The man’s pale blond hair caught the lamplight, and his eyes shone a bleached blue. It was as though all the color and life had been drained from him, and the sight sent a surge of fury through Ana.
It was the broker. She recalled the blackstone doors of the carriage that slammed in her face, the faint trace of May’s shadow over his shoulders as he’d carried her away.
He’d stood on that stage in the Playpen, watching countless Affinites forced to perform and fight to the death.
And then he’d ordered the attack on them backstage. Kill her, Nuryasha.
Ana thought of May’s body in her arms, so light and so helpless.
I want to live.
And now May was buried in the silent earth for eternity.
Wrath wrapped its white-hot grasp around her, and suddenly she was shaking, her anger roiling and pent-up grief spilling from her.
May would never live again.
And it was all…his…fault.
Ramson’s arms locked around her waist, but she hurled him off with a snap of her Affinity. By the time he slammed against the settee, Ana had thrown back the curtains and stepped into the living room.
She lifted the first broker bodily into the air with barely half a thought. She was one with her Affinity; it moved at her slightest thought like a phantom arm, an extension of her body. The broker’s dagger thunked to the wooden floorboards; he made a gagging sound as she seized the blood in his body, interrupting the natural flow to and from his heart.
She was all too aware that she was dressed in nothing but a slim black gown, her cloak and hood left in the backroom and her velvet gloves torn and discarded at the Playpen. The man in the air struggled, twitching like a broken puppet, his face slowly draining of color, his eyes rolling back into his head.
Ana flung him aside. He crashed into the far wall with a crack and lay still. Dimly, Ana heard several screams from the Affinites, saw Yuri dive for the Affinite girl and bundle her behind the settee.
Ana stepped past them.
The pale-eyed broker stood in the doorway. He held a single dagger, but it trembled in his hands as he beheld her.
She was breathing hard, her vision bleeding red, her head buzzing as she pointed a shaking hand at him. The veins in her hands had grown dark and raised from her flesh, snaking around her palms and wrists, extending to her elbows. Grotesque and gruesome, lit by lamplight for everyone in the room to see.
Ana didn’t care. Her fury was a living thing, turning the world red and distorted.
The broker dropped to his knees. He shook visibly, a sheen of sweat coating his face. “P-please,” he whispered. “Kerlan, he’ll kill me—”
He never finished his sentence. Ana wrapped her Affinity around him and lifted him into the air. He’d killed May. She wanted, more than anything, to rip him apart, to bleed him dry drop by drop and watch him suffer—
“Ana!” She heard her name as though from a distance. Someone knocked into her from behind.
They crashed to the floor, and she found herself pinned beneath Ramson. He was panting, blood seeping from his reopened wound through the bandages on his abdomen. He slammed her hands to the floor, his full weight on her. “Control yourself,” he snarled. “Think.”
“Get off me!” she screamed.
“We need answers. Who sent him? How did he find us? Can we ally with him—”
“Get. Off. Me.” She spat the words at him.
Ramson’s eyes bore into hers; his grip tightened around her wrists. “No.”
It was the trigger she’d been waiting for. Keeping her hold on the broker, she flung her Affinity at Ramson. He went still, his eyes widening and veins straining in his neck, at his temples, as she took control of his blood.
Ana threw him across the room.
She heard the thud of his body as he slammed against the far wall and crumpled to the floor. A part of her was aware of Yuri and the Affinites watching her, frozen from their hiding places behind Shamaïra’s divans.
Ana ignored them and turned back to the broker. He’d crumpled to the ground, but she easily lifted him again. A strange sense of calm descended upon her as she approached him. “Do you recognize me?” It was as though someone else spoke through her, pulling words through her lips.
The man hung suspended in the air, his body arched, his eyes bulging from his head. He opened his mouth to speak. Instead, blood trickled down his chin.
“No?” Ana continued her advance. A delicious feeling gripped her. “Perhaps you’ll remember the young earth Affinite you took in Kyrov. The child you put on show tonight. The one you murdered.”
