Artem came up behind her, reading over her shoulder. “You will exhaust yourself traveling such a distance, even in thirty-mile increments. What if you are depleted of energy by the time we arrive at the Villmark, and we are unable to escape if the need arises?”
“We shall have to travel by horse as much as possible, so I can conserve my power.”
Obritsa felt Artem’s sigh more than she heard it and grinned. Few things in life brought her actual joy; Artem’s visceral discomfort around horses was one of them. “Perhaps I’ll have to leave you behind and make the journey myself,” she said.
Artem stiffened. “I would ride the most unbearable, uncooperative beast for the rest of my days and live forever in fear of being thrown to my death if it meant I could remain always at your side.”
“Quite right, you would remain at my side,” she said, her voice cool and crisp as she wrote. “Prepare my things. We shall go to the temple as soon as I receive word from Sestra Bozhena.”
* * *
It was a particular strangeness, returning to the temple after so many long weeks of living as queen in Zheminask.
Passing quietly through the shadowed temple hallways in her robes of seclusion, Artem and two sestras following a few paces behind, Obritsa felt herself returning to the girl she had been not so long ago. She knew these sounds, these smells—the musky tang of incense; the distant clear tones of the evening choir; the warm golden bite of baking bread; the quiet shuffling of slippered feet across floors worn smooth from centuries of worship.
She knew each narrow, dark corridor as she knew her own bones, and yet the air sat too close against her skin, as if telling her she no longer belonged in these halls.
At the door to her assigned room, an attendant awaited her. The girl would say a prayer with Obritsa before admitting her to the room and would grant her any last requests before she gave herself over to her long, silent month.
But the girl waiting at the door was not an attendant.
It was Yeva.
Obritsa stopped in her tracks. “Yeva. Why are you here? Novices are above such tasks.”
Yeva bowed low, her eyes shining with tears. “I requested to be here, my queen. I didn’t know if I would ever have the chance to see you again, and besides, no novice is above serving her queen. In fact, being here is a great honor.” She rose, glancing back at the sestras. “May I embrace you, my queen?”
“Yeva, control yourself,” hissed one of the sestras. “Remember your blessing, and let the queen pass.”
But Obritsa ignored the sestras and gathered Yeva close, an action she immediately regretted. For Yeva’s scent was a familiar one, heady and rose-tinged, and her body’s curves and knobs were ones Obritsa knew intimately from years of dressing and bathing her.
Obritsa’s chest ached as she pulled away, the ferocity of her reaction startling her. She did not long to return to the quiet, uncompromising world of the temple, but her life at the palace was a lonely one. Besides Artem, she spoke only to people she hardly knew—people who cared for nothing but government and courtly matters, who showed her kindness simply because she was queen and they were not.
It was a lonely life, but she didn’t mind it. She had been preparing for it as long as she could remember, and there was a satisfaction that came from that, a pleasing sense of order. She was the Korozhka, and she was doing exactly as she had been instructed.
But Yeva’s touch left her longing for something she could not name. The quiet life of preparation she had enjoyed in the temple? The simplicity of that life, before she had learned of the murders, been poisoned, and met Ludivine?
Or perhaps the longing pulling at her heart was for Yeva herself. After all, they had spent years together as novice and maidservant. Yeva knew many false things about Obritsa—for the girl Obritsa had pretended to be was largely a lie—but she knew some true things, too. She was the only person Obritsa had told about her older sister, whom Sasha had killed when she had tried to help Obritsa escape from his manor. Yeva had helped Obritsa through her first monthly bleeding earlier that very year, teaching her how to change her rags and soothe the dull, cramping pain that pulsed through her lower abdomen.
Obritsa shook herself and murmured the Prayer of the Solitary Flame with Yeva, hiding her face from Artem. If he saw how rattled she felt, he might insist that they abort their plan, and this opportunity would be wasted.
Instead, from behind the fall of her long white hair, Obritsa murmured to Yeva, “It was a blessing to see you on this day,” which made Yeva beam. And then, once the door had been locked behind her, Obritsa stepped into the room’s heart and prayed in order to clear away her muddled thoughts—not to Saint Marzana, but in honor of the revolution.
“Without shadows that mask or light that saves,” she whispered, “without earth that shatters or wind that flies, still we burn, and still we rise.”
She prayed until she felt like herself again—and until she knew Artem would be ready in their old spot in the temple gardens, waiting for her. Then she let her power rise—the power she kept tamped down and snuffed out, even though it angered her to do so, even though it wasn’t fair that she must ignore it simply because it frightened people. Simply because, long ago, somewhere in the roots of her family, an angel had loved a human, and the peculiar power of their ancient union lived inside her.
Someday, Sasha had promised her, when the church had been toppled and Kirvaya had been purged of elementals, it would no longer be illegal to be a marque. The old barbaric laws would be destroyed. Marques would be able to live freely and without fear. He would see to it himself.
And Obritsa believed him. She had to believe him. Otherwise, her chains meant nothing, she had lied to Yeva for nothing, she had endured Sasha’s fists and blades and whips for nothing. Otherwise, she might as well defy Ludivine and let the magisters come for her head.
