there was something far more precious about his creations that made people smile. It was magic beyond the Small Science, bringing joy to people even if he could never understand them. That was what he had meant to tell her. 

But that was not what he had said, and Genya was incandescent before him, like a living flame, or a firebird. It hurt to look at her directly. 

“I expected this of them, David,” she said, in a low, deadly voice, “but never you. I thought you were better than this.” 

It was the first time anyone had ever suggested that he might be better than the others at anything other than his work. He hated that it had taken disappointing her to learn she had once thought so highly of him, and he lay awake in his room at night, trying to come up with some way to redeem himself in her eyes. He could make her any number of things: cosmetics which would bring out the gold of her eyes, hairpins which would bring out the living-flame quality of her hair- but that was the problem. His hands spoke far better than his mouth ever could, and he wanted, needed to tell her that pretty things were far more worthy of her time than bombs or guns or poisons, but that he wished she’d been given choices beyond beautiful ones. He had seen the beauty she could create, like Sankta Vasilka’s tapestries, but he wished she’d been given the chance to don a firebird’s wings. He longed to see the things that Genya Safin would create unfettered by what other people wanted her to be. Somehow, he had to fit all that in a single, perfect creation, and until he had a solution, it was all he could think about.  

He thought about it as he rushed through his morning ablutions. He thought about it at the few meals he remembered to take in the dining hall. He thought about it as he worked on the Darkling’s latest commission for his Sun Summoner, and shattered several lenses in the process. He was still thinking about it as the Sun Summoner herself was brought through the Fabrikator workshops, trailing in Genya’s wake like a bedraggled street-kitten following an elegant palace cat. He was so stunned to see Genya at  all that his words almost left him entirely, clumsy grunts stumbling out of his mouth when he wanted most to be eloquent and charming. The gift had to speak for him, he could barely string words together in front of Genya anymore.  

In the end, the answer was simple, elegant, and, best of all, practical. He presented it to her tucked into a standard Second Army satchel, beaming with pride. She stood in the doorway to her room in the Grand Palace, staring at him with mixed disdain and confusion. He hated to be stared at, but most people responded to him with some combination of disdain and confusion, so he stayed there, holding the satchel out to her. 

“What is this?” she said, wrinkling her nose like a cat who’d smelled something bad.  

“Open it,” he said, and then, tripping over himself in excitement, he explained: “It’s a Tailor’s field kit. I found the things you use most from the Durast stores, and I asked the Heartrenders and Healers what they stocked their kits with in case you found it useful-” 

She held it stiffly, which wasn’t what he’d hoped for at all. “I understand.” Her voice was cold. “I won’t bother you in the Fabrikators’ workshop any more.” 

She moved to shut the door, but he shoved himself in the way. “ No!” He hadn’t meant to shout, but he was determined that this time, there would be no misunderstanding, however clumsily his words came out. “I didn’t mean that. I meant- You should have a fieldkit, because you are a Grisha, and the work you do is Small Science, the same as mine, or Ivan’s, or the Darkling’s. Just because it happens in a palace and not a workshop or a battlefield, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. And you should come to the Fabrikator workshops whenever you like! You have every right to call yourself a Materialnik, or a Corporalnik, or whatever else you want to be, because they should be proud to have you.” He felt himself run out of words, like a clockwork toy winding down, and he could only stand there, mutely awaiting her judgement.  

She did not reply for a moment that felt like a century, and when she did, her voice sounded thick and strange as she said: “Can I hug you?” 

He felt like a moth seeing the stars for the first time, as if a sense he’d never known he had was suddenly unlocked. He could not speak, could barely manage to nod his head in response, but the moment he assented, she had thrown herself at him. It was an awkward, clumsy embrace, as if both of them were learning to hug for the first time, and he was as stiff in her arms as she was in his, but when she buried her head in his shoulder, her hair smelled of sweet cinnamon, and he held on his lips another truth that he could not yet voice. It would take half a year and half a war before he would have the chance to tell her again. 

Notes:

This may be my favourite chapter I've written so far, and it mostly exists because the first thing my wife wanted to know when I started this fic was "Will David be in it?". He is her favourite character, and writing this gave me a new appreciation for him. So, thank you, dearest, for getting me to stretch myself and add in a character who might have my favourite perspective so far!

Bonus points from last chapter go to @robynator, who figured out that David would be the narrator for this one. Please leave me your comments, I love all of them, and they are really helping me get through the stickier parts of Ruin and Rising.

Next Thursday: Genya and Nikolai are finally reunited.

Chapter 5: v – dress me in red and throw your roses

Summary:

Genya meets a privateer, and is offered a choice.

Notes:

As some of you may have noticed, we've finally hit book canon! All chapters from this one onwards will have spoilers for Siege and Storm, and therefore tangentially for bits of Season 2 of Shadow and Bone.

The second time Genya met Nikolai Lantsov, she did not know him, and would not have known if he recognised her. She barely recognised herself, dressed as a soldier rather than the Queen’s pretty doll. Her face in the mirror was not the weeping child with a mouthful of strawberries, the girl who grew up half a princess, the young woman who’d sought refuge from the court’s glittering-sharp edges in the noisy bustle of a gentle Fabrikator’s workshop. She had sacrificed those girls on the altar of the god who had raised her from servant to spy to soldier, the god who had crawled out of the Fold broken and bleeding with a new gift in his hands. Those past selves had not been strong enough to survive in this world, anyway. Their memories hung about her only like distant dreams.  

Sturmhond was not what she had expected, when the Darkling told his trusted group of soldiers that he had hired a privateer. She’d expected someone older, with the blunt, brutal pragmatism of a life spent battling the sea, not a stripling boy in a fancy coat playing the gentleman pirate. But then, that was likely the point. The Darkling had always selected his favourites young. An older captain might prove more resistant to his wild scheme of capturing first the Sun Summoner and then the Sea Whip, but Sturmhond seemed to view it all as a grand adventure. He seemed so young, driven by a boy’s belief in his own immortality. Had she ever been that innocent? Had anyone?  

That was the first moment she noticed the dissonance between the Stormhund who greeted them aboard the whaler and the real captain of his fleet. Her general and her fellow Grisha accepted the reckless boy-captain for what he appeared to be without a second thought, with the careless dismissal of otkazat’sya that the Little Palace seemed to breed into its graduates, but Genya had learned young that there was a vast difference between not-Grisha and not-dangerous. A knife in the back or a bullet to the head killed Grisha and non-Grisha alike.  

“We should keep our own watches,” she suggested to Ivan.  

He looked at her as if she was an idiot, which was, in fairness, usually how he looked at her. “What for? Do you think Rusalye is going to sneak up on us, little Tailor?”  

She hid her irritation at his patronisation and twisted her hands together, playing the nervous ingenue. “To lighten the burden from our gracious hosts?” she suggested, tilting her head towards the crew.   

He snorted. “They get paid on delivery, the General is no fool.”   

“Of course,” she said, smoothly, “but we are expecting precious cargo, and it would be a waste if we lost it because another bidder lured our crew away.”  

Ivan returned her smile with an equally  false, if less pretty, one. “If you can arrange a watch, Safin, be my guest. The wellbeing of our cargo is to be your responsibility, after all.”  

That was the crux of the problem in looking to her fellow Grisha for aid. Whatever colour she wore, they were used to seeing her among servants now, and all the Darkling’s favour had not really shifted the sense that she had been brought along as Alina’s nursemaid. As a Corporalnik, she reported to Ivan now, and he had as little interest in her reports as she did in his personality. If she wanted to convince him, or the Darkling himself, she needed more evidence, so in their long crossing to Novyi Zem, she retreated to the familiar skills of the spy, and made a study of Stormhund and his crew.  

The crew were unsettling in their own right – they avoided their passengers and never spoke within earshot beyond monosyllabic orders, which couldn’t be normal when their captain chattered as long as someone with ears was present to listen, and they watched the Grisha in particular with cold suspicion. Perhaps this was normal, or perhaps they were a particularly superstitious bunch, but there was something deeply eerie about their silence., as if they could communicate without words, or as if they had planned their mission so efficiently that communication was barely needed to see it through. As a woman who had spent her life filing away careless chatter as offerings to the Darkling, its absence gnawed at her, and made the crew seem almost an alien species to the courtiers she had grown up with.  

Stormhund himself managed to be disturbing in completely the opposite direction – there was something too familiar about him. It was like watching someone she knew well perform in a play in such heavy costume that they’d become a stranger to her, but when she studied his features – the ruddy hair, the broken nose, the faint smallpox scars scattered among his freckles – he was nobody she knew. And yet the familiarity… she’d been her parents’ eldest child, and he was too old to be the little brother she barely remembered, but then, would she even know her own parents, if she saw them again? Would she see any echoes of them in the features she had refined and perfected over two decades, or would she be a stranger to them? Could he be little Mitya, grown-up and turned pirate? It didn’t seem possible, but it seemed equally impossible that he was a stranger to her. It wasn’t that he’d charmed her – if anything, she found this strange sense of odinakovost uncomfortable. Whatever happened to her body, she’d always guarded her heart closely, and the feeling of closeness, of sameness that she felt sometimes watching Sturmhond, was an unwanted intrusion.   

It was worse somehow when she caught him watching her. She was not unused to being stared at – it was the natural consequence of her carefully cultivated beauty, and a man staring had never been enough on its own to frighten her – but he never tried to flirt with her, or charm her, as he did Taisa and Matvei, the chattier Grisha. No, his expression when he watched her was unreadable, and she lacked a Heartrender's skill at divining emotion beneath skin and muscle to the truth in the blood beneath.  

She had almost screamed when he appeared at her side while she was distracted being violently sick over the rail. It was undignified, unbecoming, and another thing that marked her out among the Heartrenders, who could easily cure their own seasickness, but had not extended that kindness to her. She had unbent to find him barely three feet from her, offering her a lace-edged handkerchief and a canteen to drink from, and she had flinched away from him before she could repress the impulse.   

She grabbed at both the proffered items to cover for her momentary lapse, and said quickly: “Thank you, Kapitan. ” He had caught her so offguard that she almost bobbed a curtsey, and she stiffened her knees against the impulse. Never again. Soldiers did not curtsey.  

He only raised an eyebrow at her. “A selfish act, I’m afraid. I hate to see a pretty girl suffer.”  

From any other boy, it would have sounded like flirting, so why did it feel more like she was being gently made fun of?  

“As a pretty girl, I have to agree with that sentiment,” she said, her voice slightly sharper than she’d meant to sound. “If only everyone selfish held such similar sentiments, I’d be eating bonbons in the Grand Palace right now and never look at another ship again.”  

He laughed, a graceless snort rather than charming chuckle she had heard before,  and it was a sound that she knew in her bones. She had never seen his face before, but, impossibly, she’d have known him anywhere. That laugh was wild strawberries in summertime, snow forts in winter-  

“A whaler wouldn’t be my first choice as an introduction to sailing either,” he said, gravely. “The trypots would make anyone sick.”  

“You don’t seem to be suffering,” she said, wondering how to extract herself from the conversation before she was sick again or revealed too much of what she’d already half-convinced herself.  

“Alas, I’m hardened to a life at sea, and have no delicate sensibilities left,” he said, in mock sorrow. “Seasickness would make a rogue of any man.”  

She raised an eyebrow, and decided to take a leap of faith. It was impossible, but if he was.. . “When I find a man on this ship, I’ll check with him,” she said, looking him up and down, deliberately. “When I heard the name Sturmhond, I wasn’t imagining a puppy.”  

He made a choking noise, and covered it with a cough as Ivan came up behind her and grabbed her elbow. “The General wants you,” he said, abruptly. “Don’t you have more important things to do than flirt with the crew?”  

She shook him off. His voice might as well have been coming from a thousand miles away. “Ivan, if you’re having trouble keeping your nose out of other people’s business, I can always fix it for you,” she said, with acid sweetness. Over her shoulder, she could see Sturmhond talking to the darkhaired girl from his crew. A friend? A lover? She couldn’t tell, on that strange new face. “I’m sure everyone would thank me for dealing with that eyesore.”  

As recompense for her sarcasm, he shoved her hard as the door to the Darkling’s cabin opened, so that she stumbled over the threshhold. It was a low trick, but she managed to regain her balance before the door could slam into her back, and swept into a graceful bow.  

“You wished to speak with me, moi soverenyi?” she said, as she rose. The shutters of the cabin had been nailed shut, so that the only light came from a flickering oil lamp which clouded the air with smoke and made the shadows seem longer, as if a nichevo’ya could stalk out of any of them. As an aestheticist, Genya abhored the decision, but as an admirer of theatre, she couldn’t help but appreciate the drama of the choice. It intimidated even her, which was, of course, the point.  

In the deepest shadow, the Darkling sat, draped across an old couch like a king on a throne or a dragon atop a hoard. He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling in seemingly-genuine pleasure at the sight of her. The smile made the scars on his face ripple, and her fingers itched to smooth them closed, though she knew it would not work. He adjusted his position to make room beside him, and she noted the stiffness of his movements – the scars beneath his black kefta still pained him too, it seemed – and the shadows seemed to shrink to the cosy shade of firelight.  

He patted the cushion beside him. “Sit,” he said, still smiling, and she did so with gratitude. Standing only worsened the nausea. He looked her over, then said: “I’ll speak with the Heartrenders about helping with your seasickness. It is unseemly to let one of my soldiers suffer so unnecessarily.”  

She felt her face heat, and willed the colour away, so she would not look like a child. “I don’t need special treatment,” she said. “I am a soldier of the Second Army. I can bear more than a little seasickness.”  

“You have, and you will again, but seasickness need not be one of them.” In the candlelight, she saw something like pride in his features, and for a moment, she felt her spine straighten, like a flower turning towards the sun. “You have no need to prove yourself to me after all you’ve done.”  

Now she felt herself flush with warmth. “Thank you, moi soverenyi, but I still need to make my place among the other Corporalki. I need them to respect me-”  

“And they will learn to,” he said with a cool finality, before reverting to his previous warmth, “You need not be so eager to become like them. You were remarkable for your talent at six, for your courage at twelve, and now...” He reached forward, plucking a lock of hair from my shoulder to smooth it back into place with almost paternal affection, “you prove me right again and again, Genya Safin. You truly are one of the greatest soldiers I have ever trained.”   

She felt her shoulders relax in spite of herself. Despite his intimidating presence, her general had always made her feel safe, as safe as she had once felt when he had wiped away her child’s tears and promised her that, whenever she asked, he would take her away from the Grand Palace, from the Queen’s coldness and the King’s lust. Perhaps a father’s protection would have felt like this.  

“My combat skills will need some work,” she said, trying to conceal her childish pleasure in the compliment, “but I am here to serve you, however you need me to.”  

He looked thoughtful at that for a moment, then shook his head. “Oh, Genya. I’ve asked too much of you already.”  

“Never, moi soverenyi.” All he had asked of her had been paid in full as she watched the king begin to sicken and rot from within, never knowing that he’d signed his own death warrant the first time he’d touched her skin.  

“No general ever deserved such loyalty, moya milaya.” It was the endearment of a father to a daughter, and it settled over her shoulders with the weight and softness of mink. “If you wished to rest in the Little Palace for the rest of your life, you would have earned it.”  

It was a kind thought, if a sentimental one. She could never return to Ravka without her general’s protection now. Who else would stand between her and the wrath of a king?  

“My place is with you,” she said, the warmth of his affection bringing tears to her eyes. When had she become so weak?  

He lifted her chin with his finger, as he had when she was a girl, examining her features. “Always, Genya?” he asked, his grey eyes scanning her features for something she could not read.  

“Always, ” she promised. There was nobody else. There had never been.  

“Good.” He released her chin, and his expression returned to thoughtful, perhaps even regretful, if men like the Darkling had regrets. With practiced lightness, he said, “The captain seems fond of you.”  

Her shoulders stiffened, the warmth beneath her heart extinguished by a lump of ice. She swallowed, hoping against hope his questioning would take a different turn. “ Moi soverenyi?”  

He paused, then said, delicately. “He has requested you join him for a private dinner tomorrow night. If you wished to pursue him, I... would not object. I trust your judgement, and your subtlety.” Relief flooded through her – he had not recognised what she had – followed by an unexpected nausea. This is trust, she told herself, he trusts me to extract Sturmhond’s secrets, but it did not feel like trust. He continued: “This is not an order, of course. As in all missions of this nature, the final decision is yours, but I can think of nobody more skilled in such delicate work.”  

The final decision is yours. Of course it was, it had always been her choice. She’d chosen revenge over safety and protection, and she’d choose it again, even now. This too was her choice- and her chance. If she was right, if she had known him, they would be able to speak privately, without the risk of his strange crew or her suspicious colleagues overhearing, and she could find out what the hell he was doing.  

She bit her tongue, wary of sounding overeager. “I’ll join him for dinner, and consider the best approach,” she said, in the tone she would have used to ask if he wanted sugar in his tea. “Is there anything you would find particularly helpful?”  

“Anything of his background, or his true loyalties.” The response was too quick – he'd expected her to agree before even mentioning the invitation. “Anything which suggests he may be planning to doublecross us.”  

“Of course, moi soverenyi.” She got to her feet and swept him another bow. “Was there anything else?”  

He rested a hand lightly on her head, like a benediction, or a blessing. “You have given enough, Genya,” he said, his voice low and affectionate, that almost-paternal note creeping in again. She focussed on her breathing, remembering the feeling of David’s hands over hers as they unpicked stone together, and when he allowed her to stand again, she could give him her practiced, perfect smile as he dismissed her from his presence. She kept smiling and breathing as she stepped out onto the deck, counting to sixty as she drifted over to the railing. She waited until nobody was looking before she let herself lean over the side and vomit until she ran out of bile. She was still heaving when she felt a hand on her lower back, and flinched until she realised it was Sturmhond’s darkhaired girl, offering her a canteen. She nodded her thanks as she rinsed out her mouth, the nausea and tightness in her chest that made her rasp for breath dissipating as suddenly as they had come on.   

“Seasickness?” said the girl, head tilted in sympathy, but Genya could read the searching expression in her honey-gold eyes.   

“Sea travel doesn’t agree with me,” she said, with a smile that did not reach her eyes. It was not a lie. There was no other explanation.  

“I can tell.” There was a crooked, teasing smile on her lips as she looked Genya over. “You’ll get used to it, pretty girl, I promise. You have look of a natural sailor to you.”  

Genya raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t realise Sturmhond employed actors in his crew. I almost believed that.”  

The girl’s laugh rang out across the deck. Genya did not believe her promise, but it turned out to have been more of a prophecy – she was not sick again that day, and her nausea abated almost as soon as she stepped onto the deck the next morning. The girl flashed her that same crooked smile, as if she knew, and they were sharing a private joke.   

That evening, before dinner, she found someone else’s spare kefta laid out on her bunk, the satchel that held her fieldkit beside it. She closed her eyes, swallowed a mouthful of bile, focussed on her breathing, imagined David’s hands over her own as she sprinkled lapis powder over the grey embroidery. You’ve always been able to see the pieces that make up the world. This was just more Small Science, nudging the individual pieces into position until they formed the whole that she wanted, which was... what did she want? She’d spent so long hungering for her revenge that in its absence, it was hard to say.   

She shook herself. She was being childish. She had a mission to complete. She smoothed the colour of red ochre across her lips, and, in a moment of vanity, powdered gold onto her eyelids. Her reflection stared back at her, amber eyes wolf-wild like a caged animal, but at least it looked perfect. She swallowed whatever this gnawing anxiety was, and went to join the captain at his dining table.   

It was the strangest performance of her life, to an audience of Tamar, the dark-haired girl, her gigantic twin, the sour-faced first mate, and the Darkling himself. They made polite conversation over a dinner of fresh-caught fish and hot kasha. Genya played the coyly-flirtatious ingenue, on her first ever real mission, Sturmhond the rakish pirate planning to sweep her off her feet. He paid her pretty compliments, made excuses to touch her hand, even fed her bites of fish from his own plate. It was all very like the clichéd foreplay from one of the novellas that Queen Tatiana’s ladies giggled over, and nothing at all like how these things had ever played out in Genya’s experience. For all its falseness, it seemed to convince their audience well enough – Sturmhond exchanged a speaking look with each of his crew, and they excused themselves to return to their duties, the dark-haired twins with a questioning look that he seemed to shrug off. The Darkling bid them goodnight shortly afterwards, refusing Sturmhond’s offer of a nightcap in his cabin with an offhand comment:   

“Genya’s company is far more charming than mine, I fear.”  

“Not at all, I find all my clients charming as long as they pay on time,” Sturmhond replied, with a roguish grin that seemed enough to distract from how Genya’s own smile had frozen on her lips. The door closed behind the general before she could tell if he’d noticed her moment of weakness. They were alone, and Sturmhond held open the door to his cabin. She prayed she was not mistaken, and stepped inside. The door closed with an audible click.  

There was barely space in the room for the two of them, crammed between a desk, two chairs, and a bunk just about large enough for two. The furniture was more comfortable and of finer make than that in the Darkling’s cabin, and she wondered if he’d had it brought across from a previous prize. The rug beneath her feet was soft and luxurious, of Shu Han make. He was too close to her, and he wasn’t speaking. He did not try to embrace her, or even touch her. A chill crept down her spine. Had he heard of his father’s illness? Did he suspect her? Did he know, somehow, sensing her guilt through the threads of a shared childhood she hadn’t quite managed to sever completely? The thought tightened around her stomach like a corset laced too tight.  

“What are you doing here, Genya?” His voice was gentle, wondering. An eavesdropper could have mistaken it for seduction, but Genya knew it too well. She knew him too well.  

“I could ask you the same question, Sobachka.”   

His eyes widened. “You do know me. I did wonder.”  

“You’re not that good an actor.” That wasn’t entirely fair, most of the Grand Palace would have fallen for his pirate’s guise, but Nikolai had never needed his ego inflating any further. “You know why I’m here. We’re retrieving the Sun Summoner.” The Sun Summoner. It was easier, calling her that. The Sun Summoner was a playing piece on a board, a political or military asset. Alina had been a wide-eyed girl who’s every emotion played out across her features in vivid colour, who had followed her around the Little Palace like a lost kitten. Who had been her first friend years. Retrieving the Sun Summoner would be easy. Seeing Alina again... that would be harder.  

“You know what I mean. Why are you here?” he said, gesturing to their surroundings. “You belong in the Grand Palace eating bonbons on a cushion, not on some secret Grisha spy mission.”  

It was almost endearing, how little he understood what her life had been. “The Darkling promoted me,” she said, and he interrupted her before she could continue:  

“To what? His seductress?”   

It was, at least, a kinder word than whore.   

“That’s Second Army business,” she said, coldly. “How I serve the Darkling is not your concern.”  

His unfamiliar features twisted into a familiar glare – he was angry? With her, or the Darkling? - but he smoothed it away before she could draw any conclusions.   

“Of course, you’re a soldier of the Second Army,” he said, parroting her own words.  

“I always was!” she snapped, trying to keep her voice low. “I have more reason to be here than you do! Aren’t you meant to be at university in Kerch?”  

He shrugged, carelessly. “I graduated early. It got boring.”  

“ So you became a pirate?”  

“Privateer,” he corrected her, with a smirk. “I think it rather suits me.”  

“ Suits you?” How, by all the Saints, did he manage to be so irritating? “You’re insane. You’re actually insane, and I’m asking Taisa to examine your head to see if your brain fell out on some battlefield. What did you even do to your poor head?”   

Reverting to the familiarity of childhood, she grabbed his face between her hands, turning it this way and that to look for the signs of makeup or dye, but finding none. No, she could read the signs well enough – it was sloppy compared to her own mastery, but... “This is Tailor work!” she exclaimed. “You found another Tailor? Someone like me?” Not as well-trained as her, obviously, but... She’d always been an oddity in the Little Palace, even as she’d taken pride in her unique abilities. The thought of having someone else in a matching kefta of red and blue...  

He pressed a finger to her lips. “Not so loud,” he cautioned her, and she glared at him. “It’s not Tailor work, not exactly. It’s nowhere near as good as yours, but...” He shook his head. “It’s been years, Genya. Why didn’t you answer any of my letters? Or Dominik’s? We missed you.”  

She flinched back from him. Of all the accusations she had expected to combat, somehow, she hadn’t expected this one. She dropped her gaze, trying to look ashamed as she searched for the answer that could unlock his walls and earn his trust again. She couldn’t risk lying to him, not when she was barely within his trust and wholly within his power, but perhaps she could tell him... something. Not the whole truth – she'd long ago realised that Nikolai realising that would break her, and she could not be broken – but a part of it.   

“It was too painful to remember, for a long time,” she said, quietly, still looking at his boots rather than his face. Supple brown leather, embossed with gold – Nikolai had always favoured finery, the ridiculous coat alone should have given him away. “It was- difficult, becoming a servant, at first. Shameful, even. It got easier if I forgot I’d ever known anything else, but you- you and Dominik-” She tried not to choke on his name. Her throat felt thick, a childish remnant of grief. “You reminded me of what I used to have. Who I used to be. And that made the change unbearable.” It was more honest than she’d meant to be, and she couldn’t bear to look up at him. Seeing pity in his face would crush her.  

“Genechka...” The childish nickname was almost a sigh on his lips, and slowly, carefully, he drew her into an embrace. She stiffened for a moment, but did not resist, and gradually, her own arms wound around him in return, her hands fluttering like shy birds. It was as though she’d forgotten how to touch someone honestly. Warmth bloomed in her chest. Against her will, she felt safe.   

“ I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “I should have written, after Halmhend.” She’d feigned sickness and locked herself in her room for two days, until the Darkling sent Healers to examine her, and she was forced back to her drudgery.   

“You should have,” he agreed, stroking her hair, “and I should have come back to court to see you when you didn’t. I couldn’t face seeing the Palace without- him. Forgive me? ”  

She could hear tears in his voice, and her own had soaked through his shirt. She wept for Dominik, and for Nikolai too. For the children they’d been, and for the years of friendship that they had shared. For the way he held her in his arms, unaware of the poison she’d painted on her skin for so many years. “There’s nothing to forgive you for,” she said, and drew back, looking up at him with a watery smile. She did not ask for his forgiveness. She did not deserve, or want it. “Tell me about Kerch? About- about Dominik, if you want to?”  

She kept him talking late into the night, about his studies and his many apprenticeships, about the war, about the missing friend who’s absence felt fresh and raw now they were back together. When the ship’s watch rang the bell for midnight, she smoothed her fingertips over her reddened eyes, added colour to her cheeks, and began to artfully dishevel her hair.  

Nikolai looked uncomfortable at her careful handiwork. “Is that really necessary?”  

She raised her eyebrows. “You know what they assume we’ve been doing, and I don’t think you want your crew to suspect you any more than I want the other Grisha to suspect me.”  

He made a face. “I wish we could come up with some other excuse.”  

“Concerned for my honour? You shouldn’t be. You know the rules for soldiers aren’t the same as those for your mother’s ladies.” Or those for servant girls.  

“What if I’m concerned for my honour?” he retorted, teasingly. “My crew will think you’ve robbed me of my virtue.”  

“Your crew think you have virtues to steal?” This was easy, this playful banter, as if they’d never been apart. “For pirates, they must be pretty gullible.”   

“You wound me,” he said, raising a hand to his heart, and grabbed her own hand as she rolled her eyes. “Stay, if we’re really playing out this ruse. I won’t have it said that I’m the kind of rogue who kicks his bedfellows out in the middle of the night. And I know my bed is more comfortable than the hammocks in the passenger quarters.”  

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” She moved to draw her hand away, but something in his gaze pinned her in place – was that concern?    

“Only the mean ones, Genechka.” His voice was teasing, but his features kept that awful, soft expression. “I’m not trying to seduce you, kotichka. I’ll sleep in my chair, I’ve done it before. You need sleep more than I do, after all that puking.”  

She wrinkled her nose. “You’re disgusting.”  

“Says the girl who threw up on every plank of my deck.” He hesitated, then, more practically, he added: “Besides, I want to pull this off as much as you do, or we’ll never have the chance to talk without your general looking over our shoulders.” There was a note of disgust in his voice as he mentioned the Darkling, and she filed it away for further interrogation.   

“I’ll stay,” she agreed, finally. The bed did look far more inviting than her hammock between Taisa and Ivan, “but if you try anything-”  

Now it was his turn to wrinkle his nose. “What a thought. You’re not my type, Safin. I like them taller, darker, and meaner.”   

 “Rude,” she said, shrugging off her kefta so she was left in her shirt and breeches, and toeing off her boots. “I’m everyone’s type.”  

“I’ve always had more refined tastes than the masses,” he said, mournfully, and she hit him in the face with a pillow.  

She had not shared a room with anyone but the King since she was a child, and she expected her usual anxious insomnia to creep in as Nikolai pulled off his own coat and boots and blew the oil lamp out. She heard the chair creak as he settled into it, and, a few minutes later, he began to snore softly. Her chest did not tighten. Her pulse did not begin to rattle. The alien sensation of warmth remained in the pit of her stomach, making her limbs feel soft and heavy, lulling her eyelids shut.   

She woke later than she’d meant to, and bolted upright, startled for a moment by the unfamiliar surroundings. It took her a few moments to recall where she was, until she heard Nikolai’s low laugh.   

“Were you watching me sleep?” she said, glaring at him.  

“Are you always this grumpy in the mornings?” he retorted, dropping her kefta over her head. “Up. It’s a big day today.”   

She grumbled incoherently, sliding her arms into the sleeves. “A big day of more stupid ocean?”  

He looked irritatingly smug. “Wait and see.”   

She understood as soon as she was on deck, of course. On the horizon, the coast of Novyi Zem crept towards them, hazy blue giving way to deep green and vivid orange, speckled with the glowing white stucco of farm buildings and towns. The Darkling stood near the ship’s prow, looking out towards the harbour, and Genya was reminded of one of the King’s hunting dogs, catching the scent of wounded prey.   

Run, Alina, part of her whispered, and she bit down on her tongue to jar her out of her disloyalty. If they tripped over Alina still hiding in the first port she’d arrived in, she was clearly incapable of surviving on her own. The oprichniki, looking stiff and awkward in sailors’ garb, filed off the ship with the crew on shore leave to gather information on a girl and a boy paying their way with a pocketful of stolen hairpins. To Genya, they stood out from the crowd like wolves among sheep, but perhaps other people were less attuned to the presence of dangerous men. The Darkling sat on the foredeck, watching the harbour traffic as though he’d know the moment his quarry stepped out of hiding. Genya found herself at his side, watching the movements of the crowds for running or commotion, or for returning spies. If the crew of the ship were quiet around their passengers, they left a wide circle of emptiness around their patron, a sign of respect (or fear) that he almost seemed to relish, not least because it provided him the privacy to debrief her upwind from the stink of the trypots.  

“Did Sturmhond reveal anything of particular interest to you after I left?” he said. He did not enquire about her wellbeing – he knew that she was strong, and could more than handle a stripling privateer.  

“A little,” she said, carefully. She did not wish to lie to her general, but nor did she wish to reveal all she knew, at least not until she knew how he would react to the presence of Ravka’s younger prince. “He claims he grew up in east Ravka, and apprenticed to a shipwright in Kerch, which his accent would support.”  

“And his forays into piracy?”   

“He hasn’t mentioned how they began yet, but I’ll keep questioning him,” she said, which was not a lie.   

“And what of his loyalties?” The Darkling’s grey eyes seemed to see through her mask of serenity. “Is he a mercenary man? A patriot? Or are his loyalties to himself alone?”  

“It has only been a night, moi soverenyi,” she reminded him, careful not to seem too knowing too quickly. “He claims to sell his services to the highest bidder, but...” What could she say that would make Nikolai appear, if not trustworthy, then at least aligned with the Darkling’s goals? “I believe he has a patriotic streak that he tries to conceal. In his heart, I think he wants what is best for Ravka.”  

“And what does he believe is best for Ravka?”   

She met the Darkling’s eyes, and told the truth, unblinking. “You, my lord, if he is not a fool.”  

“Make sure he is not, before you give up your heart to him,” the Darkling said, but he was smiling, again with that paternal pride.   

“There will be no risk of that,” she said, coolly. “He’s charming, and attentive, but my heart is not for him.” Her heart was for Ravka, and for her general. It had been since she was twelve years old. (She did not think of two little boys and the taste of wild strawberries. She did not think of messy brown hair and callused fingers covering her own)  

“That is why I chose you,” he said, simply, and she felt her spine straighten, her shoulders relax. Her general’s faith in her remained intact. If she had been disloyal, he could not read it in her features.   

After a few moments of silence, he spoke again: “Alina’s room is ready?”  

She tried to ignore the way he said her name, like he was tasting something sweet. “Yes, moi soverenyi. We have secured one of the smaller cabins, and added a Durast-made lock.” She hesitated, and then said, “She will be safe with us?” She hated the questioning note in her voice, like a child seeking reassurance.  

“There is nowhere she will be safer,” the Darkling promised. “Alina is Ravka’s future. She will realise eventually that she belongs with us.”  

“She can be stubborn,” she reminded him, as if the Darking would need reminding of such a thing.  

“She is Grisha,” he replied. “She will learn her place is here.”  

Genya did not like to consider her general’s feelings for the Sun Summoner, but whatever they were, he clearly intended to keep her close, alive, and protected, which was more than she’d ever seen Alina do on her own behalf. Perhaps he was right, too. Wherever Alina went now, she would be hunted, and she could not hide her true nature forever. If the oprichniki could find her so quickly in Novyi Zem, so could any number of slavers or kidnappers. If she was foolish enough to be caught, she would realise in time that she was where she needed to be, safe with Genya at the Darkling’s left hand. Even so, a childish, romantic part of Genya remembered too-thin fingers clutching at parchment, and hoped that she and her tracker were clever enough to have disappeared into the hinterland.  

Alina disappointed her hopes, of course. The girl had an unsettling gift for that. The oprichniki returned just after noon, and crowded around their master like a murder of crows, so that she could not overhear whatever they had found. They may as well not have bothered. She knew as soon as Ivan and the other Heartrenders were gathered, similarly garbed as merchants and laborers. She felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. They’d found her. They’d found her, and she would not be among the trusted few to retrieve her. She had clearly been excluded from that particular call to arms, and there could be no other reason for the way she gripped the rail of the ship, watching them march out into the harbour crowds until she could no longer pick them out. She stood there for hours, unfastening her kefta as the heat began to rise despite the breeze from the ocean. She did not see them again, but kept watching the crowds as the light turned from gold to amber to deep, bloody red, staining the pale stucco of the harbour buildings. Even as it began to grow dark, she maintained her quiet watch over the harbour, so lost in thought that she almost jumped out of her skin when somebody spoke to her.  

“Worried for your friends, pretty girl?” It was Tamar, Nikolai’s- what, exactly? Her position in his crew had never actually been mentioned at their dinner.  

“I’m sure they’ll manage,” she said, affixing a pleasant smile to her lips. Ivan’s crew had never been her friends. Part of her viciously hoped the Sun Summoner blinded them, or cut them to shreds, but she knew that Alina had never been a fighter. It was why she’d chosen to run at all.  

“All those big strong Grisha to bring home one little girl? I’d hope so.” Tamar leaned back against the railing, leaning back to let the sun warm her golden skin. “What’s she like, your Sun Summoner?”   

“I barely knew her,” she lied. “She studied with the Etherealki – the Order of Summoners, not with the Corporalki. And she learned with the younger classes, anyway.”  

“But you must have seen her,” she pressed.  

Genya tilted her head at her. “A few times, around the Little Palace. Why so curious?”  

Tamar shrugged, but Genya could tell the difference between true and feigned indifference easily now. “It’s not every day we play host to a living legend. My mother used to tell us stories about a Saint who would summon the sun.”  

“Your mother was Ravkan?” It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given her flawless command of the language with only a hint of a Zemeni accent.   

“She was a soldier,” Tamar confirmed. Genya noted that she had not specified for which army. First Army recruits were usually prouder of their service. “She met our father on the Shu Han border.”  

“And you grew up in Ravka?”  

“Novyi Zem, actually. Avva only stayed in Ravka for her sake, and after she died...” She gave an expressive shrug. “What about you?”  

“The Little Palace, like all Grisha children.” It wasn’t really a lie. She had studied there, even if she’d spent most of her days in the Grand Palace.   

“But before that? Or were you too young to remember when they took you?”  

“It was an honour to be chosen,” she said, the rote words tripping off her tongue before she could stop them. “I was born in Caryeva. My parents were horse breeders. The testers discovered me when I was six, but I think they’d been expecting it.” The memories were faint, but she did not remember her parents weeping as the other families did, as she was loaded into the cart with two other children. They had only pressed a kiss to her forehead and lifted her into the seat. Maybe they’d always expected to let her go.  

“So young?” She shook her head, in a sympathy that did not feel entirely feigned. “I can’t imagine that.”  

“It’s necessary,” she said. “The Little Palace is meant to be a safe haven for its children. Before the Darkling created it, Grisha were in danger from otkazat’sya everywhere they were found.” She may have missed most of the history her fellow Grisha studied, but that she’d learned well enough.  

“Not everywhere,” the other woman corrected her, lightly. “In Novyi Zem, they call Grisha zowa – blessed.”   

Genya felt her shoulders stiffen. “Why are you telling me this?”  

Tamar shrugged. “You seemed lonely, and I was bored. Besides, the captain seems to like you. Maybe I’d like to find out why.” She smirked, her eyes roving over Genya’s body, and strangely, that relaxed her a little. Flirting, with an ulterior motive of finding out more about the captain’s new paramour. It made sense, though she still would not lower her guard.  

“You don’t think he’d have some objection to you flirting with his- with me?” she corrected herself quickly. Nikolai’s claim on her was a sham. She was the Darkling’s creature.  

She waved a dismissive hand. Her movements were loose and casual, but her muscles were wiry - a soldier, like her mother? A mercenary, perhaps? “If I can steal you away with a few pretty words, he clearly didn’t take good enough care of you, but he’s been in a better temper since you arrived, and I like to keep him on side.”  

“You’re fond of him?” For all that she’d seen him ordering the crew about, she still couldn’t quite picture sweet, careless Kolya as the kind of leader that mercenaries and pirates would happily obey.  

She shrugged again. “He’s well enough, as captains go. The pay is good, the rum is free, and the fighting is never more than we can take.” The movement of her shoulders was over-casual, almost practiced – she was lying, they were closer than she was admitting. “What of your general?”  

“What about him?”   

“You’ve been part of his army since you were six, you’re part of his strike force, you’re clearly someone special,” Here, she gestured to her shoulders, to the deep blue embroidery that marked her as a Tailor. “You don’t seem like one of his bloodhounds, but you must have your own thoughts on him.”  

Her questions were getting too prying. Genya ought to shut her down with a barbed comment, but... She hadn’t argued, when Tamar had said she seemed lonely. The last real conversation she’d had, aside from that odd confrontation with David, had been with Alina. She could keep this going for a little while longer. She’d played Alina for months.  

“He’s a skilled general, likely the most powerful Grisha in the world, and Ravka’s greatest protector.” Nothing she had said was untrue. “What more could there be to know?”   

“Oh, only all the things that make him a person,” Tamar said, a teasing glint to her eyes. “Now, the stories I could tell you about Sturmhond...”  

“The Darkling is not that kind of leader,” she said, and hoped she did not sound too defensive of him. “He is like a father to our kind. He protects us from the ignorant, trains us in our powers, raises us up to follow in his footsteps as Ravka’s protectors...”  

Tamar’s head was tilted to one side, her expression searching. “Are there any Grisha in Ravka who aren’t his soldiers?”  

Genya leant forward on the guardrail, digging her fingers into the wood. “It’s been our duty since Yaromir the Determined founded our country. The Darkling restored us to our rightful place.” She had not answered the question, and she knew it. She thought of David’s gentle, callused hands, and wondered what he would have made if Ravka did not hunger for rifles, bombs, and amplifiers. “It is an honour to serve in the Second Army.”  

Tamar looked almost disappointed, “Of course. I didn’t mean to offend you.”  

“It was nothing,” she shrugged, pushing herself upright. “I should get back to work.” Not that she had anything to do until the Darkling returned or Alina was found.  

“How’s your seasickness?” Tamar called after her, as she walked away. Genya did not reply. Even before she saw Ivan step down from the driver’s seat of the wagon, she knew. Stupid, stupid Alina. She made her way to the gangplank at almost a run, refastening her kefta as she moved.   

It was hard to see Alina at first. The Heartrenders and the oprichniki had formed a phalanx around the Darkling, blocking him from easy view. She could just catch a glimpse of the boy Alina had run away for – dark-haired, handsome, but seething with an anger that repulsed her. Then again, she would be seething if she were manacled and dragged along by oprichniki. He was led below deck to the brig by the soldiers, but the Darkling and his Heartrenders headed straight for the cabin she’d furnished for Alina, and Genya followed. Without the barrier formed by the oprichniki, she could catch a glimpse of tangled brown hair, streaked with pollen, and her fingers itched to restore it to shining sleekness. The Darkling himself carried her in his arms, and she hung limp and pale as a doll against his dark robes. It was only when he laid her down in the narrow bunk that Genya could see the ruin of her left shoulder through the crescent-shaped tear in her tunic, oozing thick black blood.  

She stared between Ivan and the Darkling, unable to disguise her horror. Is this what safety looks like?  

She didn’t realise she’d spoken aloud until they both turned to look at her. She saw a sneer creep across Ivan’s face, but it was not quick enough to disguise how queasy the strange wound made him.   

The Darkling’s expression was cold. “Alina was reluctant to come home. Discipline was required.”  

Genya swallowed her nausea, and focussed on the practical – she had done very little healing work beyond minor cuts and and scrapes, and fading scars of childhood injuries for the Queen’s favourites. Still, she remembered the basics of battlefield medicine from one of the early classes that all Corporalki had taken, and she knelt beside Alina to cut away the soiled fabric and begin to clean the wound with alcohol. The girl did not stir. Not looking up, she asked Ivan: “Has she been out since she was hurt, or are you keeping her under?”  

“I’m keeping her heartrate slow. It keeps her quiet, and will stop her bleeding out. Can you handle it?”   

Cleansed of dried blood and dust from the road, the injury to her shoulder was formed of smaller gouges, layered in concentric rings around her deltoid. They cut deep into the muscle of her shoulder, but did not look infected. A true healer, like Taisa, could have given a better assessment of the damage, but some part of Genya felt oddly protective of the girl. Better she be tended to by someone she’d once called a friend than a stranger obeying orders.   

“I can handle it,” she told Ivan, “but she’ll need to wake enough to eat when I’m finished. Clear broth, to replace all the blood she’s lost.”  

She did not see his response, but heard the door close behind him, leaving her alone between the Sun Summoner and the Darkling. She felt a hand on her shoulder, the flow of his power flooding her veins, and let it pour through her, knitting together skin and muscle, the delicate framework of veins and arteries which fed them. For a few moments, she held Alina’s life in her hands, and felt almost drunk on the power.   

The feeling was quickly extinguished when he removed his hand. “That’s enough.”  

She blinked, examining her work. “I could do more. She needn’t scar, and she might still have some pain.”  

“She will benefit from the reminder that her actions have consequences.” She could feel his hand resting on the top of her head. “If she were more like you...”  

The pride that filled her was brighter than any light Alina had ever summoned, but she managed to say: “She would not be the Sun Summoner if she were more like me, moi soverenyi.” It was the first principle of the Small Science: like called to like. Genya was drawn to perfection, to correcting every minor flaw in her appearance and surroundings, and so her instincts moved her to nudge and adjust the tiniest fragments of the world to create it. Alina... She was a timid, nervous little thing, but when her passions broke through her shyness – for her tracker, her art, for a chance to correct some small injustice that frustrated her – she was lit from within. Genya could not imagine what feeling every emotion so deeply was like. Her own feelings felt so much cooler and more distant in comparison. It was one of the things that had fascinated her about the other girl.  

“Perhaps not,” he sighed. “Foolish, wilful little thing. How can Ravka’s fate lie in such small hands?”  

“She is young, moi soverenyi.” There were only three years between her and Alina, but sometimes they felt like a century. “She will mature, and realise the sacrifices we all must make to ensure our country’s future.” And our own, she added, silently.  

“You are all young,” he said, with a tired sigh. The hand was removed from her hair, and she felt cold and almost weightless its absence. “ Children.”  

She looked up at him. “ We are soldiers of Ravka.” Genya had been a soldier since she had been six years old. If she had ever thought otherwise, it had been a child’s delusion.  

He murmured something under his breath in Old Ravkan which she did not quite catch, and then, aloud: “And you will be her salvation, I promise you that.” He leaned down beside her, stroked a hand through Alina’s hair. “Take care of her for me, Genya, and try to remind her of where her loyalties should lie. All of this is for her benefit, and for Ravka.”  

She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the sensation of phantom fingers on her bare skin as she pretended to sleep. She opened them again when she heard the door open and then close, and smelled the rich, gamy scent of broth made with whale blubber. She glanced up to see Ivan’s sour expression.   

“She can’t drink that if she’s unconscious,” Genya said, sharply. “Bring her out.”  

He snorted. “You didn’t see how she fought when we found her. It was like she thought going down fighting was the only option.”  

Like an animal in a trap, she thought, and smothered the flash of sympathy for the girl.   

“Then wake her up, and hold her still,” she retorted. “Surely Ravka’s greatest Heartrender is capable of restraining one girl.”  

He sighed, impatient, but leaned over Alina’s sleeping form with a scowl. He rested a hand over her heart, and Genya remembered its bright, flickering beat-beat-beat as the Darkling’s power had swept through her. Was that how Ivan felt all the time?  

Alina’s dark eyes fluttered open, and she gasped.   

“Drink,” Genya said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders to prop her up.   

Ivan looked at them both with disgust. “You do it,” he ordered, shoving the heavy, ceramic cup into her free hand. She pressed it to Alina’s lips.   

“Drink, Alina,” she repeated. Her eyes were wide and unfocussed, as if she was still dreaming. Her hands twitched, but she could not move enough to knock the cup away. She pressed her lips together, defiant. Foolish girl. Genya would not let her starve herself out of pure stubbornness. She pinched her nose shut, forcing her to open her mouth to breath, and poured the broth down her throat, a little at a time.   

She coughed and spluttered, trying to mouth something at her, but Genya only held the cup to her lips, forcing her to finish the broth. Her brow was furrowed, her eyes as wide with injury and betrayal as if Genya were pouring hemlock down her throat, but she would understand eventually. She will not forgive you, the general’s voice echoed in her head, from so many months ago.  

Here, now, the Darkling was speaking too: “Put her back under.”  

Her face went slack, the fight going out of her. Her pupils dilated. Her eyelids fluttered shut, and she fell limp against Genya’s arm. She laid her back down gently, smoothing her hair out across the pillows, making it shine like silk. In repose, her features soft rather than defiant, she looked so fragile, so young. Genya had never felt as young as Alina looked then.  

“How long will you keep her under?” she said, not looking up.  

“Until we’re far enough from shore that she will understand her options.” The Darkling’s voice was low and reassuring. “We have Healers. She’ll be perfectly safe.”  

They had Taisa, who’s greatest skill in Genya’s opinion was a calf-eyed adoration of her general, but she did not say that allowed. She remained with Alina until long after it was dark, smoothing out the dark circles under her eyes and the dry patches on her skin. She tried not to think of the last time she had sat by a bedside, seeking small imperfections to fix because she could do nothing to repair what was broken. Nikolai’s hair had shone like spun gold before he woke up.  

Alina slept for days. Genya did not. The Darkling had charged her with the Sun Summoner’s care, and she was determined not to neglect her. Ivan thought her soft, but it was not affection that kept her tethered to her side. It was duty, ensuring that she was kept rolled onto her side and that she did not choke, that she was not tipped out of her bunk when the ship pitched and rolled. Affection was what kept Alina’s hair soft and untangled, her shift clean and unspotted by choked-on broth. Genya knew the difference well. She left Alina’s side only to wash and to eat, and regretted both when she returned to find Alina’s hands in chains.   

She sought out Ivan, and stalked up to him with a scowl that almost matched his. “Was chaining an unconscious girl down really necessary?” she snapped. “You’ll damage her shoulder more than the nichevo’ya did.”  

He shrugged, coldly. “The Darkling ordered it. Argue with him, if you must, but she’s more of a danger than you’re willing to admit.”  

Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the fever-dream state that seemed to have possessed her since they’d carried Alina aboard, but she did seek the Darkling out to plead her case. “Taisa says the wound in her shoulder will not heal further,” she began, which the general already knew. “I’m worried the weight of her manacles will further damage the muscles. It could cause her pain for the rest of her life.”  

He did not look up from the report he was reading. “Pain can be a useful reminder that actions have consequences. Alina seems to need more reminders of that fact than most.”  

“Perhaps, but-” She bit her lip, hoping she did not sound too sympathetic, “she struggled enough learning the basics of summoning with two working arms. Pain might prove a further obstacle to the mastery of her abilities. Ravka needs her, so surely her health should be our primary concern?”  

The Darkling looked up at her then, and his expression was cold. She felt herself shrink back a little, reaching for the doorway behind her. “Do you doubt my ability to protect those in my service, Genya?” It wasn’t a threat, he knew he did not need to threaten her. It wasn’t a threat, and she wasn’t afraid.   

“No, moi soverenyi.”  

“Then you know that Alina’s health is my most pressing concern. If it takes a little pain to remind her that her life is not something to be thrown away so carelessly, that is a price I am more than willing to pay. What is one girl, to the fate of Ravka?”  

She tasted bile, and swallowed it down. “I understand, moi soverenyi. Is there anything else you require of me?”   

“Keep a closer eye to Sturmhond, now that we’ve recovered our Sun Summoner. Make sure he does not need additional motivation to see the plan through.”  

She bowed and withdrew, feeling grey and sickly for reasons she did not want to dig into too hard. As she rounded the corner to Alina’s cabin, she heard voices, and sped her pace, reaching the door at almost a run. She almost rammed into Tamar, standing in the open doorway, and beyond her, she could see her gigantic twin, leant over Alina’s bed, and- Nikolai?    

She tried to duck under Tamar’s arm, but felt herself caught around the waist by the taller, stronger woman. “Ssh, pretty girl,” she heard in her ear, and she felt blackness creep in around the edges of her vision. Distantly, she could hear Nikolai speaking, and she tried to call out to him, but the world was dropping away as her heartrate fell, and she could not fight the darkness that took her.  

Notes:

So the kids are finally back together! I was so excited about this reunion, and I hope you enjoyed it too! This fic is bringing me so much joy, and I'm nearly up to the end of the original trilogy! All your comments and thoughts encourage me to write more of this fic, and as soon as it's finished, I'll be posting updates twice a week rather than only on Thursdays, so please let me know what you think of this chapter, and what you're hoping to see in later ones...

Chapter 6: vi - the night doesn't frighten me (i chose to close my eyes)

Summary:

Genya closes her eyes. The darkness falls anyway.

She woke in Nikolai’s bed, and shifted from woozy to furious in under a second. He was sat in the chair beside her, reading as quietly as if he hadn’t had her knocked out for catching him spying on Alina. She took a breath, trying to calm herself. It wasn’t a betrayal. She’d simply forgotten that they were not the children they used to be.  

“What were you doing in Alina’s room?” she said, coldly, and he started, dropping his book.  

“You’re awake!”  

“No thanks to you.” She drew back the covers, noting that she was in her shirt and breeches. Her kefta hung from a hook on the door, her boots set neatly beneath it. “Answer the question, before the Darkling is the one asking it.”  

“I wanted to check on her, make sure she wasn’t being mistreated.” At Genya’s suspicious look, he raised his hands, defensive. “I’m a privateer, not a slaver. Kidnapping a girl who ran away from a war she didn’t start never sat well with me.”  

It made sense with the Nikolai she knew, the boy who’d only ever wanted to make people smile, but she could not trust that any longer. “Then why take the Darkling’s commission at all?” she pressed.  

He sighed, looking older than she’d ever seen him. “Ravka is dying, Genya. She’s fighting a war on two fronts, split in half by an impossible divide, and her king cares more for his horses than his ministers. If your Alina can save her... My conscience will bear the weight of a few more sins, and I’ll find a way to spirit her out of the Little Palace once the Fold is gone. But first, she needs to be back in Ravka, and strong enough to destroy it.”  

It had been years, but at least part of her still believed that she still knew him well enough to hear honesty in his voice. “The Darkling will never let her go,” she said, and did not know why she said it, “She’s too vital to his plans, to the fate of the world.”  

“That isn’t your concern,” he said, and his voice was gentle, reassuring. “I promise, Genechka, for now, your general and I are allies in this.”  

She snorted. “I know what your allyship is worth. You had your minions knock me out-” She paused, her eyes widening as she realised what she had said. “ You had your minions knock me out. They’re Heartrenders! You have rogue Grisha on your crew-”  

He clapped a hand over her mouth, hushing her urgently. “Not Grisha. They grew up in Novyi Zem, never studied at the Little Palace. They're not deserters, just... crew members with additional skills.”  

She took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. Nikolai had not studied the history they were taught in the Little Palace. “Rogue Grisha are dangers to themselves and others,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Their control is imperfect – Alina permanently blinded two of the soldiers on her skiff the first time her abilities manifested, did you know that? If they lash out in a fight, they could do as much damage to you as to your enemies!”  

He raised his eyebrows. “I appreciate the worry, but Tolya and Tamar are more than capable. I’ve worked with them for years. They even did a decent job on this.” He gestured to his altered features.  

Genya flinched. “That’s- not possible.” Heartrenders and Healers were as different to Tailors as Alina was from other Etherealki. It was a natural affinity, not a skill that could be easily picked up.  

Nikolai tilted his head, looking at her with eyes half-lidded. “You know, it always confused me how someone as clever as you was so determined to believe what people told her over the proof of her own eyes.”  

She gritted her teeth, swung her legs out of the warmth of the blankets (her muscles burned, maybe she had gone too long without rest), and pushed past him to grab her kefta . She shrugged it on, not looking at him as she asked: “How did you cover carrying an unconscious Grisha up here?”  

“I told them I’d found you passed out at Alina’s door in a dead faint. Nobody seemed surprised, given how little rest you’ve had since she arrived.”  

So the other Grisha would think her even more of a weakling. Wonderful. “And if I tell them what really happened?”  

She felt his hand on hers, gently tugging her around to face him. “You can, if that’s what you decide,” he said, simply. “It would sow distrust between my people and yours, maybe give them more cause to keep Alina unconscious until we reach the Bone Road, but if that’s what duty compels of you, I'll understand.”  

The final decision is yours. Why did Nikolai’s trust feel so different to the Darkling’s? The latter was a heavy chain of office, laid around her neck to remind her of a soldier’s duty. This was like being handed a baby bird, and asked to keep it alive when snapping its neck would be more convenient. She gave a hissing sigh through gritted teeth. “Please don’t make me regret this, Sobachka.”  

He pressed a kiss to her knuckles. It felt like a promise. “Pirate’s honour, kotichka.”  

Midmorning sun blazed across the deck as she stepped outside, and Ivan approached with his usual expression of a man smelling something offensive, which may have had more to do with the trypots than with her. “The Darkling wants her awake today,” he said, without preamble, “if you’re done playing the invalid, of course.”  

“As my general orders,” she said, smoothly, and ignored his sour look as she paused at one of the water barrels to get her a drink.   

“She doesn’t require any more nursing. Taisa says she is as healed as she can make her.”  

Genya did not look up at him, focussed on the tin cup in her hands, the dull tarnish of the metal giving way to shining tin under her focus. Easier to concentrate on something small, something fixable.  

“That may be so, but she’ll be no use to anyone if her throat is too dry to speak.” She kept her tone overbright and acid-sweet, enjoying the familiarity of irritating her sour commander. Easier to focus on that, on the practicalities of waking the sleeping Sun Summoner, than on Alina’s potential reactions or the narrowing line she walked.  

She perched on the edge of Alina’s bed, holding her wrist and watching closely as Ivan raised her pulse, waking her slowly. She reached out for the strange sensation she’d felt as the Darkling’s power flowed through her, the fragile beat-beat-beat of her heart, and wondered if she could nudge it without him.   

Alina woke with an agonised gasp, eyes flying open as she bolted upright. There were tears in her wide brown eyes, and she stared at Genya with as much terror as recognition. She held the cup to her lips, willing her breathing to steady, her heartrate to slow enough to calm her so that she did not hurt herself in her panic  

“Drink,” she said, as she’d told her so many times.  

Alina seemed more focussed now, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. “What is it?”   

“Just water.” She kept her tone calm, light, reassuring, as though they were back in the Little Palace infirmary. Alina raised her manacled hands to hold the cup awkwardly, beginning to drink greedily. There was a lock of dark hair stuck to her sleep-flushed cheek. “Slowly,” she ordered, smoothing it back, “or you’ll make yourself sick.”  

“How long?” Alina glanced to Ivan by the door, the hunted-doe look creeping back to her eyes as she dropped the cup in her lap. “How long have I been out?”  

“A little over a week.” It was far longer than Genya had hoped or expected, but apparently her tracker had been... resistant to his part in the Darkling’s plan.   

Alina’s eyes flew wide, her too-thin fingers clenching into fists. “A week?”  

She tried to shove herself to her feet, but swayed as if about to faint. Genya caught her as she stumbled, righting her, and, tentatively, willed her arteries to widen, allowing more blood to her brain. It seemed to work almost too well – why hadn’t she tried it sooner? - and Alina shoved her off, stumbling over towards the sidescuttle. Her face shifted as she looked out at the blank, silvery ocean, into one of those expressions so vivid they were almost painful to look at. Her brow furrowed, her lips parted, and she let out a quiet noise of despair that would have broken a weaker heart than Genya’s.  

When she whirled back to face them, there were tears overflowing from her eyes.   

“Where’s Mal?” she demanded of Genya. It took her a few moments to connect the name to the tracker, before she remembered Malyan Oretsev, scrawled across so many envelopes she had fed to the fire. In the time it had taken Genya to make the connection, Alina had already turned Ivan, her voice shaking with rage and desperation: “ Where’s Mal?”  

Ivan did not answer, only assessed her coolly. “The Darkling wants to see you. Are you strong enough to walk, or do I have to carry you?”  

Genya stepped between him and Alina. The child had barely woken up, the general did not need to drag her across the deck in her nightgown. “Give her a minute,” she said, sharply, “Let her eat, wash her face at least.”  

“No, take me to him.” The voice came from over her shoulder, and Genya turned to frown at the other girl. “I’m fine,” Alina insisted, as if she wasn’t already pale and swaying on her feet. She paled further as the stench from the corridor hit her, and did not resist when Genya took her arm. “What is that?”  

“Blood, bone, rendered blubber. You get used to it,” Ivan told her. Genya looked at him sidelong. Was he actually trying to comfort the girl?  

“ You get used to it,” Genya retorted, wrinkling her nose.   

The ladder to the deck proved more of an issue: between her weakness and her irons, Alina struggled for a few long moments before Ivan lost patience and hauled her up by the wrists. She seemed even more fragile and fawnlike out in the bright light of day, stumbling as the ship rolled beneath them and staring about at the sailors and the other Grisha. Genya would have held her head up like a queen, proud and defiant to the last, but Alina seemed disoriented and bewildered by the brightness and people after so many days of quiet and darkness. Perhaps the Darkling would take pity on her like this – a girl who could barely walk, who retched as they passed the trypots, was more an invalid than a threat. She paused a moment beneath the rigging, staring up at the gold-eyed twins above. Did she remember them from that odd moment in her cabin? Genya nudged her forward, eager not to find out.   

The Darkling waited at the prow of the ship, a forbidding figurehead, and he dismissed Genya and Ivan with a wave. They bowed and retreated, Genya to the bow of the ship, Ivan to the ranks of the Corporalki. She watched as they played out their grim little pantomime. Alina’s tracker was marched out onto the deck, and Alina stared out at him with naked desperation, like a woman who saw her own heart laid bare. He called her name, and she reached for him with a wail as one of the guards cuffed him roughly. She did not know that he was not in any real danger, but that could be little comfort to her now. She and the Darkling spoke in low, frantic voices, and Genya could not catch their conversation, but she could see Alina shudder as he tapped the collar with one finger, her defiant glare as he cupped her cheek in one hand. For some reason, this small gesture made Genya’s own stomach roll. She clutched the railing, trying to focus on the real sensations of sea air and woodgrain beneath her fingers, not the phantom feeling of rough fingers against her cheek, the ghostly murmur of “ Pretty thing.”  

Her moment of weakness had distracted her for too long – she almost missed Ivan’s confrontation with the twins, and did not move quickly enough to step in when she saw Alina sprawled on her back, Tamar on her knees, her twin clutching his chest, and Ivan standing above them, a puppeteer with their strings in his fists. She did not even know what she would have done to intervene, because before she could move, there was Nikolai with a pistol pressed to Ivan’s head.   

Genya had thought that years as the king’s plaything and the Darkling’s spy had inured her to fear, but now her heart was a frantic bird, beating its wings against the cage of her ribs. Her duty was with Ivan. She should be moving to help Ivan. She should not be kneeling beside Tamar, checking she could breath again, or pulling a shaken Alina to her feet. Those moments felt like the impulses of another acting through her body, and she was relieved when Ivan stormed away, the twins dismissed back to their duties, and Nikolai escorted Alina back to her cabin. It took too long to compose herself, and to realise how close she had come to letting everything slip beyond her control. They were not children anymore. Nikolai had been a soldier, he was no longer the playful boy who’d promised to build her wings, just as she was no longer the girl who’d healed his burned fingertips. He was a potential threat, she was the Darkling’s spy, and the feeling of comfort and safety his presence brought was nothing more than the pulsing sensation of a phantom limb. She was not the only one the incident had shaken, either. There was a new tension in the air between the Grisha and the crew now, and Genya wondered if the weight of it was anything like what the Squallers claimed to feel before an oncoming storm.  

