Web of Frost

by Lindsay Smith

  Only the altar was fully lit. The golden icons caught the candlelight and amplified it like the sun. But Katza suspected whatever awaited her at the aisle’s end was nothing so holy nor sanctified.

  Katza nearly tripped over a leg that jutted into the aisle, and jumped back, hand to her mouth. One of the cathedral priests. His head twisted at an unnatural angle and his eyes rolled back into his skull, milky and gray. He was dead, bled out from his slit throat, his skin papery and the color of birch bark.

  “They all deserved it.”

  Katza froze. The words bounced in perfect rhythm around the vaulted ceiling, pummeling her. It was the voice that slithered through her every waking thought and every sleeping wish. The voice that, even now, could rip out her heart.

  “These false prophets and priests, these men who sought to control the blessed ones . . . they cared only for their own fortunes. Their own sense of control.”

  Katza lifted her head toward the altar. He was a black speck upon it, nested in a bundle of cloaks like a dark carrion bird. He slung one leg over the altar’s edge and leaned back, as comfortable as if he were in a peasant’s tavern. The mere sight of him seized Katza by the throat and refused to let go.

  “They cared nothing for Russalka, for her history, her fate. They would grant us only the smallest slivers of power. What can we do with only a sliver, other than feel taunted by all we are denied? What’s left for us but to serve as one of their many tools?”

  Katza gathered her skirts and crossed the distance between them. She climbed the steps to the dais, but stopped when she reached the altar’s top. The Seal of the Saints’ Wheel—it was all that stood between them. And when she looked down on it, it was bathed in blood.

  “You’re no different—you just want to be the one holding the leash,” Katza said. Why couldn’t she see it, before? Yet now, looking upon him, she felt that old pull again, like thread stitching her soul to his own. That hopeless allure, reeling her toward him, tangling up their fates and sealing them in this doomed dance.

  She could face it no more.

  He smiled at her, his lips dark and twisted, but his expression incandescent. He glowed with victory. With pride at everything he’d done. And why shouldn’t he? He’d seduced a tsarika and nearly led her to ruin. He’d all but grasped Boj’s power for his own. The blood spilled on the seal—that was a testament to his charm, his cunning, his wit. From a poor village to temnost to this: a coveted place at the tsarika’s side. His finger on the seal, ready to rip it open, and damn them all.

  He hoisted himself from the altar and circled around the seal. Katza refused to move away from him, instincts pulling her in both directions until she thought she’d tear.

  “You spared the revolutionaries.” His tone was flat; dull as cheap cutlery. Yet it pierced Katza all the same.

  “I—I had to. There was no better way.” She drew herself to full height. “Without Ulmarova’s support, I could have never convinced them to stand down, to trust that I had their best interests at heart—”

  “You LIE!”

  The echo hammered into her, and Katza flinched. Ravin’s face contorted, deep shadows filling the lines around his mouth, his nose, his forehead. He seemed fuller, somehow. Larger than life.

  “Don’t think I can’t see it. Your fears, your doubts, the way they fester inside you like a seeping wound. It soils you and stains you. It wears you down. It holds you back.”

  Katza took a step back, shrinking from his ferocity. O, Boj, how could she stand up to him? She wanted so desperately to make him proud of her. She still wanted him to think her above it all.

  “If you have doubts, I can assuage them. I can show you why what we do is the true course. The saints are a lie, and these workers, these peasants, even these ungrateful courtiers—they will only pump poison into your heart. Only the cleansing strength of raw power can save you.”

  “Please. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” Katza’s voice trembled, about to collapse. “The visions that have haunted me my whole life.”

  “What vision?” He sneered. “More lies?”

  Katza shook her head. “I’m stumbling in a field beside a slain wolf—the wolf that is Russalka. And its blood is on my hands.”

  Ravin tilted his head at her. Was he trying to discern if she spoke true? Or was he merely regarding her, like some idle curiosity?