Recognition lit the broker’s face. He struggled against her hold, his mouth opening and closing like that of a fish out of water. Ana was a mere arm’s length away now; she could see the veins of his eyes erupting, red bleeding across the white. Blood gushed from his lips.
In that moment, she recalled the Salskoff Winter Market, the screams and the terror as her Affinity ripped the life from eight innocent people. She heard Luka’s voice—the voice of reason that had guided her hand and her Affinity.
Luka would counsel forgiveness.
Looking into the broker’s pleading face, Ana searched for a sliver of pity.
Instead, she found the memory of May’s bright eyes dimmed to emptiness.
And another voice whispered to her then:
Monster.
Ana smiled, lifting a thickly veined hand and gripping the broker’s neck. It glistened, slippery and red. The blood felt like exhilaration beneath her fingertips. “Are you afraid?” she whispered. “You should know that it sometimes takes one monster to destroy another.” She pressed her face close to his, forcing his terrified gaze to meet the crimson of hers. “Remember my face as you burn in hell, deimhov.”
With a twitch of her fingers, she pulled.
There was a wet ripping sound. Red poured from him like wine from an uncorked bottle, pooling on the floorboards and forming puddles beneath Ana’s boots.
As the blood drained from him, her control over the lifeless body slipped. The corpse dropped to the floor with a thunk.
Her Affinity receded like a tide, taking with it the red of her vision, the buzz in her ears, and her adrenaline. The broker’s corpse lay at her feet, limbs bent at odd angles like a broken doll.
Ana stumbled back. Nausea flooded her stomach, and bile rose, thick and bitter, to her tongue. The rest of the parlor swam into dizzying view. Overturned settees and divans. Shattered globefires and torn books. Broken shelves. And, at the far end of the room, Ramson’s body curled against the wall where she’d flung him.
A sob choked Ana’s throat. The room had emptied at some point; the heavy brocade curtains leading to the backroom and the rest of the dacha were drawn back, and Yuri’s gaze found her. Shamaïra stood behind him, clasping an Affinite child in her arms. The rest of the Affinites behind them.
Tears blurred Ana’s vision. “I’m sorry…I didn’t…I…” Words faltered on her lips. There was nothing she could say that would justify what she had done tonight, before the eyes of a dozen witnesses.
Because you are a monster.
She was spiraling, shrinking into memories of her eight-year-old self, the world a dizzying kaleidoscope of screams and terror. Her breaths came in shallow gasps.
Ana turned and staggered out the door.
The predawn air stung her cheeks, the cold rushing into her bones and sucking out every last bit of warmth. The shadow of the Syvern Taiga stretched before her, and she remembered the night she’d lost everything and run into its darkness.
Tonight, she stood to lose everything again. May, the light in her life, had kept her grounded, kept her good, and showed her the importance of love.
She was gone.
But there was one person left, Ana realized as Shamaï
ra’s dacha faded into a small blur of golden light.
Luka was still alive. And he needed her.
She was shaking as she continued to plunge forward. The town of Novo Mynsk dozed beneath a sky that shifted from black to a dark violet with the softest of blues fringing the edges.
Footsteps fell behind her. A familiar voice called her name.
Ana slowed. Turned.
Yuri’s fire-red hair was outlined in the faraway glow of Shamaïra’s dacha. “Don’t go,” he said.
She had a sudden memory of them as children back at the Palace. Her, after her worst rages or days of silence, screaming at him to go away. And Yuri, sitting against her door until the next morning, her tea long gone cold. It had been the little things that anchored her to the present—the sigh of his roughspun servant’s tunic as he stirred on the other side of the door, the gentle knock and soft whisper that he would be back with her breakfast, the slight clink of her teacup in the early-morning silence as he left with velvet steps. The smallest reminders that no matter what she became, no matter what her Affinity made her into, there was someone on the other side of that door, waiting for her. And that she had to continue to live and to hope.
“I’m sorry,” Ana said quietly.
“Stay,” Yuri insisted. He held out a hand.
Ana almost took it. But in the darkness, she saw the eerie veins still pulsing from her flesh. She thought of the blood red of her eyes. The bodies of the two brokers, blood pooling around them. And Ramson, lying unconscious on the floor.
