Ruin and Rising (26 page)

That night, the temperature dropped enough that we had to set up tents. Zoya seemed to think I should be the one to put ours together, even if we were both going to sleep in it. I was cursing over the pile of canvas when Mal hushed me.

“Someone’s out there,” he said.

We were in a wide field of feather grass that stretched between two low hills. I peered into the dusk, unable to make anything out, and lifted my hands questioningly.

Mal gave a shake of his head. “As a last resort,” he whispered.

I nodded. I didn’t want us in another situation like the one we’d had with the militia.

Mal picked up his rifle and signaled. Tolya drew his sword, and we formed up, back to back, waiting. “Harshaw,” I whispered.

I heard Harshaw’s flint being struck. He stepped forward and spread his arms. A blazing gout of fire roared to life. It swept around us in a shining ring, illuminating the faces of the men crouched low in the field beyond. There were five, maybe six of them, golden-eyed and dressed in shearling. I saw bows drawn and the glint of light off at least one gun barrel.

“Now,” I said.

Zoya and Harshaw moved as one, throwing their arms out in wide arcs, the flames flaring across the grass like a living thing, borne by their combined power.

Men shouted. The fire licked out in hungry tongues. I heard a single shot of gunfire, and the thieves turned and ran. Harshaw and Zoya sent the fire after them, chasing them across the field.

“They might come back,” said Tolya. “Bring more men. You get good money for Grisha in Koba.” It was a city just south of the border.

For the first time, I thought about what it must have been like for Tolya and Tamar, never able to return to their father’s country, strangers in Ravka, strangers here too.

Zoya shivered. “They aren’t any better in Fjerda. There are witchhunters who don’t eat animals, won’t wear leather shoes or kill a spider in their homes, but they’ll burn Grisha alive on the pyre.”

“Shu doctors might not be so bad,” said Harshaw. He was still playing with the flames, sending them shooting up in loops and snaking tendrils. “At least they clean their instruments. On the Wandering Isle, they think Grisha blood is a cure-all—for impotence, wasting plague, you name it. When my brother’s power showed itself, they cut his throat and hung him upside down to drain like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

“Saints, Harshaw,” Zoya gasped.

“I burned that village and everyone in it to the ground. Then I got on a boat and never looked back.”

I thought of the dream the Darkling had once had, that we might be Ravkans and not just Grisha. He’d tried to make a safe place for our kind, maybe the only one in the world.
I understand the desire to remain free.

Was that why Harshaw kept fighting? Why he’d chosen to stay? He must have shared the Darkling’s dream once. Had he given its care over to me?

“We’ll keep a watch tonight,” Mal said, “and head farther east tomorrow.”

East to the Cera Huo, where phantoms stood guard. But we were already traveling with ghosts of our own.

*   *   *

THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE
of the thieves the next morning, only a field scorched in bizarre patterns.

Mal took us farther into the mountains. Early in our journey, we’d seen the curling smoke of someone’s cookfire or the shape of a hut on a hillside. Now we were alone, our only company the lizards we saw sunning themselves on rocks and, once, a herd of elk grazing in a distant meadow.

If there were signs of the firebird, they were invisible to me, but I recognized the silence in Mal, the deep intent. I’d seen it in Tsibeya when we were hunting the stag and then again on the waters of the Bone Road.

According to Tolya, the Cera Huo was marked differently on every map, and we certainly had no way of knowing if that was where we’d find the firebird. But it had given Mal a direction and now he moved in that steady, reassuring way of his, as if everything in the wild world was already familiar to him, as if he knew all of its secrets. For the others, it became a kind of game, trying to predict which way he would take us.

“What do you see?” Harshaw asked in frustration when Mal turned us away from an easy trail.

Mal shrugged. “It’s more what I don’t see.” He pointed up to where a flock of geese were tacking south in a sharp wedge. “It’s the way the birds move, the way the animals hide in the underbrush.”

Harshaw scratched Oncat behind the ear and whispered loudly, “And people say
I’m
crazy.”

As the days passed, I felt my patience fraying. We had too much time walking with nothing to do but think, and there was no safe place for my thoughts to wander. The past was full of horrors, and the future left me with that breathless, rising panic.

