King of Scars

by Leigh Bardugo

  The whispers in Nina’s head rose again, less angry than longing. Hush now, they said, hush.

  The Springmaiden passed through an archway into … a dormitory. Nina sank into the shadows by the arch, not quite believing what she saw before her.

  Women and girls lay in narrow beds as the Springmaidens moved among them. Beyond them, Nina glimpsed a row of bassinets. The room was otherwise bare, the dusty ruin of the factory wing cleared of equipment. The windows had been papered over in black—to prevent any lamplight from leaking outside and raising questions.

  A girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen was being walked up and down the length of the corridor by a Springmaiden. Her feet were bare and she wore a light gray gown that stretched over her jutting belly.

  “I can’t,” she moaned. She looked unspeakably frail, the thrust of her stomach at odds with the sharp knobs and angles of her bones.

  “You can,” said the Springmaiden, her voice firm as she led the girl by her elbow.

  “She needs to eat,” said another of the women from the convent. “Skipped her breakfast.”

  The Springmaiden tsked. “You know you aren’t to do that.”

  “I’m not hungry,” panted the girl between heavy breaths.

  “We can either walk to help the baby come or I can sit you down for some semla. The sugar will give you energy during the birth.”

  The girl began to cry. “I don’t need sugar. You know what I need.”

  A tremor passed through Nina as understanding came. She recognized that desperation, that deep hunger that sank its teeth into you until all you were was wanting. She knew the need that turned everything you’d ever cared for—friends, food, love—to ash, until all you could remember of yourself was the desire for the drug. The wasted body, the dark hollows beneath her eyes—this girl was addicted to parem. And that meant she must be Grisha.

  Nina peered down the row of beds at the women and girls. The youngest looked to be about fifteen, the oldest might have been in her thirties, but the ravages of the drug made it hard to tell. Some cradled small bumps beneath their thin blankets, others hunched over high, protruding stomachs. A few might not have been pregnant—or might not have been showing yet.

  Nina felt her body tremble, heard the thunder of her heartbeat in her ears. What was this place? Who were these women?

  Help us. Could these be the voices she had heard? But none of the women were looking at Nina. It was the dead who had summoned her. Justice.

  The door behind Nina opened again, and as one, the patients in their beds turned their heads like flowers seeking the sun.

  “She’s here!” cried one of them as the Wellmother swept in. She was pushing a cart. The women began to rise from their beds, but the Wellmother gave a short, sharp “Be still!” They sank back obediently against their pillows. “There will be no rushing or shoving. You will get your injection when we come to you.”

  Nina eyed the rows of syringes on the cart and the ruddy liquid inside them. She wasn’t even sure if it was parem, but she felt the pull of the drug, could swear she smelled it on the air. A year ago she would have clawed her way to those syringes without a second thought for revealing herself. She’d fought hard to break free from the addiction and had learned that using her new power helped. Now she focused on that power, on the current of that cold and silent river. She needed all the sense and calm she could summon because none of what she was seeing made sense.

  Grisha under the influence of parem were beyond powerful. They could accomplish things that were otherwise unimaginable even with the most extraordinary amplifier. Jarl Brum had attempted to experiment on Grisha with the drug in the hope of turning them into weapons to be used against Ravka—but always under carefully controlled conditions. His Grisha captives had been confined to specially built cells that prohibited them from using their power, and the parem had been mixed with a sedative to try to make the prisoners more compliant.

  These women weren’t even in restraints.

  The Wellmother moved down the line, handing syringes to the sisters, who injected the orange concoction into waiting arms. Nina heard a few sobs, a low, contented groan, a grumbled “She always starts on that end. It isn’t fair.”

  The pregnant girl being walked along the aisle said, “Please. Just a little.”

  “Not so soon before the baby comes. It could put you both at risk.”

  The girl began to cry. “But you never give it to the mothers after the babies come.”

  “Then you’ll just have to get pregnant again, won’t you?”

