Beneath the flickering torchlight, Tetsyev seemed to tremble as he answered. “No.”
Anger stirred in Ana, white-hot. She unlaced the ribbons of her mask and slid it off her face. “Do I look familiar now, mesyr Tetsyev?”
Tetsyev’s eyes widened as they swept across her face, taking in her eyes, her nose, the shape of her mouth. “Kolst Pryntsessa Anastacya,” he whispered.
“I lost that title.” It was difficult to keep the snarl out of her voice. “In fact, I’ve lost everything. And you’re the reason for it all.” Her voice shook, and the wall she had built around that black well of grief threatened to crumble.
Ask him about Luka. Tell him you’re taking him back to Salskoff. And get out.
But different words, words that she had wanted to ask for so long, that she had dreamt of over and over again, clawed at her chest. Ana turned to her father’s murderer, her breathing ragged. “Why did you do it?”
Tetsyev’s face was twisted away from the torchlight. “I never meant to.”
The confession hit her like a physical blow. She turned away from him, her chest heaving. “You never meant to,” Ana grated out. “So you killed my father by accident? As an afterthought?”
“It was no accident,” Tetsyev whispered. “But I never meant to, either. I was manipulated. She took control of my mind for years…I had no idea what I was doing—”
A word snagged her attention. “ ‘She’?” Ana repeated. “What are you talking about?”
Tetsyev passed a trembling hand over his face. “Deities, you don’t even know.”
Her heart stuttered. “Know what?”
“Kolst Contessya Morganya planned it.”
For a moment, Ana only stared at him, the meaning of his words sinking into her.
Ana barked a humorless laugh. “You killed my father, and now you’re trying to blame my aunt for it? You are truly…” Words failed her, and she slashed a hand through the air. “Sick.”
“You’re right. It isn’t fair of me to blame it all on Morganya,” Tetsyev whispered. “I was in it with her, at first, before it all went wrong.”
“You’re mad,” Ana snarled.
But mad wasn’t the word she was looking for, she realized, as the flickering orange flames carved out Tetsyev’s gaunt cheekbones and faraway eyes. He didn’t look mad, he looked haunted.
“Morganya and I met each other many years ago,” he began softly, and Ana found herself pulled along in the flow of his words, rooted in horror and helplessness and the conviction that, against all her greater instincts, he spoke the truth. “You must know by now, Kolst Pryntsessa, that life in the Empire isn’t easy for an Affinite. I had lost both my Affinite parents, and Morganya had just come out of months of captivity and abuse at the hands of non-Affinites. We were damaged, broken, but not enough that we couldn’t put together the pieces and dream. We envisioned a great future, a better one, where Affinites could walk freely and would no longer be reviled. But neither of us was strong enough yet to begin to create that future. Together, we practiced our Affinities: mine, in the merging and morphing of elements, and hers, in the manipulation of flesh and mind.”
Tetsyev’s voice sounded distant to Ana, as though she were listening to a strange, surreal story. Mamika. He spoke of her mamika—Morganya, with soft eyes the color of warm tea, her long dark braid, her devotion to the Deities.
He spoke of her, her Affinity, and her plan…to murder Ana’s father.
“One incident changed Morganya’s life forever—in many ways,” Tetsyev said, and Ana knew, with a chilling premonition, the incident he spoke of. It was the day Mama and Papa had been touring the Empire with the Imperial Patrols. They had discovered a girl, barely into womanhood, bruised and half-naked and crying, crawling out from the ruins of a dacha. “We planned it all. When the Empress took pity on Morganya and brought her to the Palace, we knew we had set in motion something great…and that we were going to change the world.”
The next sequence of events tumbled from Tetsyev’s lips, unfolding before Ana like a nightmare. “She grew close to the Empress. She was appointed the Countess of Cyrilia, first in line to the throne after the Imperial family. She hired me into the Palace. She hid her Affinity with daily doses of Deys’voshk. Years had passed, but Morganya was patient. Her goal was the throne.
