by Jane Kindred
I shook my head, amazed at how much she seemed to understand. “Not just yet, darling. But soon, I hope. And Papa, too.” I looked at Love. “He’s still in the palace.”
Loquel arrived with a tray of fruit and cheese. “I thought the little duchess might be hungry.”
My heart hurt at how eagerly she took it. “Say thank you, Ola,” I prompted.
“Spasibo,” said Ola shyly, looking up at Loquel.
Love laughed. “I’m afraid she spent too much time with me. I’ve made a little Russkaya out of her.”
Loquel bent to my ear as Ola busied herself with her food. “The field marshal would like a word with you. It’s about the monk.”
Love jumped up and grabbed my arm. “Please. Don’t let Kae hurt him.”
“Of course not,” I promised, not certain what this was about. I’d seen them drag Kirill in as if he were ill and couldn’t walk on his own.
“Just let me come with you,” she pleaded. “Loquel can stay with Ola for a moment.”
Loquel nodded. “I don’t mind, Your Supernal Highness.”
I agreed reluctantly. “Will you stay here with Loquel, sweetie?” Her worried look twisted my heart. “Mama and Love will be right back. I promise.” I kissed her cheek, hating to leave her, and went with Love to where Kae waited outside.
He glowered at Love. “I don’t suppose Love has mentioned yet that we found the monk about to drown Azel?”
“Drown him?” I glanced at Love, who looked miserable. “Why, in Heaven’s name?”
“Perhaps you should ask him that.” Kae’s visage was dark with anger. “They’ve managed to rouse him a bit with some ice-cold water from the Acheron. I believe he’s drunk.”
Love and I hurried to the tent where Kirill had been taken and found him on his knees between two Iriyan officers. Drenched in water with his hands tied behind his back, he was trembling violently. Love fell on her knees and I waved the soldiers back as she threw her arms around him.
“Lyuba,” he murmured against her, and then gasped as she drew back and he saw her face. “What…?” He struggled for words. “What have they done?”
“I fell from a horse, but I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. Where have you been? What’s happened to you?”
Kirill closed his eyes, swaying slightly. “Angel of light.”
“You see?” growled Kae. “Drunk out of his mind.”
“No,” Love insisted. “He doesn’t smell like alcohol. He smells…sweet.”
When I bent down, I could smell the scent in his hair and clothes. It was something I’d smelled before. “Firedust.”
Kae gave me a dubious look. “The demons’ drug? I thought that was a myth.”
“The Fallen smoke it in the dens of iniquity. I’ve smelled it many times.” I turned Kirill’s head to try to get him to look at me. “Kirill. Did you smoke something?”
“Time for devil dust?” he asked hopefully.
“Someone’s drugged him,” I said to Kae as I stood. “And quite heavily—or maybe it affects humans more strongly. I’ve never seen anyone this ‘hot,’ as they call it.”
“You see?” Love looked up at Kae. “He didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t his fault. He would never hurt a child.”
“The angel provided a sacrifice.” Kirill’s words seemed momentarily lucid before he closed his eyes again, looking as if he’d mentally wandered away.
I sighed. “We won’t get any sense out of him until the firedust loses potency. Best let him sleep it off.”
We left Kirill to his delirium and returned to my pavilion, where Ola greeted us happily, staring with curiosity at Kae’s mask as Love picked her up. Kae, in turn, seemed somewhat awed by her.
Loquel handed me a bundle wrapped in brown paper and string. “A messenger brought this for you.”
“From whom?”
“He didn’t say. Just that someone had delivered it to the camp.”
I opened it carefully and found two plain but neatly made dresses just Ola’s size, and a pair of slippers that also looked custom made for her, with a note tucked into one of the shoes. Auntie thought you might need these, it said in Lively’s handwriting. Helga wanted me to know she was well aware we had Ola and Azel. She’d probably gotten the information that Kirill had the children as soon as Lively divined it, and must have set Lively to sewing as soon as I’d escaped. I was tempted to burn the garments, but the oversize dressing gown Ola had arrived in was dirty and torn, and she really did need a pair of shoes.
