Web of Frost

by Lindsay Smith

  “I think you are ruthless,” Katza said at last. “Determined.” She smiled despite herself. “But you want the same things I do: for Russalka’s glory to carry on.”

  He pressed his thumb to the hollow of her cheek. “Yes.” His face was so close their foreheads grazed together; she felt the heat of his word lingering on her skin. “Boj’s power courses through you. Through us both. And together, we are unstoppable.”

  Unstoppable. The word sent a frisson of wanting through Katza.

  “It is true that I wish you to draw down this power for yourself. Because it belongs to you, tsarika. It always has. The church sealed it up long ago, made it impossible for you or anyone to claim it fully. Patriarch Anton threatened to bar you from it, didn’t he?”

  Katza swallowed and nodded.

  “This is what he meant. A dark, ancient ritual from the days before the saints. He can reinforce it to block us. But we can undo the partial seal they’ve already placed on it,” he murmured. “And once we seize it, no one can stop us.”

  Katza’s lips parted, hungry, as his breath gusted over her lips. She never wanted to stop.

  She pressed her lips to his.

  Ravin’s mouth was like velvet, and sweet with the sour-cherry taste of a powerful desire. He opened his lips to hers and a faint moan escaped him. It pulled a knot tight in Katza’s core. He’d ached for this, same as her.

  His fingers slid into her hair, grasping at her curls, tangling up in her. Katza deepened the kiss, a charge drawing them together. Closer. She needed more. She needed to be his, and for him to be hers. Unstoppable. She clenched a fist in the collar of his tunic, pulling him closer. He laughed softly to himself, and his teeth grazed her lower lip, tugging at it. Katza cried out as the knot cinched tighter, hotter still.

  “My blessed sun.” Ravin’s breath was a cleansing fire over her bared neck. He stamped a kiss against the corner of her jaw, then another along the lean line of her throat. Katza sucked in air, her knees shaking. “You burn so fiercely it scares me. And yet—”

  Katza clutched at his slender hip. “It scares me, too.”

  He gently drew her chin upward with his thumb. His face was flushed and his lips tinged pink—ripe and juicy. The dark hair that usually hung over his brow was mussed. “Don’t be afraid. Nothing can stop us now.”

  Nothing. Not Fahed, not the agitators, not the patriarch, not Hessaria, not anyone else. With an ache, she released him, and he reluctantly backed away.

  “Ravin . . .”

  He clutched a hand to his chest as if he held a butterfly trapped there. “My tsarika.” He smiled. It was an ocean, one she was all too willing to drown in. “It’s time for you to take your crown.”

  Someone knocked on the chapel door.

  Katza’s eyes shot toward Ravin’s. He nodded, quick, and cracked the door.

  “I must speak to the tsarika.” A voice Katza didn’t recognize. “I bring news of grave importance.”

  Katza tried to fluff her hair back into place in the mirror. “My coronation is about to begin,” she called. “Can it not wait?”

  The man poked his head inside. He was breathless, his face a deep scarlet with exertion. He wore the uniform of the Russalkan army, and clutched a messenger’s satchel to his chest. “I come from the Narrows. I think you’ll wish to hear this first.”

  Katarzyna took slow, measured steps down the central aisle of Saint Kirill’s Cathedral beneath its soaring golden domes and painted cherubs. The Russalkan anthem rang boisterous and proud around her. She kept her head high and her expression blank for the endless crowd of courtiers, advisers, generals and colonels, secretaries, ministers, and other honored guests. None of them spoke or applauded as she passed. Or if they did, she didn’t hear them.

  Her head was whirling; her chest burned with fear. The messenger’s grim warning played over and over in her head, marching to the heavy beat of the anthem. A small fleet of Hessarian ships had indeed slipped through the Narrows, bound for Petrovsk. But there were many more Hessarian ships lurking at the Narrows’s mouth, as if awaiting some command. What was the small fleet headed their way, then? Bait? A trick? An advance scout?

