Web of Frost

by Lindsay Smith

  “Well, then we will refuse to squeeze,” Katza said.

  “I’m afraid you may not have a choice.”

  Fahed strutted into the dining hall, dressed in Aleksei’s summer clothes. Katza flinched at the sight of those clothes on someone else. She took a deep breath as he seated himself next to General Tolchin and helped himself to freshly cut lox. She needed his aid now more than ever—if she could offer him something, anything, in return.

  “Oh, thank the weave of fate. Some real food,” Fahed said.

  “Why wouldn’t we have a choice?” Katza asked.

  Fahed ate a few more slices of cured fish, then wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. “All of your ground troops are up here. At least a week’s hard travel away.”

  “We could use the trains,” Katza said.

  “If you can free the depot from your agitators, perhaps.” Fahed leveled his gaze on Katza. “I know you think you can raze your own palace like you did the Hessarians. But are you really prepared to mow through your own people? In the palace, in the streets, at the train station? Doesn’t that rather defeat the point?”

  Katza shrank down in her chair. He was right, and she knew it. She dragged the edge of her spoon along the plate. “Then what about assistance from Bintar?”

  “It would take a lot to persuade them,” Fahed said, “but it is not . . . impossible.” His expression darkened.

  She needed him, and she needed Bintar. But it meant surrendering something—whether it was her hand in marriage or her refusal to work with the protesters, she would have to concede to him somehow. That vengeful fire was calling her, calling, begging to be unleashed . . .

  But when she thought to use it, all she saw was Ravin’s dark and twisted face from her vision, warning her of what could be. His cruel laugh echoed through her skull.

  “All right. Please. Give me a moment to think.” Katza stared down at the tablecloth and tried to envision a map of Russalka before her. “It will take the Hessarian navy a few days to reach Petrovsk, and the army, if they don’t meet with any resistance from Bintar, will take at least a week. So they aren’t our concern just yet.”

  General Kutuzov snorted, but she silenced him with a sharp look.

  “Tell me more about the situation at the palace,” Katza said. “I think recovering it is our first step.”

  Tolchin grimaced. “Your Highness, it would be a symbolic victory at best—”

  “That is my home you are speaking of. The home of all of my forebears. And besides—we Russalkans are nothing without our symbols.” Katza exhaled. “Are they holding my mother? What about my attendants? The other courtiers? Surely you aren’t suggesting we leave all of them to the agitators’ whims.”

  “Actually . . . they have demanded ransom for your mother. The, ah, ‘Hessarian witch,’ as they call her,” Kamenev said.

  “Ransom?” Guilt struck her like a lance. She should have sent her mother away the moment her father passed. She’d always been a target for the public’s disdain because of her illness and her Hessarian blood. But now—the very thought of those monsters, those hateful beasts, holding her hostage—

  She should have killed Ulmarova on the spot. Crushed her like she had the Hess. This was the price of her weakness. She’d failed her mother and her people because she was too afraid of blood on her hands. She had the power to feed her people, care for them all, alleviate their suffering, their need for purpose. It was all within her control. If only she could seize it . . .

  But where would she be, if she had given in to that? She knew all too well that vision left her soaked in blood, the white wolf of Russalka bleeding at her feet. She knew where the seemingly desirable path in the forest led—to the cruel version of Ravin, draining her power for himself.

  But it wasn’t true. He only wanted to help. It was a message of some sort, but she’d misinterpreted it—she must have. It had to mean something else. She just had to sort out what.

  “I will not pay any ransom or bargain with a single agitator.” Katza stood from the table. “They cannot think that they command me. Not for one second.”

  Akuliy chewed at his lower lip. “Your Highness . . .”

  “I want your forces ready to help me retake the palace. Tonight.”

  General Kutuzov balked. “It’s simply not possible. It would take us at least two days—”

  “Well, I’m retaking the palace tonight,” Katza said. “Your soldiers can do what they wish.”

