Ruin and Rising

by Leigh Bardugo

  Only Nadia and Zoya had no relief as they toiled beneath a crescent moon, though we tried to find ways to help. Genya stood with her back to Nadia’s, bracing her so she could rest her knees and feet a bit. Now that the sun had set, we had no need for cover, so for the better part of an hour, I buttressed Zoya’s arms while she summoned.

  “This is ridiculous,” she growled, her muscles shaking beneath my palms.

  “Do you want me to let go?”

  “If you do, I’ll cover you in jurda juice.”

  I was eager to have something to do. The ship was too quiet, and I could feel the day’s nightmares waiting to crowd in on me.

  Misha hadn’t budged from his spot curled into the hull. He was clutching the wooden practice sword that Mal had found for him. My throat tightened as I realized he’d brought it with him on the terrace when Baghra made him escort her to the nichevo’ya. I fished a piece of hardtack out of the provisions and took it to him.

  “Hungry?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Will you try to eat something anyway?”

  Another head shake.

  I sat beside him, unsure of what to say. I remembered sitting like this with Sergei in the tank room, searching for words of comfort and failing. Had he been scheming then, manipulating me? His fear had certainly seemed real.

  But Misha didn’t just remind me of Sergei. He was every child whose parents went to war. He was every boy and girl at Keramzin. He was Baghra begging for her father’s attention. He was the Darkling learning loneliness at his mother’s knee. This was what Ravka did. It made orphans. It made misery. No land, no life, just a uniform and a gun. Nikolai had believed in something better.

  I took a shaky breath. I had to find a way to shut down my mind. If I thought of Nikolai, I would fall apart. Or Baghra. Or the broken pieces of Sergei’s body. Or Stigg, left behind. Or even the Darkling, the look on his face as his mother had disappeared beneath the clouds. How could he be so cruel and still so human?

  The night wore on as a sleeping Ravka passed beneath us. I counted stars. I watched over Adrik. I dozed. I moved among the crew, offering sips of water and tufts of dried jurda blossoms. When anyone asked about Nikolai or Baghra, I gave them the facts of the battle in the briefest possible terms.

  I willed my mind to silence, tried to make it a blank field, white with snow, unmarred by tracks. Sometime around sunrise, I took my place at the railing and began shifting the light to camouflage the ship.

  That was when Adrik muttered in his sleep.

  Nadia’s head whipped around. The Bittern bobbled.

  “Focus!” snapped Zoya.

  But she was smiling. We all were, ready to cling to the barest scrap of hope.

  * * *

  WE FLEW THROUGH the rest of the day and long into the next night. It was dawn on the second morning when we finally glimpsed the Sikurzoi. At midday, we spotted the deep, jagged crater that marked the abandoned copper mine where Nikolai had suggested we stash the Bittern, a murky turquoise pool at its center.

  The descent was slow and tricky, and as soon as the hulls scraped the crater floor, both Nadia and Zoya crumpled to the deck. They had pushed the limits of their power, and though their skin was flushed and glowing, they were completely exhausted.

  Tugging on the ropes, the rest of us managed to get the Bittern out of sight beneath a ledge of rock. Anyone who climbed down into the mine would find it easily enough, but it was hard to imagine who would bother. The crater floor was littered with rusty machinery. An unpleasant smell came from the stagnant pool, and David said the water’s opaque turquoise color came from minerals leaching out of the rock. There were no signs of squatters.

  While Mal and Harshaw secured the sails, Tolya carried Adrik from the Bittern. There was blood seeping from the stump where his arm had been, but he was fairly lucid and even drank a few sips of water.

  Misha refused to budge from the hull. I tucked a blanket over his shoulders and left him with a piece of hardtack and a slice of dried apple, hoping he would eat.

  We helped Zoya and Nadia off the ship, dragged our bedrolls into a nest beneath the shade of the overhang, and without another word, fell into troubled sleep. We posted no watch. If we’d been followed, we had no fight left to give.

  As my eyes slid shut, I glimpsed Tolya sneaking back onto the Bittern and forced myself to sit up again. He emerged a moment later with a tightly wrapped bundle. His gaze darted to Adrik, and my stomach dropped as I realized what he was carrying. I let my weary eyes close. I didn’t want to know where Tolya planned to bury Adrik’s arm.

