The Fierce Reads Anthology: A Tor.Com Original

by Bosworth, Jennifer

  “Do not swallow,” said Magda sternly, “and do not retch.”

  Nadya closed her eyes and forced her lips to part. She tried not to gag as the crow’s eyes slid onto her tongue.

  “Open your eyes,” commanded Magda.

  Nadya obeyed, and when she did, the whole room had shifted. She saw herself sitting in a chair, eyes still closed, Magda beside her. She tried to raise her hands, but found that her wings rose instead. She hopped on her little crow feet and released a startled squawk of surprise.

  Magda shooed her to the window and Nadya, elated from the feeling of her wings and the wind spreading beneath them, did not see the sadness in the old woman’s gaze.

  Nadya rose high into the air in a great wheeling arc, dipping her wings, learning the feel of them. She saw the woods spread beneath her, the clearing, and Magda’s hut. She saw the Petrazoi in the distance and, gliding lower, she saw the gingergirl’s path through the woods. She swooped and darted between the trees, unafraid of the forest for the first time since she could remember.

  She circled over Duva, saw the main street, the cemetery, two new altars laid out. Two more girls gone during the long winter while she grew fat at the witch’s table. They would be the last. She screeched and dove beside the gingergirl, driving her onward, her soldier, her champion.

  Nadya watched from a clothesline as the gingergirl crossed the clearing to her father’s house. Inside, she could hear raised voices arguing. Did he know what Karina had done? Had he begun to suspect what she truly was?

  The gingergirl knocked and the voices quieted. When the door swung open, her father squinted into the dusk. Nadya was shocked at the toll the winter had taken on him. His broad shoulders looked hunched and narrow, and, even from a distance, she could see the way the skin hung loose on his frame. She waited for him to cry out in horror at the monster that stood before him.

  “Nadya?” Maxim gasped. “Nadya!” He pulled the gingergirl into his arms with a rough cry.

  Karina appeared behind him in the door, face pale, eyes wide. Nadya felt a twinge of disappointment. Somehow she’d imagined that Karina would take one look at the gingergirl and crumble to dust, or that the sight of Nadya alive and well on her doorstep would force her to blurt out some ugly confession.

  Maxim drew the gingergirl inside and Nadya fluttered down to the windowsill to peer through the glass.

  The house looked more cramped and gray than ever after the warmth of Magda’s hut. She saw that the collection of wooden dolls on the mantel had grown.

  Nadya’s father caressed the gingergirl’s burnished brown arm, peppering her with questions, but the gingergirl stayed silent, huddling by the fire. Nadya wasn't even sure that she could speak.

  But Maxim did not seem to notice her silence. He babbled on, laughing, crying, shaking his head in wonder. Karina hovered behind him, watching as she always had. There was fear in her eyes, but something else, too, something troubling that looked almost like gratitude.

  Then Karina stepped forward, touched the gingergirl’s soft cheek, her frosted hair. Nadya waited, sure Karina would be singed, that she would let out a shriek as the flesh of her hand peeled away like bark, revealing not bones but branches and the monstrous form of the khitka beneath her pretty skin.

  Instead, Karina bowed her head and murmured what might have been a prayer. She took her coat from the hook.

  “I am going to Baba Olya's.”

  “Yes, yes,” Maxim said distractedly, unable to pull his gaze from his daughter.

  She’s running away, Nadya realized in horror. And the gingergirl was making no move to stop her.

  Karina wrapped her head in a scarf, pulled on her gloves, and slipped out the door, shutting it behind her without a backward glance.

  Nadya hopped and squawked from the window ledge.

  I will follow her, she thought. I will peck out her eyes.

  Karina bent down, picked up a pebble from the path, and hurled it at Nadya.

  Nadya released an indignant caw.

  But when Karina spoke, her voice was gentle. “Fly away now, little bird,” she said. “Some things are better left unseen.” Then she disappeared into the dusk.

  Nadya fluttered her wings, unsure of what to do. She peered back through the window.

