by Anna Bright
When I was done, I offered my own requests.
I prayed for Torden and the Beholder crew, locked away, that their guards would not harm them. I prayed that the Rusalki would forgive Aleksei for what he had done, and that we could restore their children to safety. And I prayed for the servants and the children and my friends and the other innocents inside this tower, that the end of the day would find them safe and whole, no matter what came to pass.
A knock sounded at our door. Aleksei opened it and greeted our guards.
They led us upstairs—up, up, up we climbed, to the very top floor, Aleksei’s hand on my back—and beyond.
On the roof of Stupka-Zamok, fourteen floors above the ground, the tsarytsya waited for us. And below, all the city stood watch.
Men and women pushed and shoved for a better view on one side, and on another the little pestykk waited in their ranks. Their voices rose like a cold wave as I faced my groom.
I had pictured so many faces across from me, so many hands reaching for mine on this day.
Peter, with his bright laugh and his bright eyes and the gap between his teeth.
Bear, wry and smiling, a flower in his hands.
Torden, red-haired, red-bearded, steady and kind. His ring sat on my right hand, even now, but today I would swear on its rose-gold band to be faithful to someone else.
I’d never pictured facing Aleksei, gray-uniformed, his dark hair tied back with white. Kohl smudged around his eyes was the only nod to the occasion.
Aleksei. My sometime enemy, sometime ally, now friend. Would I have to kiss him at the ceremony’s end? I tried to envision it, tried to imagine being his wife. It felt like visualizing myself beside King Constantine in England: impossible. My mind rejected it.
I looked around, hoping despite myself that the Rusalki were already here, waiting to fight. But besides Aleksei, I saw only enemies; we stood before Baba Yaga, with Sunset and Midnight at her sides. Polunoshchna was watching my face, trying to decide if I had won today or if she had.
“Bow, Zolushka,” Baba Yaga said softly.
I bent, and the tsarytsya produced a crown from a cushion. Its arching sides and its base were crusted with diamonds, emeralds, and pearls, and it sat heavy on my head. A great murmur went up from the crowd.
“The Württemberg Crown,” she said lightly. “It looks well on you.” The tsarytsya’s own crown was as grand as mine, gold and red velvet and decked with two-headed birds of prey.
Polunoshchna looked murderous at this. But I wasn’t happy, either.
I was never born to wear a crown. And I did not want this stolen piece of finery that told the world I was heir to Grandmother Wolf, empress of the mortar and pestle and her armies of devouring teeth.
“Come you here of your own accord, Seneschal-elect Selah of Potomac?” she asked, her voice bubbling like a cauldron.
They were not the vows I had dreamed of. They were the nursery rhyme I had feared since childhood.
I ransacked the crowd with my gaze, searching, my vision blurring, pleading with the faces I saw to be the ones I longed for. But there was no one.
“Selah,” Aleksei whispered, reaching for my hands. He looked sorry, so sorry.
I had done my best to survive, had hoped to be rescued, had tried to escape. I had bargained to protect Torden, had schemed to deliver the city into the hands of those to whom it belonged.
Torden’s life was enough. I would marry Aleksei, and be grateful his brother would live.
There was nothing to be done but do this.
“Yes,” I answered Baba Yaga, certain as the stone beneath us.
“Rankovyy, come you here of your own accord?”
“Yes,” Aleksei said simply.
The tsarytsya turned again to me. “Will you be wife to this man?”
I nodded. My throat was tight.
Again, again, my eyes again combed the crowd for the Rusalki. But they were nowhere to be seen. I was all that stood between the Wolves and Torden.
How I wished he were standing across from me today. How I wished I were holding his hands instead, broad and warm. Aleksei’s fingers were cold as bones in mine.
The tsarytsya raised a stone-gray eyebrow. “The word, Seneschal-elect.”
“Yes.” I choked it out, trying to laugh, as if I were merely nervous and not on the brink of collapse. “Yes.”
Aleksei echoed my vow when it was his turn.