  When I woke, it was late afternoon. Most of the others were still sleeping soundly. Genya was pinning up Adrik’s sleeve.

  I found Mal coming down the road that led around the side of the crater, carrying a bag full of grouse.

  “I thought we’d stay tonight,” he said, “make a fire. We can leave for Dva Stolba in the morning.”

  “All right,” I said, though I was eager to get moving.

  He must have sensed it because he said, “Adrik could use the rest. We all could. I’m afraid if we keep pushing, one of them will break.”

  I nodded. He was right. We were all grieving and frightened and tired. “I’ll bring some kindling down.”

  He touched my arm. “Alina—”

  “I won’t be long.” I pushed past him. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want words of comfort. I wanted the firebird. I wanted to turn my pain into anger and bring it to the Darkling’s door.

  I made my way up to the woods that surrounded the mine. This far south, the trees were different, taller and more sparse, their bark red and porous. I was on my way back to the mine, my arms full of the driest branches I could find, when I got the eerie feeling I was being watched. I stopped, the hair rising on the back of my neck.

  I peered between the sunlit trunks, waiting. The silence was dense, as if every small creature were holding its breath. Then I heard it—a soft rustling. My head jerked up, following the sound into the trees. My eyes fastened on a flicker of movement, the silent beat of a shadowy wing.

  Nikolai was perched in the branches of a tree, his dark gaze fastened on me.

  His chest was bare and lined in black as if darkness had shattered beneath his skin. He’d lost his boots somewhere, and his bare feet gripped the bark. His toes had become black talons.

  He had dried blood on his hands. And near his mouth.

  “Nikolai?” I whispered.

  He flinched back.

  “Nikolai, wait—”

  But he leapt into the air, dark wings shaking the branches as he broke through them to the blue sky beyond.

  I wanted to scream, so I did. I tossed my kindling to the ground, pressed my fist to my mouth, and screamed until my throat was raw. I couldn’t stop. I’d managed not to weep on the Bittern or at the mine, but now I sank to the forest floor, my screams turning to sobs, silent, racking gasps. They hurt, as if they might crack my ribs open, but emerged soundless from my lips. I kept thinking of Nikolai’s torn trousers and had the foolish thought that he’d be mortified to see his clothes in such a state. He’d followed us all the way from the Spinning Wheel. Could he tell the Darkling of our whereabouts? Would he? How much of him was left inside that tortured body?

  I felt it then, the vibration along that invisible tether. I pushed away from it. I would not go to the Darkling now. I wouldn’t go to him ever again. But still, I knew wherever he was, he was grieving.

  * * *

  MAL FOUND ME THERE, head buried in my arms, coat covered in green needles. He offered me his hand, but I ignored it.

  “I’m all right,” I said, though nothing could have been less true.

  “It’s getting dark. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  “I’m the Sun Summoner. It gets dark when I say it does.”

  He crouched down in front of me and waited for me to meet his eyes. “Don’t shut them out, Alina. They need to grieve with you.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Then let them talk.”

  I had no solace or encouragement to offer. I didn’t want to share this hurt. I didn’t want them to see how frightened I was. But I made myself get up and brush the needles from my coat. I let Mal lead me back to the mine.

  By the time we got all the way down to the crater floor, it was full dark and the others had lit lanterns beneath the overhang.

  “Took your time, didn’t you?” said Zoya. “Did we have to freeze while you two frolicked around in the woods?”

  There was no point to hiding my tearstained face so I just said, “Turned out I needed a good cry.”

  I braced myself for an insult, but all she said was, “Next time invite me. I could use one too.”

  Mal dropped the kindling I’d gathered into the firepit someone had made, and I plucked Oncat from Harshaw’s shoulder. She gave a brief hiss, but I didn’t care. Right now, I needed to cuddle something soft and furry.

  They’d already cleaned and spitted the game Mal had caught, and soon, despite my sadness and worry, the smell of roasting meat had my mouth watering.

