Rule of Wolves Page 3

  Brum’s blue eyes narrowed. “Names. This stinks of the Hringsa. If there are Grisha in my streets, in my capital, I will find out.”

  There are Grisha in your house, Nina thought gleefully.

  “Don’t get cocky,” murmured Hanne.

  “Too late.”

  They climbed into the roomy coach. The king and queen had gifted Brum one of the noisy new vehicles that didn’t require horses, but Ylva preferred a coach that didn’t belch black smoke and wasn’t likely to break down on the steep climb to the Ice Court.

  “Jarl,” Ylva attempted once they were ensconced in the velvet seats. “What is the harm? The more you react to these theatrics, the more emboldened they will be.”

  Nina expected Brum to explode, but he was silent for a long time, staring out the window at the gray sea below.

  When he spoke again, his voice was measured, his anger leashed. “I should have held my temper.” He reached out and clasped Ylva’s hand.

  Nina saw the effect that small gesture had on Hanne, the troubled, guilty look that clouded her eyes. It was easy for Nina to hate Brum, to see him as nothing but a villain who needed to be destroyed. But he was Hanne’s father, and in moments like these, when he was kind, when he was reasonable and gentle, he seemed less like a monster than a man doing his best for his country.

  “But this is not a matter of a few people making trouble in the marketplace,” Brum continued wearily. “If the people begin to see our enemies as Saints—”

  “There are Fjerdan Saints,” offered Hanne, almost hopefully.

  “But they are not Grisha.”

  Nina bit her tongue. Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t. Sënj Egmond, the great architect, was said to have prayed to Djel to buttress the Ice Court against the storm. But there were other stories that claimed he’d prayed to the Saints. And there were some who believed that Egmond’s miracles had nothing to do with divine intervention, that they had simply been the result of his Grisha gifts, that he had been a talented Fabrikator who could manipulate metal and stone at will.

  “The Fjerdan Saints were holy men,” said Brum. “They were favored by Djel, not … these demons. But it’s more than that. Did you recognize the third Saint flouncing across that stage? That was Zoya Nazyalensky. General of the Second Army. There is nothing holy or natural about that woman.”

  “A woman serves as a general?” Hanne asked innocently.

  “If you can call a creature like that a woman. She is everything repugnant and foul. The Grisha are Ravka. Fjerdans worshipping these false Saints … They are giving their allegiance to a foreign power, a power with whom we are about to be at war. This new religion is more of a threat than any battlefield victory could be. If we lose the people, we lose the fight before it even begins.”

  If I do my job right, thought Nina.

  She had to hope that the common people of Fjerda didn’t hate Grisha more than they loved their own sons and daughters, that most of them knew someone who had vanished—a friend, a neighbor, even a relative. A woman willing to leave livelihood and family behind for fear of having her power discovered. A boy snatched from his home in the night to face torture and death at the hands of Brum’s witchhunters. Maybe with her little miracles, Nina could give Fjerda something to rally around, a reason to question the hate and fear that had been Brum’s weapons for so long.

  “The Apparat’s presence here undermines all we’ve worked for,” Brum went on. “How can I purge our towns and cities of foreign influence when there is a heretic at the very heart of our government? We look like the worst of hypocrites, and he has spies in every alcove.”

  Ylva shuddered. “He has a most unnerving way about him.”

  “It’s all for show. The beard. The dark robes. He likes to terrify the ladies with his strange pronouncements and his skulking, but he’s little more than a squawking bird. And we need him if we’re to put Demidov on the throne. The priest’s backing will matter to the Ravkans.”

  “He smells of graveyards,” said Hanne.

  “It’s only incense.” Brum drummed his fingers on the windowsill. “It’s hard to tell what the man really believes. He says the Ravkan king is possessed by demons, that Vadik Demidov was anointed by the Saints themselves to rule.”

  “Where did Demidov come from anyway?” Nina said. “I so hope we’ll get to meet him.”

  “We keep him safe in case any Ravkan assassins have a mind to take a shot at him.”

  Pity that.

  “Is he really a Lantsov?” she pushed.

