Zoya crossed to the bed and sat down on the corner. Her elegant fingers made a smooth pleat in the blue silk of her kefta. “I asked how you do it all, but I’ve never asked you why.”
Nikolai wedged himself against the headboard and stretched out his legs, studying her profile. “I suspect for the same reasons you do.”
“I very much doubt that.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to will away his fatigue. It had been a day of too many revelations, but if Zoya was willing to sit here with him alone, in the quiet of this room, and if what he said might heal the breach between them, then he was not going to squander the opportunity.
But how to answer? Why did it matter to him what became of Ravka? Broken, needy, frustrating Ravka. The grand lady. The crying child. The drowning man who would drag you under rather than be saved. This country that took so much and gave nothing back. Maybe because he knew that he and his country were the same. Nikolai had always wanted more. More attention, more affection, something new. He’d been too much for his tutors, his nannies, the servants, his mother. No one had quite known what to do with him. No matter how they cajoled or what punishments they devised, he could not be still. They gave him books and he read them in a night. He sat through a lesson in physics and then tried to drop a cannonball off the palace roof. He took apart a priceless ormolu clock and reassembled it into a ghastly contraption that whirred and dinged without surcease, and when his mother wept over the ruined heirloom, Nikolai had looked at her with confused hazel eyes and said, “But … but now it tells the date as well as the time!”
The only person who could get the young prince to behave was his older brother. Nikolai had worshipped Vasily, who could ride and wield a saber, and who was allowed to sit at state functions long after Nikolai was sent off to bed. Vasily was important. Vasily would be king one day.
Everything his brother did, Nikolai wanted to do too. If Vasily rode, Nikolai wanted to ride. When Vasily took fencing lessons, Nikolai begged and pleaded until he was allowed to join. Since Vasily was to study statecraft and geography and military histories, Nikolai insisted he was ready for those lessons too. Nikolai only wanted his brother’s notice. But to Vasily, Nikolai was little more than a constantly gabbling, mop-headed barnacle that insisted on clinging to his royal hull. When Vasily favored Nikolai with a smile or a bit of attention, all was calm waters. But the more Vasily ignored his little brother, the more Nikolai misbehaved.
Tutors took jobs in the wilds of Tsibeya. My nerves, they said. The quiet will be good for them. Nannies gave up their posts to tend to their ailing mothers on the coast. My lungs, they explained. The sea air will be a tonic. Servants wept, the king raged, the queen took to her bed with her headache powders.
One morning, when he was nine, Nikolai arrived at his classroom feeling very excited about the mouse in a jar that he planned to release in his teacher’s bag, only to discover another chair and desk had been set out, and another boy was sitting in them.
“Come meet Dominik,” said his tutor as the dark-haired boy rose and bowed deeply. “He will be getting a bit of education with you.”
Nikolai was surprised but delighted, as he had no companions his own age in the palace at all—though he grew increasingly frustrated as Dominik flinched every time Nikolai tried to speak with him.
“You needn’t be so nervous,” Nikolai whispered. “Mitkin is no fun, but he sometimes tells good stories about the old kings and doesn’t leave out the bloody parts.”
“Yes, moi tsarevich.”
“You can call me Nikolai if you like. Or we could come up with new names. You could be Dominik the … I’m not sure. Have you done any heroic deeds?”
“No, moi tsarevich.”
“Nikolai.”
“Be silent, boys,” said Mitkin, and Dominik jumped again.
But for once, Nikolai stayed quiet. He was busy devising how he might get Dominik to talk more.
When Mitkin stepped out of the room to retrieve a more detailed globe, Nikolai scurried to the front of the classroom and placed the mouse he’d found roaming the eastern wing beneath the fur hat Mitkin had left on his desk.
Dominik looked utterly terrified, but Nikolai was too excited to take much note.
“Wait until you hear the shriek that Mitkin makes,” Nikolai said. “He sounds like a scandalized teakettle.”
Tutor Mitkin did indeed scream, and Nikolai, who had meant to sit stone-faced, couldn’t restrain his own laughter—until Mitkin told Dominik to come to the front of the room and hold out his hands.