I sighed and held them up. “Helga knows Ola’s here.” I took her from Love’s arms. “I suppose we ought to get you a bath. Wait for me here, please,” I said to Kae. “We need to discuss our strategy.”
Kae opened his mouth to protest, but stared past me, speechless. Gereimon stood at the opening of the tent with little Azel.
The Virtue gave me a graceful bow. “Pardon me, Your Supernal Highness. I didn’t know where you wanted Master Azel.” It was his Virtuous way of reminding me it wasn’t his job to be a nanny. I regarded Azel, touched once more by his similarity to my sister.
The blue eyes returned my gaze evenly, and then he startled me with a word. “Hello, Nenny.”
I handed Ola back to Love and gave her the package of clothes. “Can you take her to get a bath?” I nodded to Gereimon. “You can leave him here with me. Thank you very much for stepping in to help.”
When they’d gone, I sat at the wooden folding table the Virtues had acquired for me and studied Azel. “Where did you hear that name? Did Helga tell you?”
He shook his head but offered no explanation. If he truly had my brother’s spirit within him, I didn’t know how to communicate with him. He was a child of only three years, yet my brother had been nearly thirteen at his death.
“Do you remember me?”
He studied me with serious eyes. “I saw you in a dream one time. You’re Ola’s mama.”
“That’s right. And I’m also your aunt Anazakia. Your mama was my sister.”
Azel’s face remained expressionless.
“It’s a bit of a mouthful.” I smiled at him. “You can call me Aunt Nenny if you like. It’s a nickname my family used to call me when I was a girl.”
“Helga isn’t my mama,” he blurted out, part question, part statement of defiance.
“No, she isn’t,” I agreed, trying not to show my outrage that she’d made any such claim. “Your mama was the Grand Duchess Omeliea Helisonovna of the House of Arkhangel’sk. We called her Ola, just like my daughter.”
I glanced at Kae and he shook his head at me, his face white beside the mask. He’d backed into a corner as if trapped by the boy’s presence in the entrance.
“That makes Ola your cousin,” I told Azel. “You looked after her, didn’t you?”
“Helga kept her in an oubliette,” he said unexpectedly, sounding disturbingly older than his physical years, and his voice had taken on a somewhat supernal tone—like my brother when someone had offended his sensibilities. “And she kept me in…” Azel paused, the color slowly draining out of his little face. “Kept me…” He stopped suddenly and stared at me. “Am I ill?” he asked and fainted dead away.
Kae rushed forward and picked him up, too late to catch him, and his scarred face twisted as he stared down at the child in his arms. “Why does he talk like that?” He clearly didn’t expect me to provide the answer. “It’s very strange. He seems much older than three.” He brought him over to my bedroll and laid him down with a father’s care, tucking the blankets around him.
“I have to tell you something.” I swallowed, afraid my voice would fail me. “He’s not just your son.”
The discomfort on Kae’s face at being acknowledged as Azel’s father was quickly supplanted by a look of suspicion. “What do you mean he’s not?”
“I received some intelligence recently. Helga did more than steal Ola’s child. She stole my brother’s shade.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t really know how I survived, do you?” We’d never spoken of it. He didn’t want me to. We both needed to forget that night. I spoke again before he could object. “I bought a spell in Raqia years ago. It allowed me to separate myself from my shade, which took on a temporary physical form and stood in for me at the palace when I wanted to sneak out. It was my shade-self you saw at the palace that night.”
Kae looked ill and I knew I shouldn’t continue, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “You did kill me, Kae,” I said quietly. “You killed me, and I felt every moment of it when my shade returned to me.”
“Please.” His voice was as rough as gravel, but he said nothing else, as if he didn’t know quite what he was pleading for.
“Helga wanted to keep Azel alive as she had me, by capturing his shade when he died, but he had no temporary body…so she took one.”
“What?” Kae’s face drained of color. “What?”
