Siege and Storm

CHAPTER 21

I DRIFTED THROUGH the half-light, past the silent lawns covered in mist, the clouded windows of the greenhouse. The only sound was the soft crunch of my shoes on the gravel path. The morning deliveries of bread and produce were being made at the Grand Palace, and I followed the caravan of wagons straight out the gates and through the cobblestone streets of the upper town. There were still a few revelers about, enjoying the twilight. I saw two people in party dress snoozing on a park bench. A group of girls laughed and splashed in a fountain, their skirts hiked up to their knees. A man wearing a wreath of poppies sat on a curb with his head in his hands while a girl in a paper crown patted his shoulder. I passed them all unseen and unremarked upon, an invisible girl in a drab brown coat.

I knew I was being foolish. The Apparat’s spies might be watching, or the Darkling’s. I might be seized and hauled away at any moment. I wasn’t sure it mattered to me anymore. I needed to keep walking, to fill my lungs with clean air, to shake the feeling of the Darkling’s hands on my skin.

I touched the scar at my shoulder. Even through the fabric of my coat, I could feel its raised edges. Aboard the whaler, I’d asked the Darkling why he’d let his monster bite me. I’d thought it was out of spite, so I would always wear his mark. Maybe there had been more to it than that.

Had the vision been real? Was he there, or was he something my mind had conjured? What sickness was inside of me that I would dream such a thing?

But I didn’t want to think. I just wanted to walk.

I crossed the canal, the little boats bobbing in the water below. From somewhere beneath the bridge, I heard the wheeze of an accordion.

I floated past the guard gate and into the narrow streets and clutter of the market town. It seemed even more crowded than it had before. People hung off stoops and overflowed from porches. Some played cards on makeshift tables made of boxes. Others slept propped up against each other. A couple swayed slowly on a tavern porch to music only they could hear.

When I came to the city walls, I told myself to stop, to turn around and go home. I almost laughed. The Little Palace wasn’t really home.

There is no ordinary life for people like you and me.

My life would be allegiance instead of love, fealty instead of friendship. I would weigh each decision, consider every action, trust no one. It would be life observed from a distance.

I knew I should go back, but I kept on, and a moment later, I was on the other side of the wall. Just like that, I’d left Os Alta.

The tent city had grown. There were hundreds of people camped outside the walls, maybe thousands. The pilgrims weren’t hard to find—I was surprised to see how their numbers had increased. They crowded near a large white tent, all facing east, awaiting the early sunrise.

The sound began as a swell of rustling whispers that fluttered on the air like the wings of birds and grew to a low hum as the sun peered over the horizon and lit the sky pale blue. Only then did I begin to make out the words.

Sankta. Sankta Alina. Sankta. Sankta Alina.

The pilgrims watched the growing dawn, and I watched them, unable to look away from their hope, their expectation. Their faces were exultant, and as the first rays of sun broke over them, some began to weep.

The hum rose and multiplied, cresting and falling, building to a wail that raised the hair on my arms. It was a creek overflowing its banks, a hive of bees shaken from a tree.

Sankta. Sankta Alina. Daughter of Ravka.

I closed my eyes as the sun played over my skin, praying I would feel something, anything.

Sankta Alina. Daughter of Keramzin.

Their hands lifted heavenward, their voices rose to a frenzy, shouting now, crying out. Old faces, young ones, the sick and the frail, the healthy and the strong. Strangers every one.

I looked around me. This isn’t hope, I thought. It’s madness. It’s hunger, need, desperation. I felt as if I were waking from a trance. Why had I come here? I was more alone among these people than behind the palace walls. They had nothing to give me, and I had nothing to offer them.

My feet ached, and I realized just how tired I was. I turned and began pushing my way back through the crowd, toward the city gates, as the chanting reached a roaring clamor.

Sankta, they shouted. Sol Koroleva. Rebe Dva Stolba.

Daughter of Two Mills. I’d heard that before, on the journey to Os Alta, a valley named after some ancient ruin, home to a sprawl of tiny, unimportant settlements on the southern border. Mal had been born near there too, but we’d never had a chance to go back. And what would have been the point? Any bit of family we might have had was long buried or burned.

Sankta Alina.

I thought again of my few memories from before Keramzin, of the dish of sliced beets, my fingers stained red with them. I remembered the dusty road, seen from someone’s broad shoulders, the sway of ox tails, our shadows on the ground. A hand pointing out the ruins of the mills, two narrow fingers of rock, worn down to bare spindles by wind, rain, and time. That was all that remained in my memory. The rest was Keramzin. The rest was Mal.

Sankta Alina.

I shoved my way through the mass of bodies, pulling my scarf tighter around my ears to try to block out the noise. An old pilgrim woman stepped into my path, and I nearly knocked her over. I reached out to steady her, and she latched on to me, barely keeping her balance.