“I had, by then, devised the perfect poison. It was slow-working; we had to ensure that it didn’t kill the Palace taste-testers and the poisoning couldn’t look suspicious. It was invisible, untraceable but for a bitter stench that we could mix into meals and pass off as medicine.
“Within one year, Kateryanna was dead, and we were one step closer to the throne.”
Ana’s knees were weak; she felt as though she might collapse. Images flitted through her mind—a white-cloaked alchemist, a beautiful young countess, a kind empress, a brokenhearted emperor: pieces of a story set in motion, careening toward an inevitable doom.
“But Morganya’s history had left a wound in her,” Tetsyev continued. “One that had festered and rotted into something twisted. I didn’t realize it until it was too late that her plan wasn’t to balance the scales. It was to tip them. Morganya wanted to overturn the world as it was, subjecting non-Affinites to our rule…or eliminating them.”
No. No, she wouldn’t accept this—she couldn’t accept it, this story of her gentle, pious mamika as a vengeful, calculating murderess…and a flesh Affinite capable of manipulating minds?
Ana shook off the strange spell of his story. The world flooded back into focus, the blood in Tetsyev’s body pulsing hot as she latched her Affinity to it and slammed him against the wall. “You lie,” she growled.
Tetsyev was breathing hard; the whites of his eyes flashed against the torchlight. “I have been a prisoner in the lies of my own making,” he rasped. “This is the first time in many years that I have told the truth.”
“Liar!” she screamed as she pressed him against the wall, her Affinity turning cruel in her wrath, cutting off his circulation. “I will kill you.”
Tetsyev scrabbled at the wall behind him. “P-please, Kolst Pryntsessa,” he half-wheezed, half-sobbed. “If I am lying—if I am the only culprit—then who is poisoning your brother at the Palace?”
Luka.
At the mention of her brother, Ana’s fury settled into cold dread in her chest.
“I tell the truth, Kolst Pryntsessa,” Tetsyev whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek. “And you must decide what you do with this truth.”
Ana flung him to the ground. She was shaking as she turned, tears blurring her world out of focus. Tetsyev’s story continued, washing over her like the dull roaring of a river.
“I left Morganya after Kateryanna died.” Tetsyev’s voice trembled, and Ana closed her eyes. She found herself matching his story to the fragments of reality that she had known. Together they wove a broken tapestry, and somewhere within that was the truth. “I remained in hiding for years—but she found me again.
“This time, she took my mind, too.”
Anything you want in this world, you have to take it for yourself, Morganya had said.
“She’d grown even stronger in the time we’d been apart. You and your brother had almost come of age, and time was running out for Morganya. She kept me imprisoned in my own mind for a year, making the poison for the Emperor this time. She came up with the plan to frame you on the night we were to administer the killing dose.”
Ana knew, too well, what came next. She’d relived it in her mind a thousand times over—the single night that had altered the course of her life forever.
“I was administering the final dose to the Emperor when you burst into the chambers and seized my blood.” Tetsyev’s voice shifted, as though he’d finally leveled his face to her. “With your Affinity, you broke the control that Morganya had over me. You didn’t know it, but
you saved me.”
The moonlight. The alchemist, outlined against the open windows. The sobbing, so faint it had sounded like the wind. The silver Deys’krug on his chest.
Ana turned to face him at last. In the maelstrom of her thoughts, her mind latched on to a single sentence. “What do you mean, I ‘broke the control’ Morganya had over you?”
Tetsyev raised his eyes to her. He sat on the ground, his white robes dirtied with grime, his frame hunched and broken. “Morganya is strong, but she is not invincible. She can control only one mind at a time. And her control can be broken. When you used your Affinity on me, it cut through Morganya’s Affinity. You broke her control over my mind; you saved me, and then you condemned me, for in the moments after the murder, I was fully myself.”
She watched his pitiful face, her anger settling into cold, logical fury. “And you ran.”
He lowered his head. “I am a coward, Kolst Pryntsessa. That is something I’m not afraid to admit.”