I pondered the unconscious boy. “He is both Azel Kaeyevich and Azel Helisonovich. I don’t know how Helga did it, or what he’s suffered because of it—or whether he can survive it,” I added sadly. “And I don’t know what he remembers. But he is my brother as well as my sister’s child.”
Kae stared at his son and when Azel began to stir, he turned and fled.
The boy recovered quickly and didn’t seem to remember the incident afterward. One of the Virtues brought in a stool and a slate with a piece of chalk they’d scrounged up somewhere, but Azel simply sat and stared at the slate as if he’d never seen one before.
“You can draw on it.” I drew a little smiling face for him, but he didn’t respond. I wondered whether Helga had ever given him anything to play with or had bothered to read to him. I was filled with rage and heartache at the idea that he might have lived his whole life in a small, empty room like the one I’d seen in my dream, with nothing to stimulate him and no one with whom to interact. If my brother’s spirit was conscious in him, imparting the skills and memories of thirteen years of privilege and indulgence as the Crown Grand Duke, he wasn’t showing it.
When Ola returned from her bath, she promptly took the slate from Azel and amused herself drawing squiggles and formless shapes she dubbed “Papa and Mama” or “Beli” or “Lub and Ola.” Azel looked on with interest but made no attempt to join her in the activity.
I watched her when she napped later, sprawled un-self-consciously across Love’s lap on the bedroll, her freshly washed hair almost floating about her head like a peach-kissed halo from a Russian icon. The periwinkle dress, as I’d expected, fit her perfectly. It was a plain commoner’s pinafore, but made of fine linen, while the celestine-blue slippers were embroidered in gold thread with the double-headed Seraph of the House of Arkhangel’sk. I suspected Lively had added the slippers to the package without Helga’s knowledge. Azel, meanwhile, remained perfectly still on the little stool, uninterested in napping.
I might have sat and watched Ola all day had it not been for an unexpected assault from the Supernal Army. They’d managed to skirt the fighting in the city before dawn to come up on our flanks in increasing numbers throughout the morning. Occupied with this defense, our troops were taken by surprise when a large contingent charged from the rear to surround us.
The soldiers poured across the Acheron—some cavalry by bridge, some infantrymen breaking through the flanks along the river, and others simply plunging into the Acheron and swelling over its banks in numbers too many to count. Aeval had spared no resources for this assault to try to overwhelm us, a tactic Kae told me she’d used at Gihon to great success, having far more men she considered disposable than did we.
He berated me for leaving the troops vulnerable, though I pointed out to him it wasn’t the vulnerability of which he’d warned me that was now at issue. Had we not camped along the river, the Supernal Army would actually have had an easier time of it, but Kae argued we hadn’t been properly on guard and I couldn’t disagree.
The palings we’d set up along the bank barely slowed the tide of Aeval’s army, who seemed perfectly willing to see their own men impaled and crushed in order to advance. A sense of despair struck me as I rode to the front with Kae, not at the prospect of our defeat, but at the thought that these were all my citizens if I was their rightful queen. Powers and Principalities, Dominions and demons, lofty Virtues and the lowliest of peasants among both Host and Fallen who were virtually slaves—they were all killing one another, shedding angelic blood, and I didn’t want it. Did not want any of it.
I yearned in vain for the seasons to be turned back to my seventeenth birthday. If I never rode off into the mountain, Kae wouldn’t follow, and he would never be enchanted by the white steed. Aeval would never have him. All would be as it ought.
My father’s death would be many years in coming, and when that sad day finally arrived, it would be my brother, Azel, who stepped up to claim the throne. And if not him—if we were fated to lose him in all possible worlds—it would be Ola and Kae with their own dear Azel and other children to come who would be the supernal family.
And in that sweet alternative to what was, I would know not even one of those who had become so dear to me since that fateful day. In that world, Tatia and Maia would marry and move to distant provinces, and Ola would be immersed in her family, in fetes and charities, and in affairs of state. And I? I had no idea whom I might have become. I had never known.
