Liliyana spat in his face.
He hit her again. This time her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Stop it!” cried Zoya, struggling in her mother’s arms. “Stop!”
“Criminal,” gasped Liliyana. “Filth.”
Grankin lifted his stick again. Zoya understood then that her aunt was going to be murdered before the church altar and no one was going to prevent it. Because Valentin Grankin was a rich, respected man. Because Liliyana Garin was no one at all.
Zoya screamed, the sound tearing from her, an animal cry. A wild gust of wind slammed into Valentin Grankin, knocking him to the ground. His walking stick went clattering. Zoya fisted her hands, her fear and rage pouring from her in a flood. A churning wall of wind erupted around her and exploded into the eaves of the church, blowing the roof from its moorings with an earsplitting crack. Thunder rumbled through a cloudless sky.
The wedding guests bellowed their terror. Zoya’s mother gazed at her daughter with frightened eyes, clutching the pew behind her as if she might collapse without its support.
Liliyana, one hand pressed to her bleeding head, cried, “You cannot sell her off now! She’s Grisha. It’s against the law. She is the property of the king and will go to school to train.”
But no one was looking at Liliyana. They were all staring at Zoya.
Zoya ran to her aunt. She wasn’t sure what she’d done or what it meant, only that she wanted to be as far away from this church and these people and the hateful man on the floor as she could get.
“You leave us alone!” she shouted at no one, at everyone. “You let us go!”
Valentin Grankin whimpered as Zoya and Liliyana hurried past him down the aisle. Zoya looked down at him and hissed.
It was Liliyana who took Zoya, still dressed in her wedding finery, to Os Alta. They had no money for inns, so they slept in ditches and tucked into copses, shivering in the cold. “Imagine we are on a ship,” Liliyana would say, “and the waves are rocking us to sleep. Can you hear the masts creaking? We can use the stars to navigate.”
“Where are we sailing to?” Zoya had asked, sure she could hear something rustling in the woods.
“To an island covered in flowers, where the water in the streams tastes sweet as honey. Follow those two stars and steer us into port.”
Every night, they traveled somewhere new: a coastline where silver seals barked on the shores, a jeweled grotto where they were greeted by the green-gilled lord of the deep—until at last they arrived at the capital and made the long walk to the palace gates.
They were filthy by then, their hair tangled, Zoya’s golden wedding dress torn and covered in dust. Liliyana had ignored the guards’ sneers as she made her requests, and she’d kept her back straight as she stood with Zoya outside the gates. They’d waited, and waited, and waited some more, shivering in the cold, until at last a young man in a purple kefta and an older woman dressed in red had come down to the gates.
“What village are you from?” the woman had asked.
“Pachina,” Liliyana replied.
The strangers murmured to each other for a moment, about tests and when the last Examiners had traveled through those parts. Then the woman had pushed up Zoya’s sleeve and laid her palm on the bare skin of her arm. Zoya had felt a surge of power race through her. Wind rattled the palace gates and whipped through the trees.
“Ah,” the woman had said on a long breath. “What gift has arrived at our doorstep looking so bedraggled? Come, we’ll get you fed and warmed up.”
Zoya had grabbed Liliyana’s hand, ready to begin their new adventure together, but her aunt had knelt and said gently, “I can go no further with you, little Zoya.”
“Why not?”
“I need to go home to tend to my chickens. You don’t want them to get cold, do you? Besides,” she said, smoothing the hair away from Zoya’s face, “this is where you belong. Here they will see the jewel you are inside, not just your pretty eyes.”
“For your troubles,” the young man said, and dropped a coin into Liliyana’s palm.
“Will you be all right?” Zoya asked her.
“I will be fine. I will be better than fine knowing you are safe. Go now, I can hear the chickens clucking. They’re very cross with me.” Liliyana kissed both of Zoya’s cheeks. “Do not look back, Zoya. Do not look back at me or your mother or Pachina. Your future is waiting.”
But Zoya looked back anyway, hoping for one last glimpse of her aunt waving through those towering gates. The trees had crowded the path. If Liliyana was still there, Zoya could not see her.
That very day, her training had begun. She’d been given a room at the Little Palace, started classes in language and reading, started to learn Shu, studied with the miserable wretch of a woman known only as Baghra in the hut by the lake. She’d written every week to her aunt and every week received a long, newsy letter back with drawings of chickens in the corners and tales of the interesting traders who came through Novokribirsk.
By law, the parents of Grisha students were paid a stipend, a rich fee to keep them in comfort. When Zoya learned this, she petitioned the bursar to send the money to her aunt in Novokribirsk instead.
“Liliyana Garin is my guardian,” she’d told him.
“Are your parents dead, then?”
Zoya had cast him a long look and said, “Not yet.”
Even at ten she’d had such cold command in her eyes that he’d simply put his pen to paper and said, “I will need an address and her full name.”
It would be six years before Zoya made her first crossing of the Shadow Fold, as a junior Squaller in the Second Army. The Grisha around her had been trembling, some even weeping as they’d entered the darkness, but Zoya had shown no fear, not even in the dark where no one would see her shake. When they’d arrived at Novokribirsk, she’d stepped down from the skiff, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and said, “I’m going to go find a hot bath and a proper meal.”
It was only once she’d cleared the docks and left her companions behind that she’d broken into a run, her heart lifting, carrying her on light feet over the cobblestones to Liliyana’s small corner shop.
She’d burst through the door, alarming Liliyana’s one customer, and Liliyana had emerged from the back room, wiping her hands on her apron and saying, “What is causing such fuss—?”