Ana’s mind swirled, cold clarity cutting through the chaos of her anger.
Tetsyev spoke of a decade-long conspiracy in the making, orchestrated by none other than Ana’s aunt. And she was one step away from succeeding.
Ana needed to go back, with Tetsyev. Reveal everything to the Imperial Court. Sentence Morganya. Save Luka. And then, with Yuri, they would begin to reverse the wheels of a great machine that had allowed this empire to thrive at the cost of the Affinites.
But first, she needed her brother to live.
“An antidote,” she said. “I need you to make an antidote to this poison.”
“It exists,” Tetsyev said, and Ana’s knees almost buckled with relief. “I made one in case the tasters became too sick. It’s kept in the apothecary’s wing of the Palace, with the poison itself.”
There was a cure.
Luka would live.
“You must listen to me, Kolst Pryntsessa,” Tetsyev whispered in the silence that had fallen. “You face more enemies than you know. Morganya has allied herself with Alaric Kerlan and the Order of the Lily. He made a deal with her—that he would end Affinite indenturement once she took the throne, and in return, she would send him to conquer Bregon.
“I’ve gained Kerlan’s trust,” Tetsyev continued. “I served him from afar for all these years. Nearly four moons ago, Kerlan sent his Deputy to assassinate your brother.”
Ana’s blood ran cold.
“I foiled that attempt; I alerted the Imperial Patrols. They arrested the man and threw him in prison—but I heard he is back. And I know he’s looking for me. He’s here, tonight.” Tetsyev gave a shaky little laugh. “Funny how the Deities like to play with fates, Kolst Pryntsessa. If you hadn’t found me tonight, I would have taken my own life. I cannot live this life of lies and deceit any longer, constantly looking over my shoulder and sleeping with a poison under my pillow.”
Ana heard his words as though he spoke from very far away. A roaring filled her ears, and suddenly she was back in the dacha in the Syvern Taiga, Ramson standing opposite her with a smile like a wolf.
What is it that you want?
Revenge. I plan to destroy my enemies one by one and take back my position and what was rightfully mine.
The scene changed, and she was in Shamaïra’s dacha, the room swirling with intoxicating warmth and heady fumes. She remembered flipping Ramson’s wrist, catching sight of the flower tattoo. It had been a lily of the valley.
The Order of the Lily.
And, just like that, it all came together. It felt as though she had been walking in a thick fog, searching for something she couldn’t quite put her finger on…and suddenly it had shown itself.
Ramson had been working for Kerlan all along. And Kerlan was working with Morganya.
Tears stung her eyes. She thought of Ramson, the way he had looked at her beneath the falling snow, his eyes bright like a boy’s.
It had been an act, every moment of it. Every piece of that man she’d seen had been a lie. And she’d fallen for it all.
But there was no time to pity herself.
Ana lifted her gaze to the alchemist. There was nothing left to do, no more pieces left to puzzle over. “I’m going back to Salskoff to stop Morganya,” she said, “and you’re going to come with me.”
Tetsyev wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’ll be executed for treason,” he whispered.
“I’ll grant you mercy if you cooperate.” It sickened her to say the words, when she’d waited an entire year to see this man die. But she was no longer just Ana, the frightened girl who’d stumbled into the Syvern Taiga and wanted nothing more than to have her home and her family back.
She was Anastacya Mikhailov, Crown Princess of Cyrilia, and her empire depended on her.
Tetsyev had crawled over to her, his tears tracing streaks down his cheeks. He clung to her skirts and kissed them. “Thank you, Kolst Pryntsessa,” he wept. “Kind, good, merciful—”
Ana tore her skirts from his hands. “I am none of those things,” she said. “I only grant you mercy because your life is worth nothing to me. But make a single mistake again, and I won’t hesitate to kill you.”
She turned from him in disgust and retrieved Ramson’s pocket watch. She wanted, more than anything, to hurl it across the room and see it shatter into pieces.
She checked the time. Forty-eight minutes past nine.