  Her father had pulled the gingergirl into his lap and was stroking her white hair.

  “Nadya,” he said again and again. “Nadya.” He nuzzled the brown flesh of her shoulder, pressed his lips to her skin.

  Outside, Nadya’s small heart beat against her hollow bones.

  “Forgive me,” Maxim murmured, the tears on his cheeks dissolving the soft curve of icing at her neck.

  Nadya shivered. Her wings stuttered a futile, desperate tattoo on the glass. But her father’s hand slipped beneath the hem of her skirts, and the gingergirl did not move.

  It isn't me, Nadya told herself. Not really. It isn't me.

  She thought of her father’s restlessness, of his lost horses, his treasured sledge. Before that…before that, girls had gone missing from other towns, one here, one there. Stories, rumors, faraway crimes. But then the famine had come, the long winter, and Maxim had been trapped.

  “I've tried to stop,” he said as he pulled his daughter close. “Believe me,” he begged. “Say you believe me.”

  The gingergirl stayed silent.

  Maxim opened his wet mouth to kiss her again and the sound he made was something between a groan and a sigh as his teeth sank into the sweetness of her shoulder.

  The sigh turned to a sob as he bit down.

  Nadya watched her father consume the gingergirl, bite by bite, limb by limb. He wept as he ate, but he did not stop, and by the time he was finished, the fire was cold in the grate. When he was done, he lay stretched out on the floor, his belly distended, his fingers sticky, his beard crusted with crumbs. Only then did the crow turn away.

  They found Nadya’s father there the next morning, his insides ruptured and stinking of rot. He had spent the night on his knees, vomiting blood and sugar. Karina had not been home to help him. When they took up the bloodstained floorboards, they found a stash of objects, among them, a child’s prayer book, a bracelet of glass beads, the rest of the vivid red ribbons Genetchka had worn in her hair the night of the dance, and Lara Deniken’s white apron, embroidered with her clumsy stitches, the strings stained with blood. From the mantel, the little wooden dolls looked on.

  Nadya flew back to the witch’s hut, returned to her body by Magda’s soft words and Vladchek licking her limp hand. She spent long days in silence, working beside Magda, only picking at her food.

  It was not her father she thought of, but Karina. Karina who had found ways to visit when Nadya’s mother took ill, who had filled the rooms when Havel left, keeping Nadya close. Karina who had driven Nadya into the woods, so that there would be nothing left for her father to use but a ghost. Karina who had given herself to a monster, in the hope of saving just one girl.

  Nadya scrubbed and cooked and cleared the garden, and thought of Karina alone with Maxim over the long winter, fearing his absence, longing for it, searching the house for some way to prove her suspicions, her fingers scrabbling over floors and cabinets, feeling for the secret seams hidden by the carpenter’s clever hands.

  In Duva, there was talk of burning Maxim Grushov’s body, but in the end they buried him without Saints’ prayers, in rocky soil where to this day nothing grows. The lost girls’ bodies were never found, though occasionally a hunter will come across a stash of bones in the wood, a shell comb, or a shoe.

  Karina moved away to another little town. Who knows what became of her? Few good things happen to a woman alone. Nadya’s brother Havel served in the northern campaign and came home quite the hero. As for Nadya, she lived with Magda and learned all the old woman’s tricks, magic best not spoken of on a night like this. There are some who say that when the moon is waxing, she dares things not even Magda would try.

  Now you know what monsters once lur
ked in the woods near Duva, and if you ever meet a bear with a golden collar, you will be able to greet him by name. So shut the window tight and make sure the latch is fastened. Dark things have a way of slipping in through narrow spaces. Shall we have something good to eat?

  Well then, come help me stir the pot.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Leigh Bardugo

  copyright (C) 2011 by Anna & Elena Balbusso

  From

  Leigh Bardugo

  DEBUT AUTHOR

  Read on for a preview of

  Shadow & Bone

  On Sale June 2012 from Henry Holt Books for Young Readers

  Shadow and Bone

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  macteenbooks.com

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2012 by Leigh Bardugo

  Map © 2012 by Keith Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bardugo, Leigh.