Alina was curled on her side in her bunk when Genya brought her dinner tray, her face to the wall. Genya felt something tighten around her heart at the curve of her spine, like that of a weeping child or a sick animal. Was this how she’d slept in that great white bed in the Little Palace?  

“You should eat,” she said, covering momentary softness with practicality.  

“Leave me alone.” She even sounded childlike, her voice raw with pain and thick with tears.  

She hovered in the doorway, trying to read the best course of action in the protruding bones of her shoulderblades. “Sulking gives you wrinkles,” she said, trying to draw an unwilling smile from her.   

“Well, lying gives you warts.” Her voice was sour, but at least she was talking.   

Genya feigned a laugh, and set the tray down on the bedside table. Alina did not speak again, and to draw her out, Genya pretended to examine her own reflection in the small mirror. “Maybe I should go blond,” she said, pretending to be thinking aloud. “Corporalki red clashes horribly with my hair.” It was the kind of frivolous thing she might have said to draw her out two months ago ( a century ago ), and it drew a familiar snort from the girl on the bed.   

“You know you could wear baked mud and still outshine every girl on two continents,” she said, over her shoulder, but she did not return Genya’s smile.   

Genya sighed, and focussed on the toes of her shining boots rather than on Alina’s lovely, wounded face. Humour had not worked. Flirting would be too cruel. Honesty would be... difficult. “I missed you,” she said, and was surprised at how much the simple truth seemed to hurt both of them.  

Alina’s voice was soft and aching when she spoke again: “Were you ever my friend?”  

“Would it make a difference?”  

“I like to know just how stupid I’ve been.”  

You were never stupid. Just innocent. She bit the comment back. It would do nothing now that innocence was gone. “I loved being your friend, Alina,” she said, instead. “But I’m not sorry for what I did.”  

“And what the Darkling did? Are you sorry for that?”  

How could she be? Genya Safin had been many things over the course of her twenty-one years, but she was not a hypocrite. One girl, for the whole of Ravka. The choice she’d made for Alina she’d made for herself long ago. Perhaps it was a cruel one, but the world had never had many kind options for girls like them.   

“I know you think he’s a monster,” Genya said, “but he’s trying to do what’s right for Ravka, for all of us.” If the Darkling was monstrous, Genya had met greater monsters, and she knew which she preferred.  

Alina responded with the expected outrage, shoving herself up onto her elbows in a way that could not have done her shoulder any good, but if Genya had anticipated her reaction, she had not anticipated her next words: “Genya, he created the Fold.”  

Genya blinked at her, wondering if keeping her unconscious for so long had left permanent damage to her brain. Gently, she began: “The Black Heretic-”  

“ There is no Black Heretic.” Alina’s eyes were wild, but she stared at Genya with an almost feverish intensity. “He blamed his ancestor for the Fold, but there has only ever been one Darkling, and all he cares about is power.”  

“That’s impossible,” she said, her voice cool and practical though she did not feel either. “The Darkling has spent his life trying to free Ravka from the Fold.” She hoped she sounded calm and gentle, the way one was supposed to talk to children waking from nightmares.   

Alina shoved her hand through her hair, mussing the silky strands Genya had brushed out day after day. “How can you say that after what he did to Novokribirsk?” she demanded. What he did? Genya frowned. They’d all been told that was an accident, the tragic consequence of the Darkling’s attempt to defend the skiff after Alina’s flight.   

“I know there was... an incident,” she said, carefully. Did Alina know something more than the Darkling wished to tell? Or was she lashing out to try and place blame for the tragedy anywhere but her own shoulders.  

“An incident?” she snapped, blazing with outrage. “He killed hundreds of people, maybe thousands!”  

She was so young. There had to be a way Genya could get her to understand the imperfect, selfish choices that people like them had to make to survive.  

“And what about the people on the skiff?” she said, mimicking Nikolai’s too-gentle tones.   

Alina slumped back onto the bed with a pained little gasp, the fire of her rage suddenly doused. After a few, long moment, she asked: “Were there... were there other survivors?”  

“Besides Ivan and the Darkling?”  

She nodded, jerky and mechanical, almost unwilling.   

Genya sighed. “Two Inferni, who helped them escape. A few soldiers from the First Army made it back, and a Squaller called Nathalia got out, but she died of her injuries a few days later.” Alina’s breathing was laboured, as if she was holding back sobs, and she stared up at the beams of the ceiling for a few long moments as she counted all the people that had left. Genya took her hand, gently, hoping now she would understand. “You did what you had to, Alina.”  

She let out a harsh laugh, and snatched her hand away, as if she’d touched something filthy. “Is that what the Darkling tells you, Genya? Does that make it easier?”  

She clasped her hands over her stomach, pressing the childish hurt away until she barely felt it at all. “Not really, no,” she said, honestly. Her kefta was crumpled and stained, and she focused on the stains, unpicking them from the cloth one particle at a time. “He freed me, Alina.” Why did she sound pleading? She did not need this girl’s forgiveness, or her understanding. “Run back to the Palace? Back to the- to the King?” She shook her head, refusing to choke on his title like he deserved her fear. “No. I made my choice.”  

“What about the other Grisha?” Alina demanded, and Genya almost flinched at the harshness of her voice. She swallowed that down too. She could live with Alina’s anger. “They can’t all have sided with the Darkling. How many of them stayed in Ravka?”   

She didn’t know what she had been expecting. Alina, of all people, would have no sympathy left for her. Still, her frame was stiff, and her voice colder as she responded: “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that with you.”  

“Genya-”  

Whatever else she wanted to wheedle out of her, Genya had lost the patience to hear it. “Eat, Alina,” she said. “Try to get some rest. We’ll be in the ice soon.”  

She brushed the dust of removed stains from her kefta and got to her feet. She was almost out of the door before Alina spoke again: “Genya? One more question.”  

Her hand was on the latch. She could leave. She did not have to answer.   

“The letters I wrote to Mal back at the Little Palace,” the other girl continued. “He said he never got them.”  

It wasn’t really a question. She did not have to answer. When she spoke, her voice was a choked whisper. “They were never sent. The Darkling said you needed to leave your old life behind.”   

The door clicked shut between them. The bolt slid home. In her memory, Genya stood before a fire, feeding page after page to the flames. She didn’t regret it. She didn’t. It had been what Alina needed then, to accept who she was, to unlock the power within her.  

Through the door, she could hear the too-familiar sound of a girl trying to cry without anyone hearing. As she sank to the floor in the dingy corridor, Genya was grateful that she had learned to cry silently long ago.   

She brought Alina her meals with no further attempts at conversation, and did not intervene when the Darkling staged his macabre little plays. Even if he’d ever intended to hurt Alina or her tracker, it would never have been necessary to get his way. They accepted the show for truth like the children they were, and Genya could not help them in any way that mattered. She avoided Nikolai and his altered face, too, refused his invitations to dine, tried to forget what he’d told her about the twins. Instead, she let herself sink into the familiar haze of duty that had protected her during her time in the Grand Palace, performing her chores and obeying Ivan’s or the Darkling’s orders like a doll, or a wind-up soldier. She kept her hands busy, and did not let her mind mull over her last conversation with Alina, or what it meant if Tailoring was simply a skill any Corporalnik could pick up, Healer or Heartrender. What it meant if she had never been special.  

Perhaps, if she had spent more time watching and less time avoiding her own thoughts, she would have seen the betrayal coming. As it was, she did not sense what was coming, even when Nikolai pulled her aside the night the tracker said they were close to finding their quarry.  

“I feel like you’ve been avoiding me Genechka,” he said, catching her arm outside Alina’s room and steering her towards his cabin. “I hope I haven’t offended you.” His voice was light and teasing.  

Hers was cool and neutral: “Why would you think that, moi Kapitan? ”  

He wrinkled his nose. “I hate it when you do that.”  

“I’m sorry, moi Kapitan? ”  

He closed the door of the cabin behind them, turning back to face her. “When you talk to me like I’m the Darkling. I thought we moved on from moi tsarevich when we were seven.”  

“ You were seven,” she said, unable to resist correcting him. “I was six.” He smirked, and she scowled, realising that he had been fishing for that reaction. “Do you have a problem with the way I talk to my general?” Not that it’s any business of yours.  

He sighed. “I didn’t bring you here to argue with you. I know things have been... tense since Alina woke up, but it should be different for us.”  

“Different how?” She folded her arms. “You threatened my superior officer-“  

“Who you hate.”  

“Irrelevant. Worse, you set yourself against the Darkling. ” She shoved her hair behind her ears, frustrated. “You put yourself, your whole crew, in danger, and for what?”  

He looked at her, blankly. “To stop an innocent girl being tortured. You do understand that, right?”  

She waved a dismissive hand. “He would never have actually hurt her. It was a show, nothing more.”  

“You didn’t seem to feel that way at the time.” In truth, Genya could remember little of how she’d felt for the past few days, so distant had her mind been from her body, but the icy grip of fear around her throat had made an impression. Nikolai continued: “You looked terrified. You know, the logical response to seeing a friend in danger.”  

“I don’t see how my feelings for the Sun Summoner come into this,” she said, coldly. Her feelings about Alina were one of the many things that she’d swallowed down with the past selves she had devoured. Once, she had thought they were alike, both unique, both outsiders, both with a key role in the Darkling’s vision for Ravka. She knew better now.  

Nikolai’s expression twisted with hurt. “Sankt Ilya’s balls, you don’t make this easy, Genya.”  

She gritted her teeth, an old resentment curdling in her belly. Nikolai always managed to turn that kicked-puppy look into a grappling hook, pulling himself over her carefully constructed walls. She hated it, hated how he so easily made her feel . Would she have hated Dominik, if he were in Nikolai’s place? But Dominik had always understood her better. He had known her place before she ever did.  

“What am I meant to be making easy for you, Nikolai?” Her voice was sharp, but her exhaustion must have crept into it too, because Nikolai’s shoulders slumped. He reached for her hands, cupping them in his. Once they’d been the same, the soft, pale hands of noble children, almost the same size. Now, her hands looked almost doll-like, dwarfed in comparison to his, now calloused and browned by the sun.  

“I just- hoped it would be different this time,” he said, his voice soft and almost childish. “That now I’d be someone who would understand, that you could talk to.”  

“I’m talking to you now,” she said, trying to soften in reflection, “even if you’re not making any sense. What do you actually want, Kolya?”   

He sighed. “Do you remember when we quarrelled, before I went to Caryeva? And I promised to do anything, even build you wings if it would make you happy?”  

“Of- of course.” She had not thought of that day, those childish promises, in so many years. He had felt so much younger than her then. When had he grown up?  

“What if I told you I could do that now?” He squeezed her hands tightly, as if trying to tell her something with more than words. “What if I strapped wings to your back that would carry you anywhere, away from Ivan and the Darkling and this ship I know you hate?” He gave a wet laugh, somewhere between tears and mania. “What if we could fly away together, like the swan-children from the Wandering Isle, to Kerch, or Novyi Zem, anywhere you ever wanted to go? Would you come with me?”  

She shook her head, “Nikolai, that’s impossible-“  

“Humour me,” he insisted. “No queen, no Darkling, no master but yourself. Would you come with me?”  

“And abandon Ravka?” It was ridiculous, playing along with his fantasy, but she tried anyway. “Everything I owe the Darkling, the Second Army?”  

“You could have Ravka,” he said, something wild in his voice. “Caryeva, the Summer Palace, Os Alta, even! All the world, and a new pair of ice skates, if you only tell me that’s what you want!”  

She raised a hand to his cheek. “Kolya, you’re not making sense. Are you worried about me? You don’t need to be. I’m safe. I’m happy. I’m finally where I was always meant to be.”  

He met her eyes, covering her hand with his own. “You really think this is where you belong? Playing soldier, spy, seducer, whatever the Darkling wants you to be? It’s a big world, Genechka. There are so many other places you could find a home.”  

She laughed, and did not understand why it sounded broken. “Where else could I belong but the Second Army? I’m Grisha, Nikolai.” He still did not understand. Perhaps he never could, the gap between them as wide as the distance between Alina and her tracker.  

“You could belong with me,” he said, as if it were simple, obvious even. “There’s space on my crew for Tamar and Tolya. There would be space for you.”  

For a moment, she let herself taste that glittering, impossible dream, where they curled together like children, where she learned about zowa and Novyi Zem from Tamar and Tolya, where she woke every morning to the sea and its boundless horizons- and then reality crashed back down upon her with the weight of shackles. She had boarded up that door years ago. Nikolai just hadn’t seen it yet.  

He could see the weight of the choice she had made before she spoke aloud, and his shoulders slumped as though he felt it too, but still, she clung to his hand.  

“It’s a beautiful dream, Kolya,” she said, gently, “but it’s just not possible. I have duties and- he would never let me go.”  

“If you wanted to leave, I wouldn’t give him the choice,” Nikolai said, darkly, and for a moment, she was fourteen again, standing  barefoot by an open window, as if time had circled back on itself.  

She felt like she was repeating the same words she had said all those years ago: “I don’t need you to save me, Nikolai. This is what I want. What I always wanted.” What I killed your father for.  

He dropped her hand, and it fell to her side, a string cut. “But will it make you happy?” he demanded.  

She did not answer, but turned on her heel and fled. When she stood in the shadow of the mast, among the other Corporalki, hearing the mournful song of the Sea Whip, she would remember that moment, and almost choke on it. She felt the thump-thump-thump of the grappling hooks on the side before she saw them, and stumbled as the ship lurched beneath her feet. Ivan caught her – Ivan – and set her on her feet again, pressing the cold butt of a pistol into her hand. She looked up at him, bewildered at the first kindness he had ever shown her, but he had already moved on:  

“Genya, to me. Tomas, Lena, to the Darkling. The rest of you, move to repel the boarders,” he ordered, grimly. She followed him as though in a dream, still not understanding quite what was happening, and then she heard the eerie, howling cry go up in the rigging.  

“Hounds, to me!”  

That was Nikolai’s voice. No, not Nikolai,  Sturmhond now, Sturmhond always. Pirate’s honour, kotichka. The words slid between her ribs and neatly cut out her inconvenient heart. He had warned her all along, and she had been as blind and foolish as she had once thought Alina, betrayed just as neatly.  

She moved through the melee as Ivan’s shadow. He parted the combatants before them, and they stepped over the bodies of pirate and Grisha alike. He held her arm tight, pulling her along, and said, in her ear: “Better Alina die than fall into the hands of our enemies. Do you understand?”  

She nodded, once. She would not be weak again. She could see Alina now through the path Ivan was creating, slung over the shoulder of Tamar’s massive twin. He was running for the edge of the ship. She and Ivan pursued him. Ivan reached out with one hand, closed his fist tight. The giant fell to his knees, dropping Alina to the deck. Tamar and the tracker were nearer the bow, closer to the other ship, but turned back in seeming panic. Not Genya’s problem: a blue-robed Inferni approached to take care of both of them in an arc of flame- and froze.  

She could hear Ivan snarling: “What are you waiting for?” but she knew the answer before she even looked to Tamar.  

Her left hand was clenched into a fist, her right held shining steel. Her smile was the ending of things. “Good trick. I know a better one.”  She barely seemed to move, but bright, bloody steel emerged from the Inferni’s back. He fell.   

She had looked away from Ivan for less than a moment. That was all it had taken. He lay on the deck, eyes wide and empty, blood still bubbled on his lips. The giant towered over them both, a look of vicious glee turning his features monstrous, and Genya wondered how she had never known to fear him before.  

The Inferni was dead. Ivan was dead. Genya stood alone on the battlefield, the giant’s shadow falling over her. She had painted her skin with poison for years, watched the King wither and rot, and thought herself Death’s own handmaiden. Now, she knew she was a child, and Death was a fearful stranger.  

“ Stop them! ” Her general’s voice dragged her out of her frozen fright, as it had when she’d knelt before him as a weeping child. She set her jaw, and drew her pistol, aiming for the centre of the giant’s chest. He lunged toward her. Her finger rested on the trigger-  

“ No! ” Alina threw herself between them, wild-eyed, and time seemed to stop.   

Ridiculous girl, she thought. Her giant doesn’t need protecting from me.   

“ Genya,” Her voice was calm, quiet. Gentle. Why was Alina being gentle with her, after everything she’d done? “Are you really going to shoot me?”  

She looked around for help, for orders, for a clear shot at one of the twins. There was nothing. She felt Alina’s bony hand on her sleeve, and looked down to see her hand shaking. No. She was still a soldier. She remembered her mission. She turned the barrel on Alina.   

A crack like thunder. A shot. Nikolai- Sturmhond racing past her, yelling “ Run!”  

Alina, reaching out a hand to her, even as she held a gun to her chest. “Genya,” she pleaded, “come with us.”  

Genya was fourteen again, barefoot in her nightgown, poison painted on her skin as her victim’s son, her best friend, reached out a hand to rescue her. She had not wept then, but she wept now.   

“I can’t,” she sobbed. The gun fell from her hand, falling to the deck with a clatter. “Go, Alina. Just go.”  

In the next instant, Alina had been scooped up like a child in the giant’s arms, even as she cried out: “No! Wait!”  

It was already too late. He had already leapt from one ship to the other as the ropes binding them were cut away. She threw herself down below the bow moments before musket fire split the air where her head had been. Another thunderous crack, and darkness filled the air, blinding her momentarily. In the brief burst of light that followed ( Alina ?), she could see the fleeing schooner through an empty cannon port. Nikolai was looking back at her, the uncomprehending hurt of a heartbroken child scrawled on his face. She had not known that she could still hurt like that.   

The nichevo’ya descended like the wrath of a forgotten god, cloaking the ship from her sight, and in that moment, Genya finally believed Alina. She would believe anything of the man who could create such creatures from nothing, that he was immortal, that he was a Saint, that he was a god. She could hear the crackle of musketfire, but it was not enough, could never be enough. There was another burst of light, and a few of the shapes crumbled, but more waves formed to replace them from the seething darkness beyond. Fight, Alina, she prayed, to the Saints that she did not believe in. As if in answer, lightning rippled through the darkness above, cracking it like an egg. Another pulse from the Darkling, but she heard nothing from the schooner, no screams, or even the defiant howls of Sturmhond’s crew. She heard nothing but the rushing of the wind for what could have been minutes, or centuries. She would not have known. She knew only blood, battle-terror, and the betrayal on Alina’s face as she turned the gun on her. Alina the Sun Summoner. Alina the child. Alina her friend, still reaching out after Genya tricked her, betrayed her, tried to kill her. Was that naivety? Why did it feel like a strength Genya had never possessed?  

She came back to herself in fragments. She was aware of the darkness clearing, of Lena standing over her. Hands pulling her to her feet. Her muscles stiffening to stone. She tried to mouth What are you doing? but her voice was trapped in her throat. The will to act had returned to her, yet she was held frozen as quick hands unfastened and pulled away her scarlet kefta . It was then that understanding returned, and she felt a wail rising in her chest, but she could not move enough eve to cry. It was a strange, cruel gift, but it gave her a few more moments to compose herself as her hands were clapped in irons. When her body was her own again, the Corporalki around her tried to force her towards the centre of the deck. She did not weep, struggle, or protest. This choice was still left to her. She raised her head and strode forward to meet her fate, every inch a queen. She kept her head up, even as they forced her to her knees before the Darkling with the survivors of Sturmhond’s crew.   

He ignored the otkazat’sya, but he crouched before Genya, lifting her chin with one finger.  

“Sweet Genya,” he said, softly. His voice bled disappointment like darkness. “What did Sturmhond offer you to turn against me? I promise you, it was not worth it.”  

She stared into those distant grey eyes. She was six again: You’re special, Genya. You will live in the Grand Palace, with the Queen and her ladies, and tell me of everything important you see. Twelve again: You could be my greatest soldier, if you stay, if you can endure this. You decide, Genya. Seventeen: The Ornamental Blade. A death as slow and agonising as he deserves, I promise you. Twenty-one: I trust your judgement and your subtlety. The final decision is yours.  

She wanted to fling her arms around his knees like the frightened child she had been. She wanted to spit in his face, as Alina would have done.   

When she answered him, her voice only shook a little: “Nothing, moi soverenyi. ” Nikolai had offered her the world, and she had sold his trust for a red kefta and the Darkling’s smile. The Darkling’s trust had gone far more cheaply: Alina’s outstretched hand, her wide frightened-doe eyes.  

“ Nothing?” His voice was low, deadly, disgusted. But he had made her accustomed to disgust, and to pain. “I chose you because you were strong, Genya Safin. Have you proven me wrong?”  

She raised her chin, a show of defiance, and when she raised her voice, the sky echoed it back to her: “What I did, I did for Alina, and for Ravka.”   

She did not know if it was the truth, but the Grisha before her looked startled, the Darkling enraged, as the men kneeling beside her – strangers – let up a wild, yipping howl, which died only when the Heartrenders stilled their throats. She did not cower in the Darkling’s shadow, as he glared down at her.   

“Your reward for betraying me was nothing, and so your punishment will be the same.” There was a moment of cruel relief before his true meaning set in, and a chill crept down her spine. “Chain them in the middle of the deck. The girl in the centre.”  

The nichevo’ya descended like a final curtain. Genya did not remember screaming or weeping. She would die a soldier, not a frightened child.  

When she woke under Taisa’s careful hands, she knew her true punishment, and her tears flowed freely from her single remaining eye.  

Notes:

New week, new chapter! I am currently up to 16 chapters(?!) and I still haven't quite hit the end of Ruin and Rising, but every comment gets me writing more words, so please give me your thoughts! Next chapter, we're back on dry land with Nikolai, but we'll be back with Genya soon...

Chapter 7: vii - master pretender

Summary:

Nikolai uncovers some unfortunate home truths.

He was lucky that the ship had crashed so neatly into the lake with no casualties, Nikolai told himself, lucky that Colonel Raevsky was stationed at Kribirsk and recognised him well enough to confirm his identity, lucky that Alina’s fit of temper had caused laughter rather than incited division. He did not feel lucky now, sat at the colonel’s table with a plate for fine zabuski and glass of kvas in front of him. Even a life at sea had not given him a taste for the drink.   

“You hadn’t heard, then? About your father?” Raevsky was speaking in the concerned avuncular tone he’d taken when Nikolai had first been raised to the rank of Major, in those grey, blurred days of mourning Dominik where he’d taken his first real command.  

“Word travels slowly. I’d left Kerch before it had arrived, and afterwards, we were chasing the Darkling.” He pretended to sip the kvas , and hoped his hand was not shaking. "What have you heard?”  

“Nothing but rumours and twice-told tales,” he said, grimly. “The Apparat took control of the Grand Palace for a month, spread around stories that the King had been taken ill, but I heard from one of my lieutenants that the Queen was calling on all the doctors in Os Alta who know anything of poison.”  

“And he hasn’t been seen in public since?”  

“Not that I know of. He hasn’t held court, he recalled your brother from Caryeva-” That was a bad sign. Vasily would not leave his horses for anything other than deadly illness. “He’s been missing in action for all of three months. Rumour has it he’s dying, and the Darkling’s witchcraft is the cause.” Three months. His father had been slowly dying for three months while he played privateer. And if Raevsky’s rumours were true, and the Darkling had poisoned him... Genya had talked and laughed and wept with him for weeks, and never once mentioned the King wasting away in Os Alta. Why?  

“Do you believe the rumours?”  

“Of poison, or magic?” He shook his head. “An ugly business. Half the realm blames the Darkling, the other half the Apparat. If there were any chance it was a mundane sickness, your parents would be wise to blame it rather than let Ravka tear itself apart.”  

His parents had seldom proven wise rulers. “Who would you suspect, in my place?”  

He hummed, thoughtful. “I’m no politician, moi tsarevich, and Os Alta is a long way away.”  

“But there’s no tactician I have more respect for,” Nikolai said, smoothly, “I would value your thoughts on what mess I’ll be stepping back into in the capital, if nothing else.”  

“Well...” He still looked hesitant, and Nikolai schooled his features into the attitude of the diligent student. “It’s been said the Apparat has held your father’s ear of late, and almost ruled in his stead before the illness. He had little to gain from poisoning the king, and lost much when he was suspected of it.”  

“A diplomatic way of accusing the Darkling, moi polkovnik,” he said, with a weary smile. “Do any of the dispatches mention how he managed it?”  

“His servants are everywhere,” he replied, darkly. “Is it any surprise that they made their way into the Grand Palace?  

“Is that the reason for the Second Army’s absence?”  

The colonel looked uncomfortable. “Ah, yes... The units assigned to Kribirsk deserted when the Darkling’s treason was revealed. In the dispatches I have received, they may have been the lucky ones. Other garrisons held trials for their Grisha, or killed them in their beds. We were fortunate in the discipline of the 22 nd , but perhaps we did not act fast enough to secure them.”  

“For what it’s worth, I’d have favoured your choice,” Nikolai reassured him. “We may still need the Second Army to hold Ravka together. Deepening the divisions in her army serves only the Darkling, and punishing soldiers for their former general’s poor choices does not sit well with me.”  

Raevsky raised his bushy grey eyebrows. “You plan to replace him with the little Sun Summoner?”  

“Who better to unite Ravka than a girl they already call a saint?”  

“She’s young. Untested.”  

“So was I, before you took me under your wing.” In truth, he’d never been quite as naïve as Alina, and Raevsky took more credit for Nikolai’s successes than he had earned, but he was a respected officer of the First Army, and his word would mean much for Nikolai’s chances. “She’s spirited, determined, charismatic.”  

“She’d make a better queen than a general, if that’s what you see in her,” Raevsky observed. “Did you hear some of the townsfolk? They already call her Sankta. Why not Sol Koreleva?”  

Nikolai smiled. “You don’t think she’d be too much of a handful for my poor brother? You saw her temper at the lake.”  

“I never had the honour of meeting Prince Vasily,” he said, dismissively. “If she were looking for a princely husband, I know where I’d place my odds.”  

Raevsky’s faith in him would have been more reassuring if the old man had had anything in common with his prospective betrothed. The colonel was a wily old soldier who could trick even the most pig-headed generals into following his battleplans. Alina... Alina was a beautiful, guileless, temperamental idiot. In another context, these traits might have been endearing, but Nikolai had a war to win and a throne to claim, and the person he’d hoped would prove his best ally had all the political awareness of a seven-year-old. Though given his friends at that age, that comparison may have been unfair to seven-year-olds everywhere.  

She had, at least, had the common sense to remain in the tent he had left her in. From outside, he could hear her voice, high and anxious as a chirping bird:  “-told you: I was tired! I lost focus!”  

Mal’s response was low and resentful. “If you want to lie to me, go ahead. But I’m not going to pretend to believe you.”  

It wasn’t the start Nikolai had hoped for, but he announced his arrival with a smile he didn’t feel and a ready quip: “Why not? It’s only common courtesy.”   

They leapt to their feet like children expecting a scolding. The tracker’s glare would have had him on latrine duty for a week if Raevsky had seen it, and Alina looked as though she were considering smashing the pitcher on the table over his head and making a break for it. A little unfair, but he could work with it.   

He raised his hands in a gesture of peace: “I’m just here to talk.”  

 “So talk.” Mal spoke as if accustomed to speaking for both of them. Difficult, but it could be managed. “Who are you, and what are you playing at?”  

“Nikolai Lantsov, but please don’t make me recite my titles again.” Apparently Raevsky’s acknowledgement would not be enough for this suspicious pair. “It’s no fun for anybody, and the only important one is ‘prince.’”  

“And what about Sturmhond?” Alina demanded, as if she suspected him of bumping off the infamous privateer to take his place.  

“I’m also Sturmhond, commander of the Volkvolny, scourge of the True Sea.”  

“Scourge?” She looked cynical, which at least displayed she had the capacity for cynicism  

“Well, I’m vexing at the very least.”  

“Impossible.”  

“Improbable.”  

“This is not the time to try to be entertaining.” So she had cynicism, but not a sense of humour. He made a mental note, and then immediately discarded it. This would be difficult enough without taking  refuge in humour.  

“Please,” he said, trying to sound soothing despite his frustration “Sit. I don’t know about you, but I find everything much more understandable when seated. Something about circulation, I suspect. Reclining is, of course, preferable, but I don’t think we’re on those kinds of terms yet.” They remained standing, both glaring as if he might still attack them. Mistrustful children, both of them. As if he’d attack them alone. “All right, well, I’m going to sit. I find playing the returning hero a most wearying task, and I’m positively worn out.” He crossed to the table, poured himself a drink from the pitcher, and took a sip. Kvas. Disgusting. “Awful stuff,” he said. “Never could stomach it.”  

“Then order some brandy, your highness , I’m sure they’ll bring you all you want.”  

Was that a joke? He hoped so, but Alina looked so sullen it was difficult to tell. “True enough. I suppose I could bathe in a tub of it. I may just.” It was more Vasily’s style than his own, but better right now that they think him indulged and frivolous than threatening or surprising. Alina apparently met surprises with violence. Mal apparently responded to attempts to lighten the tension in the air by storming off: he stomped over to the tent flap to glare out at the camp rather than at Nikolai.  

Alina folded her arms. “You can’t honestly expect us to believe any of this.”  

He slipped his signed ring off his finger, sliding it across the table for her to examine. “I have the royal seal.”  

She snorted. “You probably stole it from the real Prince Nikolai.”  

“I served with Raevsky. He knows me.”  

“Maybe you stole the prince’s face, too.” Sweet Saints, but they were a stubborn, sullen pair.  

He sighed, rubbing his temples, and combatted their ceaseless questions with honesty in the desperate hope that eventually they’d get to the meat of the conversation. Why had he lied? So his crew didn’t kidnap him. Where did his parents think he were? The University in Ketterdam, where Isaak was sitting through his classes and drinking on his behalf. Why was he even doing all this?  

The last was the hardest question. For Ravka. For his family. For Dominik, who deserved a better friend than a second Vasily. For Gen- no. Not for Genya. She did not want anything he could offer her. He began, more slowly than before: “I’m second in line for the Ravkan throne. I nearly had to run away to do my military service. I don’t think my parents would approve of my picking off Zemeni pirates and breaking Fjerdan blockades. They’re rather fond of Sturmhond, though.” Sometimes, he thought Sturmhond would have been his father’s favourite child. A dashing pirate bringing military success who hunted Fjerdan slavers the same way he hunted deer would have been infinitely preferable to a bookworm, or worse, a politician.  

“ Fine,” the tracker groused. “You’re a privateer. You’re a prince. You’re a prat. What do you want with us?”  

Vasily would have had the boy beaten for his insolence. Sturmhond would have thrown him in the brig. Nikolai only fixed a smile on his lips and sipped his drink, which was, unfortunately, still kvas. “Your help.” Apparently he would need to explain the obvious. He tried not to sound like he was talking to children: “The game has changed. The Fold is expanding. The First Army is close to outright revolt. The Darkling’s coup may have failed, but it shattered the Second Army, and Ravka is on the brink of collapse.”   

Alina rolled her eyes. “And let me guess: you’re just the man to put it right?”  

For someone as shy as she usually seemed, the Sun Summoner had a lot of nerve and very little self-preservation. Dominik, used to wilful little sisters, would have known how to handle her. Even Genya seemed accustomed to dealing with her temper better than Nikolai was.   

He leant forward, trying to get her to meet his eyes, to understand him, to believe him.  “Did you meet my brother, Vasily, when you were at court? He cares more about horses and his next drink of whiskey than his people. My father never had more than a passing interest in governing Ravka, and reports are he’s lost even that. This country is coming apart. Someone needs to put it back together before it’s too late.” He bit his tongue, a little disgusted with himself for such open disloyalty. He’d been more honest than he’d intended.   

“Vasily is the heir,” Alina said, dismissive.   

“I think he can be convinced to step aside.” Or killed, the part of him that was Sturmhond whispered. He would not be the first younger brother to seize the throne in the Lantsov family line. Anatole Lantsov had swept in with the First Army and taken Os Alta before his father’s body had been cold, and placed his brother’s head on a pike shortly afterwards. He hoped Vasily would have the self-preservation to avoid that fate, but his brother had never been an avid student of history.   

Alina looked repulsed, as if she saw through his easy smile to the thoughts that lay beneath. “That’s why you dragged us back here? Because you want to be King? ”  

It shouldn’t have stung. The girl was a means to an end, nothing more. He folded his arms, and slowed his speech, concealing any sign of anger or defensiveness. “I dragged you back here because the Apparat has practically turned you into a living Saint, and the people love you. I dragged you back here because your power is the key to Ravka’s survival.” I dragged you back here because I can’t save this rotten country alone, and Genya chose a different side.  

She leapt to her feet, slamming her hands down on the table, and actually stamped her foot. Wasn’t she a little old for that? “You dragged me back here so you could make a grand entrance with the Sun Summoner and steal your brother’s throne!”  

It wouldn’t have stung if it hadn’t been true. He leaned away from her burning gaze. On the whaler, he’d thought her a trapped animal, on the Volkvolny, a shy little mouse who hid behind her lover, but now he could see the sun’s own radiance in her, and it was painful to look upon.  

He gritted his teeth, and did not look away from her. “I’m not going to apologise for being ambitious. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m the best man for the job.”   

“Of course you are.” She didn’t understand. How could she? He had watched his father and brother for years, tried to gently nudge them into taking their duties seriously, and been smacked down for the presumption that he knew better than his elders. If he could have made them better men, he would have.  

“Come back to Os Alta with me.”   

She could not hear the plea in his voice. “Why? So you can show me off like some kind of prize goat?”  

“I know you don’t trust me,” he continued. An understatement – she looked at him with more suspicion now than she ever had the Darkling. “You have no reason to. But I’ll abide by what I promised you aboard the Volkvolny. Listen to what I have to offer. If you’re still not interested, Sturmhond’s ships will take you anywhere in the world.” He hoped that wasn’t a lie, that there was still enough real honour in him that he would not hold her against her will. “I think you’ll stay. I think I can give you something no one else can.” The tracker muttered something from the door, but Nikolai had been a consummate actor at fifteen, and had dealt with worse hecklers than a petulant teenager. “I can give you the chance to change Ravka,” he said, and hoped the fire in his heart showed in his face. “I can give you the chance to bring your people hope.”  

It was the wrong tactic. He could tell as soon as he saw her sour expression. She’d become used to helplessness, to being a pawn in others’ schemes. She could not yet see how much power she could claim in her own right.   

She sniffed. “Oh, is that all? And just how am I supposed to do that?”  

It was too early to reveal himself now, too much of a risk, but deception and pretty words had only caused her to throw up more defences. He told her the truth: “By helping me unite the First and Second Armies. By becoming my Queen.”  

The table clattered onto its side, and Nikolai felt his head slam hard against the tentpole behind him, a hand at his throat. The tracker’s face was inches from his own, his expression twisted with the desperate fear of a wild creature. He could push him off, threaten him, but that would be like threatening Alina herself with the tie that seemed to bind them.   

“Easy, now,” he soothed, his voice low. He was twelve, head spinning with kvas and poison, facing a horse half-maddened with fear. “Mustn’t get blood on the uniform. Let me explain-“  

“Try explaining with my fist in your mouth.” He felt Mal’s spittle spattering on his cheek, and mentally upgraded the boy from temperamental to unstable. He’d faced more dangerous men than a seventeen-year-old tracker who didn’t know enough to keep his knees together when threatening people. He jerked a knee up between his legs – hopefully he and Alina weren’t planning on children soon – and twisted away as the boy doubled over, a flick of his wrist bringing a knife into his hand. He didn’t want to use it, but better safe than sorry.   

“Step back, Oretsev,” he warned him, his voice shifting to that of Major Lantsov. “I’m keeping my temper for her sake, but I’d just as soon as gut you like a carp.  

“ Try it, ” the boy snarled.  

“ Enough! ” There was a painful flash of light, and in the moment they were both blinded, Alina had flung herself between them. It seemed to be a habit of hers. Concerning. “Sturmhond, sheathe your weapon, or you’ll be the one who gets gutted.” Unlikely, but he wasn’t going to alienate her further. He tucked the knife back into his sleeve, confident Oretsev wouldn’t swing at him as long as his lady-love stood in the way. “Mal, stand down.”  

The boy dropped his hands, fists still clenched, and eyed him warily. He’d charming and affable enough on the ship, but that temper… he hoped for her sake that he’d never turn it on Alina. He’d seen too many soldiers taking their anger out on their lovers.  

Nikolai straightened the sleeves of his uniform, still speaking in the rough, weary tones of Major Lantsov: “I’m not proposing a love match, you heartsick oaf, just a political alliance. If you’d stop and think for a minute, you’d see it makes good sense for the country.”  

He let out a harsh bark of laughter. “You mean it makes good sense for you. ”  

It was hard to remain calm and reasonable in the face of what seemed like a child’s tantrum. If he’d behaved like this in the 22 nd , Sergeant Pechkin would have had him digging latrines until his arms burned. The boy had been First Army, but who had trained him? Nikolai took a deep breath, and continued: “Can’t both things be true? I’ve served in the military. I understand warfare, and I understand weaponry. I know the First Army will follow me. I may be second in line, but I have a blood right to the throne.” With Alina at his side, they could save Ravka. They could save the world from the ever-expanding fold. But first, he had to calm this idiot child.  

The idiot child was jabbing a finger into his face. “You don’t have a right to her! ”  

The cynic in Nikolai wanted to respond: And you do? For all his self-proclaimed adoration of Alina, he was very quick to speak for her rather than to her. “What did you think was going to happen?” he said, letting a controlled anger slip into his voice. “Did you think you could just carry off one of the most powerful Grisha in the world like some peasant girl you tumbled in a barn? Is that how you think this story ends? I’m trying to keep a country from falling apart, not steal your best girl.”  

“That’s enough,” Alina muttered, but Nikolai continued. They wanted honesty, they would have it.  

“You can stay at the palace, perhaps as the captain of her personal guard?” he offered. It was more than generous. Plenty of men in Oretsev’s position had been executed, or carted off to monasteries lacking key parts of their anatomy. “It wouldn’t be the first such arrangement.”  

The boy looked horrified at the proposed compromise. “You make me sick.”  

He waved a dismissive hand. He’d been seventeen once, he knew that, but surely he’d never been this naïve? “I’m a depraved monster, I know.” He turned to Alina. “Just think about what I’m saying for a moment.”  

“I don’t need to think about it!” the boy shouted. Nikolai was starting to deeply dislike him, understandable jealousy or no. “And neither does she! It isn’t going to happen!”  

“It would be a marriage in name only,” Nikolai reminded them both, but he could see they already would not believe that. He couldn’t convince himself of it, either. He remembered too many sidelong looks, comments on how Fjerdan he seemed next to his father and brother, the moment Sobachka had turned from a teasing childhood nickname to a polite word for bastard. He amended his statement: “Except for the matter of producing heirs.” No child he claimed would grow up to face that particular cruelty.  

Mal’s face reddened, and he flung himself forward. Nikolai reached for his knife, but Alina threw herself between them again.   

“Stop!” she yelled, “Just stop it! And stop talking about me as if I’m not here!”  

Mal growled – actually growled – and began to pace. Nikolai set his chair upright again and sat back down, hoping he had not scared Alina any more than she already seemed to be. She was composing herself, and took the seat opposite him.  

“Your highness-“ she began.  

“Nikolai,” he corrected her, gently. “But I’ve also been known to answer to ‘sweetheart’ or ‘handsome’.”   

He’d been trying to make her laugh, but the tracker whirled on him again, and Alina silenced him with a look.   

“You need to stop that, Nikolai, ” she snapped, “or I’ll knock those princely teeth out myself.”  

Not the reaction he’d aimed for, but at least she wasn’t wild with fear. “I know you’re good for it,” he said, rubbing the bruise on his cheek for good measure. He’d had worse, far worse, but it wouldn’t hurt to make her feel that her blow had struck true. That she could defend herself with him, and not expect him to strike back harder.  

“I am,” she said, firmly, “and I’m not going to marry you. But…” She took another deep breath. “I will return to Os Alta with you.”  

Mal had relaxed, his back to them, but now he stiffened again. “Alina-“  

“Mal, we always said we’d find a way to come back to Ravka, that we’d find a way to help. If we don’t do something, there may not be a Ravka to come back to.” He slumped his shoulders like a sulking child, but Alina had already turned back to Nikolai, her jaw set stubbornly. “I’ll return to Os Alta with you, and I’ll consider helping you make a bid for the throne. But I want the Second Army.”  

He hadn’t expected her to ask for it, this girl who’d run from power at every opportunity, and something in him balked at handing her an army. She was naïve. She was volatile. She was a child. Maybe, in a few years… “The people love you, Alina,” he began, “but I was thinking of a more symbolic title-“  

“I’m not a symbol,” she snapped, “and I’m tired of being a pawn.”  

This, then, was the key to the puzzlebox of Alina Starkov. If she was going to be part of the game, she wanted to feel like a player, not a piece. He could respect that, work with it, even.  

Mal, apparently, found it more difficult to accept: “No,” he said, immediately. “It’s too dangerous. It would be like painting a target on your back.”  

“I already have a target on my back,” Alina retorted, “and neither of us will ever be safe until the Darkling is defeated.”  

She was right, but there were more daunting practicalities to consider: “Have you even held a command?” Nikolai pressed her. If this was what she wanted – power, a title, an army – she’d need to be able to defend it with more than I want.  

“No,” she admitted.  

He continued: “You have no experience, no precedent, no claim,” he said, listing off the points that her enemies would raise against her. “The Second Army has been led by Darklings since it was founded.”  

“Age and birthright don’t matter to the Grisha,” she insisted. “All they care about is power. I’m the only Grisha to ever wear two amplifiers, the only Grisha alive powerful enough to take on the Darkling and his shadow soldiers. No one else can do what I can do.”  

She didn’t sound like she believed it yet, but they could work on that. He took a long moment, drumming his fingers on the table, then rose, and offered his hand to her with a bow.   

“Alright, Summoner,” he said. “Help me win the people, and the Grisha are yours.”  

Her eyes widened in surprise. It would have been almost cute, if she hadn’t so recently punched him in the face. “Really?” she exclaimed.  

He couldn’t help but laugh. “If you plan to lead an army, you’d better learn to act the part. The proper response is, ‘I knew you’d see sense.’”  

She took his hand and they shook. Her fingers were soft – not a labourer’s hands, or a soldier’s. Hadn’t she been First Army? How was she still so soft, so vulnerable?  

“As for my proposal-“ he began, but she cut him off with a scowl.  

“Don’t push your luck,” she said, snatching her hand away as if repulsed by him. “I said I’d go to Os Alta with you, and that’s it.”  

“And where will I go?” Mal’s voice was quiet, the angry young man giving way to a lost child.  

Alina’s expression shifted from scowling to wounded in an instant. “I- I thought you’d go with me?”  

“As what? The captain of your personal guard? ”  

Nikolai cleared his throat: “As much as I’d love to see how this plays out, I do have some arrangements to make. Unless, of course-“   

He wanted to offer Alina reinforcement against the rage he could see playing across Mal’s face, but as he snarled: “ Get out, ” he could have sworn he saw her shake her head. He absented himself, and sought out Tamar and Tolya.   

He stepped into the tent they had been assigned, and they both looked up at him, silent and expectant. Their calm expressions belied their eagerness – they’d wantee to learn more of Alina since she was first brought aboard the whaler.   

“She wants the Second Army,” he said, “but she agreed with at least some of the plan, in principle. She’ll support us, and come with us to Os Alta.”  

“And the marriage?” Tolya asked. “A Grisha queen might do much for the Second Army, and persuade more rogue Grisha to call Ravka home.”  

He shook his head. “She refused, which was only to be expected. Her tracker’s the jealous type.”  

Tamar leant her chin on the back of her chair. “You want us to watch him?”  

“If Alina accepts a guard, which she knows she needs, she’ll appoint him captain, and likely ask the two of you to join,” he said. “That should give you plenty of opportunity to observe him. He can be charming, when he chooses to be, but…”  

“But?” she prompted him.  

“He has a temper,” he admitted. “Nearly threw me across the tent when the proposal came up. Now, it could just be fear, you saw how he and Alina panic when they’re separated. But if he turns that temper on someone less tolerant than me, or worse, on Alina… ”  

Their spines turned rigid, as he’d known they would at the implied threat to the Sun Summoner. “He seemed a charmer, on the Volkvolny,” Tolya said, his words slow and considered. “I don’t trust that in anyone with a temper.”  

Nikolai agreed, but felt the urge to try and defend the boy given that they still had to travel with him, at least for now. “Given the last few weeks they’ve had, a little temper can be excused from both of them.” He paused, then: “They’re just very… seventeen. ”  

The three of them exchanged a glance of perfect understanding. For all that they’d sailed and fought together since they were teenagers themselves, they felt a long way from the children Mal and Alina still seemed to be.   

It was easier than Nikolai had expected, to slip back into the role of Major Lantsov after playing Sturmhond for so long. Both characters required an admixture of confidence, sternness, and familiarity, military men who could be trusted with a command but still remembered how to smile and ask after people’s families. Alina did not adjust to her new role nearly so well. She sulked when asked to greet the crowds, when reminded to be discreet when romancing her tracker, when he suggested that she pick out new colours for her general’s uniform. It would have been easier to construct a grand romance to woo the people if talking to her did not feel so very much like banging his head against a brick wall. Perhaps he’d shown her too much of his hand – she hadn’t liked or trusted him as Sturmhond, but she had at least respected him.   

It was when she sighed and rolled her eyes at the suggestion she should have a personal guard over dinner that he leaned back in his chair, half-closing his eyes, sinking back into Sturmhond’s looser, less military posture.   

“Do you know how I got the name Sturmhond?” he asked her.  

She blinked, surprised at his change of subject. “I thought it was some kind of joke, a play on Sobachka.” The nickname on her lips reminded him of Genya, which stung more than he’d expected. He swallowed that pain, converted it to the anger that Sturmhond always held beneath his skin.  

“No,” he told her, “It’s a name I earned. The first enemy ship I ever boarded was a Fjerdan trader out of Djerholm. When I told the captain to lay down his sword, he laughed in my face and told me to run home to my mother. He said Fjerdan men make bread from the bones of skinny Ravkan boys.” He’d been twenty then, and had seethed at the insult. Now he swallowed the taste of bile.  

“So you killed him?” She folded her arms, unimpressed. Mal, who’d spent more time among his crew, was suddenly stiff in his seat, remembering the rest of this story.  

“No,” he said, coolly. It was an ugly memory, the blood, the old man screaming, the howls and yips of his crew. “I told him foolish old captains weren’t fit meat for Ravkan men. Then I cut off his fingers and fed them to my dog while he watched.” He still did not regret it.  

“You… what?” Alina paled, her eyes wide as saucers in her too-thin face. Good.   

“You heard me.” He held her gaze, unrepentant. He did not tell her that the man had traded in slaves as well as furs, that he’d been a necessary casualty in the birth of Sturmhond’s legend. That was not the point of the story. “My enemies understood brutality. And so did my crew. After it was over, I drank with my men and divvied up the spoils. Then I went back to my cabin, vomited up the very fine dinner my steward had prepared, and cried myself to sleep. But that was the day I became a real privateer, and that was the day Sturmhond was born.”  

“So much for ‘puppy’,” she murmured, pushing her plate away. He did not think of Genya then: When I heard the name Sturmhond, I wasn’t imagining a puppy. He hoped she’d never heard the story of his name.   

It wasn’t enough for her to be frightened, he needed her to understand what it meant to lead, what it meant to hold power. He had until they reached Os Alta to turn her from frightened child to general, and every moment he dragged his feet, his father could be dying. “I was a boy trying to lead an undisciplined crew of thieves and rogues against enemies who were older, wiser, and tougher. I needed them to fear me. All of them. And if they hadn’t, more people would have died.”  

She folded her arms. “Just who’s fingers are you telling me to cut off?”  

“I’m telling you that if you want to be a leader, it’s time you started thinking and acting like one.” He needed – Ravka needed – the Sun Summoner, not a sulking teenager, a lovesick girl, or a skittish doe.  

Despite seeing her with the Darkling, he was still surprised when she looked back at him with defiance as well as fear in her dark eyes. “I’ve heard this before, you know,” she said, coldly, “from the Darkling and his supporters. Be brutal. Be cruel. More lives will be saved in the long run.”  

“Do you think I’m like the Darkling?” He hadn’t meant to place any weight on the question, as if the answer should be obvious, but now, staring into those sharp brown eyes, he realised that her opinion mattered to him. He could fool all of Ravka, but in this moment, that meant nothing if this orphaned peasant girl could see through him and find nothing worth believing in.  

“No,” she said, slowly. “I don’t think you are.” Before he could truly sink into the relief that sentence brought, she added: “But I’ve been wrong before.”  

In their slow, meandering progress (too slow, the roads were crowded with pilgrims, the towns with dignitaries who needed to see the Sun Summoner to believe her), he did his best to convince her she’d placed her faith in the right man. He kissed babies, charmed old women, handed out coin and bags of grain and sugar like Sankt Nikolai himself. Alina seemed unmoved at first, but gradually unbent enough to accept Tamar and Tolya into her guard, and to share her theories about amplifiers with Nikolai. He tried to accept that as a good omen, especially with Mal growing more distant from Alina with each passing day. It felt cruel, watching the poor girl’s heart break, but better he leave now than risk her safety in Os Alta.  

It was at Sala he managed to find a dispatch box with further information on the King’s illness, and to hear rumours that had flowed out of the capital with the Darkling’s departure. At the officer’s table in the garrison, the brandy flowed freely, and so did the chatter. The young captain of the fort had pressed himself snug against close to Nikolai’s side, and was looking sidelong at him with wide brown eyes.   

“-sorry to hear the news of your father’s illness,” he was saying, over the hubbub of the mess hall. “You only heard of it when you reached Kribirsk?”  

“My old colonel was the one to tell me,” he replied, “Though with the Fold between them and Os Alta, he couldn’t tell me much more than that. You probably know more than I do, given that you defend the main artery to the capital.” It was sloppy flattery, but the man was eager to see what he wanted in Nikolai – the weary soldier-prince in need of the comfort his warm, strong arms could provide.   

“I don’t want to speak out of turn, moi tsarevich, ” he said, but surrendered to Nikolai’s encouraging smile. “Most of the outposts have heard by now that poison is suspected, and the Darkling fled, but I’m sure that Ravka’s best doctors are tending to him as we speak.”   

Nikolai thought little of Ravka’s best doctors after hearing they’d declared him beyond saving at twelve, and he’d take a Grisha Healer over a First Army medik over them any day, but he accepted the comment as kindly meant. “We learned as much at Kribirsk. Of course, the true state of the Crown is a state secret, but I’m sure a man with a posting as significant as yours has heard something of import…” He let the end of the sentence drop, and watched with satisfaction as the captain picked it up for him, ever the gentleman.  

“Well… it’s rumour rather than fact, but I hear the Darkling had a spy among the Queen’s staff,” he began. His next words made Nikolai’s stomach drop. “A Grisha girl she raised herself, if such a thing is to be believed. On the Darkling’s orders, she turned on her benefactors, and was spirited away from the Palace when he fled.”  

“But there’s nothing confirmed?” he said, and hoped that filial worry would be enough to explain his sudden sternness.  

The captain rubbed the back of his head, suddenly nervous, and lowered his voice. “We’ve been asked to watch for the girl if she returns – red hair, amber eyes, strikingly pretty.”   

He could see her now, her image burned into his eyelids. Genya in his cabin, Genya on the deck of the ship, pale and fearful. Genya in the meadow, with strawberries in her hands. It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t have- she’d been his best friend, his mother’s darling, the closest thing he knew to a sister. But even as he tried to convince himself of her innocence, the truth slipped into his gut like a knife. If she’d been falsely accused, she’d had time to throw herself on his mercy, to beg his protection rather than the Darkling’s. He had practically begged her to come home with him. It’s a beautiful dream, Kolya. Of course she’d been too much a coward to tell him why she could not return to Ravka without the Darkling to protect her. She’d laughed and schemed and gossiped with him while his father rotted from her poison, and he’d been too blind to see anything more than the girl he’d once known, the girl he’d longed to see again. He would never be so blind again.  

He tried to focus on making cheerful conversation and winning over the regiment assigned to Sala, but his heart wasn’t in it. He retired to his room with a bottle of brandy, and used the hangover the next day as a distraction from his anger, and his unexpected guilt. It was pointless to wonder if he would have been able to see the poison in her heart if he’d returned to court, or if he’d have been able to out-manoeuvre the Darkling if he’d been there, if he’d been paying attention. If, if, if. Such a pointless, nonsensical little word, but his mind kept returning to it like a tongue worrying the spot where a tooth had been. The letter he received the next morning confirmed his worst fears, and did nothing to dispel his belief in Genya’s guilt.  

His thoughts returned to it when Alina asked, as they talked strategy: “And the King and Queen will stay?”  

“If my father left the capital, it would be as good as handing the country over to the Darkling now.” He paused, then added, in a rare moment of honestly: “Besides, I don’t know that he’s strong enough to travel.”  

Alina’s brow furrowed, her eyes soft with a sympathy more genuine than almost every other condolence he’d received on their journey. “He hasn’t recovered?”  

He shook his head. “They’ve kept the worst of it from the gossips, but no, he hasn’t, and I doubt he will.” His next words emerged, choked and bitter and far too truthful. “Your friend is stunning. For a poisoner.”   

“She isn’t my friend.” Alina folded her arms over her chest, shrinking in on herself. He wondered if Genya had betrayed her too. “And I doubt she used poison.”  

“She did something to him. None of his doctors can find a cure, and my mother won’t let a Corporalki Healer anywhere near him.” He paused, then added, begrudgingly: “It was a clever move, really.” Genya might be a traitor, but she had always been the clever one.  

Alina’s brows were raised, that brief, unsettling moment of softness fading as rapidly as it had appeared. “Trying to kill your father?”  

“The Darkling could have murdered my father easily enough,” he explained. Easier to make this a lesson for Alina than a heart-to-heart. He couldn’t afford to look weak to her now. “But he would have risked outright rebellion from the peasants and the First Army. With the King alive and kept in isolation, no one knew quite what was happening. The Apparat was there, playing the trusted adviser, issuing commands. Vasily was off someplace buying up horses and whores.” He stared out of the carriage window, hoping she’d not learned to read his face or his moods in their travels together. “I was at sea. I didn’t hear the news until weeks after it was all over.” Months, even. The letter originally intended for him had likely reached Isaak in Kerch while the Darkling and Sturmhond hammered out terms off the coast of Fjerda. “When word of the massacre in Novokribirsk and the Darkling’s disappearance got out, all hell broke loose. A group of royal ministers and the palace guard forced their way into the Grand Palace and demanded to see the King. Do you know what they found?” He shouldn’t have kept talking. The letter was a state secret, intended for his eyes alone. But in the quiet, rocking carriage, the words kept flowing out of him, as if he’d weakened at the slightest sign of tenderness from the waspish little Saint. “They found my mother cowering in her parlour, clutching that snuffly little dog. And the King of Ravka, Alexander III, alone in his bedchamber, barely breathing, lying in his own filth. I let that happen.” He’d let Genya happen, and had welcomed a serpent onto his ship like a long-lost sister.  

“You couldn’t have known what the Darkling was planning, Nikolai. No one did.” It would have been easier if she’d been sarcastic, or cruel. It would have stemmed the tide of words that kept pouring from his mouth.  

“The Grisha and oprichniki who held the palace on the Darkling’s orders were caught in the lower town, trying to escape. They were executed,” he continued.  

“What about the Apparat?”  

The question was astute enough to surprise him, and he looked away from the window and back to her. She was sat curled on her side of the carriage, her feet on the bench and her arms around her knees, as if she was unused to sitting alone rather than packed in with other soldiers or cartographers.   

“Escaped,” he told her. “No one knows how. But he’ll answer for it when the time comes.”  

She scrutinised him, with those dark eyes that seemed to burn through him like sunlight through mist. What did she see? A broken boy? A failed prince? A ruthless would-be tyrant? She did not tell him, and he was almost afraid to ask. Instead, she said: “You let Genya go.”  

Would he have left her, if he’d known what she’d done? He did not know the answer, but Alina appeared to expect one. “She was a pawn. You were the prize.” He hoped it was true, even as he knew it was not. Genya may be been the Darkling’s assassin, but she was too clever to be an unwitting one. He shook himself out of his melancholy before Alina could notice, and added, with a bright, false grin: “Besides, she was too pretty for the sharks.”  

They did not speak of Genya again, and Nikolai threw himself into the roles of the homecoming hero, the golden prince, the steadfast soldier. None of those characters had ever known Genya Safin’s name, and if they did not know her, he could not think of her. He attended parties, children’s choirs, and military rallies with Alina on his arm, and did not think of Genya once. He had enough to distract him – the crowds in Tashta muttered “ traitors, kingslayers” at the sight of Grisha in his retinue, and it wasn’t until he pulled Alina in for a kiss that the mood shifted from distrust to elation. Naturally, as soon as they were in the carriage, she kicked him in the shins and threatened to cut him in half. The crowd had loved it, of course, but Alina made it very clear that she did not. The second time she kicked him, he’d grabbed her ankle, and her cheeks had flushed scarlet.   

“Promise not to kick me again, and I’ll promise not to kiss you again,” he told her.   

“I only kicked you because you kissed me!” she said, crossly.  

“Promise,” he repeated, and he dropped her foot as she sulkily promised.   

“Great,” she said, “Now get out.”  

He was half-tempted to leave her to stew, but the crowds of pilgrims pressed to either side of the road made that impossible. “It’s my coach,” he reminded her.  

“The deal was only for kicking. It did not prohibit slapping, punching, biting, or cutting you in half. ”  

He was trying to charm her. He was. It was in Ravka’s best interest to bind her to the Lantsov dynasty, to make her the Sun Queen in truth as well as in name. But in moments like these, when he actually succeeded in making her blush… she seemed so young. For all that she’d been through, for all her claims of being a pawn no longer, she was still enough of a girl-child that he could make her blush by touching her bare ankle, and it sat ill with him, for all that half the eligible maidens at court were married at her age.   

“It’s an act, Alina,” he reminded her. “The stronger our alliance, the better it will be for both of us. I’m sorry if it puts a burr in Mal’s sock, but it’s a necessity.”  

She folded her arms, shrinking into her kefta. “That kiss wasn’t a necessity.”  

“I was improvising,” he said, which was true. “I got carried away.”  

“You never improvise.” She sounded disgusted again. “Everything you do is calculated. You change personalities the way other people change hats. And you know what? It’s creepy.” That stung. “Aren’t you ever just yourself?”  

“I’m a prince, Alina. I can’t afford to be myself.” She should have understood that better than anyone. She would never understand it at all. Nobody was more insistently herself at all times than Alina Starkov. He bit his lip, hating to show her weakness, needing to know the truth. “I… you really think I’m creepy?”  

She pulled at a loose thread on the sleeve of her kefta. “Occasionally,” she said, not meeting his eyes.  

He sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. The girl had a disarming knack for forcing honesty out of him, if only because she responded to any sign of pretence with sarcasm or violence. “I’m a younger son, most likely a bastard, and I’ve been away from court for almost seven years,” he admitted. “I’m going to do everything I can to strengthen my chances for the throne, and if that means courting an entire nation or making moon eyes at you, then I’ll do it.”  

He'd never seen Alina so lost for words. Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened. It was not a flattering expression, but in that moment, there was an almost incandescent beauty in the way her every thought danced across her features. He almost laughed aloud. “You’re never going to survive at court if you don’t learn to hide what you’re thinking a bit better. You look like you just sat in a bowl of cold porridge. Close your mouth.” She tried to school her features into an attempt at pleasing neutrality, but ended up with a heavy-lidded smirk. “Now you look like you’ve had too much wine.”  

She slouched back in her seat, her dignity affronted. “How can you joke about something like that?”   

“I’ve heard the whispers since I was a child.” That was true – courtiers were always more careless than they thought they were. “It’s not something I want repeated outside of this coach—and I’ll deny it if you do—but I couldn’t care less whether or not I have Lantsov blood. In fact, given all the royal inbreeding, being a bastard is probably a point in my favour.”   

Alina was perceptive, but even she could swallow a lie wrapped so prettily in honesty. She shook her head, the usual roll of her eyes to indicate she neither knew nor cared if he was joking.  

“Why is the crown so important to you?” she demanded, “Why go through all of this?”  

“Is it so hard to believe I might actually care what happens to this country?”  

“Honestly, yes.”  

Of course that was her response, for all it was careless and cruel. He’d made himself a consummate liar, and now mourned that nobody could read honesty in his face the way he could read Alina. For all that he’d been more honest with her than anyone since Dominik had died.  

“I guess I like fixing things,” he said, and it was true. “I always have.” His dragonfly, his mother, Ravka. Genya. Perhaps it was his greatest failing, his love for beautiful, broken things.  

Chapter 8: viii – the weight of family, the pull of gravity

Summary:

A Lantsov family reunion.

There was one more night before they entered Os Alta. The party at Count Minkoff’s dacha could not have been a more perfect dress rehearsal for Alina’s court presentation if Nikolai had planned it himself, but he found himself on edge, his skin itching with anxiety and guilt. On the ship, he’d have poured a drink for himself and Privyet, and began to sketch out his next great design. In the army, he’d have leaned on Dominik’s shoulder, and taken comfort in the anchoring weight of his presence. Now, though, he lacked both confidants and distractions, and playing the role of the charming prince was wearing him thin. He could not afford to lose hold of it now, not so close to the capital. Home, he corrected himself. Ravka’s golden son would never choose a cabin on the True Sea over her greatest palace.  