  “He has more claim to the crown than that bastard Nikolai.”

  The coach jolted to a halt and they descended, but before Nina’s feet had even touched the gravel path, a soldier was running up to Brum, a folded paper in hand. Nina glimpsed the royal seal—silver wax and the crowned Grimjer wolf.

  Brum broke the seal and read the note, and when he looked up, his expression made Nina’s stomach sink. Despite his wet clothes and the humiliation he’d suffered at the harbor, he was beaming.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  Nina saw Ylva smile ruefully. “You’ll be leaving us, then. And I will wait every night with fear in my heart.”

  “There is nothing to fear,” Brum said, tucking the paper into his coat pocket. “They cannot stand against us. Finally, our moment has come.”

  He was right. The Fjerdans had tanks. They had Grisha captives addicted to parem. Victory was assured. Especially if Ravka was stranded without allies. I should be there. I belong in that fight.

  “Will you be traveling far?” Nina asked.

  “Not at all,” said Brum. “Mila, you look so frightened! Have you so little faith in me?”

  Nina forced herself to smile. “No, sir. I only fear for your safety as we all do. Here,” she said, “let me take your coats so everyone can get inside and be warm. You should have every moment together as a family before Commander Brum leaves.”

  “What a blessing you are, Mila,” Ylva said fondly.

  Nina took her coat, and Hanne’s, and Brum’s, her hand already snaking into the pocket where he’d placed the note.

  War was coming.

  She needed to get a message to her king.

  3

  NIKOLAI

  NIKOLAI TRIED TO STEADY his nervous mount with a pat to the horse’s withers. His groom had suggested it wasn’t appropriate for a king to ride out on a horse named Punchline, but Nikolai had a soft spot for the piebald pony with crooked ears. He certainly wasn’t the prettiest horse in the royal stables, but he could run for miles without tiring and he had the steady disposition of a lump of rock. Usually. Right now he could barely keep still, hooves dancing left and right as he tugged at his reins. Punchline didn’t like this place. And Nikolai couldn’t blame him.

  “Tell me I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing,” he said, meager hope in his heart.

  “What do you think you’re seeing?” asked Tamar.

  “Mass destruction. Certain doom.”

  “Not entirely certain,” said Zoya.

  Nikolai cut her a glance. She’d tied back her black hair with a dark blue ribbon. It was eminently practical, but it had the unfortunate effect of making him want to untie it. “Do I detect optimism in my most pessimistic general?”

  “Likely doom,” Zoya corrected, pulling gently on her white mare’s reins. All the horses were nervous.

  Dawn crept over Yaryenosh, bathing the town’s rooftops and streets in rosy light. In the pastures beyond, Nikolai could see a herd of ponies, their winter coats shaggy, stamping their hooves in the cold. It would have been a quaint scene, a dreamy landscape for some hack painter to sell off to a rich merchant with a surfeit of cash and a dearth of taste—if it hadn’t been for the dead, ashy soil that stained the countryside like a blot of spilled ink. The blight stretched from the paddocks of the horse farm in the distance all the way to the edges of the town below.

  “Two miles?” Nikolai speculated, trying to determine the extent of the da
mage.

  “At least,” said Tolya, peering through a folding long glass. “Maybe three.”

  “Twice the size of the incident near Balakirev.”

  “It’s getting worse,” said Tamar.

  “We can’t say that yet,” protested Tolya. Like his sister, he wore an olive drab uniform, his huge bronze arms exposed to display his sun tattoos, despite the winter chill. “It’s not necessarily a pattern.”

  Tamar snorted. “This is Ravka. It’s always getting worse.”

  “It’s a pattern.” Zoya’s blue eyes scanned the horizon. “But is it his pattern?”

  “Is it even possible?” Tolya asked. “We’ve had him locked in the sun cell since he … returned.”

  Returned. There was something quaint about the word. As if the Darkling had simply been vacationing on the Wandering Isle, sketching ruined castles, sampling the local stews. Not brought back to life by an ancient ritual orchestrated by a bloodthirsty Saint with a penchant for bees.