  She stormed from the dining hall, quickly enough that they couldn’t see her tears fall.

  “Your Highness.” Fahed hurried after her down the hall, and Katza’s whole body tensed. “Please, Your Highness. A word.”

  Katza whirled toward him. “What is it?”

  “Bintar’s army is paltry, as we both know. But we have mastered the tactics required to halt a far superior force from traveling through the Dylani Pass.”

  Katza clenched her jaw so hard she felt her teeth might crack. She had a sickening feeling she knew what was coming next.

  “I know you can tear armies apart, but you are but one woman. You cannot hold them off in the bay and the pass.” Fahed’s grin curled viciously. “I could send word to the emir. It would be nothing to ask him to seal off the pass. If you so wished.”

  “If I so wished,” Katza echoed. “And what is it you want in return?”

  Fahed smirked. “So you’re learning the ways of the court after all. Yes, now you understand how this works.”

  Katza’s stomach churned. So this was what it meant to be a tsarika. To bargain for the least terrible option. Sell her country out. But the more she parceled out, the less of Russalka would remain.

  “Tell me what it is you wish,” Katza said. “And I’ll consider it.”

  Fahed arched one brow. “We both know you don’t have time to deliberate.”

  Katza gave him a weary stare.

  “I want a permanent seat on the Golden Court. An elevated position. Someone has to temper you and your damned prophet, after all.”

  “You want to stay in Russalka, after all that’s passed?” Katza asked.

  “I could have more power here than in Bintar, fighting my siblings for scraps.” He reached forward to tuck a loose curl back behind her ear. “Grant me that, and I will give you an army.”

  Katza’s stomach churned. But she saw no other way. For all that she’d held the Hessarians back, she could not rely solely on her power and Ravin’s.

  And if her vision had been a warning—

  “Very well. Then you’ll have your seat.”

  Fahed’s smile oozed across his face. “And you shall have your army.”

  She prayed it would be enough.

  Katza closed herself inside the library. She needed military strategy books. Books on the history of the Saints’ Wheel. Books of the old Russalka, before Tsar Ivan II declared the Church’s power absolute and erased the old ways by decree. If Ulmarova’s “prophets” were drawing from the same well of power as Katza was, then there had to be some way she could block them from it. The church had found some way to partially block others, but Katza needed something more powerful. She couldn’t permit them even a drop from the well.

  She tore through book after book. A chronicle of great naval battles under Tsar Petr III—though naturally, they offered no advice for dealing with the Hessarians, with their submersibles and other superior designs. An account of how the combined forces of the Mozgai cavalry and Bintar held off a Texeiran contingent ten times their own size in the Dylani Pass. Books about the Battle of Bloody Hooves, when Mozgai and Russalkan forces stormed a fortress that had been seized by a splinter faction of Mozgai.

  But nothing of prophets, nothing of blocking their access to the well. The church had done it somehow—but how could she do the same? How could she make the power hers, and hers alone?

&nbs
p; Finally, Katza came to a section of books dedicated to fairy tales. She’d read many of them as a younger girl, when the summer humidity off the bay grew too oppressive for her to play outdoors with Aleksei. Tales of sirens, of golden chickens, of the very earliest saints, though some of the details had been confused . . .

  No, perhaps confused was not the right word after all.

  Katza paused on an illustration of the children’s tale, “Wolf’s Bargain,” and leafed through it. Someone had taken a paintbrush and marked several passages with black. She flipped back to the front of the fairytale book and found a note tucked in the flypaper.

  Your Highness,

  After careful consideration and consulting with Saint Kirill, I have determined that the falsehoods presented in this book are too dangerous and incendiary to be permitted in the royal collection. I have removed the more offensive passages, but I strongly encourage you to remove the book and others like it, lest they corrupt young, innocent minds in the palace.

