Beyond the vast stretch of road, the prison wagon loomed, its doors open like the mouth of a hungry beast. The broker leaned into its shadow as he deposited a small, limp form into the wagon. May’s head lolled once, and then disappeared behind the wagon’s blackstone walls.
The other Whitecloak locked the doors.
Desperation as she’d never felt before twined around Ana, squeezing the air from her throat and wringing tears from her eyes. “May!” she bellowed, her voice cracking. “MAY!”
At her scream, someone looked back—but it wasn’t May.
The broker with the sun-bleached hair turned to her. His pale eyes locked with hers. They narrowed for a moment, and then he turned and was gone.
Ana’s hand closed around something hard—a piece of cobblestone, displaced by May earlier.
Picturing the broker’s hateful blue eyes, Ana smashed the stone into the yaeger’s face.
He let out a low groan, his grip on her legs slackening. His hold on her Affinity wavered again.
Ana was on her feet even before the yaeger rolled over, clutching his dripping nose. Dimly, she heard him shouting something at his squad, saw looks of panic flit across the Whitecloaks’ faces as they mounted their horses.
She threw her Affinity out and ran, fighting the yaeger’s block, her legs pumping desperately as she tried to close the gap between her and that black wagon.
The remaining Whitecloak spurred his horse, and the wagon jolted into movement, picking up speed. Only the kapitan circled toward them, bow and arrow out and cloak billowing behind him. “Kaïs!” he shouted.
The yaeger’s answering call was cut short as Ana hurled her Affinity against his power. For a moment, his wall splintered; she sensed a glimmer of the bonds in the kapitan’s body and grasped them—
The kapitan’s eyes widened and his horse careened sharply to one side as his body seized beneath her control. “What in the Deities—” His arrow tumbled from his grasp, and a glass vial shattered against the ground. Even from several dozen paces away, Ana could make out the green liquid oozing between the cracks of the road.
“Kapitan!” Behind her, the yaeger let out a choked cry. “You must retreat! She’s dangerous!”
The kapitan hesitated, his eyes darting between Ana and his fallen soldier. Ana seized the opportunity. “Come get me, you sick bastard!” she shouted. Make him angry. Goad him. Anything to stop that blackstone wagon from leaving this square.
Yet as Ana flung her Affinity at the kapitan again, he seemed to arrive at a decision. With a last glance back, he turned his horse and galloped after his squad.
“No!” Ana choked. But the wagon and its flanking riders sped off through the stalls, growing smaller and smaller.
Hopelessness tightened around her throat.
She had no idea how long she ran, chasing the wagon even after it disappeared between the red-bricked dachas of Kyrov. It was only when she tripped over a loose cobblestone and fell to the ground, splitting the fabric of her gloves and cutting her palms, that she realized she was crying. And a different voice filled her head.
Don’t go where I can’t follow, May had asked of her.
She’d let happen what she’d sworn she’d never let happen to May. May had saved her in the moment she’d most desperately needed saving. And she had failed May.
And…it was her fault. Ana bit into her hand to stop herself from screaming, her tears mingling with blood and dust. In another life where she might have been born differently, normally, she would still be the Kolst Pryntsessa Anastacya Mikhailov, second heir to the throne of Cyrilia. And in that life, a kinder life, the laws would be just and the people in power would be good and the good people would win.
She pounded the cobblestones once, crimson smearing on the dusty ground. She could sense, through her Affinity, people milling around her and slowing down to look, but none stopped to help.
This was not that world, Ana thought. This world was neither just nor kind nor good, and you chose to keep fighting or to surrender.
Ana climbed to her feet, dusting off her tattered cloak as she turned to face the Vyntr’makt. Her Affinity flared with each step, the world thrumming with blood as she ran.
She found the yaeger where she’d left him. A small crowd had gathered, and several people knelt at his side with handkerchiefs and strips of gauze. How eager they were to help the monster draped in a cloak of white.