The Count and Countess had spared no expense in preparing for their visit – the corridors were lined with the dwarf fruit trees they were so proud of breeding, and the air was filled with the scent of fruit so sweet it was almost cloying. It was a marked change from the garrisons and inns they’d billeted in on the road, and where his time on the road had been a bittersweet reenactment of his army days that made him miss Dominik more with every mile, it was strange to be back in the lap of luxury and not see Genya disappearing around a corner or standing in his mother’s shadow. The rooms were comfortable, the other guests charming, and yet Nikolai could not remember ever feeling so alone. No, that was untrue. He had not felt so alone since he knelt in the mud at Halmhend and felt half his heart die in his arms. He wondered if without the distractions of war and politics and Alina, he’d feel the rest wither away with the knowledge of Genya’s betrayal, and then forced the melancholy down into the pit of his stomach. He could not be distracted now, when he needed to provide Alina with her last opportunity to practice before their return to court.  

She was sat next to him at dinner, of course – rumours of their courtship had far outstripped them on the road – and she ate with unexpectedly impeccable manners, despite how hungry she must have been from the road. She was quiet, which he’d learned to expect, but kept craning her neck to glance out of the window until he nudged her foot with his own. “You don’t have to pay attention, but you do have to look like you’re paying attention,” he murmured in her ear. She blushed, which drew an indulgent smile from the married couples present, and kicked him hard in the shin. Nikolai kept his smile courtier-smooth, and resisted the urge to pinch her in return. The Countess, squeezing his thigh under the table, would likely have noticed the prince and the Sun Summoner squabbling like children.  

He was rewarded when she plastered on a wide smile and nodded along as the other guests spoke of the latest plays and fashions in Os Alta. Her smile became slightly more fixed as the topic of conversation turned to rumours of sightings of the Darkling, and he noted that she rubbed at her injured shoulder more as the evening wore on. If she would have let him, he might have caught her hand, squeezed it gently, brought her back to the stuffy dining room and away from the deck of a whaler where a knife was held to her cheek. Reminded her that she was not fighting this battle alone anymore. But she would not have welcomed comfort from him, and so they remained, seated side-by-side and entirely alone.   

He could not fault her performance, it was her best so far. She accepted compliments with more grace than he’d ever seen in her, nodded along to admittedly monotonous conversations, and even provided a gentle lightshow on the Countess’s request. She did not even try to make her escape until after the dessert plates were cleared away, despite their hosts’ musical efforts to drive them out into the gardens.  

Perhaps this was why, when he caught her at the terrace door, he made only a cursory effort to make her stay. “This is good practice for the monotony of court,” he teased, trying to lure a real smile out of her.   

She gave a dramatic and obviously feigned yawn. “Saints need their rest.”  

He raised his eyebrows. Of all the criticisms he might have made of the Minkoffs’ taste, he could not fault their gardens. Even at night, scent lay heavy in the air, and the paths winding between high hedges and tinkling fountains provided the perfect setting for a secret assignation. “Are you planning to sleep under a rosebush?”  

She rolled her eyes and gave a long-suffering sigh. “I’ve been a good little dancing bear, Nikolai. I’ve done all my tricks, and now it’s time for me to say goodnight.”  

This time, when he reached for her hand, she did not immediately pull away. ““Maybe I just wish I could go with you. The Countess kept squeezing my knee under the table at dinner, and I hate playing cards.”  

“I thought you were the consummate politician,” she teased, and it should not have meant so much, that she was finally comfortable enough to be playful after so many weeks of fear and distrust.  

“I told you I have trouble keeping still.” He was already wondering how he was going to manage returning to a life as an ornament to the court after years of keeping his hands and mind busy at every turn.   

“Then you’ll just have to ask the Countess to dance,” she grinned, and slipped away from him, into the dark of the gardens. He watched her go, the light from the window sparking stars form her new kefta until she was beyond its reach. A clawing, hungry sensation, a wound dormant for so long, reopened in his chest, as he realised he was envious. Not envious of Mal Oretsev for being the recipient of Alina’s sunlit smiles, but envious of Alina herself. For all their quarrels, and Oretsev’s hideous temper, she had her dearest friend and confidant at her side as she faced her future. Nikolai had grown used to feeling alone since Dominik’s death, but the brief taste of companionship he’d had with Genya had reopened a wound he’d thought healed long ago.  

He would have remained there, lost in thought, had Raevsky not stepped out to join him moments later. “ Moi tsarevich, there are interlopers at the gate. They are demanding the Sun Summoner.”  

He felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. “Pilgrims?”  

“Worse. Grisha. They claim to be remnants of the Second Army-”  

“But they could just as easily be the Darkling’s,” Nikolai finished for him. They moved quickly, gathering soldiers and footmen around them as they slipped through the gardens, and sent Tamar running to bring Alina inside.  

It was a ragtag group who met them at the gate, in faded, travel-stained keftas of red, blue, and purple.  

“Where is Alina Starkov?” their leader at the gate demanded.  

“The Sun Summoner is safe inside,” Nikolai responded, hoping it was already true. “We are not going to endanger her safety by bringing her out just because you want to speak with her.”  

“We have travelled across half of Ravka to find her,” the Corporalknik said, “We’ve slept in hedges, by the sides of the road, hidden from the First Army’s attempts to hunt us down-”  

“For your general’s treason, and the safety of the nation,” Captain Nevskyt said, sharply.   

Nikolai gritted his teeth. Too confrontational. They needed to properly assess whether they posed a danger to Alina or not.   

“Our general’s treason is not ours,” the man at the gate insisted. “We were posted at Sikursk, far from Os Alta. We knew nothing of his plans until we received word of what happened at Novokribirsk and the regiment we were posted with turned on us.”  

“So you deserted?” Popovska sneered. She had never been fond of Grisha, Nikolai recalled, and he wished there was an easy way to distract her.  

“We fled for our lives when they began to court-martial us for a conspiracy we knew nothing of!” he snapped. “We seek the Sun Summoner, and we will not be kept away from her by otkazat’sya fools any longer.”  

“Alina Starkov is not our prisoner,” Nikolai said, hoping he sounded calm and reasonable. “She has sworn her loyalty to Ravka, and we are escorting her to Os Alta so she may take her rightful place.”  

“As what?” This was a new speaker, a remarkably beautiful Etherealki woman, who stepped forward beside the Corporalnik. “Your puppet general? Or a Sun Queen to prop up a failing dynasty?”  

“As Ravka’s hope for the future,” Nikolai said, trying to evade the question. “I understand your fears, and I know that you may feel you have little reason to trust the First Army with her safety, but we have just as little reason to trust you, as long as we cannot prove the Darkling sent you.”  

The Etherealnik rolled her eyes dismissively. “You don’t consider the fact that this gate is still standing is evidence for our good intentions?” she said, tapping the gate with a fingernail for emphasis. “It’s cute that you’re all out here to defend her, but you could not stop us taking Alina if we wanted to.”  

Between the Grisha hidden among his soldiers and the snipers in the trees, they’d put up a better fight than she implied, but she did have a point.   

“You’ve all travelled far, and you must be exhausted,” he began, though the grim determination on their faces spoke of something far more powerful than bodily frailty. “Rest here for the night. The Count will have food and drink brought out to you, even blankets, clean clothes, and any medical supplies you require that he can provide. I can’t speak for the future of the Second Army, and neither can the Sun Summoner – that's the King’s prerogative alone – but I can speak for you all if you stand down until we reach Os Alta.”  

The Corporalnik rattled the gate, impatient. “If we wanted to talk to the King’s lackey, we’d be at the doors to the Grand Palace. We came for the Sun Summoner.”  

“Show some respect, bloodletter,” Nevsky snapped. “You’re addressing a Prince of Ravka and an officer of the First Army.”  

Nikolai was aware of a commotion behind him, and was chagrined to see Alina pop up beside him, closely followed by Tamar and Tolya. Apparently the order to get her to safety had been misheard as “bring her into trouble.”   

She did not look at Nikolai, but peered through the gate with a frown. “Fedyor?”   

The Corporalnik broke into a grin that transformed his features from horselike to almost handsome, and swept her a graceful bow. “Alina Starkov. I could only hope the rumours were true.”  

Nikolai looked at her sidelong. “You know him?”  

“He saved my life,” she said, a little hesitant.  

Fedyor bowed again. “It was my great honour.”  

It was a pretty story, but not one Nikolai could place much faith in. “Can he be trusted?”   

“He’s a deserter,” Nevsky commented, sending a ripple of discontent through the crowd on both sides of the gate.   

This was getting too close to heated for Nikolai’s comfort. He waved Tolya over. “Move everyone back and make sure that none of those footmen get it in their heads to start shooting. I suspect they lack for excitement out here amid the fruit trees.” He turned back to the gate. “Fedyor, is it? Give us a moment.” He drew Alina away from the crowd, into the relative privacy of an arbour, and said quietly, “Well? Can he be trusted?”  

 “I don’t know.” She chewed on her lip, looking suddenly very young again and very nervous. “I think he was stationed at the southern border. He was a high-ranking Heartrender, but not one of the Darkling’s favourites.”  

He sighed. “Nevsky is right. Grisha or not, their first loyalty should have been to the King. They left their posts. Technically, they are deserters.”  

“That doesn’t make them traitors,” Alina said, quietly. There were any number of generals who would argue with her on that point, but Nikolai was not among them. He’d chosen to join the infantry and still had moments of gutwrenching terror where he’d wanted to flee. He could hardly judge a conscript for acting on that fear.  

“The real question is whether they’re spies,” he reminded her, and that flash of fear shifted across her face again, her right hand moving to cradle her left arm as if it pained her.   

“So what do we do with them?” she asked him, and her eyes were wide, frightened. Easier for her if he made the decision for her, but she’d asked to lead the Second Army, and this would be the first of many choices he would have to trust her final judgement on.  

“We could arrest them, have them questioned,” he suggested. With Tamar and Tolya, they could at least offer them the hope of a fair questioning. She chewed on her lip, pulling at a loose thread on her sleeve, and did not answer him. “Talk to me,” he prompted her. The voices at the gate were getting louder again.  

“Don’t we want the Grisha to come back?” she said, hesitantly. “If we arrest everyone who returns, I won’t have much of an army to lead.”  

She was right, but giving her an army she feared would be like forcing her onto a tightrope above a snakepit. “Remember,” he told her, “you’ll be eating with them, working with them, sleeping under the same roof.”  

“And they could all be working for the Darkling.” Like Genya. She’d slept in the same wing of the Palace as him his entire life, and had been watching him for the Darkling that whole time. “What do you think?”  

He shrugged. “I don’t think these Grisha are any more or less trustworthy than the ones waiting at the Little Palace.” Even if many of those were children, the Darkling had already shown that he would happily use children as spies.  

“That’s not encouraging.” She was still tugging at that loose thread, slowly unravelling one of the golden suns. One of the Fabrikators would have to put it right soon.  

She had been right, despite the danger, and he tried to reassure her of that. “Once we’re behind the palace walls, all communication will be closely monitored. It’s hard to see how the Darkling can use his spies if he can’t reach them.”  

She took a breath, still cradling her left arm against her chest. “All right,” she said, eventually. “Open the gates. I’ll speak to Fedyor and only him. The rest can camp outside the dacha tonight and join us on the way into Os Alta tomorrow.”   

“You’re sure?” he asked her. She looked so small, so fragile, he was almost afraid to put so much weight on those too-young shoulders.   

“I doubt I’ll be sure of anything ever again, but my army needs soldiers.” Her voice was grimly determined.  

“Very good,” Nikolai said with a short nod, the kind he’d have given any younger soldier in their first command. “Just be careful who you trust.”  

"I will.” Her gaze lingered on him a little too sharply before she turned back towards the gate, and he let out a sigh when she was far enough away not to hear it. Just when he thought she might be warming to him... It was no matter. They were allies. They did not need to be friends.  

This did not stop him from staying up all night in the room beside hers, Tolya keeping him company with a book of epic poetry in his lap.  

“Wearing a hole in the carpet will not save Alina from the Darkling’s spies,” he commented, “and she’s well-guarded, between Tamar, Oretsev, and me.”  

“And if something happens to her when I promised her safe conduct to Os Alta?”  

Tolya snorted. “You cannot keep her from sneaking around with Oretsev, so you can hardly take responsibility for every choice she makes.”  

It was true, and yet, for all that Alina had proven a sullen and sometimes unwilling pupil, her safety, and her successes, still felt like his responsibility. A mark of the quality of his teaching, as well as of her skill. He knew sitting in on this interrogation would weaken her in front of her first potential recruits, but he couldn’t help but worry he’d abandoned her in a trap.   

His worries proved fruitless – at breakfast the next day, he was fidgety with lack of sleep, while Alina was as calm as he’d ever seen her, despite the dark circles beneath her eyes.  

“Fedyor says that the massacres at Chernast and Ulensk occurred after the First Army turned on the Grisha,” she told him, pouring herself a third cup of tea. “There’s no proof – both forces will cover for their friends, but it will make other Grisha on the run more likely to side with the Darkling if they think returning to the Little Palace means a trial for desertion or treason.”  

“We could propose an amnesty to my father,” he suggested. “The First Army won’t want to try the units who turned on their Grisha, and the Grisha who chose desertion over death by firing squad will have an opportunity to choose our side over his.”  

“Do you think he’d agree?”   

In truth, he did not know. He’d worshipped his father and brother as a child, but the longer he spent away from Os Alta, the more the shadow of their neglect and selfishness had eclipsed his boyhood adoration. “We won’t get what we don’t ask for,” he said, and noticed her eyes flick to Mal, “but we must be careful not to ask for personal favours over political ones.”  

She set her jaw. “I’m helping secure the throne you want and I don’t get to ask personal favours?”   

“From me? Ask, and I’ll grant it, if it’s in my power and won’t harm Ravka. From my father, we’ll be lucky if he lets us into the Grand Palace at all.”  

“You said Ravka needed me!”  

“And over the past few weeks, I’ve shown you the truth of that. But the King is not Ravka.” He paused, feeling disloyal, but forced himself onward: “He’s used to flattery and adoration, and might see your disappearance as a personal slight. Persuading him to put Ravka above his feelings may be an uphill battle, but asking little for ourselves and offering much will help with that.”  

She sunk back into her chair, looking sullen but thoughtful, and Nikolai hoped he had said enough to persuade her. Having a contingent of Grisha sworn to her before they even reached the Little Palace was better than he could have hoped for, but anxiety still roiled in his belly.  

It clawed up to choke him as they reached the hill above Os Alta, and saw the shining regiments of the First Army arrayed between them and the gates. It could be a heroes’ welcome for Ravka’s prodigal son and daughter, but it could just as easily be a guard to keep them from the city. Between the rogue Grisha and the ever-expanding crowd of pilgrims who followed them, they might look as much like a potential rebellion as a group of weary travellers returning home.  

He could pick out Vasily’s horse long before he could recognise his brother – he'd always favoured warhorses which looked more like sculptors’ models than beasts of battle. He rode up and down the lines bellowing out a speech like a general in a history book, and Nikolai wondered how many of the soldiers before him were actually listening to the speech, or if their regiment commanders had told them to look attentive and then follow their actual orders. He hadn’t truly expected his father to rise from his sickbed to greet them, but even so, to see Vasily in his place was a blow.   

He turned to Alina, who sat pale and rigid in her saddle now, her nerves returned. He smiled, hoping it would reassure her. “It seems my brother has come to greet us,” he said, and nudged his own horse forward as Vasily cantered up to meet them.   

Before he’d left for the army, he would have greeted his brother with a shout, and run to meet him like a child. Now, though, the brother he’d worshipped looked pale and soft, like raw dough compared to the trained soldiers lined up behind him, despite his arrogant bearing. There was a moment of icy tension as their eyes met for the first time in seven years, and then Vasily slid from his saddle into a graceful dismount, and Nikolai followed. To his surprise, his older brother pulled him into a brief embrace, and for a childish moment, he wondered if Vasily had missed him.   

He felt his brother’s breath against his ear. “Just what are you playing at, Sobachka?” He spat the nickname like a curse, and drew back from him, turning to survey their procession. “So this is the girl you claim is the Sun Summoner?” he said, more loudly.   

Nikolai had thought himself prepared for his brother’s attempts to undermine him, but it still stung, despite the easy opening it provided. “It’s a claim easy enough to prove,” he said, and inclined his head to Alina. He caught a glimpse of her rolling her eyes, but she still raised her arms with a dramatic flourish, sweeping a radiant wave of light across Vasily’s assembled troops. There was a commotion as horses reared and soldiers panicked, but it quieted quickly enough.   

Vasily only sniffed, folding his arms. “You’ve been busy, little brother.” He seemed to expect Nikolai to scramble for his praise as he had as a child, as if he expected the same child who left for Poliznaya.   

Nikolai only smiled. If Vasily had not grown up in the past seven years, that could only be to his benefit. “You have no idea, Vasya,” he said, and was amused to see his older brother pout like a child at the diminutive. “I’m surprised to see you in Os Alta. I thought you’d be in Caryeva for the races.”  

“I was,” Vasily replied. “My blue roan had an excellent showing. But when I heard you were returning 
home, I wanted to be here to greet you.” Their father had lain close to death for three months, and Vasily had been at the races. It should not have disappointed him, but he still felt a curl of disgust in his stomach. 

“Kind of you to go to all this trouble,” he said, sweetly.   

“The return of a royal prince is no small thing,” Vasily replied. “Even a younger son.”  

That explained his presence in Os Alta far better than their father’s illness had. He’d been comfortable enough in the promise of a crown uncontested with Nikolai in far-off Kerch, but a younger brother close at hand with the Sun Summoner on his arm was a more pressing threat. He’d likely raced home to play the diligent heir as soon as word of their return had reached him, and their slow progress had given him extra time to call in favours at court. Perhaps his brother intended to put up more of a fight for the throne than he’d anticipated.  

“We younger sons learn to appreciate what we can get,” he said, with a mischievous grin, and glanced down the line of horsemen for a familiar face. At least one veteran unit from the Halmhend campaign would have been recalled to protect the king in his hour of need. He spotted his mark, and called out to him: “Sergeant Pechkin, I remember you from the Halmhend campaign. Leg must have healed well if you’re able to stand there like a slab of stone.” Pechkin had been in the bed beside him in the infirmary when he took his first bullet, and had teased him with a rough soldier’s affection when he’d vomited after it was pulled out.   

The man looked astonished at being singled out. “ Da, moi tsarevich,” he replied, with a surprising bashfulness for a man with shoulders as broad as Tolya’s.  

“‘Sir ’ will do, sergeant. I’m an officer when I wear this uniform, not a prince,” he reminded the older man. He resisted the urge to watch for Vasily’s reaction – this moment was about more than his older brother’s opinion.   

“Yes, sir,” the old soldier said, and added, hesitantly: “Only bothers me when it rains.”  

“Then I’d imagine the Fjerdans pray daily for storms,” he said, and watched his chest puff up with pride. “You put quite a few of them out of their misery, if I recall.” He did not recall, but it was a fair guess, given that he’d survived long enough to earn a comfortable place in Os Alta.   

“I seem to remember you doing the same, sir,” Pechkin replied, with a grin. It was exactly the response he’d hoped for, respectful, but with enough camaraderie to show that the soldier-prince had not forgotten the rank-and-file of the First Army.  

He turned back to Vasily, who looked like he’d bitten into a ripe plum only to find it rotten inside. “Brother,” he said, with a sunny smile. “Let’s get to the palace so we can dispense with our greetings. I have a case of Kerch whiskey that needs drinking, and I’d like to get your advice on a foal I spotted in Ketterdam. They tell me Dagrenner is his sire, but I have my doubts.” He’d established his place among the soldiers, but he did not actually want his brother’s enmity if it could be avoided.  

Vasily still looked resentful, but could not resist such appetising bait. “Dagrenner? Did they have papers?”  

“Come and have a look.”   

His brother’s face was still wary as he climbed back into the saddle, but Nikolai made sure to smile and speak only of horses as they rode through the city gates. It had been seven years since he’d last been in the city, and war had made little impact on its shining streets. The main boulevards were still swept clean and lined with the townhouses of nobles and wealthy merchants, all signs of poverty swept out of view of the wealthy. He wondered if Dominik’s mother was still in her farmhouse on the outskirts, if Marya and little Oxana had avoided the draft after surrendering their brothers to Ravka. The clean, shining streets, the sparkling fountains, the palace’s golden gates, all sights which had once been familiar and welcoming, now felt like memories from another life. Trying to remember the boy he had been when he left felt like trying to squeeze into a shirt he’d outgrown years ago. The only change was the cries of “ Sankta Alina” which rose around them as they passed, but they were rarer than they had been on the road. The city seemed subdued and nervous. In the Apparat’s absence, excessive religious fervour was cause for suspicion.   

Alina’s spine was rigid as they rode through the palace gates, her lips pressed tightly together. She held the reins with one white-knuckled hand, her other arm cradled to her chest. When they reached the fountain, she winced as Tolya lifted her from the saddle. Nikolai would have offered her his arm, but she looked so grimly determined that he did not want to let her know he’d seen her moment of weakness.    

Instead, he chucked her under the chin and squared her shoulders, ignoring Oretsev’s glare. “Keep quiet, and try to look penitent,” he murmured, and strode to catch up with Vasily, letting her take a few moments of quiet comfort with her tracker before they faced the King and Queen. The King and Queen... They’d been Madraya and Avva when he left, but he’d almost forgotten how to speak of them that way. It had been easier to blend in to the infantry when he could let them forget who his parents were, and Sturmhond had never had parents to speak of.  His own footsteps on the polished parquet sounded too loud, and he half-expected to be scolded by a housekeeper for causing a ruckus. It was a childish expectation, but the high ceilings and gilded walls made him feel like a child again, too loud, too chaotic, too much for the shining refinement of court. At the doors to the audience chamber, he took a deep breath, straightened his uniform, and gave Alina one last smile.   

“ Tsarevich Vasily Lantsov and Grand Duke Nikolai Lantsov! ”  

That was his cue. The play began.  

Relief surged through him as the doors swung open – both thrones were still occupied. His father could not have been as close to death as rumour had whispered. It was quickly followed by numbing shock. When had his parents grown old? His mother’s face was lined, her golden hair fading to silver. His father was greying too, and sat hunched in his chair. As they drew closer, Nikolai could see the purple mottling of his skin, and catch the faint smell of decay. It was no surprise that it was rumoured his father was dying, if this was him at his best.  

At the foot of the dais, he paused, and bowed deeply. “ Moi tsar. Moya tsaritsa.” Not overfamiliar, not hungry for affection or attention. He had left them a puppy, he would return a true prince of Ravka.  

There was a long, terrible moment where they did not respond, and his heart clawed in his chest. Had he come too late? Did they wish he’d stayed away, this inconvenient blemish on the Lantsov family crest?  

Then his mother rose to her feet and bounded down the stairs, more like a girl of fifteen than a woman of forty-five. “ Nikolai!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms around him and showering kisses upon his cheeks.  

“ Madraya,” he sighed, the gnawing reopened wound in his chest warmed and sated by her affection. When she drew back, he saw real tears on her cheeks, and felt a surge of guilt for his long absence.   

Behind her, a footman helped his father to his feet. “Come, Nikolai,” the King said, in a voice which trembled. “Come.” He held out a hand, and Nikolai stepped forward, offering his father his free arm. He leaned on it hard, and Nikolai realised with a shock that his father seemed so small beside him now, so fragile. Not the towering warrior king of his childhood imagination, but a sick old man happy to see his family reunited at last. At his father’s gesture, he escorted his parents to the smaller audience chamber behind the throne room, and settled his father in a chair by the fire. Vasily had followed them, lips pursed in the sour-plum expression that had appeared on his face when Nikolai spoke to Sergeant Pechkin.   

He knelt on the fireside rug before his father, and kissed his hand.   

The King looked down at him with a curious, unreadable expression. “Well,” he said, “you finally came home. I must truly be in my dotage if it’s dragged you away from Ketterdam.”  

“I came as soon as I heard of your illness,” he said. “My studies are nothing compared to my family.”  

Vasily snorted. “Your studies in what? Drinking and gambling?”  

His mother flinched. “Vasya -”  

He squeezed her hand, still resting on his shoulder. “It’s alright, Madraya. I should have been here sooner. Father, are you recovering swiftly?”   

The King snorted. “You’re looking at me, aren’t you? The doctors say they’re trying their best, but whatever Grisha witchcraft the Darkling concocted is beyond those fools.”  

“So the rumours are true?” Nikolai widened his eyes. “The Darkling has truly turned against us?”   

“He’s been plotting against us in that Little Palace of his since the last Darkling fell,” his father said, grimly, “He planted a spy under our noses, and we never noticed.”  

“I raised her as if she were my own,” his mother bemoaned, collapsing onto a sofa and clutching one of the balls of fluff she called a dog to her chest. The sight reminded him of a scene from another lifetime – Genya's tenth birthday, when she’d picked out her own puppy from one of his mother’s litters. Kolenka, she’d called it, because he follows me around almost as much as you do. When had his mother taken it back from her. The Queen continued: “She practically shared a nursery with you, Kolya! The danger we put you in when we took that little bitch into our home.”   

The venom in her tone should have startled him. It was almost more concerning that it didn’t. “Do we know how the Darkling swayed her to such treason?” he said. He knew his mother could be cold, his father dismissive, but surely that alone was not enough for her to condemn anyone to this fate. This close, the King looked as though his body was rotting while he lived.   

His parents exchanged an unreadable look, and his father said: “That girl was the Darkling’s creature from the day she was born, Nikolai. We should never have exposed you to her.”  

He’d been angry with Genya since his earliest conversation with Raevsky, and when he heard the rumours of what she had done, he’d thought he hated her. Now, though, his traitor brain conjured up the scent of summer strawberries, the taste of burnt raisins from games of pomdrakon, her lively firebird’s shriek. The last kiss she’d pressed to his cheek. You can’t save me, Kolya. What had she needed saving from at fourteen, that child of the same palace he’d grown up in?  

He sighed, folded his father’s withered hand in his own. “They’ll call you Ravka’s strongest king, if even Grisha magic could not fell you,” he said, and wished he was a good enough liar to convince himself.  

The King gave him a weary smile. “Flatterer. I thought you were studying philosophy, not rhetoric.”  

It was as good an opening as any. He gave a rueful smile. “If you’re about to quiz me on my studies, I have some explaining to do.” He looked up at his father, trying to school his features into an expression of repentance that did not come naturally to him. “I owe you an apology, Father, and you too, Mother.”  

“For your dawdling?” the King scoffed, but Nikolai shook his head.  

“For my deception. I fear I’ve misled you with regard to my studies. I did spend some time at the University in Ketterdam, but I’ve had more pressing concerns of late that caused me to abandon my studies.”  

His father frowned. “But your grades- your letters-”  

“I hired a clerk to take my place at the University. It was a grave deception, and I beg your forgiveness-”  

“As you should,” Vasily said, smugly, “wasting our parents’ money on some deserter while you gad about-”  

Nikolai ignored the interruption: “-which I hope you will grant when I tell you what I have been doing in place of my studies.”  

His father raised a single eyebrow. “And what exactly was more important than your university studies?”  

Nikolai took a deep breath, and hoped he looked stern and sincere in equal measure. “The future of Ravka itself,” he said.   

The drama of his statement was slightly undermined by a second snort from Vasily: “Is this your way of revealing a bastard squirrelled away in a Ketterdam brothel, Sobachka?”  

“Vasya, please,” his mother said, which was the closest she had ever come to scolding her eldest son. She looked back to Nikolai, concerned. “You haven’t come to tell me I am a grandmother, have you, Kolya?”  

He laughed. “I wish I had such joyous news, but no, Madraya.” He looked back to his father. “Have you heard of Sturmhond?”  

“The pirate?” Vasily demanded.  

“Privateer,” Nikolai corrected, reflexively.   

“The one all the reports from Os Kervo go on about?” the King said, his brow crumpling in confusion. “They told me he took down half the Fjerdan supply lines in thanks for his letter of mark. Impressive work for a captain nobody had heard of two years ago.”  

That tale had grown in the telling, but he was not going to regret it if it turned to his benefit.   

“Well, that was shortly after I left the university,” he explained. His mother gave a horrified gasp, and he wondered how much more horrified she would be if she knew that he had actually left his studies long before he became Sturmhond. “I couldn’t sit idle and study when news of the war came in on every ship.”  

“What are you trying to tell us?” his father said, in a low, unreadable voice.   

Nikolai took his hand. “Father, I am Sturmhond.”  

“What horseshit.” Vasily’s voice was careless, dismissive, almost deliberately so. “It’s a pretty story, Sobachka, but you can’t really expect anyone to believe you’re Ravka’s great naval hero. You’re practically a child.”  

“Perhaps, but a child with plenty of commendations for his skill at tactics,” he said, lightly. “I know you were too busy to attend the medal ceremonies at Poliznaya, but surely word reached you at some point?” He turned back to his father. “I know it was deceitful, but I saved up my stipend, bought a ship, hired a crew, and wrote to you for a letter of mark as soon as I captured my first Fjerdan trader. I had to do something for you, for Ravka.”  

The Queen clutched at his shoulder with one too-thin hand, “Kolya, you can’t have!” Her tone was pleading. “You could have been killed, held to ransom-“  

“Which is why Sturmhond was born,” he explained. “I couldn’t risk my folly endangering you or Ravka if I was captured by the enemy. Nikolai Lantsov was a liability. Sturmhond could be a legend.”  

“Why not return to Poliznaya?” his father demanded. “The First Army could have used a general with your skills, boy.”  

Because I had a chance at freedom. “Because I wished to claim something for myself,” he said, instead. It wasn’t untrue. “I wished to prove myself worthy of such a father.”  

There was a silence that lasted a little too long, and Nikolai felt anxiety twist in his stomach. Had he pushed too far? Laid his flattery on too thick?  

Then a wide smile curved across his father’s features. “Kolya,” he said, voice thick with emotion. “Can this really be true?”  

“I would swear it before a Heartrender if you found one you trusted,” he said, seriously. “A dutiful son does not deceive his parents, but I could not abandon you, or let you stop me helping you however I could.”  

“So you became a pirate,” Vasily sneered, “saved the Sun Summoner from the clutches of the Darkling, and swept into Os Alta a returning hero? What next, you’ve promised her your hand in marriage?”  

“There are no promises between Alina and I,” he said. “I merely retrieved her from the ship the Darkling held her on, and brought her back to her true place.”  

“And you think the little Saint can be trusted, after abandoning her country? She came from the First Army, we ought to hang her for desertion.” The King folded his arms over his too-thin chest, resentful.  

“The Apparat is hoping we will do just that,” Nikolai pointed out. “Sankta Alina on the gallows will transform his followers from cultists to revolutionaries. Sankta Alina in the Grand Palace, sworn to our family, may bring her followers back into the fold.”  

“And for that we should bow and scrape to the little peasant?” his mother sniffed, her expression remarkably similar to Vasily’s  

“We don’t need to debase ourselves to turn her popularity to our purposes,” he said, and something about the way his father’s expression changed at those words made him feel almost unclean. “The people simply need to learn that she is sworn to us, trusted by us, and they will flock to us again.”  

“As they should regardless!” The purple on his father’s face was darkening, his expression trembled, and for a moment, Nikolai feared his father might have a seizure. “We are their rightful sovereigns, the descendants of Yaromir the Determined!”  

“And yet, the peasants love their Sun Summoner. Killing her will not change this, so we must ensure she is seen to serve Ravka and the Lantsov family.” He moved to sit at his mother’s side. “I understand this goes against our pride, Father, but if this is the sacrifice we must make for Ravka, I know you will be willing.”  

His father pouted, somehow halfway between a much older man and a petulant child. “I don’t see why we should make exceptions for Grisha traitors when making exceptions for the Darkling caused all this.”  

Making his father proud had been Nikolai’s first motivation for childhood mischief, for his earliest inventions, for his eight years in the First Army. He had long ago realised that his father was not a good king, or even a good man, but something about his petulance, his childishness, filled him with crushing disappointment. For so many years, he had hoped King Alexander III might one day be a king worthy of following. Surrendering that hope would be painful. Nikolai was accustomed to pain.   

“The Darkling will attempt to sway the Second Army’s loyalty, and without another figure to turn to, they may follow. To those who were raised in the Little Palace, he might be the only father they have ever known.” An image flashed into his mind – Genya on the deck of the ship, her smile radiant at the Darkling’s smallest praise. He blinked it away. “We must show them that you are the true father of all of Ravka, of the Sun Summoner herself.”  

“Hmph. And you think a girl who abandoned her post can be trusted?”  

“I think that we have enough that she desires to persuade her, and enough leverage to compel her.” He kept his voice cold and distant, tried not to think of the girl with the burning glare and the radiant smile and the too-thin face.   

“And we should believe you about her trustworthiness?” Vasily said, sounding bored. “Either you just admitted to deceiving us for years, or you’re lying to us now. Either way, nobody should be taking your word for granted.”  

“Lucky that the final judgement rests with our father, not with you, then,” Nikolai said, finally giving in to the temptation to roll his eyes at his brother. “If I had never created Sturmhond, I would never have been in a position to retrieve the Sun Summoner from the Darkling’s clutches. Already the loyal remnants of the Second Army have begun to gather, knowing she has returned to us. If we seize this moment, offer them an amnesty, we may be able to crush the Darkling’s rebellion before he has time to gather more troops.”  

His father sighed, looking defeated. “I see you have everything planned out for me already.”  

Nikolai shook his head, affecting the mask of the pious son once more. “Not at all, father. At every moment of my journey, I thought only of what you would do in my position.” It would have been a more truthful statement if he’d added: and then I did the opposite.  

Yes, Nikolai had known for many years that his family was the worm slowly devouring the eagle of Ravka from within. But painful truth was always far quicker to reach his head than his slow, unadaptable heart. As he followed his parents out into the throne room again, he wondered if Genya’s betrayal would break what was left of that foolish heart, when it finally realised she was gone.   

Notes:

Thank you for all your comments and feedback on this fic. I really appreciate all of you. You've been so welcoming to me. <3

Chapter 9: ix – the heart knows nothing

Summary:

David knows nothing at all. War comes for him anyway.

David Kostyk was starting to think he knew nothing at all. He had gone with the palace guards who arrived at his workshop willingly enough, and had not realised he had been arrested until his hands were manacled to the table.  

“But I’m a Fabrikator,” he objected, and when they goggled at him: “The Darkling never shares his plans with the Materialki. Everyone knows he favours the Etherealki and Corporalki. We just make things.” It didn’t make sense to David – he had never understood why producing fire out of the air or stopping a heart was more useful than making trees fruit out of season, or healing a broken bone. He’d never needed to do either of the former, though he would have been grateful for a Healer’s gift on his frequent cuts and burns.   

“You are the highest ranking member of the Second Army left in Os Alta, and you claim you knew nothing?”   

David felt a chill in his spine. “That... that can’t be right. The older officers are protecting the king and the city.”  

The second officer, the one with a captain’s stripes on his shoulder, gave a snort of laughter that did not feel funny. “Your superiors have been executed for their role in the Darkling’s attempted coup. If you don’t want to join them, I suggest you tell us all you know.”  

David’s stomach churned. All the senior officers? Stern Lydia? Steady Arkadi? Pyotr, his mentor, his hero? “I’ve told you, I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know the King was sick until you told me as much.” He hated how his voice was shaking. If it was true, if this wasn’t some cruel joke at his expense, he had to be brave, and calm. The little ones, who’d seemed lost when their lessons were suspended, would need someone brave and calm and kind as Pyotr was. “I spend all my time in the Fabrikator workshops, I make keftas and rifles and sometimes toys for noble children.” And once, an amplifier. He could still feel the snap as it closed around Alina’s neck. “I knew nothing , I swear to you.”  

His heart was thundering in his ears, and he couldn’t hear what they said next over its violent pulsing. His hands clenched into fists reflexively, but without them, the Small Science did not come so easily. It would take him minutes rather than moments to rust through the metal cuffs, and what then? Materialki did not get combat training.   

One of the guards reached under the table, pulling out a case of tools, most of which David did not recognise. The one he picked up was unfortunately recognisable, though – a heavy mallet with a single narrow end.  

“You can keep up your lies as long as you like,” he said, with an affable smile. “Your superiors took some time to break, but they all sang in the end.”  

“You- you can’t do this,” David stuttered. “Torture won’t get you truth I don’t know, I’ll just tell you whatever makes you stop.”  

The other guard laughed. “You think you know about torture, little Grisha? The King of Ravka lies rotting in his bed at the hands of one of you witches, and you think you know anything of suffering, you spoilt little bastard?”  

It was a stupid thought, and it escaped David’s mouth before he could stop it. “I’m not a bastard. My parents were married seven years before I was born.”  

The hammer came down on his hand with a crack, and David let out a strangled croak that was almost a scream. “Y-you haven’t even told me what you think I know,” he panted, and hated how pathetic he sounded. Was this how steel felt, under his hammer?  

“Tell us the Darkling’s plans,” the captain demanded.  

David closed his eyes, reaching into the metal of the manacles for its quiet, humming song. “I told you,” he said, trying to compose himself, “I don’t know anything useful. Hurting me won’t change that.”  

 He was right, he knew he was right. Torture was nowhere near as useful for extracting truth as a Heartrender’s hand on a pulse. But they did not seem to care about the truth as they brought the hammer down once, twice, again. I am steel , David thought, the hammer makes steel unbreakable. But he was not steel. His bones did not hear his silent songs, and when his fingers broke, he screamed.  

There was another bang, this one unaccompanied by pain, and his eyes flew open in confusion. What he saw did not make any sense, could not have been real. Anfisa – Anfisa , his pretty, fussy oldest sister, who had never held a rifle or a blade, had stormed into the small room like a wolf on the fold, her face alight with fury. In her shining violet silk, she seemed so out of place in that grim place that she must have been a dream.   

But her voice, when it hit his ears, still shook him like thunder: “What do you think you are doing?”  

For a sickening moment, he thought she believed whatever the soldiers believed, that she was angry with him, that he had shamed their family. Then she stepped around the table and laid a hand on his shoulder. The guards, who had loomed over him, suddenly shrank in their chairs like naughty children.  

“ Moya grafinya, we’ve been ordered to question every officer of the Second Army in Os Alta. This man was the Darkling’s favourite Fabrikator, by all accounts. He may know the cause of the King's illness.”  

Anfisa’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “ This man is David Kostyk, only son of the Count of Duva, cousin to the Duke of Ryevost, great-great-grandson to Ivan the Golden himself, and you have broken his fingers? What possible reason could you have to torture a Prince of the Blood, a second cousin to King Alexander himself?”  

Being a second cousin to the King was nothing particularly special among the nobility, who could almost all claim distant descent from one king or another, but it seemed enough to cow the guards.  

“We were following orders, my lady,” the captain said. “All senior Second Army officers must be questioned regarding the king’s illness.”  

“ Senior officers? My brother is nineteen, you imbecile. Was slaughtering every adult Grisha in the capital not enough to sate your bloodlust?”  

“The Darkling’s assassin was twenty,” the other soldier muttered. David would have warned him that trying to argue with Anfisa in a temper was a pointless course of action, but he was not feeling particularly sympathetic to the man who was currently trying to hide a hammer behind his back, “and he’s known to be an associate of hers.”  

“Oh, you’re investigating her associates?” Anfisa’s voice dripped poison. “The Queen and all her ladies are her associates, but I don’t see you taking a hammer to their fingers.”  

“My lady, we understand your upset,” the captain said, nervously, “but we do have to investigate the King’s illness, and your brother may have vital information regarding the assassin.”  

“My brother needs rest and medical attention before anyone speaks to him,” Anfisa snapped. “If he has any useful information, he will of course share it with you as a loyal servant of the King. And if you wish to interrogate him further without his consent, you had better have sufficient evidence for a trial, do you understand me?”  

The palace guards were accustomed to looking stern and serious at the gates, not dealing with rabidly angry noblewomen. David leaned back against his sister as they reluctantly unlocked his manacles, and they did not resist as she helped him to his feet. “If you wish to speak with David again, you will go through me, or my husband, Count Kirigan. And if either of you, or any of the palace guard, lay a hand on another child, Grisha or no, I will ruin you so thoroughly that you will wish yourselves dead.”  

She helped him to his feet and swept him away. In the corridor, still leaning heavily on her arm, he could only say: “I’m not a child, Anfisa.”  

She sniffed. “You are nineteen, David. You’ve never even seen a battlefield.”  

She wasn’t wrong, but in that moment, pale and shaking as he was, he felt like beaten steel, still red-hot and flexible, but settling into a form that would one day be unbreakable. “I’m the most senior officer left in the Little Palace.” He took a strangled, choking breath. “ I’m the most senior officer left.” It felt impossible. It felt true. “I have to be strong, Anfisa.”  

“David, you’re raving.” Anfisa’s brow was furrowed with concern. “Your hand is broken. Let me get a doctor at least. “  

“Fix my hand, whatever you need to do, I need to get back to the Little Palace-” She was still staring at him. He hated being stared at. He hated the pain radiating from his hand. He hated not being able to think , he needed to think , there would be people he had to protect, people counting on him- nobody but the Darkling had ever counted on him before. He would ruin everything. Maybe he already had ruined everything-  

He blinked. Anfisa had pushed him into a comfortable armchair in her chambers, and was already in the process of ordering servants about, bustling and efficient and herself again, not his terrifying rescuer. She shoved a warm cup of tea into his uninjured hand and ordered: “Drink.”  

He drank with the automatic obedience of childhood, coughed when he realised how much brandy she had spiked it with, then drank more. It was bitter, and stingingly alcoholic, but it let his mind slip away from the shattered agony of his hand, and disappear into the twisting weave of fabric-  

“No, no, no.” Anfisa was kneeling at his side. “You don’t get to go to sleep until we get your fingers splinted. The doctor is already on his way, you don’t have to wait long-”  

“Anfisa.” He felt almost dizzy, dragging out the middle syllable of her name into an infant’s babble: Anfiiiiiiisa. “ You said you knew her. The assassin. You know who she is? The woman who killed the king?”  

“The girl,” Anfisa corrected him, “You know her too, did nobody tell you? The Queen’s little fosterling was accused-”  

“ Genya?” David said, and the sound he made was almost a laugh. “They think she- that she would- Why? ”  

Anfisa’s mouth went thin and tight. “The King was found half-dead in his bed, his skin and sheets covered in Grisha poison. Genya Safin has been his mistress for years.”  

Genya, working for days on a comb the Queen wore once. Genya, always in her mistress’s shadow where once she had been like her daughter. Genya, tucked beside him at his workbench, working on potions she had told him were perfumes. Genya, the Darkling’s head bent low to her ear, turned towards him like a flower seeking light. Genya in the doorway to her little chamber, her robe loose about her shoulders, clinging to him like she had not been touched kindly in years. David Kostyk did not know people, but he knew Genya. His father had once told him a trapped animal would gnaw off its own limb in order to escape. What wouldn’t Genya sacrifice to escape the trap she had lived in for so long?  

“Of course,” he said, faintly, the stars she had revealed to him finally forming constellations to his eyes. “Of course she would.”  

“ David.” Anfisa was looking up at him, her eyes looking into him and through him and seeing his soul laid bare. He hated being stared at. “You- you lo -”  

“Please, Anfisa,” he said. “Please don’t say that.” Genya was beyond his reach and his help. “I- I have duties now.”  

He returned to the duties he didn’t know he had, fingers splinted, bandaged, and lathered in stinking ointment. Nobody had told him he had duties now. Nobody had told him that Pyotr was dead, that the King was dying. Perhaps that was for the best. The last thing he had been told was to follow the guards who had broken his fingers. Before that, it was to clip a collar around Alina’s neck.  

It took him some time to gather the eldest who were left, and they all looked surprised to see him return. Everyone but him seemed to have become used to the adults vanishing one by one from the Little Palace, never to return. The eldest Fabrikators left were him and then Paja, who was sixteen, and little Leoni, who was only fourteen and who’s bright smile had been dimmed by days of fear. How had he not noticed how afraid they were? It was worse when he found the oldest Etherealnik and Corporalnik: Adrik and Sergei were fifteen and sixteen, and plump, witty Nina was not even fourteen. Had the Darkling really taken everyone older with him, or left them here to die? He could not think of such things.   

“We need to begin lessons again for the little ones,” he said, and they stared at him, goggle-eyed.  

“ Lessons?” Adrik was the first to recover. “They’re picking us off one by one and you’re worried about lessons? ”  

“Who would even teach them?” Paja demanded, “All our teachers are dead or gone.”  

“We should be fighting back!” little Nina said, “We can’t let them do this to us!”  

They were about to descend into a bickering cacophony, so David raised his voice: “You might be able to fight back but the children can’t. The only ones left to teach them are us and Botkin, and Botkin can’t teach them Small Science.”  

“What if they come for us again?” He had not spent much time around Leoni, but she was almost unrecognisable without her bright smile. “What will we do then?”  

David set his jaw, hoping he looked grimly heroic and not like a frightened boy. “I am your commanding officer,” he said, calmly. “I will stop them.”  

Paja and Leoni looked astonished, Nina and Adrik disbelieving. “Have you even held a rifle before?” Adrik asked.   

“Many times.” The fact that he hadn’t fired one yet was irrelevant. “I’ve been making bombs and rifles since before you and your sister ever came to the Little Palace.”  

“Fabrikators aren’t soldiers,” Sergei pointed out, frowning. “Adrik and I should outrank you.”  

David folded his arms, and hoped it looked stern rather than an attempt to reduce the throbbing in his hand. “So do you and Adrik have a better idea than securing the Little Palace and continuing to train? Or aren’t you sure you can train them-”  

“I know I can!” Nina interrupted, but he continued:  

“If any of you aren’t sure you can train them, there are plenty of books in the library, and together we’ll find the right ones for everyone.”  

There was a moment of bewildered silence, and then Paja spoke, quietly: “They’re saying the Darkling is a traitor, that we’re all traitors. Are we?”  

David remembered the click of the collar snapping closed, the painful way it had seemed to jab into Alina’s neck and shoulders. “I- It doesn’t matter what they are saying. It matters what we do next. And what we will do next is protect ourselves and the children. Either the Darkling will return, or-” He didn’t want to think about or. He couldn’t imagine an or, “ or another general will be appointed. We can’t make either happen faster. We can only make sure they have a Second Army to lead when they come.”  

It was the most any of them had ever heard him talk, and it fortunately stunned them to silence. “Gather the little ones,” he ordered. “M-make sure you know all of the ones you should be teaching, and keep an eye on them. I know you might not want to do it, but there is nobody else.” He paused, then, feeling he should say something reassuring: “The Darkling always picked the best teachers for us. I picked you for the same reason.”  

They stared at him for a few more moments, then began to dissipate, returning to dormitories or workshops to try and gather the children. Or possibly to skive off, he could not know which, but at least he had tried.   

The second thing David did was to begin to seal the doors and windows of the Little Palace. It was hard work one-handed, and he was sweating and shaking by the time he was halfway through the dining room shutters. He folded into a seat for a few moments’ rest, his hand cradled to his chest, but when he looked up, he was not alone. Leoni and Paja had herded the smaller Fabrikators into the hall, and they were all staring at him.   

It was Leoni who spoke up, her voice bright and cheerful. “You can see that David has already started today’s lesson: we are practicing bonding wood to wood. So, you’re going to check all the shutters and doors that lead outside that you can reach safely, and bond them closed. The group who seals the most shutters gets first pick of fruit from the hothouses. Are you ready?”  

David blinked, then said: “Leave the courtyard doors. If there’s a fire, we’ll need a way out.”  

“Everything leading outside but the courtyard doors,” Leoni corrected. “You heard him, let’s go!”  

Paja drifted over to stand over him, looking down at him with unreadable brown eyes. “You need a Healer to look at that hand,” she observed.  

He shook his head. “We don’t have a Healer.”  

“One of the Corporalki, then,” she said.   

“Later. We need to rig up an alarm to the courtyard doors.”  

“I have some ideas.” She slid to the floor beside him, and began to sketch out her plans with charcoal on the dining hall floor. It was strange, working with someone other than Genya, and it was hard to adjust to speaking his thoughts out loud. He did not want to cover Paja’s hands with his own. He did not want her pressed close to his side, and she did not try to sit close to him.   

They were halfway through setting up the alarm when Nina arrived with a smaller Corporalnik in tow. “Adam wants to be a Healer,” she said. “I told him he could practice on you. I’ll help, fingerbones can be tricky.”  

Their work was careful, precise, and agonising, as they snapped each individual bone back into place. David bit through the sleeve of his kefta, and winced at the metallic taste of steel on his tongue. His left hand would ache in the rain until the day he died. It would remain a useful reminder of the price of obedience.  

It was twinging the day the Sun Summoner returned to the Little Palace, bursting through the double doors like a violent storm, interrupting their quiet, fearful rhythm of children teaching children and preparing for war. They had gathered in the Hall as soon as the alarm had been rung of soldiers on the path, and they had formed barricades of the tables ready to meet the enemy, carefully arrayed in their orders. The Fabrikators, lacking hand-to-hand training, held whatever firearms they had found.   

Their shabby discipline broke when they realised salvation had arrived in place of death. Among the Grisha following Alina, Marie and Nadia broke rank, Nadia flying to her brother, Marie to Sergei’s arms. In spite of himself, David stared out at the Grisha surrounding Alina, looking for a hint of flame-coloured hair. He did not see it, and tried to ignore the pain in his chest, the lurch in his stomach.   

Sergei stepped forward. “Alina Starkov. I’m pleased to welcome you back to the Little Palace.” He did not sound pleased to David, who was less displeased by Alina’s presence than by the number of people glancing at him.  

Alina smiled. “Thank you, Sergei. I’m glad to be here.” She did not look any gladder to be here than she had the first time. David would miss the way fear had stripped away such pretences in the weeks they had waited for her arrival.  

Sergei was still talking. David was not paying attention anymore – his hand ached, Alina was here, and she and Sergei could squabble all day as long as the little ones still had their lessons and their order. His brain shifted to planning out the next class for the young Fabrikators – lens work was difficult, and he wanted to make sure they could all understand it properly.  

He regretted not listening when people began to shout, but by that point, he had lost the thread of what they were shouting about. The Corporalki were shouting. The Etherealki were drawing flint and steel. The Materialki and some of the youngest Grisha drew closer to him, all wide, frightened eyes and small grasping hands. David felt himself shrink, could only cover his ears at the cacophony of voices, but he drew them back behind him, away from the growing argument. If it broke out into violence, he could at least keep the little ones away from it all.  

They were the furthest away when the dome cracked open, a crack of blinding sunlight pouring through. Someone screamed. Mila, the youngest, burst into tears. Even Sergei and Zoya looked frightened.  

Only Alina stood calm in the midst of the panic. “You think the Darkling is powerful? You have 
no idea what he is capable of. Only I have seen what he can do. Only I have faced him and lived to tell 
about it.” David’s eyes were fixed to the sharp points of the collar around her neck. He knew too well what the Darkling was capable of, and he had chosen not to face him. He did not know if he would choose that a second time. “I don’t care if you think I’m a Saint or a fool or the Darkling’s whore. If you want to remain at the Little Palace, you will follow me. And if you don’t like it, you will be gone by tonight, or I will have you in chains. I am a soldier. I am the Sun Summoner. And I’m the only chance you have.” 

She stormed away into the Darkling’s chambers, and in the hubbub, David realised that his little group were all staring at him.   

“What should we do?” Paja asked him.  

He closed his eyes, bit his tongue. The warmth of Genya pressed against him. The burning hatred in Alina’s eyes, the click of the collar. The little ones’ wide, frightened eyes, desperate for someone to bring order to the chaos, like melting sand into glass.  

“We stay here,” he said, eyes still closed. “We swear to the Sun Summoner.” If the Darkling had come to him now, asked him to collar Paja or Leoni, even Nina or Adrik, he would break his own fingers again before agreeing. He did not know if it would mean anything to Alina, but that was not what mattered. “She will keep the little ones safe.”   

He remembered the days when he’d thought Genya was a princess. She’d been as small as the youngest among his group, tiny Mila. David tried to imagine sending Mila into the Grand Palace, and almost retched at the thought. However terrible Alina might be, she was not that.  

He did not expect Alina to hunt him down to his workshop the next morning, where a gaggle of children now settled to watch him work when they did not have lessons. He had skipped breakfast in the hope that she had forgotten him, but it was impossible to ignore when she entered.  

“David?”  

“Yes, moi soverenyi?” Technically, he’d avoided her well enough that he hadn’t sworn an oath to her, but it wasn’t a lie – she was his general now.  

“Who would you recommend to join my council?”  

He frowned. “I thought Zoya and Fedyor-”  

“No,” she interrupted. She was trying to get him to meet her eyes. He could not do it. Alina looking through him, after what he had done- he could not bear it. “From the Materialki.”  

“Materialki don’t sit on the Darkling’s council.”  

“I’m not the Darkling.”  

He ducked his head, focussing his gaze on the work in front of him. It was a pair of mirrored gloves, based on his old prototype, but sleeker, less fragile, more armoured. Better suited for a general. “Paja,” he suggested. “She’s- smart. Sensible. And Leoni. People like her.”  

“Two Alkemi?”   

“I don’t know anyone among the Durasts you brought back. I don’t know if they can be trusted.”  

"You should pick David!” He jerked his head up to see Nina among the children sat in front of him, so uncharacteristically quiet that he would not have noticed her. “He kept us all safe for weeks while we waited for you. And he’s not a hothead like Sergei.”  

Alina narrowed her eyes. “Do you think you should be on my council, David?”  

He could feel her gaze upon him like an open flame, dazzling and painful. “N-no. My judgement is- flawed. I hate talking to people. I won’t be useful there.”  

“Come anyway,” Alina said, and there was a cadence of order to her tone. “I need more familiar faces around me. And you are my best Fabrikator.” There was a mocking echo of the Darkling’s words in her tone, audible to him alone.   

He closed his eyes, awash in guilt. “ Da, moi soverenyi. As you command.”   

For all the things David Kostyk did not know, he understood this: despite her sainthood, despite her dazzling light, despite that she appeared to be everything the Darkling was not, he would not obey the Sun Summoner blindly. He would not obey blindly again.  

Notes:

Thank you for all your wonderful comments! I'm overwhelmed by how kind you all are, and it's definitely helping me keep up with writing a chapter a week. Let me know what you thought of this update, and I'll be back next Thursday with Chapter 10.

Chapter 10: x - all your sums and your pieces

Summary:

Nikolai attempts to make friends. David fails to make enemies.

Alina’s council, when they filed in the next morning, were frighteningly young. He was almost the oldest, second only to Pavel, at twenty, but his tongue caught in his mouth, and he had little to contribute to discussions of strategy and politics. He kept quiet, hoped to sink beneath the Sun Summoner’s burning gaze, but when she began to speak of the Darkling’s nichevo’ya as a true threat rather than a fearful rumour, he saw the warmth drain from Paja’s cheeks, and even Sergei looked afraid. He had to speak.  

“It’s not Grisha power,” he said, with difficulty. “It’s merzost. ” He’d looked up at Alina to try to gauge her reaction, but as soon as her eyes met his, he had to pull away, look down at his sleeve. “That energy, that substance, it has to come from somewhere. It must be coming from him.” What was it like, to draw on the making at the heart of the world from its source? To go beyond the silent dance of particles and cells and reach into their cores, rending them apart and making them anew with will alone? The thought alone was beautiful and terrible in equal measure, and so too was Alina’s gaze, which remained fixed upon him for the rest of the meeting. It disrupted his focus, made his breath quicken in his throat, itched under his skin like sunburn. He hated being stared at. As soon as the meeting concluded, he bolted for the door, for the quiet safety of his workshop, for the company of nobody but the children, who only saw him as the adult who’d weathered the storm of uncertainty with them. 

He had hoped that their new general, like the Darkling, would forget about him as long as she didn’t need anything from him, and retreated into his latest project – reflective disks to line the roof of the Little Palace which would amplify Alina’s power with the same principles he’d used in making her gloves. The concept of the Small Science manipulating light fascinated him – he might not be able to call to the substance that was drawn to Alina, but he had learned a little of optics and lenses from making her gloves, and unlike fire, water, or lightning, light could be amplified with something as simple as glass.  

When Alina finally found him the next day, he attempted to explain this in answer to her questions about his work, but the words would not flow out of him in the orderly, comprehensible way blueprints did, and she seemed confused, or possibly bored, by his explanation. He was expecting her to tire of him entirely and leave when she unexpectedly asked him: 

“What can you tell me about Ilya Morozova?” 

He flinched at the question, but of course Alina would not know. She had spent scarcely any time at the Little Palace, and had not attended the lessons the rest of them did. It was dangerous to speak of such things carelessly.  

There was nobody else in the room, but he still lowered his voice. “They called him the Bonesmith.” 

Alina shuddered, like one of the little ones hearing a ghost story. “Why? Because of the amplifiers he discovered?”  

David frowned. “He didn’t find them. He made them.” He had shaped the flesh and bone and sinew of his creations as a potter sculpted clay, until they resonated with the same hum as the making at the heart of the world, calling like to like with a greater force than any Grisha alone could muster. 

“ Merzost?” she breathed, “How?” 

“No one knows,” David said. It wasn’t a lie, not really. He might have his suspicions about Genya and her strange powers, halfway between fabrication and flesh-shaping, but they would be no help to Alina, with Genya at the Darkling’s side and no other Tailors among their ranks. It would be small comfort to Alina and her allies that Genya had none of the training that could allow her to do such strange and impossible things, and speaking his suspicions aloud might sign her death warrant if the side she’d chosen hadn’t already. No, better that they think Genya a harmless maker of beautiful things. It was not the recognition she deserved, but if it granted her mercy, he would take the secret to his grave. 

Alina’s eyes were fixed on him, as though she could see into his soul. He continued, hurriedly: “After the Black Heretic was killed in the accident that created the Fold, his son came out of hiding to take control of the Second Army. He had all of Morozova’s journals destroyed.” 

“Why was his son in hiding?”  

His son? It took him a moment to realise Alina’s interest had leapt from the journals to the Black Heretic, and another to remember that of course she would not know the answer, obvious as it was to him: “A Darkling and his heir never live at the Little Palace at the same time. The risk of assassination is too great.” 

“I see. Why would he have had the journals destroyed?”  

Truthfully, David couldn’t imagine a reason good enough, but the history books provided their own: “They documented Morozova’s experiments with amplifiers. The Black Heretic was trying to re-create those experiments when something went wrong.” He wondered if the Black Heretic, or the Darkling himself, ever envied Morozova’s powers of creation and metamorphosis. Etherealki could do some extraordinary things by drawing upon the air itself, but they did not seem to have the same connection to the making at the heart of the world that David felt. 

Alina was talking again: “-result was the Fold?” 

He nodded. “His son had all of Morozova’s journals and papers burned. He said they were too dangerous, too much of a temptation to any Grisha.” As he said it aloud, the pieces he had collected began to form a picture in his mind – Genya at eight, her dainty nose in the air: ladies don’t work with glass or metal;  the Darkling: could an amplifier of this design allow the user to draw on another’s power?; his own careless words: you could be another Bonesmith. Of course the Darkling had pressed Genya into the service of beauty and nothing else: he would never allow one of his soldiers to match his power. Even when Alina received her amplifier, he wanted to ensure that she would remain under his control. Aloud, he continued: “That’s why I didn’t say anything at the meeting. I shouldn’t even know they ever existed.” 

 “So how do you?” 

He glanced around, and then felt stupid. Pyotr was dead. Whatever he should not have told David, it could not hurt him now. He sent up a quiet prayer to Sankt Ilya-in-Chains to protect him on the road to the Bright Lands. “Morozova was a Fabrikator,” he said, and speaking those words aloud in Pyotr’s absence still felt like a betrayal, “maybe the first, certainly the most powerful. He did things that no one’s ever dreamed of before or since.” He thought of Genya’s furrowed brow, the concentration and skill with which she brought scent to stone and glass- perhaps it was a lie. Even if Genya had not dreamed of such things, David had. He bit his lip, trying to focus on Morozova, and Morozova alone. “To us, he’s kind of a hero.” 

Alina’s eyes on him seemed to burn into his very thoughts. “Do you know anything else about the amplifiers he created?” 

Good. He wouldn’t have to lie about this. “There were rumors of others, but the stag was the only one I’d ever heard of.” 

Still, she stared at him, as though she knew he was concealing something from her, and could burn away his clouds of misdirection without ever calling upon her light. 

“David,” she said, “why are you here? You fashioned the collar. You must have known what he intended.” 

He swallowed. He had been avoiding this question as much as Alina’s too-piercing gaze, but he could not escape it now. His tongue felt thick and clumsy, and he knew the words that came out would not convey his true meaning to her.  

“I knew he would be able to control you, that the collar would allow him to use your power,” he confessed, because it was true. That he’d believed it was a failsafe, for if Alina was too injured or too frightened to call on her power herself, did not change the cruelty of what he had done. That he had been doing as he was told only made that cruelty worse. He tried to explain how he had changed his mind, but his stupid, stumbling tongue could only manage: “But I never thought- I never believed- all those people-“ He had thought himself a good man. He had thought Pyotr a good man. He had been unable to imagine a world in which his kind, generous mentor would serve a wicked one. He knew better now. The words were almost lost to him entirely as the sea of shame lapped at him, so instead, he held out his hands to her, stained by ink, not callused by battle. “I make things. I don’t destroy them.” 

