Rule of Wolves

by Leigh Bardugo

  “All of it?” asked Nadia. “We haven’t begun construction on the missile shells.”

  “We’ll have to use another metal.”

  But even Zoya knew what that meant. The missiles would be too heavy to attack from a safe range, and far harder for Squallers to aim at a distance.

  “Os Kervo will be Fjerda’s next target,” Zoya said, because someone had to.

  “We’ve issued blackout warnings throughout the city,” said Nikolai, his gaze skating past her. He’d barely looked at her since she’d returned. “But I think Fjerda may hold back. They attacked us in the hope of intimidating the west and getting them to declare for Vadik Demidov. It’s a strategy the Darkling used in the civil war.”

  “He got the best of me again.” She sounded resigned, maybe angry. But there was no hint of the misery inside her, the prickling thing that kept her awake, that ate at her night and day. Rage was easy. Even sorrow. But shame? I let him get away. Anything the Darkling did now, anyone he harmed—the blame would lie with her.

  “I agreed to let him be removed from the palace,” said Nikolai. “This isn’t the first time the Darkling has taken us by surprise, but let’s remember his schemes never quite stick.”

  Not yet. This time he might win and keep winning. Maybe they should have found a way to forge an alliance with him, to truly bring him to their side. Maybe the Fjerdans wouldn’t have dared attack if they’d known the Darkling had returned. But was Genya expected to work side by side with the man who had sacrificed her to a rapist? Was Zoya meant to share the war room with the man who had murdered her aunt?

  “What will he do?” asked Leoni. She was seated beside Adrik. They’d been together at the funeral too. It was common for Grisha who worked undercover to fall in love during a mission, but the romances rarely lasted once the thrill had passed and the agents were back on their home soil. Adrik and Leoni seemed to be an exception, though how either of them put up with the other was beyond her. Maybe relentless gloom and persistent sunshine were the right combination.

  Nikolai leaned back in his chair. “The Darkling has a gift for spectacle rivaled only by my own. He’ll want to stage a very public return.”

  “My sister has spies and informants stationed in nearly every major town in Ravka,” said Tolya. “We’ll ask about newcomers and strangers.”

  “At least Tamar is well,” said Nikolai.

  Nadia looked pale beneath her freckles, but all she said was, “Thank the Saints.”

  Tamar’s messages had confirmed that with Ehri’s support for the treaty, the Shu queen’s council had agreed to ratify and back their newly forged alliance. Now it was a question of maintaining their leverage and of trying to dismantle the secret khergud program.

  “Let’s make sure our soldiers on the northern border keep an eye out for signs of the Starless,” said Nikolai. “I don’t want them crossing into Fjerda.”

  “Would the Darkling join up with the Fjerdans?” asked Nadia.

  “He might,” said Tolya. “It’s another move he’s made before.”

  Nadia’s laugh was rueful. “I don’t know who to root for.”

  Zoya wasn’t sure either. More Fjerdans worshipping Ravkan Saints meant more sympathy for Ravka and potentially less support for the war. But that faith might make it far easier for the Darkling to gain a foothold there.

  Tolya crossed his huge arms. “The Apparat actively campaigned against granting the Darkling Sainthood. The Fjerdans will have to break with the priest if they want the Darkling on their side.”

  “Will they?” said Nikolai. “The Apparat survives. That’s what he does. If he senses the Darkling can become a valued asset, we can be sure he’ll have a sudden epiphany. And coming back from the dead makes for a very grand entrance. Fjerda may not have to choose between the priest and a newly risen Saint at all.”

  “I don’t think the Darkling will join the Apparat,” Genya said.

  It was the first time she’d spoken. The room felt suddenly still, as if encased in glass.

  Nikolai turned to her. “You knew him better than any of us, longer than any of us. Why?”

  She set down her teacup. “Pride. The Darkling doesn’t forgive. He punishes. He punished you for betraying him as Sturmhond. He punished me for choosing Alina. When the Darkling staged his coup, he trusted the Apparat with the capital. The priest was meant to lend his authority to the Darkling’s cause. Instead he marshaled the people’s faith for Alina Starkov.”