Ana focused her Affinity and flung several onlookers back, her hands raised for dramatic effect. “Leave,” she snarled, her voice cutting through the shrieks of the crowd. “Leave, or I’ll kill you all.”
She turned to face the yaeger. Blood ran in rivulets from where she’d smashed the rock into his head, streaming down his cheeks. He glanced up at her from a bruising eye and tensed.
He was Nandjian, Ana realized with dull surprise, taking in his olive skin and dark hair. She thought of the ambassadors who had graced the Palace’s Grand Throneroom during court sessions with Papa.
Had he traversed into Cyrilia of his own volition?
She felt his power descending over hers, but instead of the iron hold from before, it was softer. Weaker.
She shrugged him off easily and seized his blood, pulling him into a sitting position. He coughed, and crimson trickled from his lips. “That broker. Where is he taking her?”
The yaeger only looked at her, his mouth tightening.
Ana snapped his head back, tilting it so he could just barely breathe. For some reason, Ramson Quicktongue’s face flashed before her. He wouldn’t blindly threaten—he would find his opponent’s weak point, find some kind of leverage…and push.
She knew next to nothing about this bastard, yet it was irreconcilable to her that he wore the Cyrilian tiger’s badge of honor on his chest…and that he had let his comrade shoot an arrow at a ten-year-old. Ana wanted to rip the insignia from his armor.
“I won’t ask again,” she said.
His next words surprised her. “You’re the Blood Witch of Salskoff,” he rasped.
Ana’s breath caught. In the legend, the Blood Witch had shown up in Salskoff’s Winter Market on Fyrva’snezh and murdered dozens of innocent people. Vaporized them, so that there was nothing left of them afterward but blood running red rivers on the cobblestones, staining the snow. She had red eyes that gleamed with her blood magic, and teeth sharper than a tiger’s. A deimhov from hell; a monster among humans.
Nobody had connected the Blood Witch to the sick princess who had been locked away in the Salskoff Palace since her childhood.
Ana tightened her grip on the yaeger’s blood. “Then you know what I can do,” she said quietly.
“I know you killed eight innocent people.”
It was an accident. I was seven years old. The words almost—almost—left her lips. Instead, she said, “And I’ll do it again, unless you give me what I want.”
He hesitated.
Ana tilted her head to the bloodred glow of the setting sun, so that the crimson of her eyes caught the light. “Look at where we are. Look at all of these people around you—mothers, fathers, and children. They could all be dead within seconds, and it’ll be because of you. You call yourself a soldier? Then protect your civilians.” She tightened her grip on his blood, just to prove her point. “Tell me where he’s taking the child.”
A muscle twitched in the yaeger’s jaw, and his eyes seemed to burn into hers for an eternity. Then he coughed once, and the fire went out. “Novo Mynsk,” he said quietly.
“Where in Novo Mynsk?” she pressed. When he was silent, she lifted her chin to scrutinize the few vendors and spectators who still lingered behind their stalls. “Shall I prove the veracity of my promise? Whom shall I pick first? A child? Or her mother? And how shall I torture them so that their screams—”
“The Playpen. He’s one of the Lilies. He
’ll employ her there as a performer.”
She let go of him at once, turning away so he wouldn’t see her shaking. It felt like someone else had been speaking through her lips, murmuring those cruel, barbaric words. As if Sadov’s influence remained and she’d spoken his twisted thoughts.
As she drew her hood over her head, she wondered something darker—whether it was that Sadov’s voice had become her own.
“Don’t hurt them,” the yaeger said. “Please.”
The plea was soft, and she wished she hadn’t heard it. Ana looked back. The yaeger was still sitting in the same spot, but something in his expression had shifted. He was begging her. And he was afraid.
Ana thought of the helplessness of the grain Affinite, of the sadness she’d seen in May’s eyes when she’d first met her. And she saw an echo of that in this soldier’s eyes.
Her anger dissipated like steam in the cold. “Why do you do this?” she asked instead. “You’re one of them.” A pause. “One of us.”