  “I thought your guidance would help me escape this fate. But I see now it’s not so. You’re the force that compels me to slay Russalka. If I draw on the well of power too much, if I become lost in this relentless pursuit of control—then there is no going back.” Her lower lip quivered. “I’ll destroy everything I want to save.”

  Tears streamed from her face. She’d never confessed her vision before—not to the priests or prophets, not to Aleksei or Nadika, not to anyone. How close had she come to making it reality? How close did she teeter still?

  Ravin reeled back from her. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this—that much was plain to her. His face went soft, boyish again; but quickly he recovered and closed the gap to stand before her.

  “You are mistaken. This vision—it can’t be what you think.”

  “It must be.” Katza shook her head. Her chest burned with unspent anguish—so many years of keeping the vision’s dire warning inside. “What else could it mean? That night we first met, I was so certain you were offering me a way to avoid it. A way to keep the people tame. But I see now that all you offered was a half-life for Russalkans. I can’t go through with it.”

  “You must, tsarika.”

  “No. I cannot.” She drew her shoulders up, protective. “Opening the well, enslaving all of Russalka to me—that’s no life. That is Russalka’s death. If we open the well, then it’ll bring that vision about.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He surged forward and gripped her shoulders. His fingers drove into her skin; she cried out at the blunt pain. His face loomed inches from hers, full of heat and rapture. A true believer’s stare, pinning her to the spot.

  She feared that face and loved it; she yearned for it and wanted to scratch it, tear it apart. Who was he, beneath that jawline, both brutal and refined? Behind those piercing eyes? If she cut him open, would nothing but shadows and violence spill out?

  “You don’t understand.” His voice was firm as granite. “Seizing the well, before anyone else can—it’s our only chance. We must summon a better way. A stronger and more powerful way.”

  “No. There is no returning to the old ways.” Katza shook her head, over and over, eyes squeezed shut to guard her against the force of his gaze. “We can’t go back. The world has changed, and Russalka must, too.”

  “We must summon the days long before the saints, before the tsars and the agitators and the church and all the rest. Only the old Russalkan power can save us.” His tone hissed with urgency. “You must harness that primal energy. The one that already lives in your blood, only you’d forgotten it until you tasted that power again.”

  “Please.” Katza tried to pull from his grip, but it was impossible. He was blood and iron, caging her in. “I can’t.”

  “You must. And you need me to help.” He laughed. When she opened her eyes, he was all darkness and light, twisted into something unrecognizable save those eyes. “Only I can slice away the lies and dissembling that everyone seeks to spin around you. They are like spiders building their web, but I can save you.” He shook her. “Only I can help you control it.”

  Katza’s tears dried up as her anger rose. “But I don’t control it! Not around you.” She clenched her teeth. “That’s the problem, Ravin. You strip away every last bit of reason I have. You strip away my shields, my resistance, my common sense.”

  He laughed so bitterly it stung. “You think you don’t do the same to me?”

  Katza winced and tried to step back. He was lying. Vo
lkov was in his blood—he knew no other way but to lie. “I have no restraint around you. I am like Marya, nothing but rage and vengeance, only I haven’t the skill to temper it. Because no such skill exists. You make me into something hungry. Something savage. And all Russalka will suffer for my unchecked wrath.”

  “Because that’s what you are meant to be.”

  He loosened his grip on her shoulder and pulled her to him. Even as her mind repulsed at his touch, her body sank into it, yielding and pliant, craving his warmth. Her head nestled against his neck, and she gasped for air, chest heaving in time with his own. How could she deny this pull, this feeling of a perfectly matched game of checkmates?

  “You are not a pretty doll to be placed on a shelf and admired. You are not a puppet to dance on suitors’ and advisers’ strings. You are meant to be ferocious, tsarika. You are meant to be a wrathful god.”