Once she had prayed her mind soft and drunk and her anger had slipped away like leaves on a current, she began sifting through the air for the threads that would take her first to Artem, then to the north.
* * *
They traveled for nearly two weeks—by foot and by horse and, occasionally, when Obritsa began to itch with impatience, by thread. It was easy to steal fresh horses when they needed them, though every time she did so, Artem grew tense with disapproval. It wasn’t the theft he minded; it was the risk of discovery.
Obritsa kept her hair tied tightly beneath her hood, her face smudged with dirt, and her eyes downcast, but still Artem worried.
“My daughter,” he told anyone who asked. “She does not speak.”
On the twelfth day of travel, they arrived at the southern edge of Shirshaya, and on the fourteenth, they entered the gray foothills of the Villmark—the mountain range that formed the spine between Kirvaya and Borsvall and extended into the frozen north until it was swallowed by the great, city-sized slabs of ice that bordered the Silent Sea.
The horses they stole in the mountain village of Sulavat were stout and shaggy, and they took easily to the treacherous mountain paths of the Villmark, though this did nothing to ease Artem’s anxiety. They rode in stalwart silence for two days straight, and when the horses began to tire at last and Obritsa suggested they continue in the morning by thread, Artem did not protest.
They found a room in the cottage of a shepherd in a village so small it could hardly be called a village—the last settlement, the shepherd told them, until the distant fishing towns on the shore of the Silent Sea some two hundred miles north.
That night, not even the fire, and the piles of musty furs on the bed, and the solid shield of warmth that was Artem beside her could keep Obritsa warm.
“Artem, I haven’t done wrong, have I?” she asked just before falling asleep, her voice hoarse from disuse. The first few days on the road, they had talked often to pass the time and to distract Artem from
the horse beneath him. But the farther north they had traveled, the less they had spoken. It was as if the cold had stolen their voices.
Artem’s voice held a small frown. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Should I have told Sasha about what Lady Ludivine said? Should I have gone to him first for instruction?”
For a long time, Artem was quiet. Obritsa shifted in her nest of furs to look at his thoughtful face.
“Perhaps, if you think only of the revolution and our duty to the Fell Blade, you did wrong,” Artem admitted. But then he looked down at her, his expression grave. “However, if what Lady Ludivine said is true—”
“—and I have no reason to suspect otherwise,” Obritsa interrupted.
“—then the revolution is in danger because the entire world is in danger. You said it yourself. The revolution will mean nothing if the Gate falls.”
And she knew this was true, had decided for herself that she had done nothing wrong—but it was still a wonderful comfort to hear Artem’s thoughtful voice confirm it.
“Quite right,” she said, snuggling back down into the warmth of the furs, and then, after a moment, mumbled, “Thank you.”
Artem pulled the furs up to Obritsa’s ears, grumbling something about the cold, but said nothing else. Within minutes, Obritsa had fallen asleep.
And on the twentieth day, they found the fortress.
* * *
Artem was the one to sense its presence.
Obritsa’s thread had deposited them onto a ridge of snow-dusted cliffs. The stones beneath their feet were thin and gray, lining the cliff top in chalky layers.
It was here that Artem stiffened, put out his arm to keep Obritsa still.
“Earthshaker magic,” he muttered. “And close.”
Obritsa did not catch the scent until they had crept carefully across the cliffs’ crags and juts and squeezed through a narrow cave through which the high winds whistled mournfully.
Emerging from the cave, sweating inside her thick wrap of furs, Obritsa smelled the magic at last—dank and alpine, colored with the rich damp of soil and the sharp bite of wood.
They followed its trail for another hour before the sun began to set. Then the cliffs abruptly ended. Below them, frozen rocky shelves sloped gently down to an immense flat valley nestled between similar formations of stone and ice on all sides. Nearby was a wide cove of black water bordered by icebergs and a shipyard where great dark vessels were being constructed. Forests of torchlight illuminated the shipyard, the shore, the valley. Figures in shabby furs hauled stones along roads carved through the snow. Others marched across the ice flats in orderly lines, hundreds strong. Up from this scene rose the sounds of anvil and forge, hammer on rock, and bellowed orders in a language Obritsa could not understand.
Artem tugged on her arm, forcing her down behind a cluster of boulders that would shield them from view. Numbly, she obeyed.
Then she saw the fortress.
Dark and square, it jutted out from the side of a mountain at the far end of the valley. Architecturally, it was elegant and spare—long, clean lines carved into its stone face; narrow towers that rose high above the ice like the necks of black swans. At its base were enormous doors that stood open, and crowning the building, like a polished obsidian stone, was a smaller structure of terraces and domed roofs. Along the building’s front facade, windows glinted in the dimming light like bared teeth.
Obritsa’s heartbeat thudded against her skull. She searched for words but could not find them. A distant, rasping scream echoed through the mountains, its source impossible to determine. But she did not think it had been made by a human.
“What is this place?” Artem whispered.