“Do you think I have a choice?” His voice was raw. “In this empire, if I am not the hunter, then I become the hunted.”
She would never forget the way he gazed up at her, yaeger and Affinite in one. Trapped in a corrupt system.
Your choices, Luka’s voice whispered, but something in her brother’s words was broken now, changed with the year she had spent away from the Palace. Choices were for those with privilege and power. When you had none, all you could do was survive.
She left before he could see how much her encounter with him had shaken her. She’d threatened to kill innocent people. She’d tortured a man.
I did it to save May, she told herself.
But perhaps all monsters were heroes in their own eyes.
News of the fight in the Vyntr’makt had spread through Kyrov like wildfire. Ana hurried along the streets that had only moments earlier been celebrating the arrival of winter. Now the bricks of the dachas glowed bloodred in the setting sun, and the shuttered storefronts gaped at her like empty eyes. She caught snatches of hushed conversation from the townspeople rushing home from a day’s work.
Ana tugged her hood down lower and followed the steady stream of people away from the Vyntr’makt. Exhaustion was creeping over her—the bone-deep weariness that came from using her Affinity—and she needed to leave, now, before that squad of Whitecloaks brought back reinforcements.
She’d—miraculously—defeated one Whitecloak, but she shuddered at the thought of having to fight an entire squad. Her Affinity was a muscle, to be exercised daily, never to be pushed to the extreme for fear that she would lose control. And over the past years, Ana had exercised it too little, and recently, she’d stretched it too thin.
Inside a glass storefront, lacquered phoenixes and icehawks spun, catching the dusk light. She and May had been in that store barely half an hour ago, whispering about Whitecloaks as though they were a distant threat. She whipped her head away as she turned a corner, the ache of tears burning deep into her heart.
She was on a smaller, emptier street. Gone were the beautiful residential dachas, the decorated storefronts and polished streetlamps. Stone buildings with wooden roofs crowded close together, dilapidated and crumbling. And, at the end of the street, was a building with red-shingled roofs. A wooden sign announced in weathered gold letters: The Gray Bear’s Keep.
Something about the inn struck her as off—perhaps it was the lack of music or conversation as she drew near, or the fact that, despite its shabby appearance, its doors were made of polished oak.
Her steps slowed of their own accord, and she came to a stop several buildings away. She’d just started to convince herself that she was being paranoid when the oak doors swung open and two men exited.
Ana swung herself into the shadow of a nearby doorway and peered out. There was something strange about these men, too. One, dressed in a black riding cloak and leather boots, moved with unnatural, predatory grace. Ana caught the glint of not one but two daggers on his belt as he retrieved a bulging pouch from his cloak. A mercenary.
The other, tall and lumbering as a bear, wore a grimy bartender’s apron. He glanced around furtively before reaching for the pouch, the greed on his face unmistakable even from this distance.
The mercenary tossed the bag at the bartender. Coins clinked as the bartender snatched it from the air. He missed—or ignored—the derisive look the mercenary shot him as he pulled open the strings to examine the bag’s contents.
The mercenary tilted his head to the empty street corner. Waiting.
A shiver passed through Ana. Exhausted as she was, she kept her Affinity flared.
As though on cue, a third man appeared around the corner, leading two horses. This man was dressed like the first: black cloak, black boots, and black hood obscuring his face. He turned the horses around, and as the mercenaries mounted, Ana’s stomach dropped.
She’d thought the second horse carried a large sack—but she realized now that it was actually a person. A horrible, sinking feeling gripped her as the horses shifted and the captive’s face came into plain view. Tawny hair, chiseled jaw, and broken nose. Ramson Quicktongue was these mercenaries’ latest haul.
Panic twisted her stomach. She thought of lunging out with her Affinity right there, right now. But her bones creaked in protest, and she clutched the wall to steady herself. There was no chance she could beat three people in her current state. Besides, there could be more of them.