She took a step back. “It’s best that I don’t,” she whispered.
Sorrow clouded Yuri’s eyes. “I stand by what I said earlier,” he said quietly. “The future lies here, with us. In the hands of the people.”
“I’ll fix it,” Ana found herself whispering. Yet the meaning of the sentence had blurred. What, exactly, was she going to fix when she went back to her Palace? She thought of Luka and his words that had defined her entire life; of Papa, turning away from her bedside that day, and then convulsing beneath her bloodstained hands. Of red blood and white snow at the Salskoff Vyntr’makt; of the broker’s skin stained crimson.
Monster.
Deimhov.
She was going to fix herself, Ana realized, guilt seeping into her stomach. For so long, she had held on to the idea that if she could find the alchemist and avenge the murder of her papa, then somehow she would be redeemed, too.
Redemption was something Ana had to earn; she needed to learn to forgive herself before she could fight for others.
Yet the Affinites of her empire could not wait for the equality that they deserved. And there already was a person who could lead them to it.
Ana took Yuri’s hands. “You will make a great leader, Yuri,” she said. “I pledge my heart to you, and my service to fighting for all Affinites. But first I need to fix the mistakes I’ve made.”
Yuri pressed her knuckles to his lips. “When you’re ready,” he said, “send a snowhawk to Goldwater Port. I plan to establish a stronghold there, in the south. Our revolution will begin there.” He drew her into his arms. “And remember that I love you, no matter what you choose.”
“I love you too, my friend.”
She clutched him tightly, breathing in the scent of his smoke and fire, closing her eyes and wishing she could stay like this forever.
She felt Yuri slip something around her neck; it tinkled, warm against her skin. Ana lifted it into her palm. The pendant winked at her: a small silver circle divided evenly into quarters, one for each season.
“A Deys’krug,” Yuri said, taking her hand. “We will come full circle again.”
“We will find each other again,” Ana reaffirmed, because the possibility that this was the last time they would see each other was something she couldn’t bear to voice. “Will you ask Shamaïra to take care of Ramson? Tell him I’m sorry, and that…I’ll come find him after it’s all over, to honor our Trade.”
Somewhere along the way, between Shamaïra’s dacha and the endless stretch of night, she’d made up her mind. Ramson’s body hurtling across the room, curled up against the wall bloodied—that had been her doing.
She could not let anyone else get hurt because of her. She would find him again—or he would find her—after this was all over, and she would pay him for his help. But now she would go and find her alchemist alone.
If Yuri had questions, he didn’t ask them. Instead, he only said, “I will.”
Ana gently dropped his hands and stepped back. “Deys blesya ty, Yuri.” Deities bless you. It was a phrase said not in farewell but in hope and well-wishing; a phrase reserved for the ones closest to your heart.
“Deys blesya ty, Kolst Pryntsessa.” His voice was faint in the silence of the night as she turned from him and began to make her way back to Novo Mynsk. Back to the inn, where her rucksack and outfits and parchments of plans and maps lay, waiting for her. Waiting for Kerlan’s Fyrva’snezh.
She sensed the spark of Yuri’s blood growing farther and smaller, alone against the Syvern Taiga, watching her until her feet hit the cobblestone streets of the city and dachas sprang up all around her again. And when she looked back toward the forest, Yuri and Shamaïra’s dacha had disappeared, swallowed by the infinite night as though they’d never existed in the first place.
It was dawn by the time she found her way back to the inn where she and Ramson had set up camp. Her belongings and room lay untouched beneath a faint dusting of gold light that filtered through the cracked windows. Ana latched the door, took two steps, and fell onto the small cot.
Sleep took her.
The sky was afire when Ana woke, groggy and dizzy and drained, as though she’d slept for days. Clouds had gathered in the west, and the setting sun lit them in brilliant shades of reds and corals and violets. When she threw open the windows, the air hung heavy with the scent of winter and promised snow.
