Rule of Wolves Read online

  But the blight had stopped, right on the edge of the fountain, clear as the mark of high tide on the sand. All it had touched lay gray and wasted. All that lay beyond was lush and green and full of life.

  “Akeni,” the queen whispered on a sob.

  Only the wind answered, blowing in off the orchard, scattering the last, faint tendrils of shadow. Nothing remained but the sweet smell of flowers, happy and unknowing, their faces turned to the sun.

  2

  NINA

  NINA TASTED THE SALT AIR on her tongue, letting the sounds of the marketplace wash over her—the call of vendors hawking their wares, the gulls in the Djerholm harbor, the shouts of sailors aboard their ships. She glanced up to the cliff top where the Ice Court loomed above it all, its high white walls gleaming bright as exposed bone, and she restrained a shiver. It was good to be out in the open, away from the cloistered rooms of the White Island, but she felt as if the ancient building was watching her, as if she could hear it whisper, I know what you are. You do not belong here.

  “Kindly shut up,” she muttered.

  “Hmm?” said Hanne as they made their way down the quay.

  “Nothing,” Nina replied hastily.

  Talking to inanimate structures was not a good sign. She’d been cooped up too long, not just in the Ice Court but in Mila Jandersdat’s body, her face and form tailored to keep her true identity secret. Nina cast another baleful glance at the Ice Court. Its walls were said to be impenetrable, never breached by an attacking army. But her friends had breached it just fine. They’d blown a hole in those grand walls with one of Fjerda’s own tanks. Now? Nina was more like a mouse—a big blond mouse in too-heavy skirts—nibbling away at the Ice Court’s foundation.

  She paused at a wool vendor’s stall, the racks crowded with the traditional vests and scarves worn for Vinetkälla. Despite her best intentions, Nina had been charmed by Djerholm from the first time she’d seen it. It was tidy in the way only a Fjerdan town could be, its houses and businesses painted in pink and blue and yellow, the buildings snug against the water, huddled close together as if for warmth. Most cities Nina had seen—how many had there been? how many languages had she spoken in them?—were built around a town square or a high street, but not Djerholm. Its lifeblood was salt water and its market faced the sea, sprawled across the quay, shops and carts and stalls offering fresh fish, dried meats, dough wound around hot irons and cooked over coals, then dusted with sugar. The stone halls of the Ice Court were imperious and cold, but here there was mess and life.

  Everywhere Nina looked there were reminders of Djel, his sacred ash boughs woven into knots and hearts in preparation for the winter parties of Vinetkälla. In Ravka, they would be readying for the Feast of Sankt Nikolai. And for war. That was the knowledge that sat heavy on her chest every night when she lay down to sleep, that crept up to twine around her throat and choke the breath from her every day. Her people were in danger and she didn’t know how to help them. Instead she was browsing nubbly hats and scarves behind enemy lines.

  Hanne was beside her, bundled in a thistle-colored coat that made her tawny skin glow despite the overcast day, an elegant knit cap tucked over her shorn hair to avoid drawing attention. As much as Nina hated the confines of the Ice Court, Hanne was suffering even more. She needed to run, to ride; she needed the fresh smell of snow and pine, and the comfort of the woods. She’d come to the Ice Court with Nina willingly, but there was no question that the long days of polite conversation over tedious meals had taken their toll. Even this little bit of freedom—a trip to the market with parents and guards in tow—was enough to bring color to her cheeks and shine to her eyes again.

  “Mila! Hanne!” called Ylva. “Don’t go too far.”

  Hanne rolled her eyes and lifted a ball of blue wool from the vendor’s cart. “Like we’re children.”

  Nina glanced behind her. Hanne’s parents, Jarl and Ylva Brum, trailed them by only a few yards, drawing admiring glances as they walked along the quay—both of them tall and lean, Ylva in warm brown wool and red fox fur, Brum in the black uniform that filled Nina with loathing, the silver wolf of the drüskelle emblazoned on his sleeve. Two young witchhunters followed, their faces clean-shaven, their golden hair worn long. Only when they had completed their training and heard the words of Djel at Hringkälla would they be permitted to grow beards. And then off into the world they would merrily go to murder Grisha.