Obritsa scanned the ice flats, unsure what she was looking for. The immensity of the task before them was a heavy black ocean pouring through her veins. She began to feel the foolishness of her decision to come here with no protection besides Artem against whatever forces were at work in this place.
“I think they’re building an army,” she replied, her teeth chattering in the cold. “And if angels are involved, as Ludivine claims…”
It was then that Obritsa lost her words, for out from a bend in the mountains below them came a train of sledges pulled by mountain horses as robust and shaggy as hers and Artem’s had been.
The sledges stopped before a long, low structure built into the side of a cliff. As Obritsa watched, children stumbled off the sleds and into the snow, shoved forward by the fully grown drivers. The children were wrapped in furs but moved stiffly through the cold nevertheless. A few collapsed in the snow; one did not rise. The others, scrambling to their feet, could not move fast enough for their keepers and were dragged by their collars through the building’s doors. One of the drivers lifted the fallen child from the snow and punched them in the jaw before dropping them and kicking them again and again until the snow darkened at their feet.
Obritsa shook. Flanking her spine, where her birthmarks had once blackened her skin, Sasha’s old knife wounds smarted deep in the bed of her muscles.
“Those are our children,” she said, not knowing if it was true but feeling sure that it must be. “They’ve brought Kirvayan children to this place, and for what? To beat them?”
Artem placed a hand on her arm. “We don’t know that those are the stolen children.”
“Well, they looked like children to me, and they looked like they didn’t want to be here.” She turned, held Artem’s frowning image in the frame of her stiff furred hood. “We must go to them. We must find out what’s happening and tell Ludivine, quickly.”
“We will do nothing quickly,” Artem said. “It’s nearly nightfall. You will take us back to that stone hut we slept in last night. We’ll make a fire, and eat, and sleep, and plan. We’ll return in the morning and continue our observations then.”
Obritsa swallowed her protests. She knew Artem was right; they would gain nothing by acting rashly.
She had seen people being beaten before and felt nothing. She had been beaten herself and felt nothing. Sasha had made sure of that.
But that night, as she lay sleepless in the dim firelight beside a snoring Artem, Obritsa’s back burned and ached as it had in those long weeks of recovery after Sasha’s knives had carved away her birthmarks. Unbearable, those weeks had been—Sasha punishing her if her cries of pain woke the others, the pain like twin fires pulsing beneath her skin.
Her only comfort had been Artem, who had nursed her, changed her bandages, read her stories by candlelight when she could not sleep.
Obritsa closed her eyes, breathing slowly to settle her pounding heart. Artem would hate her once he woke and realized the truth: that Obritsa had drugged his supper when he had gone outside to relieve himself. That she had returned to that icy valley in the dead of night, alone.
Artem—dear, loyal Artem—did not deserve her betrayal.
But Obritsa nevertheless held the image of the terrible black fortress in her mind and pulled threads from the air until that familiar circle appeared before her, aglow and eager. She slipped out of bed and faced her creation, the pulsing light painting faint ripples across her body.
She was the Korozhka, the destroyer of empires, the daughter of the revolution. Sasha had taught her that elementals deserved whatever pain they received, and for her entire life, Obritsa had accepted this as truth.
But the sight of that child being beaten to death in the snow so far from home had crystallized something startling within her. No child deserved that. And certainly not if it would do nothing to help the revolution. This logic, she told herself, Sasha would certainly accept. If an elemental child were going to be punished, it should be by the Fell Blade, for a strategic purpose, not by some faceless villain in a cloak.
She left Artem unconscious by the fire and stepped through the light of her power.
Obritsa stepped out of her thread into a small drift of snow, just behind the boulders where she and Artem had hidden earlier that day.
She waited in silence, crouching low against the frigid rock, until her toes were nearly numb and her teeth had begun to chatter. But no one came running to see what the light of her thread had been, and at last she felt safe to move.
The valley below was a web of industry despite the late hour. Torches flickered along a gridwork of dark roads cut through the snow and ice. Sledges pulled by mountain horses and shaggy, wolflike dogs carried heaps of supplies from one end of the valley to the other, from the shipyard to the fortress. Groups of people in furs pulled stones along the roads; others filed in and out of a narrow door cut into one of the mountains, through which burned the fierce orange light of what must have been an enormous forge.
Obritsa scanned the valley, heart pounding, until she found the long, low structure into which the children had been taken. It was a building of dark stone—the grinning mouth of a beast poking its head out from under the mountain.
Once again came that rattling, inhuman shriek, echoing across the valley. Obritsa shivered at the sound, and for a moment, she considered turning back. She could easily find threads that would take her back to Artem. When he awoke, she would have to explain what she had done, but that was a small price to pay for leaving this place behind forever. She had enough information to give Ludivine; surely an angel would be intelligent enough to take her observations and craft a conclusion from them.
But she could not forget the image of that child in the snow being kicked and kicked, too tired or frightened or injured to fight back. If she could get into that building, if she could elude whatever guards patrolled it, she could take the children away from this place one by one. She could use her threads to drop them all into the cottage where Artem slept, and in the morning, they could all flee south before whoever lived in that fortress even realized what had happened.
Queen of the Blazing Throne Page 6