Baba Yaga turned one last time on me. “As a Wolf of the Imperiya Yotne, will you honor the pack in all your doings, sparing not even your mate, should its hunger require he be sacrificed?”
I drew back ever so slightly. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. This marriage wasn’t about Aleksei and me. It was about the tsarytsya, like everything else in her world.
I didn’t blame the Rusalki for not coming. I didn’t blame the Leshii and the Vodyanoi for abandoning Aleksei and me to our destruction.
“Yes,” I said for the third time, sealing my fate.
I stared down at the crowd, studied their curious faces, their squinting eyes.
I’d rolled the dice, played the tsarytsya for the city, and lost. I’d failed every one of these people.
Then, suddenly, at the edge of the gray slush of the crowd, I spotted a face. A face I knew.
I drew in a low, sharp breath.
Homer.
He wore a gray uniform but I would have recognized his ruddy face and iron hair and iron eyes anywhere. His arms were crossed over his barrel chest.
I thought he’d been captured. But there he was. My knees threatened to buckle.
Perrault pressed in beside him, slipping from a nearby alley. His clothes were plain and his hair was cropped close to his skull, but he was a fox among Wolves, as sure as I lived.
He wasn’t in prison.
And if he had not been captured, he hadn’t betrayed me. Polunoshchna was a liar.
Perrault stood outside Baba Yaga’s tower, waiting for it to turn and face him.
I didn’t see Lang. But Yu stood at Perrault’s side.
One face. Then another.
Bear. The prince of England, who had broken my heart by accident. His blue eyes were burned into my memory.
And another.
The girl—a girl whose name I did not know, but who had fought alongside Bear the day he defeated the Duke of Cornwall. Aleksei had just spoken with her.
Her breast pocket was stuffed with yellow cowslips.
My eyes raked the crowds, frantic. Dozens of women slowly drew near, forming rows close—so, so very close—behind the ranks of the little pestykk.
I turned to Aleksei, my eyes wide.
And then the explosions began.
59
I staggered and fell, my ears ringing, and Aleksei threw his narrow body over mine. When the earth stopped shaking, I raised my head.
The air was full of smoke. I choked on it, lungs aching. A few feet away, the tsarytsya lay prone, blood trickling from her temple. Midnight was out cold.
Aleksei hauled me up and pushed me toward the door in the roof that would take me downstairs. “Go.” There was more strength in his skinny arms than I would have guessed.
I glanced back. Sunset was coughing, pushing herself to stand, bloody palms leaving red prints on her knees. “What are you going to do?”
Aleksei pushed me toward the door again. “Follow you.”
We had to shove before it gave; the explosions had rocked the frame of the building. I stumbled through the door and raced down the stairs, gray uniforms jostling past, not seeing or caring who I was in their rush to get out. All around me people shouted, wailed, coughed in the smoke, pressing and pushing on the narrow iron stairs.
I had foreseen this. I had foreseen what a hellscape this tower would be, if Baba Yaga’s enemies ever breached her gates.
I hadn’t imagined that I’d be inside when it happened.
Two floors down, someone pushed a man over the railing. He fell the remaining ten stories and st
ruck the flagstones with a sound that made me sick.
Somehow, Aleksei kept a level head through it all, pushing ahead of me and seizing my wrist with his skinny fingers. He threaded through the crowds like a needle through fabric, weaving and winding and dragging me along behind him. My head spun and the stairs creaked and I stumbled more than once, but Aleksei never let me go, never lost his cool.
Finally, we reached the bottom floor. Aleksei shoved me toward the front door as he raced toward the basement. “Go!” he screamed over his shoulder. “I’ll find Cobie and Anya.”
I watched his retreating back, frozen in place. And then the explosions began again.
A rumble, and a scrape, and a stone crashed from the ceiling. It smashed to the foyer floor and pinned a man beneath it.
My stomach lurched at all the blood. Smoke rose, thick and heady, around us.
The crowd swam, bodies pressing, nails scratching. Someone pushed me, and my knees hit stone; an elbow hit my back, and I lay flat on the floor. Heavy boots trampled my shoulder and arm.