  Maybe she ought to wait to discuss it with her council and her war cabinet. Or maybe Boj would grant her some sign. Saint Zhukov, show me the strategy I need to unravel this mystery. Katza fixed the sign of the patron saint of war in her mind and continued her steady dirge toward the altar, where Patriarch Anton waited to crown her tsarika.

  The patriarch offered her a bitter smile when she approached and began the high chant. It was in the old tongue, but Katza knew the story: the church’s official version of how Saint Kirill united Russalka under the banner of Boj and the Wheel of Saints.

  Katza preferred the old tale, the one that had of late been loping through her mind. The story of Rus and Salka, the lovers in the snow, and the dark threats menacing their happy lands. Rus transformed into a wolf to guard the earth, and even though Salka was devastated to have to leave her lover behind, she cast herself into the sea. There she became a siren, charged with protecting her nation by water. They fought many bloody battles against hordes of demons and warmongerers, but Russalka survived because of their sacrifice.

  “We honor our past with white and blue slashed with red. But only Boj and the saints can guide us. We must follow their will to ensure Russalka’s victory.”

  Anton handed her the scepter then: a silver truncheon wrapped with a slithering, snaking wolf’s form. She clutched it in one hand, studying the onyx gems set into the wolf’s eyes and the dark way they gleamed. Then he handed her the silver sphere. It was decorated with all the symbols of the Saints’ Wheel, but inside, in delicate porcelain craft, she knew the figure of the siren lurked.

  “It is time,” Anton whispered.

  Katza swallowed and shifted the scepter to the crook of her elbow. With a trembling arm, she extended her free hand to Anton.

  The dagger was quick; one slash across her palm and then it was over. The sting didn’t come until she took the scepter in her hand again. But then it was time for her other palm. That stung more. She gripped the scepter and sphere in each hand, now slippery with her blood.

  Katza glanced up; Saint Lechka’s icon was staring down at her. She could almost imagine Lechka was smirking, daring Katza to call on her once more.

  “Blood spilled between sea and earth to bind you to Russalka,” Anton said. “By Boj’s grace, you shall serve Russalka until your death, Tsarika Katarzyna I.”

  He settled the fur-trimmed crown atop her head, laden with jewels, glittering with silverwork and topped with the symbol of the Saints’ Wheel. Katza swayed as she tried to stand again under its weight, momentarily dizzy with blood loss. Anton rushed forward to help her, but she waved him off. She could not be weak. Not now, and not ever.

  Once she straightened, the processional sounded again, and the assembled courtiers applauded. Her gaze went to Nadika in the front row, ceremonial saber swinging at her side as she clapped and flashed Katza a pure smile. Then she spied Ravin next to her, more restrained in his dark gray tunic and black peasant’s pants and boots. He, too, applauded, with a burning in his eyes. Katza pressed her lips together, and felt the ghost of his kiss.

  And then she staggered forward as the full force of a vision nearly sent her to her knees.

  She was alone in the woods. Dark, naked branches twisted all around her, like slender fingers grasping from the grave. Snow speckled Katza’s face as she stumbled in the drifts underfoot, and her footfalls sent up fresh sprays of white that wormed into her clothes. Her wrists, her legs, her neck—cold seeped into all of it, leaving her raw.

  “Hello?” Katza cried. Was this the clearing she so dreaded? Please, Boj, no—not on this, her coronation day. No more portents that she’d be Russalka’s death.

  But there was no clearing—only a rough trail through th
e trees. No footprints in the freshly fallen snow, but she saw the dip of a path beneath the virgin snow’s blanket. Katza looked behind her and saw only her own footsteps leading toward where she now stood. Not twenty feet behind her, the trail dissolved into darkness.

  Branches cracked in the distance. Birds startled and shot toward the sky. Katza wrapped her arms around herself—she wore no coat—and forced herself to trudge forward into the fresh drifts. Whatever was coming, she had to keep moving ahead.

  Saint Marya, Saint Sergei, Saint Lechka . . . Katza ran through the Saints’ Wheel, but didn’t know whom to call. She was lost, but the path was clear. She was being followed—Saint Gonyei?—but it could be friend or foe. Silence and the crunch of her own boots were her only answers. She kept pushing ahead in the forest, guided only by a darkening twilit sky.