The tutor took a slender birch rod from his desk, and as Nikolai looked on in horror, Mitkin slapped it down on Dominik’s palms. Dominik released a small whimper.
“What are you doing?” Nikolai cried. “You must stop!”
Nikolai called for the guards, shouted down the hallway for help, but Mitkin did not stop. He smacked the rod against Dominik’s hands and forearms ten times, until the boy’s flesh was a mass of red welts, and his face was crumpled and wet with tears.
Mitkin set the rod aside. “Every time you act out or misbehave, Dominik will be beaten.”
“That isn’t right! It isn’t fair—the punishment should be mine!” But no one would raise the rod to a royal prince.
Nikolai protested to his mother, his father, anyone who would listen. Nobody seemed to care. “If you do as Tutor Mitkin tells you, there will be no more trouble,” said the king.
“I heard that little whelp mewling,” said Vasily. “It’s just a few lashes. I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss.”
The next day, Nikolai sat quietly in his chair. He broke his silence only once, when Mitkin stepped out of the room.
“I’m sorry for what happened yesterday,” he told Dominik. “I will never let it happen again.”
“It’s what I’m here for, moi tsarevich. Please do not feel badly.”
“You’re here to learn to read and write and add sums, and that is all,” said Nikolai. “I’ll do better. I vow it.”
Nikolai held to his promise. He kept silent every day after that. He did not sneak into the kitchen to steal almond paste. He did not disassemble anything valuable, run through the portrait hall, set any fires. Everyone marveled at the changes wrought in the young prince and applauded Tutor Mitkin for his ingenuity.
What they didn’t know was that, amidst all the quiet and calm, Nikolai and Dominik still somehow managed to become friends. They devised their own code to communicate in their lesson books and built toy boats with working sails that they launched in the abandoned water garden where no one ever ventured. They gave each other titles that changed with every day, some grand—Dominik the Bold, Nikolai the Just, and some less so—Dominik the Farter, Nikolai the Spider Squealer. They learned that as long as they didn’t trouble the calm order of the palace, no one much cared what they did, and that if they appeared to be working hard at their studies, no one bothered to check whether they were memorizing dates or trying to figure out how to build a bomb.
When he was twelve, Nikolai asked for extra reading in chemistry and Kaelish history and retired to the library every afternoon for hours of quiet study. In fact, the reading and essays took him little time at all, and as soon as he’d sped through them, he would disguise himself in peasant roughspun and sneak out of the palace to visit Dominik’s family in the countryside. He worked in the fields, learned to fix handcarts and farm equipment, to milk cows and gentle horses, and when he was thirteen, he took his first slug of home-brewed spirits from a beaten tin cup.
Each night, he fell into bed exhausted, happy to have occupation for the first time in his life, and in the mornings he presented his teachers with flawless work that made them wonder if perhaps Nikolai would become a great scholar. As it turned out, the prince was not a bad child; he just had no gift for remaining idle.
He was happy, but he was not blind. Dominik’s family was granted special privileges because of their son’s status at the palace, and still they
barely subsisted on the crops they harvested from their farm. He saw the way their neighbors suffered beneath the burdens of taxes from both their king and the dukes who owned their lands. He heard Dominik’s mother weep when her eldest son was taken for the draft, and during a particularly bad winter, he heard them whisper about their neighbor Lusha’s missing child.
“What happened to Lusha’s baby?” Dominik asked.
“A khitka came for it,” his mother replied. But Nikolai and Dominik were not children anymore, and they knew better than to listen to talk of evil forest spirits.
“She drowned it herself,” Dominik told Nikolai the next day. “She had stopped making milk because her family is starving.”
Even so, things might have continued on that way if Vasily hadn’t discovered Nikolai sneaking back into the palace one night. He was fifteen by then, and years of getting away with deception had made him careless.
“Already tumbling peasant girls,” Vasily had said with a sneer. “You’re worse than Father.”
“Please,” Nikolai had begged. “Don’t tell anyone. Dominik will be punished for it. He may be sent away.”