I was going to die here, as surely as if the tsarytsya herself had ordered it. Blood flowed from my mouth, from my cheek, from my knees. A screaming pain wrenched through my ribs.
But when I looked up, there she was.
Dark hair spilled over Wash’s shoulders, and blood poured from a cut on her forehead. “Selah! What are you doing here?” She tugged me close to the wall, out of the crowd.
“I fell.” Tears stung my eyes.
“No. No! Do not cry! Stand!” Wash bent and helped me up; blood dripped from her wound.
I held as tight to her as I could, our backs against the stone wall, our shoulders pressed together. The foyer was a churning sea of bodies. The air stank of fear.
Wash prayed under her breath, and I did the same.
Please, God.
Her eyes were huge on the door and her hand was tight on mine. She said something in Yotne, then shook her head, searching for the word in English. But she glanced up at the ceiling, and I knew what she meant. We had to get out before the whole place came down around us.
Wash held up a hand, five fingers. Dragged in a long, shuddering breath.
Four fingers. She wiped the blood pooling at her temple with the back of her hand.
Another breath. The crash of rock not far away.
Three fingers, an arm around my waist.
Two. My arm around hers. Please God please God please—
One.
We pushed off the wall, heads down.
We drove toward the door, a two-woman battering ram. Wash’s breath grated through her teeth, and I let out a guttural howl, more wolf than any Wolf in Baba Yaga’s house.
We burst into the battle raging outside.
60
I had not known stone could burn. Chunks of it smoldered all over the courtyard.
Fire and brimstone and blood in the air and bodies on the ground. It felt like the end of the world.
Gray uniforms everywhere were stained with red. Knives and swords and guns sang violently in the smoke. Wash and I clung to each other, panting, unsure what to do.
The little pestykk were everywhere.
No, not little pestykk. They were children. Innocents, caught in the claws of a tyrant. Someone had to get them out.
I turned, searching for someone to tell, someone who could save them, there had to be someone—and nearly ran into her. The Sidhe girl with dark hair and a pocket full of yellow flowers.
“The children!” I shouted. I could hardly hear my own voice above the din.
She seized my shoulders and turned me toward a pack of women—the Rusalki, fighting for their children’s lives. Their hair flew and their knives sliced through the air and they wept as they fought.
“The mothers are taking them!” she shouted to Wash and me, her voice straining, English accent just barely detectible above the furor. “The Rusalki are taking the children to the Leshii camp in the forest!”
The mothers pushed the children toward the edge of town, hurrying them toward the gates and beyond, and away they ran on little legs. Go, I saw one Rusalka woman say to another. She sheathed her knife, swung a small girl over one shoulder, hitched her pack onto the other, and sprinted for the wild beyond the wall.
Fur die Freiheit.
Fur die Wildnis.
I’d never seen such fierceness. I’d never seen warriors like them.
Not far behind, I saw Vasylysa—or, rather, the girl I’d known as Vasylysa. I didn’t know her real name. She and a few other maids were running. Wash chewed her cuticle, staring after the backs of the women she’d protected.
I didn’t know if they were headed to the Leshii camp or somewhere else. I bid the girl Godspeed in my heart and hoped she’d be safe, wherever she ran.
“Come on.” The English girl took me by the elbow, dragging me away from the tower. I wanted to follow her—we had to get Wash out. But I twisted against her grip. “My friends,” I shouted. “I need to find them!”
“Who are your friends?” she asked. “Who are you looking for?”
“Cobie!” I shouted. “Anya! Aleksei!”
Another explosion rang out, and I wheeled. Baba Yaga’s spindly house was in flames, its dozens of eyes clouded with smoke.
But suddenly, I could see my friends all around me.
Torden and his drengs fought to one side of the courtyard. Bear and his knights—Veery and Kay and the rest—were nearby, swords humming and words flying between them.
Torden struck again and again, finally able to use Mjolnir in the open, the hammer like lightning in his grip. Sweat poured down his forehead as he fought, dealing out by hand the violence he took such pains to avoid.