  Shadow and bone / Leigh Bardugo.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  Summary: Orphaned by the Border Wars, Alina Starkov is taken from obscurity and her only friend, Mal, to become the protégée of the mysterious Darkling, who trains her to join the magical elite in the belief that she is the Sun Summoner, who can destroy the monsters of the Fold.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9459-6 (hc)[1. Fantasy. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Ability—Fiction. 4. Monsters—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B25024Sh 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011034012

  For my grandfather: Tell me some lies.

  THE GRISHA

  SOLDIERS OF THE SECOND ARMY MASTERS OF THE SMALL SCIENCE

  CORPORALKI

  (THE ORDER OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD)

  Heartrenders

  Healers

  ETHEREALKI

  (THE ORDER OF SUMMONERS)

  Squallers

  Inferni

  Tidemakers

  MATERIALKI

  (THE ORDER OF FABRIKATORS)

  Durasts

  Alkemi

  Before

  THE SERVANTS CALLED them malenchki, little ghosts, because they were the smallest and the youngest, and because they haunted the Duke’s house like giggling phantoms, darting in and out of rooms, hiding in cupboards to eavesdrop, sneaking into the kitchen to steal the last of the summer peaches.

  The boy and the girl had arrived within weeks of each other, two more orphans of the border wars, dirty-faced refugees plucked from the rubble of distant towns and brought to the Duke’s estate to learn to read and write, and to learn a trade. The boy was short and stocky, shy but always smiling. The girl was different, and she knew it.

  Huddled in the kitchen cupboard, listening to the grownups gossip, she heard the Duke’s housekeeper, Ana Kuya, say, “She’s an ugly little thing. No child should look like that. Pale and sour, like a glass of milk that’s turned.”

  “And so skinny!” the cook replied. “Never finishes her supper.”

  Crouched beside the girl, the boy turned to her and whispered, “Why don’t you eat?”

  “Because everything she cooks tastes like mud.”

  “Tastes fine to me.”

  “You’ll eat anything.”

  They bent their ears back to the crack in the cupboard doors.

  A moment later the boy whispered, “I don’t think you’re ugly.”

  “Shhhh!” the girl hissed. But hidden by the deep shadows of the cupboard, she smiled.

  IN THE SUMMER, they endured long hours of chores followed by even longer hours of lessons in stifling classrooms. When the heat was at its worst, they escaped into the woods to hunt for birds’ nests or swim in the muddy little creek, or they would lie for hours in their meadow, watching the sun pass slowly overhead, speculating on where they would build their dairy farm and whether they would have two white cows or three. In the winter, the Duke left for his city house in Os Alta, and as the days grew shorter and colder, the teachers grew lax in their duties, preferring to sit by the fire and play cards or drink kvas. Bored and trapped indoors, the older children doled out more frequent beatings. So the boy and the girl hid in the disused rooms of the estate, putting on plays for the mice and trying to keep warm.

  On the day the Grisha Examiners came, the boy and the girl were perched in the window seat of a dusty upstairs bedroom, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mail coach. Instead, they saw a sleigh, a troika pulled by three black horses, pass through the white stone gates onto the estate. They watched its silent progress through the snow to the Duke’s front door.

  Three figures emerged in elegant fur hats and heavy wool kefta: one in crimson, one in darkest blue, and one in vibrant purple.

  “Grisha!” the girl whispered.

  “Quick!” said the boy.

  In an instant, they had shaken off their shoes and were running silently down the hall, slipping through the empty music room and darting behind a column in the gallery that overlooked the sitting room where Ana Kuya liked to receive guests.

  Ana Kuya was already there, birdlike in her black dress, pouring tea from the samovar, her large key ring jangling at her waist.

  “There are just the two this year, then?” said a woman’s low voice.

  They peered through the railing of the balcony to the room below. Two of the Grisha sat by the fire: a handsome man in blue and a woman in red robes with a haughty, refined air. The third, a young blond man, ambled about the room, stretching his legs.