  “I try not to underestimate our illustrious prisoner,” said Nikolai. “And as for what’s possible…” Well, the word had lost its meaning. He had met Saints, witnessed their destruction, nearly died himself, and become host to a demon. He’d seen a man long dead resurrected, and he was fairly sure the spirit of an ancient dragon was lurking inside the woman next to him. If possible was a river, it had long since leapt its banks and become a flood.

  “Look,” said Tolya. “Smoke.”

  “And riders,” added Tamar. “Seems like trouble.”

  At the fringes of town near where the blight had struck, Nikolai could see a gathering of men on horseback. Angry voices carried on the wind.

  “Those are Suli wagons,” said Zoya, the words hard and clipped.

  A shot rang out.

  They all shared the briefest glance, and then they were charging down the hill to the valley below.

  Two groups of people stood in the shade of a large cedar tree, mere footsteps from where the blight had bled all life from the land. They were on the edge of a Suli encampment, and Nikolai saw the way the wagons had been arranged not merely for convenience but for defense. There was no child in sight. They’d been ready for a possible attack. Maybe because they always had to be ready. The old laws restricting Suli land ownership and travel had been abolished even before his father’s time, but prejudice was harder to wipe from the books. And it was always worse when times got hard. The mob—there was no other word for it, their rifles and fevered eyes made that clear—confronting the Suli was testimony to that.

  “Stand down!” Nikolai shouted as they galloped nearer. But only a couple of people turned toward him.

  Tolya charged ahead and drove his massive warhorse between the two groups. “Lay down your arms in the name of the king!” he bellowed. He looked like a warrior Saint come to life from the pages of a book.

  “Very impressive,” said Nikolai.

  “Show-off,” said Tamar.

  “Don’t be petty. Being the size of an oak should have some benefits.”

  Both the townspeople and the Suli took a step back, mouths agape at the sight of a giant, uniformed Shu man with tattooed arms in their midst. Nikolai recognized Kyril Mirov, the local governor. He’d made good money trading salt cod and producing the new transport vehicles rapidly replacing carriages and carts. He had no noble blood in him, but plenty of ambition. He wanted to be taken seriously as a leader, and that meant he felt he had something to prove. Always worrisome.

  Nikolai took the opportunity Tolya had given him. “Good morning,” he said happily. “Are we all gathering for an early breakfast?”

  The townspeople fell into deep bows. The Suli did not. They recognized no king.

  “Your Highness,” said Mirov. He was a lean man with jowls like melted wax. “I had no idea you were in the area. I would have ridden out to greet you.”

  “What’s happening here?” Nikolai said calmly, keeping accusation from his voice.

  “Look what they did to our fields!” cried one of Mirov’s men. “What they did to the town! Ten houses vanished like smoke. Two families gone, and Gavosh the weaver as well.”

  Vanished like smoke. They’d had the same reports from other parts of Ravka: a blight that struck out of nowhere, a tide of shadow that enveloped towns, farmland, ports, each thing it touched dissolving into nothing with no more ceremony than a candle guttering out. In its wake, the blight left fields and forests leached of all life. Kilyklava, he’d heard it called—vampire, after a creature from myth.

  “That doesn’t explain why your guns are drawn,” Nikolai said mildly. “Something terrible has happened here. But it’s not the work of the Suli.”

  “Their camp was untouched,” said Mirov, and Nikolai didn’t like the measured sound of his voice. It was one thing to calm a snapping dog, another to try to reason with a man who had dug himself a tidy trench and fortified it. “This … thing, this horror struck just days after they arrived on our land.”

  “Your land,” said a Suli man standing at the center of the group. “There were Suli in every country this side of the True Sea before they even had names.”

  “And what did you build here?” asked a butcher in a dirty apron. “Nothing. These are our homes, our businesses, our pastures and livestock.”

  “They’re a cursed people,” said Mirov as if citing a fact—last year’s rainfall, the price of wheat. “Everyone knows it.”

  “I hate to be left out of a party,” said Nikolai, “but I know no such thing, and this blight has struck elsewhere. It is a natural phenomenon, one my Materialki are studying and will find a solution to.” A heady combination of lies and optimism, but a bit of exaggeration never hurt anyone.