  The girl cried harder, and Nina didn’t know if it was hunger for the drug or dread at what the Springmaiden was suggesting that made the girl cover her face and weep.

  The women fell back in their beds, fingers flexing at their sides. The fire in the lanterns leapt. A gust of wind shifted a stack of bedsheets. Mist gathered over one girl’s bed—she must be a Tidemaker. But they were all docile, gave not a single sign of defiance. Grisha on parem didn’t behave this way. It was a stimulant. Had the drug been combined with another substance? Was this what had poisoned the wolves? If Nina somehow managed to steal a syringe, would Leoni be able to discern what new atrocity the Fjerdans had concocted? And how had the girls survived long enough on the drug to bear children, maybe multiple children?

  A baby began to cry in one of the tiny cribs. A Springmaiden snatched a bottle from the bottom of the cart and picked up the infant, quieting it. “There you go, sweetheart,” she crooned.

  Nina pushed back against the wall, afraid her legs might give way. This could not be. But if the mothers were ingesting parem … then the babies would be too. They would be born addicted to the stuff. Perfect Grisha slaves.

  Nina shuddered. Was this Brum’s work? Someone else’s? Were there other bases that had been given over to these experiments? Why did I think these nightmares stopped at the Ice Court? How could I have been so naive?

  Her gaze fell on a woman lying in a daze, face nearly as pale as her pillow. A young girl lay in the bed next to her. Nina gripped the wall to steady herself. She recognized them. The mother and daughter from the Elling docks. Birgir had sent them here. Nina wished she’d killed him more slowly.

  Was this what had become of the Grisha women who hadn’t made it to the safe house in Elling? Were they in this room right now? Girls go missing from Kejerut. Not just any girls. Grisha.

  A bell sounded somewhere in the factory. The Wellmother clapped her hands, and several of the Springmaidens gathered to follow her.

  “Have a good night, Marit,” she said to one of the uniformed women as she left. “We’ll have a shift in to relieve you tomorrow night.”

  Nina slipped in behind them as they left the dormitory. She kept to the gloom, trying to steady herself and think of the task ahead—getting out of the factory. But her mind felt fractured and wild, crowded with the images of that room.

  Help us. The voices of the dead. The pain of the living.

  Ahead she could see the Springmaidens approaching the guards at the main door.

  “Did your straggler find you?” she heard one of the guards ask the Wellmother.

  “What straggler?”

  “I don’t know, braids, pinafore. Looked the same as the rest of you.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re all very tired and—”

  “Line up for a head count.”

  “Is that strictly necessary?”

  “Line up.”

  Nina did not wait to hear the rest. She set off at a sprint, back down the hall toward the eastern wing, trying to keep her footsteps light. The main entrance wasn’t an option anymore. If the guards discovered an extra Springmaiden had—

  A bell began to sound, different from the last, high and shrill. An alarm.

  Lights came on all around her, the sudden glare blinding.

  She wasn’t going to make it back through the dormitory to the eastern gate.

  Nina slid behind a dusty hunk of machinery as two
guards stormed past, guns at the ready.

  She looked up. Several of the windows here were broken, but how to reach them? And what was on the other side?

  No time to debate the issue. By now the guards and the Wellmother knew that a rogue Springmaiden or someone dressed in a convent pinafore had infiltrated the factory. Nina had to get down the mountain and back to the convent before anybody found her bed empty. She scrambled atop the old piece of equipment and reached for the window ledge, struggling to haul herself up. She managed to wedge her foot between two bricks and shove her body onto the stone ledge.

  Through the broken glass, she could see the twinkling lights of the town in the distance, patches of snow on the forest floor far below.

  She heard footsteps and saw another squad of armed soldiers charging through the eastern wing on heavy boots.

  “Lock down the perimeter,” one was saying. “We’ll search in a grid and work our way back toward the central hall.”

  “How do we even know someone is here?” another complained.

  If they looked up—

  But they continued on, conversation fading.