She did not say: I understand, or I forgive you. He did not deserve either from her. He felt small, and stupid, and insignificant, a crumpled piece of foil melting in the sun’s radiance.  

She rose to her feet, and he wished he could fade into nothing at all. “Good luck with the dishes,” she said. 

He leaned over his work. “I don’t believe in luck.” He had believed too long in luck, and goodness, and justice, concepts that could not be found in the silent dance of particles which formed all that he knew was real. He could only believe now in what he constructed from those pieces on his own. If goodness was to exist in this broken world, he could not trust anyone to create it but himself. 

He did not trust the sudden surge in attention he received from his addition to Alina’s council, either. He’d been beneath the notice of most of the Corporalki and Etherealki for most of his life, and he’d preferred it that way, but now occasionally they would deign to share a breakfast table with him, or ask for his thoughts on a new concept for grenatki or the potential for some of ‘his’ Fabrikators working more closely with the Corporalki on producing better armour, stronger soldiers. He gave what thoughts he could, and was astonished when they waited for his clumsy mouth to line up the words for each response with patient, attentive smiles.  

Stranger still was the younger prince – he remembered him vaguely as an unstoppable force of energy who sometimes tore through the Fabrikator workshops in search of Genya, a toy, or some obscure piece of knowledge that he would not leave without. He retained that energy still, now coiled inside him like a spring, but still almost humming with it. It was distracting enough, sharing his workspace with someone other than Genya, or the children who still clustered around him, but neither Genya nor the little ones (even Nina and Leoni), watched him with Nikolai’s discomfiting focus, or asked so many questions about why he made each edit to the blueprint, created and discarded each prototype. He did not understand Nikolai, did not understand his obsession with David’s work or his endless (but helpful) comments, and, in truth, did not care for how easily he won over the other Fabrikators with an easy smile and a little deference. David’s work had never been enough to speak for him until Alina had picked him out for her council, and he still did not know why she had done that, or why it mattered so much to everyone else. The prince’s designs were interesting, visionary even, but his execution was slapdash and inexpert compared to David’s carefully-honed craftsman’s skills. Perhaps it was petty, for a man with noble blood and Grisha power to resent another for simply being likeable. David did not like to be petty, but it was hard to let go of his resentment when its object was so irritatingly present.  

He had never been good at hiding his feelings, but somehow it still surprised him when Nikolai said, unprompted: “You don’t like me, do you, Lord Kostyk?” 

David focused on the blueprint in front of him, feeling his cheeks heat up. “You don’t need to call me Lord Kostyk, moi tsarevich . Nobody else does.” 

“David, then, if you’ll call me Nikolai,” he said. He sounded cheerful and unbothered, which only bothered David more. “I didn’t come here to steal your secrets, or snoop on your work, if that’s what concerns you. I’ve always admired the things your workshop has produced, and I’ve always wanted to meet their creator.” 

“You’ve met me now,” David pointed out. “I can follow your blueprints just fine.” 

“And miss all the fun?” David did not know much about nobles beyond his immediate family, but he knew enough to understand that most of his peers did not consider a hot, smoky workshop to be fun. “Designing an invention is nothing like actually making it.” 

“You don’t need to make it yourself. You’re a prince.” This should all have been blatantly obvious, but the prince – Nikolai – looked like a kicked puppy. 

“Maybe not, but-“ He hesitated, then interrupted himself: “Is this really about me getting in your way?” 

David frowned. “I never said you were in the way. I just thought there were more important things you could be doing.” 

Nikolai muttered something under his breath that David did not catch, then said, aloud: “More important things than helping build the armaments that will save Ravka?” 

That wasn’t what he had meant. Why was it so hard to say what he meant? “Not more important. But your blueprints are good, any skilled Durast or otkazat’sya artificer could follow them if the materials were right. There are other things, different things, that only you could do, that I couldn’t!” 

Nikolai looked at him sidelong, and David shrank in his chair, face flaming. “Like what, exactly?” the prince said, coolly. 

“Doesn’t matter,” David muttered, which was a lie, and an obvious one.  

“I’m here to bring the First and Second Armies together. If anyone else agrees with you that there are better things I could be doing, I should know that, no?” 

“It’s not that. ‘s personal. And you won’t like it.” The embroidery on his cuffs was fraying again. He tugged at it, trying to focus on the untwisting fibres rather than the memories – Genya alone, when once she and Nikolai and his servant boy had gone everywhere hand-in-hand-in-hand. 

“Tell me anyway?” When David said nothing, he pressed: “If there’s nothing I can do to change your opinion, I’ll find another Durast to work with me on my plans, and leave yours alone. But if there is something I can do to put it right, I can’t fix it in ignorance.” 

David steeled himself, and met Nikolai’s gaze, hoping that at least some of the impact he felt would be reflected upon the prince. “Do you remember Genya Safin?”  

Nikolai’s affable smile froze on his lips: “The girl who poisoned my father?”  

David could not read him well enough to tell if he was angry, but he didn’t care, either. “Yes. But before that, she was your mother’s servant. And before that, she was your friend.” He took a deep breath, taking advantage of the way Nikolai still sat frozen. “When I was a child, I used to think she was your sister, did you know that? I believed it until I was about ten, because I only ever saw her with you or the Queen. And then your mother made her a servant, and your father- someone was hurting her!” His speech was slipping, becoming garbled and incoherent to his own ears, but anger spurred him onwards. “And you played pranks, and went to parties, and did nothing for her all those years? A girl who stayed by your bed for three weeks when she wasn’t yelling at grown Healers to come and help you?” 

Nikolai’s voice sounded strained, as if each word had to force its way out of his tight-lipped mouth. “She betrayed me, betrayed my family.” 

Now that the torrent of words had poured out, David felt empty, exhausted, but the prince still had not understood him. More slowly, he said: “An animal in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape. Maybe you were the limb she had to lose to get free.” 

Nikolai pushed himself to his feet, beginning to pace around the workshop. “I tried, Kostyk,” he snapped, and it was the first thing he’d heard the prince say that did not seem filtered through a layer of false charm. “I offered her freedom- offered her everything- all the world and a new pair of ice-skates, and she wouldn’t take it! She wouldn’t even tell me how to help her!” 

David suddenly felt small and ashamed and deeply hypocritical. He shrank in his seat, crumpling like paper in flames. “’m sorry,” he mumbled, “That- that’s more than I could do. Did. I just- someone should have helped her. She was- she was always so alone.” Alone among the palace servants, alone among the Grisha. The only places he’d ever seen her belong were with Nikolai, the Darkling, or him. “The Darkling shouldn’t have been the only one she could turn to. I should’ve been- better.” Not weak, not a coward, not a man who followed orders because he assumed his commanders were good men. His hand twinged, and he closed it into a fist. 

Nikolai paused in front of him, listening to his words with a frown of pure attention. He turned, rested a hand on David’s shoulder, and David found he did not flinch away from the unexpected contact. “ We should have been better,” he said, in a low, thick voice. “You’re- you’re right, there was more I could have done, even if she didn’t ask, even if I didn’t think of it.” 

“We could still do something,” David said, quietly. Politics were an alien language to him, but even he had noticed how the arrests at the Little Palace had halted at the first hint of resistance from the nobility. “Help her escape or hide, if she’s caught-“ 

Nikolai’s frown remained, as if he were solving a complex equation: “It wouldn’t be easy, but… if she denounced the Darkling, blamed him for everything-“ 

“She couldn’t have made the poison alone,” David said, picking up the thread as Nikolai paused. “She was barely trained in Fabrikator work.” 

“She could have been tricked,” Nikolai agreed. “People won’t want to believe it, but it’s possible. And for now, only rumour links her to the poisoning.” He hesitated: “This isn’t a promise. I don’t know if I can forgive her, let alone persuade my mother and father, and the court…” 

“But you’ll think on it?”  

“I’ll think on it, if you’ll help me,” he agreed. “I wasn’t flattering you earlier, you really are the best Durast we have.” 

Two months ago, he would have argued, crediting Pyotr, or any number of more senior Grisha. Now, he only nodded. “I know. I’ll do whatever I can. Only- think on it,” he pleaded, and fell silent.  

The argument had been painful, exhausting even, but it strengthened something between them. Their conversations flowed more easily, as did their constructions. They did not speak of Genya again, but there was a sense of purpose now that made it easier to adjust to their shared space, their shared work. Occasionally, Nikolai would place a tool into David’s hand almost before he realised what he needed, or David would amend a material or measurement in his design to receive a bright smile and an I should have thought of that! rather than the disgruntled, half-hearted thanks he was anticipating. It did not evoke the curled-cat warmth of Genya at his side, there was a strange relief to it – like plunging into fresh snow after the banya’s heat. He had never thought himself lonely before, but sometimes, working late into the night, he would notice how empty the workshop felt. 

Nikolai did provide more than simple company – he was no glazier, but his practical knowledge of lenses and optics gained from years on the sea was surprisingly helpful, even with the minute adjustments that the discs required. He came up with the harnesses for the Grisha on the roof, saving David himself a nasty fall more than once. He was pragmatic enough to balance David’s desire for perfection, but never careless where safety was concerned. There were too few of them for that. The whole Palace was too quiet, once Alina sent the children away. 

He hadn’t known – Alina had discussed her plan with Botkin and her guards before presenting it to the council as a fait accompli . He had tried to argue – her orphanage was far away, and everyone knew she had grown up there – but his words were too clumsy, and anyway, his true motive was obvious. There were always at least a few children lurking in the corners of his workshop, where they knew they would not be scolded for daydreaming or homesickness. He had never really understood why they liked him so much when his peers never had, but he realised he would miss them when he looked up from his work at midnight to find little Nina still out of bed and curled up in a comfortable chair, pretending to read as her shoulders shook. Anfisa would have wrapped her in a warm, overperfumed embrace, Nikolai would have made an easy joke that turned her sadness to giggles, Genya would... he did not know what Genya would do encountering a lonely girl weeping like her heart had broken. He hoped he would have the chance to learn. 

“Nina,” he said, uncertainly, and she glared up at him, baleful. “It’s a long way to Keramsin tomorrow. You should rest.” 

She folded her arms, hugging her book to her chest. “I’m not going. I’m old enough to stay and fight. I’m not a child.”  

She looked like a child to him in that moment, red-cheeked and swollen-eyed, but even David knew well enough not to say that to her. He did not remember feeling anything like a child at thirteen.  

“Of course you’re good enough to stay and fight,” he said, instead. “You’re probably already better in hand-to-hand than I am.” It was true – he avoided training with Botkin at every opportunity. “I’m not sending you and Leoni to Keramsin because I don’t think you’re capable.” 

“General Starkov says-“ 

“General Starkov doesn’t know anything about the Little Palace, or about you. ”  

She looked up at him, fierce hope brilliant on her face: “So you’ll tell her-?” 

“That I can’t trust anyone else with the children,” he said. Her face fell, but he continued: “Nina. You’re clever. You know there’s a chance everyone here will die. If that- if that happens, those children might be all the Grisha that are left.” 

“So me and Leoni have to play nursemaid to them?” 

“So you and Leoni must do whatever it takes to keep them safe, and teach them as well as you can,” he corrected her. “Nina, the Darkling...” How to explain it to her, the things he suspected the Darkling had done? She was a child. She was twice the age Genya had been when the Darkling had made her a slave and a spy. “The Darkling is a bad teacher. A bad person. I don’t want him to have the chance to hurt more children, but if... if he wins, there need to be people to keep them safe. That’s you and Leoni. People trust you, listen to you. You can protect them in ways I can’t.” 

She stared at him. It was the longest speech he had ever given in front of her. “You mean that?” she said, suspiciously. 

“I think you'll be in danger whether you stay or go. Anyone can fight for Ravka. You, Leoni, and Botkin are the only people who can keep the children safe.” 

He did not expect her to launch herself out of her chair and fling her arms around him. It almost knocked him off his feet, as she buried her face in his shirt. It took focus not to flinch away, to wrap his arms around her.  

“I don’t remember any other home,” she said, in a small voice. “I don’t want to go.” 

“I know,” he said, patting her hair awkwardly. “Most of the children will feel the same. But you are brave, and clever, and you will make sure that even without a home, they have someone looking after them.” He drew back as her arms loosened, braced her shoulders, offered her his grubby handkerchief. “You are a soldier of the Second Army, Nina Zenik. Do not forget it.” 

He walked her back to her dormitory, but did not return to his own bed that night. He stayed up until dawn, and when he met the covered wagon that would take the children away, he handed them each a roughly-made doll or spinning top or game as they climbed inside. Some of them were crying. Little Mila tried to cling to the edge of his kefta, but he lifted her into the carriage and gently detached her fingers. Nina and Leoni were the last to get in. Their eyes were reddened, but Leoni was smiling brightly for the little ones, and Nina’s shoulders were squared with determination. He had not made toys for them, these girls who had become soldiers too soon, but he handed them each a small bag. Coloured glass beads for Leoni, who loved to wear them in her hair, and sweets from Kerch for Nina. He handed them each up with the best bow he could manage, and was less surprised by Nina’s parting embrace. Even when the flap was folded down behind them, he watched the carriage until it was out of sight, as if he could protect them by watching alone. 

There was no time to miss them, but somehow David managed to anyway. Even working with Nikolai, the workshop seemed too quiet, too empty, except when Alina visited and it suddenly seemed far too small to contain her presence. The air seemed to vibrate and shimmer even before she entered, and the buzzing and brightness always gave him a headache. He did not mention it. He had given her far worse than a headache. He provided her with her regular updates on the reflector discs, the grenatki, the tracer bullets. Even if it wasn’t his project, he knew everything that happened in the workshops these days. They spoke so often that he was stunned when she asked him: 

“If I wanted to remove the collar, how would I do that?” Her brow was furrowed – serious or angry? He could not tell.  

“You can’t,” he said. What he meant, he realised too late, was I can’t.  

“Not now,” she said, hastily, as if she felt she had to make excuses to him. To him, of all people. “But after we’ve-” 

His hand was aching. He clenched it tight. “No,” he said, aloud, and felt the click of the collar under his fingers. “It’s not like other amplifiers. It can’t just be taken off. You’d have to break it, violate its structure. The results would be catastrophic.” She had to know that if he could remove it, he would have. She had to. 

Her brows drew together. “How catastrophic?” 

He bit his lip. “I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure it would make the Fold look like a paper cut.” Merzost was ever unpredictable in its effects. He would not let his experiments with it harm anyone again. 

“Oh.” David did not know how to read people well. Their voices and expressions were mysteries to him. But even so, he could tell a part of Alina’s heart was breaking at his words, and unlike little Nina, he did not know the right way to comfort her.  

He picked up the ink bottle from his desk, trying to remain in the room, not in a distant forest glade, with Alina-now, not Alina-then. David, don’t do this. David understands the future, and he knows better than to fight it. One girl for the whole of Ravka. It had sounded so simple, so clear on the Darkling’s lips. He could still feel the click of the collar around her neck, around Nina’s neck, around Genya’s neck. How many girls would it really take, to save Ravka? How many children like Nina and Leoni, dressed up like toy soldiers and training to fight and die for it? What did Ravka matter outside of an atlas, when the people who hurt for it – the people he’d hurt for it – were real and living and breathing, walking worlds beyond comprehension, not objects to be molded at his will or anyone else’s? 

It was Alina who brought him back to the workshop, to the present. She took the ink-bottle from his hands, and when she looked up at him, her expression was gentle, merciful, infinitely forgiving, like a saint in a picture book. He almost wished she had punched him, when she said, too kindly: “If you hadn’t done it, the Darkling would have found someone else.” 

She was right, and it didn’t matter at all. The Darkling could have found someone else. But he could have chosen to be a better person then, when it would have mattered more. Instead, he had chosen weakness, selfishness, and he would be selfish again: as she turned to leave, he called out to her: “Alina?” She looked back at him, still kind, still not understanding he did not deserve her kindness. “I heard- I heard Genya was on the ship. With the Darkling.” 

Alina’s face fell. They had been friends. Good. Genya deserved friends. “Yes.” 

“She’s alright?” It was cruel to sound so hopeful, when Genya had not chosen Alina as he had, but he could not help himself.  

“I don’t know. She was when we escaped.” Alina paused. “I begged her to come with us.” 

“But she stayed?” Of course she had stayed. Who else would protect her from the King, where Nikolai had failed, and David had never tried at all? 

“I don’t think she felt she had a choice.” 

“I should have...” He should have done so many things. He should have insisted on joining the mission to retrieve Alina. He should have told Genya about how strong she was, how powerful, how she did not need whatever protection the Darkling had offered her. He should have knelt at her feet like a prince in a storybook and promised her to protect her from every terrible thing in the world, and instead, she had been forced to protect herself.  

“We do the best we can,” Alina said, gently, as if she did not know how terribly he had already failed to. He redoubled his efforts on the discs, sacrificing food, sleep, anything extraneous to making up for the wrong he had done. He finished the discs in less than two weeks, and collapsed, so exhausted he nearly slept through the first demonstration. 

Almost. Nikolai barged into his room with a samovar full of strong tea. “Can’t let the man of the hour sleep through his big moment,” he said, with a grin. 

“You did most of the work,” David grumbled, but accepted the tea. 

“So you’d deny me the chance to show off my finest Fabrikator and favourite cousin?” 

“Third cousin.” 

“You wound me, Kostyk,” he said, flinging himself onto the bed in an attitude of completely unneccessary grief. “And here I thought we’d bonded, these many months of sweating over the forge together.” 

“I’m glad we didn’t,” David said, sipping his tea. “Being soldered to anyone would be painful enough. If it was you, you’d make me go to parties.” 

“If you think you’ll get out of this by insulting me, you’re vastly mistaken. Alina would tell you insults only make my heart grow fonder.” 

“You’re incredibly strange and I hope your insanity doesn’t run in the family,” David said. He gulped down the last of his tea and swung his legs out of bed, pulling on his kefta. As he washed his face in the basin, he asked, off-handed: “Are you really going to marry Alina?” 

He heard a rustle behind him – a shrug? “I’m trying to persuade her it’s the best option for Ravka. I don’t know that she agrees.” 

“She’s in love with her tracker, you know,” David said, with a frown. Then, trying to catch Nikolai’s expression in the mirror: “Are you in love with her?”  

Nikolai’s expression did something strange, his gaze growing distant, the animation fading from the lines of his shoulders. “I could be,” he said, quietly. “I could be.” David could not tell if Nikolai was trying to convince him or himself. 

Outside, sunset glared off the windows of the Little Palace, casting a dim red glow over Nikolai’s guests, who looked up at the roof with mixed expectation and boredom. Nikolai introduced him to generals and ministers, who all had such similar uniforms and mustaches that David could not tell the difference between them. Nikolai nudged him at the right moments, reminding him to smile and nod at the right moments, but his attention remained fixed on the ropes, pulleys, and discs on the roof. He’d wanted to take charge of one of the discs, but Nikolai had pointed out that there was nobody else who knew the system well enough to direct it from the ground. Instead, he blew his whistle, wincing a little at the high, shrill note, indicating the last adjustments the discs required, and then, a second time, to signal Alina. His stomach churned as she raised her hands. If it didn’t work... if he’d failed in this too... 

Two beams of light burst from Alina’s hands, striking the discs and flaring upwards, splitting the sky. Good – the principle at least was sound. He gave another short whistle, and the discs tilted towards eachother, the Grisha handling them ducking back from the glare. The beams merged, forming a perfect blade of light, and then it tilted. There was a crash like the end of the world, and David spun to see the forest beyond the lake slashed neatly in half, the top halves of trees sliding forward like an avalanche. The discs tilted again, and the beam swept lower, across the surface of the lake. The water steamed. David blew his whistle again, heart hammering in his chest, and the light went out, as if it had never been. 

There was a perfect silence. Smoke and steam curled up into the lilac-pink sky. The last trees toppled to the ground, far away across the lake. 

“It worked.” David did not mean to speak aloud, but his voice rang out into the quiet. “It actually worked.” He’d helped.   

A laugh rang out from Zoya, not cruel and mocking, for once, but true and hopeful. Suddenly, they were all laughing, Nikolai sweeping Paja into a clumsy waltz, Alina hugging the captain of the guard. David was inside the laughter, not an outsider looking in. He was a part of it, the cause of it. He wished that Genya was here, inside the bubble of hope with him. Then Alina’s giant bodyguard caught him up and lifted him onto his shoulders, and he was borne away in a whirl of celebration. It was a moment of almost perfect happiness, because of something he had made. It was almost enough to give him hope, until he saw Genya again. 

Chapter 11: xi - long black night, morning frost (i'm still here, but all is lost)

Summary:

Genya learns the meaning of ruin, and of salvation.

Notes:

This chapter is a heavy one, with content warnings for suicidal ideation, chronic pain, emotional abuse, and gaslighting. If you need to skip it for your mental health, don't worry - next week picks up at the start of Ruin and Rising in the White Cathedral. Take care of yourselves. <3

When Genya awoke, in fits and starts, she knew that this was not mercy. For all Taisa’s twittering about the Darkling’s great favour keeping her alive, she knew he had made an example of her. His favour had raised her, and destroyed her just as quickly. She knew it by the way that even silly Taisa could not bear to look at her directly, and by the pain that rippled through her every time she moved. There was no mirror in the cabin that had once been Alina’s, but what she could see of her skin was rent with gouges that leaked shadow in place of blood, ugly cracks in the perfect porcelain of her skin. She closed her eyes, clenched her hands into fists until her nails bit into her palm. I will not break. So she was in pain. She could survive a little pain. She was to be shamed. The King and Queen of Ravka had tried and failed to shame her for years. She was to be made an example of. Queen Tatiana had tried as much, and she had worn her servant’s uniform like a coronation robe.   

She had once seen the Darkling as almost a father to her. She knew better now, but even so, it was a struggle not to turn toward him as he entered. He had been the centre of her world for too long to ignore easily.  

“Genya.” His voice was soft. Once she would have thought it affectionate. Now, she did not look at him. She felt the end of her cot shift with his weight. A hand came into her field of vision, smoothing a frizzed curl against her shoulder. Again, her name: “ Genya. Sweet girl, moya milaya. What did they offer, to turn my most loyal soldier against me?”  

She did not answer, pressing harder into her palm. Even making a fist hurt, the skin on the back of her hand still torn open and ragged. The pain was good. The pain kept her angry.   

“Still not talking?” His voice was honeyed, all false sympathy. “Taisa did her best with your throat, but perhaps a Heartrender might make you more talkative.”  

“What would you have me say?” She wanted to sound defiant like Alina, or heartlessly amused, like Kolya. Instead, her voice escaped in a broken rasp that brought tears to her eyes when she heard it. She would not have recognised it as her own.  

He hooked a finger under her chin, forcing her eyes up to meet his. She wondered, distantly, if he saw the mirror of his scars in her own. “The truth, Genya,” he said, voice low and terrible. “First Alina, then you. Two of my most favoured soldiers, turning against me in less than a season. Her betrayal I expected, she never understood her duty, but you...” 

That was rich. “I have given my life to my duty to you, and to Ravka,” she said, trying to sound like one of Kolya’s history-book heroes. “When forced to choose, Ravka won.”  

He raised an eyebrow. “I never knew you for a patriot, Genya Safin. You’re a gifted liar, but don’t take your old teacher for a fool.”  

“Fine.” Her mouth pulled against her scars as she let herself snarl. “You want to know why I let Alina run? I let her go because Heartrenders can Tailor.”  

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “Where did you learn that?”  

“Does it matter, when it’s true?” She shook her head, ignoring the pain that rippled from her cheek, down her neck, to her shoulder and arm. “For eight years, I told myself that you chose me because- because no other Grisha could do what I could. That my childhood was a necessary sacrifice, because I was special.” She spat the word like a curse. “But you could have picked any Heartrender, any Corporalnik even. There was never anything special about me.”  

He grabbed her chin again, and she could not repress a pained, pathetic mewl as his fingers pressed down on a scar. “I picked you because I thought you were strong enough to bear the weight of suffering. If it broke you, I was mistaken, but who would you have had me choose instead? Lena? Taisa? Little Nina, only thirteen? You were strong, Genya. None of them could have borne what you have.”  

Only thirteen. Her stomach lurched. She had been twelve when she’d run to him for protection. Had he forgotten even that? “One girl for the whole of Ravka,” she said, dully, as the weight of it sank over her like a wave. “Was it easy for you to do? Pick out me, and Alina, offer us up at the altar of Ravka’s perfect future?”  

His dark eyes met hers, searching, all-consuming. Once, she would have thought, affectionate, tender. She knew better now. “Never, Genya,” he said, as if it were a promise. “I made those choices for Ravka, but they were never easy ones.”  

She raised her chin, jerking his hand away. “I don’t believe you.”  

She felt the bed shift as he got to his feet, felt his shadow fall between her and the dim light of the sidescuttle. She did not look at him. She did not want to give him her fear. “Have a care, Genya,” he said, his voice gentle. “I spared you because you’ve served me well until now, but there are worse punishments I could bestow.”  

She sank back into the thin mattress, feeling the wave of despair lapping around her. “You can try, moi soverenyi.” He had made her used to suffering.  

Time passed in fits and starts. She lost track of it, between the pain, the exhaustion it brought, and the drugs that Taisa poured down her throat when her screaming disturbed the other Grisha. Sometimes, in the dark of her cabin, she would see things that could not possibly be real, but they were better than being alone with her pain. 

Dominik at her bedside, his olive uniform black with blood, staring down at her with alien impassivity on his gentle face. Please, she wanted to beg, don't leave me here alone again. He shook his head, resigned, disappointed in her. You left me first. She reached out to him with a pathetic cry, and his image popped like a soap bubble, reformed into Queen Tatiana, leaning over her with a mother’s smile. Pretty thing. What a shame, that he broke you so. Part of her wanted to reach up to her, like an infant asking to be held. Part of her wanted to claw at her face until it bled, until she had scars to match Genya’s own. She reached up, and she dissolved into shadow and mist. Not such a pretty thing now.  

She could not have said how many days had passed when the cabin door was opened and the oprichniki dragged her out into the over-bright sunlight of the deck. They’d reached Os Kervo. The harbour was crowded with figures in blue-red-violet keftas, and the Darkling stood on the dock, his still-loyal troop grouped around him. Despite herself, she shrank from the noise and the crowd. It was one thing to wear her scars, her pain, with proud defiance in the darkness of her cabin. It was another to stand proudly before so many eyes, to hear their gasps of horror and pity, to watch them turn away from her where previously eyes had followed her despite their owners’ disgust for her. It should not have hurt. She did not need their good opinion. She had never wanted it. It still hurt, to have their gazes spin away from her with disgust. For a moment, she could see herself as they did: an open wound of a girl, an object for pity and disgust.   

It was worse as they dragged her down the gangplank and onto a waiting cart, and she realised with horror why she had not been tied up or chained. Every step was agony, as if the nichevo’ya had shredded the muscles of her thigh and calf beyond Taisa’s ability to repair. They did not chain her because she could not run, would never run again. Somehow, that was the worst humiliation: that they thought her incapable as well as hideous. In truth, they were right. Making the gestures that had come so naturally to her since childhood pulled at her scars to the point of agony, and the pain kept her from focussing on the smallest things. Even if she’d been able to call upon the Small Science for more than a moment at a time, she was always watched, either by the oprichniki, by the goggling younger Grisha, or by gentle Taisa, the only one who seemed able to speak to her without a twisted expression of disgust. She still flinched, though.  

“They call you Razrusha’ya,” she said, pulling a comb through Genya’s tangled hair. It was a small kindness, and one Genya did not entirely understand. What did her hair matter, against the ruin of her body? What did her hair matter, when even the act of reaching up to brush it sent ripples of pain down her spine?  

“And you’re still here?” It was perhaps petty to be cruel to Taisa, but she had little kindness left in her. “Don’t you worry that ruin is catching?”  

“I worry about you. The Darkling does too.” She said it with a wide-eyed innocence that reminded Genya she was only sixteen. Had she ever been so naïve? “He told me to keep a close eye on you, in case-” She paused, as if the thought were too terrible to name. As if she had not seen Genya torn apart by the nichevo’ya less than a month ago.  

“In case of what?” Say it. Say it, you stupid girl.  

“In case you tried to- to hurt yourself.”  

Genya let out a bark of a laugh. “Oh Taisa. You really think the Darkling is worried for the sake of my health? He just doesn’t want me to die by any hand but his.”  

Taisa shook her head, clearly disbelieving. She would not have believed herself, at sixteen, when she still believed the Darkling almost a god. “I- I know you likely think the worst of the General now, but he needs the Second Army united. Traitors are- traitors endanger all of us.”  

“If he’d wanted to show the fate of traitors, he would have done me a kindness and put a bullet in my head.” Taisa flinched at her harshness, and she was reminded that the attack on the whaler was the girl’s first battle.  

“So he’s right,” she said, softly. “You would- you do mean to harm yourself.”  

Genya sighed. “No, Taisa,” she said, as if explaining the simplest thing in the world. “The King did not kill me. The nichevo’ya did not kill me. Shame will not kill me either, whatever the Darkling believes.”  

She did not think Taisa believed her, let alone understood her, but when, a few days later, she brought her a bundle of black lace, she still could have wept at that small kindness.   

“For you,” Taisa said, quietly. “I know you said shame won’t kill you, but it doesn’t have to hurt you. Not- all the time, anyway.”  

Of course, as they passed through the camps, prisons, and forts where the remnants of the Second Army were found, the Darkling added Genya’s shawl to his grim little pageants for the groups who did not immediately fall at his feet in deference to their saviour. Show them, he would order, and if she refused, he would pull the veil away himself. This, he would say, is the price of defiance. The traitor’s due. I once raised her high, and look how she has fallen. Razrusha’ya. The ruined. Perhaps it was pathetic, but his words made her cling to her shawl more tightly every time. Her face was not a symbol of his power. If it was ruined, it was her ruin.  

Once, near Os Alta, he ripped her shawl as he pulled it away from her hair, and she spat at his feet like an old woman bestowing a curse. He ignored her, continued his speech, but later, when the crowd dispersed, he seized her by the hair, dragging her back to her wagon faster than she could walk any more. She did not scream, but perhaps the stumbling was pathetic enough.   

“Have you not suffered enough?” he demanded of her. “Must you force my hand? Do you really seek death that desperately? Or is it further punishment you demand?”  

The pain was still rippling through her body, and her stomach was lurching with the aftershocks. Even so, she managed to say: “I have never forced your hand, moi soverenyi. Your choices have been your own. You chose to give me to the Queen, then the King, then Alina, then the nichevo’ya. If I die, I’m sure that will also be your choice.”  

“And now we come to the core of it.” He crouched beside her. She was still crumpled against the side of the wagon, where he had thrown her. “You blame me for the cruelty of the King and Queen, when if you had only asked, I would have removed you from their grasp in an instant? It was always your choice to remain. You chose revenge.”  

It's your choice. She remembered the moment as clear as crystal, as if she had never left it. He had seemed like a giant then, crouching to her level, wiping her tears. He was only a head taller than her now. She tried and failed to picture herself at twelve, and instead saw Nikolai, saw Dominik. How small they had seemed to her, across the vast gulf of lost innocence. How naïve. She remembered Nikolai sprawled too-still in a bed of white linen, while Healers gathered at his head and the Apparat waved incense over his head and muttered prayers for his recovery. How she would have given anything to see him move and smile at her again. She was a woman, now. If that boy, not Nikolai-now, but Nikolai-then, threw himself into her lap and begged her protection, would she tell him: It’s your choice?    

Something twisted like a knife in her chest, and when she spoke, it was almost a she-wolf's growl. “ I was twelve. I begged your protection, and you offered me revenge.”  

“Which you chose.”  

“I should never have had to choose!” One girl, one boy, one child for the whole of Ravka. What was Ravka, if not all the children who had been sacrificed for it? Children like Dominik, like Alina. Like she had been. “ You chose a pretty doll for the Queen to play with and the King to break. You chose to teach me only poisons and potions and pretty things. You loaded me like a weapon, pointed me at the King, and then said you choose, and you call that my choice? I chose it like Alina chose that collar-”  

She did not see his eyes darken with rage, or the quick motion he made with his hands. She only saw the blade of shadow as it whirled at her throat, and for a moment, she slipped beyond rage, through fear, to a terrible, transcendent peace. For a moment, the blade hovered at her neck. She could feel its kiss against the skin of her throat. If she leant forward... It would be over in a moment, like it had been for Ivan. The pain, the shame, the fear, it would all drain out along with her blood. She met the Darkling’s eyes, daring him to break the skin. This would not be the moment that he broke her. And then... And then...  

All the Saints in the stories are beautiful. You’ll be the one who’s clever enough to live to the end. She heard it, as clearly as if Nikolai had whispered it into her ear, and she felt tears roll down her cheek. Ugly and broken and ruined she might be, but she did not want to die.  

The cool press of shadow against her neck dissipated, and suddenly she felt the Darkling’s arms around her shoulders, pulling her into a rough embrace, a hand in her hair. She struggled for a moment, but he held on.  

“Moya milaya,” he murmered into her hair, and that was what broke her. For a moment, she was no longer Genya the Defiant, and he was no longer the Darkling, the general who’d sold her body to the King and then to Sturmhond. She was a broken, frightened little girl again, and he was the closest she’d ever known to a father. “I know it hurts. No one knows that pain as I do. Just stop fighting me, and I promise, the Lantsovs will pay in blood for every tear you have ever shed.”  

She did not speak, only buried her head in his shoulder, and clung to him, sobbing, as he murmured into her hair as though she was a child. Some distant, cold part of her was disgusted at her weakness, but what could she do? She wasn’t brave like Dominik, stubborn like Alina, clever like Nikolai. She was only Genya the Tailor, and when cruelty could not break her, kindness had.  

Impossibly, she felt herself break again when they reached Os Alta. She did not know how they took the gates – she was kept back from the fray, at the Darkling’s side, but they moved through empty city streets in near-silence, the sounds of fighting distant and over before they ever reached the battle. She knew she should be afraid for herself, for Nikolai, for Alina, but where there had previously been rage and fear, there was only emptiness, as if the core of her had been carved out by the Darkling’s embrace. Hating him had given her resolve. Recalling that she given him a daughter’s love along with a daughter’s loyalty had drained her. Still, she was relieved when they divided from the group that moved towards the Grand Palace. She could not bear to see Nikolai ( Nikolai betrayed, Nikolai slain, Nikolai pitying ) as she was now.   

She felt distant, unmoored from her body, as they moved towards the chapel, pursuing the remains of the Second Army who fled them ( why were they fleeing? ). Their forces surrounded the chapel, ready to pick off any survivors as the nichevo’ya streamed in through the door. Somewhere, far away, Genya’s body was shuddering, her hands pressed over her ears, waiting for screams that never came over the sound of gunfire within. Nichevo’ya after nichevo’ya split from the Darkling’s shadow, until he was lifted into the chapel on the tide of flowing darkness. When they came for her, she waited for the pain to shock her back into her skin, but they only forced her forward, sweeping her through the doors, setting her down at the Darkling’s side without a mark on her skin. Once, she would have longed for such a mark of favour. Now, seeing Alina and her ragged allies, still fierce, still defiant to the last, she felt only the aching void within her.   

Alina was still shouting: “Leave her alone!” She glanced around instinctively, but there was nobody behind her. Alina was talking about her, did not know her veiled in black lace and hobbling like an old woman, did not know that this was the fate she had earned.   

“Show them,” the Darkling ordered, and, as if in a trance, she unwound her veil.  

An awful moan emerged from Alina’s ragged group, an animal sound far worse than the shocked gasps and horrified whispers that she had grown used to over the long months of travel. Alina – Alina, who hated her – reached out a hand to her almost instinctively: “ Genya.”  

That should have been the worst part, the final humiliation. It was not.   

Then, from the centre of the small, ragged group, he emerged. He was... not un changed, but perhaps only she would have noticed that he’d grown a little skinnier, a little more careworn. His hair looked terrible, as if he’d tried to cut it himself, and it was such a silly thing to notice that she almost wanted to laugh at herself.   

He came towards her. David, her David, David who cared more for his books and his creations than he ever had for her, David who had never noticed her even as she almost shadowed him, David who had never been a fighter or a spy but loved to make toys for children, crossed the line between Alina’s forces and the Darkling to reach for her- and she flinched away.   

This was the pain that brought her back to herself. She could be seen as ruined by a thousand ogling spectators that had never mattered to her, but for David to see her as a broken, ugly thing ( Genya, I like pretty things! ) was the thing she could not bear. She pulled the veil back up, a shield between her and the too-sharp gazes upon her, and knew that it did not matter, that everyone in the chapel could see the silent sobs that wracked her body.   

David did not turn away from her rejection, her weak, flinching, hideous form. He only stood in front of her, looking not at her face but at her hands, knotted over her stomach, and reached out his own hand to her.   

She was eleven, on the shaded path between the Palaces ( Genechka, please... ). Fourteen, shivering in her nightgown, the King’s footsteps in the corridor, Nikolai in the window ( You can’t save me, Kolya. ) Twenty-one, on the deck of a whaler, a gun trained on Alina’s heart ( All the world, and a new pair of ice skates ). She was every version of herself at once, lonely, frightened, determined, strong, and Genya-then had never taken the hand offered to her, out of pride, stubbornness, helplessness. Genya-now looked at the boy she had loved for half her life, took his hand, and let herself be saved.  

Notes:

I can't believe we've gotten this far already, and that you've all left me so much wonderful feedback. Please keep sending me your thoughts and feelings on this fic - it really helps me get the next chapters written.

Chapter 12: xii - no amount of waiting will make you brave

Summary:

Within the White Cathedral, Genya finds sanctuary in an unlikely space.

The road to the White Cathedral was anything but holy, despite the pilgrims’ whispers of their sacred progress. Alina was borne aloft on a stretcher, pale and transparent as watered milk. She looked more like a marble saint on a tomb than the fierce, stubborn, beautifully flawed girl who still burned in Genya’s memory, an impression which was not helped by the swarm of pilgrims who surrounded her, murmuring like reeds: Sankta Alina, Rebe Dva Stolba, Sol Koroleva. Not that Genya could get close to her on that long, fearful flight through the cabins. Her movements were sluggish, clumsy, and agonising, even with David’s arm to lean on, and they saw more of the elderly, sick, and dying pilgrims, the mothers with small children, than of Alina and her bodyguard. Even when she’d been dragged from the ruins of the chapel, Genya had been kept away from her as Tamar and her twin laboured for hours to make her heart beat again.

“Please,” she had begged – begged – as the minutes dragged into hours. “I’m a trained Corporalnik, I know anatomy. Please let me help her.”

Tamar had glanced up at her, disgust plain in her golden eyes. “Razrusha’ya.” Her voice was the snarl of a trapped animal, the fearful rage of a woman who felt hope dying beneath her hands. “Why should we trust the Darkling’s poisoner with the care of Ravka’s saint?”

Genya reeled back as if she had slapped her, but before she could prepare a riposte or mask her hurt, David had stepped between them.

“Never call her that again.” She had never heard her gentle Fabrikator sound so deadly. What had war done to him, that he seemed as much a stranger to her as she was to him? “She has suffered through more than you can imagine, and deserves more than any of us can give. If your saint were awake, she’d tell you the same.”

He’d come to her rescue again. Once, he would have been the hero Genya had never dared to dream of. Now, his words felt like the seal on her sentence. She has suffered more than you can imagine. Of course he had finally noticed her now. David had always loved broken things. If she’d had her pride, she would have shrugged him off, rejected his help, and made her own staggering progress through the caverns. But her pride, the shining, mirrored armour that had shielded her for so long, was broken too, and she leant on his shoulder with mingled gratitude and hatred. Gratitude for his seemingly endless patience with her weakness, her slowness, her tears when the pain became too much. Hatred for the pity he must feel for her now, when she looked like a monster and moved like an old woman bent double with arthritis. Hatred most of all for her repulsive, pathetic reflection, a girl so broken she could no longer muster a sharp retort or a winning smile.

She could not even summon up courtly thanks when David mended her threadbare shawl, erased a stain from her ruined clothing, somehow shaped a twisted treeroot into a walking stick for her, dissolving instead into snivelling gratitude. He was as patient and gentle with her moods and her exhaustion as he was with his projects in the workshop, which only made her feel more like a broken thing he had taken responsibility for.

They fell further and further behind the group as their progress continued. Part of it was Genya’s injuries, which slowed her some, but sometimes, she suspected herself of hanging back intentionally, as if the stares and whispers were as painful as the nichevo’ya’s claws. She knew what the pilgrims and Soldat Sol thought of her, even if they obeyed Alina’s command and did not say it to her face. Traitor. Whore. Kingslayer. Ruined One. Part of her was surprised every time they woke unharmed, with the tail-end of Alina’s followers still in earshot. In Alina’s place, she would have left the girl who had betrayed her to wander the depths of the caves, to be devoured by whatever monsters still roamed them. Lucky for all of them, perhaps, that she was not in Alina’s place.

The White Cathedral was vast, bigger than any room in the Grand Palace, but the damp little cave that Genya was assigned was a hovel even compared to her servant’s chamber. It did not matter. It came with a grubby door of faded wood that she could lock from the inside, a door nobody else had the key too. She closed that plain little door between her and the rest of the world, drank the last of the poppy-milk that remained in the jar Taisa had given her, and slept for three days.

The lock on her room was, unfortunately, not proof against Fabrikators, or she might have slept forever. She might have wanted to. She remembered little from those first, hazy weeks, and that was a mercy. She recalled someone - Alina? - combing through the snarls of her hair, David’s low, soothing tones reading aloud from Morozova’s journals, even Zoya attempting to snipe at her. It was easier to let waves of sleep swallow her, to shelter in the quiet darkness of the cave with the distant sound of prayers the only marker of time passing. No wonder Baghra never left her hut. Why ever leave, when the outside world was filled with cruel looks, crueller whispers, and the cold justice that was all traitors could expect.

Then again, Baghra had never met Tamar. The woman pulled her warm, safe blankets away from her with brutal efficiency, and, when she tried to bury deeper into her bedroll, poured a bucket of cold water over her head. Genya emerged like a scalded cat, half-minded to claw at Tamar’s face or give her a pig’s nose for her troubles, but the other woman caught both her wrists easily in one hand.

“So you are capable of moving,” she said, one brow arched. “I was starting to wonder if there was even a girl in all those blankets, or just a sad little worm.”

“What business is that of yours?” she sniffed, putting her nose in the air. It probably would have been more effective if she hadn’t been dripping onto her bedroll, because Tamar looked very much like someone trying not to laugh. “Surely the Darkling’s poisoner taking to her bed and rotting away only means you have one less room to guard.”

She could see a flash of Alina’s face over her shoulder, pale and wan and wounded, and the part of her that was still at heart the Queen’s Tailor longed to smooth out the dark circles under her eyes, the worried furrow of her brow. “Genya-” Alina said, softly, but Tamar was done with cajoling her.

“I’d be happy to let you rot, but given that you’re incapable of defending yourself-”

“A big assumption.”

“Is it?” Tamar looked at her wrists, which she’d not yet managed to wrestle away. “You’re incapable of defending yourself, and that makes you worse than a potential traitor – it makes you useless. At least a spy can be fed false information until we know where they stand.”

She dropped Genya’s wrists, and Genya took the opportunity to yank the covers back over herself, hiding from that too-sharp golden gaze. “Why do you even care?”

“I don’t. But if you can’t fight, you’re a liability.” Tamar’s expression was cool and level, not a hint of disgust – or pity.

Genya was not quite done with pitying herself just yet: “I don’t care if I get hurt.”

“I do!” Alina protested, dropping to her knees to take hold of Genya’s shoulder. “You can’t think-”

“Alina needs to watch her own back,” Tamar interrupted her again, which seemed unbecoming in a Saint’s sworn sword. “She can’t be looking after you.”

Genya sniffed. “I never asked her to.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we only got what we asked for?” Tamar said, and the picture began to clarify before her. Of course Alina would rather sacrifice her own life than leave anyone she’d called a friend behind, even Genya. The girl was prickly, changeable, sullen and sunny by turns, but when she gave her loyalty, she was steadfast, even to the undeserving. It was Tamar’s job to ensure that despite this particular brand of insanity, Alina lived long enough to fulfill all the hopes Ravka had piled onto her skinny shoulders, and did not die trying to pull Genya out of the swamp of her own misery. It was a chilling thought. “Come on, up, up!”

Genya reluctantly knelt up to reach for the clothes Alina had brought her, roughspun peasant’s wear that would be easy to move in, so unlike the pretty gowns and silken keftas she had once favoured. “Will you at least grant me a few minutes to wash?” she said, icily.

“What, one bucket wasn’t enough for you?” Tamar said, and Genya could have sworn she was trying to tease her, but this was where Alina seemed to have had enough.

“She’s getting up,” she said, stepping between them. “Give her fifteen minutes, I’ll have her ready for you in no time.”

“Five. I don’t trust you not to go soft on her.”

“Ten, and if we take any longer, you can drag me out of bed for training tomorrow.”

Tamar and Alina seemed to have reached an accord, but Genya had not yet consented.

“Ten minutes,” she said, “and you can give me one lesson. In private. I’m not here to be stared at by cultists and zealots.”

“Give the cultists and zealots some credit,” Tamar retorted. “If the Sun Summoner is in the room, you could be riding a mule naked and playing the balalaika and their focus would remain on their saint.”

“I’ll make sure she goes easy on you,” Alina said, shooing Tamar out of the room to help Genya wash and dress. It could not have been a pleasant task, but the way her scars pulled at her skin made using a basin rather than a bathtub difficult. As she ran a damp, soapy cloth across Genya’s back, Alina commented, too casual: “Did David mention he was working on a salve to help with the pain from the scarring? He’s let me test some on my shoulder, it’s good. Numbing.”

She had not expected David to think of such a thing, and something about the simplicity, the thoughtfulness, made her heart flip over in her chest in spite of how deadened her emotions still felt. She wished she’d had the forethought to ask Alina for some when she arrived for her training with Tamar, but it turned out that the Heartrender started by forcing her through a series of mindnumbingly dull stretches to remind her muscles how to move again.

“I thought we were learning to fight,” Genya complained, grunting in pain as she reached for her toes.

“You think you can fight with your muscles tied in knots from sleeping for weeks? Be my guest,” Tamar retorted, “but don’t go crying to Alina when I knock you on your ass.”

“I might surprise you,” Genya muttered, which turned out to be a barefaced lie. She did not surprise Tamar with anything but her capacity for whining, though her pride did keep her from crying to Alina, and by the end of the hour, her muscles burned as well as her scars , and she felt awake for the first time in weeks. She tried to hold her head up as she passed through the caverns back to her little room, but the constant stares weighed upon her like chains. She might have gone back to bed, if she hadn’t almost run straight into David.

“Genya!” he exclaimed, with a smile she had never seen before. “I was looking for you. Alina said you were awake?”

“Despite Tamar’s best efforts,” she grumbled.

He frowned. “Did she hurt you? I told her to be careful-”

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, but he continued:

“-of your scars, I know they still hurt you.” He rummaged in his pocket, produced a small, round tin. “I wanted you to have this, before she made you start training. It’s not quite finished yet. I wanted to make it smell pretty too.”

The scent of the balm, when she opened it, was mint concentrated to a nose-numbing potency. “Thank you,” she said, still a little stunned. She had not talked this much in months.

He frowned. “You don’t need to thank me. It was always for you. Alina just helped me test it.” He hesitated, then: “The Apparat doesn’t like the Grisha to gather, but if the Priestguard let you into the library, I’m always there in the mornings.”

“I thought you didn’t like company when you were reading.”

“You’re not company,” he said, and on his lips, it felt almost like a compliment. “You’re you.”

Tamar did not go so easy on her the next day, or the next. After she could run through her stretches without coaching, they began working on stances, which Genya was apparently terrible at: “You stand like a dancer, but you’re not fast enough to move like one! A stiff breeze could knock you over!” and sparring, which she was, if possible, even worse at. Tamar dumped her on her ass or threw her to the floor like a sack of potatoes within ten seconds nine times out of ten.

“You’re wasting your time with me,” Genya grumbled. “I was never meant to be a soldier.”

“Says the girl who wore a scarlet kefta with such pride that even I envied you for a second,” Tamar retorted, offering her a hand to pull her to her feet.

Genya did not take it, only stared at her in astonishment. “Was that a compliment?”

“Did you hit your head on that last fall?” Tamar said, in mock sympathy.

Genya pushed herself to her feet, feeling the ache in her muscles and scars. Her skin seemed to stretch more easily these days, between the exercises Tamar set her after their sessions and David’s cooling balms. “Why are you really doing this?” she asked. “Alina’s not going to take me into battle, even if the Apparat gives her an army. I’m too crippled to be a soldier, and too ruined to be a spy.”

Tamar narrowed her eyes. “You really believe that? You?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sturmhond thought to the last he could convince you to run away with him. David Kostyk is no fighter, but he crossed battle lines to bring you home. Alina Starkov, a living Saint, refused to leave you behind even as she fled the Darkling himself. You think all those people who hold the fate of Ravka in their hands have made a mistake about you?”

She raised one eyebrow. “It’s been known to happen. Alina’s made mistakes before.”

Tamar took a hold of her shoulders, forcing her out of the slouch she’d gained since her injury. “And the Darkling?” She flinched at his name, tried to pull away, but Tamar met her gaze and continued: “You really think he made an example of you because you are small and crippled and useless? Powerful bullies don’t waste their time with the small, the crippled, the useless. They crush them underfoot like insects, and walk away from the bodies. The ones they keep alive, the ones they make examples of – they're the ones like you, like Alina.”

“What do you mean?” She stood, frozen, transfixed by her strange, impassioned tone.

Her voice was low, clear, even, like Toyla’s when he quoted poetry, or the Apparat, preaching scripture. “He tried to break you because he feared what you could become without his hand on your harness. I don’t have to like you to want to see what about you he was so scared of.”

Genya barely knew Tamar Kir-Bataar. They were not friends, were barely allies, and yet, Tamar’s words were the ones which echoed around her head long after she left their training session. She was not permitted in David’s workshop – nobody trusted the poisoner near a Fabrikator’s stores – but there were other, less obvious places where she could find the tools she needed. The steaming kitchen the pilgrims called the Kettle was one such place, and the women who worked there always needed an extra pair of hands, accused poisoner or no. Tiny Katya, who walked bent almost double as Genya had, her daughters, burly, broad-shouldered Syuzanna, who heaved the sacks of grey flour her mother could no longer lift, quiet Raya who jumped at shadows, who’s fear Genya could see in her own reflection on bad days, and even baby Alenka, Raya’s child, swaddled in a crib by the fire, who had been named for the Sun Saint. All of them were too busy to stare at her for more than a few moments, and Katya was more than willing to put her to work.

“Idle hands have no place in a kitchen,” she would say, brightly. “Now keep stirring the kasha, dearie. Lots of big, strong soldiers to feed up today.”

Once she would have resented being excluded from the ranks of the soldiers, reduced to one of the servants. But there had been companionship, sometimes, in the backstairs and kitchens of the Grand Palace, even in the narrow corridor where the maids’ bedrooms were, and the warmth of the Kettle was almost an echo of it. They were not her friends, not exactly, but they trusted her enough to let her stir the stew and heal burned fingertips, and something about the bustle and chatter drew her back again and again, even if she always remained outside it, a little.

On the rare occasions Alina joined her, she hoped the other girl found a similar solace in the endless, repetitive tasks and busy chatter of the peasant women. She wondered if, in another life, they might have sat in their mothers’ kitchens, preparing meals for feasts and weddings with the other women of their villages and watching younger siblings play underfoot, far away from powerful men and their schemes and their wars. It was a pretty fantasy, even if Raya’s pallor and flinching were a constant reminder that nowhere was truly safe from the cruelty of powerful men. Genya could smooth away Raya’s burns from dropped saucepans, fade the scars she noticed on her skin, but she could do nothing for the deeper scars that cruelty had left on the older woman. Well, not quite nothing – a word to Tamar, and there were two of them in her beginner’s training sessions. If nothing else, Raya’s presence reminded Genya that she must have improved – while Tamar could still throw her over her hip or send her crashing to the mats, but Raya could seldom land a blow on her, even when she really tried.

Over the uncountable days that passed in that smoky cavern, she grew bolder in their quiet tolerance of her presence, bold enough to ask Katya directly: “Does the Apparat know I work here? Will he be angry with you for letting me near his stewpots?”

To her surprise, Katya laughed. “What would a great man like the Apparat know of what goes into preparing his meals? He's distracted by holy matters. He'll no more tell me how to run a kitchen than I would tell him how to handle the Saints.” Genya thought of Alina, kept under guard, barely allowed out of her rooms, pale and wilting as a flower grown in darkness. Perhaps someone should tell the Apparat to handle his saint better.

“You’re not worried ruin is catching? That my curse will bring rot and vermin to your kitchen, or that the Darkling’s poisoner will slip her potions into your kasha?” Even the Queen, who had once been almost a mother to her, had seen the corruption her touch spread, and turned away.

Katya raised an eyebrow. “It’s a foolish housekeeper who blames witches rather than damp cupboards and dirty floors for her troubles, and it’s a foolish spy who would try to poison as many people as we have here only to starve in the tunnels. You don’t strike me as a foolish girl.”

More than you know. “I used to think I was the cleverest person in the Grand Palace. Now I think I know nothing at all.”

“Well, that makes you wiser than half the Soldat Sol,” Katya retorted, handing her a wooden spoon.

More gently, Syuzanna added: “It’s a foolish person who'd place all the blame for what powerful men do on the shoulders of girls.”

Genya stared into the cauldron, stirring the grains as if they had mortally offended her. “You don’t have to be nice to me. I don’t need your pity. I made my own choices.”

“Hmm, perhaps you’re not as wise as I thought.” Katya nudged her aside, rapping her knuckles lightly with a ladle. “Or perhaps you’re too proud to know the difference between pity and acceptance.” The rest of their working hours passed in a silence more tense than companionable, but Genya was surprised when Raya, usually shy to the point of silence, drew her aside before their training session the next morning.

“Mother is- she has her pride, and so do you,” she began, hesitantly, “but it shouldn’t keep you away from the Kettle. We all have our burdens. The kitchen is where we can set them down and focus on good work.”

It was hard to be acidic and barbed with Raya, when it clearly took most of her courage even to leave the Kettle for their training sessions. “I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted,” she said, and almost choked on the words. They were truer than she’d wanted them to be. What was most of the White Cathedral beyond the three rooms she frequented, but a place where nobody wanted her? What was the wider world? She’d thought herself inured to disdain from her years in the Grand Palace, but the thick skin she’d been so proud of now felt as tender and vulnerable as baby Alenka’s. “I don’t want to inconvenience your mother.”

“You’re not an inconvenience,” Raya said, with surprising intensity. “You put in as much work as any of us, and we’d all be suffering without your salves and healing. Besides, Mother likes you, and that’s all that matters with Syuzanna and me. She hated Mikh- my late husband,” she quickly corrected herself. Genya had never heard Raya mention Alenka’s other parent before, and was surprised at the fiery protectiveness it inspired in her. Anyone who could inspire terror in quiet, gentle Raya deserved the cold dirt of a shallow grave. Raya continued, more quietly: “Mother worked at the Grand Palace when she was a girl, in the time of the King’s grandfather. She does not speak of it, but- I don’t think much has changed in how powerful men treat their servant girls since her time.”

One girl for the whole of Ravka. Had it ever been one girl? The words clung to the edges of her mind like a burr on the hem of a gown, impossible to disentangle, pricking her at every moment she forgot they were there. As she grew more accustomed to the rhythm of life in the White Cathedral, they gnawed at her more and more. For a holy space dedicated to her service, Alina was barely seen in the Cathedral’s halls beyond the seven daily prayers. Every step she took was dogged by the Priestguard, and the Apparat ensured they turned away all unapproved visitors, which seemed to include most of the Grisha who’d followed her down here, and even the tracker, who’s adoration for her was deemed less than reverent.

Genya was lucky, in that regard. The Apparat seemed to see the Kettle as an appropriate place for a saint from humble origins, and Razrusha’ya as a symbol of her gentleness and mercy. In his speeches and prayers, he conjured up a Sankta Alina who was sweet and maternal, soothing Ravka’s poor and desperate as Raya soothed baby Alenka. His Alina was never prickly, stubborn, defiant, ridiculous, a creature completely unrecognisable to anyone who’d ever met the woman herself, and Alina, who’d never bent before the Darkling’s pressure, submitted to his orders as meekly as a child. The Apparat, it seemed, knew children about as well as he knew Alina. Even Genya could have told him that a child who seemed quiet, obedient, and perfectly behaved was either terrified, or, more likely, planning something.

The Apparat’s ignorance when it came to matters of the hearth and the nursery was their greatest boon. He had the Grisha and the Soldat Sol who’d fled the Little Palace watched closely, but the women of the Kettle were humble pilgrims, almost beneath his notice outside of prayers. He watched the canisters of salve that David passed to Genya via Alina, the soldiers who Zoya flirted with, even the patients that Sergei muttered to, but he did not pay attention to the trays of food that Syuzanna carried to Alina’s rooms, or the gossip that they exchanged by the heat of the stove as Genya bounced a fretful Alenka in her arms. All the same, Genya breathed more easily when Katya and her family were hurried out of the kitchen by the Priestguard during the Apparat’s arrest of the other Grisha. She could not plot and scheme to free Alina and see these women as acceptable losses when they’d given her a place at their hearth.

For all that she had dismissed the Apparat’s ignorance, she had not watched Alina closely enough either. She barely recognised the woman who drew sunlight miles beneath the earth from a few inches of blue sky. She had seen Alina sullen, Alina heartbroken, Alina defiant. She had never seen Alina triumphant. Suddenly the pilgrims’ whispers of Sol Koroleva seemed more like prophecy than wishful thinking. Like calls to like, she recalled, from her long-ago lessons. She’d seen it in David’s calm, stone-steady nature, in Zoya’s thundering temper. She had mistaken Alina’s rare, bright smiles for sunshine. Now she saw her true radiance, fierce and unflinching, a light that burned shadow and skin with equal ferocity. Now she watched the girl she’d teased and fussed over and deceived burn her handprint into the chest of a young soldier, and almost flinched. When the pilgrims fell to their knees on their last progress through the Cathedral, she finally understood the woman they saw – not the sweet-sunlit maiden the Apparat had conjured, but a soldier of living fire. No wonder they shielded their eyes from her beautiful, terrible radiance.  No wonder they lined the walls of the caverns to catch a glimpse of her, offering up what few valuables or pretty trinkets they had managed to save as tribute to their saint.

Genya’s only regret in leaving the White Cathedral was missing the chance to say goodbye to Katya and her daughters. She spotted Syuzanna standing almost head and shoulders above the crowd, but no sign of Raya or Alenka. She hadn’t really expected to see them in such a crowd, but it was still a pang to leave without bidding them farewell. She thought Katya absent too, until she saw her forcing her way through the crowd with her walking stick. She couldn’t help but pause to embrace her, and was astonished when she drew back to find her black shawl had been seamlessly switched for one of deep forest green. Once, she might have turned her nose up at it as a peasants’ garment, but she looked through the intricate loops of hand-knitted lace, worth a hundred times its weight in gold, and almost wept.

“Katya,” she murmured, “I can’t accept this! You should keep it for Syuzanna, for Alenka-”

She shook her head. “It was meant for you,” she said, with absolute certainty. “Only for you. Not black. For you, never black. Promise me, dearie,” she said, and her fingers dug into Genya’s shoulders. “Lovely young girls should not wear widows’ weeds.”

Genya’s vision blurred with tears, and she found herself unable to argue with the old woman. She could only embrace her again, pulling away only when she risked losing Alina in the crowd. She had not thought she would miss anything about those bleak days beneath the earth, but though she had not known them long, Katya and her family would remain vivid in her memory in the weeks that followed.

Ravka above seemed even bleaker than Ravka below. They emerged from a crypt, and her first sight of the surface was the endless rows of graves, stretching as far as her eye could see. Ravka had been at war her whole life, and she’d seen military camps and the distant remnants of battlefields on the road with the Darkling, but somehow, she’d never truly understood the toll unending war had taken on the county. Almost every grave held fresh flowers, or painted icons, even, worst of all, well-loved toys. Almost every grave was someone’s beloved son or daughter. One girl for the whole of Ravka. How naïve she had been, to believe that she and Alina were the first or only sacrifices the Darkling was willing to make.

They followed the river as closely as they could, but mostly kept to the woods, trusting Mal’s tracking abilities to keep them from the most-travelled parts, and Tolya and Tamar’s instinctive sense for nearby heartbeats to alert them to ambushes. Once, they came across a silent, burned-out village. She did not see any bodies, but there were no human heartbeats she could feel. It was a tiny place, barely five houses clustered together in the shadow of the trees. It was a perfect picture of the end of the world

The rough, secretive nature of their travel often came unpleasantly close to her journey at the Darkling’s side, but even when the haze of despair rose around her, Tamar refused to let her fade into it, distracting her with yet more combat training or with techniques that her mother had given her to improve her skill at Heartrending. She still lacked the Heartrender’s instinctive knowledge of heartbeat, nerves, and hormones, but when she concentrated, she could feel the strong beat of her companions’ hearts, and when flashes of memory threatened to overwhelm her, it was those heartbeats she focussed on, sinking into them until her own beat in time with them again instead of racing ahead.

