The battlefield was a grim site: smoke and mud, Fjerdan tanks reduced to hunks of still-burning metal. But the mines had slowed the enemy, not stopped them. The tanks that survived the explosions charged ahead.
“Masks on!” He heard the call go down the line from his First Army captains and Second Army commanders. They had every reason to believe those tanks wouldn’t just be firing mortars but shells full of jurda parem, the gas that could kill ordinary men and instantly addict Grisha. “Prepare to engage!”
Nikolai looked to the skies. High above, Ravka’s flyers patrolled the clouds, making sure the Fjerdans couldn’t bomb their forces from the air and taking any opportunity to strafe the Fjerdan lines. Ravka’s flyers were lighter, more agile. If only they had the money for more machines.
“Hold the line!” Adrik shouted. “Let them come to us.”
“For Ravka!” Nikolai yelled.
“For the double eagle!” came the reply, soldiers’ voices raised in solidarity.
Fjerdan troops armed with repeating rifles followed behind the tanks that had made it through the minefield, cutting a swath through the smoke and haze. They were met by Ravkan soldiers fighting side by side with Grisha.
Nikolai knew a king did not belong on the front lines, but he also knew he couldn’t hang back and let others wage this war. His officers were mostly former infantry, grunts who had risen through the ranks and earned the respect of their men. There were the aristocrats too, but Nikolai didn’t trust them in precarious positions. Old men like Duke Keramsov had fought in long-ago wars and could have provided valuable experience, but most had refused the call. Their fighting days were over. They’d built their homes and now they wanted to rest in their beds, tell stories of old victories, and complain about their aches and pains.
“On my command,” he said.
“This is a terrible idea,” moped Adrik.
“I have a surplus of bad ideas,” said Nikolai. “I have to spend them somewhere.”
Tamar touched her hands to her axes. When her bullets were spent, those would have to suffice. She signaled to her Heartrenders. Nadia signaled to her Squallers.
“Forward!” Nikolai shouted.
Then they were moving ahead, plunging into the fray. The Squallers drove back the Fjerdan tanks as the Heartrenders gave them cover. A squad of Inferni used the burning remnants of the tanks to create a wall of flame, another barrier the Fjerdan troops would have to breach.
All of the Ravkan forces wore gas masks specially crafted by Fabrikators to prevent the inhalation of jurda parem. The drug had changed everything, made the Grisha vulnerable in ways they had never been, but they refused to wear those masks as emblems of weakness or fragility. They’d painted them with fangs and curling tongues, gaping mouths. They looked like gargoyles descending onto the field in their combat kefta.
Nikolai stayed low, the rattle of gunfire filling his ears. He squeezed off a shot, another, saw bodies fall. The demon in him sensed the chaos and leaned toward it, hungry for violence. But even if the obisbaya hadn’t purged Nikolai of the thing, it had given him better control. He needed cool strategy now, not a monster with a taste for blood.
Tolya’s hands shot out, his fists closing, and Fjerdan soldiers dropped, their hearts bursting in their chests.
Nikolai almost let himself hope. If tanks and infantry were all the fight Fjerda had to offer, Ravka might stand a chance. But as soon as he saw the hulking machine lumbering onto the field, he knew Fjerda had more horrors in store. This wasn’t a tank. It was a transport. Its huge treads kicked up dirt and mud, the roar of its engine shaking the air as it disgorged smoke into the gray sky. A mine went off beneath one of its huge treads, but the thing just kept coming.
Nikolai looked to the west. Had Zoya succeeded on her mission? Would rescue come?
This is the crossroads. This day would decide if Ravka had a chance or if Fjerda would blow through the border like a cold northern wind. If they failed this test, their enemy would know just how precarious Ravka’s position was, just how strapped for cash, just how weakened. A victory, even a wobbly one, would buy his country some desperately needed time. But that would require reinforcements.
“They’re not coming,” said Tolya.
“They’ll come,” said Nikolai. They have to.
“We gave them everything they needed. Why would they?”
“Because an agreement must mean something, otherwise what are we all doing here?”
A high metal shriek sounded as the transport drew to a halt and its gigantic metal doors opened like the jaws of an ancient monster.
