King of Scars

by Leigh Bardugo

  Zoya worked hard for her mother’s affection. She was always first in her lessons, always made sure to eat only half of her supper and give Sabina the rest. She was silent when her mother complained of headaches, and she stole peaches for Sabina from the duke’s orchards.

  “You could be whipped for that,” her mother said disapprovingly. But she ate the peaches one after another, sighing contentedly, until her stomach turned and she vomited them all beside the woodpile.

  Everything changed when Zoya caught the eye of Valentin Grankin, a wealthy carriage maker from Stelt. He was the richest man for a hundred miles, a widower twice over, and sixty-three years old.

  Zoya was nine. She did not want to be a bride, but she did not want to displease her mother, who petted her and cooed at her as she had never done before. For the first time, Sabina seemed happy. She sang in the kitchen and cooked elaborate meals with the gifts of meat and vegetables that Valentin Grankin sent.

  The night before the wedding, Sabina made orange cakes and laid out the elaborate pearl kokoshnik and little gold lace wedding gown Zoya’s bridegroom had provided. Zoya hadn’t meant to cry, but she hadn’t been able to stop.

  Aunt Liliyana had come all the way from Novokribirsk for the ceremony—or so Zoya had thought until she heard her aunt pleading with Sabina to reconsider.

  Liliyana was younger than Sabina and rarely spoken of. She had left home with scant fanfare and braved the deadly journey across the Shadow Fold to make a life for herself in the hardscrabble town of Novokribirsk. It was a good place for a woman alone, where cheap property could be had and employers were so desperate for workers they gladly offered positions to women that would otherwise be reserved for men.

  “He won’t hurt her, Liliyana,” Sabina said sharply as Zoya sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet brushing the wooden slats of the floor, the perfect circle of her untouched orange cake uneaten on the plate before her. “He said he would wait for her to bleed.”

  “Am I to applaud him?” Liliyana had demanded. “How will you protect her if he changes his mind? You are selling your own child.”

  “We are all bought and sold. At least Zoya will fetch a price that will give her an easy life.”

  “Soon she will be old enough to be a soldier—”

  “And then what? We’ll live off her meager pay? She’ll serve until she’s killed or injured so that she can go on to live alone and poor like you?”

  “I do well enough.”

  “Do you think I don’t see your shoes tied together with string?”

  “Better to be a woman alone than a woman beholden to some old man who can’t manage a wife his own age. And it was my choice to make. In a few years Zoya will be old enough to make her own decisions.”

  “In a few years Valentin Grankin will have found some other pretty girl to occupy his interests.”

  “Good!” retorted Liliyana.

  “Get out of my house,” Sabina had seethed. “I don’t want to see you anywhere near the church tomorrow. Go back to your lonely rooms and your empty tea tins and leave my daughter alone.”

  Liliyana had gone, and Zoya had run to her room and buried her face in her blankets, trying not to think of the words her mother had said or the images they’d conjured, praying with all the fervor in her heart that Liliyana would come back, that the Saints would save her, even as she soaked her pillow with tears.

  The next morning Sabina had muttered angrily about Zoya’s blotchy face as she dressed her in the little gold gown and the attendants came to walk the bride to church.

  But Aunt Liliyana was waiting at the altar beside a flummoxed priest. She refused to budge.

  “Someone do something about this madwoman!” Sabina had screamed. “She is no sister of mine!”

  Valentin Grankin’s men had seized Liliyana, dragging her down the aisle. “Lecher!” Liliyana had shouted at Grankin. “Procurer!” she yelled at Sabina. Then she’d turned her damning eyes on the gathered townspeople. “You are all witness to this! She is a child!”

  “Be silent,” snarled Valentin Grankin, and when Liliyana would not, he took up his heavy walking stick and cracked it against her skull.

  Liliyana spat in his face.

  He hit her again. This time her eyes rolled back in her head.

  “Stop it!” cried Zoya, struggling in her mother’s arms. “Stop!”