She still had nightmares of the nichevo’ya descending, the screams of Nikolai’s crew, and thanks to the close confines of their camp, everyone knew it. It would have been humiliating, but for the awareness that she was far from the only one who struggled with the dark. She was never the only one who found herself creeping back to the campfire’s warmth after they’d all retired to their tents: Alina, Sergei, Nadia, Adrik, even haughty Zoya sought comfort and silent companionship by the light of the flickering embers. They did not speak of their nightmares. They did not have to. Once, she even ran into Alina’s Mal, who’d clearly overheard her retching in the woods. By daylight, she would have sworn he still hated her, and justifiably so, but in that moment, he had given her a look of perfect, haunted understanding, and handed her a flask of vodka from the cave that left an almost antiseptic sting in her mouth. Most nights like that, she would find herself falling asleep by the fire rather than in her tent. The sunrise usually woke her, but she seldom woke alone. David did not seem to suffer with nightmares, and he stumbled over his words when he tried to comfort her, but he was always by her when she awoke to the dawn chorus, and somehow, that meant safety. That no matter how terrible the night had been, David had crossed it to find her.

Those days of travel were deeply unpleasant in every practical way. Those days of travel were almost perfect, some of the happiest she could remember since her childhood. Sometimes, falling asleep in the cramped little tent she shared with Alina, Zoya, Tamar, and Nadia, she could almost imagine she lay beneath the branches of an old oak tree, the canvas tent replaced by walls of snow, the quiet snores beside her coming from Dominik and Nikolai, in a far-away kingdom that no longer existed outside her memory.

Nikolai. Now that she’d emerged from the oblivion of the White Cathedral, part of her missed him so violently it felt almost like a phantom limb, still aching in absentia. The rest of her was terrified of their reunion. Somehow, more through chance than action, she’d won Alina’s forgiveness for her betrayal, made up for the letters she had stolen and earned back their fragile friendship of a few months. Her bond with Nikolai had lasted almost as far back as she could remember, and her betrayal of him had been a far crueller, more deliberate thing. When he finally appeared, wearing his own face this time, he'd swept them all safety on that ridiculous sky-ship she’d never quite believed in. A flash of memory flickered across her vision – a warm fire burning in the grate, her fingers sweet and sticky from pomdrakon, Nikolai and Dominik’s shallow breathing on either side of her. One day I’ll build you wings like Sankta Vasilka, and you can fly wherever you want. She’d never expected him to keep that foolish childhood promise. She wanted to throw herself at his feet and beg his forgiveness. She wanted to throw herself from the side of the ship as it launched, vanish into the forest and find a quiet place to die. Instead, she pinned down her veil more securely, and swallowed down her fear and her grief. She’d been out of practice for months, but she still knew well enough how to despise and devour her own heart.

Notes:

A bit of a quieter chapter this time, but Genya deserves some time to recover after Chapter 11! Next chapter, Nikolai is back, and we'll finally get to some long-awaited revelations...

Chapter 13: xiii – no amount of fear will keep you safe

Summary:

Genya faces justice, and finds it lacking. Nikolai discovers the cost of a crown.

Notes:

So we're finally here at the reunion we've all been waiting for! I'm really sorry it's a week late, I've been pretty ill but I'm doing better now and should be back to a weekly posting schedule for a little bit at least. Most of the dialogue in the trial scene is canon, but hopefully it fits well in this fic.

Genya had once been told that the only way three people could keep a secret was if two of them were dead. In retrospect, assuming the twelve of them could conceal her identity for any amount of time had been a hopelessly naïve plan, but then, it had been Nadia’s idea. Still, she’d expected better, even of poor, fragile Sergei, than to use her name in front of the crew almost the moment Alina was out of earshot. She never got the chance to find out what he’d actually wanted from her in the sudden uproar that followed.  

Perhaps it was unfair to place all the blame on Sergei. She had tried to keep out of Nikolai’s line of sight on the skyship, but she’d felt his eyes on her all the same. Maybe the veil had been a mistake, drawing more attention than it was worth. Maybe he would not have known her for the girl he’d grown up with beneath the ruin of her beauty. But then, she’d known Nikolai when he wore another’s face. He might have known her anywhere.  

She’d thought him distracted during their flight – they’d all seen Alina cut a man in half, and then retch over the side of the ship, and he’d watched her with a furrowed brow, his concern as plain to her now as it had ever been when they were children. It was strange – she'd grown almost used to seeing Nikolai-as-Sturmhond. His true face, the face of a man she’d never seen him grow into, was so familiar that it cut into what was left of her heart. There was the golden hair that had been the Queen’s legacy to her younger son, that she’d tousled and trimmed and coveted with her whole heart, back when she’d wanted nothing more than to be Tatiana in miniature. There were his hazel eyes, still too clever, too sharp, even through her veil. There was his crooked smile, disarming and mischievous, with a new sorrow to it that some part of her still wished she could smooth away. It was with a sharp pang of relief that she realised she saw nothing of the King in his frame, his features, even his bearing. As a child, he’d so desperately wanted to be like his father and Vasily. She was glad he seemed to have failed at that in every regard. 

She had watched his every move from the shadow of the mast. Most of their little group seemed familiar to him – Tolya almost swept him off his feet in a bearlike hug, Tamar clasped his hand in hers in an unexpected display of affection, even Zoya barely rolled her eyes when he swept her a bow and bestowed a kiss upon her fingertips. Most unexpected of all was his greeting to David, who had ignored him to lie flat on the deck, tapping the strange, smooth surface with his usual furrowed brow of intense focus.  

“It’s some kind of cured resin,” he’d said to her, over his shoulder, and it was almost embarrassing how such a pedestrian statement made her heart flip over in her chest, lit a fierce flame of protectiveness in her belly. Even as they rose above the blood and fear and violence of the battlefield, David had found something new and marvellous, and wanted to share it with her, “but it’s been reinforced with... carbon fibres?” 

“Glass,” Nikolai had said, and the brilliant smile that lit his face only made her chest tighten. Cruel enough that despite the years and the betrayals between them and the children they’d once been, he could still break through what remained of the armour around her heart. Crueller still that he could look at David, lying on the deck of the ship, and immediately understand his brilliance, his hope. So few people understood the beauty that David saw in the world. Of course Nikolai would be one of them.  

“ More flexible!” David had exclaimed, and she was glad of her veil, because she could feel her cheeks heating beneath it. 

“What can I say?” she had murmured, “He’s a passionate man.” Alina had giggled despite how pale she still seemed, not understanding that it wasn’t truly a joke. If not for the lingering pain from her scars, the need for secrecy, (her fear that he would not want her), she would have knelt beside hm on the deck and kissed him in that moment, as he looked up at her, flushed and bright-eyed from the thrill of a new discovery.  

Nikolai’s head had turned sharply at her words, and she shrank away behind Nadia until his attention shifted away from her again. She did not stop watching him, though, and what she saw made her heart ache . It would have been easier if war had made him careless or cruel, if she could dismiss his kindness at their last meeting as an act to win her trust. Instead, she watched him comfort Alina when she wept, answer David’s every eager question about his ship, and saw only the little boy who’d always given her his portion of strawberries, because once she had said they tasted like home.  

When they’d disembarked at the monastery hidden deep in the Fjerdan mountains, she’d almost thought she’d escaped his notice, and treacherous hope wormed into her heart. For a few moments, camouflaged among the other Grisha, she could relax a little, as one of Nikolai’s First Army officers began to explain the layout of the Spinning Wheel, where they’d be quartered, the restricted areas, where the other refugees spent their days... 

She was only half-listening. After so many months in caverns and days spent trudging through forests, the sky seemed almost infinite, broken only by the deep blue-grey stone of the mountains and the glowing white of snow. It was nothing like Os Alta, nothing like the White Cathedral. The air was crisp and clear, filled only with the distant scents of pine and cold stone. No smoke. No screaming. For a brief moment, she could pretend that this was a new place, one where she could be happy. 

Someone was clutching at her sleeve. “Genya,” Sergei muttered. Nadia hushed him hurriedly, but he only repeated, louder and more frantic: “ Genya. This isn’t a safe place, we need to go.” 

She turned to look at him, summoning patience she’d almost forgotten she possessed. He looked so young, so frightened. “It’s alright, Sergei,” she soothed. “This is the place we’ve been looking for.” 

He shook his head violently, grasping at her arm so tightly that she flinched, from the unexpected closeness and from the pressure on her scars. “No. No, no, no, the Little Palace was meant to be safe, but it wasn’t, nowhere was safe, this place is too obvious, and we have to go.”  

His panic was drawing attention both from their fellow Grisha and from the First Army. David – David – turned away from an animated discussion about the monastery’s hot water pipes, and immediately began to gently disentangle Sergei from his grip on Genya’s arm.  

“Be careful, you’re hurting her,” he said, in a low, calm voice.  

Sergei only shook his head again, trying to pull away from his grip to turn back to her. “No, Genya, you need to listen-”   

He reached out a hand. Her veil fell away. She flinched back, hands flying up to cover her face, but it was too late. Sergei had gathered a crowd around them now, and Nevsky had forced his way to the front of it. “Genya?” he said, in a disbelieving tone, “You have Genya Safin?”   

At his words, several things happened in rapid succession. First, Sergei let out an anguished wail, and bolted into the crowd. He would have dragged her along with him, if the guards had not stepped between them, forming a tight circle around her. She felt her pulse begin to thunder. She’d been caught. She’d been caught-  

She felt a familiar callused hand in hers, a familiar warmth against her side – David, drawing her away from the impending wall of olive-clad soldiers. She felt another painful twist of love for him, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop them, the two of them alone- 

Zoya stepped in front of her. “Do you make a habit of accosting your guests?” she said, haughtily. “This woman is a member of the Sun Summoner’s retinue, not a pickpocket to be seized to show off to your superiors.” 

Nevsky’s chest began to puff out. “ That woman is accused of poisoning His Most Serene Highness King Alexander III, and it is only through the mercy of the Saints that he survived.” 

Genya felt the world lurch beneath her feet, and she stumbled hard into David’s side. He steadied her as best he could, with her death grip on his hand, but it was Alina’s tracker – Mal, she corrected herself, Mal – who stopped her folding to the floor.  

“I’ll get Alina,” he muttered in her ear, then, to Zoya: “Stall them.” He took off running. Genya shrunk against David’s side, trying not to hyperventilate. She closed her eye, reached out for the familiar heartbeats of her companions – elevated, but not as frantic as her own. She felt them move closer, gathering close around her – were they going to hand her over? But when she opened her eye again, she saw only their backs as they surrounded her – Nadia, Zoya, Stigg, Harshaw, even Tolya and Tamar, all shielding her with their own bodies. She almost wanted to sob with a sudden, overwhelming affection for all of them – despite her betrayal, her remoteness, her weakness, they defended her as they would have Alina herself.  

Tamar folded her arms. “You doubt the word of a Saint who vouches for her?” 

Nevsky set his jaw. “I’m a soldier of the First Army. I cannot put the word of a saint above the order of my king, and the king demands her arrest.” 

Genya took another deep, steadying breath. If she was going to face the King and Queen again, she would not look like a frightened child. She would face them as she had the Darkling. They would not break her.  

“Does the King have any evidence of this beyond gossip and superstition?” David demanded. Of course, of course he still believed her innocent, despite all the odds. It made him all the more endearing, but planted another seed of terror in her heart – she was going to disappoint him, as she’d disappointed Alina, Nikolai, Dominik, the Queen, everyone else who had ever loved her.  

“He’s the King, sir,” Nevsky said, simply. “His word carries its own weight.” 

“She’s here!” Genya did not need Nadia’s exclamation to draw her attention to Alina, who was thundering back down the stairs with an expression of fearful, radiant rage. The wall of guards parted before her like shadows dissipated by the dawn, and then Alina’s arm was around her shoulders, drawing her upright and sheltering her at the same time. She had never been more relieved to have Alina as her friend, and not her enemy.  

“The king is waiting,” one of the guards urged. 

Zoya whirled on him, advancing like an oncoming storm. “ Let. Him. Wait. ” 

There was a sudden, fearful silence, and, with the weight of Alina’s arm around her, Genya realised she was shaking. It was as though their roles in their friendship had been turned on their head – Genya the frightened girl, Alina the world-weary protecter. For a bewildering moment, she could almost understand Alina’s ferocious loyalty to her. She’d have done anything for Alina in that moment.  

She turned Genya away from the soldiers, until all she could see was Alina and the wide, blue sky. 

“Listen to me,” she said, and reached out a hand, smoothing Genya’s hair back from her face. “No one will hurt you. Do you understand?” 

Alina was the one who didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. She’d never slept in the maids’ quarters of the Grand Palace, never dreaded a footstep in the hall, never- “He’s the King, Alina,” she said, and hoped that would be enough to help her see the truth. 

Alina set her jaw. “He’s not the king of anything anymore.” It might have been a threat. It sounded like a promise. Then, more gently, but with the cadence of an order: “You must face him.” 

“For him to see me... brought low like this...” There was a swallowed sob in her voice. Saints, she sounded weak – mewling like a kitten at the moment where she most needed her strength, her pride, her beauty. The things the Darkling had snatched away from her when he deemed her undeserving of them. 

Alina could see her shrink away, and gently reached out, tilting her chin up with one finger until she stood as she’d done before the scars bent her in half. “You are not low,” she said, with a controlled, protective anger that she had not thought her temperamental friend was capable of. “ You defied the Darkling to give me freedom. I won’t let yours be taken.” 

It was almost enough to give her courage, until from behind her, Mal spoke: “The guards are getting antsy.”  

The panic rushed back in. She’d be torn limb from limb, thrown off the mountain, cast out to starve and freeze in the Fjerdan snows- 

“I can’t do this.” She hardly realised she’d spoken the words aloud, between short, panicked gasps of air. She couldn’t look at the Lantsovs enthroned in splendour, sat in judgement above her as she was shamed before every friend she had in the world. She could already see the engraving in the history books – Razrusha'ya, scarred and hideous in the Darkling’s own colour, Alexander and Tatiana golden, glorious, triumphant- 

“You can,” Alina insisted, and she felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She glanced up, expecting David- and saw Mal Oretsev, looking down at her with steady assurance. 

“We’ve got you,” he said, simply. 

“Why?” The word broke in her mouth, emerging as half a sob. She did not deserve this friendship, this comfort. Not from him. “Back at the Little Palace, I reported on Alina. I burned her letters to you. I let her believe-” 

“You stood between us and the Darkling on Sturmhond’s ship,” Mal said, still in that same steady voice that reminded her he had been a soldier once, had faced fear perhaps as deep as the fear she felt now. “I don’t reserve my friendship for perfect people. And, thank the Saints, neither does Alina.” 

“Can you trust us?” Alina asked, and strangely, that was the thing that calmed her. Nobody had ever asked her to trust them, offered the implicit promise to catch her if she stumbled. The Darkling had expected her faith as a god expected worship, the Queen had expected her obedience and fealty whether she deserved it or not. Even Nikolai, kind, caring Nikolai, the brother of her heart, had assumed her trust in him, had never asked for it.  

She swallowed, took another deep breath, recalled Tamar’s words to her in the White Cathedral: He tried to break you and tame you because he feared what you could become without his hand on your harness. I don’t have to like you to want to see what about you he was so scared of. There was every chance Tamar was wrong, that the King, the Queen, the Darkling had all seen weakness in her rather than hidden strength. That did not matter. They had made her a ruin. She would show them ruination. 

She pulled Katya’s shawl up over her head like the coif of a knight in a storybook, and imagined the fierce old woman at her side. She was not the first, or the only unwilling girl a Lantsov king had laid his hands on, but she would make certain that she was the last. 

The guards closed in around them, marching them through the observatory. She could feel the stares of the crowd on her through their olive-drab uniforms, but Alina and David flanked her, hand-in-hand-in-hand, and she tried to take courage in that, even as her heart thundered in her ears, even as bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it down. She had faced the Darkling, the nichevo’ya, the shadows of the Fold. This close to the end of the world, what was the King to the things she had seen? Only a man. Only a man. 

The door they approached towered above her, flanked by vast bronze horsemen who stared down at her in cold, dispassionate judgement. Behind her veil, she raised her chin, defiant. Strike me down, she dared them. Try it. They did not move. They were only statues. 

The door swung open, revealing a scene which could have passed for a mockery of a royal family portrait: Nikolai, the golden prince, arms folded, expression as cool and unreadable as the statues beyond the door, the Queen, her porcelain perfection faded to human frailty without Genya’s careful Tailoring, the King, leaning on the back of his chair. The King, so frail and shrunken that he almost seemed a mockery of her memories. She could still smell the rot beneath his heavy cologne, and some part of her took a vicious satisfaction in it.  

His eyes widened as he looked first to Alina. “I didn’t ask to see this witch!”  

How could he look through her as if she was not even there, after all the things he had done to her? How could this man, pouting like a petulant child, be the monster who’d devoured her every scrap of innocence and hope, who’d shaped her into the weapon of his own destruction? 

Alina bowed. “ Moi tsar.”  

“ Where is the traitor?” he bellowed, spittle flying from his lips, and Genya dug her nails into her palms. She would not flinch. She would not flinch. 

She stepped forward, no longer hiding behind Alina and David, and pulled down her veil in a single, swift motion. The King gasped, eyes bulging in astonishment. The Queen- the Queen had covered her mouth, and the child in Genya still searched her face for a single hint of compassion for the girl she had raised, the pretty thing she’d loved as a daughter.  

“What is this?” the King muttered, looking, of all things, offended by her scars . As if he’d been expecting his pretty doll returned to him, penitent and pleading forgiveness. 

“This is the price she paid for saving me.” Alina’s voice was high, clear, determined. “For defying the Darkling.” 

The King slumped back in his chair, scowling as if he’d been thwarted. “She is a traitor to the Crown. I want her head!”  

Would he have made the same demand, if she’d still been beautiful? If she’d arrived unscarred, unbroken, flung herself to her knees and begged for his mercy, would he still have called for her death? Or would he have raised her to her feet, claimed she’d been the Darkling’s pawn, and had her brought to his bed before nightfall? In a strange, twisted way, she felt almost grateful for her scars. 

She did not look at him, shifted her gaze to Nikolai. Nikolai, brother of her heart. Nikolai, who had not known her aboard the skyship, if the set of his jaw and coldness of his gaze was any indication. Nikolai, who stood between his monstrous parents, and not at her side, as he had in her every nightmarish imagining of this scene. She met his eyes, raised her chin. She would not beg for mercy, not even from him. 

Her voice did not tremble when she spoke: “I will take my punishment, if he takes his.” 

In the corner of her eye, she could see the King’s face flush with rage. “You will stay silent among your betters!” 

How many years had those words kept her quiet? How long had they been used to make them small, insignificant? For how long had she accepted that her place behind the Queen, beneath the King, beside the Darkling, was far beyond her power to change? Now, she kept her gaze fixed on Nikolai. Who was Alexander Lantsov to demand her attention? “I have no betters here.” 

The Queen gasped. “If you think that-” 

“If he cannot be tried for his failures as a king, let him be tried for his failures as a man.” Looking at Queen Tatiana was more difficult than she’d expected. When she’d been a child, the Queen, her Queen, had been goddess and monarch and mother to her. Now, she saw only a woman made smaller and older than her years by bitterness, cruelty, and an isolation she had built for herself and then raged against. I would have loved you forever, a child’s voice whispered in her mind. Part of her would always love her, the gilded Queen of memory. But love had not been enough to move the Queen to save her, and love would not be enough to silence her now. 

Distantly, she heard the King sneer: “You ungrateful whore.” She did not flinch. Did he really think words could hurt her anymore? 

“That’s enough. Both of you.” It was impossible to look at Nikolai, to read in his face what she heard in his voice. She forced herself to anyway, and saw, beneath the cool impassivity of justice, a boy who’d lost the last lovely illusions of childhood. Her heart twisted in her chest. She was not a hero, but she had hoped to save him from this. 

Somewhere, far away, his father was still blustering: “I am Ravka’s King! I will not-” 

Nikolai stood up to his full height. “You are a King without a throne, and I respectfully ask that you hold your tongue.” He did not raise his voice, but she felt a chill slip down her spine as he approached her. For the first time, she could not see the boy with the strawberries in his cold, distant face. “Genya Safin. You are accused of treason and attempted murder.” 

Not Genechka. That name belonged to the far-off land of childhood now, with the boy she had called Kolya. The man in front of her was a stranger. Her nails dug into her palm, but she could only meet his gaze with her one remaining eye. “I didn’t try to kill him. If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead.” 

“But you did something to the King.” He stepped closer to her. It was impossible not to notice how he towered over her, this man she did not know, this man who’s father she had drugged year by year. “Something from which the court doctors said he’d never recover. What was it?” 

She swallowed. “Poison.” 

He folded his arms. “Surely it could have been traced.” Did he think she’d lie to him now, at the end of all things? Was this his attempt to give her a chance to exonerate herself? 

She could lie. She could weep, cast blame on the Darkling, play the innocent. She’d played that role well for so many years.  

But no. Nikolai deserved the truth of her betrayal, and she deserved to keep her hard-won pride. It was all she had left.  

“Not this,” she said, “I designed it myself. If given in small enough doses over a long enough time, the symptoms are mild.” A shame that the King had been so greedy, so determined to devour her. She might have suffered less. He might have lived longer. 

“A vegetable alkaloid?” She almost jumped at David’s voice, so far away had his hand tucked in hers felt. She risked a glimpse up at him, fearful of what she would see in his face. For once, he met her gaze with his own, and squeezed her hand tight. 

When she continued, she ignored the King, the Queen, the friends she’d betrayed, and spoke only to David: “Once it builds up in the victim’s system, a threshold is reached, the organs begin to fail, and the 
degeneration is irreversible.” When she felt strong enough, she looked back at the King, purple and shaking with impotent rage. It’s not a killer. It’s a thief. It steals years. And he will never get them back.” 

He could take her life, but never again would he lay a hand on an unwilling woman without remembering what it had cost him. 

The Queen was shaking her head. “Small amounts over time? You didn’t have that kind of access to our meals-” 

It would almost have been endearing that the woman who’d raised her still seemed determined to believe her innocence, if she did not know now that Tatiana had sensed her next words, was trying to divert the oncoming flood. Too late, you stupid bitch. “ I poisoned my skin,” she snapped, before they could try to silence her again, “my lips,” Her lips, her breasts, every other part of her he’d tried to lay claim to, “so that every time he touched me-” She shuddered, and felt David squeeze her hand again. “Every time he kissed me, he took sickness into his body.” She swallowed down bile, looked back up to meet Nikolai’s eyes. “He brought this on himself.” 

This time, he was the one who flinched. “But the poison would have affected you too.” 

“I had to purge it from my skin, then heal the burns the lye would leave. Every single time.” She’d stripped off and regrown layers of her skin to erase his touch, and still she did not feel clean. “It was well worth it.” 

Nikolai rubbed a hand over his mouth, and she could tell that bile clawed at his throat the way it did her own. “He- he forced you?” It was the first time his cool, impassive mask had slipped. She nodded.  

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Father. Did you?” 

The bottom fell out of her stomach. She wanted to run. She wanted to hit him. He’d known her almost their entire life. It was still not enough for her word to matter. 

The King sneered. “She is a servant, Nikolai. I didn’t have to force her.” 

There was a long moment of silence. The thunder of her heart in her ears, pumping anger-fear-betrayal-grief through her body, was the only sound in the world. It was the cruellest thing Nikolai had ever done to her, giving her just enough time to hope before he spoke again: 

“Genya Safin, when this war is over, you will stand trial for high treason against this kingdom and for colluding with the Darkling against the crown.” 

She slumped, the strings of hope and rage and stubbornness which had held her up for these few precious months severed by his words alone. She’d loved him enough to give him the truth. It had not been enough to save her. 

He continued: “Father, you are ill. You have served the crown and the people of Ravka, and now it is time for you to take the rest you deserve. Tonight, you will write out a letter of abdication.” The King blustered, but whatever he said did not matter, as she hung half-supported by David and Alina. Nikolai did not let him finish, anyway: “You will write the letter, and tomorrow you will leave on the Kingfisher. It will take you to Os Kervo, where you’ll be seen safely aboard the Volkvolny and across the True Sea. You can go someplace warm, maybe the Southern Colonies.” 

“The Colonies?” Tatiana sounded outraged. Perhaps, to them, exile was a great and terrible shame. Genya could only think of the number of servant girls in the Southern Colonies, and wish she’d concocted a more lethal poison. 

“You will have every luxury. You will be far from the fighting and the reach of the Darkling. You will be safe.” Safe. It was only her dignity that kept her from vomiting on the floor of his precious war-room. They would be safe. Every maid in her part of the Grand Palace had spent their evenings wide-eyed and fearful, but they would be safe while those women suffered with Ravka. 

The King was still bellowing: “I am the King of Ravka! This... this traitor, this-” 

Whatever he would have called her, it would not have hurt more than Nikolai’s cold, distant expression, looking through her rather than at her as he replied: “If you remain, I will see you tried for rape.” 

It was stupid, pathetic, but a part of her still wanted him to see her pain and sweep her into his arms, stroke her hair, murmur Genechka into her ear like they were children again. Even if she survived her trial, she would never have that comfort again.  

The Queen gave a low moan, usually a sign of a rising fit of vapours. “Nikolai, you cannot mean to do this.” 

Nikolai turned to look at his mother, who he’d always adored even above Vasily, and the coldness did not fade from his eyes. “She was under your protection, Mother.” 

“She is a servant!” There it was, the truth beneath the pretty lie of her childhood. She'd seen Tatiana as a mother, Nikolai as a brother.  

“And you are a queen. Your subjects are your children. All of them.” She flinched at his words as if he had slapped her. It was not quite satisfaction. 

The King rose from his chair, made a hobbling advance on Nikolai: “You would send me from my own country on so slight a charge-” 

Tamar stepped forward, a hand on the axe at her waist. She’d almost forgotten her presence, but was grateful for it now. “ Slight ? Would it be slight if she had been born noble?”  

Mal crossed his arms. “If she’d been born noble, he never would have dared.” 

She wondered if it was true. She hoped it was true, that if she’d had someone, anyone to protect her... but even the Darkling had not been protector enough. 

“This is the best solution.” Nikolai’s voice was chill, distant, determined, an impassive judge rather than a son, a friend, a brother. Perhaps that would make him a better king. In that moment, Genya could not see it.  

“It is not a solution at all!” his father snapped. “It is cowardice!” 

“Cowardice,” she muttered, hissing through her teeth. “I was twelve.”  

The King had reached Nikolai now, was shouting up into his son’s face, flecks of spittle flying from his mouth. Genya wished she had her veil to shield herself. “You have no right, no authority. Who are you to sit in judgment on your King?” 

Nikolai folded his arms. “These are Ravka’s laws, not mine. They should not bow to rank or status.” That was a pretty falsehood, and they all knew it. “You know this is for the best. Your health is failing. You need rest, and you’re too weak to lead our forces against the Darkling.” 

“Watch me!” the King roared.  

“Father,” Nikolai said gently, “the men will not follow you.” 

The King’s eyes narrowed, and in that moment, she could almost have pitied him, a shrivelled, half-rotten figure, barely a man, let alone a king. “Vasily was twice the man you are. You are a weakling and a fool, full of common sentiment and common blood.”  

She saw Nikolai flinch, and swallowed the urge to reach out to him. He did not need her compassion. “Maybe so,” he said. “But you will write that letter, and you will board the Kingfisher without protest. You will leave this place, or you will face trial, and if you are found guilty, then I will see you hang.” 

It was justice of a kind, she could recognise that, but it was more than that: it was a coup so perfect that the King’s continued spluttering, the Queen’s tears, all felt like mere aftershocks of the earthquake that was Nikolai seizing Ravka’s crown from his father’s failing hands. As a courtier, she could respect a masterstroke. As a woman, she wanted to claw at his face until it mirrored her own. However fair his judgement, however good a king he would make, however hard it was for him to exile the last family he had living, his reign would always be built on her rape.  

The King threw off the guards who moved to escort him to his room at Nikolai’s order, and for a moment, she thought he might hit him.  

“You are no Lantsov,” he growled. 

Nikolai gave his father a shallow bow. “I find I can live with that.” 

A vein jumped in his father’s forehead for a moment, and then he whirled around, storming towards the door. He turned as he passed Genya, grabbed a hold of her face with one hand, forced her to meet his gaze. 

“At least now you look like what you truly are,” he growled. “ Razrusha’ya.”   

Genya stiffened her spine, drawing herself up until she stood taller than the stooped, wretched man before her. “Remember me when you board that ship, moi tsar . Remember me when you take your last look at Ravka as it slips beneath the horizon.” She leaned in, pressed her lips to his ear like the lover she had never been. “ I am not ruined,” she whispered, “ I am ruination.” It was a line from an old song, of princesses with poison touches, and kings who tried to take what was not theirs. He knew as well as she did, and paled in recognition of the threat. She’d destroyed him once. She would happily destroy what was left of him. She drew back, smiled at him, the scars dragging at her lips until it became more of a snarl, feral with anger and grief. “I hope the taste of me was worth it.” 

She drew back, set her shoulders, hoped he had not noticed the tear in her eye, the tremble in her voice. She would not break. She was not ruined. She had not needed Nikolai, Alina, even David to stand at her side. She was not some fragile, dependent- 

She felt David’s arm settle on her shoulders, and shook the weight off, turning her snarl onto him as the tears began to roll down her cheek. “ Don’t.” If he touched her, she would be broken again. She could not be broken again. 

Tamar and Alina started towards her, hands outstretched: “Genya-” 

She reeled away from them. “I don’t want your pity,” she spat, and they stopped in their tracks, helpless as children. “You don’t understand. None of you do.” How could they? Tamar, Tolya, Mal, who fought like they’d been born to it. Precious Alina, too pure for a spy’s filthy work. Even David- David reaching out to her- 

“Don’t you dare,” she snapped, and there was a sob in her voice that repulsed her. “You never looked at me twice before I was like this, before I was broken. Now I’m just something for you to fix.” Genya, I like pretty things! What was she, but a once-pretty, now-broken project for his clever mind to repair? 

But he did not look at her with the calculating frown with which he faced a new, difficult project. He bunched up his shoulders, as he did when words caught in his throat, and said: “I know metal.” 

She stared at him, half-maddened, wholly uncomprehending. “What does that have to do with anything?”  

His brow furrowed, and she was stood in the doorway of her chamber in the Grand Palace, a satchel pressed into her hands, facing a boy she did not understand trying to explain something he did not have words for. “I... I don’t understand half of what goes on around me. I don’t get jokes or sunsets or poetry, but I know metal.” His fingers flexed unconsciously, as if seeking a stone to unpick. She knew every callus and scar on his hands. “Beauty was your armour. Fragile stuff, all show. But what’s inside you?” He met her gaze, and suddenly, she understood the weight of eye-contact as he felt it, the intimacy, as he looked into her soul, and revealed his own to her. She was stripped of her scars, her skin, her masks and deceptions, and he saw her as she truly was. “That’s steel. It’s brave and unbreakable. And it doesn’t need fixing.” 

He stepped towards her carefully, like a man approaching a frightened animal, and gently tilted her face up with one hand. He waited a long moment until she gave an incremental nod, and then he pressed his lips to her own. For a moment she stiffened, remembering other lips, other embraces, and then she tasted the warm smoke-and-stone scent that had always meant safety and threw her arms around him. The kiss could have lasted a century and it still would not have been long enough, but when they reluctantly broke apart, she heard a low whistle from Tamar.  

She looked up at David, her David, and smiled. “We should get you out of the workshop more often.” 

He looked down at her, and it was a moment of that rare, perfect understanding that existed only between them, until Nikolai broke it with a hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him.  

“Do not think to rest easy, Genya Safin.” He looked colder and more remote than she’d ever seen him. He looked exhausted. “When this war is over, you will face charges, and I will decide whether or not you are to be pardoned.” 

Genya bit down on her tongue, forced herself to sweep him a bow before she replied. “I don’t fear your justice, moi tsar.”  

“I’m not the King yet.” 

Could have fooled me. “ Moi tsarevich,” she amended. She had not called him that since she had been eleven, and the unbreachable divide had opened between them. 

He dismissed them with a wave, and she let David sweep her out, tucked under his arm like something far too precious to let go. She only glanced back at Nikolai once before the door closed between them. He sat at his desk, his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking. The door closed between them, and he was gone. 

Notes:

Thank you again for all your lovely comments! I'm catching up on responding to them now, but they all delight and inspire me. <3

Chapter 14: xiv - a molecular rift you can't fix

Summary:

Nikolai reckons with the weight of Lantsov blood.

Notes:

I'm sorry this chapter is late again! I'm on holiday and finding WiFi is tricky, but I hope you enjoy it.

I poisoned my skin, my lips. Part of him had expected her to deny it. Hoped she would deny it. Prayed that she’d protest her innocence, or claim she’d been the Darkling’s unwilling tool. He would have believed her. He would have wanted to believe her. He did not want to believe her now. If he’d been more like Vasily, more like his parents, he would have dismissed her words as pure spite, or an attempt to sow discord in what remained of the Lantsov family. But he had never truly been his father’s son, and despite the lies and betrayals that lay between him and Genya, he knew in his bones that she’d spoken the truth.

His parents had not denied it either. She is a servant, Nikolai. He remembered her words from ten years ago, when he’d woken from his coma to see her dressed in servants’ white: princes and servants aren’t friends, any more than otkazat’sya and Grisha. Had that been when it started? When she wasn’t even old enough to pin up her hair and let down her skirts, when she had still been delighted with the new doll he’d found for her name-day? His stomach churned, and he buried his head in his hands. She had been right. He had been no friend to her. Ten years. Ten years he’d known something was wrong with her, and had been too blind to see that the cause of Genya’s suffering was the rot at the heart of his own family. He hated that she hadn’t told him. He knew she should not have had to.

Under Ravka’s laws, the price for treason was death by burning. If he refused to try Genya, if he signed the pardon he’d written out, would Ravka call him a just king, or one who spared a poisoner because she had grown up at his side? Under Ravka’s laws, the punishment for rape was a lifetime of hard labour, a living death some thought crueller than execution. His father would never serve a day of that sentence. Would he call himself a just king, if he let Genya burn while her rapist lived in luxurious exile? Would he have given any servant girl the same chance to defend herself that he had offered her? Would he have listened to her, believed her, if he’d been able to see her as a stranger and not a near-sister? He could not know. He could not even know if Genya was the only woman the Lantsov family owed lifetimes of reparation towards.

He thought of Halmhend, of Dominik’s life slipping away beneath his clumsy fingers, of the first person he’d loved and could not save. He had lost others since then, comrades-in-arms and crew members alike, but Genya... he had failed Genya for ten long years. He could perhaps survive her loss, as he had survived Dominik’s, but he’d lost half of his heart on that battlefield. He would keep living without the rest of it, but he had knew the price Ravka had paid for its unfeeling monarchs – the country had paid that toll in blood, in the valleys of Halmhend, in the mountains of Shu Han.

In truth, he owed her a debt beyond affection, beyond even justice. Genya’s accusation had been the lever he’d leaned on to remove his parents from power. No matter how golden the Ravka he built was, it would remain rotten at its heart if he built it on the rape of a child and sent that child to her death. Whether pardoning her was justice or mercy or love, whether it would one day earn him her forgiveness, or only her disdain, it was the only course of action he could take if he wanted the future he dreamed of to be worth anything at all.

He sighed, pressed his seal into the scroll, bound it tight with a Lantsov-blue ribbon. He wanted to put it into her hands now, set her mind at ease, but he had taken enough from her today already, and he had other duties to fulfil. He took up the letter of abdication he had drafted instead. He still needed to bid his parents goodbye.

They had been housed in what had been the guest quarters of the monastery, the rooms which benefitted most from the newly-repaired hot water pipes. The tiles hummed beneath Nikolai’s feet, a soothing constancy in contrast to the writhing in his mind and his gut. He’d had no choice in the judgement he’d made. He’d had every choice, compared to Genya. He almost choked on the knowledge of what she had done – no, what she had had to do. Maybe you were the limb she had to lose to get free. If he’d seen the snare she was in, would he have helped? Could he have helped, before the war, before Vasily’s death, before she had made his father too weak to stand against her? He remembered the distant shape of her on a balcony through a carriage window, how he had thought of Sankta Vasilka, who’d locked herself away to protect herself. Would he have left her then, if he’d known her tower was more prison than sanctuary? Would he have, could he have, should he have – all meaningless questions. They would not help either of them now.

Still he hesitated between his mother’s door on the left and his fath- the King’s on the right. Part of him wanted to vent his rage against him, force his hand to parchment and sign the warrant for the only punishment Nikolai could give him. Another part of him, the part that was cold, calculating Sturmhond, knew that his father had only had an hour to rage against his confinement, and needed longer to realise the inevitability of his fate. Ideally days or weeks, but time was a rare and precious commodity.

That left the Queen as the logical first option. Logical, but… Nikolai had never been close to his father. Whether it was the whispers of his bastardy or a natural preference for the heir who resembled him, Alexander III had always favoured his elder son. Nikolai was accustomed to the King’s rejection, even his anger, but the Queen’s… She had always been the more doting parent when the mood took her, and part of him remained the child who had longed for her honey-sweet smiles of approval. Even in her flaws – her petulance, her selfishness, her hypochondria – he could not reconcile his lovely, fragile, unhappy mother with the woman who’d looked on her foster-daughter with cool disdain as Genya recounted the harm her husband had wrought. Had the mother he loved ever really existed, or was she a mask for the cruel, distant woman beneath? Did any of that matter, when he might never see her again?

He steeled himself, then nodded to the guards, knocked on the door, opened it as he heard her call: “Enter!”

He could tell even before he saw her that she had been weeping, and his heart still ached at that sight despite the knowledge that she had little right to tears in this situation.

“Madraya-“ he said, trying to sound cool, dispassionate, until she launched herself across the room to fling her arms around his neck.

“Kolya,” she wailed, drawing his name out into an agonised moan. “Please, my darling, my sweet boy-“

The revulsion he felt at her touch almost disgusted him. She was a mother seeking comfort from her child. She was a queen, and he could not recall her ever acting as one. But she was still his mother, and he smoothed her hair and held her for a few long moments until she composed herself and looked up at him, eyes still pooling with tears. “You cannot mean to do this to us- your own parents-“

“Madraya,” he repeated, and tried to sound soothing rather than impatient. “Sit, let me pour you a drink-“

“Do not try to pacify me, Kolya!” she snapped, pushing away from him. Angry colour was starting to blotch across her face. “I am your mother! Would you really choose that girl over your own flesh and blood?”

That girl. The disgust in her voice hit like a slap, and remembered how she’d once spoken of her: dear Genya, pretty thing, moya milaya. He caught his mother’s wrists, looked down into her eyes. When had she become so small?

“When did you stop loving her?” he said, softly.

She’d been pulling against him, but stopped suddenly, her arms limp in his grasp. Her blue-green eyes, so close to his hazel, turned wide and wounded. She dropped her gaze, and suddenly shrank into the aging, exhausted woman who’d wept for months over her eldest son.

“When my love for her became a knife that could be used to cut both of us,” she said, bleakly. He dropped her wrists, and she swayed slightly, then staggered over to the couch by the fire. She collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, and buried her face into her hands. “I loved her,” she said, and she was not weeping now, but her voice sounded hollow and empty, even muffled as it was by her hands. “Doubt me as you like, it does not matter any more. I loved her almost as I loved you, or Vasily, but…”

“But?” He prompted, taking a seat beside her, and taking her hand.

It was a long moment before she spoke again, and when she did, something in her voice had cracked and shattered until it was nothing more than a pained, hoarse whisper. “She was the Darkling’s gift to me, but your father… he saw it as an insult, I think, that anyone other than him was given a Grisha servant. Worse still that...” She paused, rubbed her eyes hard. “I was unhappy often, when you were very young, and I think he preferred it. He... he was happiest when he felt like my sole source of joy, and he did not care for it when I found another.”

He had not come here to speak of himself, to seek some fantastical closure for wounds long closed, but he felt the gaping scar of hunger open up once more in his chest, the mark of the boy who had always been too much to be loveable. “Vasily and I...”

She clutched at his hand, frantically. “Of course you made me happy, my sweet boy, my Kolya. But you were always in your father’s gift and he made sure I knew it, knew that you were only so close because he wished it so! But the Safin girl...” Her voice fell away, and she clung to his hand ever more tightly, as if afraid that even now he would pull away from her. It was strange, almost terrible, how he felt their positions reversed – now she seemed to seek his approval and understanding as eagerly as he had once sought hers, and he longed to give it to her with a child’s generosity, even as the part of him that had lost that child’s naivety was repulsed by her naked plea for sympathy that she did not deserve. “He could not take her from me so easily, and for years, I knew he hated it, hated I still had some little happiness that didn’t belong to him.”

She swallowed, shook her head. “I knew what he intended months before he ever touched her. Don’t look at me like that, Kolya, I could not have protected her, not from him!” It was a lie, and a flimsy one at that. She could have returned her to the Little Palace and the Darkling’s care. She could have sent her away from court. She could have done a thousand things to protect the girl she claimed to love so well, and that she’d chosen none of them was almost crueller than her coldness during her trial. “All I could do was harden my heart, and allow only one of us to be hurt by his cruelty.”

He had known for years that his mother could be small, self-serving, petty. It was another to hear her use it to defend the indefensible. “So you robbed her of the only mother she’d ever known as Father robbed her of her innocence?”

Another high-pitched sob. “Oh, don’t say such things, Kolya! What was I to do?”

“You were the Queen of Ravka. You were the closest thing to a mother Genya had. You could have protected her, as a mother and a queen is meant to. Sent her away, sent her to the Darkling, even been kind to her-”

She shook her head, her shoulders shaking more violently. “Of course you don’t understand!” she wept. “No mother in Ravka can protect her child from the draft, from the King, from- from anything! My mother was the Queen of Fjerda, and what could she do for me?! All I could to was watch as she was used to humiliate me!”

He stayed silent, let her cling to his hand as she wept, did not resist as she leaned her head against his shoulder. Perhaps she had always been small, selfish, cruel, or perhaps years at his father’s side had made her so. Perhaps it did not matter which was true, when she was his mother, and for all the ways she had failed, he could not help but love her.

When her sobs had quieted, he said, gently: “If you wished to remain in Ravka, separate from the King... there are convents, places of sanctuary you could retire to without shame. Plenty of women choose the veil when their children are grown.”

She stiffened, looked up at him, affronted: “And live away from court?”

“You may choose the veil, or exile, Madraya. Please, it is all I can give you.” He held out the offer to her, and part of him was a child holding out a crystal dragonfly to her again. Take what I offer. Love me. Stay.

She shook her head, slowly: “Kolya... your father, I cannot... What would people think, if I left him when he was dying?”

The dragonfly lay in splinters, his heart with it. Distantly, a memory replayed in his mind – his glass-and-wire heart in pieces, his mother turned away from him. Genya bleeding, silent and pale, the only one truly wounded by their pathetic little pageant.

“Of course.” He drew his hand away from hers, gently, pushed himself to his feet. He wanted to shake her, demand she think of anything beyond her own pain. He wanted to cling to her and weep like a child for the loss of a family that had perhaps existed only in his own imagination. It was years too late for either. He paused, halfway to the door, then, on impulse: “Just- please, Madraya, tell me I am not the son of a monster.”

She gave a sharp, pained little inhale. He could not bring himself to look at her.

When she spoke, her voice was calmer, steadier than he had expected. “His- his name was Magnus Opjer. He was Fjerdan, a merchant. He was- he was kind, and clever, and he made me laugh.” A pause, then: “You are so like him, sometimes it hurt to see.”

He had asked for the truth. A part of him had still expected denial, some token attempt to assure him he was a Lantsov through and through. To hear confirmation of his bastardy from his own mother’s lips... he did not know whether to laugh or to cry. His father was kind, clever, had never laid a hand on Genya. His father was not a Lantsov, was not even Ravkan. Not a drop of Nikolai’s blood gave him a claim to the land he had loved ever since he’d learned to love things he could not hold. He was less a puppy or a too-clever fox than a cuckoo in the eagle’s nest, and it broke his heart even as it gave him relief from the burden of Alexander Lantsov’s tainted blood.

“Thank you,” he said, and hoped it sounded as though he meant it. One day, he would mean it. “I hope- I hope I become a king you can be proud of.”

He did not expect her to rise to her feet, to fling her arms around his shoulders from behind in one final embrace. “If- if you cannot be proud of your Lantsov blood, or your mother’s virtue, you can be proud that you are the son of a good man. If he had known you, he would have loved you.”

He felt her hand slip something into his pocket – a small oval frame, a miniature, and he took hold of her fingers, turned, pressed a courtier’s kiss to her now-swollen fingers, squeezing her hand one last time.

“Until tonight, Madraya,” he said, softly, and slipped outside, shutting the door between them. He would have slumped against it, listened for her quiet sobs, but the guards in the hall were looking at him expectantly. He cleared his throat, hoped he sounded commanding rather than choked up: “Any news on the King?”

The soldiers on the opposite door glanced at each other, then saluted him crisply. “He raged and threw things for some time, moi kapitan, but he’s been quiet for the last hour.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said, with a returning salute. “I will see him now.”

“Moi kapitan-” The lieutenant – Ivanov? - looked conflicted, then continued: “This is- we are doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

In truth, Nikolai did not know what the right thing was any more. He’d seized control of a kingdom he lacked any claim to. He’d signed a pardon for his father’s poisoner. He’d tried his oldest friend for treason. But still, he gave the lieutenant a reassuring smile, clapped him on the shoulder. “You heard his ranting,” he said, gently. “He is my father, and I owe him a son’s loyalty, but... this is no place for a man as sick in mind and body as he is. Is it not also my duty to ensure he is well-cared-for, far away from the front line?”

This seemed to be enough for Ivanov, who relaxed and stepped aside as Nikolai stepped towards the door. He only wished he could convince himself so easily.

In the monastery’s finest bedchamber, his father sat slumped in a chair, his skin almost grey with exhaustion. Somehow, the clear, bright mountain light only served to make him seem more colourless, closer to a walking corpse than a living man. He did not look up as Nikolai entered, only gave a harsh, humourless laugh. “Come to see how far I’ve fallen, Sobachka?”

“Are you comfortable, Father?” It was the last thing he cared about, but it was enough to wrongfoot him for a moment.

He hunched his shoulders. “What do you care?”

“You are my father, even if you will not be my king for much longer. Your health will always be my concern.”

“Of course it’s your concern,” he sneered. “You’re probably hoping the little bitch finishes me off before we even reach the colonies, aren’t you?”

“You know that isn’t true.” He kept his voice cool, dispassionate, as if dismissing the wild claims of a child lashing out in pain. “If I wanted you dead, I would have had you smothered in your chambers. None here would gainsay me.”

His father’s complexion darkened from haggard grey to violent, blotchy red in an instant. “You would not dare-”

“No, Father,” he interrupted him. “I simply would not, not now at least. If I’d known what you’d done to Genya years ago, I would have been tempted.” More than tempted. He could imagine it now, horrifyingly vivid: his father’s hands flailing wildly, then going limp, the burst blood vessels in his face, as if he’d finally shouted himself to death, his eyes bulging at the realisation anyone had the effrontery to kill him. He hated himself for how clearly he could picture it, hated more the coldness that stayed his hand rather than any filial love.

The King spat at his feet. “You were never a true Lantsov. I should have seen it years ago. Vasily would never have picked that common little whore over his own kin.”

Nikolai gritted his teeth. “Perhaps not. But you were never a true king.”

Alexander’s eyes bulged, a vein in his forehead protruding as though it would burst. “The Eagle Throne-”

“Will be a greater seat for not holding a rapist. How old was she when you first laid hands on her? Sixteen? Fifteen?” Twelve?

He waved a dismissive hand. “What does it matter? What does she matter? You’d really betray the whole of Ravka, your own kindred, for one girl?”

It had been harder, with his mother. She had been small, and petty, and unkind, but there had still been something in her he could have pity for. There was nothing to pity in Alexander III. It was easier to look down at him as if he were a stranger, a bitter, selfish old man who had never understood what Ravka even meant. He looked down at the man he had once called Father, and let out a cold, humourless laugh. “You think you are Ravka? Ravka is not an old man dying of his own greed and cruelty. Ravka is every boy who’s bled on her battlefields. Ravka is every mother defending her home with nothing more than a kitchen knife. Ravka is a girl demanding justice even if it kills her. You are not Ravka. You are not even worthy to set foot on her soil.”

“And what would you know of Ravka, mongrel son of a Fjerdan bitch?”

“Better the son of a Fjerdan bitch than the son of a rapist.”

Alexander pushed himself to his feet. It still did not bring him to Nikolai’s height. “And who will you give your mother’s throne to? The traitorous whore the Darkling put in my bed? She won’t be worth it, I assure you-”

His words choked off as Nikolai grabbed the front of his shirt, lifting him off his feet. His voice was low, cold, deadly, Sturmhond, not Sobachka.

“You will never speak of her again. You will never look at her again. If you ever think of her again, it will be in your prayers to the Saints for their forgiveness, because even if she can forgive what you did to her, I never will.” Nikolai let go, and he collapsed into his seat as if he had been struck. “You will sign the letter of abdication.”

“But-”

Nikolai raised a hand, silencing him. “You will sign and seal it here, under my eyes, with the guards outside as witness, and you will count yourself blessed to be sent into exile without more suffering than you have brought upon yourself. Or you can test me again, and I will have you smothered in your sleep. It’s your choice. Father.”

He held out the letter he had drafted. His father squinted up at him for a long moment, and then something in him broke, and he looked down at his hands, more like a scolded bully than a king. “I’ll need a pen,” he muttered.

The deed was witnessed, and, almost unbelievably, it was over. Nikolai was king, in everything but the crown. He’d longed for this moment for years, planned for it every moment of his months with Alina. And now he stood on the precipice of true power, and it had never felt more hollow. What was the crown of a bleeding kingdom worth, if it meant he had lost what little remained of his family? What was the Eagle Throne, if he’d stepped over Genya’s broken body to take it?

He paced the halls of the Spinning Wheel that night, unable to close his eyes without seeing the betrayal and resignation which had slipped across Genya’s face when he had not defended her. For all that he’d flinched at her scars, he had done all he could to save her from the nichevo’ya short of carrying her onto the Volkvolny. But that betrayal, that particular pain... that he could have spared her, and making the politically clever choice would never ease that guilt. It had been the right choice for Ravka, but how many times had other leaders used that as an excuse to sacrifice people like Dominik, like Genya, to achieve their ends? What was the right choice for Ravka even worth, if it was made over the bodies of the children they had once been?

He was still trapped in uncharacteristic melancholy when he stumbled into the library and was surprised to find an oil lamp still burning, and David Kostyk bent over a book despite the late hour. He had not wanted company, had been actively avoiding it, but David did not even look up from his book, and he settled into a shadowy alcove, hoping he remained unnoticed.

It was a foolish hope. Almost as soon as he was settled, David said, still not looking up: “You’re really going to try Genya for what she did?”

Of course he would be the first to ask. He'd kissed her in the war-room like she was Ravka’s greatest treasure, and even the part of Nikolai which had not quite given up a brother’s protectiveness could only draw up a reluctant approval of his unexpected gentleness with her.

His shoulders slumped. There was no point lying to David – he might believe it at first, but his questions were so blunt, so clear-eyed, that the usual courtiers’ tricks had no effect on him. “I- when the war is over, I’ll pardon her.” He felt the weight of that roll of parchment, still locked in his desk drawer, as if it sat in his uniform pocket, over his heart.

“She shouldn’t need to be pardoned.” David did not raise his voice, but he did not need to. Nikolai knew his anger well enough. “She should be a hero. You think she’s the only one the King hurt? She-”

“You’re right,” Nikolai said, softly. “She did nothing but defend herself. But nobody else in Ravka will see it that way.”

“Why does it matter what everyone else thinks?”

“If I want to be king, I have a duty to see justice-”

“You had a duty to her!” David seldom looked directly at anyone, but now Nikolai could feel his glare burning a hole into the side of his face. “She hasn’t seen her parents since she was six. Your parents are exiles, your brother is dead. Who else do either of you have left but each other?”

Nikolai closed his eyes. “Am I supposed to break the rules for Genya because I care for her? How would that make me any better than men who break the rules because they think they are above them?”

The sound of a book slamming closed. “If you can’t see the difference between the two, you don’t deserve to call yourself king of anything at all.” David’s voice was low and furious, but as he passed by Nikolai’s alcove to leave, Nikolai shot out a hand, catching his wrist. In one day, he’d already estranged himself from his mother, his father, Genya, and somehow, David’s fury was the last, intolerable rejection.

“I’ll pardon her,” he said, with an edge of desperation. “As soon as the war is over, as soon as Ravka is safe-”

“You could both be dead by then.”

“As soon as my parents arrive in the Colonies, then,” he said, knowing it was unnecessarily reckless, still not caring.

“It won’t be enough.” David was attempting to detach Nikolai’s fingers from his sleeve, but he clung on tight.

“Then tell me what would be!” he said, and hated that he sounded pleading. “There’s no way to try the King for what he did, or punish him beyond exile. There’s no way to silence the rumours about what she did-”

“Except accepting her as a war hero and your foster-sister,” David said, as if explaining something to a particularly frustrating small child.

Nikolai hesitated. The cold rationality of politics murmured: And have half the court call her my assassin, not the Darkling’s? The logic was sound. Distance between him and Genya could only cement his reputation as a just ruler. And yet... “What if she never wants to look at me again?” It was a small, selfish concern, almost childish, but it slipped out anyway. “What if she only ever sees him in me?”

David sighed, crouched, took gentle hold of his shoulders. “This isn’t a puzzle, or a mechanism. You can’t fix it with the perfect master plan. You can only stop holding this over her head, and hope she can forgive you.”

Nikolai blinked at him, astonished. “When did you get so wise, little cousin?”

David snorted. “I didn’t. I’ve just always known the difference between people and puzzles.” He stood, shrugging Nikolai off, and strode off, presumably to his own bed.

Nikolai did not move from the alcove. He slept little, and when he did, he dreamt of living shadows and  a ballroom painted with blood. Again and again, he saw Vasily caught up by the nichevo’ya, his strong older brother limp as a doll in the monster’s grip, the horrific sound of ripping muscle and cracking bone, the crack as his body had fallen to the floor. In the dream, he did not hold his mother back, but ran to his brother’s side as the blood pooled around him.

“Vasya,” he murmured, voice choked in his throat. “Vasya, don’t-”

But when he blinked, he looked down at Genya, Genya all in white, Genya with her face rent apart and bleeding shadow.

“You can’t save me, Kolya. Nobody can.” She reached up to touch his face, as Dominik once had, but rather than cradling it, she raked long nails across his cheek, and shadow like ink clouded his vision. Now we match.

He woke, shaking, and steeled himself with a few deep breaths. He was hardly the first soldier to battle night terrors, but he could not let his men see his moment of weakness, not when the public story of his father’s exile was one of a sickly old man giving way to his younger, healthier son.

The hangar was nearly empty, this early in the morning, and the chill in the air was biting. The King and Queen had been escorted from their rooms by Nikolai’s most trusted guards, both wrapped in worn travelling furs. The King did not look at him once as Nikolai handed him onto the Kingfisher, but seemed self-possessed or afraid enough not to make another scene. The Queen... Tatiana clung to him until the last possible moment, as if expecting a last-minute reprieve from a remorseful son. Nikolai detached her gently, kissed her hand, lifted her onto the skyship, and swallowed his filial guilt. However much he loved his mother, he would always wonder how often had Genya clung to her for affection, only to receive cruelty. However much he loved Genya, he still watched the skyship until it vanished into the clouds, his parents faded silhouettes on the deck. Part of him wanted to call it back, to demand they try one more time to be the family he’d always imagined. Part of him hoped it would collide with the mountainside, and free him from the suffocating bonds of his love for the monsters who had raised him. Neither of his wishes were granted. They only vanished without looking back at him, as if they’d never had a second son at all.

Becoming king in all but name changed little about his role at the Spinning Wheel – he'd already commanded the ragged remnants of the First Army and the rogue Grisha who’d joined him in the mountains, and Alina’s arrival changed little about the day-to-day running of their fortress. Strategy meetings, bombing runs, hearing reports from spies, the war continued to devour his days as his studies of Morozawa’s journals devoured his nights. It was almost easy to forget Genya’s presence, to forget the weight of that scroll in his desk, and yet-

She was almost ever-present, either at Alina’s side or pressed close to David’s, but he only ever saw her at a distance. He never saw her leave, but as soon as he approached, she’d vanished like a wisp. And when he did not approach, but watched from a distance... She was happy, happier than he’d seen her since childhood. Alina made her smile, Zoya made her laugh, the rare moments he saw her with David she seemed almost lit from within. But whenever she caught sight of him, her smile would evaporate, her posture stiffen, and they would both be back in the war room, her pale defiance against the King’s violent rage, while Nikolai stood and stood and did nothing-

He wanted to give her the pardon. He knew it was the right thing to do. But for the first time in far too many years, she seemed happy, and he was too much a coward to rob her of it so soon. Instead, he raided the rare supply caravans, the bags and boxes that had been salvaged as they fled the Grand Palace, even the wardrobe his mother had left behind. Some of the finer gowns had already been set aside for Alina, but the rest... It gave him a small, selfish satisfaction, to see her in something approaching finery rather than faded, grubby black. From a distance, she looked like the girl he remembered who’d worn silk in summer and velvet in winter, the girl who’s rare laughter had formed part of the music of his childhood, the girl who was almost his sister. From a distance, there were no scars, no years or betrayals between them. From a distance, her smiles might even be for him.

He thought there would be more time. They were meant to have more time, time to find the Firebird, time to free West Ravka, time to watch stars fall from the sky in waves and laugh like they were children again. He was wrong, of course. The Darkling would never have given them that precious time to repair what once had been. His gift had always lain in the creation of scars, never in their healing. Genya could have told him that.

Notes:

Thank you for all your wonderful comments. They inspire me every day. <3

Chapter 15: xv - gods upturning inkpots

Summary:

Genya Safin cannot save everyone.

Genya had grown used to shadows in the Grand Palace, in the Darkling’s retinue, in the White Cathedral. Beneath her shawl, she’d come to think herself better suited to darkness than harsh daylight. Despite this relationship with shadows as veils, protectors, hiding spaces, she felt herself grow accustomed to the bright, clear air of the Spinning Wheel, almost in spite of herself. For all its faded grandeur, the old monastery could not have been more different in its airy open halls to the narrow, candlelit corridors of the Grand Palace. Even with the First Army’s glares or flinches at her scars, she could begin to hold her head high again, knowing that she was not alone, that even without the poisoned chalice of Lantsov affection or the heavy weight of the Darkling’s regard ( or the steady banked-fire warmth of Nikolai ) she had friends now, friends who had seen her weak and broken and pulled her back to her feet, friends who had shielded her from the King and Queen with their own bodies rather than throwing her to the wolves. Friends who loved her and believed in her strength even without the shining armour of her beauty. It was no wonder, perhaps, that in those few, fragile weeks of planning and preparation, that, despite herself, she had begun to feel safe.  

Her small, precious circle of friends did not extend to Nikolai. His presence was a haunting, a reminder of past guilt, past weakness. She could feel his eyes on her when they passed each other in the hallways, when he dropped into the Fabrikator workroom to examine David’s designs, or when she felt brave enough to dine in the refectory rather than hiding in Alina’s rooms with her. She did not – could not – regret how she’d betrayed him, but she also could not bring herself to meet his eyes for long enough to read whatever was in them. She did not know what would be worse: his hatred, his pity, or his hurt, and her heart would have broken at the unbridgeable gap between them, if she had allowed it to break again. She had loved Nikolai, perhaps would always love him despite his betrayal of her, but she could not allow that to imprison her as she had once allowed her grief to swallow her beneath the earth. She had learned Tamar’s strength, Alina’s boldness, David’s capacity to bend without breaking against impossible weights, and she would not break again.   

David was... David was in some ways still a mystery to her, despite how close he held her as he scrawled out notes across his designs or in the margins of Morozawa’s journals. It was not so very different to how they’d sat as teenagers, heads bent over poisons and bombs, hands barely touching, but for the fact that occasionally he’d pause in his writing to plant a careless kiss in her hair, or that she could now lean her head against his shoulder without him flinching in surprise. Sometimes, when the sunlight which streamed bright and clear through the workshop windows had faded from gold to pink to deepest red, and Nikolai’s rogue Grisha had left for the evening meal, he would glance up to see a room empty but for the two of them, and gently shift her from his side into his lap for a few heady moments of privacy. She’d always privately imagined that she’d have to teach him how to kiss her, how to hold her, but he settled his hands around her waist as if they’d been made to fit there, and when he kissed her, it was as though he’d put months of study in considering how exactly to make her melt against him, driving out every thought but the smoke-and-gunpowder scent of his skin, the rough warmth of his callused hands through the thin fabric of her shirt. She’d known other kisses, other touches upon her skin, but never this... tenderness. David’s hands had always spoken better than his words, and they told her that to him, she was still precious, still beautiful, still unbroken and unbreakable in his eyes.   

More than once, she was struck anew by the cruelty of the King, the Queen, and the Darkling, robbing her of this as they’d robbed her of her girlhood. They could have had these first fumbling encounters as teenagers, had years to learn each other’s skin unmarred by battlescars, had each other as a safe harbour from the crushing weight of war. Genya had grown used to life’s unfairness, but it felt particularly cruel that, if they’d had more time, her first memories of hands on her skin and lips against her own could have been David’s careful tenderness rather than the King’s clawing, crushing advances. Sometimes she’d find herself weeping mid-kiss, half from happiness, half from the bitter knowledge that this should have been first. The first time, David had put space between them before comforting her, afraid he had done something wrong, but he quickly understood what she needed, and held her securely enough as she wept to erase the memory of any other hands on her skin. It let her ground herself in the present moment – the soft, worn fabric of his shirts, the wiry warmth of his body, the scent of smoke that never quite left his skin – and distance herself from the war, the betrayals, the brother she had lost. In David’s arms, she was not the Ruined One, the poisoner, the traitor, the handmaid of the Darkling or the Sun Summoner. In his arms, for the first time in years, she was only herself, and she could take the time to weep, to breathe, and to recover herself before brazening out the stares and glowers she received in the rest of the Spinning Wheel.  

