Zoya grimaced and parried, trying to remember her long-ago education with Botkin Yul-Erdene. They’d used knives and rapiers and even taken target practice with pistols. Zoya had enjoyed all of it, particularly the hand-to-hand combat, but she’d had little cause to practice her skills since. What was the point of using her fists when she could command a storm?
“Not bad,” he said as she succeeded in dodging one of his thrusts. “Using your power has become too easy for you. When you fight this way, you have to focus so entirely on surviving that you stop thinking about everything else. You cannot worry about what came before or what happens next, what has been lost or what you might gain. There is only this moment.”
“What possible advantage is that?” Zoya said. “Isn’t it better to be able to predict what comes next?”
“When your mind is free, the door opens.”
“What door?”
“The door to the making at the heart of the world.”
Zoya feinted right and stepped close to deny Juris the advantage of his longer reach. “That is already what I do when I summon,” she said, sweat beginning to drip from her brow. “That’s what all Grisha do when we use our power.”
“Is it?” he asked, bringing his sword down again. The clash of metal filled her ears. “The storm is still outside you, something you welcome and guard against all at once. It howls outside the door. It rattles the windows. It wants to be let in.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Let the storm in, Zoya. Do not summon. Do not reach for it. Let it come to you. Let it guide your movements. Give me a proper fight.”
Zoya grunted as his blade struck hers. She was already breathless, her arms aching from the weight of her weapon. “I’m not strong enough to beat you without using my power.”
“You do not use it. You are it. The storm is in your bones.”
“Stop. Talking. Nonsense,” she snarled. It wasn’t fair. He was forcing her to play a game she couldn’t win. And Zoya always won.
Very well. If he wanted her to fight without summoning, she would, and she would best him at it too. Then Juris could hang his big ugly head in shame. She charged him, giving in to the thrill of the fight, the challenge of it, ignoring the pain that shivered up her arms as his blade met hers again and again. She was smaller and lighter, so she kept to the balls of her feet and stayed well within his guard.
His blade hissed against the flesh of her arm, and she felt the pain like a burn. Zoya knew she was bleeding, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to know he could bleed too.
Lunge. Parry. Attack. React. React. React. Her heart pounded like thunder. In her blood she felt the roaring of the wind. She could feel her body move before she told it to, the air whistling past her, through her. Her blood was charged with lightning. She brought her sword down, and in it she felt the strength of the hurricane, tearing trees up by their roots, unstoppable.
Juris’ blade shattered.
“There she is,” he said with his dragon’s smile.
Zoya stood quaking, eyes wide. She had felt her strength double, treble, the strength of a whirlwind in her limbs. It shouldn’t have been possible, but she couldn’t deny what she’d felt—or what she’d done. The proof was in the broken weapon that lay at her feet. She flexed her hand around the grip of her sword. The storm is in your bones.
“I see I finally have your attention,” said the dragon.
She looked up at him. He’d stolen her amplifier, broken some part of her. She would repay him for that—and he would help her learn to do it.
“Is there more?” she asked.
“So much more,” said Juris.
Zoya dropped back into fighting stance and lifted her blade—light as air in her hands. “Then you’d better get yourself a new sword.”
ADRIK WAS FURIOUS—still glum, but furious. It was like being yelled at by a damp towel.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded the next morning. They’d walked out to the southern part of town, with Leoni and the sledge in tow, ostensibly to try to make sales to local hunters and trappers. But they’d stopped near an old tanning shed so that Adrik would have privacy to let Nina know just how disastrously she’d behaved. “I gave you direct orders. You were not to engage, certainly not on your own. What if you’d been captured?”
“I wasn’t.”
Leoni leaned against the cart. “If Hanne hadn’t stepped in to help, you would have been. Now you’re in that girl’s debt.”
“I was already in her debt. And have you forgotten she’s Grisha? She won’t talk. Not unless she wants to put herself in danger.”
Adrik glanced up at the factory looming over the valley. “We should destroy this place. It would be a mercy.”
“No,” Nina said. “There has to be a way to get the girls out.”
Adrik looked at her with his moping, melting-candle expression. “You know what parem does. They won’t come back from this. They’re as good as dead.”
“Stop being such a head cold,” Nina retorted. “I came back from it.”
“From one dose. You’re telling us these girls have been dosed for months.”
“Not with ordinary parem. The Fjerdans are trying something new, something different. It’s why Leoni got sick but didn’t get a real reaction. It’s why my own addiction didn’t get triggered again.”
“Nina—”
She seized his arm. “The Second Army knows more now than we did when I took parem, Adrik. They’ve made progress on an antidote. It’s possible the Fabrikators and Healers at the Little Palace could help them.”
Adrik shook off her grip. “Do you understand what you’ve done, Nina? Even if they decided last night was nothing more than a bit of miscommunication, they’re going to increase security in that factory. They may report the breach to their superiors. We need to leave this town while we still can, or we risk compromising the entire Hringsa network and any chance Ravka has of acting on the information you learned. You didn’t even get a sample of the drug they’ve developed.”
She hadn’t had the chance—and she’d been too shaken to think clearly. But she wasn’t going to make the girls on the mountain pay for her mistake.
“I won’t do it, Adrik. You can leave me here. Tell the king I deserted.”
“Those women are going to die. You can make up any happy ending you want, but you know it’s true. Don’t ask me to sacrifice the hope of the living for the comfort of the dead.”
“We aren’t just here to recruit soldiers—”
Adrik’s blue gaze sharpened. “We are here on orders from the king. We are here to salvage the future of our people. Ravka won’t survive without more soldiers, and the Grisha won’t survive without Ravka. I saw the Second Army decimated by the Darkling. I know what we’ve lost and how much more we stand to lose. We have to preserve the network. We owe it to every Grisha living in fear.”
“I can’t leave them behind, Adrik. I won’t.” They brought me here. They were the reason she’d finally been able to lay Matthias to rest. The voices of the dead had called her back to life with their need. She would not fail them. “Leoni,” she pleaded. “If it were you up there, someone you loved …”
Leoni sat down on a fallen tree trunk and looked up at the fort.