  The path forked ahead.

  Katza laughed to herself and shook her head. Of course. Boj did always have a sense of humor. Katza peered down one trail, straining to see anything—lit cottages, perhaps, or the singing of churchgoers in the distance. But there was nothing. She stepped toward the other but it was similarly obscured. She rocked back on her heels, stymied. If they were the same, did it matter which she chose?

  A sharp metallic scent suddenly filled her nose—

  And the vision was gone. She stood in Saint Kirill’s, the organ ringing brassily around her, her heavy garments and accoutrements weighting her in place. She blinked through the haze of incense at the vague faces clapping for her. For the tsarika.

  She steeled herself and strode back down the aisle, blood trickling from her palms, ermine cape flaring behind her as if she might take flight.

  Nadika met her at the end of the aisle with Stolichkov and a few other assorted ministers in tow. “You’ve heard the messenger’s warning?” Katza asked them.

  Stolichkov nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  An attendant reached for the scepter and sphere, stained with all of the tsars’ blood, and Katza numbly handed them over. Sveta unclasped her cloak and the dense underskirt of her gown, then helped her into a thicker traveling coat.

  “We must return to the palace at once,” Katza said. “Tell all of the war cabinet to meet with me there.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.” Stolichkov snapped his heels together and bowed, then turned to alert the generals.

  Nadika exchanged hand signals with the contingent of palace guards she now commanded. “We may have a challenge exiting the cathedral,” Nadika warned her. “It’s as if the whole city has gathered to, uh, to witness their new tsarika.”

  To deride her, Katza suspected she meant. As the guards eased the heavy cathedral doors open, Katza saw so for herself.

  Thousands and thousands of them—peasants in their spun linen dresses and shawls and factory workers in their caps, farmers in their sashed tunics and flared pants, university students, shopkeepers, the idle intellectuals with ink-stained sleeves: all had gathered to shout Katza down.

  “The tsarika is a liar!” they screamed. “A tyrant!”

  “She’d kill us all if it meant getting her way!”

  “Death to the tsarika! Death to the nobility!”

  “Death to the uncaring Boj!”

  A thin line of city guards held the rioters back, but it was like holding back the spring floods. “There is no time for this,” Katza muttered.

  She needed a clear path back to the palace. The Hessarians were coming, and she needed a plan.

  “Silence!” Katza cried.

  As the boos and jeers rose and frothed around her, she prayed. Saint Tikhona. Quell their rage.

  Silence spread over the crowd like a shadow. They were calmed, dazed into a stupor almost instantly. Katza smiled in spite of herself at how quickly they’d been defanged. She really was growing stronger. Ravin’s words echoed in her mind: unstoppable. Yes. She was unstoppable, as the Hessarians were about to find out.

  And yet the calm tugged at her, pulling her down. She was suddenly exhausted. She gripped the skirts of her coat, crusted blood on her palms cracking, and pitched forward, nearly tumbling down the cathedral steps.

  “Tsarika?” Nadika called.

  Nadika steadied her by the elbow, and she snapped back into herself. With a few quick blinks, Katza forced herself back to clarity. “Sorry. Yes. I’ll be fine.”

  She continued down the steps, Nadika and the rest of her guards close behind. They reached the line of guards holding back the protesters, but guards and rioters both were standing, heads bowed and shoulders slack, numbed. Katza gently nudged them aside and they shuffled out of her way, parting as easily as if she were cutting a slice of torte.

  Unstoppable. Katza tapped a finger to her lips and permitted herself a weary smile.

  “You can’t control everything, you know,” Nadika said under her breath, once they were safely inside their carriage. “Not all the time.”

  Katza turned her head away from her friend. She could feel the protesters’ anger start to bubble through Tikhona’s spell. They were hurting, they were fearful. Perhaps she should have addressed them first—said something to assuage them. Or maybe she could bless them now. Something to reassure them that she meant them no harm . . .

  “You can’t keep this up, Your Highness.”