Privacy in the monastery was in short supply, and while they usually had the workshop to themselves for an hour or so after sunset, Genya should have anticipated interruptions. To be caught kissing like moonstruck teenagers would have been embarrassing, but for Nikolai to catch her weeping in David’s arms... She’d have pulled away if she’d heard his approach, but as it was, they were only alerted to his presence when he spoke, voice low and deadly:  

“David. Let her go.”  

David loosened his grip around her waist, but did not attempt to remove her as she caught her breath. “She’s upset,” he said, with the cool tone he used when giving an explanation he deemed unnecessary.  

“I can see that. Give her space.” His tone was cold, clipped, and when Genya had scrubbed away the tears blurring her vision, she could see the barely-hidden rage bubbling behind his features as clearly as ever.   

She felt a spark of rage – he'd try to keep her from David, after all they’d suffered? She did not move from her position on his lap, only shook her hair back and looked down her nose at Nikolai: “Did you need something urgent, moi tsarevich?”  

He blinked, and something in him seemed to falter, the rage – no, protectiveness? - in his face suddenly smothered. Did he really believe David was the next victim of her poisonous touch? “I wanted to discuss David’s studies of Morozawa’s journals, but it can wait,” he said, looking abashed. “If you could bring them to the library this evening, I’d appreciate-”  

Genya clambered to her feet, shrugging off David’s uncertain attempts to keep a comforting hand on her waist. “No need, moi tsarevich. I was just leaving.” She swept past him with all the dignity she could muster, despite her rumpled clothing and puffy eyes, and paused only to bob him an exacting bow. As she spun away towards the door, she did not expect him to catch hold of her hand, and she froze as he touched her. The feeling of his hand in hers was still the most familiar thing in the world. The sight of it, his tanned soldier’s hand encircling her pale, scar-rippled one, was so utterly alien that it might as well have been a dream, and every word fled her tongue as he held her there. There should have been some barbed witticism, some cool courtier’s dismissal, but she could not speak before he did:  

“Genya.” Not Genechka, not Miss Safin. “You’re- unharmed?” She blinked at him, bewildered. It took her a long few moments to realise he was worried about her. “I can summon Alina, or Zoya-”  

“I’m- fine, moi tsarevich.” She felt dizzy, light-headed almost. What was he playing at? “David would- David would never hurt me.”  

“Of course.” He dropped her hand, swept her a stiff bow which did not quite cover his reddening cheeks. “If- I owe a duty of protection to everyone who has taken shelter here, you understand that, right?”  

“Yes, moi tsarevich.” She bowed again, was backing towards the door, had almost escaped when he spoke to her again.  

“Genya-” She heard him swallow. She wished she could not picture his face so perfectly in her mind, could not already hear his next words as if he’d said them a thousand times before: Genechka, please. If anyone’s scaring you... All the world and a new pair of ice skates...  

Instead of echoing his own words from a lifetime ago, he only managed: “We should talk, soon.”  

She looked back at him, and wished she could hate him enough to sound truly cutting: “What do we have left to say to each other?”   

He’d seen her as sister, servant, soldier, spy, sacrifice. She’d seen him as prince and privateer, as judge, jury, and executioner. What was left between them, now all their masks had fallen away?  

“The truth,” he said, simply. “Don’t we at least deserve that, before we face the Darkling again?”  

She was so used to the soldier-king now that a glimpse of the boy beneath was painful to look upon, like seeing a ghost, or an open wound. She closed her eyes against it, shielding herself from that aching, fragile vulnerability. “Nikolai, I-I can’t-”  

His hand on hers, David’s on her shoulder. “She doesn’t owe you any more explanation.” David’s voice was firm, decisive. It would have been easy to sink back against him, to accept the shelter of his protection. “Hasn’t she given your family enough?”  

Her eyes snapped open at Nikolai’s quiet, pained gasp, and, despite her anger, her grief, the roiling mixture of betrayal and self-loathing that he sparked in her stomach, she could not help herself. He was twelve again, seeking her permission for an adventure she knew he’d regret; fifteen again, seeking her counsel as if she was the only person in the Palace he could trust; twenty-two again, seeking the truth of why she’d abandoned him. Despite everything that lay between them, she still could not deny him what little comfort she could provide.   

“I need time, Nikolai,” she said, softly. “I- Please, I need time.” The memories of her trial in the war room were still a raw wound, and she did not know if she could relive them yet without lashing out at him.  The Spinning Wheel, for all its high, echoing ceilings and wide windows, was too small a space to contain their current feelings without suffocating them both. With time and space to lick their wounds, they might be able to see more clearly if there was any saving the friendship they’d once treasured.  

“When Alina and I return from Ketterdam, perhaps?” he suggested, gently. Relief surged through her, she nodded, and expected him to let her leave with no further words. Instead, inexplicably, he ducked his head to press a brief kiss to her knuckles, before he released her hand. She fled, wordless, and did not realise until she reached the room she shared with Zoya, Nadia, and Tamar that she was still clutching the hand he had kissed to her chest. It felt like a forgiveness she did not deserve, had not earned. A part of her wanted to reach for the lye, to scour it from her skin.   

When she reached her bunk, tucked neatly into an alcove in the stone, her heart swelled in her chest, almost choking her. Someone had carefully laid a stack of dresses atop the thin blankets, simple sarafans in printed cottons and warm, embroidered wools, all in the blues, violets, and lilacs that the Queen had once favoured. Since the nicheyo’ya, Genya had had only two shirts and the breeches she stood in. She reached out a hand to the soft, pretty fabrics, so unlike what remained of the uniform she’d once been so proud of, and felt a harsh, ugly sob rip from her chest.  

It was Zoya who found her, still crying like a child over a pile of dresses, and wiped her eye with a handkerchief without the expected biting comment. “Blow,” she commanded her, and Genya obeyed, wrinkling her nose at the indignity. “I hope you know how deeply unfair it is that you can cry this much without looking red and blotchy.”  

“Tailor’s privilege, Nazyalensky,” she said, with a watery smile. Zoya, at least, had not changed too much to recognise. “Envy was never a good colour on you.”  

Zoya sniffed, tossed her hair back over her shoulder. “Every colour suits me. Blue particularly, if you’d rather cry over those dresses than actually wear them.”  

Genya clutched them to her chest instinctively. “No. They were-”  

“The Queen’s, I know. Did she leave them for you?”   

She and Zoya had never been friends, before the weeks on the road out of the White Cathedral had forced her together. They’d always been too similar, armour too hard, edges too sharp, to allow the other close, but she was grateful for that now. Zoya understood her too well to ever pity her.  

“No. I don’t believe she thought of me once before she left.” Queen Tatiana was the only mother she could remember. She’d given up hope for her love long ago, but a part of her still ached at the loss.  

“Such women are not worthy of being called mothers.” Her voice was low, surprisingly intense. “You wear her finery with your head held high, Safin.”  

Genya looked up at her, startled, and saw in Zoya’s face a reflection of every emotion she’d ever felt about Tatiana, as clear and raw as if they’d been carved into her lovely features. She said nothing, but found Zoya’s hand with her own, felt her squeeze it tight. They sat together on the bunk, two motherless girls in the growing darkness, and did not speak again that evening.  

The next day found Genya in the eastern hangar, ensuring Alina had everything she could need packed away in the bags and boxes she could commandeer from supplies. The ballgowns Nikolai had commissioned (or possibly commandeered) were not designed to pack easily, and most of his soldiers had no idea of the effort it had taken to store gowns and jewellery worthy of Ravka’s future queen safely for travel. Through the graceful stone arches that led onto the terrace, she could see Nikolai, looking out over the valley, flakes of snow in his hair, as distant as a prince in a painting. Part of her wanted to storm out and demand they have their last conversation before his departure, to rage against him, make him understand what had been done to her. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and beg him to be careful, like they were children again. From this far away, he looked so small, so fragile. Ravka’s sky was an impossible weight on such slender shoulders. He wasn’t even twenty-three yet.  

Through the arches, she saw others join him, Mal, Tamar, Nadia, Alina, a last briefing before they all departed to Ketterdam or Dva Stolba, hunting allies, arms, and ancient myths. Once, she might have been included in those discussions, but now she stood outside the circle of trust, only hearing snippets from Alina and David. She could live with that. She’d been a soldier for a scant few months. What could she offer a war council?  

The others hurried inside, red-cheeked from the cold, leaving only Nikolai and Alina on the terrace. The bright morning light fell across them both, sparking gold in Nikolai’s hair and casting Alina in such radiance that she wondered how anyone had failed to know her for the Sun Summoner before. Together, they glowed, and Genya could already see the striking picture they’d paint in Ketterdam – Ravka’s last prince and last saint, the only hope for a world free of the Darkling and the Fold. Armies would fall at their feet, even before he slid the hideous Lantsov emerald onto her too-thin finger. She tried to picture them side by side on the Eagle Throne, like she’d seen his mother and father so many times over the years. Would they still exchange the same playful smiles, still laugh at each other’s jokes? Would Alina pine away for her tracker as she had in the Little Palace, growing paler and more translucent by the day? She wanted them to be happy together. Alina deserved to be happy. And yet... and yet...  

A shadow flickered over the terrace, like a cloud had briefly covered the sun. Genya felt a lurch in the pit of her stomach, but before she could cry out, there was a blur of shadow, and Nikolai and Alina were gone. Genya gave a warning cry moments too late, but she was running for the door to the terrace before she’d even registered moving. As she stepped out into the cold mountain air, Mal had already snatched Alina from the claws of a nichevo’ya, but the air was thick with them, as many shadows as there were snowflakes, and Nikolai- Nikolai was gone.    

The Darkling descended from above, his monsters swarming around him like bees in flight. It was every nightmare Genya had had in months, but all she could think was that she still could not see Nikolai.   

The Darkling did not even seem to see her, which was its own humiliation. His gaze remained fixed on Alina, as if they were the only two real people in the world, and everyone else was merely an actor in their great drama.   

“Shall I spare him, Alina?” he said, and Genya glanced around frantically for a flash of Nikolai’s olive-drab uniform in the shadow-stained fog, but she did not see him.  

“Leave him alone!” Alina was shouting, and it was only then that she noticed Sergei, poor, frightened Sergei, dangling from the claws of two nichevo’ya. She remembered him clinging to her sleeve, as pale and fearful then as now, and she could not hate him for giving her away. He was only a boy, only a weak, frightened boy, his lips mouthing a single word over and over again-  

The Darkling was smiling, and Genya swore she could see shadow-smoke wisping from between his teeth, seeping from the corners of his eyes, swelling in his veins beneath his skin. “He betrayed you to the first oprichnik he could find. I wonder, will you offer him mercy or justice?”  

It was a foolish question to ask Alina, Alina who’s greatest flaw might be mercy to those who deserved it least. “I don’t want him harmed,” she snapped, and as the Darkling’s smile widened, Genya realised that he’d anticipated her response, that this was part of the punishment he’d planned for her. “Give him to me!”  

“He betrayed me first, Alina. He remained in Os Alta when he should have come to my side. He sat on your council, plotted against me. He told me everything.” Sergei barely seemed to know where he was, only stared blankly at Genya, mouthing safe, safe, safe, like a prayer, like a plea- “So-” she did not need to look at the Darkling to hear the cat-with-mouse satisfaction in his smile, “the decision is mine. And I’m afraid that I choose justice.”  

There was a hideous, rending sound, a hot splatter of blood, and what had once been a boy fell away into the fog. Genya could still see his lips half-forming the word as his head fell away, and the choked scream she let out mingled with Alina’s in the air. Not Nikolai, she prayed, to the saints she had not believed in since childhood. Please, not Nikolai. I’ll forgive him anything, serve the Darkling all my days, build a shrine with my bare hands, only spare him. She could not see him fall away into the fog, she could not see him torn to pieces, she could not lose him, not like this-  

The Darkling was still talking to Alina, but his voice was distant, tinny. All that mattered, as she threw herself towards the edge of the terrace, was whether her friend was safe. “ Nikolai!” she screamed into the fog, and did not realise that Alina was screaming the same name until the Darkling answered them, coldly:  

“Ah, the pirate prince. I have regretted many of the things I’ve had to do in this war.” She did not need to look at him to know he was lying any more. His mouth was moving, after all. “This is not one of them.”  

A shadow rose, Nikolai struggling in its arms. He was alive. He was alive, and the Darkling had him, she had to reach him, had to do something- she reached for the wellspring of power at her core, willing her nails to sharpen into claws, her shoulders to burst into wings. If it took merzost to reshape her skeleton into a shape that could save him, she would do it-  

The nichevo’ya dropped him onto the terrace with a sickening crack, and Genya was already running to him, already leaning over him, Alina at her side, already reaching into his body to seek out broken bones and internal bleeding, to patch him together as best she could-  

He looked up at them, dazed, blood seeping from his mouth. Was this how Dominik had looked, at Halmhend? Had Nikolai held him as Genya held Nikolai now, felt the spark of life fade from his body without Small Science to piece him back together? Genya was not a Healer, had never been a Healer. She had not been good enough when he’d been thrown from a horse, or when Alina had lain comatose in the belly of a ship, but she had to be good enough now. She had failed Dominik, failed Alina. She would not fail again, even as her every repair revealed more complex, deeper damage: a rib that had punctured a lung, a ruptured spleen spilling into his abdomen, a thousand burst capillaries in a thousand places blooming violet across his skin.  

“This was... unexpected,” he croaked, and she wanted to hug him, wanted to shake him for making jokes when he needed all the air he could get.  

Alina was leant over him, cupping his face in one hand. “You’re okay, it’s okay,” she was cooing, softly, trying to soothe him. Good. Genya did not have the focus to spare to comfort him, not with the blood she could still sense spilling out into his chest cavity from injuries she hadn’t found yet.  

She focused on her work, ignoring Nikolai and Alina and the Darkling, the rattle of rifle-fire, the rasping chill of the nichevo’ya, the crash of some distant part of the monastery collapsing. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead, taste the metallic tang of blood, her hands shook with the effort of sealing up a hundred injuries at once, and it still wasn’t enough, could never be enough-  

She did not see the wisp of shadow until it had already vanished in his throat, but she felt the power of it – the merzost – course through his veins. It was barely a decision, to seize that momentary flush of power and use it, to pull together broken arteries and veins and organs and make him whole once more against all the laws of nature and science that she’d been taught. Later, she would regret that, but in this moment, all she wanted was for him to live.   

She felt his breath hitch in surprise, felt him cough and shudder beneath her hands, and as he scrabbled to open his shirt, she could already feel the shadows she’d bound into his skin before she saw them blooming in his veins, could already feel his ribs popping back into place with the power she should never have harnessed.   

She could hear Alina now, close to her ear: “ No, no, no-”  

Nikolai, panicked: “Alina?”  

The horror of what she had done to save him sank into her like the nichevo’ya’s claws. The darkness clawed across his jugular veins, and he threw back his head and screamed. He pushed up onto his knees, his every vein and artery pulsing with shadow, and then- and then his back burst open, spattering the white stone of the terrace with black blood. Wisps of shadow surrounded him, a nichevo’ya’s wings and claws splitting through his skin. In the centre of those swirling shadows, she could still see his face, pale, wide-eyed, frightened, and she scrabbled back towards him, wanting to hold him, soothe him, save him-  

Shadow seeped across the whites of his eyes, the hazel of his irises, until his eyes were black from lid to lid. Even still, she reached for him, catching his wrist, seeking the shadow in his veins to draw it out like poison.  

“Kolya, please,” she murmured, “Stay with me.”  

His lips curled back into a snarl, revealing fangs like cracked obsidian, thin coils of shadow still wisping off of them. He lunged at her and she flinched back despite herself. His jaws snapped shut inches from her, and he pushed backwards, away from her, even as she still reached for him.  

Distantly, she could hear the Darkling speaking in a low, pleased murmur, as though taming some wild beast: “Hungry? I wonder which one of your friends you’ll eat first.”  

In contrast, Alina’s voice sounded high and fearful: “Nikolai, don’t do this. Stay with me.”   

She had pushed in front of Genya, still reaching out desperately for Nikolai as though to call him back with her will alone- or as though to lash out with the Cut. Genya felt her muscles tense, prepared to use every moment of Tamar’s training to knock her friend to the floor rather than see Nikolai bleeding out on the terrace again.  

The moment did not come. Nikolai let out another desperate, inhuman howl, more like rending metal than an animal in pain, arching his back until it cracked audibly as he rolled into a crouch. She stumbled back as his great wings beat behind him, blowing eddies of snow and shadow towards them, and then, impossibly, he rose into the air on wings of nothing but darkness. The monstrous snarl had faded from his features, leaving only Nikolai, Nikolai pained and bewildered, Nikolai still reaching out to her with one shadow-scarred hand. Despite her fear, despite everything, she still reached out to him in return. For a moment, foolishly, she truly believed that if only she could touch him, shadow-scarred hand to shadow-scarred hand, she could pull the poison out of his skin and bring him back to himself. For a moment, she still thought she could save him. Then he wheeled in the air and began to spiral upward, his wings catching some thermal breeze from the valley below, dragging him up and away from her.  

The battle raged on around her. She did not recall it. The only thing she could see was Nikolai, vanishing into the grey sky. She had not saved him. Perhaps she never could.  

Notes:

So did I technically deviate from canon a little bit here here? Maybe! Do I regret it? Absolutely not! Leave your thoughts and your comments, I hope you're enjoying my continued tweaking of the canon! I'm working on finishing the last chapter of this fic right now, so every comment helps...

Chapter 16: xvi – all that’s left is the ghost of you

Summary:

Genya remembers as Nikolai begins to forget.

Genya barely remembered the fall of the Spinning Wheel after Nikolai’s flight. She recalled only flashes of light, writhing swirls of shadow, Alina dragging her through the corridors to the western hangar. She remembered kneeling over Nadia’s little brother on the deck of the Bittern, trying desperately to keep his heart beating as blood poured from the ruin of his shoulder. She remembered David standing over them both, firing a rifle she didn’t know he could hold. She did not notice the tears streaming down her face until they blurred her vision, and she wiped them away impatiently. She could not save Nikolai. She had to save this boy, even if it killed her. She did not notice when they lurched into the air, or when Tolya knelt beside her. She only knew that Adrik was far too still, his skin tinged with blue-grey. He would die beneath her hands, and she could do nothing.  

“I can keep his heart beating,” she flinched at Tolya’s voice, rumbling in her ear, “but neither of us can replenish his blood fast enough to fix that shoulder.”  

She swallowed. It was obvious, she should have seen it. “So he’ll lose the arm?”  

He nodded. “It’s the only way. I can make the cut, if you can cauterise it.”  

She almost gagged at the thought. Amputations were ugly business, had never been covered in what little Healer’s training she had received, but she was all they had. “I can do it,” she said, and squared her shoulders, raising her hands again. The sound of his sword cleaving through muscle, ligament, and bone, would live with her always, but she swallowed the bile in her throat, focused on sealing his arteries as quickly and brutally as she could manage. She could feel his heart hammering against his ribs like a frightened bird, and she slowed it, steadied it, until his breathing evened out, and he slept. Genya slumped back, grey and swaying with exhaustion, and only then felt the deck beneath her was tacky with blood. They had done all they could for him, and now his fate was in the hands of the Saints.  

Their journey through the skies passed in hours that felt like centuries. Genya saw her own grey exhaustion mirrored in every face, and tore apart the supplies in the hold until she found packets of orange jurda, which she handed out to first to Nadia and Zoya, then to the rest of the crew.   

Zoya, of course, wrinkled her perfect nose. “If this stains my teeth orange-”  

“It will,” Genya told her, “but I promise to put your teeth back whiter than they were before. I may even fix those weird incisors of yours.”  

Zoya glared at her. “There is nothing wrong with my teeth.”  

“Not at all,” Genya smiled. It was a relief, knowing Zoya still had the energy to glare. “You’re the prettiest walrus I know. I’m just amazed you haven’t sawed through your lower lip.”   

“Keep your hands off me, Tailor,” Zoya grumbled, “or I’ll poke your other eye out.” But she was smiling as she bit down on the jurda, even though her face twisted at the too-strong smoky-sweet taste.  

It was moments like that which kept her on her feet – soothing Zoya and Nadia’s exhausted muscles to help them keep the ship aloft, checking Adrik’s heartbeat remained steady, healing the powder burns on David’s hands as well as she could. As the grey cloud began to clear, a fearful murmur began to settle over the ship. They did not have a Tidemaker to conceal them. The Darkling would hunt them down. It would all be for nothing-  

David, her brilliant, beautiful David, saved them all. “The only reason anyone can see the ship is because light is bouncing off it. Just eliminate the reflection.”  

Alina might be the Sun Summoner, but to Genya, nobody shone quite as brightly as David in that moment. He was no Etherealnik, but he’d learned the science of light from his work with lenses and discs and mirrors, knew how it could be bent and shaped and magnified, and with his guidance, Alina veiled the hull of the Bittern from sight.   

They flew through the day, and most of the night. Zoya and Nadia swayed at their posts despite her ministrations, but forced their exhausted limbs through the motions of summoning wind again and again, even as they sweated and shook and their features took on a grey cast. Adrik muttered once in his sleep, and the barest scrap of hope was enough to make them push on, Nadia smiling through the sweat and tears which mingled on her cheeks. David took shifts steering the ship from Tamar, but at one point Genya lost track of him, only finding him again in a corner of the hold.  

It was a cramped, narrow little space, filled with the supplies that had been meant for the hunt for the Firebird, but in a corner, he’d constructed a little bed of blankets, where Baghra’s servant boy – Misha, his name was Misha – had curled up to sleep. David had been reading aloud from a book on smithing techniques, and he did not look up as she entered, only smiled, so she’d know he’d seen her. It was an odd choice of bedtime story, but that wasn’t what gave her pause. For all that she’d spent most of her time in the Little Palace at David’s side, she’d never realised before that he was fond of children, that he might want them one day. Genya had not been around children since she’d been a child herself, but listening to David read the frightened boy to sleep, she could suddenly see the appeal. His calm, even voice was audible even over the rushing of wind, Misha seemed already mostly asleep. There was nothing more she could do on deck besides hand out jurda and get underfoot, so she tucked herself into David’s side, and let the sound of his voice and Misha’s snoring lull her into an uneasy doze.   

In her dreams, she saw shadows blooming across Nikolai’s skin, and ran along the narrow terrace, struggling against wind and snow and the twisted tightness of her own scars on her skin. If she could reach him, if she could touch him, she could unbind the shadows she’d tangled into his skin, she could save him, she could bring him back to her. She could gather the broken shards of their friendship and make it whole once more, if only she could get to him in time. But she was no stronger dreaming than waking. Again she heard the wet sound of wings ripping free from his back, saw his face twist in agony, tasted the metallic tang of blood, and she was still too weak, too far from him to make a difference. The cruel wind snatched him away from her, hurling him into the sky. Still she flung herself forward, trying to catch hold of even a scrap of clothing, and she felt the world lurch around her as the stone crumbled beneath her feet and she fell into the fog.   

She woke with a start, and realised that the lurch she felt had been more than a dream. The skyship’s rolling had thrown her into the side of the hold, David and Misha on top of her, and it took a few moments to untangle their limbs and race out onto deck. In the panic of the moment, Genya had assumed they’d been found, that they were under attack, but instead, they were only descending in a spiral towards a turquoise pool deep in a hollow among the trees of the Sikurzoi. It seemed an impossibly small target, but the spray of foul-smelling water which rose as they landed confirmed that they had struck true. As they landed, Zoya and Nadia collapsed to the deck like dolls, flushed with exhaustion, and David, Tamar, and Tolya scrambled for the ropes as Genya dragged the exhausted Squallers out of the way.  

As the only ones who’d slept recently, she and Misha took charge of gathering up bedrolls and kindling, and set up their makeshift camp in the shadow of the overhang. The supplies on the Bittern were meagre – they’d been depending on Mal’s hunting for the bulk of their meals – but there was enough to pull together a thick kasha flavoured with shredded jerky, and to spoon it down the throats of her exhausted fellow travellers before they collapsed into sleep. There was no talk of watches or guards, but Genya took the first watch anyway, her eyes fixed on the imperfect circle of the sky above them. It was a faded blue-white, occasionally obscured by clouds and the shadows of birds, and she could only distantly hear the calls of birds and small animals over the breathing of her sleeping companions.  

When she saw something flicker across the sun, she started upright, half-convinced for a moment she’d dreamt it. It had only been for an instant, the ghost of a shadow wisping across her eyes. It could have been a bird, or the product of her own exhausted brain, but something about it sent a shudder down her spine. She did not scream, or disturb the others yet – even if it was a nichevo’ya, there was no sign it had seen them deep in the hollow – but closed her eyes, breathing deeply, and reached out for the heartbeats which surrounded her. The pulses of her companions were old friends to her now – Tamar and Tolya, always perfectly in time with one another; Mal and Alina, a syncopated two-step, never quite in time but impossible to separate; Nadia’s heart thrumming like a bird to Adrik’s slower, more laborious beat; Harshaw, the steady crackle of wood on the fire; Zoya, like the wings of some great bird; and David, her David, who’s heart she’d feel beating on the other side of the Spinning Wheel. She knew them all well, and counting out their steady beats was almost enough to convince her it had been a dream.  

Almost. Her ears, attuned as they were to sounds as soft as heartbeats, registered the sudden silence beyond their hidden den. No birds called out from the trees. She could not even hear the sound of leaves rustling beneath hoof and paw. That alone was enough to make her afraid. She did not know forests, she’d never been a hunter, but no place should be as silent as the Sikurzoi was at that moment. Moving as silently as she ever had through the corridors of the Grand Palace, she crept to her feet, wrapping her hair in Katya’s shawl and stealing a spare First Army jacket from Tamar’s kit. She kept to the shadows as she followed the winding path up the side of the crater, prepared to freeze at the first sound or sign of movement overhead. None came. It was as if the whole forest were holding its breath.   

The shadows of the Sikurzoi were black-velvet to her sun-dazzled eyes, and stepping into them was like stepping into one of Nikolai’s picture-books from when they were children. She almost expected to see Baba Anezka’s cottage, or a demon creeping from the shadows. Some part of her was not surprised when a rustle broke the silence, and she looked up to see a monster in the trees. Bile rose in her throat, and instinct urged her to flee, or to close her eyes and freeze like a frightened rabbit, hoping this thing that should not be would not notice her. But Genya had been swallowing bile and resisting instinct for almost ten years, and she set her jaw, and forced herself to look directly at the creature in the branches above. Once she saw it – him – in truth, she could not be afraid any more. Genya Safin knew monsters well. Even with shadows bound into his skin, with his hands and feet warped into talons, with wings of black smoke wrapped around his shoulders, she could never think Nikolai a monster. She looked up at him, forced herself to take in the rippling black scars so like her own, the ways she’d inextricably bound shadow into his bones to keep him breathing.   

Oh, Kolya. We match. She hadn’t realised she’d breathed the words aloud until he stirred in the branches above her and twisted his head, birdlike, to look down at her with dark, unreflective eyes. There was blood around his mouth. It should have scared her, but she could feel only grief for the boy she’d loved and betrayed and lost.   

“I’m sorry,” she said, softly, not knowing if he could even understand her. “I never meant- I just wanted you to live, Nikolai. I couldn’t lose you too.”  

He made no sound, only settled more into his strange, crouching position, looking down at her with those blank, unreadable eyes. She wondered if he could speak, with his throat full of shadow.  

“I’m still angry at you,” she continued, looking up at him. “Perhaps you made the only choice you could have, but I needed you, and you weren’t- you weren’t there. I always thought, all those years-”  

There was a rustling in the branches as he descended to the branch below in an odd, hopping motion, like an outsize crow. She startled back, and he froze, eyes locked on her.  

“You can understand me, can’t you?” she realised. “You’re still in there somewhere.” She’d hoped for it desperately, but the knowledge that he was still present, still aware behind those blank black eyes was bitter on her tongue. Perhaps she couldn’t help him with Small Science, not when he still seemed almost fearful of her, but... “Do you remember that book of fairytales from the Wandering Isle that you loved when we were children? The one with the swan children? There was a tale about the wolf-man, the conriocht , the pictures used to frighten me. But- it wasn’t a scary story at all, when you read it to me.”  

She steeled herself, and did not flinch when he hopped down, a little closer to her. The movement was awkward, ungainly, but not aggressive.   

She continued, still with a softness that had never come naturally to her: “He wasn’t a monster, the conriocht. He was just a man under a terrible curse, but everyone in the village was too afraid to help him. Except his sister. She took his clothes and- and she went to the darkest part of the forest, and called out to him until he knew her, until he could remember himself. I know I’m not your sister, but- remember who you are, for me?”  

Such curses existed only in fairytales, but as he hopped closer, Genya reached out for the beat of his heart. It was far stronger than it had been fluttering under her hands as he bled out on the terrace, pulsing with a terrible echo, as if the nichevo’ya’s ghostly heart beat in time with his. She could feel the places where she’d bound shadow into his skin and bones, but it would be a longer process to draw it out without the Darkling’s amplifying presence, and painful too.  

She kept talking, trying to keep him calm as she searched for a place to start unpicking her work: “I didn’t want to lie to you, all those years. I missed you, every day, every time I turned away from you. I miss you now. I’d forgive anything, do anything, if it would bring you back to me.”  

She did not realise how close he’d come until a claw brushed her cheek. She did not realise she was crying until he wiped a tear from her face. She swallowed, reached out to the cold she feel in his veins, and pulled-   

A searing pain in her cheek. A too-human gasp, not her own. A beating of wings. She was alone, blood trickling from a scratch on her cheek. Nikolai had vanished into the trees, and even as she cried out for him, she knew he would not return. She had lured him close only to hurt him again. She would not earn his trust again so easily.   

She mended the mark on her cheek as well as she could, but when they woke, the others were still too exhausted to question, or even notice it. All except David, who cupped her face in one hand and ran a curious finger along the new scar. She shook her head, gently dislodging his finger, and he did not question her further about it, only kept close to her as they rose and began to gather their meagre supplies. Mal and Alina disappeared to gather game and firewood, and when they returned, the sun was already setting. The branches of the fire crackled and popped as they settled into the warmth, discussing who would hunt the firebird and who would remain in the valley. Genya already knew she would be part of the latter party. Even with all of David’s salves and Tamar’s stretches, she moved too slowly to be anything but a liability when hunting such a dangerous creature.   

She did not expect Zoya to say: “I should have known Sergei couldn’t be trusted. He was always a weakling.”  

“Oncat never liked him,” Harshaw agreed. The big Inferni would never trust anyone his cat did not approve of, and while the little creature was fond enough of David, it shied away from Genya, as if it could still smell poison on her skin.  

Genya and Sergei had never been friends. They were not close enough in age to share lessons, and he had always imitated Ivan in everything, particularly his disdain for her, but she could not forget the terror in his eyes, the desperate way he’d clung to her sleeve at the Spinning Wheel. “Do you really think he was planning it all along?” she said, poking the fire.  

“I’ve been wondering that,” Alina sighed. Her face was too thin, too worn, the animation that usually burned in her features faded. “I thought he’d be better once we got out of the White Cathedral and the tunnels, but he almost seemed worse, more anxious.”  

“That could have been anything,” said Tamar. “Cave-in, militia attack, Tolya’s snoring.”   

Tolya threw a pebble at her. “Nikolai’s men should have watched him more closely.”  

Nadia pressed her lips together. “Did the nichevo’ya really just... tear her apart?”  

Alina and David glanced to Misha, fast asleep tucked between him and Mal. “It was... horrible,” Alina said, softly, and Genya shuddered in agreement. Whatever Sergei had done, he’d died alone, a frightened boy lost in the dark. Nobody deserved that.  

“What about Nikolai?” Zoya asked, a look of – was that genuine concern on her pretty features? Since when had she been close to him? “What did the Darkling do to him?”  

“I don’t know exactly,” Alina admitted. Genya dropped her gaze to the fire, said nothing. She could not admit, even to her friends, what she’d done in attempting to save Nikolai’s life. How she’d failed him.  

“Can it be undone?” Zoya pressed.  

“I don’t know that either.” Alina looked to David, who was chewing his lip and watching Genya with a frown.  

“Maybe,” he offered. “I’d need to study him. It’s merzost.” His face twisted in disgust at the word, as though what once had fascinated him now tasted foul on his tongue after seeing it in the Darkling’s hands.. “New territory. I wish I had Morozova’s journals.”  

If anyone could reverse the terrible thing she had done, it was gentle, clever David. He had always had a knack for restoring broken things, broken people. But to truly know, she would have to confess her part in the Darkling’s latest abomination. She had thought David’s pity would destroy her, but now, she could not imagine facing his disgust.  

Adrik was glaring into the fire before he spoke: “I’m glad Sergei’s dead. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to wring his neck myself.”  

She shuddered at his words, relieved when Zoya turned them aside with a joke. Sergei may have been a traitor, but she was no better than him. The only difference between them was that she’d had the twin blessings of survival and Alina’s forgiveness. They’d both been broken. She’d been lucky enough to begin healing. Sergei never would now.  

Zoya took a swig from the flask of kvas, and shifted the subject again: “Do you know what Baghra told me at my first lesson with her?” She lowered her voice a throaty rasp: “Pretty face. Too bad you have 
porridge for brains.” 

Genya gave an inelegant snort. She’d never known the old woman, never even had a lesson with her, but imagining a younger Zoya crackling with outrage was enough to distract her from her melancholy. It distracted the others too: soon all the Etherealki were swapping war stories of her unorthodox teaching methods. None of her teachers had ever released a swarm of bees or hit her with a switch, but then, perhaps Baghra had only taught the Etherealki students.   

Only David was still frowning. “Baghra hated me.”  

Zoya waved dismissively. “We all felt that way.”  

He shook his head. “No, she really hated me. She taught me once with the rest of the Fabrikators my age, then she refused to ever meet with me again. I used to just stay in the workshops when everyone else had her classes.”  

Genya wondered how many of their quiet lessons had taken place during Baghra’s classes. She wondered if the old woman had seen something dangerous in David’s quick, quiet mind, if she’d have seen that same danger in Genya had she been her student, or if she would have seen the power that Tamar had once suggested she’d possessed. If she’d had any other mentor, any teacher beyond those handpicked by the Darkling, if she’d still be so limited in her abilities. She’d never know now.  

“Why?” Harshaw asked. Oncat was dozing, wrapped around his shoulders like a scarf.   

David shrugged, but his brows were still knitted together. “No idea.” His shoulders slumped, and for a moment, she saw the lonely boy who’d lit up at the first chance to share his joys and his secrets with anyone at all. If Baghra had not seen his brilliance, his loneliness, his kindness, she was nowhere near as brilliant as the Etherealki clearly believed. She looked up at him, the firelight glowing on his tanned skin, the shadowed stubble of his jaw, and felt a surge of love for him.   

A smile tugged at the more mobile corner of her mouth as she spoke: “I know why.” Everyone turned to look at her: David confused, Alina and Tolya curious, Zoya and Tamar clearly awaiting the joke. “Animal magnetism,” she grinned. “One more minute in that hut with you, and she would have torn off all 
your clothes.” 

David considered this. “That seems improbable.”  

“Impossible,” Mal and Alina said, simultaneously, and burst into giggles which made them look suddenly seventeen again, lovestruck teenagers rather than careworn young soldiers. The unexpected reminder of Nikolai made her heart ache.  

“Well, not impossible ,” David said, looking insulted.  

She could not help pulling him down to kiss him. It seemed more impossible that anyone could not be in love with David Kostyk, but a small, selfish part of her was glad she’d noticed his worth first. Since their first lessons in the Fabrikator workshop, he’d created amplifiers and magnifiers for Grisha power, lumiya to push back the darkness, toys for lonely children and flowers for her hair. He was remarkable. He was gentle. He was hers. She'd kept so little for herself in this war she had been fighting - her childhood, her body, even her family had been sacrificed at Ravka's altar. She had not been able to catch Nikolai. She would not make the mistake of letting David go so easily, even if it tore the flesh from her bones.

Notes:

Sorry this chapter's a little late! I've been having a bit of a difficult week, but please know how much I love sharing this story with all of you and appreciate all your comments, even when I'm not quite on the ball about responding to them. <3

Chapter 17: xvii - a distance erased

Summary:

Lost and found.

It was strange, veiling her face with the deep green shawl again as they reached the small town in Dva Stolba. She’d grown used to it in her days on the road with the Darkling and in the White Cathedral, but in the Spinning Wheel, she’d learned to wear her scars with pride, tentatively trusting in Alina and her new friends to protect her from fear and distrust. It was an unexpected comfort to inhale the slight tang of smoke and spice, the familiar scents of the Kettle, of Katya.   

The woman who ran their boardinghouse reminded her of Katya too – little and cheerful and indomitably fierce. At the request of the others, she and David played noble newlyweds to Adrik, Tamar and Nadia’s bodyguards, and she revelled in the chance to sleep in a real bed after so many nights on the road. For a few days, there was something that passed for peace. Nadia and Tamar explored the small town by day, bringing them back paper, ink, and news of the war. Genya and David bent their heads together over sketches and formulae, and she learned more than she thought possible about optics and ethereal theory. It should have been hideously dull to be restricted to a single room with a single companion, compared to the social whirl she’d grown up in, but there was something beautiful and precious about the few days where they could shut the world out and study together as though they were children again. Sometimes, she could almost imagine Nikolai was there with them, leaning over David’s shoulder, laughing at the inkstains on her sleeves and face. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could imagine the familiar rhythm of his heartbeat, in perfect syncopation with her own, but the illusion left her hollow and empty when it faded.  

The world broke in on them too quickly, with the familiar cruelty of war. It was Tamar who woke them, her golden eyes grim. “The Darkling made another attack last night.”  

“Where?” Genya said, a chill creeping down her spine. “Dva Stolba?”  

She shook her head. “Keramsin.”  

“ Keramsin?” she repeated. “But that’s in the middle of nowhere! It’s hardly a strategic target-”  

There was a quiet snapping sound, and she glanced over to see that David had snapped his pen in half, spattering himself with ink. She got to her feet quickly, retrieved a towel to begin cleaning him off, but he did not even seem to notice. His gaze was fixed on Tamar, and when she touched him, he was shaking.  

“Keramsin?” he echoed, “But that was- it was meant to be safe-”  

“It was Alina’s home first,” Tamar said. Genya had never heard her sound so bleak. “We should have realised how obvious it was. He probably knew the children would be there before they ever arrived.”  

David had always been calm, stoical, a steady rock in a stormswept sea. Now he shook in place, his warm skin taking on a greyish undertone as the blood drained from his face. Genya tried to nudge him towards a seat, and he flinched away at her touch as he had not done in years. It seemed to startle him, too, and he reflexively reached for her hand even as he had pushed it away, as if to reassure himself she was still there.   

Nadia stepped into the room behind Tamar, her attempt to look composed disrupted by the anxious way her fingers frayed the ends of her braids.   

“We don’t have casualty reports yet,” she began, “but he wouldn’t have hurt the children. They’re his future as much as they are ours.”  

“You don’t know that,” he snapped, and it was so utterly unexpected that she stiffened at his side, but he did not let her go. “You had to have known this might happen. You kept Adrik-”  

“Adrik wanted to fight!” Nadia replied, her voice high and fraught and wounded. “If it had been my choice-”  

“You did choose. You asked Alina to let him stay! And I- Leoni and Nina, I- I sent them there-” His breath came in rapid bursts. She could feel his heart pounding. Tamar was already raising her hands- Genya stepped between them, cupping both of David’s hands in hers.  

“Look at me,” she ordered him. “Breathe. In, two, three. Out, two, three. Leoni and Nina- they were your lieutenants, weren’t they?” He nodded, and she relaxed a little. He’d said little of the days in the Little Palace between the Darkling’s departure and Alina’s arrival, but she knew enough of war now to see that they had shaken him to the core. “You sent them to take care of the other children. That was the only thing you asked of them, and if they’re as clever as you always said, they’ll make the choice that will keep all of them safe.”  

His breathing slowed, but there were tears in his eyes, almost overflowing. “They trusted me,” he said, softly. “I wanted to keep them safe. They were- They're both so young.”  

She pulled him into her arms, letting him bury his face in her shoulder, and swallowed down the bitter taste of envy. What would it have been like, to have had someone like David when she’d been thirteen? Someone who’d wanted to look out for her, to protect her- but that had always been Nikolai, and he had never truly been able to protect her from the King.  

Their uneasy peace was shattered beyond repair – David remained shaken and unsettled, flinching at unexpected touches, impossible to lure away from his work for food or comfort or sleep, as though by discovering some new marvel, he could spirit the children away from the Darkling’s grasp. Tamar’s calm had given way to bleak resolve, and her easy flirtation with Nadia had been replaced with a fierce, fearful protectiveness. Even Nadia herself had lost some of her usual sunny optimism, and Genya could feel the weight of uncertainty settling onto all of their shoulders. She could do little to comfort them, or to ease their fear, so she threw herself into work at David’s side. When Alina returned, they would present her with new hope, as well as new fear.   

They were half-asleep when the revelation came to her, the culmination of a long day of calculations and alchemical formulae and arguing through different designs and sketches. David was already snoring when it struck her like lightning, an answer so neat, so obvious, that she was astonished they had not thought of it sooner.  

“David,” she said, gently nudging his shoulder. He made a complaining sound and buried his head against his shoulder. “ David! Wake up. I figured it out.”  

He blinked up at her, sleepy, but instantly focused. “You did?”  

“It’s obvious. You said Alina hid the Bittern by bending light around a continuous surface rather than letting it bounce off, right?” He nodded, and she continued: “It wouldn’t be impossible for her to do it with a smaller surface, or a smaller space.”  

“Like another skiff?”  

“Like a person,” she said, and David’s smile could have lit up the Fold itself. “Even a group of people, if she bent the light around them to form a pocket.”  

“That’s... not impossible,” he frowned, running the calculations in his head. “It would be harder, with more colours to manage, but the principle is the same.”  

“We’ll need Alina to test it,” she said, “but if the principle is sound...”  

“If the principle is sound, this could save Ravka,” he breathed. “Genya, you’re brilliant.”  

She smirked at him, tossing her hair back. “You should tell me that more often.”  

“Every day,” he promised, pressing a kiss to her collarbone, her throat, “every hour.” The edge of her jaw, the corner of her mouth where the scarring had pulled it into a permanent frown. “You’re incredible, genius, I should get some paper-”  

She claimed his mouth with a kiss of her own, and they did not end up writing down their revelation for a few hours. It would not be enough, not nearly enough, but they had gorged themselves on thinner scraps of hope before. It would keep them fighting a few more days, and that was all that mattered.   

Alina returned without the Firebird, without the third amplifier she’d sought, and confirmed their fears – Keramsin had fallen, and the children were the Darkling’s hostages now. She took the news almost as badly as David had – it had been her plan, after all, and it had been her history that had led the Darkling to their door. But she was still Alina, brave and indomitable, and prepared to gather their meagre forces to meet the Darkling’s.   

It was Genya’s third crossing of the Fold. Despite Alina’s globe of light, her heart thundered in her ears. The dark lay heavy around them, unnaturally cold, unnaturally still, nothing like the black-velvet quiet of the Sikurzoi, or the stifling bustle of the White Cathedral. She could almost taste salt and blood on her tongue, could almost feel the beat of nichevo’ya wings around her, hear the screams of the sailors torn apart around her-  

She pressed herself against David and took deep, even breaths. She’d survived. She was not on the deck of a whaler. She was on the Bittern, she was with her friends, she was as safe as anyone could be in the Fold- but even so, she flinched at the distant shadows of the volcra at the edges of their light, at the ruined, empty towns they passed as they flew. It was only fear. It should not have held such power over her.   

Even so, echoes of the darkness wisped about her even as they settled into their new base, as she gathered supplies and materials for lumiya and blasting powder. The manor was beautiful, but its high ceilings and winding corridors were closer to the Grand Palace than the Spinning Wheel, and even in the quiet, there was no peace to be found there. The Fold rippled on the horizon like an oncoming storm, waiting to swallow them all. She could not escape it. Even in her dreams, it haunted her, swallowing her up as she carried in supplies or dug up what vegetables remained in the overgrown kitchen garden.  

Once, she dreamt she towered over an abandoned village, a statue-saint who’d failed to save her supplicants from the Fold. In the bowl formed by her hands, she held her own heart, raw and vulnerable outside the cage of her ribs, and she closed her hands around it, crushing out the fear, the weakness, the inconvenient grief. But when she opened her fists again, her hands were stained with shadow, and it was Nikolai’s broken body she held in her hands, as fragile as a baby bird, and as easily crushed. She came to weeping, and could not explain why.  

The morning of the planned assault, she rose early, and found Alina in the conservatory where she and Mal had retired for a last night of privacy. It had taken some work to dig up a clean First Army tunic, but Alina smiled when she saw it, and for a moment, they might have been back in her rooms in the Little Palace, trying on dresses for a royal celebration.  

“You should look your best when you put the Darkling in the ground,” she told her, with forced confidence. They both knew victory was unlikely, but Alina needed her believers at her side now more than ever.   

“Thanks,” she smiled, wryly. “I’ll try not to bleed all over it.”  

It was so silly, so flippant, so classically Alina to face death with a cavalier joke about ruining her clothes, that Genya couldn’t help herself. She pulled the younger girl into a tight hug, and murmured in her ear:  “Good luck. We’ll be waiting when you get back.”  

She drew back quickly, but Alina caught hold of her hand, pressed something small and cold and sharp-edged into it. “If something goes wrong, if we don’t make it—take David and Misha and get to Os Kervo. This should buy you all the help you need.”  

Genya looked down at the thing in her hand uncomprehendingly. She knew the Lantsov emerald better than any girl in Ravka. As a child, they’d been her favourite gemstone – shining and bright as the Eagle Throne, as Queen Tatiana herself had been. Now it sat in her palm, sharp and surprisingly heavy, a king’s ransom to buy their safety. She felt her throat close up with tears, and hugged Alina tight enough to bruise.   

“You’re not allowed to die,” she murmured. “I worked too hard to find that tunic to burn it with you.”  

Alina laughed wetly into her shoulder, and they clung to each other a few moments longer. In this moment, they were not the Sun Saint and the Ruined One. They were two girls, facing the end of the world, and praying that they’d done enough to prevent it.  

They drew apart, and Genya said, soft and pleading: “Bring him home. I know he might be a monster now, but- please. Bring him home.”  

“I’ll try,” Alina said, and her voice was a saint’s promise, a holy oath. Genya had not believed in the Saints since she was twelve years old, but she believed in Alina. The Darkling had robbed her of hope too many times to steal it from her now. Still, she packed bags of supplies for herself, David, and Misha, ready to run if they had to. The Lantsov emerald was sewn into her shift, over her heart, and it weighed heavily on her through the long hours in which they waited.   

Misha wielded his wooden sword against imaginary shadows, and patrolled the edges of the greenhouse as he’d seen Mal and Tolya do on the road. David pretended to read, but spent more time watching Misha’s patrols with a frown. Genya busied herself with a table of alchemical materials, creating flashbangs and smoke grenades to cover their escape, and prayed they would not be needed. Minutes dragged into hours. The sun crawled across the sky, bright and defiant as Alina herself, and Genya tried to see it as a good omen. She’d never been inclined to look for signs in the movements of birds or the patterns of clouds, but there was nothing else she could do. David tried to distract Misha from his patrols, to lure him away from the windows with the promise of a story or a new toy, but the boy only snorted dismissively. He was only seven, but war was already in his blood, and David was no soldier.   

It was Misha who noticed the light in the Fold first, and broke off from battling an invisible enemy to run to the window, his nose pressed against the glass. They were faint and indistinct, like flashes of lightning within a bank of thick cloud, but they were the first sign of any movement in the darkness.   

“Is it lumiya?” he asked, as they joined him at the window. He was pitching his voice lower, imitating Mal or Tolya, but Genya could hear the fear underlying it even without the frantic beat-beat-beat of his heart beside her.  

David shook his head. “ Lumiya burns purple, unless they’ve managed to alter the formula significantly.”  

“There’s so much of it,” Genya said, softly, unable to hide her own fear. The flashes and arcs seemed to spread through the darkness as far as the eye could see, glimmering like silver ink in dark water. She’d seen Alina use her powers often enough, but never over such distance, never in so many places at once.  

She felt Misha slip a small, sticky hand into hers, and she reached behind her back to hold David’s as well. They did not speak as they watched darkness and light roil together like a storm. Tension hung in the air like thunder. Shadow roiled. Light arced and bloomed in short bursts, gone too quickly. They all held their breath, frozen like frightened rabbits, huddled like children. Then the Fold exploded outwards like a dam had burst. Genya started to life, running to her meagre bags of supplies and loading them onto the boys’ shoulders as they still stood like statues.  

“We need to move,” she said, bluntly, but David was frozen, and Misha shaking in place. It dragged at the scars across her back and side, but she crouched and lifted the boy onto her hip, grabbing David by the hand. “Move, dearest,” she repeated, and dragged them both towards the door. It was only at her urging that David seemed to come to life again, taking the weight of Misha from her arms and moving under his own power as they stepped out into the wind. They would run. They had to run. South, to Caryeva, perhaps, then to Shu Han through the mountains-  

As they stepped out into the wind, though, the darkness rolling towards them seemed to shift and dissipate, and they began to see more clearly the ruins of Tsemna, the faded grey of grass halfway to sand. It was impossible, improbable, unbelievable- but nevertheless, Alina had performed her miracle. The darkness which had stretched halfway across the sky was giving way, little by little, to the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky. Misha let out a wild cry and struggled free of David’s arms. David gasped and faltered, falling to his knees. Genya broke free from his grip and was already running, really running, exhileration numbing the pain that flared in her legs and back. She flung herself fearlessly down the slope of the hill, and was onto the grey grass before the faint violet glow of a glass skiff came into view. She paused only when the pain in her side overrode the wild excitement in her veins, which gave David the chance to catch up with her, to take her hand.   

“The glass skiffs aren’t ours,” he warned her, but she only shook her head, too out of breath to respond. She could not resist any longer, she had to know. Then, unexpectedly, he caught her face in one hand, tilting her head up as if to kiss her, but instead, he studied her intensely. “Your scars- Genya, they’re-”  

“Awful, I know,” she said, too sharply. She wanted to be moving, she needed to see the returning soldiers, to see Tamar, Alina, Nikolai-  

He shook his head. “No, Genya, they’re fading.” He caught her hand in his, raised it to her cheek. She gasped. The chill ridges of shadow had melted away, leaving only indentations in her skin where they had been. Still scars, still marks of what she’d endured, but the nichevo’ya’s touch had faded from her skin. Which meant- which meant-   

She made a noise that was half-laugh, half-sob, and she was running again, pulling David stumbling after her. As the skiff grew closer, she could see the Squallers on the deck wore First Army green, not Grisha blue, and she knew them for Zoya and Nadia. Almost before the skiff had come to a halt, they’d thrown themselves over the railing with whoops of glee, flinging their arms around her shoulders until they spun in a circle.   

“It’s over?” she gasped, and felt Zoya nod against her shoulder.  

“His body’s in the hold,” she said. “We’ll burn it. The oprichniki won’t make a martyr of this monster.”  

“And Nikolai? Alina?”  

“Nikolai’s alive,” Nadia said, quickly. “He- he tried to protect us, in the Fold, but when the Darkling fell, he was in the air...”  

“Take me to him?” she said, half-plea, half-demand.  

“Tamar and Tolya have been working on him for half an hour,” Zoya said. “He’ll be fine.” But she still boosted Genya up onto the deck of the skiff. She weaved through clumps of Soldat Sol, laughing and weeping and clinging to each other. It should not have been easy to find him in that chaos, but she could feel his heartbeat now, and it pulled her to him like a hook under her ribcage. He was awake, propped up against the side of the ship, and when their eyes met, the rest of the world seemed to fall away. For a moment (an eternity), she could not read his expression, and her hope twisted, inverted, becoming a fear she could not name. Then he extended an arm to her, and she fell to her knees beside him, and they were just two more soldiers weeping and embracing in the afterglow of victory.  

Chapter 18: xviii - the light of our armistice day

Summary:

Three conversations at the end of a war.

There was no pain, only a distant numbness, as though he was floating outside his own body, tethered to it but not part of it, like a kite in the hand of a careless child. His own hands were rippled with shadow-scars, tipped in blackened nails. He could still feel the chill where his- the demon’s claws should have been.   

Better to separate them. The hunger, the violence, the bestial fear and aggression – those had been the demon. He- Nikolai had not torn animals apart and devoured them raw. He had not lashed out at the girls who had tried to save him. He had not felt the pull of the Fold, like a hook in his heart. He did not feel it still. He was himself again. His body was his own. The marks of shadow on his skin were only scars. No ghosts haunted his veins.  

The words circled his head like a tinny mantra, but repetition did not imbue truth. He should be happy, relieved. He should be ready to lead Ravka into a brilliant new age, to repair her fractures and make her whole again. Instead, he sat at a desk, willing his eyes to focus on the briefing in front of him and see the words as anything other than scratches. Willing his shoulders not to ache with the absence of wings. The sweet tea and toast in front of him did not yet smell like food. The crowds of Kribirsk had cheered, but he still did nto know how to face his people when he barely felt like a person himself.  

Selfishly, he wanted Alina. Fierce Alina with her vivid face, her piercing gaze, her radiant light burning through away the ghosts in his veins like purifying fire. The mark of her hand was burned over his heart, bone white against tan brown and the branching veins of shadow. But Alina’s light was gone, and she was dead to him now. Was that his fault? If he’d been gentler on her, if he’d been a better prince, a better suitor, would she have stayed? Ruled at his side, as his general, as his queen? No. He’d never been good enough to keep his parents, to save Dominik or Genya, to win Alina’s affection in anything more than pretty fictions. Alina would leave him, had already left him, just as everyone else had. It was the basest ingratitude for his survival, his freedom, but... the demon had never been lonely. And with the demon, he had never been alone.  

He was on his feet before he’d even truly registered the knock at the door. He’d lost his claws, but the hilt of the knife in his hand was smooth bone, solid, familiar, comforting. He was ready. He could defend himself-  

It was a girl, face veiled, red hair peeking through a green shawl. For a moment, he saw Genya, as she had been on the Kingfisher, and a wild, strange hope seized his heart. When the shawl fell, and he saw Alina, he could not comprehend his own disappointment. He bowed to cover it.  

“Forgive me, I was lost in thought.” He forced a smile, and added: “Unfamiliar territory.”  

She leant back against the door, piercing dark eyes fixed on him as if reading his soul, not his face. “You don’t have to do that.”  

Even now, she was still the innocent. “But I do.” He gestured to the chairs by the fire. “Join me?”   

He moved aside books and papers to make space for her, barely noticing what they signified until she asked: “What are you reading?”  

It took him a few long moments to process the title. “One of Kamenski’s military histories. Really, I just wanted to look at the words.” She was staring at his hands on the cover – the nicks and cuts from thorns and branches, the thin grey lines of shadow that traced his veins. He wanted to ask if she could still see the shadows under his skin. He didn’t want to know. Instead, he said: “I couldn’t read. When I was... I would see signs in store windows, writing on crates. I couldn’t understand them, but I remembered enough to know that they were more than scratches on a wall.” He hadn’t meant to confess that, to Alina, or to anyone else, but it was impossible to lie when she fixed those sharp brown eyes on him.   

“What else do you remember?” she asked, not warm, but not pitying either.  

“Too much. I...” Words still did not come easily to him. He could barely remember the speech he’d made at Kribirsk, something about unity and healing and the victory of light over darkness. It all felt like something another man had done in his skin. “I can still feel that darkness inside me. I keep thinking it will go, but-”  

“I know,” she interrupted, and he believed her. Her fingers traced her collarbones where branches of antler had once rested. “It’s better now, but it’s still there. Maybe it will fade in time.” At the edge of her neckline, he could see the curve of the scar on her shoulder. It was faded now, flat and grey, no longer weeping shadow. He wondered if it still pained her, as his scars still pained him, and felt disgusted at his own weakness.  

“This isn’t what people want of a king, what they expect from me.” His father had been weak, and Ravka had fallen apart in his hands. She would not survive another king so weak.  

“Give yourself a chance to heal,” she said, as if it were simple, as if she had not already decided to die rather than lead.  

“Everyone is watching. They need reassurance. It won’t be long before the Fjerdans or the Shu try to move against me.” He would need to be strong, to be ready. He could barely read, and jumped at shadows.  

“What will you do?”  

“My fleet is intact, thank the Saints, and Privyet.” It had surprised him, how much he missed the grumpy, cynical republican. They had never been confidants, but gloomy Privyet had stayed at his side from their days training at Poliznaya through the blood and screaming at Halmhend, and though there was nobody else he’d trust with his ships, it felt strangely lonely to step back into the role of major – no, king – without him. “They should be able to neutralize Fjerda for a time, and there are supply ships already waiting in the harbor with deliveries of weapons. I’ve sent word to every operational military outpost.” Zoya had sent word. He had mostly stared into space, still shell-shocked. “We’ll do our best to secure the borders. I leave for Os Alta tomorrow, and I have emissaries en route to try to bring the 
militias back under the King’s flag. My flag,” he corrected himself. Unimaginable, to picture anyone but his father as king. Unbelievable, that such a man had held the title so long uncontested. 

She smiled, leaned forward, took his hand. “Just think of all the bowing and scraping in your future.”  

He snorted. “All hail the Pirate King.”  

“Privateer,” she corrected him, and he tried to smile at her quoting him. It should not have stung. He had not been in love with her, but... Alina, sharp-eyed, sharp-edged Alina, he could have loved her. They could have been happy, or at least friendly, at least allies, and now he would be denied even that.  

“Why dance around it?” He did not mean to let bitterness slip into his voice, but it escaped him nonetheless. “’Bastard King’ is more likely.”  

She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes at him. “Actually, they’re already calling you Korol Rezni.” King of Scars.   

It did not feel like a badge of honour, to hear his brokenness stitched into his title so quickly. “Do you think they know?” he asked her.  

She shook her head. “I doubt it, but you’re used to rumours, Nikolai.” She smiled, trying to look encouraging. “And this might be a good thing! I know you love to be loved, but a little fear couldn’t hurt either.”  

He remembered the sullen, glaring girl who’d kicked him in the shins in a carriage, a year – a lifetime – ago. He would not have known her in the woman before him. “Did the Darkling teach you that?”  

She shook her head again, but she was smiling. “And you. I seem to remember a certain story about a Fjerdan captain’s fingers and a hungry hound.”  

He’d forgotten she knew that story, and the mischievious smile on her lips told him that she knew that. “Next time warn me when you’re paying attention. I’ll talk less.”  

She snorted. “ Now you tell me.”   

It was cruel, how easily they slipped back into this easy banter. How easy it would have been, should have been, if only they had loved each other.  

“It’s not too late,” he said. “You could stay. You could come back with me to the Grand Palace.” He was speaking to his friend, his Sun Summoner, his one-day queen. He was speaking to Genya in a cabin on a ship, before everything was broken beyond repair. He was the boy with a dragonfly in his hands, speaking to another queen, in another world, another life. They could be happy. He could make her happy. She could burn away the shadows in him, and he could make her laugh when melancholy seized her heart.   

She looked skeptical, but her skepticism was an old friend to him now. “And do what?”  

“Teach, help me rebuild the Second Army, rusticate by the lake?” She’d been happy sometimes, at the Little Palace, as they prepared for war. She could be happy again, in peacetime.  

“I’m not Grisha,” she argued, “and I’m certainly not a noble. I don’t belong at court.”  

You could. You could belong with me. “ You could stay with me,” he said quietly. “I still need a Queen.” Take what I offer. Love me. Stay.  

She rose from her chair, nudged his feet off the footstool, and sat in front of him, her knees touching his. She looked up at him, gentle, resolute. “I’m not the Sun Summoner anymore, Nikolai. I’m not even Alina Starkov. I don’t want to return to court.”  

He took her hand, leaned forward, pressed it to his chest. “But you understand this... thing.” He could see the gnawing emptiness in his chest, reflected in her eyes. She had her own space where darkness should have been.   

“I’d only be a liability,” she said, too gentle. “Power is alliance, remember?”   

He sighed. “I love it when you quote me. If only I weren’t so damnably wise.”  

She reached into her pocket with her free hand, pressed something flashing and green into his. The Lantsov emerald. It really was over, if it had ever been.  

He stared at it, tried to summon up any feeling other than emptiness, the aching knowledge that he would be alone again. “A Shu princess then? A buxom Fjerdan? A Kerch magnate’s daughter?” He did not love Alina. She did not love him. But at least he would have had the hope of friendship. Now he looked at the ring, and saw only the promise of his parents’ cold, distant unhappiness. He held it out to her. “Keep it.”  

She stared at him. “How much of that kvas have you drunk?”  

Even barely knowing himself, he still knew he hated kvas. “None. Keep it. Please.”   

“Nikolai, I can’t!”  

“I owe you, Alina. Ravka owes you. This and more. Do good works or commission an opera house or just take it out and gaze at it longingly when you think of the handsome prince you might have made your own. For the record, I favour the latter option, preferably paired with copious tears and the recitation of bad poetry.” She laughed, and his heart ached. She might live on, after today, but if they ever met again, they would be strangers, not friends. He pressed the ring into her hand. “Keep it, and build something new.” In Alina’s hands, the emerald could still bring hope. It would only shackle him to a future with a stranger.  