  “Papa, they’re setting up for some kind of show,” Hanne said, gesturing farther down the quay to where a makeshift stage had been erected. “Can we go watch?”

  Brum frowned slightly. “It isn’t one of those Kerch troupes, is it? With their masks and lewd jokes?”

  If only, Nina thought glumly. She longed for the wild streets of Ketterdam. She’d take a hundred bawdy, raucous performances of the Komedie Brute over the five interminable acts of Fjerdan opera she’d been forced to sit through the previous night. Hanne had kept jabbing her in the side to prevent Nina from nodding off.

  “You’re starting to snore,” Hanne had whispered, tears leaking down her cheeks as she tried to keep from laughing.

  When Ylva saw her daughter’s red face and wet eyes, she had patted Hanne’s knee. “It is a moving piece, isn’t it?”

  All Hanne had been able to do was nod and squeeze Nina’s hand.

  “Oh, Jarl,” Ylva said to her husband now. “I’m sure it will be perfectly wholesome.”

  “Very well.” Brum relented and they made their way toward the stage, leaving the disappointed wool seller behind. “But you’d be surprised at the turn this place has taken. Corruption. Heresy. Right here in our capital. You see?” He pointed to a burned-out store- front as they passed. It looked like it had once been a butcher shop, but now the windows were broken and the walls stained with soot.

  “Only two nights ago, this shop was raided. They found an altar to the supposed Sun Saint and one to … what’s her name? Linnea of the Waters?”

  “Leoni,” Hanne corrected softly.

  Nina had heard about the raid through her contacts in the Hringsa, a network of spies dedicated to liberating Grisha throughout Fjerda. The butcher’s wares had been thrown into the street, the cupboards and shelves stripped to unearth hidden relics—a finger bone from the Sun Saint, an icon painted in an amateurish hand that clearly showed beautiful Leoni with her hair in coiled braids, arms raised to pull poison from a river and save a town.

  “It’s worse than just the worship of the Saints,” Brum continued, jabbing a finger at the air as if it had personally offended him. “They’re claiming Grisha are the favored children of Djel. That their powers are actually a sign of his blessing.”

  Those words put an ache in Nina’s heart. Matthias had said as much. Before he died. Her friendship with Hanne had helped to heal that wound. This mission, this purpose had helped, but the pain was still there and she suspected it always would be. His life had been stolen from him, and Matthias had never had the chance to find his own purpose. I served it, my love. I protected you. To the very end.

  Nina swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat and forced herself to say, “Hanne, should we get a honeywater?” She would have preferred wine, maybe something stronger, but Fjerdan women weren’t permitted alcohol, certainly not in public.

  The honeywater seller smiled at them, his jaw dropping when he caught sight of Brum’s uniform. “Commander Brum!” he said. “Some hot drinks for your family? To fortify you on this chilly day?”

  The man was broad-shouldered and thick-necked, with a long ginger mustache. His wrists were tattooed with circles of waves that might have indicated a former sailor. Or something more.

  Nina felt a strange sense of doubling as she watched Jarl Brum shake the vendor’s hand. Nearly two years ago, only a few yards from where they stood now, she had fought this man. She had faced the drüskelle commander as her true self, as Nina Zenik, the drug jurda parem thick in her blood. That drug had allowed her to take on hundreds of soldie
rs, had made her impervious to bullets, and had forever altered her Grisha gift, granting her power over the dead rather than the living. She had spared Brum’s life that day, though she’d taken his scalp. Nina was the reason for his bald head and the scar that ran across the base of his skull like the fat pink tail of a rat.

  Matthias had pleaded mercy—for his people, for the man who had been a second father to him. Nina still wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing by granting it. If she had killed Brum, she would never have met Hanne. She might never have come back to Fjerda. Matthias might still be alive. When she thought too much about the past, she got lost in it, in all the things that might have been. And she couldn’t afford that. Despite the false name she bore and the false face she wore thanks to Genya’s expert tailoring, Nina was Grisha, a soldier of the Second Army, and a spy for Ravka.

  So pay attention, Zenik, she scolded herself.