“Forgive me, babya,” I said formally. Never let it be said that Ana Kuya hadn’t taught us manners. I gently set the woman back on her feet. “Are you all right?”

But she wasn’t looking at my face—she was staring at my throat. My hand flew up to my neck. It was too late. The scarf had slipped free.

“Sankta,” the woman moaned. “Sankta!” She fell to her knees and seized my hand, pressing it to her wrinkled cheek. “Sankta Alina!”

Suddenly there were hands all around me, grasping at my sleeves, the hem of my coat.

“Please,” I said, trying to push away from them.

Sankta Alina. Muttered, whispered, wailed, shouted. My name was strange to me, spoken like a prayer, a foreign incantation to keep away the dark.

They crowded around me, closer and closer, jostling to get near, reaching out to feel my hair, my skin. I heard something rip and realized it was the fabric of my coat.

Sankta. Sankta Alina.

The bodies pressed tighter, pushing and shoving, shouting at each other, each wanting to get nearer. My feet lost contact with the ground. I cried out as a chunk of my hair was ripped from my scalp. They were going to tear me apart.

Let them do it, I thought with sudden clarity. It could be over that easily. No more fear, no more responsibility, no more nightmares of broken skiffs or children devoured by the Fold, no more visions. I could be free from the collar, from the fetter, from the crushing weight of their hope. Let them do it.

I closed my eyes. This would be my ending. They could give me a page in the Istorii Sankt’ya and put a gold halo around my head. Alina the Heartsick, Alina the Petty, Alina the Mad, Daughter of Dva Stolba, torn to pieces one morning in the shadow of the city walls. They could sell my bones by the side of the road.

Someone screamed. I heard an angry shout. Massive hands took hold of me, and I was lifted into the air.

I opened my eyes and saw Tolya’s grim face. He had me in his arms.

Tamar was beside him, palms up, turning in a slow arc.

“Stay back,” she warned the crowd. I saw some of the pilgrims blink sleepily, a few simply sat down. She was slowing their heart rates, trying to calm them, but there were just too many. A man dove forward. Like a flash, Tamar had drawn her axes. The man bellowed as a red streak bloomed on his arm.

“Come closer, and you’ll lose it,” she snapped.

The pilgrims’ faces were wild.

“Let me help,” I protested.

Tolya ignored me, pushing his way through the crowd; Tamar circled around him, blades in motion, widening the path. The pilgrims groaned and wailed, their arms outstretched, straining toward me.

“Now,” Tolya said. Then louder, “Now!”

He bolted. My head banged against his chest as we plunged toward the safety of the city walls, Tamar at our heels. The guards had already seen the turmoil erupting and had started to close the gates.

Tolya bulled forward, knocking people from his path, charging through the narrowing gap between the iron doors. Tamar slipped in after us, seconds before the gates clanged shut. On the other side, I heard the thump of bodies pounding against the doors, hands clawing, voices raised in hunger. Still I heard my name. Sankta Alina.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Tolya bellowed as he set me down.

“Later,” Tamar said curtly.

The city guards were glaring at me. “Get her out of here,” one of them yelled angrily. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t have a full-fledged riot on our hands.”

The twins had horses waiting. Tamar yanked a blanket from a market stall and threw it around my shoulders. I clutched it to my neck, hiding the collar. She leapt into her saddle, and Tolya tossed me up unceremoniously behind her.

We rode in harried silence all the way back to the palace gates. The unrest outside the city walls had not yet spread within, and all we garnered were a few questioning looks.

The twins didn’t say a word, but I could tell they were furious. They had every right to be. I’d behaved like an idiot, and now I could only hope that the guards below could restore order without resorting to violence.

Yet beneath the panic and regret, an idea had entered my mind. I told myself it was nonsense, wishful thinking, but I could not shake it.

When we arrived back at the Little Palace, the twins wanted to escort me straight to the Darkling’s rooms, but I refused.

“I’m safe now,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”

They insisted on trailing me to the library.

It didn’t take me long to find what I wanted. I’d been a mapmaker, after all. I tucked the book under my arm and returned to my room with my scowling guards in tow.

To my surprise, Mal was waiting in the common room. He was seated at the table, nursing a glass of tea.

“Where were—” Mal began, but Tolya had him out of his chair and slammed against the wall before I could even blink.

“Where were you?” he snarled into Mal’s face.

“Tolya!” I shouted in alarm. I tried to pull his hand from around Mal’s throat, but it was like trying to bend a steel bar. I turned to Tamar for help, but she stood back, arms crossed, looking just as angry as her brother.