She rolled it between her fingers. “I’ll think about it.”  

He rolled his eyes. “What is your aversion to the word yes? ”  

She sniffed, pink flooding into her cheeks, and he realised that, unaccountably, she was on the verge of tears. His own throat felt tight and sticky. “Thank you.”  

He bit his lip, looked at her, memorised her features for a long moment. “We were friends, weren’t we? Not just allies?”  

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. “Don’t be an ass, Nikolai. We are friends.” Not for much longer, he thought, but she smacked him hard on the knee before he could become any more maudlin. “Now, you and I are going to settle some things about the Second Army. And then we’re going to watch me burn .”  

No one should have sounded as gleeful about attending her own funeral as Alina Starkov, but she was always surprising him.  

“You want to pick out your replacement? Big demands for a dead woman,” he teased her, and she rolled her eyes.  

“Not one replacement,” she said, unexpectedly. “Three.”  

“That’s...” He hesitated, reaching for the right word, “Unprecedented.”  

“Only in the Second Army,” she retorted. “The First Army, the Fjerdans, the Shu – all their armies have multiple generals, don’t they? The Second Army only had a single general because the Darkling was too powerful to oppose. I don’t think either of us want that to happen again.”  

“So what do you propose instead?” he asked her, leaning back in his chair.  

“One general from each Grisha order,” she said. “Each with equal power, equal say. A Triumvirate, not a single ruler.”  

“It’s... not a bad idea,” he said, surprised at how quickly she’d laid out the practicalities of her plan. How far she’d come from the half-wild girl driven more by desire than politics or pragmatism. “Do you have recommendations? I know you and Nadia were close.”  

She shook her head. “I want Zoya for the Etherealki. She’s a nightmare, but when she speaks, everyone listens.”  

He nodded in agreement. “Even those who hold no love for Grisha will fear her enough to respect her. She’s practical, political, a good strategist. She’s an excellent choice.”  

Alina tossed her head. “I do make those sometimes. I want David for the Fabrikators-”  

“Obviously. He’s a genius.”  

“-and Genya for the Corporalki.” She raised her chin, stared him down, daring him to argue.  

His grip tightened on the arm of his chair. He had not seen Genya since she had half-carried him from the skiff. He did not know if she’d ever want to see him again.   

“They may not want to accept her.” She might not accept them. Why would she want to rule over a group who’d rejected her so many times?  

She sniffed, remarkably Zoya-like as she folded her arms. “Then they’ll learn to.”  

“She’s a traitor.”  

“You’ll pardon her.”  

“I will?” The first pardon he’d written had burned with the Spinning Wheel, but he could still feel the phantom weight of the seal in his hand.  

“You’ll have to start somewhere if you don’t want to execute two thirds of the Second Army. Start with her.”  

“She tried to kill the King.”  

“She was defending herself!” Alina snapped, and he hated himself for repeating the arguments he knew he’d hear against her.   

“I know that. But the rest of the world has only heard the accusations against her. Do you really want to force her to defend herself all over again?”   

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t think she could?”  

“I don’t think she should have to.” He paused. He’d never told Alina the truth about Genya before. The wound was still too raw, too tender. But- “Alina, life in the Palace has only ever caused her pain. If she wants to leave, make something for herself elsewhere, this is her chance. She doesn’t deserve to be trapped in chains to duty again.” All the world, and a new pair of ice skates. He had not been able to give Genya freedom when she’d needed it most. He would not rob her of it now, not even for Alina.   

“At least offer it to her,” she argued, “when you offer her the pardon. She’d be good at it, Nikolai. I know she would. She’s unique, powerful, she knows court politics, spycraft, she’s persuasive-”  

“You don’t need to convince me, Alina,” he interrupted her. “It’s Genya’s decision. If she wants to serve in your Triumvirate, I’ll support her. I simply doubt she’d want to come back to the site of such suffering.” Doubt was rich food for the gnawing hole where his heart should have been, letting it spread and grow, but it was far less dangerous than hope. Hope was too heavy a weight for how fragile he still felt.  

“So you’ll pardon her?” she pleaded. “If not for her sake-”  

He was already reaching for a blank sheet of paper, willing his hand to form words rather than illegible scratchings. “I will pardon her, but not because you asked.” He paused, then: “I was always going to pardon her. If she wanted to be pardoned.” He could still hear his own voice, icy and alien: Do not think to rest easy, Genya Safin. Her betrayal had been raw and agonising, but he could still not forgive his own cruelty to her after she’d shown such courage. He should have been stronger, more impartial, more distant from his own pathetic feelings. He should not have taken that chance to betray her in turn, but it was too late now to undo it. He signed the scroll, sealed it, handed it to Alina. “Give it to her for me? It- I think she’d prefer it come from you.”   

On the deck of the skiff, she had held him in her arms, and they’d wept together like brother and sister. He had not seen her since. He did not blame her. In her position, he would not wish to see himself either.  

Alina embraced him before she left. Her skin still smelled sweet, like straw and sunlight. He tried to memorise how she’d felt in his arms, wiry and solid, still glowing like an ember in the ashes, but she was gone far too quickly. He folded into his chair, tried to focus on the briefings in front of him. Tears or blurred his vision despite his resolution to be strong. He was already mourning her, his Sun Summoner, his friend. He had not been in love with her, but he had loved her, and it was too late now to tell her that he knew the difference.  

His moping was interrupted by the door banging open unceremoniously. It took effort not to startle to his feet again, but he relaxed when he recognised David, even if his friend’s face looked uncharacteristically thunderous.   

“I don’t want to be a general,” he said, without preamble.  

“Good afternoon to you too, cousin,” Nikolai said, as brightly as he could manage. Better not to be caught crying like a child, now that he was a king. “Is there a reason you’re raising this with me and not Alina?”  

“Alina’s dead,” David said, as if he had not seen her less than ten minutes ago. “She’s not going to make me a general. You are, and you know I’ll hate every minute of it.”  

“So you want me to go against the Sun Saint’s dying wish for the Second Army?” He could not help his lips quirking into a smile. Despite everything they had suffered, David remained David.  

“She only picked me because she doesn’t know any other Materialki,” he said, as blunt as ever. It wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t false either. “ You could pick someone else. I might be the oldest among the Second Army Fabrikators who stayed loyal, but you have to have someone among your rogue Grisha who’d want the job.”  

Nikolai folded his arms. “So you don’t want to be part of the Triumvirate?”  

David narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t say that, ” and it was at that moment that Nikolai had the unsettling realisation that David had come to bargain with him. Since when had quiet, uncomplicated David ever attempted to make deals for what he wanted?  

He leant back in his chair, curious now about what his friend felt was so important he’d come in with a plan to request it. “So what did you come here to ask for it return for your service? No, wait, let me guess: half my kingdom and Genya’s hand in marriage?”  

David’s face screwed up in disapproval. “Absolutely not. Your kingdom is your problem, and the only person I'm asking about Genya’s hand in marriage is her.” He hesitated, took a deep breath, and leaned forward, his hands on Nikolai’s desk, making deliberate (uncomfortable) eye contact. “I want the Little Palace.”  

Whatever Nikolai had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “The building? Don’t your parents have a townhouse you can use?”  

David rolled his eyes. “Not the building. I want to be in charge of the school.”  

If Nikolai had not anticipated the beginning of David’s request, he was completely lost now. David, of all people, was not meant to confront him with politics or powergrabs. David hated meetings, hated anything that dragged him away from his work unless it was Genya. To ask for responsibility, for something as complicated a school... it didn’t align at all with the David he thought he had known. “Why?” he asked, and watched as the serious intent in his face slipped away, replaced with the distant, frightened-rabbit expression that appeared when his words caught in his throat.  

Nikolai was used to David by now. Instead of staring at him, he looked back down at the pages in front of him, willing the words to come back into focus. He didn’t understand it, but ne knew that David found it easier to speak if he felt that nobody was paying too much attention.  

Eventually, he heard him clear his throat to speak again, less confidently: “I- The Darkling used the Little Palace to- to spot powerful young Grisha, to manipulate them, control them. Not to make sure they achieved their full potential, but- to use them. Genya, Zoya, Alina. Even me, before- before I realised what he really was. I can’t- I trust Zoya and Genya, but they’re always busy with important things. I- My projects are important, but they’re not more important than them – the children, I mean.”  

Nikolai glanced up at him, surprised again by his expected intensity. “I didn’t know you were fond of children.”   

“I’m not good with them,” David said, as if it was the same thing. “I just- they should have someone who’ll be in the Little Palace to watch over them. I can pick out their teachers, and- if anyone tries to hurt them like the Darkling hurt Genya, they’ll be able to talk to me. I’ll be there to protect them, like I should have been for Genya and the others.”  

Nikolai blinked at him for a few moments, then finally: “Done.”  

David looked suspicious. “Just like that?”  

“Just like that,” Nikolai echoed. “If you think you can handle this, I trust you.”  

David twisted his hands together, as if seeking out something to fix. Nikolai silently handed him a pen, which he began rapidly disassembling. “I don’t know if I can handle it,” he muttered, “but someone has to. And I don’t trust anyone else to.”  

Nikolai felt a strange twist of his heart, as if David had voiced an emotion he’d forgotten the words for. “You have Genya and Zoya to support you,” he reminded him.  

He nodded. “I know. But this was my failure with the Darkling. I need to be the one to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”  

“You weren’t the only one who didn’t see him for what he was,” Nikolai pointed out, but David shook his head.  

“I made Alina’s first amplifier. I let the Darkling control her. Genya – I didn’t know who was hurting her, but I knew someone was, and I never offered to help her. I- I stood by, and let terrible things happen, and then suddenly I was the senior officer in the Little Palace.” His fingers flexed around the casing of the pen as if they pained him. “They were so young, the students under my care. And the Darkling made them into weapons, or soldiers, or spies. Whatever he needed, with no concern for what they wanted, what they could have been.”  

Nikolai hesitated, then, carefully: “We’ll still need a Second Army, David.”  

“I know, but- children shouldn’t be weapons.” He said it so simply, so plainly, that it was almost painful. His memories of Poliznaya, of Halmhend – they hadn’t felt like children then, but Alina looked like a child to him now, and she was older than any of his unit had been in their first battle.  

He bit his lip. “You’re right. It will take time, but... together, we’ll work to make it happen. We’ll build a Ravka where no child is drafted into Ravka’s armies.”  

There was a loud scrape as David shoved his chair back to kneel at Nikolai’s feet. “Whatever I can do to make this happen, I will,” he said, fiercely. It should have been ridiculous, comedic even, but the sincerity in his voice gave Nikolai pause. Whatever David’s motivations, it felt a truer oath than any he would receive at his coronation. Nikolai rose and bowed to him, accepting his vow, then extended a hand, helping him to his feet before slowly tugging him into a hug.  

“You always were my favourite cousin,” he muttered into his shoulder.  

“Third cousin by marriage,” David reminded him, but he was smiling when he pulled away.  

Nikolai gasped in mock-offense. “David. Did you just call me a bastard?”  

David blinked. “But you told us-”  

“Betrayed by my own flesh and blood-” He looked at David’s confused expression, and dropped the act. “Just teasing you, David. I- You're doing a good thing, and I admire it.”  

David’s face reddened, and he looked at the floor. “Well, so are you,” he said, shuffling his feet, “ I don’t want to be king.”  

That made Nikolai laugh, and David was smiling a little as he stepped out into the chill afternoon air. It was getting close to sunset. He would need to leave the quiet darkness of his rooms soon, but the thought of being in a crowd again, of performing the role of the King Victorious when all he could feel was the broken boy... even imagining it drained him as it never had before. For all they were calling him King of Scars, his wounds still felt raw and open.   

Without the creak of a floorboard, he would not have known that he was no longer alone, but the sound spurred him to action before he realised he had moved. He leapt to his feet, reaching for the nearest sharp object. He did not notice he only held a letter opener, or the tea tray he’d knocked to the ground, the shattered crockery and spilt tea and toast at his feet. He only knew a long moment where fight warred with flight, the instincts of demon and man battling in his hindbrain.  

“Are you going to use that, or just wave it in my face?” Genya’s voice was quizzical, disarming, and she bobbed a belated curtsey as he stood frozen, caught between impulse and embarrassment. “ Moi tsar.”  

Impulse again – he moved forward instinctively to raise her to her feet, jostling the tray in her arms, and she rolled her eyes at him. “Sit,” she ordered, and he sat, rubbing at the back of his neck. She set the fresh tray of sugary tea and toast in front of him. “Keep eating. You look like a ghost.”  

“Don’t-” he began, as she knelt and began to sweep up the remnants of tea and crockery. “You shouldn’t-”  

“There isn’t an army of servants to pick up after you here, you know,” she said, wryly, “and your Madraya gave me plenty of practice at cleaning up other people’s messes.”  

He caught her wrist as she set her dustpan aside, raising her to her feet. “Never again, Genya,” he said, softly. “You’re not my servant. You never should have been-”  

She sighed, straightened the skirts of her sarafan. “What’s done is done, Nikolai. We can’t undo it.”  

She turned as if to leave, but he still had hold of her hand. This time, he would not let her pull away from him so easily. “We could heal from it, though. If we both wanted to. If we worked towards it-”  

She stared at him, incredulous. “Nikolai, I poisoned your father. And you- you-”  

“I didn’t stand with you,” he said, quietly, an admission of guilt. “I wish- more than anything, I wish I could have been someone you could have trusted with that knowledge. Someone who didn’t-”  

“Didn’t use it to his own advantage?” Her words were cold, but there was a soft hitch in her breath which revealed the depth of her feelings. “Nikolai, I didn’t keep it from you because I didn’t trust you.”  

“Then-?”  

The words poured out of her like a torrent, as though she had kept them hidden from even herself for years. “All those years- every time he came to my chamber, or pushed me against a wall-” His gorge rose at the thought: his father, his sister- “every time he hurt me and your mother and her courtiers turned their faces from me, I told myself: If Nikolai knew, he would help me. If Nikolai knew, he’d do anything to save me. And I knew you couldn’t- I knew he was your father, your king- but that was my last hope. That if you knew, you wouldn’t be like the rest. You wouldn’t stand by and- and let him hurt me. As long as you didn’t know, I could keep pretending you could save me.” She gave a wet, desperate laugh. “Ridiculous, no?”  

“Not ridiculous.” He longed to draw her closer, pull her into his arms, let her head rest under his chin where it had always fit, and let her weep into his shoulder, but- he'd given up that right. “I- if I’d known then, Genya... I’d’ve done anything to save you, I promise. Even if I’d known before the Spinning Wheel...” He shook his head. “All excuses. I’d say that I punished him the only way I could, but we both know he earned far more than exile, and you deserved... better. So much better, Genya. From me, from my family-”  

“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped. “You could offer me all the jewels in your vaults and it would not repay me for the ten years your family stole from me! I could- I could save your life a hundred times and not make up for betraying you as I did. You talk of healing, but we severed that limb, Nikolai! We can’t grow it back, we can’t- what we had is gone, we were children and happy-”  

He stood, slowly, and carefully, giving her time to draw back, wiped her tears away with his fingers. “And now we’re grown,” he said, softly. “Do you really think happiness is so far out of reach that we can’t even try?”   

She sniffed. “You really still believe there’s something left to try for?”   

“Genya, I- You lost your parents long ago. Your mentor is dead. Vasily, Dominik, my parents... everyone else we ever had is gone now. But we’re still here. We could still be a family, if you wanted to try.”  

She hesitated, then: “The nichevo’ya, it- it was my fault. It was the Darkling’s power, but- I was trying to heal you, and I couldn’t work fast enough, but- I used merzost. You were dying, and that thing, that creature- it couldn’t die. So I took it, used its essence to keep you alive. I thought- I thought it would buy me enough time to keep you breathing, and I could pull it out bit by bit later. But-” She cut off, staring up at him, like she had confessed to the most monstrous crime yet.  

He stared down at her, wondering. After the trial, after he’d threatened her, he’d assumed she’d hated him. He’d richly earned her hatred. The knowledge that even after what he’d done, the manipulation, the cruelty, that she’d still broken every rule of Small Science to keep him alive-  

“I never deserved your friendship, Genechka,” he said, hoarsely, “but I’ll become worthy of it, I promise.”  

She pulled her hand out of his, grabbed his shoulders, shook him hard. “I used merzost, you idiot! I hurt you!”  

He tilted her chin up gently with one hand, traced the scar that ran along her cheekbone. “I hurt you, too. Can you forgive me?”  

“That was the nichevo’ya-”    

“It was me in there too. Always.” He paused, then: “Even when I didn’t know words, I knew you. You saved my life- You've saved me so many times, and I never truly thanked you. Let me at least try?”  

She sighed again, sank into a chair, as if exhausted. “Nikolai, I can’t- I can’t promise you things will be like they always were.”  

“Neither of us are the people we used to be.” He’d miss them – the boy with the dragonfly, the girl with her hands full of strawberries – but it was time to let go of the children they had been. “But the people we are now deserve a chance, don’t they?”  

She did not answer him with words, but twined her fingers with his, as he drank the too-sweet tea. After a few long minutes, she asked him: “Can you still feel it?”  

He could not admit the truth to anyone. He could not lie to her. “Like a missing limb. A space where wings and claws and hunger should be, but-”  

“But you can feel where they should be?” He looked at her, startled. He had not expected her to understand. She continued: “It’s not the same, but- I hated the Darkling, by the end. For what he did to you, to Alina, to all of us. But- he was still my protector, for so many years. I spent so long trusting him, depending on him-”  

“You loved him,” he said, with instant recognition, and then, when she looked to deny it: “We’ve both known monsters, and loved them anyway.” If the Darkling was a monster, Alexander and Tatiana Lantsov were hardly less monstrous.  

“We haven’t forgiven them, though.” She looked at him, and he could read the question in her amber eye.  

“No. But I’ve known monsters, Genya Safin. You aren’t one of them.”  

She looked down at their entwined hands, both rippled with shadow scars. “Neither are you,” she said, softly. “You’re- you’ve done some terrible things, but I think you can be better. I know you can be better.”  

“ We can be better,” he said, like a promise. “We’ll heal. We’ll improve, we have time.”  

She gave another sad little laugh. “What a pair we make. King of Scars, Queen of Ruin.”  

“Mother did say we could have been twins.”  

“I wish we had been,” she said, softly. “I wish- I loved being your sister, Nikolai. It just feels so long ago.”  

“You’re still my sister, Genya,” he said, and it was a promise. “Whatever you’ve done, whatever happens, wherever you decide to go... You’ll always have a place at my side, if that’s where you want to be.”  

“And if I don’t?” she said, and he felt his heart, so close to overflowing, crack again. “If I want to go to Kerch, or Novyi Zem, forget all about Ravka and war and Lantsovs?”  

He swallowed, his throat suddenly tight and painful. “Then- then I’d put you on the Bittern, and have it take you wherever you wished,” he said, and tried to swallow the gnawing emptiness in his chest. “The whole world and a new pair of ice skates, remember? I promised you, Genya.” He would keep that promise. He would, even as it broke his heart again.  

She smiled, and he felt her fingers tighten around his. “Lucky for you I don’t want the whole world, then,” she said, and her voice was gentle, teasing. “I’ll settle for my own rooms in the Little Palace. I’m thinking the south wing, with some big windows... Oh don’t cry, Kolya, you’ll set me off again, and I’ll look terrible at the funeral!”  

They caught each other up, pressed together like kittens or children, and did not know if they were laughing or crying, but they were smiling when they broke apart. The gnawing emptiness in Nikolai’s heart would always be there, a little raw, a little aching, but finally, finally, someone had stayed.   

At the funeral of the Sun Summoner, Genya Safin was seen at the King’s left hand. She would be found there always.  

Chapter 19: xix – the ghosts in the attic, they never quite leave

Summary:

The war is over, the Darkling slain, and the Sun Summoner fled to her idyllic happily-ever-after. But Ravka and her young rulers bear scars it will take more than peacetime to heal.

Notes:

Is this chapter almost a year late? Yes. Am I going to apologise profusely in my author notes? No, I'm just relieved to be finally writing again. It's been an intense few months, but I hope this surprise update brings at least some of you joy. <3

Genya Safin did not weep as she watched Alina Starkov burn. She knew her friend too well for that. Alina would revel in her newfound freedom, her hard-won privacy. Besides, Genya had already mourned her Saint, her Sun Summoner, her first friend in so many long years, as she’d carefully sculpted the features of the poor Soldat Sol girl to resemble hers. She’d raised her cheekbones, narrowed her face, darkened her brows, and drained the gold from her hair until it was shining white. By the time she had finished, it might have been Alina herself, cold and still on the table. Poor Ruby, drafted to serve the Sun Summoner in death as she had in life. She looked smaller and frailer than Alina ever had. She wondered if the girl would have chosen this death for herself, if it would be an honour, or a tragedy. She smoothed her hair out, and tried not to think of those long days in the belly of the ship, where she’d brushed out Alina’s hair and wondered if she'd ever wake again.   

She would miss Alina dearly, but she could understand her decision too easily. They would never be equals and friends again, not after Alina had seen her betrayal and offered her an unearned chance for redemption. She would never be able to see the skinny girl she’d taken under her wing beneath the skin of the burning Saint who’d conquered the Darkling. Perhaps it was only right, to let Sankta Alina die with her power, and let Anya Keramsova be born. Anya might even be as faithful a correspondent as Alina had been to Mal – she'd promised to write after all.   

So it wasn’t the Sun Saint that Genya Safin wept for, as the sun itself sank unfeeling into the trees. Still, she kept her gaze fixed on the small figure on the great pyre, tried to avoid her eye flickering to the other body in the distance. And yet...   

And yet. At Tomikyana, when they had carried the Darkling’s body off the skiff, her throat had closed with an emotion she could not name. She’d retreated from the barn, swallowed the painful, wracking sobs, willed her heartbeat to slow and her hands to stop shaking. She did not understand it, this unexpected grief. She’d watched the Fold hoping, praying for his death. He had scarred her, and all of Ravka, almost beyond salvation. It made no sense, that now his death would make her weep, and she swallowed down the inexplicable emotion, focussed on necessities – bringing Nikolai out of shock, Tailoring a corpse for a Sun Saint, tending to the living Alina’s injuries as best she could. She did not want to think of it, did not want this alien, all-consuming emotion. But there was nobody else to tend to his body, and for some reason, that too sat ill with her.   

It was strange to look down at him as he lay on a table in the stillroom, this man who had been god and general and Death itself to her for so many years. She had somehow not quite believed he had it in him to die. His heart did not beat, his grey eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, his skin was starting to purple, but part of her still expected his head to snap around to look at her, to start issuing orders even as the wound in his chest gushed blood once more. It seemed impossible that she should live and breathe when the man who had all but created her lay so very still before her.   

His was not the first body she’d prepared for burial – she knew the steps, and moved through them as though they were a macabre dance for a girl and a corpse. Easier, always, to let her body do what her mind could not fathom. He had taught her that. The first step, removing his clothes to wash the body, felt almost indecent, and yet she moved through it mechanically, revealing his tanned skin lined with an impossible number of scars. Perhaps Alina had always been right, and he had lived hundreds of years, hundreds of lives. Perhaps no mortal’s skin could bear such a tapestry of wounds...  

Her vision focused on her hand atop his tanned, weathered skin, still marred by the stark ridges of the nichevo’ya’s claws, and almost hated herself for pitying him. If he’d suffered in the course of his long, long life, he’d paid every scar forward, into Nikolai’s veins, Alina’s marred shoulder, into her missing eye and the scars that had warped her features beyond repair. Such a man had never wanted pity, and did not deserve it now. He did not deserve the tears that pricked unbidden in her single remaining eye, but they spilled over regardless as she rinsed away the blood which had crusted around the wound in his chest, the killing blow. It was such a small thing to have felled a monster: a narrow wound between his fourth and fifth ribs. Alina had been neat in putting an end to his story. She did not know if she could have given him such mercy. She did not know if she could have killed him at all.  

If she closed her eye, she could still fell his hand on her face, in her hair, hear his whisper in her ear: moya milaya, my sweet one. The smell of cold stone and smoke still hung in the air, still almost choked her. She felt for the edge of the table, closed her hands around it, reached out for the nearest heartbeat. There was only her own, and those of the mice in the skirting boards. He was dead. He was dead, and still she wept, and could not say why.   

She could have left. She could have commandeered some of the Soldat Sol to prepare the body before it was loaded back onto the skiff. But it felt almost taboo, the thought of abandoning this last duty to him. In Caryeva, it had always been a daughter’s duty to prepare her parents for burial. She had distant memories of a woman who’s face she no longer knew weeping as she washed the body of her own father. The Darkling had not truly given her a father’s love or protection. She did not owe him a daughter’s duty. But Genya had learned the difference between duty and love at his knee. Duty did not compel her wash his cold skin clean of blood and grime. Duty did not make her dig up a fresh shirt and breeches for him, or repair the rent in his black kefta. Duty did not force her hands as she smoothed his slack features into something resembling peaceful slumber. That ritual she had completed in the silence of Tomikyana had nothing at all to do with her duty to him. But love... She hated him, yes. She had hated him since she had come back to herself in the White Cathedral. But she could not forget the comfort and safety his presence had once provided, the way he had wiped her child’s tears and promised her strength and courage and vengeance. Perhaps these rites had something to do with what affection she still felt for him. Perhaps they had more to do with the girl she had been: look, she whispered to her younger self, we did all we could. It would never have been enough. All these rituals were for the living: proof that she’d treated his body with a dignity and mercy he had not accorded hers. Proof that the monster was truly defeated, that his body burned as any other man’s would have.  

Now, the flames leapt higher, and the smell of charring flesh began to fill the air. Dusk was gathering, and the crowds began to dissipate to the taverns and the more distant bonfires beyond, but Genya could not bring herself to slip away into the darkness. It was macabre, repulsive even, to watch the flames lick and devour the bodies of Sun Saint and Darkling alike, and yet, she could not look away, nor stem the flow of her tears. For almost ten years, she’d known herself only as his soldier. She’d been free of him only a few months, and in this moment, she almost did not know herself outside of his shadow. Despite herself, despite the hatred that still roiled in her gut, a part of her remained the maid in the white kefta, the invisible girl drawn out of obscurity and into notoriety by his notice alone.   

She did not realise she was not alone still until she felt a hand slide into hers, a tension run down her arm as she was pulled into a walk, and then there was Zoya, dragging her along with imperious haste.  

“We’re drowning our sorrows,” she said, brusquely. “You look like you should be doing the same.”  

“Are you really taking me to task for looking miserable at a funeral?” she said, but did not resist as she was led to a set of benches around a lit brazier. It was out of the crowd – only David and Alina were seated there, and had no need to move up as she and Zoya joined them.   

“Enjoying the turnout for your own funeral?” Zoya asked Alina, who gave a tightlipped smile.  

“Not as much as you would,” Genya teased her, and Zoya tossed her hair.  

“Of course not. My funeral would have songs written to mourn my beauty and talent, and speeches to make playwrights weep.”  

“Be fair to Nikolai,” Alina said, “he didn’t exactly have much time to prepare.”  

“You should have given him notes ahead of time,” Zoya said, and it was hard to tell if she was joking or not. “I intend to ensure that I am properly mourned.”  

“Assuming you’re not too obnoxious for Death himself,” Genya retorted, and received a sharp elbow to the ribs for her sarcasm.  

“Play nice,” Alina scolded them, “or I won’t share the brandy Mal commandeered from supplies.”  

“Anything but kvas,” she and Zoya said at the same moment, and giggled despite themselves. There was quiet for a few moments as they passed around the bottle like teenagers.  

Alina spoke first: “The Darkling tried to make me into his consort, his weapon. He stole me from my ordinary life, my ordinary happiness. But- I can still feel where the tether between us was. It’s like part of me is reaching out to him, and there is no one there.” Her breath came in short, choked gasps, and Genya did not look at her as she wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Alina had always hated anyone seeing her cry. “I hated him so much, but- I almost hate him more for making me miss him.”  

Zoya threw an arm around the smaller girl’s waist, almost protective. “I loved him, once.” Her voice was low, deadly, desolate. ‘I was his favourite soldier, his greatest weapon. I gave him my heart, my loyalty, my blood. It did not save anyone I loved from him, but- part of me still wonders that the sun can set without his command.”  

A shudder went through the group at her words. General, traitor, or god, the Darkling had been the foundation of their world for so long that his absence was still almost impossible to imagine. Genya's throat felt dry and sticky, and the brandy she gulped to soothe it was cloying and burning by turns. What could she say, to match Alina's torment, Zoya’s rage? She, who had never even tried to fight him? Who had only turned against him at the last possible moment?  

She tried to clear her throat before she filled the silence. Nobody was looking at her directly, but their expectation hung in the air like smoke. “I barely know who I am, now he’s gone.” It felt like an admission of guilt. “He was my enemy- but before that, he was my general, my protector. I was a soldier and a spy because he made me those things. He- he created  me, as his spy, his weapon, his ruin, his enemy. Every single thing that has shaped me since I was six years old was because of him, and I still- he is still the only father I can remember.” Her voice felt shrunken, pathetic, childish, and she hated herself for it, hated the weakness she had just admitted, even hated the pressure of David’s hand on her own as he tried to comfort her.  

“Can I propose a toast, or is this a private party?” She flinched at the voice in the shadows, but it was only Nikolai slipping from shadows to firelight. She and Alina shuffled apart, making space so that he could sit between them. He took the bottle Zoya passed him, and held it aloft. “To monsters and their children. May we prove better than our parents.”  

“I’ll drink to that,” she said, and felt his fingers press over hers as he passed the last of the brandy to her. It should have hurt, to know that despite all they had done, Nikolai still loved his monstrous parents, but the knowledge glowed in the pit of her belly like an ember. She was not alone. He knew what it was to feel love for a monster – like a phantom limb, it lingered even in the absence of its object, dimmed but unextinguished by the truth of their nature. Perhaps a part of her would always love the father she had seen in her general. It did not change the relief his death had brought all of them.   

That relief seemed to settle over all of Ravka in their progress back to Os Alta, filling the air of the towns they passed through with a giddy holiday spirit, even as the churches and chapels rang with funerary masses for the Sun Saint. She attended a few of the masses herself, veiled in her prayer shawl, but saw little of the friend she missed in the sermons of the priests. Sankta Alina of the Fold was purity and innocence, sweet and anodyne as sunlight in a storybook. If Alina had been sunlight, she’d been all of it – brilliant, yes, but caustic and blinding too. Even her kindest touches had sometimes burned the skin. She was not dead, not really, but she deserved a truer memorial than stained glass and sanctity would allow. Ravka’s people may have loved their Sol Koreleva, but a dead hero was far more palatable than a wounded girl.  

Despite herself, in moments when the holiday spirit infected their camp, when town musicians played and David awkwardly pulled her into the dancing, she knew she was being cynical. The too-thin farmers and townsfolk who watched their progress had had precious little to celebrate in the past few years, and the end to the civil war was good cause for revelry for all of them. It was strange – for all the balls she’d attended at the Queen’s side, she’d never really danced before, and after the first time she giggled tripping over David’s feet, he’d made a habit of dragging her out into the crowd whenever music played.   

“You don’t have to do this,” she told him, as she gave up attempting the steps of the country dance and resigned herself to swaying, her body pressed to his. “I know you hate dancing.”  

“I like dancing with you,” he corrected her, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and when could she do then but kiss him? Still, she did not miss the grateful smile he shot Nikolai as the young king tapped him on the shoulder.  

“May I have this dance?” he said, sweeping her a bow that would not have been out of place in the Grand Ballroom.  

She swept him an equally elegant curtsey. “As my king wills it.”  

Nikolai was a better dancer than her and David combined, and she felt ungainly and ill-matched as she never had with her Fabrikator, but if she did not know the steps, she knew Nikolai. She’d spent half her childhood following his lead, and her feet followed his as if they’d never really stopped.   

“Will you come to my coronation?” he asked her, and she wrinkled her nose.  

“As your general, do I have a choice?”  

“ You always get a choice,” he said, far too intense for a moment, until he caught himself and added: “David, however, must attend by royal decree. I have a very silly hat I want him to wear.”  

“He’ll hate every second of it.”  

“Then he’ll be in good company. I need someone there who’ll suffer nearly as much as I will,” he grinned. “I’m not a monster, though. He won’t have to be anywhere near as close to the Apparat as I will.”  

Her lips twitched into a smile to match his. “Do you remember the horror stories we’d tell about the things we saw caught in his beard?”  

“When he got borscht in it and looked like a vampire?”  

“ No, the spinach was worse. When it looked like it had started mouldering-”  

Nikolai threw back his head in a snorting laugh as pure and unpretentious as a child’s, and she laughed with him, and for a moment, she was so truly happy she felt almost unmoored from the earth, floating away on a tide of their laughter combined.  

She laughed more than she’d thought she ever could, those days on the road, but her trepidation grew as they drew closer to Os Alta. Every broken window, every burned-out house felt like a reminder of her guilt. You could have stopped this. You chose the side of the monsters. It had been easy to look at Nikolai and Alina, naive and cushioned from the world’s harsher blows, and insist that she had had no other choice. It was harder to look at the too-thin children and too-young mothers and make those same arguments to herself. Perhaps she had had no other choice. Perhaps she had chosen wrong anyway. The crowds of Os Alta cheered for Nikolai, but she did not miss the glares and occasional stones that were thrown her way as she rode behind him, her head held high. It was strange – she had not noticed how naturally her pride had returned to her in her months at war until she felt it bend under the weight of their hatred.  

It was easier in the Little Palace. There, she was the Sun Summoner’s chosen general, and at least to the younger Grisha, some of Alina’s radiance had rubbed off on her. She was her first friend, first disciple, and that mattered far more in the Little Palace than the whispers of her treason. Alina’s authority was particularly helpful when it came to stripping the halls of signs of her predecessor: tearing down the black velvet drapes that the Darkling had favoured, raiding his office and chambers for his secrets, even throwing open the secret Corporalki labs to the antiseptic light of the sun. They were small things, perhaps, but as symbols, they mattered – this was no longer the stronghold of the Black General. And it gave some small, spiteful part of her joy to watch the children tumble through the corridors in a half-feral horde as they never would have in her predecessor’s time, laughing and chattering and streaking the whitewashed walls with colour under David’s watchful eye. Zoya hated the childish murals, and they offended Genya’s court-honed taste, but David had been surprisingly firm on the idea:  

“This is the only home most of them remember,” he had said, staring down at the papers before them. “It should feel like a home, a place they belong.”  

“As if your parents let you cover the walls of Duva in scribbles,” Zoya had sniffed, but Genya had caught her smiling despite herself as she passed the excited children sketching out their designs in the dining hall. Their laughter was almost sanctifying – Genya had never felt the presence of the Saints in the chapels, the White Cathedral, the high and hallowed halls of the Spinning Wheel, but to see the Little Palace become a place of colour and light before her eyes felt like a miracle.  

Little surprise, then, that she found every excuse to remain there, dodging summons to meet nobles and diplomats or attend councils or salons. Those who wished to find her knew where she was, and what was the harm in taking some time to enjoy her newfound security? Without a vain and ageing Queen to summon her every five minutes, the Grand Palace whirred on in her absence like some great machine that had never noticed a missing piece. She was not needed there. She managed to avoid it entirely for two months, but she could not avoid it forever. The Triumvirate's attendance at Nikolai’s coronation was mandatory, even if Genya’s deep red gown clashed hideously with Zoya’s royal blue skirts and David’s violently purple kefta.  

The Grand Palace had not fared well under the Darkling’s brief reign, and in some ways it was a relief, for all the expenses it would eventually cause Nikolai. Easier to focus on the scars of musketfire in the walls, the faded patches of floor where furniture had been smashed or looted. She could pretend that it was not the same building, that she was not the same girl. She repeated the words like a mantra, but if there were scars to focus on in the throne room, they had been hastily covered over. It was the same. It was exactly the same.  

He had never touched her here. They had never even spoken in the throne room, but she could remember too well the feeling of worn carpet on her knees. Queen Tatiana had kept her kneeling by her throne for hours to dazzle her petitioners with her strange pet Grisha. It was an elaborate punishment for a crime she had never committed, but- it’s effect had worked as intended. She could feel the weakness in her knees even now, as if they still remembered folding to the ground like a penitent’s, like a pet’s-  

She felt herself somehow slip from her skin as the crowd fell silent, the Apparat’s liturgy becoming garbled nonsense, the scent of incense suddenly dizzying, her breath catching in her throat- He was not the same king, Nikolai looked nothing like his father, and yet she could see Alexander Lantsov slouched in the throne, half-giant, half-corpse, all monster, and she- she was nothing, a nichevo’ya,  a monster out of place and out of time. She felt the pain and humiliation like a fresh scar, like she’d pressed down on an open wound merely by stepping onto the balcony. She could feel eyes on her, feel them skim across her scars, her eyepatch, with disgust or pity. She used to be so beautiful, she could hear them say, even the King couldn’t resist her. Who would want her now, as she is? She was more than her looks, she knew that, but she had learned at Queen Tatiana’s knee how many at court would mourn the loss of a girl’s beauty more than that of her life. What would her strength matter here, where her victimhood was carved into her skin? 

She squeezed her eye shut, reaching out for the pulse of the heartbeats around her – David, Zoya, Tolya, Tamar, Nikolai – but could not match her own to their steady pace. It hammered against her ribs like a frightened bird, her breath coming in short, sharp trills of fear. She’d faced the nichevo’ya unflinching, but here, now, fear without source flooded her every vein, preparing her for a fight she could not win against an enemy no longer there. It made no sense, and yet she could not escape it, it choked her-  

Pressure on her hands, gently steering her from the balcony to the vestibule. Hands on her shoulders, pushing her down onto the bench. This was familiar, at least – how many times, in how many places, had she laid back and counted cracks in ceiling tiles and slipped as far away from her body as she could manage-  

Arms around her, holding her upright, not holding her down. The smell of steel and silk – David. She buried her face in his kefta, let the smell of him overwhelm her senses. As her breathing levelled and her heartrate slowed, she could feel his hands rubbing circles into her shoulders, his lips pressing childish kisses to her hair, reminding her who held her, reminding her she was safe, reminding her that she was Genya-now, not Genya-then, that the two would only ever meet in her memory.  

The next day, he’d left their bed before she woke, and she did not know why until the palace steward came to complain about the rogue Durast installing locks on the inside of every servant’s bedroom door. He did not return until late in the evening, face smudged with grease and fingers rough with filings, and she pulled him into bed with a fervour that surpassed words. No poet would write sonnets to a man who made locks for maidservants, but then, poets knew little of love, compared to David Kostyk.  

Later, in the warm haze of the dying fire, he smoothed a hand through her hair and said, unprompted: “Nikolai and I are visiting Lazlayon soon.”  

“Your brother-in-law’s manor? Isn’t that in the middle of a swamp?” She wrinkled her nose at the thought. The Grand Palace was at the top of a hill, and managed to be damp and drafty enough without the lowland air.”  

“It has good cellars, though,” David said, as if the architecture of a house they’d never visited was a fact of key significance. “You should come with us. You haven’t met Anfisa, not properly.”  

“I’ve seen plenty of her.” Countess Kirigan had been among the Queen’s ladies before her marriage. She’d been kind enough when Genya was a child, but the difference in their ages and stations had ensured they were never truly friends. Between the rumours of her treason and her servant’s status, she somehow doubted a friendship between them now. “I somehow doubt I was included in the invitation, moi lapushka. ”  

“ I’m inviting you,” he said, stubbornly, because of course he couldn’t understand, her fairytale smith born half a prince. He loved her, and so he would never understand that the world saw her first as a monster, not a marvel. “And it might be good for- for everyone, to get away from the palace for a little while.”  

He did not say for you , but it still stung, knowing how obvious her vulnerability seemed to be. “You’re worried about me,” she said, flatly.  

He leant back with a frown, his thumb tracing the lines of scars along her arm. “Of course I’m worried about you. You barely leave the Little Palace-”  

“I have work.”  

“You don’t sleep-”  

“Neither do you.” She meant to say it without rancour, to point out his hypocrisy with lightness and humour, but she knew it sounded sulky rather than teasing.   

“Not like you don’t sleep,” he said, and it was true, and she hated it. “I forget to go to bed. You pretend to fall asleep, but I wake up and you’re- gone.”  

And what could she say to that? “I love you,” she said, and knew it did not explain anything. “It’s just... an adjustment.”   

“We don’t need to share chambers-” he began, but she cut him off:  

“No, I want you here. The dreams are- they feel less real when I wake up to you.” It wasn’t fear of nightmares that drew her from their bed. Her dreams were terrible, but they were only dreams. But the moments between sleeping and waking, with no work to busy her hands and mind... those were the moments she could feel phantom hands on her skin, phantom wounds still aching across her body. To lie still and quiet in the dark was to fall back through time, to a version of herself she had left behind in her waking hours. If she fell asleep quickly, she could bear it, but too often, it drove her out of bed to the banya or the lake, to scrub real feeling into her skin, or to the dining hall to study the gaudy murals. Anything that would put the past back where it belonged.  

“But I won’t be here,” David said, with the triumph that said he believed he’d won the argument already. “I’ll be in Lazlayon, and so will Nikolai. And without you, who’ll remind us to take breaks from work to eat and sleep and-”  

“Surely your sister will have you both in hand,” she retorted, but the look of wounded concern he turned on her was a greater weapon than any lumiya. It was how she found herself in the sticky heat of Lazlayon, where summer had not quite faded yet, despite the golden-red of the leaves in the garden. As she’d predicted, her hostess was coolly polite to her, and she did not feel the welcome David had promised her within its halls. While he and Nikolai had invited her to join them in mapping out the areas of the wine cellars suitable for military use, once she’d picked out the chambers with sufficient light and soundproofing for the Corporalki to use, she felt more of a hindrance than a help, and Anfisa seemed to have little interest in her company.   

Quiet and solitude had never suited Genya. She’d spent her childhood surrounded by the Queen’s ladies, or by Nikolai and Dominik, and even after she was reduced to a servant, she had been too much in demand to be lonely. To be alone, and to have little to do... it made her restless, reminded her too much of her days as the Darkling’s example. It drove her out of the manor and into the gardens, where she tried and failed to study the books she’d taken from the Little Palace library. She could barely comprehend how much of a true Corporalnik’s education she had missed in the syllabus the Darkling had designed for her, and David’s theory that he’d been trying to limit her power to stop it exceeding his own was little comfort when she felt years behind the people she was meant to be leading. If she could have used the time to focus on her remedial studies, she would have at least felt like she was making progress, but too often the book lay facedown in the grass as she lay on her stomach, watching greblyaki skim across the surface of the pools, and water-spiders spin their delicate webs between the reeds. Sometimes she would sketch designs for David’s theoretical submersibles into the margins, but mostly she found herself staring into the water, wondering why stillness was unbearable when work seemed equally beyond her.  

Time slipped away from her, as it had in the darkness of the covered wagon; as it had when she sat vigil at Nikolai’s bedside; as it had when the King’s weight pressed down on her. When they sat down to dinner, and Nikolai asked her with a smile how her afternoon had been, she could not account for the hours she had wasted, or even claim to have enjoyed them. They had passed over her like waves above a sunken ship, never really touching her. Outside the Little Palace, severed from the routines and rituals that had kept her grounded, she could feel herself becoming unmoored. She’d hoped that at least the excitement of a base to plan and construct would distract everyone from her current state, but she was, of course, wrong. She could tell David was fretting as she picked at her breakfast, and noticed that he began to attend her meals religiously, watching as her favourite foods were shovelled onto her plate despite her lack of appetite. Bad enough that he hovered – David alone could get away with that – it felt worse still when she was caught sitting up late in the parlour after the household were abed. She had waited until David’s breathing had evened out, until the soft footsteps of the servants had faded, but it had not been quite enough to ensure her privacy.  

She’d tucked herself into a soft window seat, curtains pulled tight between her and the room. Her much-abused book rested on her knees, the flickering candle at her feet. It was just enough light to fill her sheltered nook, without ruining her night vision so much that the shadows of the trees became the wisping shapes of nichevo’ya. The only sounds were those of the old house, settling around her. It was the closest she’d come to peace in weeks.   

She almost flinched when the curtain was suddenly pulled back, and lashed out instinctively with a kick that would have made Tamar shake her head. She only succeeded in knocking her candle to the floor, and rolled into a crouch to set it right before the carpet was alight. Hands marred with familiar lines of shadow met her own, and she looked up to see Nikolai kneeling before her, clearly trying hard not to laugh.   

“Found you,” he whispered, and for some reason, this set her off into a fit of laughter that felt more manic than joyful. It was like they’d slipped out of time entirely, like they were children again, like she hadn’t- like he hadn’t-   

Callused warmth on her wrist. His hands had not been callused then. They’d matched then, the small, soft hands of cosseted noble children. They matched now, in the shadowy scars that ran along their wrists like cracks in porcelain. “We match,” she said, and her throat felt tight, choked, her eyes stinging with saltwater. He was human. She was alive. There was nothing to weep for, and yet-  

He'd slid back against the wall beside her, until her head rested against his shoulder, his head leant atop hers. How strange, that he’d been a head taller than her since they were fourteen and fifteen, and yet had not sat like this in so many years. His hand carded through her hair as she shook, trying desperately to regain control of herself. It felt pathetic, and she said as much.  

His chin bumped her forehead as he shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice sounded almost as choked as her own. “When I was Sturmhond,” he said, softly, “there was an illness we saw sometimes on long voyages. Sailors would become tired, unsettled, and sometimes they’d wake up with long-healed wounds reopened.”  

She sniffed, then, her voice still watery: “What exactly does scurvy have to do with me being useless right now?”  

He flicked her nose lightly. “Let me get to it. Tolya said that it was a problem with their rations. The wounds weren’t reopening on their own. The scar tissue fell apart because there wasn’t enough in their body to keep rebuilding it.”  

“So I need to eat more fruit?” she snorted, and he elbowed her.   

“You’re impossible,” he told her, “The point is that bodies remember old wounds long after we think they have disappeared. My shoulder still aches before a rainstorm, it has since Halmhend. I-” He hesitated, she could hear him swallow. “The demon is supposed to be gone, but I can still feel its hunger, like there will always be something missing there. Like there always was something missing there, and the demon filled that space because I allowed it to.”  

She felt another pang of guilt at what she had helped the Darkling make of her friend. “You didn’t choose the demon,” she reminded him.   

“You didn’t choose the Darkling,” he retorted, and it was a kind lie, but a lie all the same.   

“I chose him again and again. I chose him over Alina, over your family, over you-”  

“And I wish by all the Saints you’d had a better choice, but you didn’t,” Nikolai interrupted. “He was a monster, but he kept you alive and offered you protection in an impossible moment. You really think I don’t understand that?”   

She sighed. “I suppose you would understand that. But- he's gone, Nikolai. I can’t- I hate that he- that everything that happened still has a grip on me.”  

“Old wounds,” he reminded her. “The demon is gone. My parents are gone, but Ravka is still bleeding from years of their abuse and neglect. Why should you be any different?”  

“I’m not some wounded animal for you to put back together,” she said, waspishly, but he only laughed, and she felt the reverberations against her ear.  

“You certainly snap at me enough,” he teased her, “but I know what you are. You’re Genya Safin. You’re unbreakable.” She could hear something like envy in the last word. How odd, to think that golden, shining Nikolai saw himself as the broken one between the two of them.   

“And you?” she said, softly.  

His voice turned dry. “They already call me the King of Scars. Everyone knows I came to the throne as broken as Ravka is.”  

She rolled her eyes. “So dramatic, Kolya. You came to the throne scarred because you fought and you lived. Every time they look at your scars, the people remember that they have a king who knew they were worth fighting for, and who was strong enough to fight for them. You’re just too vain to see it.”  

He elbowed her playfully in the side. “You’re one to talk about vanity,” he teased her, then, hesitantly: “It’s still hard to sleep now. I keep thinking if I lose focus, the demon might... wake up. If it came back, began hurting things, or even people-”  

“So we lock your door and your window,” she said, pragmatically, “and send in Zoya or one of the twins to check on you in the mornings.”  

“And waste their time on my weakness?”  

“You’re Ravka’s King,” she reminded him, though the title still felt strange and bitter on her tongue. “Your weaknesses are Ravka’s, and what better use could their time have than protecting Ravka’s vulnerabilities?”  

“I hate it when you’re right,” he grumbled, then: “Your turn.”  

“What?”   

“You tried to solve my problem. At least give me a shot at yours.”  

She shook her head. “It’s foolish. Nothing you need to worry about.”  

He nudged her with his shoulder. “I haven’t forgotten the last time you told me that, Genya. You’re my general. Your struggles are my struggles.”  

She sighed. “It is foolish,” she repeated, “The war is over. I’m a general, for Saints’ sake. I shouldn’t be jumping at shadows. But-” She swallowed. The words seemed to stick in her throat, unwilling to be let out into open air. “Whenever I’m in the Grand Palace, whenever anything reminds me of- of how it used to be, or I have time to think on it too long, I might as well be back there. I should be beyond this, but-”  

“But your body still remembers how it felt?” Nikolai finished, as her words caught in her throat, but she shook her head.   

“It’s as if I got so used to... stepping away from myself, when things became too painful, or too difficult, that now, it’s all I know how to do. I have duties to fulfil, but I can’t do that if I can’t even- if I can’t even exist in my own skin without panicking.”  

Nikolai sighed, squeezed her hand: “Genechka-”  

“Don’t pity me, Nikolai,” she said, tightly. “You know I can’t bear it if you-”  

“I don’t pity you,” he said, quietly. “I meant what I said. You’re unbreakable, Genya. If you’d been my sister by blood... You’d be a better ruler for Ravka than I ever could.”  

She sniffed. “You’re sweet, but I’m barely a general now. I don’t know how I’d manage to hold your responsibilities when I can barely carry my own.”  

He was quiet for a few moments, and she thought he would not speak again, but when he did, his voice was quiet, uncertain: “I wasn’t here looking for you. I dreamt- when I was the demon, words meant nothing to me. Writing looked like scribbles on a sign or a page. When I- when it comes back, in my dreams, reading helps. If I wake up, and I can read again, I know it was only a dream. Maybe you need to find something that does that for you.”  

“Something like what?” She chewed her lip, focussed on the bloom of pain, on the warmth of Nikolai’s shoulder under her head, to keep her in her body.   

“Something you couldn’t or weren’t allowed to have before. Something to help you remember the difference between then and now.”  

He was twisting a heavy signet ring on his finger, the kind of thing that would have slipped off his claws before, she noticed. Something you weren’t allowed to have before. Perhaps she’d already been following his advice unknowing – David’s gentle, callused hands on her skin drove away every ghostly touch she’d ever felt on her skin. It wasn’t a cure, but perhaps... perhaps it was the start of one.  

She closed her eyes, focussing on the wall at her back, the sound of Nikolai’s heartbeat, the weight of the kefta she’d thrown on over her nightgown, turning every detail of her surroundings in her mind for what was new, what was comforting, what was so familiar she flinched from it... She traced the embroidery on her sleeve with careful fingers, thought of everything she’d sacrificed to earn this kefta, whether anything would ever be worth it.   

Nikolai’s breathing was quiet and even when she finally spoke again, and he jumped a little at the sound of her voice. “I don’t remember spending a day out of uniform since I was twelve. Isn’t that strange?”  

“Mm. I barely knew myself after a few months in a First Army uniform.”  

“That explains that ridiculous coat,” she teased, and he laughed.  

“I loved that coat. Sturmhond was an act, but... he was everything Major Lantsov could never be. He was free. He had no uniform, no duty to anyone but his crew...”  

“He served Ravka because he chose to, not out of duty?” she added, and felt him nod.   

“I meant it, when I promised you the whole world,” he said, softly. “You don’t deserve to be shackled by duty again.”  

“Do you remember the story that came from? ‘The whole world and a new pair of ice skates?’ It was in the same book as the one with the conriocht, wasn’t it?” She could remember the pictures even now – the beautiful demon queen in her palace of snow, the pale, half-frozen little boy at her feet still trying to assemble a puzzle of ice as his hands turned black and blue with cold. “The snow queen promised the boy she stole the whole world, and a new pair of ice skates, if he could make the ice form the word ‘eternity’, even though it was impossible.”  

“Do you remember the rest of the story?” he asked, and she shook her head. “His sister travelled the whole world to save him, and she showed him the puzzle could not be solved with only one pair of hands. The queen made the promise, but she was the one who won his freedom, and gave him the whole world.” He hesitated, then: “She had red hair in the pictures, do you remember? She always reminded me of you.”  

“Alina was the one who saved you.”   

“You saved me first. If you hadn’t tried to heal me...” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. That story taught me the greatest gift I could give anyone I loved was their freedom. I wanted that for Dominik. I still want that for you.”  

“I’m not a prisoner, Kolya,” she reminded him. “If I wanted to leave, I would, but I don’t. I just... don’t want to be afraid anymore.”  

He squeezed her hand, and said nothing more, but she could hear the words he had held back singing through her bones. Please don’t leave me again. For a moment, she saw him as a child again, the little prince who was given everything except the love of a family he hungered for. She squeezed his hand back. I’m here. I’ll stay.  

Morning found them like that, heads bent together, backs against the wall, like children in a fort of snow. It was Anfisa who found them, throwing open the door to the library with a graceful curtsey that did not quite disguise her cool, clipped words: “Your Majesty. Miss Safin. Will you be joining us for breakfast?”  

They scrambled to their feet, still in their nightclothes, and Nikolai quickly swept her a bow. “ Moya grafinya, forgive our ill manners, we were reading and lost track of time. Give us a few minutes to dress, and we’ll be with you in a matter of moments.” He swept from the room as if he were not in his nightshirt, and Genya attempted to slip by in his wake, only to have her wrist caught as she passed by her hostess.   

“Miss Safin,” Anfisa said, with a poison-sweet smile, “Will you join me for tea after breakfast? I fear I’ve been a poor hostess, and my brother has written so fondly of you that I’ve been longing to get to know you.”  

“Of course, moya grafinya.” She swept her an exacting curtsey, polite, but no lower than she’d give any equal. A general of the Second Army did not have to bow and scrape, even to a countess. Even to her lover’s sister.  

David at least seemed delighted to see her at breakfast, and monopolised her conversation with explanations of the modifications he already planned to make to the cellars. Anfisa did not speak, but smiled at him with a gentle, older-sisterly indulgence even as she watched Genya like a sheepdog watching a fox. Despite her resolve and her poise, Genya felt jittery and nervous when the count led Nikolai and David away to ‘give the ladies their time to converse’. For all her courtly upbringing, she’d been more spy than lady, and she felt that difference settle like a weight on her shoulders as she was left alone with the perfect, ladylike Anfisa Kirigan.  

Anfisa’s smile vanished with David’s footsteps, and Genya could see her knuckles through her skin as she gripped her teacup tight. She knew these signs well, she’d watched for them in the Queen all her life, and while she did not think Anfisa would raise a hand to her, a part of her was already awaiting the blow that would come.  

She took a long sip of her tea, and set the cup down with a deliberate clink before she spoke: “My brother David is a good man, with a heart more tender than anyone believes,” she began, coolly, and Genya realised with a dizzying swoop that Anfisa was trying to protect David from her. “If you break his heart, or abandon him for a better prospect, he would never think to avenge himself. But I will.”  

Genya could feel her heartbeat thunder in her ears, reached desperately for Nikolai’s words the night before. Remember the difference between then and now. She’d been a peasant girl facing a queen. Now she sat opposite Anfisa as an equal, a general to a countess. The weight of her kefta was the same, but she was not powerless any more.”  

“I understand your meaning, moya grafinya, but you seem to be operating under an incorrect assumption.” Anfisa raised an eyebrow, and Genya sipped her tea before continuing, forcing her to wait for the rest of her explanation. “There is no ‘better prospect’ in the whole of Ravka to me than your brother. He is the best man I have ever known, and if anyone harms him, I would gladly share in their destruction with you.”  

Anfisa pursed her lips. “And when I discovered you with the King in the library this morning-”  

Genya did not mean to flinch at her words, did not want to seem weak or guilty in front of this woman, but it was not Anfisa’s voice she heard, but the Queen’s: A lack of gratitude is unbecoming in a servant. You should wear the jewels my husband gives you. No matter her titles and pardons and royal favour, she would always be the Darkling’s whore, ready to sell herself to the highest bidder.   

“We did nothing,” she said, and her voice was a hoarse, pained whisper, as it had been when the nichevo’ya scarred her throat. “He never touched me. Moya tsaritsa , please-”  

She did not expect the other woman to rise from her seat so quickly that the porcelain on the tea table clattered, and she flinched back, anticipating a slap. Instead, Anfisa stepped around the table to crouch before her, catching hold of the hands she’d clenched together in her lap.  

“How old were you, the first time?” she said, and her voice was suddenly terribly gentle.   

Genya felt her throat relax, her vision start to come back into focus as the present flooded in. She took a deep breath. Her voice did not shake when she replied. “Twelve, moya grafinya.”  

She gave a hissed gasp that Genya hated, like a civilian seeing an open wound. It was not the worst reaction she could have had, but pity from anyone still turned Genya’s stomach. But Anfisa surprised her again. The pretty, delicate noblewoman was the last person Genya expected to say: “You were far more merciful than he deserved.”  

Genya steeled herself, met her eyes. “Was I?” she said, softly. “I took from him his kingdom, his comfort, his last remaining son.” She swallowed, then added: “Nikolai is- we grew up like brother and sister. We are all the family the other has left.”  

Anfisa nodded, slowly, her face unreadable. Genya did not know if she believed her, but when she spoke again, there was less ice in her voice: “David is brilliant, kind, and devoted, but he is not- half the world does not understand him. The other half see him as an idiot to be manipulated. I have done my best to protect him, but-” She hesitated, and Genya could not quite restrain herself.  

“The world is full of fools,” she said, folding her arms. “I have known what David is since I was fourteen, and I have loved him all that time. We are not the children we were, but he- he has been as constant as the North Star. You may think I am taking advantage of him – I'm sure plenty of people believe that – but the truth is, he would survive without me. I would be lost without him.” Her David, still and calm and steady, who had taught her the quiet songs of metal and stone. She could no more picture a world without him than without Nikolai.   

A small smile crept over Anfisa’s lips. “Well, then, we have work to do. The union of the future Count of Duva and a General of the Second Army will be no small thing.”  

Genya blushed. Anfisa laughed, and the tension faded from the air as if it had never been. If David had shown her how to brush away the past, and Nikolai had suggested how to better put it into action, it was Anfisa who helped her carry out her plans. It felt frivolous, spending her general’s stipend on colourful dresses and impractical heeled boots, but when she moved through the halls of the Grand Palace, the click of her heels, the swish of her skirts, the brightness of the fabric all reminded her that she was in a different time now, in body and in mind. Nikolai seldom let her walk the corridors alone, and if memories assailed her as she moved through the rooms, they were of three children, running and laughing and whispering secrets. Little ghosts, now, instead of monsters. It was enough. It would have to be enough.  

Chapter 20: xx - thousands of answers to one simple question

Summary:

Three times David Kostyk asked Genya Safin to marry him, and what came of them.

David Kostyk had known he would marry Genya Safin since the day she stepped out of the Darkling’s shadows and into his arms. It had become as much a fact of the world to him as the colour of the sky or the molecular composition of Grisha steel. It felt so obvious a truth that he scarcely bothered to speak it aloud, despite Nikolai’s teasing and Anfisa’s unsubtle hints about where the finest kokoshniks in Ravka could be bought. Of course he and Genya would marry. As soon as she was ready.

The first time he had mentioned it to her, it was the night of Nikolai’s coronation. The celebrations had spilled out of the Grand Palace into the gardens, and the two of them had retreated to the banks of the lake. Her scars gave her less trouble now, but he’d still wrapped her in his kefta to keep them from aching in the cold. She was smiling now, soft and dreamy, the amber of her eye almost aglow in the light of distant bonfires. Impulsively, he pressed a kiss to her hair, and felt the shudder of a laugh run through her.

“You don’t have to stay out here for my sake,” she reminded him. “You must be dying to get back to your work.”

“My work will still be there in the morning,” he said, which was usually her line. “Didn’t you say I needed to be seen to celebrate the coronation?”

She tilted her head, pressed a kiss to the edge of his jaw. “And you did beautifully,” she said, which sparked a glow of pride in him even if a part of him couldn’t quite believe it, “but you don’t need to pretend to enjoy parties because I love them. I love you just as you are.”

Words of tenderness did not come easily to Genya, which made them all the more precious to him. “Your parties are beautiful things you’re proud of. I want to appreciate them.”

“Flatterer,” she smirked, but she was preening at the compliment. “What if I’m tired of gaiety and hoping a handsome Fabrikator might steal me away?”

“He'd have to get past me first,” David pointed out, and she tapped on his chest with a giggle at his joke. He loved to hear her laugh, loved that even though he was quiet and slow and barely understood the complex social designs that brought her joy, he could bring that rare, precious sound to her lips as easily as Nikolai. He leaned down to kiss her, as if he could swallow that sweet sound and live on it forever. She kissed him back, fingers tangling in his hair, and he felt as though he'd slipped into position like a cog into a machine after a lifetime out of place.

He drew back to look down at her, to confirm she was really there in his arms. His Genya, his Grisha-steel girl, unbroken, unbreakable.

The words slipped out unformed and clumsy, innocent as a child’s: “Marry me?”