  “Criminal,” gasped Liliyana. “Filth.”

  Grankin lifted his stick again. Zoya understood then that her aunt was going to be murdered before the church altar and no one was going to prevent it. Because Valentin Grankin was a rich, respected man. Because Liliyana Garin was no one at all.

  Zoya screamed, the sound tearing from her, an animal cry. A wild gust of wind slammed into Valentin Grankin, knocking him to the ground. His walking stick went clattering. Zoya fisted her hands, her fear and rage pouring from her in a flood. A churning wall of wind erupted around her and exploded into the eaves of the church, blowing the roof from its moorings with an earsplitting crack. Thunder rumbled through a cloudless sky.

  The wedding guests bellowed their terror. Zoya’s mother gazed at her daughter with frightened eyes, clutching the pew behind her as if she might collapse without its support.

  Liliyana, one hand pressed to her bleeding head, cried, “You cannot sell her off now! She’s Grisha. It’s against the law. She is the property of the king and will go to school to train.”

  But no one was looking at Liliyana. They were all staring at Zoya.

  Zoya ran to her aunt. She wasn’t sure what she’d done or what it meant, only that she wanted to be as far away from this church and these people and the hateful man on the floor as she could get.

  “You leave us alone!” she shouted at no one, at everyone. “You let us go!”

  Valentin Grankin whimpered as Zoya and Liliyana hurried past him down the aisle. Zoya looked down at him and hissed.

  * * *

  It was Liliyana who took Zoya, still dressed in her wedding finery, to Os Alta. They had no money for inns, so they slept in ditches and tucked into copses, shivering in the cold. “Imagine we are on a ship,” Liliyana would say, “and the waves are rocking us to sleep. Can you hear the masts creaking? We can use the stars to navigate.”

  “Where are we sailing to?” Zoya had asked, sure she could hear something rustling in the woods.

  “To an island covered in flowers, where the water in the streams tastes sweet as honey. Follow those two stars and steer us into port.”

  Every night, they traveled somewhere new: a coastline where silver seals barked on the shores, a jeweled grotto where they were greeted by the green-gilled lord of the deep—until at last they arrived at the capital and made the long walk to the palace gates.

  They were filthy by then, their hair tangled, Zoya’s golden wedding dress torn and covered in dust. Liliyana had ignored the guards’ sneers as she made her requests, and she’d kept her back straight as she stood with Zoya outside the gates. They’d waited, and waited, and waited some more, shivering in the cold, until at last a young man in a purple kefta and an older woman dressed in red had come down to the gates.

  “What village are you from?” the woman had asked.

  “Pachina,” Liliyana replied.

  The strangers murmured to each other for a moment, about tests and when the last Examiners had traveled through those parts. Then the woman had pushed up Zoya’s sleeve and laid her palm on the bare skin of her arm. Zoya had felt a surge of power race through her. Wind rattled the palace gates and whipped through the trees.

  “Ah,” the woman had said on a long breath. “What gift has arrived at our doorstep looking so bedraggled? Come, we’ll get you fed and warmed up.”

  Zoya had grabbed Liliyana’s hand, ready to begin their new adventure together, but her aunt had knelt and said gently, “I can go no further with you, little Zoya.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need to go home to tend to my chickens. You don’t want them to get cold,
do you? Besides,” she said, smoothing the hair away from Zoya’s face, “this is where you belong. Here they will see the jewel you are inside, not just your pretty eyes.”

  “For your troubles,” the young man said, and dropped a coin into Liliyana’s palm.

  “Will you be all right?” Zoya asked her.

  “I will be fine. I will be better than fine knowing you are safe. Go now, I can hear the chickens clucking. They’re very cross with me.” Liliyana kissed both of Zoya’s cheeks. “Do not look back, Zoya. Do not look back at me or your mother or Pachina. Your future is waiting.”

  But Zoya looked back anyway, hoping for one last glimpse of her aunt waving through those towering gates. The trees had crowded the path. If Liliyana was still there, Zoya could not see her.