  Patriarch Anton

  Katza flipped back to “Wolf’s Bargain” and began to scratch at the paint with her nail. What hadn’t the patriarch wished for her and her brother to read? It seemed harmless enough, at least as bloody fairytales went. It was the tale of a wolf who’d cunningly worked his way into a village’s trust in order to gain access to their sheep, but was caught. Yet as they went to cast him out, he bargained with the villagers to atone for his ways by offering to help them catch similar predators. Entire paragraphs had been painted over with thick black.

  The first few attempts, all Katza succeeded in doing was tearing the page as she tried to flick the dried paint away. She frowned as her nail snagged and tore in a jagged line across the bed. But finally she managed to pry one thick smear of paint up, slowly, carefully, and the words beneath it were sharp and clear:

  Besides, the wolf thought to himself, if I am in total control of the village, then no other wolves can take my place.

  Katza stared at the passage, reading it over and over. Why had the patriarch deemed this too dangerous an idea?

  She recalled the patriarch’s lectures. Boj’s will was too powerful for any one person to possess, he’d said. It had to be filtered, shared across the Saint’s Wheel. It was necessary to maintain order. Control. Yet here was a story from the commonfolk, warning of the dangers of concentrating such power.

  In the days before the Saints’ Wheel, was it possible for one person to control the entire wellspring? Katza’s heart hammered against her ribs. She felt as if a dozen conflicting ideas were converging, weaving themselves together into a single tapestry, and finally a clear picture had emerged.

  Ravin had spoken the truth on one point: the whole structure of the saints had been designed to keep any one person from seizing control of that well. That must have been why Anton tried to censor this story—so no one would see the curch as the wolves, blocking others from this power they wanted for themselves. If they convinced everyone that no one could access it directly, then no one would think to seize control of all of it. And if someone were to control it, all of it, the entire well, as Ravin had been encouraging her to do—

  Katza covered her mouth. She felt suddenly ill, a tremor rippling through her as the tapestry finished. The meaning of her vision. Ravin wanted her to use her Silov blood to seize the entirety of the well’s power. Make her the wolf.

  And then, once she’d done so, he could all too easily take it from her.

  Katza brought Nadika a cup of freshly brewed chai sometime after noon. The Mozgai woman looked far better after a solid sleep, the puffiness beneath her eyes drained and the warm sandy color returned to her flesh. Olga had laundered Nadika’s ceremonial uniform by hand and hung it up to dry in the tall windows that overlooked the gardens, so Katza brought her a dressing gown to keep herself warm, too.

  “Thank you.” Nadika perched in the deep windowsill opposite Katza, sipping the chai as steam wisped around her face. “I feel much better, though I know we have a long road ahead.”

  “As long as you’re willing to walk it with me,” Katza said.

  Nadika reached out and squeezed Katza’s hand. “Always, Your Highness. I’ve seen what must be done. I’ll do everything in my power to stay at your side through it all.”

  Katza turned toward the windowpanes, warped with ancient glass. The gardens, so full of every color imaginable in the summer, were covered over in thick piles of snow; the fountains were dead, little more than lumps beneath the snow cover, and only the occasional raised arm of a statue pushed through the white. The gardens cascaded down the hillside all the way to the docks along the Zima river tributary. They could follow the river west back to Pechalnoe Bay and the harbor of Petrovsk, or east to head deeper into Russalka.

  “I have such happy memories of this place,” Katza said. “Riding the ferry boat here with Aleksei . . . playing hide and seek in the gardens, or hosting tea parties when my mother was feeling like herself.”

  Nadika smiled sadly. “I remember it well.”

  Katza tucked her knees up beneath her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. Gooseflesh raised on her bared arms. “Nadika . . . I must ask you for your advice.”

  Nadika looked pale for a moment, but recovered. “I’ll do my best to help. But I’m not strategist, no advisor . . .”

  “No, and that is why I feel comfortable asking you.” Katza smiled. “Tell me the truth. You have visions, too.”