She cleaned herself in the small wash closet at the end of the hallway, trying not to think of the blood caked on her face and hands as she scrubbed it off. It all still felt like a dream—Yuri, the Redcloaks, Shamaïra’s, the brokers. And May.
No, she wouldn’t think of that. She couldn’t, not yet, not when tonight amounted to everything she had been working for over the past eleven moons.
She would get through the night, find her alchemist, and go from there. So Ana took all the memories from the past day and locked them away. Tonight she needed to be at her strongest and quickest and cleverest.
She rummaged through the few parcels they’d stacked against the wall until she found what she was looking for. The dress she’d purchased days ago slid over her body smoothly. It was made entirely of white chiffon, embedded with tiny beads that glittered white, silver, and blue and fell in a spiral, flowing with the translucent folds and pooling at her feet. When she looked at herself in the cracked mirror hanging on the wall, she inhaled, the dress glimmering like falling snow.
She took the boxes of fresh creams and powders and began to dress her face as she remembered the maids used to back when she was a child. Bronze creams rubbed evenly across her skin, to cover bruises and the roughness. Then a dusting of rose-scented powders to give her a shimmering look. A dark blush just under her cheekbones, and a dab of vermilion rouge on her lips.
When she stood and looked at her reflection, she felt slightly more reassured. She barely recognized the girl frowning back at her in the looking glass. That girl was made up and manicured to look like she belonged. A high dama of Novo Mynsk.
No one would recognize her tonight. She was a ghost.
Still, when Ana slid the mask she had chosen over her face, she felt her entire body relax. The color matched her dress, silver whorls tracing snowflakes around the edges. Traditionally, Fyrva’snezh did not require masks. Yet…the people of Novo Mynsk seemed to have a fondness for masked events.
Are all balls in Novo Mynsk masked? she’d asked Ramson several days ago.
He’d smiled at her from behind a black mask of his own. The people of Novo Mynsk have a lot to hide.
Ana stuffed what she had left of her belongings in a small beaded purse she’d purchased as an accessory for the ball: her sketches of Luka, her parents, her mamika Morganya, and Pyetr Tetsyev. An unused globefire. A map. When she got to the bottom of her rucksack, she paused and pulled out a single copperstone.
It was the last of the three she had given May. Let’s buy ourselves a treat at the next town.
A knot formed in her throat. She blinked, and the phantom of May’s toothy smile vanished into the impending twilight outside.
She had killed the broker who had killed May. But did one life pay for another?
Ana kissed the coin and tucked it into the bottom of her purse before strapping it to her wrist. She found the parchment with the address to the Kerlan Estate that she’d gotten from Ramson several days ago and slipped that, along with her false papers, into her purse.
Then she tossed the rest of her papers and plans into a tin bucket used for collecting bathwater, set it on fire, and watched it burn until there was nothing left but ashes.
Ana pulled on matching silver-white gloves, threw on her fur cloak, and swept one last look around her now-empty room before she left. She was ready. Ramson had secured them spots as mesyr and dama Farrald, a common Bregonian last name that piqued Ana’s curiosity for a moment before she brushed it off. Ramson had his reasons for everything; now was not the time to question them. She would present herself alone as such at the door and make excuses for her husband. The rest of the plan remained the same: find Tetsyev, lure him to the basement that Ramson had made her memorize the path to on a badly drawn map, and escape through the secret passageway. Ramson had hired a carriage to take them far, far away.
Twilight had fallen outside; the last rays of the sun gave way to the violet cloak of night. Storm clouds broiled in the skies. And as the lamplighters ran down the streets, Novo Mynsk came alive with the scintillating shimmer of lights, rowdy laughter, and the distant but ever-present sounds of song and bar music. Whereas the townsfolk of Salskoff would have lit blue-papered lanterns at their windows and sat at home to witness the First Snow with their loved ones, the people of Novo Mynsk took to the streets. Ana passed throngs of revelers singing in Old Cyrilian, dressed in white robes and glimmering blue headdresses that were farcical portrayals of the Deities. They danced and laughed and drank, torchlight lancing off their masks and the coins in their hands.
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