  Nina took one last glance out the window.

  “No mourners,” she whispered, and launched herself through the broken glass.

  She fell fast and hit the ground hard. Her shoulder and hip screamed at the force of the impact, but Nina stifled any sound as she rolled down the slope, unable to stop her momentum. She tumbled into the tree line, struck the base of a pine, and forced herself to shove to her feet.

  She made herself take a moment to get oriented, then ran, dodging through the trees, keeping her hands up to try to stave off the slicing branches, trying to ignore the pain in her side. She had to get back to the convent and inside before the Wellmother returned. If she didn’t, Leoni and Adrik would be taken unawares, and all their covers would be blown.

  She came to a stream and charged through, shoes squelching in the shallows, then plunged down the next hill.

  There, the convent—its windows still dark, though she could see lanterns in the stables, the chapel yard, the dish of scraps she had left out for Trassel.

  Nina ran, lost her footing, righted herself, half falling now, trying to get down the mountain. When she reached the edge of the trees, she slowed, angling to the south so she could avoid the stables.

  She heard the sound of hoofbeats and peered along the road. She saw the wagon, the driver whipping his horses hard. The Wellmother was returning from the factory, and Nina knew they would be searching the rooms within minutes.

  Nina pulled off her muddy shoes, slid inside the kitchen, locked the door, and shoved the key beneath the flour tin. She hurried to her bedroom, already dragging her ruined clothes over her head.

  “What’s going on?” Leoni asked groggily as Nina stumbled into the room and hurriedly shut the door behind her.

  “Nothing,” whispered Nina. “Pretend to be asleep.”

  “Why?”

  Nina heard doors slamming and voices in the convent entry. She yanked off her clothes, wiped her face and hands clean with the inside of her blouse, and stuffed the whole sodden mess into the trunk at the foot of her bed. “I was here all night.”

  “Oh, Nina,” groaned Leoni. “Please tell me you were just getting a midnight snack.”

  “Yes,” said Nina, wiggling into a night rail. “A very muddy one.”

  Nina threw herself under the covers just as the door sprang open and light from the hall flooded the room.

  Nina made a pretense of startling awake. “What is it?”

  Two Springmaidens stormed inside, pinafores rustling. Nina could hear voices in the dormitories above them, the clatter of doors opening and girls being woken from their sleep. At least we’re not the only ones under suspicion, thought Nina. Maybe they think a student snuck out to visit a soldier in the factory barracks.

  “What’s going on?” asked Leoni.

  “Be silent,” snapped one of the Springmaidens. She held up her lantern, casting her gaze around the room.

  Nina saw it in the same moment the Springmaiden did—a smudge of mud on the floor near the base of her bed.

  The Springmaiden handed her companion her lantern and threw open the trunk, rummaging inside. She pulled out the filthy pinafore and blouse.

  “Why do you have a novitiate’s uniform?” the Springmaiden demanded. “And why is it covered in mud? I’m going to get the Wellmother.”

  “There’s no need.” The Wellmother stood in the doorway, round face stern, hands folded over the dark blue wool of her pinafore. “Explain yourself, Enke Jandersdat.”

  Nina opened her mouth, but before she could say a word, Hanne appeared behind the Wellmother. “The clothes are mine.”

  “What?”

  “They’re mine,” repeated Hanne, looking ashen and lost, her hair flowing in thick, ruddy waves over her shoulders. “I went riding when I was not supposed to and took a fall from my horse.”

  The Wellmother narrowed her eyes. “Why would you hide them here?”

  “I knew my dirty clothes would be discovered in my room, so I planned to wash them myself.”

  “And somehow the widow Jandersdat didn’t notice a heap of muddy clothing in her trunk?”

  “Mila said she would hide them for me until I could see to them.”

  The Wellmother eyed the soiled pinafore. “The mud seems fresh.”

  “I went riding only this morning. You’ll see the clothes are my size, far too long for Mila. It is my fault, not hers.”