But Vasily did not hold his tongue, and the next day, new guards had been posted at every door, and Dominik was gone, barred from the palace in disgrace.
Nikolai had cornered Vasily in the lapis drawing room. “Do you understand what you’ve done?” he’d asked furiously.
His brother shrugged. “Your friend won’t get to study with his betters, and you won’t get to keep rambling in the fields like a commoner. I’ve done you both a favor.”
“His family will lose their stipend. They may not be able to feed themselves without it.” He could see his own angry face reflected at him in gleaming blue panels veined with gold. “Dominik won’t be exempt from the draft next year.”
“Good. The crown needs soldiers. Maybe he’ll learn his place.”
Nikolai looked at the brother he had once so adored, whom he had tried to emulate in everything. “You should be ashamed.”
Vasily was still taller than Nikolai, still outweighed him. He jabbed a finger into Nikolai’s chest and said, “You do not tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, Sobachka. I will be a king, and you will always be Nikolai Nothing.”
But while Vasily had been sparring with instructors who never pushed him too hard and who always made sure to let the future king win, Nikolai had been spending his days roughhousing with peasants who didn’t know whose nose they were bloodying.
Nikolai snatched Vasily’s finger and twisted. His brother yelped and fell to the floor. He seemed impossibly small.
“A king never kneels, brother.”
He left Vasily clutching his sprained finger and his wounded pride.
Again, Nikolai vowed he would make things right with Dominik, though this time it would be harder. He began by devising ways to funnel money to his friend’s family. But to do more, he would need influence, something his brother possessed simply by virtue of being born first.
Since Nikolai could not be important, he turned his clever mind to the task of becoming charming. His mother was vain, so he paid her compliments. He dressed impeccably in colors that suited her tastes, and whenever he visited her, he made sure to bring her a small gift—a box of sweets, orchids from the hothouse. He pleased her friends with amusing gossip, recited bits of doggerel, and imitated his father’s ministers with startling accuracy. He became a favorite at the queen’s salons, and when he didn’t make an appearance, her ladies were known to exclaim, “Where is that darling boy?”
With his father, Nikolai spoke of hunting and horseflesh, subjects about which he cared nothing but that he knew his father loved. He praised his father’s witty conversation and astute observations and developed a gift for making the king feel both wise and worldly.
He did not stop with his parents. Nikolai introduced himself to the members of his father’s cabinet and asked them flattering questions about statecraft and finance. He wrote to military commanders to commend them on victories and to inquire about the strategies they’d deployed. He corresponded with gunsmiths and shipwrights and applied himself to learning languages—the one thing at which he did not particularly excel—so that he could address them in their own tongues. When Dominik’s other brother was sent to the front, Nikolai used every bit of sway he had to get him reassigned to a place where the fighting was light. And by then, he had considerable sway.
He did it because he liked learning the puzzle of each person. He did it because it felt good to feel his influence and understanding grow. But above all else, he did it because he knew he needed to rescue his country. Nikolai had to save Ravka from his own family.
As was tradition among noblemen, Vasily accepted his officer’s commission and treated his military service as symbolic. Nikolai joined the infantry. He endured basic training with Dominik at Poliznaya, and they traveled together to their first assignment. Dominik was there when Nikolai took his first bullet, and Nikolai was there when Dominik fell at Halmhend, never to rise again.
On that battlefield, heavy with black smoke and the acrid scent of gunpowder, Nikolai had shouted for a medik, a Grisha healer, anyone to help them. But no one came. He was not a king’s son then, just one more voice crying out in the carnage.
Dominik made Nikolai promise to take care of his family, to make sure his mother knew he’d died well, and then he said, “Do you know the story of Andrei Zhirov?”
“The revolutionary?”
Zhirov had been a radical in Nikolai’s grandfather’s time.
A grin ghosted over Dominik’s blood-flecked lips. “When they tried to hang him for treason, the rope broke and he rolled into the ditch the soldiers had dug for his grave.”
Nikolai tried to smile. “I never heard that story.”
