The dragon huffed. “Only if you’d like to return the favor.”
Nikolai had to crane his neck to take in the palace as they approached. He’d never seen a structure so vast. It would have taken a regiment of engineers working for a thousand years to imagine such a creation, let alone see it built. The palaces and towers were clustered around three major spires: one of black stone, one of what looked like glowing amber, and one of what could only be bone. But there was something wrong about the place. He saw no signs of life, no birds circling, no movement at the many windows, no figures crossing the countless bridges. It had the shape of a city, but it felt like a tomb.
“Is there no one else here?” he asked.
“No one,” said the shifting grotesque in a chorus of baritone voices punctuated by the growl of a bear. “Not for almost four hundred years.”
Four hundred years? Nikolai looked to Zoya, but her gaze was distant, her hand clasped around her bare left wrist.
The sand rose, lifting them higher, and Nikolai saw that the three spires surrounded a domed structure, a mass of terraces and palaces and waterfalls of cascading sand that shimmered in the gray twilight.
They passed beneath a large arch and into a wide, circular chamber, its walls glinting with mica. The sand beneath their feet became stone, and a round table swelled up from the floor, its center a milky geode. Elizaveta gestured for them to sit in the stone chairs that emerged beside it.
“I fear we can offer you no food or drink,” she said.
“We’ll settle for answers,” said Nikolai.
Yuri knelt on the stone floor, his head bowed, nattering in what Nikolai thought was liturgical Ravkan, since he could only pick out an occasional word—promised, foretold, darkness.
“Please stop that,” Elizaveta said, her bees humming in distress. “And please, sit.”
“Leave him be. He’s abasing himself and enjoying it,” said Juris. He folded his wings and settled onto the floor a good distance from Yuri. “Where to begin?”
“Custom dictates we start with who the hell are you?”
“I thought we’d already covered that, boy king.”
“Yes. But Sainthood requires martyrdom. You all look very much alive. Unless this is the afterlife, in which case I am sorely underdressed. Or overdressed. I suppose it depends on your idea of heaven.”
“Does he always talk this much?” Juris asked Zoya, but she said nothing, just gazed up at the flat expanse of colorless sky above them.
“We all died at one time or another and were reborn,” said Elizaveta. “Sometimes not quite as we were. You can call us what you like, Grisha, Saints—”
“Relics,” said Juris.
Elizaveta pursed her lips. “I don’t care for that term at all.”
Yuri released a small, ecstatic sob. “All is as was promised,” he babbled. “All I was told to hope for—”
Elizaveta sent a vine curling over his shoulder like a comforting arm. “That’s enough,” she said gently. “You’re here now and must calm yourself.”
Yuri grasped the vine, pressing his face into the leaves, weeping. So much for the great scholar.
“Where are we exactly?” Nikolai asked.
“In the Shadow Fold,” said one of the mouths of the grotesque who had introduced himself as Grigori. Sankt Grigori. If Nikolai recalled correctly, he’d been torn apart by bears, though that hardly explained his current condition. “A version of it. One we cannot escape.”
“Does any of this matter?” Zoya said dully. “Why bring us here? What do you want?”
Juris turned his slitted eyes on her, his tail moving in a long sinuous rasp over the floor. “Look how the little witch mourns. As if she knew what she had lost or what she stands to gain.”
Nikolai expected to see Zoya’s eyes light with anger, but she just continued to stare listlessly at the sky. Seeing her this way, devoid of the spiky, dangerous energy that always animated her, was more disturbing than any of the bizarre sights they’d encountered. What was wrong with her? Had the amplifier meant so much? She was still strong without it. She’d be strong with both arms tied behind her back and a satchel of lead ball bearings weighing her down.
“I wish we could have brought you elsewhere, young Zoya,” said Elizaveta. “We had power before the word Grisha was ever whispered, when the extraordinary was still called miracle and magic. We have lived lives so long they would dwarf the history of Ravka. But this place, this particular spot on the Fold, has always been holy, a sacred site where our power was at its greatest and where we were most deeply connected to the making at the heart of the world. Here, anything was possible. And here we were bound when the Darkling created the Fold.”
“What?” Zoya asked, a spark of interest at last entering her eyes.
“We are woven into the fabric of the world in a way that no other Grisha are, the threads tightened by years and the use of our power. When the Darkling tampered with the natural order of the world, we were drawn here, and when his experiment with merzost failed, we were trapped within the boundaries of the Fold.”
“We cannot leave this place,” said Grigori. “We cannot assume physical form anywhere but here.”
“Physical form,” Juris sneered, and thumped his tail. “We don’t eat. We don’t sleep. I don’t remember what it is to sweat or hunger or dream. I’d chop off my left wing just to hear my stomach growl or taste wine again or take a piss out a window.”
“Must you be so vulgar?” Elizaveta said wearily.
“I must,” said Juris. “Making you miserable is my sole entertainment.”
Grigori settled into the shape of what looked like three bear heads topping the body of a single enormous man and folded two sets of arms. “We endured this endless twilight because we believed our purgatory would end with the Darkling’s death. He had many enemies, and we hoped he might have a short life. But he lived on.”
“And on,” grumbled Juris.
“He survived and became nearly as powerful as one of us,” said Grigori.
The dragon snorted. “Don’t flatter him.”
“Well, as one of us in our youth,” amended Elizaveta. “Then at last the time came when the Fold was destroyed and the Darkling was slain. And yet our bonds did not break. We remained prisoners. Because the Darkling’s power lives on. In you.”
Nikolai’s brows rose. “So naturally I must die. This is all very civilized, but if you wanted to murder me, why not get on with it during the battle?”
Juris snorted again, steam billowing from his huge nostrils. “That was hardly a battle.”
“Then during that delightful cocktail party where you chased us down and tried to set fire to my hair.”
“We cannot kill you, boy king. For one thing, we know the unrest it would cause your country, and we do not wish to see more people die if it is not necessary. Besides, even in your death, the power might well survive. No, the Darkling’s curse must be burned out of you.”
“Obisbaya,” said Nikolai. “The Burning Thorn.”