Yet she couldn’t afford to lose Ramson Quicktongue, either.
She couldn’t beat them by brute force. She’d have to play it smart. Attack from behind.
Deities, she thought. One night with Quicktongue and she was already thinking like him. The Ana of a year ago would have valued honor and faced her enemies head-on. But then, she supposed, in a world of con men, crime lords, and cutthroats, there was no honor and there were no rules to the game. You only played to win.
Ana watched the two mercenaries round the corner and held her breath, counting to ten. When she stepped out onto the street, only the bartender remained, cradling his pouch of coins.
He turned when she was several paces behind him, but by then it was too late. Ana’s hand went up and he froze, pain and shock flashing across his face as he inevitably felt her control on his blood. Ana gave a tug, just for emphasis, and the pouch of gold tumbled from his hands. Goldleaves spilled onto the ground.
“You move, and I’ll kill you before you can raise a pinky,” Ana said. The bartender looked at her with renewed fear. “Now I’m going to let you go, because I need you to talk.”
A fresh wave of fatigue washed over her when she dropped her hold on him. She needed to conserve what little strength she had left.
The bartender stood statue-still.
Ana tilted her head. “Tell me. Who were those men?”
His eyes slid to the streets around them, as though fearing the mercenaries would emerge from the shadows. Fear was good, though. Fear was a weapon, as Sadov had taught her so very well.
“Bounty hunters,” the bartender said, his words slurring with a lowborn Cyrilian accent.
“And where are they taking him?”
“Kerlan,” the bartender whispered, growing paler still. The name seemed to cast a shadow over him, cinching fear tight around his neck.
“Who?”
“Kerlan. Lord Kerlan.”
“Who is that? And where is he?”
“The Head of the Order, in Novo Mynsk.”
She’d meant to ask him what Order he spoke of, but her heart caught at the words Novo Mynsk. May was headed there.
All other thoughts scattered. Her direction was clear. “I need a horse,” Ana said, taking a wager.
The bartender nodded frantically. “The stables. Choose whichever you’d like.”
She rewarded him with a flat smile like the
one she’d so often seen on Sadov’s face. “One more thing. I’ll be taking this.” She scooped up the pouch of goldleaves that had been abandoned on the dirt road. She didn’t feel bad for that, Ana realized, as she turned on her heels and strode toward the stables in the back. After all, the bounty hunters had paid that gold for Quicktongue, and since Quicktongue was her prisoner, it stood to reason that she should take the gold.
“Stay there until you can’t hear my horse anymore,” she called over her shoulder. “You move, and I’ll bleed you dry.”
The stables were surprisingly well kept. Ana selected a valkryf with a coat the color of milk, already saddled, as though the owner had expected a short stop. When she rode out of the stables at a brisk trot, the bartender was still standing where she’d left him. She kept her Affinity honed on him until she was far enough away that the glow of his blood had faded to a flicker, and then to nothing.
* * *
—
The sun had almost set, its light bleeding out over the expanse of the Syvern Taiga like a last breath. Storm clouds gathered over the horizon, and the air thickened with the promise of rain.
Ana stretched her Affinity out, sweeping the vicinity for the bounty hunters’ trail. The Gray Bear’s Keep was close enough to the edge of town that she didn’t have to wade through a thick crowd of bodies before she closed in on the bounty hunters. There was no mistaking it; she sensed, blurred and distant, three figures: two with blood fast-flowing, and one sluggish, several hundred paces ahead of her.
As she steered her horse around the last dacha, she caught sight of two horsemen in the distance, speeding into the shadows of the Syvern Taiga. She suddenly wished she had some sort of weapon on her. She’d never learned to spar—or to even handle a sword—and coming into a fight with a weakened Affinity and empty hands made her feel extremely vulnerable.
But she didn’t have a choice. May was gone, her alchemist still missing, and her only hope lay unconscious on the back of one of those mercenaries’ horses. Ana had no weapon and no plan, but she also had nothing more to lose.
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