  We sat around the fire, eating and passing around a flask of kvas, watching the flames play over the hull of the Bittern as the branches crackled and popped. We had a lot to talk about—who would go with us into the Sikurzoi and who would remain in the valley, whether or not people even wanted to stay. I rubbed my wrist. It helped to focus on the firebird, to think of that instead of the black sheen of Nikolai’s eyes, the dark crust of blood near his lips.

  Abruptly, Zoya said, “I should have known Sergei couldn’t be trusted. He was always a weakling.” That seemed unfair, but I let it pass.

  “Oncat never liked him,” Harshaw added.

  Genya fed a branch to the fire. “Do you think he was planning it all along?”

  “I’ve been wondering that,” I admitted. “I thought he’d be better once we got out of the White Cathedral and the tunnels, but he almost seemed worse, more anxious.”

  “That could have been anything,” said Tamar. “Cave-in, militia attack, Tolya’s snoring.”

  Tolya threw a pebble at her and said, “Nikolai’s men should have watched him more closely.”

  Or I should never have let him go. Maybe my guilt over Marie had clouded my judgment. Maybe sorrow was clouding it now and there were more betrayals to come.

  “Did the nichevo’ya really just … tear him apart?” asked Nadia.

  I glanced over at Misha. At some point, he’d climbed down from the Bittern. Now he was fast asleep beside Mal, still clutching that wooden sword.

  “It was horrible,” I said softly.

  “What about Nikolai?” Zoya asked. “What did the Darkling do to him?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Can it be undone?”

  “I don’t know that either.” I looked to David.

  “Maybe,” he offered. “I’d need to study him. It’s merzost. New territory. I wish I had Morozova’s journals.”

  I almost laughed at that. All the time David had been lugging those journals around, I would have gladly thrown them onto a garbage heap. But now that there was a good reason to want them, they were out of my reach, left behind at the Spinning Wheel.

  Capture Nikolai. Put him in a cage. See if we could pull him from the shadow’s grasp. The too-clever fox, finally caught. I blinked and looked away. I didn’t want to cry again.

  Abruptly, Adrik snarled, “I’m glad Sergei’s dead. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to wring his neck myself.”

  “You’d need two hands for that,” said Zoya.

  There was a brief, terrible silence, then Adrik scowled and said, “Okay, stab him.”

  Zoya grinned and passed him the flask. Nadia just shook her head. Sometimes I forgot they were really soldiers. I didn’t doubt that Adrik would mourn the loss of his arm. I wasn’t even sure how it might impact his ability to summon. But I remembered him standing in front of me at the Little Palace, demanding the right to stay and fight. He was tougher than I’d ever be.

  I thought of Botkin, my old teacher, pushing me to run another mile, to take another punch. I remembered the words he’d spoken to me so long ago: Steel is earned. Adrik had that steel, and so did Nadia. She’d proven it again in our flight from the Elbjen. A part of me had wondered what Tamar saw in her. But Nadia had been in some of the worst fighting at the Little Palace. She’d lost her best friend and the life she’d always known. Yet she hadn’t fallen apart like Sergei or chosen life underground like Maxim. Through all of it, she’d stayed steady.

  When Adrik handed the flask back, Zoya took a deep drink and said, “Do you know what Baghra told me at my first lesson with her?” She lowered her voice to imitate Baghra’s throaty rasp. “Pretty face. Too bad you have porridge for brains.”

  Harshaw snorted. “I set fire to her hut in class.”

  “Of course you did,” said Zoya.

  “Accidentally! She refused to ever teach me again. Wouldn’t even speak to me. I saw her on the grounds once, and she walked right by. Didn’t say a word, just whacked me on the knee with her stick. I still have a lump.” He yanked up his trouser leg, and sure enough, there was a knob of bone visible beneath the skin.

  “That’s nothing,” Nadia said, her cheeks pinking as we all turned our attention to her. “I had some kind of block where I couldn’t summon for a while. She put me in a room and released a hive of bees in it.”

  “What?” I squeaked. It wasn’t just the bees that had shocked me. I’d struggled to summon for months at the Little Palace, and Baghra had never mentioned that other Grisha got blocks.