As we neared the front lines, it became apparent the demonic forces had cleared the way for Aeval’s army to completely surround us. Whether by design or for the conservation of their own resources, any semblance of mutual cooperation against our common enemy had been abandoned. We had been abandoned. It seemed Helga’s new strategy was to hang back—not to wait for both armies to exhaust one another as we’d done, but to allow the larger army to destroy the smaller so they could get down to the real business of fighting for the throne of Heaven.
“This doesn’t look good for us.” Kae sat on his mount beside me as we surveyed the battle from above the bank. The Supernal forces were still coming, pressing in at our flanks, and it was almost impossible to see any white uniforms among the fray that weren’t splattered and soaked with red. “It might be time for us to consider getting you out of here.”
“Getting me out? You expect me to flee like a coward while men are dying for me?”
“You are not a soldier, Nazkia,” he said sternly. “You shouldn’t even be on this battlefield. If you die here, what’s the point of them dying for you?”
“I’ve never claimed to be a soldier!” I shouted at him. “Do you think I don’t know I’m next to useless with a sword? I’m not on this battlefield as a soldier, I am on it as their leader. Something you insisted I ought to be!”
“I said you would make a great queen. That hardly requires that you be a great leader. Leading and ruling are two entirely different things.”
I was speechless with outrage, and unexpectedly, he burst out laughing.
“Now, don’t get like that, Nenny.” He seemed unaware of his slip. “I don’t want our last moment together to be spent in a tiff.” His look was suddenly sober. “We’re not getting out of this one. I’ve ordered Gereimon and Belphagor’s platoon to get you and Love and the children out. You should head for Raqia, find one of your portals, and disappear into the world of Man. I’m sorry I’ve let you down.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m so very sorry for everything.”
Behind him I could see Gereimon and two of his Virtues swiftly approaching through the fighting.
“No.”
Kae slipped down from his mount and took my hand. “It has been an honor to serve you, Your Supernal Highness.” He brought my knuckles to his lips.
“No!” I insisted as my escorts rode up beside us.
Kae swung back into his saddle. “Don’t leave your daughter and my son to certain hell because of your pride. Get out of here.” He spurred his horse forward and thundered into the thick of battle.
We were defeat
ed, and Kae was right. I couldn’t leave Ola and Azel to become the pawns of either faction. But Helga still held Vasily prisoner. I couldn’t leave him here.
Gereimon pulled his horse up beside me. “We must hurry, Your Supernal Highness.”
I turned to argue with him and then paused as something peculiar sparkled at the corner of my vision. On the opposite bank of the Acheron, light seemed to be glowing. I wondered for a moment if Aeval’s army had set Raqia on fire.
And then I realized what I was seeing. Someone had opened a breach from the world of Man.
Dvadtsataya: More Things in Heaven and Earth
From the window of Lively’s room in the Winter Palace’s east wing, a brilliant line of molten color bloomed on the horizon, as if a second sun were rising over Raqia. There was no mistaking it: Heaven had been breached. Lively had never seen a portal, let alone a breach, but the shimmering line of white gold and fiery red recalled the myth of the Lake of Fire into which the first Fallen had been expelled, as if the Pyriphlegethon itself had uncoiled and poured down from the Empyrean into the Acheron. She didn’t need her Chora to tell her Aunt Helga would be furious.
When one of the Cherubim themselves came to fetch her, she knew the audience wouldn’t go well.
“And just how do you explain this?” Helga demanded. “I thought the Grigori had agreed not to interfere.”
“How would I know?”
Her aunt’s swift move toward her caught her off guard, and the slap nearly knocked her off her feet. “Do you think I’m stupid, girl?” she demanded as Lively caught herself against the couch. “Do you think I don’t know you’ve kept an ear to the underground? I may not have your skill at the Chora, but I can hear them whispering, murmuring of news. And if I can hear them, you most certainly can hear them, and you have never been the sort of girl to keep from eavesdropping when presented with the opportunity.” Helga paced to the window and looked out between the folds of the heavy emerald velvet. “I told you not to keep things from me, Lively.”
“I swear to you, Auntie, I didn’t know the Exiles were coming to Anazakia’s aid.”