Mal made a choking sound. He hadn’t changed his clothes from last night. There was stubble on his chin, and the smell of blood and kvas hung on him like a dirty coat.

“Saints, Tolya! Would you just put him down?”

For a moment, Tolya looked like he had every intention of crushing the life out of him, but then he relaxed his fingers and Mal slid down the wall, coughing and gulping air.

“It was your shift,” Tolya rumbled, jabbing a finger at Mal’s chest. “You should have been with her.”

“I’m sorry,” Mal rasped, rubbing at his throat. “I must have fallen asleep. I was right next—”

“You were at the bottom of a bottle,” Tolya seethed. “I can smell it on you.”

“I’m sorry,” Mal said again, miserably.

“Sorry?” Tolya’s fists flexed. “I ought to tear you apart.”

“You can dismember him later,” I said. “Right now I need you to find Nikolai and tell him to meet me in the war room. I’m going to go change.”

I crossed to my room and closed the doors behind me, trying to pull myself together. So far today, I’d nearly died and possibly started a riot. Maybe I could set fire to something before breakfast.

I washed my face and changed into my kefta, then hurried to the war room. Mal was waiting there, slumped in a chair, though I hadn’t invited him. He’d changed clothes, but he still looked rumpled and red-eyed. There were fresh bruises on his face from the previous night. He glanced up at me as I entered, saying nothing. Would there ever be a time when it didn’t hurt to look at him?

I set the atlas on the long table and crossed to the ancient map of Ravka that ran the length of the far wall. Of all the maps in the war room, this one was by far the oldest and most beautiful. I trailed my fingers over the raised ridges of the Sikurzoi, the mountains that marked Ravka’s southernmost border with the Shu, then followed them down into the western foothills. The valley of Dva Stolba was too small to be marked on this map.

“Do you remember anything?” I asked Mal without looking at him. “From before Keramzin?”

Mal hadn’t been much older than I was when he came to the orphanage. I still remembered the day he’d arrived. I’d heard another refugee was coming, and I’d hoped it would be a girl for me to play with. Instead I’d gotten a pudgy, blue-eyed boy who would do anything on a dare.

“No.” His voice still sounded rough from the near choking he’d received at Tolya’s hands.

“Nothing?”

“I used to have dreams about a woman with long gold hair in a braid. She would dangle it in front of me like a toy.”

“Your mother?”

“Mother, aunt, neighbor. How should I know? Alina, about what happened—”

“Anything else?”

He contemplated me for a long moment, then sighed and said, “Every time I smell licorice, I remember sitting on a porch with a red painted chair in front of me. That’s it. Everything else…” He trailed off with a shrug.

He didn’t have to explain. Memories were a luxury meant for other children, not the Keramzin orphans. Be grateful. Be grateful.

“Alina,” Mal tried again, “what you said about the Darkling—”

But at that moment, Nikolai entered. Despite the early hour, he looked every inch the prince, blond hair gleaming, boots polished to a high shine. He took in Mal’s bruises and stubble, then raised his brows and said, “Don’t suppose anyone’s rung for tea?”

He sat down and stretched his long legs out before him. Tolya and Tamar had taken up their posts, but I asked them to close the door and join us.

When they were all assembled around the table, I said, “I went among the pilgrims this morning.”

Nikolai’s head snapped up. In an instant, the easygoing prince had vanished. “I think I must have misheard you.”

“I’m fine.”

“She was almost killed,” said Tamar.

“But I wasn’t,” I added.

“Are you completely out of your mind?” Nikolai asked. “Those people are fanatics.” He turned on Tamar. “How could you let her do something like that?”

“I didn’t,” said Tamar.

“Tell me you didn’t go alone,” he said to me.

“I didn’t go alone.”

“She went alone.”

“Tamar, shut up. Nikolai, I told you, I’m fine.”

“Only because we got there in time,” said Tamar.

“How did you get there?” Mal asked quietly. “How did you find her?”

Tolya’s face went dark, and he pounded one of his giant fists down on the table. “We shouldn’t have had to find her,” he said. “You had the watch.”

“Leave it alone, Tolya,” I said sharply. “Mal wasn’t where he should have been, and I’m perfectly capable of being stupid on my own.”

I took a breath. Mal looked desolate. Tolya looked like he was about to smash several pieces of furniture. Tamar’s face was stony, and Nikolai was about as angry as I’d ever seen him. But at least I had their attention.

I pushed the atlas to the center of the table. “There’s a name the pilgrims use for me sometimes,” I said. “Daughter of Dva Stolba.”

“Two Mills?” said Nikolai.

“A valley, named after the ruins at its mouth.”

I opened the atlas to the page I had marked. There was a detailed map of the southwestern border. “Mal and I are from somewhere around here,” I said, running my finger along the edge of the map. “The settlements stretch all along this area.”