  “Because he believed she could be more easily controlled,” said Nikolai.

  “More fool him. But that’s something the Darkling and the Apparat had in common,” she said, her voice hardening. “They underestimated her. They underestimated every one of us. All the Darkling ever wanted was to be loved by this country, adored. He won’t side with the Apparat because the priest did the unforgivable: He turned the people against him.”

  “Then what will he do?”

  Genya’s fists crushed the material of her kefta. “The question is, what will we do?”

  “Is there anything we can do?” asked Adrik, and for once his miserable tone was completely appropriate. “Even with support from the Shu and the Zemeni, do we have enough flyers or missiles to face Fjerda in the field?”

  Nadia and Leoni exchanged a glance, and Leoni bit her lip. “If we had a new source of titanium, we’re ready to move into production immediately.”

  Tolya took a deep breath. “I know we’re all angry and grieving. What the Fjerdans did is unforgivable, but—”

  “But?” said Zoya.

  He held her gaze. “What we do next will determine not only what kind of war this is, but what every war will look like after. Launching a rocket without ever needing to put a soldier or a pilot in harm’s way? War is meant to have costs. At what point are we as bad as the Fjerdans?”

  “Maybe that’s what we need to be,” said Zoya. “This is a world where villains thrive.” Where men like David died buried beneath a heap of stone in their wedding clothes while the Darkling and the Apparat somehow still drew breath.

  “Does that mean we become villains too?” Tolya asked, and Zoya could hear the pleading in his voice.

  “You’ve never been the weakest person in the room, Tolya. Mercy means nothing if we can’t protect our own.”

  “But where does it end?”

  Zoya didn’t have an answer to that. Nikolai had said it enough times: Once the river was loosed, it could not be called back.

  Genya touched her hand gently to Tolya’s arm. “David hated making war. He was an inventor, a creator. He dreamed of a time when he could build wonders instead of weapons.” She reached out to Zoya, and reluctantly Zoya took her hand, feeling an unwelcome ache in her throat. “But he also knew that we couldn’t forge peace alone. The Fjerdans have shown us who they are. It’s up to us to decide who we want to become.”

  “And who is that?” Zoya asked, because she truly didn’t know. All she’d ever had was anger.

  “We build the rockets,” said Genya. “We make them understand what we can do. We give them a choice.”

  Zoya wondered who would get to make that choice. Parents who didn’t wish to send their children off to die? Jarl Brum and his hateful drüskelle? Royals eager to keep their position at any cost?

  “This has always been about stopping a war,” said Nikolai. “If the Fjerdans don’t think we can hold back the tide, they’ll roll right over us.”

  Nadia shifted in her chair. “But without titanium—”

  “We’ll have the titanium,” said Nikolai.

  Zoya couldn’t hide her surprise. “The Zemeni have agreed to provide it?”

  “No,” he said. “They don’t have it to sell, not processed. But the Kerch do.”

  Adrik snorted. “There’s no way they’ll sell it to us, not at any kind of price we can afford.”

  “That’s why I don’t intend to ask. I happen to know someone who can help with this particular kind of negotiation.”

&nb
sp; Tolya frowned. “Negotiation?”

  “He means we’re going to steal it,” said Zoya.

  Genya’s cup clattered in her saucer. “If the Kerch find out we’re involved in something like this, it will be a diplomatic disaster.”

  Nikolai gave Genya’s shoulder a brief squeeze and stood. He looked less a king with a country to rule than a privateer about to unleash his cannons on an enemy ship.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But Ketterdam is the right place to gamble.”

  21

  THE MONK

  HE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE TO GO. He hadn’t thought past the need to become whole again and finally return to himself. He hadn’t even been entirely certain his plan would work. But he had clung to that piece of the thorn wood, and the orphans had offered him the perfect chance to try.

  Alina.

  She’s alive. Yuri’s voice an echo in his head, a gnat he couldn’t quite seem to swat. Sankta Alina, Daughter of Dva Stolba, Alina of the Fold. She lives.

