Zoya tossed her hair over one shoulder. “Maybe. But I’m always me. You change like light over water. These moments, these interactions, they only seem to feed you. What’s your secret?”
“The secret …” Nikolai mused. He held out his hand, and she dropped the silver vial into his palm. “I suppose the secret is that I cannot stand being alone.” He uncorked the concoction. “But there are some places no one can go with us.”
He touched the bottle to his tongue, and Zoya snatched it from his hand as he fell backward, plummeting into the dark before his head reached the pillow.
Zoya traveled with the outriders. Sometimes Nikolai rode in the coach with Tolya and Yuri, but mostly he stayed astride one of his white horses, bracketed by his guards, Tamar following a discreet distance away. He did not wear the full military regalia and sash that his father had favored but instead the olive drab coat that was standard-issue for soldiers of the First Army. He’d earned the respect of the military by serving in the infantry before becoming an officer, and the medals he wore pinned to his chest were not ceremonial but battle-won.
In every village and town, Zoya watched as the king worked his particular kind of magic. Even the way he sat his horse changed depending on the crowd he greeted. Sometimes he was relaxed, at ease in the saddle, the sun gilding his hair and gleaming off his perfectly polished boots as he smiled and waved to his beloved subjects. Sometimes he was somber and heroic, standing atop stages and on balconies to address crowds as they prayed in their churches and gathered in their town squares. Though he and Zoya took pains to hide the urgency of their mission, they rode hard each day and never spent more than a single night in any location. They had allotted three weeks for this journey. Whatever they did or didn’t discover on the Fold, they’d be back in the capital to prepare for the festival with time to spare.
In Ryevost, where the great earthquake had struck, Nikolai stripped down to his shirtsleeves to work side by side with the men of the town, moving rubble and raising beams. He stood on the site where the great stone seal of Sankt Lubov had split, spewing forth a tide of tiny silver hummingbirds that had circled the town square in a whirring cloud for a fortnight before dispersing. He vowed to build a new church there, paid for with Lantsov gold.
“And where will all the money actually come from?” Zoya asked that night.
“The Kerch? My wealthy new bride? Maybe the Apparat can sell off a fancy altarpiece.”
But she now saw what he had intended when he conceded to the Apparat’s request for new churches. The Apparat would get these houses of worship, more places to lodge his spies and loyalists, but the people would not think of the priest when they said their prayers and heard the church bells chime. They would think of their golden king and whisper of the day he’d come to their village.
“I grew up in a place like this,” Zoya said as they entered the next bleak backwater. “Hopeless. Hungry. Desperation makes people do ugly things, and it is always the girls who suffer first.”
“Is that why you push so hard for the new factories we’re building?”
Zoya gave the barest shrug. “A broad back is needed to lift an axe or move a stone, but it doesn’t take strength to pull a lever or push a button.”
She could sense Nikolai’s scrutiny. “I’ve never known you to have much sympathy for the common people.”
I was common enough once. Liliyana and Lada were common. “It has nothing to do with sympathy. For the Grisha to thrive, we need a strong Ravka.”
“Ah, so you’re just being practical, of course.”
She could hear the skepticism in his voice, and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. But it was hard not to look at these muddy streets, the gray houses with their warped roofs and slanting porches, the tilting spire of the church, and not think of Pachina, the town she’d left behind. She refused to call it home.
“Do you know what changed everything in my village?” She kept her eyes on the road, rutted with holes and broken rocks from the previous night’s rain. “The draft. When the war was so dire that the crown was forced to start taking girls as well as boys to fight.”
“I thought the draft was seen as a curse.”
“For some,” Zoya conceded. “But for others of us it offered an escape, a chance at something other than being someone’s wife and dying in childbirth. When I was little, before my powers emerged, I dreamed of being a soldier.”
“Little Zoya with her bayonet?”
Zoya sniffed. “I always had the makings of a general.” But her mother had seen only the value in her daughter’s beauty. Zoya’s face had been her dowry at the tender age of nine. If not for Liliyana, she would have been bartered away like a new calf. But could she blame her mother? She remembered Sabina’s raw hands, her tired eyes, the gaunt lines of her body—perpetually weary and without hope. And yet, after all these years, Zoya found no scrap of forgiveness for her desperate mother or her weak father. They could rot. She gave her reins a snap.
Zoya and the rest of Nikolai’s party rode through the barley fields and inspected the new armaments factory, endured the singing of a children’s choir, and then had tea with the local council and the choirmaster.
“You should poison the choirmaster for inflicting that atrocity on us,” Zoya grumbled.
“They were adorable.”
“They were flat.”
Zoya was forced to put on a little demonstration of summoning for the local women’s group and resisted the urge to blow the town magistrate’s wig off his head.
At last they were permitted to ride out with the governor and see the great swath of forest that had supposedly been felled in a single night. It was an eerie sight. The smell of sap was heavy in the air, and the trees had fallen in perfect lines all the way to the crest of a hill that overlooked a tiny chapel dedicated to Sankt Ilya in Chains. The trees all lay in the same direction, like bodies laid to rest, as if pointing them west toward the Fold. They’d let Yuri emerge from the coach to stretch his legs and see the supposed miracle site, Tolya towering over him like the one tree that had refused to fall. According to Tolya, they’d begun to piece together a text that might well be the original description of the obisbaya.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Zoya said, watching the skinny monk talk animatedly to a beleaguered-looking Tolya, “that this is all contrivance? That the Apparat and the monk are not enemies at all? That they both wanted you away from the safety of the capital, and that they’ve gotten just that for their trouble?”
“Of course it has,” said Nikolai. “But such displays are beyond even the Apparat’s considerable reach. It pains my pride to say it, but there may be something at work here that’s bigger than both of us.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said. But looking out at the felled trees, she felt as if an invisible hand were guiding them, and she did not like it. “I don’t trust him,” Zoya said. “Either of them.”
“The Apparat is a man of ambition, and that means he can be managed.”