  Nadika swallowed a mouthful of chai and pursed her lips. “I can’t explain what they are. I don’t—very few of the Mozgai believe in the saints, in the Russalkan Boj. We have our own traditions from before the saints, and are—” She squared her jaw. “—grateful that we’ve been permitted to keep them.”

  Katza paused at that. “Well, I’ve been finding that there are many things in this world that can’t be explained by Boj and the saints alone,” Katza said. “That doesn’t make your visions any less meaningful. At least, I don’t think it does.”

  Nadika arched one eyebrow. “And what does your prophet say?”

  Katza’s cheeks flushed. “He isn’t my—I mean, he isn’t anyone’s—”

  “Your Highness, spare me.” Nadika grinned, though it was fleeting. “I’ve seen the way you look at him. Like a break in the blizzard. Like a welcoming light in the dark.”

  Katza turned her head away, turning deep crimson now.

  “And I see the way he looks at you.” Nadika’s expression hardened. “Like you’re the key that will all too willingly unlock every door for him.”

  Katza squeezed her eyes shut. Like her vision had warned her. She slumped forward, forehead pressed against her knees.

  “I want you to be happy,” Nadika said, “and I see how happy he makes you.”

  Katza nodded without opening her eyes.

  “But even more than I wish you happiness . . . I wish for you to be tsarika.” Nadika’s voice turned sharp. “I know you are—I know the capacity for it exists inside of you. But this angry, vengeful thing you become when you are with him—it is not like any tsar.”

  “It worked out well enough for Marya,” Katza said hotly.

  “That was the last, desperate act of a dying woman,” Nadika said. “She still died in the end. Yes, she died with the satisfaction of revenge, but her dreams were still cut short. Her people were still left to suffer without her around to rule.”

  Katza chewed on the inside of her cheek. She supposed Nadika was right. Just as Aleksei’s vision had warned her—the tighter she squeezed, the more Russalka would crumble. And like the wolf’s bargain, perhaps no one person should have that kind of control.

  “You will find the right way to save Russalka. From the Hessarians, and from itself.” Nadika reached out to pat Katza’s knee. “I know you have the mind for it. You just haven’t the experience. Not yet. But you will.”

  Someone bellowed Katza�
��s name from deep within the summer palace.

  Katza sprang up from the windowsill, but Nadika moved even faster. In no time, she’d clipped her holster around her waist and freed her pistol from it, eyes sharp as a hawk’s. Katza closed her eyes and drew on the power, probing her way through the gilded palace halls as she sought the source of the sound.

  Then she found him—his heartbeat fluttering golden in her mind. Ravin.

  Katza pulled her shawl around her shoulders and went bounding down the halls. He’d made it out of Petrovsk. Did he think she’d abandoned him? How had he known to come to Zolotov? She was terrified, the wolf’s story haunting her still. Saint Volkov—the saint of lies, come to coax the power from her blood. But a part of her didn’t care, she didn’t care, she just wanted to see him again, and feel his embrace . . .

  The generals’ guards surrounded him in the grand foyer, rifles leveled at his chest. “Stop! Lower your weapons!” Katza shouted from the top of the stairs. Ravin’s gaze shot to hers, and she felt her heart seize up, relieved and overwhelmed that he was alive—

  But her joy curdled at his expression, just as dark and sinister as in her vision. She wanted desperately for it to be wrong, but she couldn’t unsee it. She saw the proof of it everywhere.

  “Your Highness.” Ravin slumped against one of the pillars. He was breathing heavily, lathered like a horse, and his heavy coat was torn and stained. “Bless the saints that you’re all right.”

  Was that blood on his forehead? Katza bit her lower lip. No matter what her visions had warned, the thought of him injured—it wounded her, too. She rushed down the staircase and flew into his opened arms.

  “My blessed sun.” He pulled her close, chest still heaving, and pressed a kiss to her temple. “My tsarika.”

  She allowed herself a few precious moments wrapped in his embrace. Questions would come later. Doubt would find its way back in like a stubborn infection. But for now, her prophet was alive, and he was hers, and she was his.