  Yes, Alina Starkov was well and happy and living with her tracker. If you could call that living. Yuri’s babbling awe droned on and on.

  Her questions had troubled him, but Alina always had a talent for getting under his skin. Why do you have to be the savior? The answer to her question was as obvious as it had always been: Who else could protect the Grisha and Ravka? A reckless boy who liked to play pirate? A vengeful girl too afraid of her own heart to master the tremendous power she’d been granted? They were dangerous. Dangerous to him, to his country, even to themselves. Children.

  His shadow soldiers carried him through forest and glade as his mind wandered too, until at last he arrived in a town by a river. This place was familiar, but most places were. He knew every pebble and branch of Ravka. But the guns and tanks and flying machines that had overwhelmed this world were new to him and unwelcome. Had his plan succeeded, had he managed to weaponize the Fold with Alina by his side, Ravka never would have been vulnerable to this march of brutality.

  She is alive. Sankta Alina who gave her life for Ravka.

  “I gave my life for Ravka,” he snarled at no one but the trees, and Yuri, finally chastened, went silent.

  He had the nichevo’ya deposit him by a high bridge over the river gorge and walked the rest of the way into the village, unsure of where he was headed. His feet were bare and he still wore Yuri’s ragged black robes and trousers, the fabric bloodied where a bullet had grazed him. He longed for a bath and clean clothes. Human things.

  Shopkeepers stared worriedly at him from their doorways, but they had nothing to fear from him. At least not yet. It wasn’t much of a town, but he noted icons in nearly every window. Most of these backwaters were religious and had grown more so during the civil war. Alina was certainly popular, always shown with her white hair and lit as if she’d swallowed the sun. Very dramatic. He saw Juris too—a wartime Saint if there ever was one—and Sankta Marya, patron saint of those far from home. No signs of the Starless One.

  All in due time, he told himself, and Yuri joined in. They could be of one mind about that.

  Names crowded into his thoughts. Staski. Kiril. Kirigan. Anton. Eryk. An avalanche of memories. He’d been all of them, but who should he become now? He’d had plenty of time to consider such things in the isolation of his glass cell, but now that he was free, truly free to choose, he found that only one name suited. The oldest of them: Aleksander. He had no reason to hide his strangeness anymore. Saints were meant to live forever.

  He passed into a muddy town square and saw a small church capped by a single whitewashed dome. Through the open door, he glimpsed the priest, tending to something by the altar, as a woman lit candles for the dead. It would do for sanctuary. They couldn’t very well turn a barefoot beggar away.

  It wasn’t until Aleksander was inside, the cool shadows of the church thick and comforting around him, that he realized where he was. Above the altar hung a painting of a man with iron fetters at his wrists and a collar at his neck, his eyes looking up at nothing. Sankt Ilya in Chains.

  He really did know this place. He had come back to the beginning: This church had been raised over the ruins of the home of Ilya Morozova, Aleksander’s grandfather, a man thrown to his death from the very bridge Aleksander had crossed on his way into town. He had been known as the Bonesmith, the greatest Fabrikator to ever live. And yet he had been much more than that.

  “Hello?” the priest said, turning toward the doorway.

  But Aleksander had already sunk into the shadows, gathering them like a shroud around his body in the darkness of the side aisle.

  He moved quietly to the door that he knew would lead him down into the basement, down the rickety stairs to where old pews and rotted wall hangings had been stacked. His memories were as dark and dusty as this place, but the plan of the church and what had come before it was buried in his mind, and he knew there was yet another room beneath this one. He located a lantern and went looking for the hatch.

  It didn’t take long. When he pulled on the metal ring, the hinge let loose a shriek. Maybe the priest would hear and try to pray away the ghosts.

  Yuri rattled around in his skull at that little bit of sacrilege, but Aleksander ignored him.

  I will show you wonders, he promised.

  This is a holy place, Yuri protested.

  Aleksander nearly laughed. What made a church holy? The gilded halos of the Saints? The words of its priest?

  The prayers said beneath its roof.

  He scowled in the darkness. The boy’s piousness was exhausting.