I turned the page to an illustration of a road leading into a valley studded with towns. On either side of the road stood a slender spindle of rock.

“They don’t look like much,” grumbled Tolya.

“Exactly,” I said. “Those ruins are ancient. Who knows how long they’ve been there or what they might have been? The valley is called Two Mills, but maybe they were part of a gatehouse or an aqueduct.” I curved my finger across the spindles. “Or an arch.”

A sudden silence descended over the room. With the arch in the foreground and the mountains in the distance, the ruins looked exactly like the view behind Sankt Ilya in the Istorii Sankt’ya. The only thing missing was the firebird.

Nikolai pulled the atlas toward him. “Are we just seeing what we want to see?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “But it’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence.”

“We’ll send scouts,” he suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want to go.”

“If you leave now, everything you’ve accomplished with the Second Army will be undone. I’ll go. If Vasily can run off to Caryeva to buy ponies, then no one will mind if I take a little hunting trip.”

I shook my head. “I have to be the one to kill the firebird.”

“We don’t even know it’s there.”

“Why are we even discussing it?” asked Mal. “We all know it’s going to be me.”

Tamar and Tolya exchanged an uneasy glance.

Nikolai cleared his throat. “With all due respect, Oretsev, you don’t quite seem at your best.”

“I’m fine.”

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“I think you do that enough for the both of us,” Mal shot back. Then he scrubbed a hand over his face, looking more weary than ever. “I’m too tired and too hungover to argue this. I’m the only one who can find the firebird. It has to be me.”

“I’m going with you,” I said.

“No,” he said with surprising force. “I’ll hunt it. I’ll capture it. I’ll bring it back to you. But you’re not coming with me.”

“It’s too risky,” I protested. “Even if you caught it, how would you get it back here?”

“Get one of your Fabrikators to rig something up for me,” he said. “This is best for everyone. You get the firebird, and I get free of this saintsforsaken place.”

“You can’t travel by yourself. You—”

“Then give me Tolya or Tamar. We’ll travel faster and draw less attention on our own.” Mal pushed his chair back and stood. “You figure it out. Make whatever arrangements you want.” He didn’t look at me when he said, “Just tell me when I can leave.”

Before I could raise another objection, he was gone.

I turned away, fighting to hold back the tears that threatened. Behind me, I heard Nikolai murmuring instructions to the twins as they departed.

I studied the map. Poliznaya, where we’d done our military service. Ryevost, where we’d begun our journey into the Petrazoi. Tsibeya, where he’d kissed me for the first time.

Nikolai laid his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t know whether I wanted to swat it away or turn and fall into his arms. What would he do if I did? Pat my back? Kiss me? Propose?

“It’s for the best, Alina.”

I laughed bitterly. “Have you ever noticed people only say that when it isn’t true?”

He dropped his hand. “He doesn’t belong here.”

He belongs with me, I wanted to shout. But I knew it wasn’t true. I thought of Mal’s bruised face, of him pacing back and forth like a caged animal, of him spitting blood and beckoning to Eskil for more. Go on. I thought of him holding me in his arms as we crossed the True Sea. The map blurred as my eyes filled with tears.

“Let him go,” said Nikolai.

“Go where? Chasing after some mythical creature that may not even exist? On some impossible quest into mountains crawling with Shu?”

“Alina,” Nikolai said softly, “that’s what heroes do.”

“I don’t want him to be a hero!”

“He can’t change who he is any more than you can stop being Grisha.”

It was an echo of what I’d said only hours ago, but I didn’t want to hear it.

“You don’t care what happens to Mal,” I said angrily. “You just want to get rid of him.”

“If I wanted you to fall out of love with Mal, I’d make him stay here. I’d let him keep soaking his troubles in kvas and acting like a wounded ass. But is this really the life you want for him?”

I took a shaky breath. It wasn’t. I knew that. Mal was miserable here. He’d been suffering since the moment we arrived, but I had refused to see it. I’d railed at him for wanting me to be something I couldn’t, and all the while, I’d demanded the same thing from him. I brushed the tears from my cheeks. There was no point to arguing with Nikolai. Mal had been a soldier. He wanted purpose. Here it was, if I would just let him take it.

And why not admit it? Even as I protested, there was another voice inside me, a greedy, shameful hunger that demanded completion, that clamored for Mal to go out and find the firebird, that insisted he bring it back to me, no matter the cost. I’d told Mal that the girl he knew was gone. Better for him to leave before he saw just how true that was.

I let my fingers drift over the illustration of Dva Stolba. Two mills, or something more? Who could say when there was nothing left but ruins?

“You know the problem with heroes and saints, Nikolai?” I asked as I closed the book’s cover and headed for the door. “They always end up dead.”