  That very day, her training had begun. She’d been given a room at the Little Palace, started classes in language and reading, started to learn Shu, studied with the miserable wretch of a woman known only as Baghra in the hut by the lake. She’d written every week to her aunt and every week received a long, newsy letter back with drawings of chickens in the corners and tales of the interesting traders who came through Novokribirsk.

  By law, the parents of Grisha students were paid a stipend, a rich fee to keep them in comfort. When Zoya learned this, she petitioned the bursar to send the money to her aunt in Novokribirsk instead.

  “Liliyana Garin is my guardian,” she’d told him.

  “Are your parents dead, then?”

  Zoya had cast him a long look and said, “Not yet.”

  Even at ten she’d had such cold command in her eyes that he’d simply put his pen to paper and said, “I will need an address and her full name.”

  It would be six years before Zoya made her first crossing of the Shadow Fold, as a junior Squaller in the Second Army. The Grisha around her had been trembling, some even weeping as they’d entered the darkness, but Zoya had shown no fear, not even in the dark where no one would see her shake. When they’d arrived at Novokribirsk, she’d stepped down from the skiff, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and said, “I’m going to go find a hot bath and a proper meal.”

  It was only once she’d cleared the docks and left her companions behind that she’d broken into a run, her heart lifting, carrying her on light feet over the cobblestones to Liliyana’s small corner shop.

  She’d burst through the door, alarming Liliyana’s one customer, and Liliyana had emerged from the back room, wiping her hands on her apron and saying, “What is causing such fuss—?”

  When she saw Zoya, she’d pressed her hands to her heart as if it might leap from her chest. “My girl,” she said. “My brilliant girl.” And then Zoya was hugging her aunt tight.

  They’d closed up the shop, and Liliyana had cooked them dinner and introduced Zoya to the child she’d taken in whose parents hadn’t made it back from their last crossing—a scrawny snub-nosed girl named Lada, who demanded Zoya help her draw the Little Palace in extensive detail. They’d shelled hazelnuts by the fire and discussed the personalities of the chickens and all the gossip of the neighborhood. Zoya had told her aunt about her teachers, her friends, her chambers. She’d given Liliyana gifts of calfskin boots, fur-lined gloves, and an expensive gilded mirror.

  “What will I do with this? Look at my old face?” said Liliyana. “Send it to your mother as a peace offering.”

  “It’s a gift for you,” Zoya replied. “So you can look into it each morning and see the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”

  * * *

  When the Darkling had used Alina to gain control of the Fold and expand it, he’d destroyed Novokribirsk to show his enemies his power. The darkness had consumed the city, turning its buildings to dust and its people to prey for the unnatural monsters that roamed its depths.

  In the wake of the disaster, all crossings had ceased, and it had taken weeks for news of the casualties to reach Kribirsk. The Second Army was in chaos, the Sun Summoner had disappeared or been killed, and the Darkling was said to have emerged somewhere in West Ravka. But Zoya did not care. She could only think of Liliyana. She’ll be sitting in her little shop with Lada and the chickens, she told herself. All will be well. Zoya waited and prayed to every Saint, returning to the Kribirsk drydocks day after day, begging for news. And finally, when no one would help her, she’d commandeered a small skiff on her own and entered the Fold with no one to protect her.

  She knew that if the volcra found her, she would die. She had no light or fire with which to fight them. She had no weapons but her power. But she’d taken the tiny craft and entered the dark alone, in silence. She had traveled long miles to the broken remnants of Novokribirsk. Half the town was gone, swallowed by the darkness that reached all the way to the fountain in the main square.

  Zoya had run to her aunt’s shop and found no one there. The door was unlocked. The chickens squawked in the yard. A cup of bergamot tea, Liliyana’s favorite, sat on the counter, long since gone cold.

  The rest of the town was quiet. A dog barked somewhere, a child cried. She could find no word of Liliyana or her ward until at last she spotted the same customer she’d seen that long ago day in her aunt’s shop.