Dominik nodded. “This country, Zhirov shouted. They can’t even hang a man right.”
Nikolai shook his head. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” said Dominik. A wet sound came from his chest as he struggled to breathe. “I just know they shot him anyway.”
Soldiers did not cry. Princes did not weep. Nikolai knew this. But the tears fell anyway. “Dominik the Brave. Hold on a little longer.”
Dominik squeezed Nikolai’s hand. “This country gets you in the end, brother. Don’t forget it.”
“Not us,” he said. But Dominik was already gone.
“I’ll do better,” Nikolai promised, just as he had so many years ago in Mitkin’s classroom. “I’ll find a way.”
He had witnessed a thousand deaths since then. His nightmares had been plagued by countless other battlefields. And yet it was that promise to Dominik that haunted his waking hours. But how was he to explain any of this to Zoya, still sitting patiently at the corner of the bed, still keeping her distance?
He looked up at the honeycomb ceiling, blew out a long breath. “I think I can fix it,” he said at last. “I’ve always known Ravka is broken, and I’ve seen the way it breaks people in return. The wars never cease. The trouble never stops. But I can’t help believing that somehow, I’ll find a way to outsmart all of the kings who came before and set this country right.” He shook his head and laughed. “It is the height of arrogance.”
“I’d expect no less of you,” Zoya said, but her voice was not cruel. “Why did you send Nina away?”
“What?” The question took him by surprise—even more the rapid, breathless way Zoya had spoken the words, as if forcing them from her lips.
She did not look at him. “We almost lost her before. We barely had her back, and you sent her into danger again.”
“She’s a soldier,” he said. “You made her one, Zoya. Sitting idle in the palace with nothing but her grief to occupy her mind was no good for her.”
“But she was safe.”
“And all of that safety was killing her.” Nikolai watched Zoya carefully. “Can you forgive me for sending her away?”
“I don’t know.”
“I
won’t ask you to forgive me for what happened in the bell tower.”
“You spoke,” she said slowly. “That night in Balakirev. You said my name.”
“But—” Nikolai sat up straighter. The beast had never had language before, not when he’d been infected during the war, and as far as he knew, not now that the monster had returned. When the Darkling had infected him, even in the moments when Nikolai was able to push his awareness to the fore, he hadn’t been able to read, hadn’t been able to communicate. It was one of the most painful elements of his transformation. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe my consciousness was trying to find a way through. Today—”
She shook her head. “You didn’t sound like you.”
“Well, in that form—”
“You sounded like him.”
He paused. “I’m tempted to say it was fear or your imagination getting the best of you—” She glared at him. “But I’d prefer not to get slapped.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense. It might have been the fear or the fight, but I truly believed you wanted to kill me. You weren’t just hungry. You were eager.” Zoya clenched her fists against her thighs. “You liked frightening me.”
He wanted to say that he wouldn’t have hurt her, that he would have stopped the thing inside him before it could. But he refused to do either of them the dishonor of that lie.
“Is it possible?” he asked instead. “Could the Darkling’s consciousness have somehow survived with his power?”
“I hope not.” She unclenched her fists. “I hope there’s a thorn wood waiting beneath the sands of the Fold. I hope all of this talk of magical rituals and warrior priests turns out to be more than just a fanciful tale. But if there is no cure and if this thing in you is more than just a curse the Darkling left behind, if he’s trying to use you to find a way back to this world…” She looked at him, her blue eyes fierce in the lamplight. He sensed the deep well of loss inside her, the pain she worked so hard to hide. “I will put a bullet in your brain before I let that happen, Nikolai.”
The men who had ruled Ravka had loved power more than they’d ever loved their people. It was a disease. Nikolai knew that, and he’d sworn he would not be that kind of leader, that he would not succumb. And yet, he’d never been sure that when the time came, he could step aside and give up the throne, the thing he’d fought so long and hard for. And if he let himself become more monster than man, it would mean he had failed. So he would put aside his doubt and his desires. He would try to be better. And the woman before him would make sure he protected Ravka. Even from himself.
King of Scars Page 20