  Katza tried to raise her head, but his gravity kept her pressed against him. Wrath, control, vengeance—none of it had served her any greater purpose that she could not have served with a more tempered approach. Even destroying the Hessarian attackers—she could have captured them. Learned their secrets, perhaps. If she had not been so drunk on the raw power that burned through her like the purest vodok.

  “No.” Katza lifted her face and reeled back from him. “I cannot be that anymore. Russalka needs a ruler, not a tyrant. I must serve everyone.”

  Ravin’s face stretched again, the shadows lengthening. Something stirred in the depths of the cathedral. The candles sputtered and spit as darkness crept in around them. And his eyes, those dark eyes—the blackness of his pupils seemed to swallow up the white.

  Katza tried to back away from him, her pulse cantering, but his hold on her remained. His fingers, so long and spindly, slid up her face and forced her gaze toward his.

  “You are my tsarika.” When he spoke, it was like a chorus of voices, thick with darkness. “My vessel of strength.”

  His fingertips were searing into her cheeks. Katza tried to turn her head, tried to pull back from him. “Please, no.” The darkness shifted around them as some of the candles hissed and went out.

  “Together, we are Russalka’s night and day, beginning and end. Don’t you see it?” His smile was waxy and devilish. “I see it so clearly. I see through the lies.”

  “You’re wrong.” Katza reached up for his wrists and clawed, trying to force him to release her. “We are Russalka’s death—”

  “How could you think you would survive without me?” His laughter rang like breaking glass. More candles popped and went dark. The air around them swirled, chattering like a pack of starved rats. “You are meant for me. And I, for you.”

  His nails dug into her scalp. Katza’s breaths came in halting spurts; she was too afraid to move. His heat suffused her. Even as the darkness rose around them, as terror skittered through her body, she felt herself pulled to him once more. How a part of her wanted to bask in that heat, let it burn and burn until it could harm her no more. How she wanted to feel that power engulf her.

  But he would burn her away until there was nothing left. The power would tear her apart.

  “Russalka needs both of us. Can’t you see?” His lips looked blood-stained in the eerie shadows. “Can’t you see what we can become?”

  Katza closed her eyes and saw the clearing in the woods. Felt the fresh-fallen snow as it clung to her face and hair. Let the twilight chill temper her as she looked at the bared trees, black against the dark gray sky.

  There was no wolf in the clearing. Only trees. Only endless white.

  Katza opened her eyes and yanked his hands from her face. Her power went still, a calm stream.

  “No.”

  Ravin narrowed his eyes to knife slits.

  “Russalka doesn’t need us both—it needs a middle path. And that is what I’m giving my people.” She tilted her chin high. “It’s already been done.”

  The shadows scampered up the columns around them, twisting and coiling like vines. Ravin towered over her, at once lanky and menacing. His fingers seemed to stretch like claws as he curled his hands. The well’s power pulsated through him as the shadows gathered and writhed in his path. Katza took another step back, and then another, until a column pressed into her spine.

  “Unseal it,” Ravin growled. That thickness in his voice had compacted into stone. “Unseal the well.”

  The pews rattled, straining against the bolts that pinned them to the floor. The column vibrated against Katza’s back as a fine dusting of plaster rained down on them. She drew a deep breath, though her lungs refused to fill.

  “No.”

  “You must unseal it! It is the only way for us both to be whole.”

  Chunks of plaster dislodged and crashed around them. The saints’ icons shook in their brackets. Saint Pechalnya tipped forward and smashed to the ground in a shower of wood and gold. Katza cringed and looked down as a fragment of the painting skidded to a stop at her feet—the ocean siren in the corner of Pechalnya’s icon.

  “I am whole already. Without you.”

  Katza reached for the well, but rather than grab a fistful of its power, she imagined it as strands. Fine threads, each with a specific purpose, each filtered and tame. Filtered as though by the saints themselves.

  “I am the tsarika of Russalka. I carry Silov blood. I am the heir to the earth and the sea and the blood that’s spilled between them.”