  Brum tried to pay the honeywater vendor, but the man refused to take his coin. “A gift for Vinetkälla, Commander. May your nights be short and your cup always full.”

  A cheerful burst of flutes and drums sounded from the stage, signaling the start of the performance, and the curtain lifted, revealing a painted cliff top and a miniature marketplace below. The crowd burst into delighted applause. They were looking at Djerholm, the very city where they stood, and a banner that read THE STORY OF THE ICE COURT.

  “You see, Jarl,” said Ylva. “No lewd japes. A properly patriotic tale.”

  Brum seemed distracted, checking his pocket watch. What are you waiting for? Nina wondered. Diplomatic talks between Fjerda and Ravka were still proceeding, and Fjerda had not yet declared war. But Nina felt sure battle was inevitable. Brum would settle for nothing less. She’d passed on what little intelligence she’d been able to gather eavesdropping at doors and over dinners. It wasn’t enough.

  Cymbals crashed to start the tale of Egmond, the prodigy who had designed and built extraordinary castles and grand buildings when he was only a child. The acrobats pulled at long skeins of silk, creating a towering mansion of gray spires and glittering arches. The audience clapped enthusiastically, but an actor with a haughty face—a nobleman who didn’t want to pay for his fanciful new home—cursed Egmond, and the handsome young architect was bound in chains, to be dragged off to the old fort that had once stood on the cliff top above the harbor.

  The scene changed to Egmond in his cell as a great storm arrived on a roll of thundering drums. Blue ripples of silk cascaded over the stage, embodying the flood that had engulfed the fort with the king and queen of Fjerda inside it.

  Working undercover wasn’t simply a question of mastering a language or learning a few local customs, so Nina knew her Fjerdan myths and legends well. This was the part of the story where Egmond was meant to place his hand on the roots of a tree that had poked through his cell wall, and with Djel’s help, use the strength of the sacred ash to buttress the walls of the fort, save the king and queen, and build the foundation for the mighty Ice Court.

  Instead three figures walked onto the stage—a woman engulfed in red paper roses, a young girl in a white wig with antlers around her neck, and a woman with black hair in a blue gown.

  “What is this?” growled Brum.

  But the gasp from the audience said it all: Sankta Lizabeta of the Roses, the Sun Saint Alina Starkov, and—an excellent touch if Nina did say so herself—the Stormwitch, Zoya Nazyalensky, had entered the play.

  The Saints placed their hands on Egmond’s shoulders, then against the prison cell walls, and the twisted bits of fabric meant to symbolize Djel’s ash began to expand and unfurl, like roots uncoiling through the earth.

  “No more of this,” Brum said loudly, his voice carrying over the crowd. He sounded calm enough, but Nina heard the edge in his voice as he stepped forward. The two drüskelle followed, already reaching for the clubs and whips at their belts. “The weather is turning. The play can continue later.”

  “Leave them be!” shouted a man from the crowd.

  A child began to cry.

  “Is this part of the play?” asked a confused woman.

  “We should go,” Ylva said, trying to herd Hanne and Nina away.

  But the crowd was too close around them, pushing toward the stage.

  “You will disperse,” Brum said with authority. “Or you will be arrested and fined.”

  Suddenly, thunder sounded—real thunder, not the tinny drums of the performers. Dark clouds moved in over the harbor so quickly it seemed as if dusk was falling. The sea was suddenly alive, the water forming whitecaps, rolling in swells that set the ships’ masts swaying.

  “Djel is angry,” said someone in the crowd.

  “The Saints are angry,” called someone else.

  “You will disperse!” Brum said, shouting over the rumble of the oncoming storm.

  “Look!” a voice cried.

  A wave was racing toward them from the harbor, looming higher and higher. Instead of breaking against the sea wall, it leapt the quay. It towered over the crowd, a wall of seething water. The people screamed. The wave seemed to twist in the air, then crashed down onto the quay—directly into Brum and his soldiers, sending them sprawling across the cobblestones in a rush of water.

  The crowd gasped, then burst into laughter.

  “Jarl!” cried Ylva, trying to go to him.

  Hanne held her back. “Stay here, Mama. He will not want to be seen as weak.”