  Aleksander lowered himself into the room beneath the basement. Here, the floor was dirt and the lantern showed nothing but earthen walls, roots trying to push their way through.

  But he knew what this room had once been—the workshop at the back of Morozova’s home, the place where his grandfather had tampered with the boundaries between life and death, had resurrected creatures with the hope of building power into their bones. He’d tried to make his own amplifiers and he’d succeeded.

  Aleksander had attempted to follow in Morozova’s footsteps. He’d cajoled his mother into bringing him to this town, to the home she’d occupied as a child. When she’d seen the church built in the place where her father’s workshop had been, she’d laughed for the better part of an hour.

  “They killed him, you know,” Baghra had said, tears of mirth leaking from her eyes. “The ancestors of the very men and women walking this town and praying in this church threw him into the river. Real power frightens them.” She’d waved at the painted altarpiece. “They want the illusion of it. An image on a wall, silent and safe.”

  But power was exactly what Aleksander had found, tucked away in this basement—his grandfather’s journals, the records of his experiments. They had become his obsession. He’d been sure that he could do what Ilya Morozova had done, and so he’d tried. The result was the Fold.

  A gift, whispered Yuri’s voice, and Aleksander was suddenly standing in Novokribirsk, watching the tide of the Fold rush toward him, hearing the screams around him. You saved me that day.

  Aleksander peered into the darkness of the basement room. He certainly hadn’t meant to save Yuri. But he was glad someone remembered the good he’d done for this country.

  He felt along the wall, the soil cold and moist beneath his palm, to the niche where he’d found the journals, bound up in oilcloth. Empty now. No, not entirely. His fingers fastened around something—a piece of wood. Part of a child’s toy. The curving neck of a swan fashioned with exquisite care, broken at the base. Useless.

  Why did you go to Alina? Yuri buzzed away. Why seek her out? To reclaim his power, of course. The universe wanted to humble him, to force him to appeal to a pair of pathetic orphans like a beggar on his knees.

  Why did you go to her?

  Because with her he was human again. She had once been naive, lonely, desperate for approval, all the things that had made it so easy for him to manipulate his soldiers in the past. So how had s
he bested him? Sheer stubbornness. That pragmatic impulse that had allowed her to survive the orphanage, to endure so many years without using her power. Something more. He’d known the name for it once, a hundred lifetimes ago. It’s not too late for you. Alina might be right, but he hadn’t fought his way back from death for the sake of being saved.

  There was no penance for him to make. Everything he’d done was for the Grisha, for Ravka.

  And the blight? Could he add that to the list of his supposed crimes? He had to admit that it was partially his fault. Though if the boy king had been good enough to lie down and die as he was meant to, the obisbaya would have been completed and the Fold never would have ruptured. But how terrible could it be? Ravka had been through worse and so had he.

  Aleksander looked down at the broken toy in his hands. He shouldn’t have come here. He smelled the turned earth, the incense from the church above. This place was nothing but another grave.

  He wanted to be out of the darkness, back beneath the watery winter sun. He closed the trapdoor behind him and swept up the stairs from the basement, but he paused at the door to the church. He could hear the priest speaking, the shuffle and murmur of a crowd. They must have entered while he’d been sunk in his thoughts.

  What day was it? Had they all assembled for morning services?

  The priest was telling the tale of Sankt Nikolai—the little boy nearly eaten by cannibal sailors, who had gone on to minister to the poor and hungry. It was as bloody and odd as all the Saints’ lives.

  Perhaps it was time for a new story, a single Saint, greater than all those who had come before him, who didn’t dole out his power like some kind of banker keeping a ledger of prayers and good deeds. Perhaps it was time for a new kind of miracle.

  From his hiding place behind the door, he raised his hands and focused on the painted icon behind the priest. Slowly, shadows curled from Sankt Ilya’s open hands; they began to bleed from his mouth.

  A gasp went up from the congregation. The priest turned and fell to his knees. Aleksander drank their fear and wonder. Heady as that cheap cherry wine he’d had in … he could not quite recall.