  She yanked the threads of power into her. Strong, but not crackling.

  “And I will serve my people well.”

  Ravin lashed out with a torrent of darkness. The spell coiled around her skin, binding Katza’s ankles together and tearing at her skirts. Thousands of claws, grasping, shredding at her. She saw a world bathed in blood, an army of millions dancing to her command—

  Katza gasped as her head snapped back. She tried to move her arms, but they were pinned at her sides. Blood coated her tongue. Ichischa. She sorted through the strands. Ichischa, cleanse me!

  Hot light burst from Katza, singeing the shadows until they withdrew. Katza scrubbed the tar from her arms and staggered away from Ravin. But more shadows were twisting toward her; more parts of the cathedral were collapsing . . .

  The well throbbed in the back of her mind. An insistent reminder of the raw power she could harness. But no—she had to make do with these threads. She couldn’t succumb to its allure.

  Tikhona. To pacify Ravin. He was scarcely recognizable, his face twisted with a sneer, the darkness devouring his features and his black eyes smoldering like coal. Tikhona, subdue him!

  Ravin stumbled to the ground, but within seconds he was back on his feet. Crackling with the well’s power even more strongly than before.

  Morozov. Marya. Someone. Anyone. Grant me your blessings—quell his madness—

  “Join me, Katarzyna.” He extended an arm to her that was wreathed in cold flame. “We can transcend all of these foolish trappings. Embrace the call of the well.”

  Katza was backed into the narthex. To charge down the aisle, she would have to run past him. She put the altar between them, but there was nowhere left to go. The saints’ icons surrounded her, quaking in their moorings; the stained glass window of the Saints’ Wheel cupped in Boj’s hands was to her right.

  “Only Silov blood can dissolve the seal. And when we transcend, you’ll have no more need of yours.”

  Katza sorted desperately through the threads. Tuman. Tikhona. Gonyei. Agniesz. No. None of them would suffice. Not against a monster fueled by the well of power itself.

  And so Katza stretched out her arms and embraced the well one last time.

  Electricity arced across her body, seething and scrubbing and raw. A laugh came to her, unbidden, as she opened her mouth. Spread her fingers wide. Harnessed that raw power’s call.

  Ravin paused and reared back his head.

&nb
sp; The white crack of lightning struck him through like a lance. Brilliant light flooded the cathedral, swallowing up the dark. Ravin screamed, but it was lost and folded into the gleaming ball of heat. Fueling it. Burning hotter and brighter.

  Katza felt that old bloodlust consuming her. It would be so easy to give in to this, time and again. She tasted the power on her lips, sickly sweet, and marveled at what could have been—

  But it was done. She was free.

  She released the power of the well, and the ball of light collapsed. The narthex filled with the scent of charred meat.

  Katza took a step and leaned forward into the blast range, the burnt radius where her power had struck. Smoke poured from it, rolling over the bloody seal. And at the center . . .

  One blackened arm reached out of the smoke.

  “You . . .” Ravin’s voice wheezed. A tuft of black smoke poured from his bloodied, burned lips. “Will pay for that.”

  And then he rose, burned and smoldering, but a hulk of a man with fire still churning underneath his split skin. The smoke was everywhere—filling the cathedral—the whole building at his command.

  Katza turned to the stained-glass window and flung herself at it.

  Cold air rushed around her as she plunged toward the canals, accompanied by shards of colored glass. Morozov, steel me against the cold. Carry me out of the waters safely—No, not Morozov. Pechalnya—saint of the sea—

  She plunged into the depths. The ice went straight to her heart, her lungs. She fought against her body’s instinct to suck in ice-cold water, but it seared into her throat. Everything went numb. She opened her eyes and saw only watery blue-black, felt only the cold seeping into her . . .

  But then something wrapped around her, like a warm blanket. She bobbed up toward the surface and gasped for air. Frost hardened and solidified beneath her until she was bobbing on a platform of ice.