  “Sankta Zoya!” someone yelled. “She brought the storm!”

  A few people in the crowd went to their knees.

  “The Saints!” another voice said. “They see and they protect the faithful.”

  The sea roiled and the waves seemed to dance.

  Brum stumbled to his feet, his face red, his clothes soaked with seawater. “Get up,” he snarled, yanking his young soldiers to their feet. Then he was in the crowd, pulling the penitent up by the collars of their shirts. “Get off your knees or I will arrest you all for sedition and heresy!”

  “Do you think we went too far?” Hanne whispered, sliding her hand into Nina’s and giving it a squeeze.

  “Not far enough,” murmured Nina.

  Because the performance and even the wave had only been a distraction. The play had been staged by the Hringsa network. The wave had arrived courtesy of a Tidemaker undercover in one of the harbor boats. But now as Jarl Brum and his men rampaged through the crowd, the honeywater vendor, who had slipped into an alley when the play began, gave a quick wave of his hands, parting the clouds.

  Sunlight poured from the sky onto the butcher shop that had been raided a few nights before. The wall looked blank at first, but then the vendor uncorked the bottle Nina had slipped into his cart. He gusted a cloud of ammonia at the paint and a message appeared, as if by magic, scrawled across the storefront: Linholmenn fe Djel ner werre peje.

  The Children of Djel are among you.

  It was a cheap party trick, one she and the other orphans had used to send each other secret messages. But as Nina had learned not so long ago in Ketterdam, a good con was really about spectacle. All around her she could see the people of Djerholm gaping at the message emblazoned on the storefront, pointing to the sea that had now calmed, to the clouds that were rolling back into place as the honeywater vendor casually wiped his hands and returned to his stall.

  Would it matter? Nina didn’t know, but little miracles like these had been happening all over Fjerda. In Hjar, a damaged fishing boat had been about to sink when the bay froze solid and the sailors were able to walk safely back to shore, their catch intact. The next morning, a mural of Sankt Vladimir’s sacred lighthouse had appeared on the church wall.

  In Felsted, an apple orchard had burst into full fruit despite the cold weather, as if Sankt Feliks had laid a warming hand upon the trees. The branches had been found festooned with ash boughs—a symbol of the blessing of Djel.

  Half the town of Kjerek had fallen ill with firepox, a near-certain death sentence. Except the mo
rning after a farmer witnessed a vision of Sankta Anastasia hovering above the town well with a wreath of ash leaves in her hair, the townspeople had woken free from sickness, their skin clear of sores, their fevers gone.

  Miracle after miracle created by the Hringsa and Second Army spies. Tidemakers had frozen the bay, but they’d also created the storm to wreck the fishing boat. Squallers had brought on the early frost in Felsted, but Sun Soldiers had made the trees bloom. And while Hringsa agents hadn’t created the firepox, they had made sure Grisha Corporalki had been there to heal the victims. As for the vision of Anastasia, it was amazing what a little theatrical lighting and a red wig could do.

  Then there was the strange blight that had struck north of Djerholm. Nina didn’t know where that had come from, a natural phenomenon or the work of some rogue Hringsa operative. But she did know there’d been murmurs it was the work of the Starless Saint, retribution for the religious raids and arrests by Brum’s men.

  At first Nina had doubted that their miracles were making any difference at all, had feared that their efforts amounted to little more than childish pranks that would lead to nothing. But the fact that Brum had been devoting more and more resources to attempting to root out worship of the Saints gave her hope.

  Brum stomped back to them, his face a mask of rage. It was hard to take him too seriously when he was soaked to the bone and it looked like a fish might wriggle out from one of his boots. Still Nina kept her head down, her eyes averted, and her face expressionless. Brum was dangerous now, a mine waiting to detonate. It was one thing to be hated or confronted, quite another to be laughed at. But that was what Nina wanted, for Fjerda to stop seeing Brum and his drüskelle as men to be feared and to acknowledge them for what they were: scared bullies worthy of scorn, not adulation.

  “I’ll see my family back to the Ice Court,” he muttered to his soldiers. “Get names. All of the performers, everyone who was in the marketplace.”

  “But the crowd—”