Her lips curved into her lovely crooked smile. “How much kvas did Nikolai hand you at the ball?”

“I mean it,” he insisted, curling a lock of her hair around his fingers. “I want to marry you.”

Her smile broadened, sweetened. “Oh, David. One day, I promise. Give me a little more time as a girl before I have to learn to be a wife?”

She pressed another brandy-sweet kiss to the corner of his mouth, and he realised to his surprise that he was not disappointed. One day was almost a yes, and the war was over now. They had time be a boy and a girl as well as two Grisha, two generals, and he would not deny her a long courtship. He could never deny her anything that made her happy, whether it was trinkets or compliments or time.

The second time he proposed to her, it was less of an accident. It was six months into Nikolai’s reign, and was the only thing that had enticed him to participate willingly in the disorganised, disorderly parade of chaos that was the new king’s first progress around his fragile new realm.

He understood the purpose of it, at least in theory, at least as Genya had explained it to him. The people of Ravka, nobles and peasants alike, may not have been fond of King Alexander Lantsov, Prince Vasily, or the Darkling, but they had at least been familiar faces, known quantities to factor into the equations of daily life, however far they had factored into it. Nikolai was a hero to the First Army, and respected, if grudgingly, by what remained of the Second, but to much of Ravka, he was a stranger. This progress would remedy that, and give the nobles of Ravka no excuse to miss swearing their fealty to the new king.

All this sounded very sensible and therefore like something that did not require any of David’s attention, but for one important fact – the progress would rest at Duva on its tour of the northern territories, and Genya had so far avoided the many invitations he’d extended to visit his childhood home. But Genya was coordinating the court's lumbering progress across the kingdom, and she would be needed at every stop on the journey, including the one she seemed most determined to avoid.

David had lived at the Little Palace almost the year round since he had been brought there as a child, but the hills and forests which surrounded the village and the fortress above it held some strange, halcyon place in his memories, gilded with the pure, perfect sunlight of a world before war and death had come to him. In his memory, the sky was always bluer than Zoya’s kefta, the trees deep green or heavy with snow, the air crisp and pure without the thousand smells of a busy city competing for his attention. In his memory, Duva was a place he had been perfectly, uncomplicatedly happy, and he wanted to share that, not just with Genya, but with Nikolai too. For all that he had once hated Nikolai’s flippancy, the way nothing had ever seemed to truly touch him, a part of him wanted to show him a place of such perfect harmony that even Nikolai and Genya could set aside their masks and lay their armour down, the way they so seldom could in Os Alta now.

So he bore with the progress as it lumbered across the realm, tolerated the constant noise, the lack of privacy and space, even the stench of the latrines. It helped, a little, that Genya was, if anything, more miserable on progress than he was. Not that he wanted her to be miserable, but it helped to know that even his lovely, courageous Genya, who understood the nuances of court far better than he ever could, found the whole process as bothersome as he did. They both missed the comforts of the Little Palace as well as the privacy it had offered them, but Genya particularly suffered whenever the necessities of travel demanded she sleep in a tent, even the most luxurious tent he could requisition for her. Though the Darkling’s death had allowed her scars to heal over, to move more freely and even to walk without a cane or supporting arm most days, the chill of a Ravkan spring and the lack of a feather mattress put an ache in her bones that all her lovely smiles couldn’t conceal. David did the best he could, heating stones for her bedroll and weatherproofing her tent as best he could, but he was grateful when Nikolai noticed her hobbling, and insisted she was billeted inside where possible. ‘Where possible’ wasn’t nearly often enough, though, and as the baggage train wended its way north, towards Duva, her pride bent enough that he overheard her pleading with Nikolai to send her home:

"Surely you can manage the last leg of the journey on your own.” He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but the wall of the tent were thin, and besides, it was the tent they were meant to share. He paused outside the flap, awkward, knowing he was not supposed to hear this, not sure where he should go to avoid it.

Nikolai’s response was warm, teasing. “Genya dear, you should know by now that if I have to suffer the hardships of a royal progress, I can’t be expected to do so alone.”

“Zoya will take care of you,” she retorted, and Nikolai snorted.

“Nazyalensky would sooner bite off my head and hang it on her wall. Besides, I’m picky, and you are better at arranging things the way I like them.”

A put-upon sigh from Genya, though David knew that she enjoyed every reminder that she still had a purpose in the court. “Is this what all your generals have to do? Ensure that nobody feeds you borscht and that you have coffee with your breakfast?”

“It’s what my favourite and most beloved generals do.” There was a coaxing edge to Nikolai’s voice, the way he spoke to their hosts who seemed less than happy to host him. “I could hardly face this journey without you.”

“That would be much more convincing if I didn’t know you’d served several years in the infantry. Did Raevsky make sure nobody fed you borscht then?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Dominik ate it for me.”

“He always was your better half.” There was a silence, the sound of a sniff, then: “Oh, Kolya-”

“No, it’s- it’s just travelling north reminds me of him. Of Halmhend.” A swallow, then Nikolai continued with a pyrite-false brightness: “It’s been a long time, and it will be good to see the north in a new light. Make some new memories, with new friends- and you, of course.”

“Is that why you won’t let me leave the progress?” A pause, then: “It wouldn’t be for long, just a couple of months, but what with the cold, and the travelling... And I still barely know half of what the Corporalki students in the Little Palace are taught. I’m behind enough as it is, if I’m to be their general-”

“You’ll have time for that once the progress returns to Os Alta,” Nikolai reassured her, but David could hear her pacing, boots crunching on the hard-packed dirt. He wondered if there was an adjustment he could make to her boots to make walking and riding more comfortable for her, limit the weight put on the muscles severed by scars, but Nikolai’s next words distracted him entirely: “Besides, I don’t want to leave you in the capital without me. If the Apparat-”

A sharp inhale from Genya, a brief “He wouldn’t dare-”, but Nikolai continued without pause:

“If the Apparat decided to try you, even with the Dragonfly, I might not get back in time,” he finished, and this time, there was no reply from Genya. When Nikolai spoke again, it was into a silence that might have contained those terrible, silent sobs that wracked Genya when she woke from a nightmare. “Genechka, please. I love a gamble as much as any Lantsov, but I can’t risk you.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to seeing Nikolai unarmoured, unmasked, and he would have treated the moment with more delicacy but for the awful, nagging suspicion that beyond the thin wall of canvas, his Genya was weeping, and he was not there to hold her until she came back to herself. Even so, there was a part of him that felt like an intruder as he made a show of blundering into the tent, making as much noise as he could to forewarn them of his presence.

Their heads had been bent together, but they sprung apart like guilty children caught in the act, trying to conceal scrubbing their eyes of any hint of tears in a gesture that was almost painfully similar.

Genya was the first to realise it was only him, and to relax, stepping forward to take his hands. “Did you need something, my love?”

“You haven’t come to steal my favourite general away, have you, cousin?” Nikolai added, a forced note of cheer in his voice that David did not care for.

“Only to see if you were alright,” he replied, with a frown, looking between them. He wasn’t sure what he had expected – he was so seldom sought out as a confidant for emotional rather than mechanical secrets – but something in him was still stung by how quickly they’d set their glittering masks into place again, hiding any sign of their conversation, their shared weakness, even from him. It was unworthy, he knew, and unfair, to expect Genya to turn every corner of her heart over to him, let alone Nikolai, and yet...

And yet he had seen too much of the pyrite-bright masks they wore for the sake of politics since the coronation, and precious little of his friend, his beloved. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of first getting to know them in isolation, but now he struggled to match the pair he’d shared such easy silences with to the glittering courtiers who took their places as soon as anyone else entered the room. Lazlayon had been a blessed respite the first time they had visited, but as the construction had begun, and the cellars filled with Fabrikators and mechanists, he did not see Nikolai and Genya there any more, only the Prince and the general. He saw them often, in meetings and briefings and, with Genya, in the quiet of their shared tent or chambers, and yet... and yet he missed them. He missed the strange, stone-song peace he felt when their masks fell away, and he could see the people beneath them.

And so, as the progress drew closer and closer to the home of his childhood, that fairytale fortress that shone with warmth in his memory, David’s mind was pulled from designs for skyships and skiffs into less practical dreams – Genya in his mother’s garden, spring flowers in her hair. Nikolai and his father, heads bent together as they discussed the building of schools or granaries, the reforms he dreamed of that David only partly understood. A place that could grant them the respite it had once offered him, from a world that forced them into masks and armour for their own safety.

In the gentle haze of his daydreams, he forgot that no place in Ravka was untouched by the war, and Duva was not as he remembered it. The villagers who lined the streets were as gaunt, grey, and haunted as every other crowd they had seen, and the fact that he knew so many of their faces only made it more painful to witness. His mother was gaunter and greyer too, less the image of Anfisa he remembered than a distant echo of Baghra. The father he remembered as taller than the trees and stronger than a bear had dwindled and shrunk until they were of a height, and half his body seemed to be withering away. He’d been a poor correspondent, with the war between him and his family, but surely, surely if his father were so very sick, he would have known-?

In truth, he might not have recognised his own parents in the two aged figures who bowed low as the royal procession approached, but for the fact that they stood at the very gates of Duva itself.

“Moi tsar.” His father’s voice was raspier than he remembered, as if whatever illness had taken his strength had robbed him of his words too. “Duva is yours, its fortress and its lands, its people and its lord, as it was your father’s before you. We owe you our fealty and our love.”

“Especially,” his mother added, “because you have brought our son home to us.”

David felt the eyes of the procession dart around with some bewilderment before finally settling on him, but before he could shrink away from them, Anfisa, with great presence of mind, shoved him into his parents’ arms.

He returned their embraces awkwardly, not just because the touch was unexpected, but because he no longer fit in their arms as he remembered. He was too tall, too ungainly, no longer the child who fit perfectly beneath their chins, and that too was a loss that he had not anticipated. He knew he had changed in his absence, but some part of him had expected to return to a Duva untouched by time, an enchanted kingdom under glass, and it was not so. His parents’ bedchamber had been moved to the ground floor, the better for his father to avoid the stairs, and their old room, the grand chamber of the Counts of Duva since time uncounted, the room where he’d crept in so many times after a nightmare, was given over to Nikolai. The army of servants he recalled were now a skeleton crew of those too old for the fields or the army, though most of them knew him from the days before the Little Palace, before he was Grisha, when he was just the count’s strange little son. They’d looked at him with worry then, and with distrust now, despite his bright violet kefta and the general’s pins on his shoulder. That was a disappointment, too – he'd thought they’d be proud of him, the long-lost son returned a war hero and a general. The people of the Grand Palace had been proud of Nikolai. Then again, Nikolai was easy to like. Nikolai made himself easy to like, and David never could. Even his mother’s garden had changed, the beds that had once been reserved for roses and foxgloves had been overturned to potatoes and beets, practical things to fill bellies rather than simply to delight.

His disappointment must have shown in his face, because his mother pinched his cheek gently. “No need for such moping, umnitsa. There’ll be time for flowers again someday.”

“I know,” he said, and did not know how to tell her that they would not be the flowers he remembered.

As the returning heir, and a general, he was not shown to the room he had shared with his sisters as a boy. The only sister left at home now was Natalya, who’d only been a baby when he left, and barely recognised him now. His trunk and his kit had been deposited in the finest guest room, but there was something sad about them too, something lonely. It took him a moment to realise why – he'd become accustomed to seeing them matched with Genya’s, as if their baggage shared the same bond that they did, the same odkina’vost which pulled them together. He had not slept a night without her since the Spinning Wheel.

His mother’s smile faded from her lips as he asked her where Genya had been billeted, her mouth shrinking into something small and hard as a stone. “She is roomed with General Nazyalensky, as is proper for unmarried ladies,” she said, and something in him felt small and ashamed at her look, and he did not know why.

“We are usually roomed together,” he said, and again, his mother’s eyes narrowed.

“So I have heard,” she said, and there was a chill in her voice that used to precede a scolding. “That may be the way of the army, but we are old-fashioned, here in the country.”

“Old-fashioned?” he frowned. “Is Anfisa staying with Natalya, then?”

She let out a hissing sigh through her teeth. “No, David, she is roomed with her husband, Count Kirigan.”

“Genya-”

“Is not your wife, my son. Wherever she may have come from, I would have you show the same respect to her under my roof as you’d show to the daughter of a general, or a duke.” She folded her arms, as if that was the end of the conversation, as if what she’d just said made any sense at all.

“Of course I respect Genya,” he grumbled to Nikolai and the twins, while Anfisa was showing Genya and Zoya the bathhouse. “She wouldn’t explain why it was so important that Genya room with Zoya instead of me. If she were going to make generals share a room-”

Tolya was nodding along seriously, but Nikolai made a choked sound that caused David to pat him ineffectually on the back before he spoke. “I- I think she might mean a different sort of respect than the one you’re thinking of.”

“A different kind of respect? What other kind is there? She’s brilliant, brave...” It felt like he was stating the obvious, and wondered if perhaps Nikolai and his mother had inhaled some form of poisonous mould during his tour of the castle, but then the odd, static expression crept from Nikolai’s face to Tolya’s as they exchanged a glance that he was excluded from.

“I think the Countess may have been implying that you respect her as a general, rather than a woman,” Tolya said, suddenly very interested in the chess set he was setting up.

“Of course I know that she’s a woman,” he replied, with great patience. “I do notice that much, you know.”

Nikolai continued to sound like he was quietly choking, so David patted him on the back again, which didn’t seem to help at all. If anything, it seemed to make it worse.

“A woman of high station,” Tolya added, looking at him sidelong.

“She’s a general,” he said, offended now on Genya’s behalf.

“Of... equal station to you,” Tolya continued, as if that was a hint.

“She’s a better general than me!”

Tamar let out a groan, discarding the letter she’d been writing. “They’re talking about sex, David.”

“Oh.” He paused, then: “I do know about that too.” Even setting aside his practical experience, it was impossible to be ignorant of such things in the Little Palace. Soldiers and teenagers tumbled into bed together in equal frequency, and even David, who had found the whole thing both embarrassing and unnecessary at the time, could have repeated back the advice about regular visits to Healers and the steps necessary to prevent an ill-timed pregnancy.

Nikolai buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. “You could have as easily said it was a matter of rank,” he complained from that position, his voice still sounding choked.

“I hate you all,” Tamar muttered, but shook her head when David offered her a bewildered apology. “To nobles, there are people you marry, suitable people, chaste people, and there are people you bed. For soldiers, those are often the same people, for nobles...” She gave an expressive shrug. “If she had roomed you together, it would probably have meant that she didn’t think you were serious about her.”

“Of course I’m serious about her.” It was impossible to consider anything else. He had loved Genya since that first day in the workshop when he had covered her hands with his, though he had not had a name for it yet. “I’ve already asked her to marry me once.”

Nikolai’s head snapped up now, his gaze suddenly sharp. “You never mentioned that.”

David shrugged, and hoped the movement would conceal his discomfort. “There was nothing to tell. She said she needed more time.”

“Did she know you meant it?” Nikolai pressed, with a sudden, focused intensity usually reserved for their creations. “Did you offer her the family ring? The bridal kokoshnik of the Countess of Duva?”

“Was I supposed to?” It had been an impulse, his first proposal, but he had meant it with all his heart. He'd not even considered that a proposal might require tools.

“Did you write her a nuptial ode?” Tolya offered, and David shook his head again.

“There’s no romance in your soul at all,” Nikolai said, which seemed very unfair. There hadn’t been a day on the progress where Genya had lacked for a hot stone for her feet, or balm for her scars. “A proposal should be planned, rehearsed, like any good show or campaign. How can you expect to win her hand in marriage if you aren’t prepared to strategize for it?”

“A proposal of marriage should be a declaration of the commitment you are willing to make,” Tolya said, but did not sound entirely like he disagreed with his king. “In The Epic of Kregi-“

“Don’t start,” Tamar groaned, looking at them all like they were hopeless, which was a nice change from that look only being applied to David. “Don’t listen to them. A proposal should be a confirmation of what’s in both your hearts, nothing else.”

It was a confusing muddle of advice. Poetry had never been his strongest suit, and planning a grand display of love, when things as simple as words caught in his throat. But he knew about engineering to know that the first step in any project was gathering the proper tools, so the next day, he sought his mother out.

“May I have the family ring?” he asked, bluntly, when he found her in the kitchens while his father walked the village with Nikolai.

“I suppose you’re of an age for your own signet,” she said, thoughtful, “but I didn’t think politics was of interest to you, umnitsa.”

“Not for me. For Genya.” His mother’s features shifted into a comic o of surprise. “I didn’t think- I don’t want people to think I don’t respect her, that she isn’t my equal. I need to ask her properly, show everyone that- that she should be honoured.”

She was still blinking at him, her mouth hanging open like a fish gasping in air. “Are you- is this not a little soon? The war is hardly over, you have only been a general for a few months-“

“I have not been home in years,” he said, and, when she looked more confused: “I thought it would be just the same as when I left, but it all changed. I changed.”

“And this- this proposal of yours-?”

“It will- it’ll fix things.” It would solder together the child he had been here with the man who had returned, the girl in the workshop with the burning-bright woman she had become. It might even remind Nikolai that he was a boy as well as a king, give him a scheme for his clever mind that did not involve weapons of war. “It will give us something to celebrate.”

A strange, unreadable look crossed his mother’s features, but after a few silent, terrible moments, she looked down at her hands, at their soft, paper-thin skin, so unlike his own, and drew a ring from her own finger. It left a pale ring behind, like a ghost of itself.

“Clean it, before you give it to her,” she said, her voice clipped with some unidentifiable emotion, and he nodded, ducking into the larder to borrow some vinegar.

It was an old-fashioned thing, unlike the elegant, Fabrikator-crafted jewellery he usually gave her, but the small rubies inset within it were a match for her kefta, and the red-gold of the band held almost the lustre of her amber eye. It would suit her, he thought. Duva would suit her – he could imagine the calculating look in her eyes as she examined the Great Hall, the solar, the gardens, all places where her gift for producing beauty and grandeur from nothing at all would shine. She would make it the castle he remembered from his childhood, the hilltop paradise rising from the trees that had once won the heart of a king’s daughter.

Nikolai was already hard at work with his father, examining the meagre stocks left in the granaries, discussing whether a grant from the Crown could assist in the reopening of the mines, the thousand practicalities of rulership that seemed to have passed him by, so he was surprised when the King returned from the village with designs, not for support beams or automated mine doors, but for the garden.

“We only have two more days,” he said, with brisk cheerfulness, “but I intend to ensure that we have something good to celebrate.”

That was how David found himself pouring the last of his stable lumiya from grenatki into empty oil lanterns, carefully sealing the glass closed. It was simple work – even the youngest of his students could have managed it – but there was something soothing in the repetition, something that allowed him to slip away from his fears – for Genya, still at risk from her enemies despite her pardon, for his parents, grown suddenly old and frail in his absence, for his students, grown hollow-eyed and fearful from their visit to the Fold under the Darkling’s wing. Fears of how close he had come to losing all these people during the war. Fears that he might yet lose them, that by the day of their wedding, more of these precious, irreplaceable faces might be gone forever.

He was so lost in the intense focus that drove his worries away, that he did not notice that Genya had entered the room until he felt her heat settle beside him, the weight of her head on his shoulder. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, but did not look up from his work until she spoke:

“What are you working on, my love?”

“A… present.” Nikolai had briefed him on this already. “Mother worries about the servants carrying oil lamps in the granaries. Flour is incredibly flammable, especially when it lingers in the air.”

“Could you use it in explosives?” she asked, curious. “If our spies-“

He shook his head. “There needs to be enough in the air, and that’s hard to achieve outside a granary or a bakehouse. Besides…”

She leant up, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “I know you hate it, but Ravka still needs you to defend it.”

“Bombs don’t defend anything,” he muttered, but he did not wish to quarrel with her, not today. “Have you been sleeping well?”

“As well as can be expected,” she said, which he knew meant not at all. “Your father is- interesting. He invited me to play chess with him in the evening.”

“You should go. It means he likes you.” He could still remember sitting by the fire with a book while his father played chess with Anfisa. “He won’t play with anyone he doesn’t think will give him a good match.”

“What a compliment.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “I took him some of the balm you made me. He said it helped a little with the pain in his back.”

“That was- very strategic of you.” That was Genya, always ensuring they had appropriate gifts for their hosts, that they left the best possible impression of the young king and his court. He did not know how she kept all that in her head, but it did not surprise him that she could manage it anymore. They were as relevant to her work as the properties of titanium and iron were to his.

“I think he might benefit from a wheeled chair like the one you designed for me. I know you never had the chance to build it, but it might help him conserve his strength.”

It might have been that practical element of her nature that he loved the most. So many people seemed to see her love of beauty, of ornament, and thought it shallow, but Genya had shown him a world where beauty held its own uses, its own practicalities. The design she slipped in front of him was both – a modified version of the practical chair he had designed for her, back when walking had been far more agonising and exhausting, designed for the halls, streets, and fields of Duva rather than the caves of the White Cathedral, with something of a throne in its carvings. Something that would make his father look more like a king than a dying man.

“It’s perfect,” he said, and turned to kiss her.

When she returned his kiss, twined her arms around his neck, pressed against him on the narrow bench so he could feel her every soft curve, it was hard to think of anything but Genya. He wanted to drown in the taste of her lips, to breathe only the cinnamon scent of her hair, to help her shrug off her kefta and-

But there was no place to act on those thoughts in Duva, not yet. Under his mother’s roof, he would treat her as he should have always treated her – as a woman to be honoured. The plaintive sound she made as he drew back almost broke his resolve, and if not for the weight of the ring box in  his pocket.

“Nikolai’s asked me to do some research in the library with Tolya, and my father will enjoy playing chess with you,” he said, feeling his brow furrow in regret. Her cheeks were pinked, giving her a softly luminous look, even as she pouted.

“More than you enjoy kissing me?” she teased.

“Nobody enjoys anything as much as I enjoy kissing you,” he replied, seriously, and when she laughed, added: “except possibly Nikolai and blowing things up. He’s upsettingly excited about it.”

She laughed, then. “At least that hasn’t changed,” she said, with a soft, crooked smile. “Will you have time for me tomorrow, at least?”

The strategy began to take shape in David’s mind – Duva at sunrise, the dawn turning the grey stone pink, his bottles of lumiya still shimmering in the trees like fallen stars. “As soon as the sun is up,” he promised. “Nobody will be in the garden, it will be like we’re back in the Little Palace glasshouse.”

“Except colder.”

“And quieter, without the children running around.” It was not the same as their own cosy bedchamber, where she’d picked out the softest sheets and curtains, and found a samovar that warmed to the perfect temperature for tea, but it would be something like the place they were slowly shaping into a home. It would be something like sharing his home with her.

David had been correct in his prediction that researching poetry with Tolya would never be anywhere near as enjoyable as kissing Genya. He could appreciate the other man’s passion for the topic, but there was little, for him, that differentiated one poem from another. They all seemed to use a thousand different words and comparisons to say something that, to him, was as simple and essential to the world as the silent songs of stone.  The poem he eventually settled on was from Kerch, which prompted a disgusted noise from his guide, but if the scheme had been a muddle of Nikolai’s pageantry, Tolya’s poetics, his mother’s propriety, he would at least choose the poetry that made sense to him.

The last piece of his plan was his alone. Working with plants had never been his greatest strength, despite their place in Fabrikator training. Sometimes he wondered if it was a sign, that instruments of death bloomed easily from his fingers, but living things resisted his touch, his will. But this night, he poured his focus into the stems of potatoes and carrots until they brought forth white or violet blossoms, into the trunk of the cherry tree until the air was filled with blossom and colour. He tried, harder than ever before, to listen to the movements of sap and leaf, as if they were the cool, melodic sounds of stone and metal.

He did not notice the sky fading from purple to grey-blue to pink. He’d meant to return to his room, to change into a clean kefta and wash – Genya hated when he returned to their rooms stained with dirt – but somehow, the time slipped away from him again, and when he looked up, she was already there, among the flowers and the bottled starlight, and somehow outshining it all.

“Genya?” he said, and tried to cover a yawn.

“Has my general taken up gardening?” she teased, but stepped forward to kiss him anyway. She glanced around, taking in the blossoms, the lights. “Oh, David. You did all this for me?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly conscious of the sweat and the dirt that lingered on his skin. “The others helped.”

“Is it a special occasion?” she said, lightly. “It isn’t my birthday for another month.”

“You like flowers,” he said, simply. “You deserve- flowers, and poetry, and all the things I don’t understand. But I want you to have them anyway.”

Her lips curved into a playful smile. “As if you don’t spoil me enough already?”

He shook his head. “I- I haven’t done enough of the proper things, gone about them the proper way. I want to make you happy, to honour you-“

Her smile slipped, a furrow appearing between her brows. “My love, what’s this about?”

He was doing it all wrong, he had ruined the romance of his carefully-designed scenery already. “I- I want to do things properly with you.” The poem was a crumpled slip of paper in his pocket, but he knew the words already. He fumbled for them anyway, fingers closing around the ring box, as he began, voice hesitant, uncertain: “I need so much the quiet of your love, After the day’s loud strife-“

“David,” Genya interrupted, taking his clenched hand in hers. “Why are you reading me poetry?”

David blinked. “I was- trying to be romantic.”

She wrinkled her nose. “This isn’t like you. Romance for us is a new pair of goggles, or a warm stone to heat my bed.”

“It can’t be poetry too?”

“It could be, if I thought you actually wanted to read me poems and not engineering manuals.”

“You don’t like the engineering manuals.”

“David, I can hardly sleep without them anymore.” She sighed, trying to unwind his fingers from where they were tightly clenched around the box. “What’s prompted this? Are you worried about something? Was someone- unkind?”

He shook his head. This was all wrong, she was meant to be enchanted, not concerned. “No, nothing- I’m not worried about anything you’ve done,” he tried to clarify. “I just-“ He swallowed, began again: “It’s been brought to my attention that I may have behaved- improperly to you.”

She bit her lip, as she always did when trying to suppress a smile. “Improperly, my love? How so?”

He could feel heat rising to his face, turning it red and blotchy. “In a manner unbefitting of a lady. That is, I respect you as a lady and a general, but I haven’t-“ The words were getting tangled again, coming out in a confused muddle. “I don’t- that is, people should know I respect you. That you are worthy, and brilliant, and-“ His throat was closing up, he did not know what to say, how to make this go right. “People should look at you and see the future Countess of Duva, not some- passing fancy that I don’t respect or care for.” It was not quite the proposal he had intended, but he snapped the ring box open anyway, pressing it into her hands.

“I love you, and I respect you,” he said again, “and I want everyone to know that.”

She blinked at him, head tilted to one side. “Do you think I ever doubted that you respected me?”

“I- I didn’t think so, but-“

“What changed your mind?” she asked, and he felt the weight of her gaze on him, as though she were looking into his very soul.

“My mother- Nikolai- They reminded me that- that things work differently, outside the Second Army. I hadn’t really thought of it before, and it doesn’t really make sense to me yet, but-“

“No more buts,” she said, firmly. She looked down at the ring in her hands, the corner of her mouth pulled sharply down by her scar as if it pained her still. “This is beautiful, David, truly, but it’s all somebody else’s idea. Your mother’s suggestion, Nikolai’s design, Tolya’s poetry… None of it’s yours.”

“They helped me,” he said, quickly, “but they were right. Your reputation-“

“My reputation is nothing, David. Half of Ravka still call me Razrusha’ya, the other half call me the Darkling’s whore.”

The very thought of it enraged him, that anyone could say such things of his clever, beloved Genya. “Then that makes this all the more important. If we married, if they saw that I don’t think such things of you-“

“Then they would think you a fool, and me an enchantress,” she finished for him. “Truly, David, it’s romantic that you worry for my reputation, but… there is something freeing in being a ruin, a disgrace. Now my reputation is nothing, it cannot be taken from me.”

“So you won’t marry me.” His shoulders slumped, the disappointment a sharp stab he had not truly expected.”

“Not like this,” she said, “Not for the sake of my reputation, your mother’s propriety, even Nikolai’s desire to throw a good party. If we marry, it will be about our hearts, not about what others might believe.”

“But-“

She pressed a finger to his lips, soft and tender, looking up at him with that amber eye he could drown in. “I’ve given up so many things I wanted for myself because of what others wanted for me. Let me be selfish, David. Please?”

He could not argue with her, any more than he could resist her. At breakfast that morning, he avoided the gazes of his mother, Nikolai, and the twins, and disappeared into a book whenever they tried to question him on what had passed between him and Genya. Let them think him a coward, or a sulking child. If Genya asked for a little more time, another moment of selfishness, he would give her that. It was a small thing, compared to what he would have been willing to do for her sake. Keeping that fraught, fragile question between his lips was far more difficult.

It was over a year before he asked her again, in the terrible storm that followed Zoya’s return from the Wandering Isle with all her trainee spies but Nina Zenik. Nina had been Zoya’s protégée, the student she’d pushed the hardest, invested the most training in, but if the Etherealnik general mourned her at all, David did not see it. He saw only the sharpened edges of her temper and the vicious knife of her tongue, turned too often now against his students:

“Useless!” she had hissed, advancing towards a young Inferni still struggling to produce flame on command. “All of you, useless! If we were on the front lines, you’d be meat for drüskelle wolves.”

David could not have said what impulse placed him between Zoya and the cowering student, and was almost as surprised as she was to find himself in her path.

“Kostyk,” she said, her tone icy. “You’re in my way.”

“You’re shouting at my students,” he replied, because it was true, and tried not to flinch as she glared up at him.

“Your student? I wasn’t aware you’d become an Etherealnik overnight,” she sniffed.

“The Little Palace is my responsibility. The students are my responsibility,” he reminded her, and she rolled her eyes with a hissing exhale.

“They’re Second Army soldiers, not mewling infants,” she retorted. “They need discipline, not c-”

“Not care?” he interrupted her. “Perhaps if you’d cared more for your trainees, Nina would still be here.”

For a brief, horrifying moment, Zoya looked as if he had slapped her. Then the wind rose, and the air began to crackle with her anger. “How dare you-”

“How dare you!” He felt something inside of him snap, worn thin by rage and grief. “You treat them like tools or gamepieces, and when you lose one, you shrug your shoulders and-”

“I keep my composure, like a general, rather than making a spectacle of my weakness for the whole world to see?” Her lips were almost invisible, her back ramrod straight. “We can’t all afford your soft heart, Kostyk. One of us has to be the strength the Second Army looks to.”

“You think it’s weakness to mourn a child you half-raised?” Her ice-blue gaze usually made him shrink away, but now he could feel only disdain for her. Better disdain than the void of grief that waited below it. “You sound like the Darkling.”

“Enough, David.” He looked down with a start to find Genya pressed between them, pushing them apart, pushing him out of his fury. Anger had never come easily to him, and seldom came at all in Genya’s presence. “That was uncalled for.”

Zoya pursed her lips. “I don’t need you to defend me from your sweetheart, Safin.”

“She was- she was being cruel.” The thready sound of his own voice brought him to himself, and he felt his face begin to heat. He had shamed himself, arguing with his fellow general in full view of their students-

“She was being harsh,” Genya corrected, as if it wasn’t the same thing, “but she was preparing them the realities they’ll face in battle. Drill sergeants won’t be as gentle with our recruits as you are.”

“She didn’t-” He swallowed something shaped like a sob, then continued: “It wasn’t enough to save Nina. What’s the point of harshness if it doesn’t even save them?”

“We’re raising Second Army soldiers, Kostyk. With the best will in the world, we’ll never be able to save all of them.” Zoya’s voice was softer now, her face shadowed beneath her hair.

“If we could save them all, we would,” Genya said, squeezing his arm gently. “But for now, we have to prepare them to survive without us. And Zoya has a gift for surviving, despite her frankly insufferable personality.”

This backhanded compliment seemed to shake Zoya from that glassy, unreadable state. She tossed her hair back from her face, returning to her usual sharp-edged serenity. “Well, while this has been a lovely impromptu meeting, unless there’s something important you wanted to discuss-?”

“Run along and find someone else to bully,” Genya dismissed her. “I hear Raevsky’s visiting the Grand Palace, you can pick on him.”

She looped her arm through David’s, turning him away from Zoya and towards the chambers they shared. The walls of the Little Palace, now stained with vivid colour, suddenly seemed too fragile for the precious beings they contained, too flimsy to protect the fragile bodies of those he loved. He felt a sudden, sharp ache for the thick walls of Duva, where he’d always felt so safe. It was a fort, not a palace, practical rather than lovely, but all the better to protect its precious contents.

Genya did not say a word as she deposited him on an overstuffed settee, but busied herself by the fire, heating a samovar for tea. She only spoke again when she’d filled his cup to the brim.

“It’s not like you, to quarrel with Zoya.”

It was a statement, not a question, but it still felt like an embarrassing reminder of his lack of dignity. He almost snatched the too-hot cup from her hands, squirming beneath her level amber gaze. “It was- beneath my station, I know-”

She shook her head, cupping his hands with her own. Her touch washed over his burned fingers like a balm. “That’s not what I meant. You’re angry with her.”

He pressed his fingers against the metal of his cup, trying to seek out the right words from the burning in his fingertips. “She- she was meant to look after Nina. She failed her. I failed her-”

“Accidents happen in the field,” Genya reminded him. “Nina knew that, and still wanted to learn-”

“Zoya said she wasn’t ready,” he said, the words tumbling out almost as one. “You said she was too rash, too careless, but I argued that she should go, that she was old enough for fieldwork, that- she begged me to argue for her, Genya.”

“And you believed in her,” Genya said. “That doesn’t make what happened your fault. Or Zoya’s.”

He snorted. “Zoya’s not losing any sleep over her part in Nina’s-” He couldn’t say death. He could not picture lively, clever Nina on a Fjerdan pyre, “in her disappearance.”

Genya paused, then said, carefully: “I think you’re wrong about Zoya. The two of you are more similar than you realise.”

He snorted, disbelieving despite himself. Zoya was never lost for a sharp word or cutting witticism. Zoya knew exactly what to say to get her own way, and used that knowledge with surgical precision. Zoya could attend council all day, dance all night, and still know more about how the Etherealki students were keeping up with their lessons than David ever could. Sometimes he envied her ruthless efficiency. Sometimes- sometimes he looked at her, and saw who the Darkling might have been once. It frightened him.

“I am nothing like her,” he said, because it was true, and he would not lie to Genya.

She gave him one of her lovely, crooked smiles. “Neither of you find it easy to speak what’s in your heart, but I know you well enough to see it. You’re both cutting yourselves to pieces with grief and guilt, and turning those blades on each other when punishing yourself isn’t enough.”

“If Nazyalensky turned a blade on me, I’d already be dead,” he retorted, taking refuge in literalism rather than admitting Genya might have a point, “but at least it would show she cared for Nina.”

Genya sighed then, looking suddenly weary. She looked pale, he realised, and he wondered, with a twist of guilt, if his resentment of Zoya had put more work on her shoulders. He hated the thought that he had added to her burdens through his actions, however unintentionally.

“Of course she cared,” she said, and he could hear the weariness bleeding in her tone now, making her sound short and impatient with him. “We all care for the little ones, David, and Zoya... she was my student first, but Nina idolised her. You think she didn’t feel that weight, that she doesn’t feel that loss?”

He dropped his gaze to his hands, still wrapped around his tea cup, the steam on the tea wisping away into the cool morning air. He did not want the guilt that gnawed at his breastbone along with the grief, but it chewed at him anyway.

“What was the point of it all, Genya?” he said, softly. "We fought, and we sacrificed, and- I thought it would keep them safe. I didn’t think-” He swallowed, the words catching and tangling in his throat, in his guilt.  “I wanted to be a better leader than him, keep children from becoming soldiers like we were, but- I failed. I failed her, Genya. I’m failing all of them, I can’t- I can’t keep them safe.”

 The admission tore from him like a sob and he hated it, this final revelation of his weakness, of his failure, brought out from the veils of rage and blame he’d cast over it. Despite himself, he half-expected to hear the click of Genya’s heels moving away from him, disgusted by the truth of his nature, his weakness. He knew, as he felt her hand on his cheek, turning him to look at her, he had done her a disservice. Genya had always been strong enough for both of them. He wished that he was strong enough to protect her.

“This is the only home most of the children here can remember,” she said, gently, “but we can’t keep them here forever. Nobody’s parents can protect them from everything. My parents couldn’t keep me from the Darkling. Yours’ and Nikolai’s couldn’t keep you from the war. We couldn’t protect Nina from the drüskelle, but that doesn’t mean you failed her. It doesn’t mean you’re failing the others.”

“I could have done more,” he said, “I should have done more.”

Hands over his, gently removing the cup from between his fingers. Arms looped around his neck, thick wool scratching through the thin linen of his undershirt. The comforting weight of Genya settled into his lap and he buried his face in her neck, ashamed and grateful in equal measure. Her skin still smelt cinnamon-sweet and warm, as it had when they were children.

“You did all you could,” she murmured. “We all did. Sometimes that isn’t enough to save the children it should.”

Her words were warm and comforting, but still lacked the ring of truth that his guilt possessed. Even if she was right, even if he had done all that was possible to save Nina Zenik, there were other children in his care, others he might fail  through grief-stricken absence, or worse, through dying with some crucial task unfinished that would preserve them. He was already failing Genya, he could see it in the pigment she had pulled into her cheeks to cover the pallor of exhaustion, in the dark circles beneath her eyes that she smoothed to ivory every morning. 

“Genya,” he murmured into her neck. “Don’t let me keep failing you." In his arms, she remained soft and tranquil, but he could still recall how brittle she had once been, as though if she thawed she would break. He wanted to hold her like that forever, warm and safe enough to be softer, gentler. He wanted to see her safe in Duva, where death had never come calling. “I can’t fail you again. Not like he did.”

“You haven’t failed me,” she said, drawing back to look at him, without leaving the circle of his arms. “You’re nothing like him.”

He shook his head. “I don’t- he did terrible things, but at least he was strong enough that he could have protected people. If he’d been a better man, a better General-”

“Alina couldn’t protect everyone either,” she reminded him, and he did not say that Alina had barely been a general at all. “Nikolai can’t protect everyone. He never could. I-” She gave a bitter little laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever protected anyone, when it really mattered. You cannot take every loss on your shoulders alone.”

He wished it was true. He wanted it to be true. But he had made grenatki, and rifles, and every wound caused by his creations stained his hands. What was a little more responsibility, when he bore guilt for so much suffering already? What had the Darkling been to him, beyond a convenient cover for the consequences of his creations? He would not – could not – disavow his responsibilities so easily again. Not to Ravka. Not to Genya.

He wove his fingers through hers, not daring to look at her brilliant, beautiful face for fear it would overwhelm him. “Marry me,” he said, repeating his words from a year ago, a plea, a promise. He would not disavow her, in life or in death, and the world had to know it.

She stiffened in his arms. “What?”

“Marry me,” he repeated, with greater urgency. “I need- I can’t fail you, and if anything happened to me-”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” she said, her voice pitched high in confusion or fear. “Nina was a field agent-”

“Nina was brilliant and fierce and we still lost her,” he interrupted. “It could happen. You said yourself, we can’t protect everyone. But if we were married-”

“Your parents would disown you!”

“If we were married,”  he continued, heedless of her interruption, “you’d be the Countess of Duva. My family would have to welcome you, protect you-”

“David-”

“You’d have allies beyond me and Nikolai,” he pleaded, desperate for her to understand that this made sense, that it would keep her safe. That he had a duty to her and would see it through. “If we had children-”

“If?” she echoed. He could feel her eyes upon him, staring as if he’d run mad. “You know it’s rare for two Grisha-”

“But not impossible,” he countered. “It’s happened before, and if- if it happened with us, I’d want you to be mine, to be safe and cared for-”

She yanked away from him, starting to her feet. “You’re not listening to me,” she said, and there was an edge of panic or frustration to her voice that he could not identify but did not like. “I’m a Grisha and a general and I don’t need your hand in marriage to protect me-”

“But if it could help you-”

“Or it could chain me.” She turned her back on him in a swirl of skirts. “You don’t understand-”

“I’m not stupid, Genya. If I don’t understand, help me.”

She did not return to the comfortable settee by the fire, but began to pace, her fingers knotted over her stomach.

“I know you think this will help, but- marriage can be a cage, not a doorway.”

“You think I want to imprison you?”

“I didn’t say that!” She shook her head, as if to dismiss the thought, but he still didn’t understand. “I meant- I've spent most of my life being owned, and you ask me to go back to it? To put myself in your hands, to become your property-”

“You could never be my property,” he corrected. “If anything-”

“The law says otherwise,” she snapped. “Did you know there are villages in Ravka where they say a wife is cheaper than a mule? And you don’t have to feed the wife as well, either.”

He had not known this, and felt a thin coil of shame at this awareness. “A husband owes his wife a duty of protection-”

“And I know you’d already protect me!” she said, but it did not sound like agreement. “I don’t need to belong to you for- for us to be happy!”

He tried to reach for her hand. “Genya, please-”

She pulled away. “Please, David. If you love me, don’t bind me to you like this.”

His hand dropped to his lap. Genya raised hers to her face, and strode from the room, taking the warmth and colour with her as she left.

She dined with him as usual that evening, and kissed him goodnight in their usual fashion, but there was an edge of deliberate reassurance to her actions which did not provide him the comfort she’d clearly intended. He knew he’d made a mistake somewhere, pushed too far or missed a signal he should have readily understood, but whatever he’d done to cause Genya’s uncharacteristic loss of composure, it was beyond him to figure out.

Instead, he sought council from his usual advisor in matters of social intrigue, and went to bother Nikolai. For most people, he hoped, it was more difficult to find and bother the King of Ravka, but he and the twins had spend the first few months of Nikolai’s reign mapping the secret passageways of the Grand Palace, and some of them could only be opened by Fabrikator artifice. A trick of the Darkling’s, most likely, but useful for David now, especially as he knew when he was most likely to find Nikolai alone rather than surrounded by ministers, generals, or overeager debutantes. For all that a consistent routine was, as the twins liked to point out, an assassination risk, Nikolai’s years on campaign and at sea had given him an unmatched appreciation for the banya. On the one hand, this provided David with a reliable time to speak privately with the king whenever he wished to. On the other hand...

“If you’re an assassin, you’re doing a terrible job at hiding.” Nikolai sounded unreasonably cheerful for a man at risk of assassination in his own bathhouse. This was, David reflected, possibly why many people might wish to assassinate him. “If you’re a debutante, the bedroom is-”

“It’s me,” he said, stepping out of the steam before more detailed instructions could be provided to the imagined enterprising noblewoman. “I came to talk-”

“David.” Nikolai sounded practically gleeful, which was never a good sign. Presumably he had a new design he wanted to talk through. “It’s been a while since we were of an age to take baths together, cousin, but I’m willing to take one for old times’ sake-”

“I need your help,” he interrupted, before Nikolai could divert the conversation any further than he already had. “Please don’t make any innuendos before I’ve finished explaining the situation, you know I won’t understand them and there’s no point in you explaining them to me again.”

“Killjoy,” Nikolai muttered, but gestured to the currently-unheated sauna bench. “What’s on your mind? Some new Kerch invention you want to get hold of? A rogue Fabrikator that Genya wants you to track down? More reports on that Starless cult worrying you?”

David shook his head. “Much worse than that, or I wouldn’t be bothering you. Genya and I had an argument.”

“Genya and you-” Nikolai buried his face in his hands with a sigh, before looking up with half a frown. “Wait, Genya had an argument with you? I got rid of Zoya less than half an hour ago-”

“I’ll apologise to her later,” he said, trying to force Nikolai to focus on the issue at hand. “Genya and I never argue, you know that.”

“So what precipitated this improbable argument?” Nikolai asked, raising one acerbic eyebrow. “Are you here to ask me to make her be reasonable, or to get your word in before she asks me to punish you? Because-”

“Neither!” he replied, affronted. “I wanted your advice, but if you’re going to keep making jokes, I’ll write to Alin- Anya instead.”

Nikolai’s face twisted as he tried (unsuccessfully) to smooth any hit of mockery from his features. “Alright, I’m sorry, I’m listening. You and Genya quarrelled. Is she alright? Is she still angry with you?”

He gnawed at his lip, uncertain. “She wants me to think she’s not angry with me. Or she wants me to not be angry with her, I’m not sure, but- I didn’t want to make her angry. I wanted to make her feel safe, I just- made a mistake somewhere, and I don’t know what it was.”

“What did you do?”

David shrugged helplessly. “I asked her to marry me again. I thought- she said “one day”, and I wanted to make it now. I want to make sure that if anything happened to me, she’d be safe, cared for.”

“She’d be cared for anyway,” Nikolai pointed out, but David shook his head.

“Not if something happened to both of us. I don’t want to leave her dependent on the kindness of one person, even if that’s you. I thought- if we were married, if our children- if we have children – if they were the heirs to Duva, my family would have to protect her just as much as they would me or Anfisa, whatever happens to us. She’d have allies. She always brings up the need for marriage alliances in council, so I thought...” He tailed off, unable to quite draw the connection between his and Nikolai’s own marital situations.

“But she said no?” Nikolai pressed, and David nodded in confirmation. “Why?”

David was silent for a moment, focusing his attention on smoothing out the grain of the wood on the rough bench he was sitting on. He needed to remember what she’d actually said, beneath the tangle of hurt and rejection that surrounded it in his mind, or Nikolai wouldn’t really be able to help at all.

“She said... She said she didn’t need me to protect her. That marriage could be a cage, not a doorway. That my parents would disown me. But I don’t care if my parents disown me, and I’d never want to keep her in a cage. I just want to make sure that whatever happens, she’s safe. Isn’t that what a marriage is for?”

He recalled his mother gazing up at his father, an indulgent smile upon her lips: My strong protector, she had called him. His father holding him on his lap during the trial of a cruel husband, murmuring in his ear: Remember, a good lord and a good husband protects those in his care. Even foolish Kirigan carrying Anfisa over the threshold after their wedding, his arms shaking but still determined to prove he was strong enough to keep her safe.

Nikolai seemed thoughtful when he eventually spoke in reply. “I wish I could agree with you, but she has a point.”

It was not what David had wanted to hear, precisely, but there was something reassuring in Nikolai understanding Genya’s perspective even when he did not.

Nikolai continued: “Plenty of couples in Ravka marry for love, but according to the Knizhka Sankt Lukin... a wife is to serve and obey her husband as she would the Apparat himself, and plenty of men – and their families – interpret it to give them ownership of new brides, their property, and their children. Any children would belong to you and your family before they belonged to her.”

“I would never- my family would never-“

“You might trust them with your life and your heart, but can you ask that of her, after all the betrayals she’s faced?” Nikolai shook his head. “If she left you, she wouldn’t even get to keep her pension. The priesthood only let us recruit young women to the Army if it wouldn’t encourage them to abandon their marriages, and my grandfather apparently agreed with them.”

He wanted to say that was impossible, that she would never leave him, that he would never prove unworthy of her. But he’d once thought that the Darkling would always rule the Second Army, that his every order was just and clever. He had not recognised that leader he’d believed in in the man who’d coldly ordered Alina collared and Genya tortured. If one day, he became someone he did not recognise, someone she could no longer forgive…

“She said it was a cage,” he repeated, and now saw what she had meant. “I don’t want that for her. I want her to have… everything. Freedom, happiness…”

“All the world and a new pair of ice skates,” Nikolai murmured, then shook his head with a pensive look. “If she had a noble family, her own source of wealth, it might be different.”

“She’s a general,” David reminded him with a frown. “She has a stipend.”

“Her stipend is more than most in Ravka could dream of, but it doesn’t give her the resources to fight a legal battle with a noble family, especially in the church courts.” He sighed. “Besides, her rank provides her some protection, but she may never have the people’s respect the way Zoya does. Too many still see her as a traitor.”

“But you pardoned her! She’s a general, she lives at court-“

“But that isn’t enough to rewrite her past.” Nikolai slumped deeper into the water. “I wish I could help you now, truly. But changing the law on marriage to a more equal contract, like they have in Kerch or Novyi Zem, will take time, and I can’t change history.”

David was silent for a few minutes, mulling this over. “What if we could, though?”

“Change the law?”

“Change history, too.”                                   

It was not a certain plan. It might not achieve anything, or take far too long to ever make Genya feel safe enough to consider marriage. But it might make her safer, and that would be worth every moment of scheming and politicking that Nikolai would drag him into to pay for it. When he returned to the Little Palace, it was the knowledge of his plan that gave him the courage to seek Genya out in her study, to make amends for their disagreement the day before. She did not look up as he entered, but turned her head to capture his lips with her own when he leant down to place a kiss on her cheek.

“You’re not angry with me?” she asked, with a crooked smile. “You were gone when I woke up this morning.”

“I needed to talk to Nikolai. Not because I was angry,” he added, hastily, in case she thought he was avoiding the question, “because I didn’t understand. I understand now. Marriage... I never thought it could be a cage. I thought it was about alliance, about protecting those you care for. I thought it would help you, not trap you.”

Her lips were still curved in that sweet, crooked smile, but there was something soft and sad in her amber eye. “That's very romantic of you, David. It’s hard to see a cage when you think you’re looking at a sanctuary.”

“It should be a sanctuary,” he said, an emotion he couldn’t quite name filling his chest. He could see Genya gazing up at the Darkling as though he held her heart in his hands, Nikolai’s distant horror at his parents’ cruelty, Alina’s wail as the collar clicked about her throat- “Love isn’t- love shouldn’t be a chain.” The world held too many chains already.

A sudden warmth bloomed in his fingertips – Genya catching his hands in her own, Genya pressing her lips to his fingertips, a gesture so tender he felt his cheeks flush despite their privacy.

“You were the one who taught me that,” she said, her voice low and husky. Her gaze was molten gold, soft and bright and burning. “You were the first person to show me love could be a key, not a cage.”

That strange sensation in his chest, so fierce, so tender, coiled so tight around his neck that he could not speak, even as Genya raised one of her hands to caress his cheek.

“You told me once you didn’t understand poetry or sunsets or romance, but I never met anyone at court who knew how to love the way you do. Nikolai and I- we grew in the same soil, we learned to love selfishly. Whatever we loved could be snatched away by someone more powerful, and we would have to fight tooth and nail or let it go. You- you love like possession has nothing to do with it, like you can’t imagine anyone loving differently. You’re a marvel, David.”

What could he say to that? Words failed him – words would always fail him – but Genya’s were truer and more precious than Grisha steel.

“I’m going to change the law,” he said, because it was true. “Not so you have to marry me, but- so if you ever wanted to, it would be safe. You wouldn’t have to trust me or Nikolai to protect you, the law will, like it would in Kerch, or Novyi Zem.”

The law should always have protected her, but she didn’t say as much. She just gazed at him with the wondering affection that he could never quite understand. “Marriage means that much to you? Marrying me is worth changing the law?”

He shook his head. “You are worth changing the law for. Anyone who knows you would agree with that.”

He felt her hands curl in the lapels of his shirt, and she pulled him down to her to kiss him fiercely. He returned her kiss, and let his hands and his mouth tell her what his fumbling words never could.

Later, much later, they lay tangled on the rug before the fire. The flames were caught and scattered in the red of Genya’s hair, in the amber of her eye, in the drowsy contentment that hummed through her as she curled against him. The world was, for once, perfectly quiet, as if the noise and bustle of the Little Palace had settled into the silent harmonies of stone-song.

“I never realised marriage was so important to you.” He almost jumped at Genya’s voice, low and husky as it was. “We never really spoke of it. I... I suppose I never really thought I’d marry at all.”

“Should I have told you sooner?”

She shook her head, her hair tickling his cheek. “I could have asked about it, about children. It just seemed so unlikely, with the war, and... it all seemed so distant, like this was a lovely dream and some day I would wake up. Like the future was always going to hold something terrible so the only time that mattered was now.”

“It still might,” David said, “That’s why it matters. That even if we don’t have forever, I do everything I can now to make sure you’re safe and happy.”

“You already make me happy,” Genya reminded him, pressing a kiss to his cheek, “which is more than most wives in Ravka can say of their husbands.” She hesitated, then: “I didn’t see many happy marriages at court, but... it is important to you, and that matters to me.”

“Not as much as you matter to me,” he hastened to assure her, but she shook her head.

“I know. I believe you, when you say you want to give me a choice. But...” she hesitated, then continued: “if changing the law takes too long, and you get tired of waiting for me to change my mind, tell me? If we can’t marry in Ravka, there’s Kerch, and Novyi Zem, the Wandering Isle... there’ll be a place for us, somewhere the laws are kinder.”

“And leave Ravka?” It was an impossible picture, that his foolish wish could drive her from their home when all she had suffered could not.

“If that’s where we can be together the way you want us to. Besides,” she added, with a smile, “it means we’ll always have Ketterdam.”

It was a lovely promise, and he had no doubt that she meant it, but he would not hold her to it. Not when he and Nikolai still had their plan to enact. Unfortunately, because he’d sought Nikolai’s advice rather than Alina’s, it involved attending a party. Alina would never have suggested parties as a solution to anything, and whenever he was dragged to one by Nikolai and Genya, he could see why she’d chosen to fake her death rather than go to any more of them, but this time, he was ready almost an hour before his beloved, his kefta clean and neatly pressed, his face clean-shaven from a week’s worth of stubble, and his hair ruthlessly slicked back into some kind of order thanks to one of Genya’s tonics.

Genya herself was sat on the edge of their bed, eyeing the beautiful gown that the palace seamstresses had crafted as if it might bite. David understood the feeling, but Genya loved parties, loved any excuse for music and dancing, especially if he’d emerged from his workshop in order to be swept along with her.

“Are you feeling sick?” he asked, with a frown, and she tilted her head, bewildered.

“Do I look ill?” she replied, turning to the mirror to scrutinise her appearance.

“You look beautiful,” he said, because it was true. Genya, in her white silk slip, gleamed like a pearl in the deep reds and violets she had decorated their bedchamber in, “but you don’t look excited. You’re usually excited for parties.”

“I’m excited to plan parties,” she corrected him. “This is the first one Nikolai’s remembered to invite me to as a guest, rather than as his chatelaine.”

“And that’s different?”

“Of course it’s different, darling.” She folded her arms, sinking back against their quilt. “His guests could politely ignore me as a chatelaine, but in that thing…” She gestured to the gown, its sweeping neckline, the curves of golden embroidery on vivid Lantsov blue, the dainty cap sleeves that would leave her shoulders bare, “I’ll hardly look like a member of the King’s staff in that.”

“You’ll look glorious, like a general, like a queen.”

“Exactly.” Her hands were folded over her stomach, tangling together as they always did when she was worried. “Do you think the soldiers of Ravka want to be reminded that Razrusha’ya was given command of an army?”

He sat down on the opposite side of the bed, reaching back to smooth a hand through her hair. “You really think Nikolai and I would let anyone insult you?”

“I think things are… easier when people can forget I am anything more than a servant of the court. To remind them of the station Alina gave me, to parade my scars like I’m some great beauty of the court…”

Her voice trailed off, uncertain, and he hated that uncertainty, that she could be so unsure of her worth, her grace.

“You will always be the most beautiful person in any room, whether it’s a court or a cave,” he said to her, and it was both a truth and a promise, “and you deserve to be able to enjoy the things you love creating. Try it, just for tonight? We can always leave early if you hate it.”

He felt her weight shift behind him, and heard her sit upright in a swish of fabric. “David Kostyk,” she demanded, “Are you asking me to go to a party?”

Nikolai had chosen the gown well – Genya’s hair glowed like living fire in contrast to it, and the golden suns embroidered on the bodice and eyepatch gave her eyes a luminous quality that he’d never be able to capture in metalwork. In the candlelit ballroom, with sapphire pins glinting in her hair, she looked like a storybook princess come to life. Even so, as they moved through the ballroom, the crowds left a space around her as though she were something too lovely, too precious to touch, and she shrank against him, as if the weight of their eyes upon her suddenly dragged at her as much as it did him. The way the nobles cleared around them was useful to David, though – his last responsibility for the evening was almost complete, as he moved them into position at the base of the stairs.

The crowd fell silent as the fanfare announced the entrance of the young king. Nikolai’s coat was cut from the same deep blue silk as Genya’s gown, the suns emblazoned on his shoulders like military epaulettes.

“My dear friends,” he began, addressing the crowd from the top of the stairs, “you have come tonight to honour all those who have sacrificed in the name of Ravka, be it from their families, their hopes, or-“ and here he nodded to a West Ravkan duke who’d profited most from the war, “our purses. We have had many such ceremonies, to honour our brave sons with medals and military honours, but what of Ravka’s daughters?”

The crowd was hushed, confused by this sudden turn from the usual courtly formalities. “Our villages and towns are full of mothers who’ve sent sons and daughters to the war, and from among those daughters, one rose to save Ravka from the darkness of its division.”

A murmur began to sweep the crowd – Sankta Alina, Rebe Dva Stolva – and David could only hope it was approving as Nikolai continued: “I invited you here tonight in the honour of all these women, these first members of the Noble Order of Sankta Alina, and it seems only proper that the Saint should have already chosen the first member of the order that bears her name.”

A dramatic pause, the crowd glancing around as though expecting someone to burst from its midst at Nikolai’s words. Beside David, Genya was so very still. He was not even certain she was breathing.

“When Sankta Alina came to the Little Palace, many sought her friendship, but she chose a girl who shared her understanding of service to Ravka as her first companion – not a trained soldier, but the ward who had been my mother’s most beloved companion, the light of my father’s declining years.”

It was not the truth, but it was perhaps what the truth should have been, and he prayed that Genya would forgive him for his complicity in overwriting her past with something these cold, callow people could more easily comprehend. Her hand, still wrapped around his, was white-knuckled, and when he glanced sidelong at her expression, her lips were pressed tight together, her eyes shining with an emotion he could not name.

Nikolai seemed almost unable to look at her as he continued: “For her loyalty to the Crown and to the Saint, the Darkling held her hostage, hoping that in breaking her, he would break Ravka, and all those who loved her. But Genya Safin did not break, not from the Darkling’s torture, or from the cruel rumours of treason that have been her only recompense for the suffering she has endured. Even in these halls, where she should be most beloved-“ Here, Nikolai injected a note of surprised grief into his voice, “Even here, I hear whispers that she is called Razrusha’ya, the Ruined One. Is this how Ravka treats her daughters? Are her scars not greater marks of heroism than every medal a soldier has been awarded?” Nikolai held out a hand, and, with a deferential bow, one of the Soldat Sol presented him with a simple wooden box.

“It is for her courage,” he continued, “and for Alina’s love, that I call her forward now. Genya Safin, General of the Second Army?”

He extended his empty hand towards her, and for a moment, David feared they had gone too far in their efforts to repair her reputation, overwritten truths that they should have aired. But he had underestimated Genya’s courage – she stepped forward with the calm elegance of the princess he had once believed her, and sank to her knees in a graceful curtsey at Nikolai’s feet, as if it was a dance she had rehearsed for all her life.

“Your majesty,” she said, and her voice was low, but somehow echoed across the ballroom’s marble floors, “I am unworthy of such honour.”

“No-one could be more worthy,” Nikolai replied, his voice suddenly softer, as if meant for her ears alone, and adjusted his grip to her wrist, helping her rise. For the crowd, he continued: “You kneel to nobody, Genya Safin. You are the inaugural member of the Order of Sankta Alina, and you shall be called, not Razrusha’ya, but Rebe Ravka, our most beloved sister. In place of our beloved saint, you shall induct new members into her order, and ensure the light we saw in her is honoured in Ravka’s other daughters.”

There was a moment of silence as he pinned the medal to the shoulder of her gown, and in that moment, to David, he saw again that odkina’vost they shared, that likeness in their bearings, the tilt of their heads, the curve of their smiles, and the strange joy it brought him was almost painful, that these two people he so cared for still shared that sameness.

There was applause from somewhere in the crowd that rippled outwards as Nikolai swept Genya a bow. “Rebe Ravka,” he said, as formally as if they’d never met before. “Would you do me the honour of opening the ball in my company?”

“Of course,” she said, and her lips curved into a new, sweeter smile, still crooked, still Genya, but lacking the loneliness that hung in the corners of her mouth, the shadows that still sometimes hung in her eyes.

The musicians struck up the sounds of the first dance, and David quickly shrunk back to the walls, where he could avoid being roped in before Genya could partner him again. It was not the wedding he had hoped for, but as David watched Nikolai and Genya weave between the other dancers, it felt, suddenly, like some piece of the world that had been out of joint for far too long had finally clicked back into place. It felt like they had come home.

Notes:

I can't believe we are finally here! This fic has taken me over a year to finish, but we got there in the end. I was originally planning to include their wedding in this chapter, but it turned out that was a story for another time. Please give me all your thoughts and your comments, and I hope this makes up for all the tears have inflicted on you!

I hope I will be back with a mini sequel covering the Ketterdam wedding soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy this gorgeous fanart by @eyes-like-alexandrite on Tumblr, which reduced ME to tears!

https://www.tumblr.com/eyes-like-alexandrite/746381147649540096/grand-duke-nikolai-lantsov-of-ravka-pictured

I love you all, I wish you the best, and I hope this chapter feels like a warm place to leave these characters we love so much.

Notes:

Ravkan dictionary

Kolya - Diminuitive of Nikolai
borscht - beetroot soup
vatrushka - sweet buns filled with cream cheese and fruit
Madraya - mum, mama
Avva - dad, papa
kotichka - kitten
sobachka - puppy
sharlotka - apple cake
pomdrakon - a game played by soaking raisins in brandy, setting them on fire, and trying to pick them up while they're burning

Find me on Tumblr or Twitter as @lottiesnotebook. I don't post much more than fic updates, but I love hearing from people there!