  “What did you do?” Tamar asked incredulously.

  “I managed to summon a current to send them up the chimney, but I got stung so many times, I looked like I had firepox.”

  “I have never been more glad I’m not Grisha,” Mal said with a shake of his head.

  Zoya lifted her flask. “Let’s hear it for the lone otkazat’sya.”

  “Baghra hated me,” David said quietly.

  Zoya waved dismissively. “We all felt that way.”

  “No, she really hated me. She taught me once with the rest of the Fabrikators my age, then she refused to ever meet with me again. I used to just stay in the workshops when everyone else had her classes.”

  “Why?” Harshaw asked, scratching Oncat under the chin.

  David shrugged. “No idea.”

  “I know why,” said Genya. I waited, wondering if she really did. “Animal magnetism,” she continued. “One more minute in that hut with you, and she would have torn off all your clothes.”

  David considered this. “That seems improbable.”

  “Impossible,” Mal and I said at the same time.

  “Well, not impossible,” David said, looking vaguely insulted.

  Genya laughed and planted a firm kiss on his mouth.

  I picked up a stick and gave the fire a poke, sending sparks shooting upward. I knew why Baghra had refused to teach David. He’d reminded her too much of Morozova, so obsessed with knowledge that he’d been blind to his child’s suffering, to his wife’s neglect. And sure enough, David had created lumiya just “for fun,” essentially handing the Darkling the means to enter the Fold. But David wasn’t like Morozova. He’d been there for Genya when she’d needed him. He was no warrior, but he’d still found a way to fight for her.

  I looked around at our strange, battered little group, at Adrik with his missing arm, gazing moon-eyed at Zoya; at Harshaw and Tolya, watching as Mal sketched our route in the dirt. I saw Genya grin, her scars pulling taut as David gestured wildly, trying to explain his idea for a brass arm to Nadia, while Nadia ignored him, running her fingers through the dark waves of Tamar’s hair.

  None of them were easy or soft or simple. They were like me, nursing hurts and hidden wounds, all broken in different ways. We didn’t quite fit together. We had edges so jagged we cut each other sometimes, but as I curled up on my
side, the warmth of the fire at my back, I felt a rush of gratitude so sweet it made my throat ache. Fear came with it. Keeping them close was a luxury I would pay for. Now I had more to lose.

  CHAPTER

  13

  IN THE END, everyone stayed. Even Zoya, though she kept up a steady stream of complaints all the way to Dva Stolba.

  We’d agreed to split into two groups. Tamar, Nadia, and Adrik would travel with David, Genya, and Misha. They’d secure lodgings in one of the settlements at the southeast edge of the valley. Genya would have to keep her face hidden, but she didn’t seem to mind. She’d wrapped her shawl around her head and declared, “I shall be a woman of mystery.” I reminded her not to be too intriguing.

  Mal and I would travel into the Sikurzoi with Zoya, Harshaw, and Tolya. Because we were so close to the border, we knew we might be facing an increased military presence, but we hoped we could blend in with the refugees trying to get through the Sikurzoi before the first snows came.

  If we weren’t back from the mountains in two weeks, Tamar would meet with any forces the Apparat might send to Caryeva. I didn’t like the idea of sending her and Nadia alone, but Mal and I couldn’t cut our group down any further. Shu raiders were known to pick off Ravkan travelers near the border, and we wanted to be prepared for trouble. Tamar at least knew the Soldat Sol, and I tried to reassure myself that she and Nadia were both experienced fighters.

  I also wasn’t sure what I’d do with any soldiers who did show up, but the message had been sent, and I had to believe that we’d figure out something. Maybe by then I’d have the firebird and the beginnings of a plan. I couldn’t think too far ahead. Every time I did, I felt panic tugging at me. It was like being underground again, no air to breathe, waiting for the world to come down around me.

  Our team left at sunrise, leaving the others sleeping in the shade of the overhang. Only Misha was awake, watching us with accusatory eyes as he pelted the side of the Bittern with pebbles.

  “Come here,” Mal said, waving him over. I thought Misha might not budge, but then he shuffled to us, his chin jutting out in a sulk. “Do you have the pin Alina gave you?”