  “They’re trespassing on Count Nerenski’s land.”

  Nikolai let the mantle of Lantsov authority fall over him. “I am Ravka’s king. The count holds these lands at my discretion. I say these people are welcome here and under my protection.”

  “So says the bastard king,” grumbled the butcher.

  A hush fell.

  Zoya clenched her fists and thunder rolled over the fields.

  But Nikolai held up a hand. This was not a war they would win with force.

  “Could you repeat that?” he asked.

  The butcher’s cheeks were red, his brow furrowed. The man might well keel over from heart failure if his ignorance didn’t kill him first. “I said you are a bastard and not fit to sit that fancy horse.”

  “Did you hear that, Punchline? He called you fancy.” Nikolai turned his attention back to the butcher. “You say I am a bastard. Why? Because our enemies do?”

  An uncomfortable murmur passed through the crowd. A shuffling of feet. But no one spoke. Good.

  “Do you call Fjerda your master now?” His voice rang out over the gathered townspeople, the Suli. “Will you learn to speak their tongue? Will you bow to their pureblood king and queen when their tanks roll over Ravka’s borders?”

  “No!” cried Mirov. He spat on the ground. “Never!”

  One down.

  “Fjerda has loaded your guns with lies about my parentage. They hope you will turn your weapons on me, on your countrymen who stand at our borders even now, ready to defend this land. They hope you will do the bloody work of war for them.”

  Of course, Nikolai was the liar here. But kings did what they wished; bastards did what they must.

  “I’m no traitor,” snarled the butcher.

  “You sure sound like one,” said Mirov.

  The butcher thrust his chest out. “I fought for the Eighteenth Regiment and so will my son.”

  “I bet you had quite a few Fjerdans running,” said Nikolai.

  “Damn right I did,” said the butcher.

  But the man behind him was less convinced. “I don’t want my children fighting in another war. Put them witches out front.”

  Now Zoya let lightning crackle through the air around them. “The Grisha will lead the charge and I will take the first bullet if I
have to.”

  Mirov’s men took a step back.

  “I should thank you,” Nikolai said with a smile. “When Zoya takes it into her head to be heroic, she can be quite frightening.”

  “I’ll say,” squeaked the butcher.

  “People died here,” said Mirov, trying to regain some authority. “Someone has to answer for—”

  “Who answers for the drought?” asked Zoya. Her voice cut through the air like a well-honed blade. “For earthquakes? For hurricanes? Is this who we are? Creatures who weep at the first sign of trouble? Or are we Ravkan—practical, modern, no longer prisoners of superstition?”

  Some of the townspeople looked resentful, but others appeared downright chastised. In another life Zoya would have made a terrifying governess—straight-backed, sour-faced, and perfectly capable of making every man present wet his trousers in fear. But a Suli woman was staring at Zoya, her expression speculative, and his general, who could usually be counted upon to meet any insolent look with a glare powerful enough to scorch forests, was either oblivious or deliberately ignoring her.

  “Khaj pa ve,” the woman said. “Khaj pa ve.”

  Though Nikolai was curious, he had more pressing matters to attend to. “I know it is little comfort, but we should discuss what aid the crown can offer in recompense for your lost land and homes. I will—”

  “I’ll speak to the governor,” Zoya said briskly.

  Nikolai had intended to talk with Mirov himself, since the man’s interest in status might make him susceptible to attention from royalty. But Zoya was already directing her mount his way.

  “Be charming,” he warned her under his breath.

  She flashed him a warm smile and a wink. “I will.”

  “That was very convincing.”

  The smile vanished in an instant. “I’ve had to watch you smarm all over Ravka for years. I’ve learned a few tricks.”

  “I don’t smarm.”

  “Occasionally you smarm,” said Tolya.

  “Yes,” conceded Nikolai. “But it’s endearing.”

  He watched Zoya slide down from her horse and lead Mirov away. The man looked nearly slack-jawed, a frequent side effect of Zoya’s beauty and general air of murderousness. Perhaps there were some things more intoxicating than status for Mirov after all.