  “Of course I can,” Katza said. But she knew her friend was right. All she wished was to carry out Boj’s will. And yet at every turn—

  The carriage rolled over a cobble and Katza jolted into another vision.

  First she smelled the smoke, for she could see and smell nothing else. Thick black plumes were choking her, illuminated by flashes of red and orange. Fire. Katza found herself sprawled across a floor. No, she realized, a deck. She was aboard a ship, and it was pitching wildly back and forth.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  “Seal the bulkhead! Contain it!”

  Men rushed past her, charging into the smoke, sputtering and coughing as they ran. Katza pulled herself to her feet, using the metal railing as support, but then the ship pitched again and she was nearly tossed overboard. She caught the lip of the railing and found herself face to face with the murky, chilly water below.

  “Get back!” someone shouted at her.

  “It’s no use! We’re going down!”

  “Why won’t the tsarika use her blessings?”

  Katza opened her mouth to cry, but no sound came out. I can! I can stop this! Why couldn’t she tell them?

  She didn’t have time to wonder. A fresh explosion sent her sprawling across the deck. Bits of shrapnel shredded through her legs and back. She coughed, spitting up blackened blood—

  “We have to stop it.” Katza jolted back into the present. “The Hessarians. I have to be there to help them get past their defenses.”

  Nadika’s nostrils flared. “Your Highness—”

  “Bring me to the admirals and captains of the Pechalnoe fleet. I think I know what I must do.”

  Admiral Pyotr Akuliy greeted Katza at the dockside garrisons. “Your Highness.” He scanned her partly dismantled coronation dress and her hair matted down from when she’d worn the crown. “Perhaps you might be more comfortable discussing this in the palace?” He rubbed his sizable belly. “I’ve heard your chef does magnificent things with a roast lamb . . .”

  “There isn’t time.” Katza turned to Stolichkov. “Find Sveta. Tell her to fetch me some warmer clothing, suitable for wearing at sea.”

  Stolichkov quivered with indignancy. “Your Highness, I’m not your valet—”

  “Then find someone who is! There’s work to be done.”

  Stolichkov huffed, then turned to one of his aides. After a tense exchange, the aide scurried off, Katza’s crown tucked under his arm like a bundle of laundry.

  “Tell me how many ships the Hessarians are sending,” Katza said. And speak to me as if I know nothing about na
val warfare, she thought, but she suspected the admiral was already going to do just that.

  “The contingent our spies marked passing through the Narrows includes eight destroyers—ahh, those are large ships. They usually lead the charge, and the destroyer part refers to their—”

  “The artillery mounted on their decks,” Katza said. That much she remembered from Aleksei’s tales.

  Akuliy nodded. “And then eight cruisers. They aren’t as well armored, and are smaller, but they’re good gunships and likely to tear our own destroyers apart if we aren’t careful. Apparently the Hessarian engineers have developed some sort of clockwork gear casing that allows them to more accurately aim their mortar fire.”

  “Three destroyers and eight gunships,” Katza repeated. “All right. We can work with—”

  Akuliy raised a finger. “There is also an unknown quantity of lighter boats. The Hess favor those to place mines on enemy hulls, but they can also use them to disrupt and confuse an adversary. Our larger boats can’t react to their quick maneuvers.”

  “An unknown number? All right.” Katza rubbed her hands together. The cold was starting to settle into her bones, and her fingers creaked, stiff. “What about our forces?”

  “We have most of the Pechalnoe Sea fleet, save those conducting the customary winter patrols along the northwestern coast of Hessaria and Abingdon.”

  Katza exhaled. “Good. All right, that’s good—”

  “So that’s two destroyers and five patrol boats,” Akuliy said.

  “What?” she cried. “That’s all we have in the whole fleet?”

  “Just about. Your, um, your father’s . . .” He shifted uncomfortably, his walrus mustache twitching. “Your father’s budgetary concerns did make it rather difficult to rebuild the fleet after the Five Days’ War.”

  Katza turned toward Stolichkov, who had been examining the seams on his leather gloves. “What budgetary concerns?”