The Rusalki were half gone, but others clad in green and gold and blue and white fought the soldiers in gray. And the Beholder’s crew were all around me. Still no sign of Lang, but—Yu and Homer. Skop. Vishnu. Basile. And Cobie and Anya.
The girls raced to my side, Anya clinging to Skop. “Wash needs care!” I shouted. Blood was still flowing freely from the cut on her head.
“Yu!” Skop bellowed into the mob, and the doctor raced over. He and Cobie helped Wash out of the courtyard, toward the gates. I cast a desperate glance at the battle, not wanting to join it but fearing for those I left behind. I saw more faces I knew every moment.
“Selah.” Anya took me by the arm, turned me to face her. “You’re bleeding. You aren’t a soldier. There’s nothing you can do.” She cupped my face. “Let’s go home.”
Home.
I began to shake.
I followed Anya past the ditch the rebels had dug as a firebreak at the edge of the city. Past Stupka-Zamok’s walls. Past the empty-eyed skulls watching from the gates, their backs turned on the witch queen whose castle burned behind them.
I was going home.
61
I had seen a dozen rivers, a score of seas, a thousand miles of ocean since I had first set foot aboard the Beholder.
None of them had made my heart race like the sun on the river outside Stupka-Zamok’s walls.
My blood stuttered. And despite the aching in my lungs, I began to run.
I raced downhill, the river surging close to me, the smoke starting to clear as I neared the water. And then I saw her through the haze of gray.
My ship. Her figurehead, beautiful and dangerous and persistent despite the wear of salt and time.
Polunoshchna had led me to believe the Beholder was taken. But she was waiting for me, arms wide and eyes full of light.
I stopped, hands on my knees, panting, as Skop and Yu helped Wash up the gangplank. Yu asked questions, eyes gentle, carefully assessing the gash on her head.
The crew emerged slowly, then rushed toward us. Andersen, Will, J.J., Yasumaro, Jeanne—everyone who hadn’t joined the fray outside Baba Yaga’s house, and those who had repaired to the ship’s safety when the battle began. I embraced each of them in turn, my heart leaping every time a new old face appeared.
> When Perrault ran out of the galley, I walked into his arms, and we clung to each other.
He wasn’t a traitor. I cursed every doubt that had made me fear he was.
“You found the Sidhe?” I asked him when I could speak.
He nodded. “Constantine would not send fighters. But Prince Arthur came, and brought . . . an alternative.”
I wet my lips. “And you were—never in prison?” I asked. Perhaps he had been captured—perhaps he’d simply escaped. Perrault did look different; he’d shed fine clothes for a gray uniform, his hair was cut short, and he looked soberer than I remembered.
“Prison?” A flash of the old Perrault appeared, scandalized. And despite everything, I gave a weary laugh.
“We should go farther downriver,” Yu urged. “We need to get Selah out of here.” But the thought of retreat rankled.
“She’s back?” Lang’s voice floated up the gangplank.
I whipped around, and there he was. Tanned face, ink-stained hands, dark eyes staring wildly around. Relief flooded his face like paper catching fire when he saw me, and he opened his arms as if to wrap me in them.
He stopped short at the look on my face.
“Where were you?” I asked.
Lang hadn’t been in the courtyard outside Stupka-Zamok. I hadn’t seen him anywhere. I hadn’t realized until that moment how badly it hurt that everyone had been there but him.
“Organizing the Leshii camp. They were in chaos, the Vodyanoi, the Leshii, the Rusalki, the Sidhe, Bear’s knights. We got the drengs out and were getting ready for the children.” Lang’s eyes were fixed on me, his voice distracted, as if he were only vaguely aware that he was speaking.
“I understand,” I finally said. My voice cracked. “I’ve been trying to coordinate my own rescue from inside the tsarytsya’s house. So. I can imagine the administrative challenge you must’ve faced.”
Slowly, he came closer. “You’re angry.” Lang’s eyes were weary as they assessed my burns, my ripped wedding gown, the bruises blooming on my arms. Too late.
