“Then I have made you strong enough to survive the fall.”
“Reassuring.” She pressed her boot into his flank and hitched herself onto the ridge of his neck. It wasn’t comfortable. Dragons had not been made for riding.
“Hold on,” he said.
“Oh, is that what I’m supposed to—” Zoya gasped and clung tight as Juris’ wings flapped once, twice, and he launched himself into the colorless sky.
The wind rushed against her face, lifting her hair, making her eyes water. She had flown before, had traveled on Nikolai’s flying contraptions. This was nothing like that. She could feel every shift Juris made with the currents as he rode the wind, the movement of the muscles beneath his scales, even the way his lungs expanded with each breath. She could feel the force of a stampede in the body beneath her, the heaving power of a storm-tossed sea.
There was nothing to see in the Saints’ Fold. It was all barren earth and flat horizon. Maybe that was maddening for Juris—to fly for miles and yet go nowhere. But Zoya didn’t care. She could stay this way forever with nothing but sky and sand surrounding her. She laughed, her heart leaping. This was the magic she’d been promised as a child, the dream that all those fairy stories had offered and never delivered. She wished the girl she’d been could have lived this.
“Open the door, Zoya.” The dragon’s words rumbled through his body. “Open your eyes.”
“There’s nothing to see!” But that wasn’t entirely true. Up ahead, she glimpsed a jagged blot on the landscape. She knew instantly what it was. “Turn around,” she demanded. “I want to go back.”
“You know you cannot.”
“Turn around.” The strength of the storm filled her bones, and she tried to move the dragon’s head.
“Zoya of the lost city,” he said. “Open the door.”
The dragon swooped and dove for the ruins of Novokribirsk.
It felt like falling. Zoya was the stone, and there was no bottom to the well, no end to the emptiness inside her. Do not look back at me.
The past came rushing at her. Why now? Because of Elizaveta’s talk of wounds? Juris’ taunts? The torment of being drowned each day as Nikolai grew more distant? She did not want to think of Liliyana or all that she’d lost. There was only the wind and the darkness before her, the dead gray sky above her, the ruins of a lost city below.
And yet it was the memory of her mother’s face that filled Zoya’s mind.
Sabina’s beauty had been astonishing, the kind that stopped men and women alike on the street. But she had made a bad bargain. She had married for love—a handsome Suli boy with broad shoulders and few prospects. For a time, they were poor but happy, and then they were just poor. As they starved and scraped by, the affection between them wasted away too. Long days of work and long months of winter wore at Sabina’s beauty and her spirit. She had little love to give to the daughter she bore.
Zoya worked hard for her mother’s affection. She was always first in her lessons, always made sure to eat only half of her supper and give Sabina the rest. She was silent when her mother complained of headaches, and she stole peaches for Sabina from the duke’s orchards.
“You could be whipped for that,” her mother said disapprovingly. But she ate the peaches one after another, sighing contentedly, until her stomach turned and she vomited them all beside the woodpile.
Everything changed when Zoya caught the eye of Valentin Grankin, a wealthy carriage maker from Stelt. He was the richest man for a hundred miles, a widower twice over, and sixty-three years old.
Zoya was nine. She did not want to be a bride, but she did not want to displease her mother, who petted her and cooed at her as she had never done before. For the first time, Sabina seemed happy. She sang in the kitchen and cooked elaborate meals with the gifts of meat and vegetables that Valentin Grankin sent.
The night before the wedding, Sabina made orange cakes and laid out the elaborate pearl kokoshnik and little gold lace wedding gown Zoya’s bridegroom had provided. Zoya hadn’t meant to cry, but she hadn’t been able to stop.
Aunt Liliyana had come all the way from Novokribirsk for the ceremony—or so Zoya had thought until she heard her aunt pleading with Sabina to reconsider.
Liliyana was younger than Sabina and rarely spoken of. She had left home with scant fanfare and braved the deadly journey across the Shadow Fold to make a life for herself in the hardscrabble town of Novokribirsk. It was a good place for a woman alone, where cheap property could be had and employers were so desperate for workers they gladly offered positions to women that would otherwise be reserved for men.
“He won’t hurt her, Liliyana,” Sabina said sharply as Zoya sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet brushing the wooden slats of the floor, the perfect circle of her untouched orange cake uneaten on the plate before her. “He said he would wait for her to bleed.”
“Am I to applaud him?” Liliyana had demanded. “How will you protect her if he changes his mind? You are selling your own child.”
“We are all bought and sold. At least Zoya will fetch a price that will give her an easy life.”
“Soon she will be old enough to be a soldier—”
“And then what? We’ll live off her meager pay? She’ll serve until she’s killed or injured so that she can go on to live alone and poor like you?”
“I do well enough.”
“Do you think I don’t see your shoes tied together with string?”
“Better to be a woman alone than a woman beholden to some old man who can’t manage a wife his own age. And it was my choice to make. In a few years Zoya will be old enough to make her own decisions.”
“In a few years Valentin Grankin will have found some other pretty girl to occupy his interests.”
“Good!” retorted Liliyana.
“Get out of my house,” Sabina had seethed. “I don’t want to see you anywhere near the church tomorrow. Go back to your lonely rooms and your empty tea tins and leave my daughter alone.”
Liliyana had gone, and Zoya had run to her room and buried her face in her blankets, trying not to think of the words her mother had said or the images they’d conjured, praying with all the fervor in her heart that Liliyana would come back, that the Saints would save her, even as she soaked her pillow with tears.
The next morning Sabina had muttered angrily about Zoya’s blotchy face as she dressed her in the little gold gown and the attendants came to walk the bride to church.
But Aunt Liliyana was waiting at the altar beside a flummoxed priest. She refused to budge.
“Someone do something about this madwoman!” Sabina had screamed. “She is no sister of mine!”
Valentin Grankin’s men had seized Liliyana, dragging her down the aisle. “Lecher!” Liliyana had shouted at Grankin. “Procurer!” she yelled at Sabina. Then she’d turned her damning eyes on the gathered townspeople. “You are all witness to this! She is a child!”
“Be silent,” snarled Valentin Grankin, and when Liliyana would not, he took up his heavy walking stick and cracked it against her skull.