The dust cleared and a line of soldiers advanced from inside the transport. But they wore no uniforms, only ragged clothes, some of them barefoot. Nikolai knew instantly what they were—Grisha, addicted to parem. Their bodies were emaciated and their heads hung like wilted flowers on narrow stalks. But none of that would matter once they were dosed with the drug. He saw the cloud of orange gas puff toward them from spigots somewhere inside the transport. Instantly, they snapped to attention.
This was the moment Nikolai had been dreading, one he had hoped he could prevent.
Three of the dosed Grisha charged forward.
“Get down!” Nikolai yelled. The land before the enemy Grisha rose up in a rippling wave, mines exploded, tanks overturned. Ravkan soldiers were thrown over and buried beneath mountains of mud and rock.
“Squallers!” Nadia called to her troops, and she and Adrik were back on their feet, combining their strength to push rubble and earth aside, freeing their compatriots.
Then Nadia stumbled.
“Amelia!” she cried. The wind she’d summoned faltered. She was staring at one of the dosed Grisha, a slender girl with chestnut hair, dressed in little more than a faded smock, her sticklike legs jammed into heavy boots.
“Saints,” Tamar said on a breath. “She’s a Fabrikator. She vanished from a mission near Chernast.”
Nikolai remembered. Nadia had worked side by side with her in the labs before her capture.
Tamar seized Nadia by the shoulder, pulling her back. “You can’t help her now.”
“I have to try!”
But Tamar didn’t let go. “She’s as good as dead. I’ll put an axe in her heart before I let you fall into this trap.”
Amelia and the other dosed Fabrikators raised their hands, about to cause another earthquake.
“I have a clear shot,” said Tolya, his rifle raised.
“Hold,” said Nikolai. Again he looked to the west, hoping—because hope was all they had left.
“Take the damned shot!” Adrik said.
Nadia struck him with a gust of air. “They can’t make us kill our friends, our own kind! We’re doing the Fjerdans’ work for them.”
“Those aren’t our friends,” Adrik snapped. “They’re ghosts, sent back from the next life, haunted and hopeless and looking for blood.”
Nikolai signaled for the second wave of fighters to engage as their flyers tried to get close enough to the Fjerdan lines to fire on the transport without being blown from the sky themselves.
And then he heard it, a sound that echoed with a steady whump whump whump like a beating heart, too even and unyielding to be thunder.
Every head turned to the west, to the skies, where three vast airships—larger than anything Nikolai had ever seen airborne—emerged from the clouds. Their hulls weren’t emblazoned with Kerch’s flying fish. They bore the orange stars of the Zemeni naval flag.
“They came,” said Nikolai. “I think you owe me an apology.”
Tolya grunted. “Just admit you weren’t sure either.”
“I was hopeful. That’s not the same as unsure.”
Nikolai had known Zoya’s diplomatic mission to speak to the Kerch had been doomed from the start, as had she. The Kerch had always been led by one goal alone: profit, and they would remain neutral. But Ravka had needed to maintain the pretense of asking—quite desperately—for aid. They had needed Fjerda’s and
Kerch’s spies to believe they were without allies.
Months before, Nikolai had given the Kerch exactly what they’d demanded: plans for how to build and arm izmars’ya, underwater ships that could be used to disrupt Zemeni trade routes and blow up Zemeni ships. And the Kerch had gone about doing just that. But what the Kerch didn’t know was that those ships they’d so successfully destroyed had been empty of men and cargo. They were phantom ships, decoys sent out to sea to give the Kerch the illusion of success, while the Zemeni had moved their trade routes up into the clouds with Ravkan airship technology.
The Kerch could have the ocean. The Zemeni would take the sky. Ravka had kept its word and delivered exactly what the Kerch wanted, but not what they needed. That was a lesson Nikolai had learned from his demon.
“The Kerch are going to be furious when they find out,” said Tamar.
“Making people happy isn’t the province of kings,” Nikolai noted. “Perhaps if I’d been born a baker or a puppeteer.”
As they watched, doors at the base of the airships opened and a froth of fine powder gusted downward in a gray-green cloud.