  “Liliyana Garin? Have you seen her? Is she alive?”

  The old customer’s face paled. “I … She tried to help me when the darkness came. She pushed me out of the way so that I could run. If not for her—”

  Zoya had released a sob, not wanting to hear any more. Brave Liliyana. Of course she had run toward the docks when the screaming began, ready to help. Why couldn’t you be a coward this one time? Zoya could not help imagining the dark stain of the Fold bleeding over the town, the monsters descending from the air with their teeth and claws, shrieking as they tore her aunt apart. All her kindness had meant nothing, her generosity, her loving heart. She’d been nothing but meat to them. She’d meant even less to the Darkling, the man who had unleashed his horrors just to make a point, the man she had as good as worshipped.

  “She should have let you die,” Zoya spat at the old customer, and turned her back on him. She found a quiet street, curled up against a low stone wall, and wept as she had not done since she was a child.

  “Smile, beautiful girl,” said a stranger passing. “We are still alive! There is still hope!”

  She snatched the air from his lungs and drove him to his knees. “Smile,” she commanded as his eyes watered and his face turned red. “Smile for me. Tell me again about hope.”

  Zoya left him on the ground, gasping.

  She’d made the crossing once more, silent and unnoticed in her craft, back to Kribirsk and the remnants of the Grisha camp. There she’d learned that the Darkling had raised his banner and called his loyal Grisha to him. Members of the Second Army were deserting, flocking to the Darkling’s side or returning to Os Alta to try to mount a campaign against him.

  Zoya had stolen a horse and ridden through the night to the capital. She would find the Darkling. She would destroy him. She would take away his dream of ruling Ravka even if she had to lead the Second Army herself.

  Zoya never told Alina the details of why she had chosen to fight beside her, why she’d turned against the man she’d once revered. It didn’t matter. She’d stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sun Saint. They’d fought and they’d won. They’d watched the Darkling burn.

  “And still the wound bleeds,” said the dragon. “You will never be truly strong until it closes.”

  “I don’t want it to heal,” Zoya said angrily, her cheeks wet with tears. Below, she saw the version of Novokribirsk that existed in this twilight world, a black scar across the sands. “I need it.”

  The wound was a reminder of her stupidity, of how readily she’d been willing to put her faith in the Darkling’s promise of strength and safety, of how easily she’d given up her power to him—and no one had needed to force her down the aisle to make her do it. She’d done it gladly. You and I are going to change the world, he’d told her. And she’d been fool enough
to believe him.

  “Zoya of the lost city. Zoya of the broken heart. You could be so much more.”

  “Why didn’t you come?” she sobbed, surprised at the fresh tears that rose in her. She’d believed them long since shed. “Why didn’t you save her? All of them?”

  “We didn’t know what he intended.”

  “You should have tried!”

  She would always be that girl weeping into her pillow, whispering prayers no one would answer. She would always be that child dressed in gold being led like an animal to slaughter. It was power that had saved her that day in the church, and that was what she had learned to rely on, to cultivate. But it had not been enough to save Liliyana. After the war, she’d gone in search of Lada, hoping the child might have survived. She found no trace. Zoya would never know what had become of that bright-eyed, pug-faced girl.

  “Can you forgive us?” Juris asked. “For being foolish? For being frail? For being fallible despite our great powers? Can you forgive yourself?”

  For loving the Darkling. For following him. For failing to save Liliyana. For failing to protect the Second Army. The list of her crimes was too long.

  Zoya, the dragon rumbled. It was less a spoken word than a thought that entered her head, a sense of eternity. Open the door. Connect your past to your future.

  Zoya rested her head on the dragon’s neck and felt strength flow through her. She heard her heart beating in time with his, slow and relentless, and beneath it, a deeper sound, lower, one that touched everything, the sound of the universe, the making at the heart of the world. She wished she could be strong enough for this, but whatever Juris wanted from her, she could not find her way to it.