  “Is this true?” the Wellmother asked Nina.

  Nina looked at Hanne.

  “Is it?” the Wellmother demanded.

  Nina nodded.

  The Wellmother huffed a frustrated breath. “Finish the search,” she instructed the Springmaidens. “Hanne, I cannot begin to express my disappointment. I will have to write to your father immediately.”

  “I understand, Wellmother,” Hanne said, her misery clear. It was no performance. She had risked her future at the convent to save Nina.

  “And you, Enke Jandersdat,” said the Wellmother. “Your role here is to instruct Hanne in the Zemeni language, not to enable her disruptive behaviors. I will have to reconsider this whole arrangement.”

  “Yes, Wellmother,” said Nina contritely, and watched as the woman shuffled Hanne down the hallway, closing the door behind her.

  Leoni flopped back on the pillows. “Please tell me whatever you learned inside the factory was worth it.”

  Nina lay back, adrenaline still flooding her body. “It was worth it.” But she’d seen the look in Hanne’s eyes as the Wellmother led her away—she was going to want answers.

  Nina thought of the punishment Hanne would take, what a letter home to her father might mean. She owed Hanne—maybe her life. She most certainly owed her the truth.

  Help us.

  But there was no way Nina could give it to her.

  19

  ZOYA

  ZOYA HAD THOUGHT THEY would be led to new rooms that would serve as their living quarters. Instead, Juris and Grigori departed, and with a wave of Elizaveta’s hand, the table and chairs dropped into the floor. A moment later, new walls rose around them. The sand twisted and arched, forming three doorways around a central chamber—all of it the lifeless, sun-leached color of old bone.

  Zoya was not sure how much more of this she could stand. The world felt like it had been torn open.

  “I wish we could offer more comfortable accommodations,” said Elizaveta. “But this is a place of few comforts. Rest if you can.”

  Zoya’s room looked like a bedchamber in a castle of old: pointed windows, heavy leather-backed chairs that sat before a vast fireplace, a huge canopied bed hung with velvet curtains. And yet there was no glass in the windows. There was no leather, no velvet. It was all that fine-grained sand, every item, every surface wrought in the same driftwood hue. The fire that burned in the grate flickered blue like that horrid dragon’s flames. It was a phantom room
. Zoya’s hand went to her wrist. She needed to talk to Nikolai.

  She opened the door—though it was hard to even think of it as a door when it hadn’t existed moments before.

  Nikolai stood in the archway of a chamber identical to hers.

  “It’s like looking at a sketch of something grand,” he said, turning slowly to take in his new quarters. He ran a hand over the gray sand mantel. “Luxurious in its details but devoid of anything that would actually make you want to stay here.”

  “This is a mistake,” said Zoya. Her head hurt. Her heart hurt. She had to keep her fingers from wandering continuously to her wrist. But she needed to think clearly. There were larger things at stake than what she’d lost. There always were.

  “Where’s Yuri?” he asked.

  “Probably genuflecting somewhere. Nikolai, is this a bargain we want to make?”

  “We came here for a cure, and now we’ve been offered one.”

  “You could die.”

  “A risk we’ve long been willing to take. In fact, I believe you offered to put a bullet in my head not so long ago.”

  “We have less than three weeks before the party in Os Alta,” she protested.

  “Then I will have to master the monster in that time.”

  “You saw what they can do. What if we shatter the bounds of the Unsea and unleash them on Ravka? Are you willing to make that gamble?”

  Nikolai ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know.”

  “And yet you agreed to dance at the first asking like a boy at a country ball.”

  “I did.”

  And he didn’t sound remotely sorry about it. “We can’t trust them. We don’t really even know who they are.”

  “I understand that. Just as you understand that is the choice we must make. Why are you fighting it, Zoya?”

  Zoya leaned her head against the edge of the window and looked out at the nothing beyond. Had the Saints been staring at this same empty view for hundreds of years?

  “If these are the Saints,” she said, “then who have we been praying to all this time?”