The power inside me had once seemed so miraculous, but each confrontation with the Darkling drove home the limitations of my abilities.
There is no fight to be had.
Despite the death I’d seen and the desperation I felt, I was no closer to understanding or wielding
merzost
. I found myself resenting Mal’s calm, the surety he seemed to carry in his steps.

“Do you think it’s out there?” I asked one afternoon when we’d taken shelter in a dense cluster of pines to wait out a storm.

“Hard to say. Right now, I could just be tracking a big hawk. I’m going on my gut as much as anything, and that always makes me nervous.”

“You don’t seem nervous. You seem completely at ease.” I could hear the irritation in my voice.

Mal glanced at me. “It helps that no one’s threatening to cut you open.”

I said nothing. The thought of the Darkling’s knife was almost comforting—a simple fear, concrete, manageable.

He squinted out at the rain. “And it’s something else, something the Darkling said in the chapel. He thought he needed me to find the firebird. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s why I know I can do it now, because he was so sure.”

I understood. The Darkling’s faith in me had been an intoxicating thing. I wanted that certainty, the knowledge that everything would be dealt with, that someone was in control. Sergei had run to the Darkling looking for that reassurance.
I just want to feel safe again.

“When the time comes,” Mal asked, “can you bring the firebird down?”

Yes.
I was done with hesitation. It wasn’t just that we’d run out of options, or that so much was riding on the firebird’s power. I’d simply grown ruthless enough or selfish enough to take another creature’s life. But I missed the girl who had shown the stag mercy, who had been strong enough to turn away from the lure of power, who had believed in something more. Another casualty of this war.

“It still doesn’t seem real to me,” I said. “And even if it is, it may not be enough. The Darkling has an army. He has allies. We have…” A band of misfits? Some tattooed zealots? Even with the power of the amplifiers, it seemed a mismatched battle.

“Thanks,” Zoya said sourly.

“She has a point,” said Harshaw, propped against a tree. He had Oncat perched on his shoulder and was sending little flames dancing through the air. “I’m not really feeling up for much.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I protested.

“It’ll be enough,” said Mal. “We’ll find the firebird. You’ll face the Darkling. We’ll fight him, and we’ll win.”

“And then what?” I felt panic press in on me again. “Even if we beat the Darkling and I destroy the Fold, Ravka will be vulnerable.” No Lantsov prince to lead. No Darkling. Just a scrawny orphan from Keramzin with whatever force I might piece together from the Grisha who survived and the remnants of the First Army.

“There’s the Apparat,” said Tolya. “The priest may not be trustworthy, but your followers are.”

“And David thought he might be able to heal Nikolai,” Zoya put in.

I turned on her, my anger rising. “Do you think Fjerda will wait for us to find a cure? How about the Shu?”

“Then you’ll make a new alliance,” said Mal.

“Sell my power to the highest bidder?”

“You negotiate. Set your own terms.”

“Hash out a marriage contract, pick a Fjerdan noble or a Shu general? Hope my new husband doesn’t murder me in my sleep?”

“Alina—”

“And where will you go?”

“I’ll stay by your side as long as you let me.”

“Noble Mal. Will you stand guard outside our bedchamber at night?” I knew I was being unfair, but in that moment I didn’t care.

His jaw set. “I’ll do what I have to do to keep you safe.”

“Keep your head down. Do your duty.”

“Yes.”

“One foot in front of the other. Onward to the firebird. Keep marching like a good soldier.”

“That’s right, Alina. I’m a soldier.” I thought he might finally crack and give me the fight I wanted, that I was itching for. Instead, he stood and shook the water from his coat. “And I’ll keep marching because the firebird is all I can give you. No money. No army. No mountaintop stronghold.” He shouldered his pack. “This is all I have to offer. The same old trick.” He stepped out into the rain. I didn’t know if I wanted to run after him to apologize or knock him into the mud.

Zoya lifted one elegant shoulder. “I’d rather have the emerald.”

I stared at her, then shook my head and released something between a laugh and a sigh. My anger went out of me, leaving me feeling petty and embarrassed. Mal hadn’t deserved that. None of them had.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Maybe you’re hungry,” said Zoya. “I always get mean when I’m hungry.”