  “Yes,” said Ana Kuya. “A boy and a girl, the youngest here by quite a bit. Both around eight, we think.”

  “You think?” asked the man in blue.

  “When the parents are deceased…”

  “We understand,” said the woman. “We are, of course, great admirers of your institution. We only wish more of the nobility took an interest in the common people.”

  “Our Duke is a very great man,” said Ana Kuya.

  Up in the balcony, the boy and the girl nodded sagely to each other. Their benefactor, Duke Keramsov, was a celebrated war hero and a friend to the people. When he had returned from the front lines, he converted his estate into an orphanage and a home for war widows. They were told to keep him nightly in their prayers.

  “And what are they like, these children?” asked the woman.

  “The girl has some talent for drawing. The boy is most at home in the meadow and the wood.”

  “But what are they like?” repeated the woman.

  Ana Kuya pursed her withered lips. “What are they like? They are undisciplined, contrary, far too attached to each other. They—”

  “They are listening to every word we say,” said the young man in purple.

  The boy and the girl jumped in surprise. He was staring directly at their hiding spot. They shrank behind the column, but it was too late.

  Ana Kuya’s voice lashed out like a whip. “Alina Starkov! Malyen Oretsev! Come down here at once!”

  Reluctantly, Alina and Mal made their way down the narrow spiral staircase at the end of the gallery. When they reached the bottom, the woman in red rose from her chair and gestured them forward.

  “Do you know who we are?” the woman asked. Her hair was steel gray. Her face lined, but beautiful.

  “You’re witches!” blurted Mal.

  “Witches?” she snarled. She whirled on Ana Kuya. “Is that what you teach at this school? Superstition and lies?”

  Ana Kuya flushed with embarrassment. The woman in red turned back to Mal and Alina, her dark eyes blazing. “We are not witches. We are practitioners of the Small Science. We keep this country and this kingdom safe.”

  “As does the First Army,” Ana Kuya said quietly, an unmistakeable edge to her voice.

  The woman in red stiffened, but after a moment she conceded, “As does the King’s Army.”

  The young man i
n purple smiled and knelt before the children. He said gently, “When the leaves change color, do you call it magic? What about when you cut your hand and it heals? And when you put a pot of water on the stove and it boils, is it magic then?”

  Mal shook his head, his eyes wide.

  But Alina frowned and said, “Anyone can boil water.”

  Ana Kuya sighed in exasperation, but the woman in red laughed.

  “You’re very right. Anyone can boil water. But not just anyone can master the Small Science. That’s why we’ve come to test you.” She turned to Ana Kuya. “Leave us now.”

  “Wait!” exclaimed Mal. “What happens if we’re Grisha? What happens to us?”

  The woman in red looked down at them. “If, by some small chance, one of you is Grisha, then that lucky child will go to a special school where Grisha learn to use their talents.”

  “You will have the finest clothes, the finest food, whatever your heart desires,” said the man in purple. “Would you like that?”

  “It is the greatest way that you may serve your King,” said Ana Kuya, still hovering by the door.

  “That is very true,” said the woman in red, pleased and willing to make peace.

  The boy and the girl glanced at each other and, because the adults were not paying close attention, they did not see the girl reach out to clasp the boy’s hand or the look that passed between them. The Duke would have recognized that look. He had spent long years on the ravaged northern borders, where the villages were constantly under siege and the peasants fought their battles with little aid from the King or anyone else. He had seen a woman, barefoot and unflinching in her doorway, face down a row of bayonets. He knew the look of a man defending his home with nothing but a rock in his hand.

  Chapter 1

  STANDING ON THE EDGE of a crowded road, I looked down onto the rolling fields and abandoned farms of the Tula Valley and got my first glimpse of the Shadow Fold. My regiment was two weeks’ march from the military encampment at Poliznaya and the autumn sun was warm overhead, but I shivered in my coat as I eyed the haze that lay like a dirty smudge on the horizon.