“Squallers!” Nadia bellowed, her face beaming now, her cheeks wet with tears, as Ravkan flyers in the air and Grisha soldiers on the ground directed the powdery antidote onto the regiment of addicted Grisha.
The antidote drifted down onto them like a fine coating of frost and Nikolai saw them turn their palms up, confused. Then they tilted their heads to the sky, breathing deeply. They were like children seeing snow for the first time. They opened their mouths, held out their tongues. He saw them turn to one another as if waking from a nightmare.
“To us!” commanded Tamar as she and Tolya advanced, laying down cover for the Grisha prisoners with their rifles.
Arm in arm, the sickly Grisha stumbled toward the Ravkan lines, toward home and freedom.
The Fjerdan officers called for their soldiers to open fire on the deserting Grisha, but Nikolai’s flyers were ready. They strafed the Fjerdan lines, forcing them to take cover.
Ravkan Grisha and soldiers moved forward to guide their weakened friends. Now they really did look like ghosts, strange spirits coated in silvery powder.
“Your Majesty?” Amelia said in confusion as Nikolai slung her arm around his shoulders. Her lashes were dusty with antidote, her pupils dilated.
Around them, Nikolai saw the Fjerdan ranks breaking in the tumult the Zemeni arrival had caused. The skies were thick with Ravkan and Zemeni flyers. Fjerda had lost their Grisha assassins, and half their tanks lay in smoldering pieces.
Nikolai and the others plunged back through the field, taking the Grisha prisoners with them. He handed Amelia off to a Healer, and then he was commandeering a horse and shouting to Tolya, “Come on!”
He wanted to see this from the air. When they reached the runway, they leapt into his flyer. It roared to life and they soared skyward.
The view from above was both heartening and terrible. The Fjerdan lines had broken and they were in retreat, but brief as the battle had been—barely a battle, a skirmish, really—the damage was shocking. The muddy basin below had been carved up by Grisha Fabrikators, the landscape pocked with deep wounds and furrows. The dead lay scattered in the mud: Fjerdan soldiers, Ravkan soldiers, Grisha in their bright kefta, the frail bodies of the sickly prisoners who hadn’t made it off the field.
It was just a taste of what was coming.
“This is going to be a different kind of war, isn’t it?” Tolya asked quietly.
“If we don’t stop it,” said Nikolai as they watched the Fjerdans fall back.
This tiny victory wouldn’t solve the problem of his parentage or fill their coffers or swell the ranks of their army, but at least the Fjerdans would have to recalibrate. Ravka couldn’t afford to rig the entire northern border with mines. But Fjerda had no way of knowing that, so they would have to waste valuable time sweeping potential incursion points. They could no longer rely on parem as a weapon against Ravka’s Grisha. And more importantly, the Zemeni had shown that Ravka was not alone. The Fjerdans had wanted to play quick and dirty. This day had shown them what this fight would really look like. See what your country thinks of war now that your soldiers will have to bleed too.
Nikolai let his flyer coast gently into the landing bay at the base of the largest airship, bringing it to an abrupt stop that taxed the little craft’s brakes.
Kalem Kerko was there to greet him and Tolya. He wore blue fatigues, his hair in short twists.
“Your Highness,” he said with a sharp bow.
Nikolai clapped Kerko on the back. “Let’s not stand on ceremony.” He had trained with Kerko’s family when he was learning the work of gunsmiths, and he was not remotely surprised to see the ways in which the Zemeni had improved upon Ravkan airships. “You just saved our asses.”
“You gave us the skies,” said Kerko. “We can at least help you keep this miserable country. Will you pursue the Fjerdans? They’re in retreat.”
“We can’t afford to. Not yet. But you’ve granted us valuable time.”
“We’ll travel with you to Poliznaya.”
“The stockpile of antidote?” Nikolai asked.
Kerko gestured to a wall of what looked like grain sacks. “You can say that you hoped there would be more. I won’t be offended. Your soldier’s face shows the truth of it.”
“Tolya always looks that way. Except when he’s reciting verse, and no one wants that.” Nikolai tallied the sacks of antidote and sighed. “But yes, we hoped there would be more.”