“We leave now,” she said, whirling around and snatching the torch from its sconce. Ramson had told her it took roughly five minutes to get to the end of the escape tunnel. “Follow me.”
She stretched her Affinity down the tunnel as they walked, sensing for the warm thrum of blood in bodies, feeling out any traps. There was a possibility that there was no carriage awaiting her at the end of the tunnel, that Ramson had tricked her and this was a trap. Still, it was the only way out.
But the corridors were empty. There was only the sound of her and Tetsyev’s breaths, their harried footsteps echoing against the stone walls. The ground grew rougher, the air wet and then dry again.
A door met her at the end of the tunnel. Moonlight filtered through its cracks. Ana snuffed out her torch and twisted the handle in the same combination as the one upstairs. It swung open.
She let out a breath of relief.
They were in the back of Kerlan’s gardens, a single path cutting between tall trees that obscured mostly everything else from view. A trellis covered the entrance, overgrown with ivy and small white flowers.
A carriage stood on the grassy lawn in the shadows of the trellis. Two valkryfs pawed the ground at her approach.
Ramson had told the truth.
She turned to Tetsyev. “Get in,” Ana began, but Tetsyev was no longer standing behind her.
Another man stood in his place, dressed in a black doublet. The moonlight cast a long shadow in his wake, reminding her of a different dungeon filled with the pungent smell of fear and Deys’voshk.
“Hello, Kolst Pryntsessa.” Vladimir Sadov smiled widely at her, pressing his long white fingers together. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
There was a soft whooshing sound. A sharp pain pierced her shoulder, and the world went black.
The darkness came and went, but the pain was endless.
Ramson tried to rein his consciousness back from the depths of sleep, but then someone shook him.
He groaned and cracked an eye open. He immediately regretted it as bright light pierced his vision and the world swayed around him.
The air held the faded stench of blood and sweat. He recognized this room, with the bleeding walls and countless chains and the cupboard with vials of unknown poisons. He was once again in the dungeons of Kerlan’s estate—only this time, he was the prisoner.
His shoulders ached. He strained forward and found the familiar feeling of cuffs chafing against his wrists. Rams
on sank back against the wall.
He had been here for hours, or perhaps longer—he couldn’t tell anymore. His interrogator, a hulking man in a black mask, was nowhere to be seen. Ramson’s eyes caught the pail of black water in the corner. A shudder ran involuntarily down his back as he remembered the suffocating feeling, the feeling of drowning.
“You’re awake.”
He would know that voice anywhere. Ramson swung his head to the source. “You.”
“Me,” Kerlan agreed pleasantly, as though he had just shown up on the doorstep of a neighbor. “I decided to take over, since my bruiser, too, needs sleep. That, and I only trust myself when it comes to these types of affairs.”
Ramson knew when Kerlan was trying to unsettle him. He turned his thoughts away.
Ana.
His chest tightened, and he forced himself to breathe steadily. She should be long gone by now, untraceable in the Syvern Taiga with her carriage and her alchemist.
Ramson had no idea where she was going, or if he would ever see her again. He’d consciously refrained from asking.
Kerlan was watching him with a smile. “Thinking about your girl, Ramson? Don’t worry. A friend of mine is seeing to it that she’s taken care of.”
Cold panic spread through his veins, and it was all that Ramson could do not to beg for an explanation. He forced his lips into a wicked snarl. “When are you going to do things yourself, Alaric, instead of sending your big musclemen—”
The blow came out of nowhere, a bolt of lightning to his head that sent him reeling. Ramson groaned and coughed, blood spattering the damp stone floor. “That felt personal, Alaric,” he wheezed.
“Did it? Well, I suppose the rest of your last few days will, too. Tell me, how do you wish to die, Ramson Quicktongue?” Kerlan paused. “Or should I say—Ramson Farrald?”
It was a name he hadn’t used in seven years, until tonight; a past he’d tried to bury by forging a new name and a new life for himself. Kerlan knew; and he wielded it now to inflict wounds that a blade never could.
Ransom growled, “You have no right to say that name, you son of a bitch.”
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