“I did,” said Nina. “I won’t deny it.”
Hanne’s gaze swung back to Nina. She folded her arms. “You’re not sorry, are you?”
“I’m sorry for the hurt I caused. I’m sorry to have lost your trust. But we are soldiers, Hanne, warriors born. And we do what has to be done. There were lives at stake. There still are. I don’t believe this is the only place where your father’s men are experimenting on Grisha.”
Hanne swallowed, and Nina knew she was remembering the girls in their beds on the ward, the babies in the cribs, their suffering. “There are more?”
“More bases. More factories. More laboratories. I won’t pretend that all Grisha are good. Or all Ravkans. They aren’t. Maybe I’m not. All I know is that what your father and his men are doing is wrong. They have to be stopped.” She laid her hand on Hanne’s shoulder, afraid she might pull away. “We could stop them.”
Hanne looked up at the factory, at the wagon full of prisoners, at the great ash towering over the road with its finger-bone branches. She ran a hand over her shorn scalp, the stubborn lines of her face more pronounced without the thick cloud of her hair to soften them. When her gaze returned to Nina, there was new fire in her eyes. “Save them all,” she said.
Despite the sorrows and dangers of the day, despite the challenges that lay ahead, Nina felt a new lightness overtake her. “Save them all.”
“But Nina,” Hanne said. “No more lies.”
“No more lies,” she agreed, and Nina wished, with all her heart, that could be true.
“What do we do first?” asked Hanne.
“We see to your father.”
“I won’t kill him.”
Nina felt a smile curling her lips. “That is the very last thing I’d have you do.”
When Hanne had gone to drag the still-unconscious Brum up the hill into the woods, Adrik turned to Nina.
“No more lies?” he said.
“Eavesdropping, Adrik?” She looked over his shoulder. “Is Leoni in the wagon? Is she all right?”
“She is. No thanks to you. Leoni didn’t make a mistake with the fuses. You caused that accident,” he said. “You rigged those explosions to blow the dam. You put me and Leoni and countless innocent civilians at risk.”
It was true. She’d done a contemptible thing. So where was her regret?
“Do you know what I learned in Ketterdam?” Nina asked, gazing at the tree of bones she had built. “No one is innocent. You turned the tide today, Adrik. You didn’t just hold back the waters—you changed the way these people see Grisha. You performed a miracle.”
“It wasn’t a miracle. It was skill and luck and a fancy prop you built out of body parts.”
Nina shrugged. “The Fjerdans won’t accept us as people, so maybe it’s time they saw us as Saints. And this is how we’ll do it, town by town, miracle by miracle. They’re already whispering your name here, just as they whisper Sankta Alina’s name. I guarantee tomorrow there will be shrines dedicated to you all along this road.” She raised a brow. “You might not like what they’re calling you, though.”
“I don’t like any of this,” he said, but then his curiosity got the better of him. “Tell me.”
“Sankta Leoni of the Waters.” She paused. “And Sankt Adrik the Uneven.”
Adrik rolled his eyes. “We need to go, Nina. Time is short.”
“There’s something else,” said Nina, though she knew Adrik would never forgive what she told him next. “I didn’t share all of the information in Brum’s letter.”
Adrik went very still. “What have you done, Nina?”
“There was talk of an assassination plan against the king.”
“By the Fjerdans?”
“It wasn’t clear. It only said that Lantsov wouldn’t be a problem for someone named Demidov. That their spies believed the situation would resolve itself without interference soon.”
Adrik cursed. “We have to get to Hjar as soon as possible. How could you keep a threat to the king’s life to yourself?”
What difference could it make? There were always threats to the king’s life. Nikolai had Tolya and Tamar to watch over him, and Adrik would have insisted on calling off the plan so they could travel to Hjar and locate a member of the network with access to a flyer who could get word to the capital. The king of Ravka had plenty of people to protect him. The girls on the mountaintop had only Nina.
“It was one day lost,” she said. “There’s time to get word to the king.”
“That was not your call to make. But I won’t debate it with you now. You can answer for what you’ve done back in Ravka.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Nina—”
“I know what I need to do, Adrik, and I won’t get a chance like this again. Ravka made me a soldier. Ketterdam made me a spy. Hanne can help me become something else entirely.”
“Nina, you can’t mean to—”
“I do.”
“We’ll have no way to reach you there. You’ll be without allies, without resources. If things go wrong, you won’t have any way out.”
Nina glanced up at the smoldering wreckage of the factory. “Then I’ll just have to blow a hole in the wall.”
THE THORN WOOD WAS BLEEDING. The sap that flowed from its trunks was no longer gold but red, as if with Elizaveta’s death it had died too. Its stalks began to shrivel, its thorns wilting. Nikolai pulled himself free, and the blood from his hands and legs dripped onto the sand. His chest throbbed, and yet the only sign that he’d driven a spike through it was a star-shaped scar. One more to add to his collection.
In the distance, he could see the great palace crumbling, its spires collapsing. What will be left? he wondered And how were he and Zoya going to get free of this place?
He stumbled over to her. She lay on a wilted bed of thorn trees and red quince blossoms, her hair splayed around her face. Before her, a dark pile of dead bees was heaped amid the branches. Sankta Elizaveta. Only a few feet away, he saw a mound of bones, both bear and human, blowing away to ash. Would this whole world crumble to dust?
He knelt beside Zoya and checked her pulse. It was steady. He was surprised to see two fetters of black scales at her wrists.
“Zoya,” he said, shaking her gently. “Commander Nazyalensky.”
Her lashes fluttered and she looked up at him. Nikolai reared back. For a moment, he thought he’d seen … No, that was impossible. Zoya gazed at him with vibrant blue eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” she replied.
“You’re sure?”
“Which one of us gets to kill the monk?”
“You’re fine.”
He helped her to her feet and they made their way to where Yuri lay buried up to his neck in sand. At some point the rat had fainted. Blood trickled from his nose.
Nikolai sighed. “I hate to say it, but we’re going to have to let him live. I need all the information we can garner on the Cult of the Starless and how the Saints brought us here. I think it may have been Elizaveta who unlocked my chains the night I got free from the palace.”