“Are you hungry all the time?” asked Harshaw.

“You haven’t seen me mean. When you do, you’ll require a very big hanky.”

He snorted. “To dry my tears?”

“To stanch the bleeding.”

This time my laugh was real. Somehow a little of Zoya’s poison was exactly what I needed. Then, despite all my better judgment, I asked the question I’d wanted to ask for nearly a year. “You and Mal, back in Kribirsk—”

“It happened.”

I knew that and I knew there had been plenty of others before her, but it still stung. Zoya glanced at me, her long black lashes sparkling with rain. “But never since,” she said grudgingly, “and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. If a man can say no to me, that’s something.”

I rolled my eyes. Zoya poked me in the arm with one long finger. “He hasn’t been with anyone, you idiot. Do you know what the girls back at the White Cathedral called him?
Beznako.
”

A lost cause.

“It’s funny,” Zoya said contemplatively. “I understand why the Darkling and Nikolai want your power. But Mal looks at you like you’re … well, like you’re me.”

“No he doesn’t,” said Tolya. “He watches her the way Harshaw watches fire. Like he’ll never have enough of her. Like he’s trying to capture what he can before she’s gone.”

Zoya and I gaped at him. Then she scowled. “You know, if you turned a bit of that poetry on me, I might consider giving you a chance.”

“Who says I want one?”

“I want one!” called Harshaw.

Zoya blew a damp curl from her forehead. “Oncat has a better chance than you.”

Harshaw held the little tabby above him. “Why, Oncat,” he said. “You rogue.”

*   *   *

AS WE CLOSED IN
on the area where the Cera Huo was rumored to be, our pace quickened. Mal grew even quieter, his blue eyes moving constantly over the hills. I owed him an apology, but I never seemed to find the right moment to speak to him.

Almost exactly a week into the journey, we came across what we thought was a dry creek bed that ran between two steep rock walls. We’d been following it nearly ten minutes when Mal knelt and ran his hand through the grass.

“Harshaw,” he said, “can you burn some of this scrub away?”

Harshaw struck his flint and sent a low blanket of blue flame rolling over the creek bed, revealing a pattern of stones too regular to be anything but manmade. “It’s a road,” he said in surprise.

“Here?” I asked. We’d passed nothing but empty mountains for miles.

We stayed alert, searching for signs of what might have come before, hoping to see etched symbols, maybe the little altars we’d seen carved into the rock closer to Dva Stolba, eager for some kind of proof that we were on the right path. But the only lesson in the stones seemed to be that cities rose and fell and were forgotten.
You live in a single moment. I live in a thousand.
I might live long enough to see Os Alta turn to dust. Or maybe I’d turn my power back on myself and end it all before then. What would life be like when the people I loved were gone? When there were no mysteries left?

We followed the road to where it just seemed to end, buried in a slump of fallen rock covered in grass and yellow wildflowers. We scrambled over it, and when we reached the top, a sliver of ice crept into my bones.

It was as if the color had been leached out of the landscape. The field before us was gray grass. A black ridge stretched along the horizon, covered in trees, their bark smooth and glossy as polished slate, their angular branches free of leaves. But the eerie thing was the way they grew, in perfect, regular lines, equidistant, as if they had each been planted with infinite care.

“That looks wrong,” said Harshaw.

“They’re soldier trees,” said Mal. “It’s just the way they grow, like they’re keeping ranks.”

“That’s not the only reason,” said Tolya. “This is the ashwood. The gateway to the Cera Huo.”

Mal took out his map. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s a story. There was a massacre here.”

“A battle?” I asked.

“No. A Shu battalion was brought here by their enemies. They were prisoners of war.”

“Which enemies?” asked Harshaw.

Tolya shrugged. “Ravkan, Fjerdan, maybe other Shu. This was old days.”

“What happened to them?”

“They starved, and when the hunger became too great, they turned on each other. It’s said the last man standing planted a tree for each of his fallen brethren. And now they wait for travelers to pass too close to their branches, so they can claim a final meal.”

“Lovely,” grumbled Zoya. “Remind me to never ask you for a bedtime story.”

“It’s just a legend,” Mal said. “I’ve seen those trees near Balakirev.”