“Parem is fairly easy to manufacture if someone manages the formula. But the antidote?” Kerko shrugged. “It requires too much raw jurda. Perhaps your Fabrikators can find a new way to process the plant.”
The formula had been the work of David Kostyk, Ravka’s most talented Materialnik, working with Kuwei Yul-Bo, the son of the very man who had invented parem. But the idea had come from the source of jurda, Novyi Zem, and a young boy who had grown up on a farm there. He’d told Kuwei that during the harvest, mothers would put balm from the stalks of the jurda plant on babies’ lips and eyelids to prevent the pollen from affecting them.
“It takes a tremendous amount of the crop to create the antidote,” said Kerko. “Worse, the harvesting of the stalks ruins the fields. If we keep pushing, our farmers will revolt. And there’s something else. One of our suppliers reported a bizarre occurrence in his fields, a blight that seemed to come from nowhere. It turned two of his pastures to barren wasteland, and the livestock grazing there vanished like—”
“Smoke,” finished Nikolai. So the vampire had sunk its teeth into Novyi Zem.
“Then you know of this plague? It’s the second event of this kind our country has seen in two months. Are you witnessing its like in Ravka?”
“Yes,” Nikolai admitted. “There was an occurrence near Sikursk and another south of Os Kervo. We’re running experiments on the soil. We’ll let you know what we discover.”
But Nikolai knew what they would find: death. Nothing would grow in that soil again. And if this blight kept spreading, who knew where it might strike next or if it could be stopped? Even the thought of it was enough to rile the demon inside him, as if it recognized the power that had created it in the source of this destruction.
“Is it connected to the Fold?” asked Kerko.
Tolya looked surprised. “You’ve been there?”
“After the unification. I wanted to see it for myself. A cursed place.”
That word again: cursed.
“There’s a connection,” said Nikolai. “We just don’t know what it is yet.” That much was true. And Nikolai wasn’t prepared to tell Kerko that the Darkling had returned. “I’ll escort you to Poliznaya. We can store the antidote on base.”
“There will be retribution from the Kerch,” warned Kerko as they walked back to the flyer. “For all of us. They’ll find a way.”
“We know,” said Tolya solemnly. “And we know the risk you’ve taken by
coming to our aid.”
Kerko grinned. “They were willing to attack our ships and our sailors without ever raising the flag of war. The Kerch have never been friends to the Zemeni, and it’s best they know we’re not without friends either.”
They shook hands, and Nikolai and Tolya climbed back into the flyer.
“Nikolai,” said Kerko. “End this war and end it quickly. Show that Magnus Opjer is a liar and banish the Lantsov pretender. You must prove you’re not a bastard and that you’re fit to sit that throne.”
Well, thought Nikolai as the engine of his flyer rumbled to life and they shot into the brilliant blue sky. One out of two isn’t bad.
7
NINA
HELLO, NINA.
Nina was a trained covert operative. She’d made her way in the brothels of Ketterdam and run with the most dangerous thugs and thieves of the Barrel. She’d faced killers of every variety, and occasionally she chatted with the dead. But when the Wellmother spoke those words, Nina felt her heart plunge right out of her chest and slide all the way to her fur-lined slippers.
She only smiled.
“Mila,” she corrected gently. A misheard name, an innocent mistake.
The Wellmother lifted her hand and a gust of wind made the lamplight flicker, glinting off the twinkle in her eyes.
“You’re Grisha,” whispered Nina in shock. A Squaller.
“Foxes go to ground in the winter,” said the Wellmother in Ravkan.
“But they don’t fear the cold,” Nina replied.
She sat down on the sofa with a heavy thump. Her knees felt weak, and she was embarrassed to find tears in her eyes. She hadn’t spoken her language in so long.
“Our good king sends his thanks and his regards. He’s grateful for the intelligence you sent. It saved many Ravkan lives. And many Fjerdan lives too.”
Nina wanted to weep with gratitude. She’d had contact with messengers and members of the Hringsa, but to talk to one of her people? She hadn’t realized the weight she’d been carrying with her.
“Are you really from the convent?”
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