Nina wasn’t certain what to say. Or if she wanted to say anything at all. The specifics of the Ketterdam auction were unknown to most in Ravka even among the Grisha, and Nina doubted Adrik would be thrilled to discover she’d been running with a gang of criminals. “I don’t really know. We were … working together in Ketterdam. The worst of the mission was over. We thought we were all safe. But then Matthias showed up, bleeding. He’d been shot.” He’d found his way to her, despite the fatal wound, despite the pain he was in. For one last kiss, for a final goodbye. “There were drüskelle in the city, and they certainly had their reasons for wanting Matthias dead. But we all had prices on our heads. People were hungry for our blood, and the streets were a holy mess.”
She could still see his blood staining his shirt, feel the soft stubble of his nape beneath her fingertips. His hair had just begun to grow out properly, thick and golden. “He wouldn’t tell me who was responsible,” she said. Matthias hadn’t wanted to burden her with that. He’d known she would strike out in her grief. But he should have understood that the mystery of his death would punish her. She’d thought her new mission working with the Hringsa in Fjerda, getting Grisha to freedom, would help ease her grief and her guilt, but she felt no better than she had at the start of it all. “It eats at me.”
“I know that feeling.” Adrik took another sip from his flask and winced at the taste. “Vengeance was all that drove me at the end of the war. I wanted the Darkling to pay for my arm, for the lives of my friends. I wanted him dead.”
“And you got your wish.”
“And yet my arm didn’t grow back. None of my friends came back to life.”
“I could help with that,” Nina said, and was relieved when Adrik laughed his dry, reluctant chuckle. Some Grisha blanched at any mention of her new power. She’d been a Heartrender once, felt the pulse of the world beating along with her heart. Parem had changed her. Nina had felt like a fraud sitting beneath the golden dome in the Little Palace, wearing her red kefta. She could no longer manipulate the living, hear the flow of their blood or the song of their cells. But the dead did her bidding—and she supposed she did their bidding too. She’d come to Gäfvalle, after all.
Nina finished the last of her tea. She could sense Adrik waiting. She knew it was time. Maybe laying Matthias to rest would be the thing to help free her heart from this burden. She only knew she could not go on this way.
She rose. “I’m ready,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t true.
They rode out from camp, following the river.
Tell me a story, Matthias. She needed to hear him now, needed to know some part of him would remain with her. Tell me about your family.
Tell me about yours, Nina. Why did you never speak of them?
Because she’d never known them. She’d grown up in a foundling home not unlike the orphanage at Keramzin. There were no records of Nina’s parents. She was one more child who had arrived without papers or history. Keletchka, as they called it—from the fruit crate. She’d been given the name of one of the home’s patrons and had worn donated clothes that arrived tied up in big sacks and smelling of the chemicals they were boiled in to make sure they were free of lice.
Were you unhappy, Nina?
No, Matthias.
It wasn’t in your nature, even then.
It is now, she thought. Whatever spark had burned in her was no match for this grief.
But back then, she hadn’t been unhappy, despite the chores and the boring lessons and the meals that were mostly cabbage. There had always been noise and company and games to play. She had appointed herself the home’s official greeter, welcoming new arrivals, helping to name the new babies, and offering up her rag doll, Feodora, to anyone who might need a friend on their first night in the dormitories.
Besides, the staff always treated her kindly. Come, little Nina, tell us the news, Baba Inessa would say and seat Nina on a stool in the kitchen, where she could suck on a bread crust and watch the women at their work.
Nina had been just seven years old when she’d met her first tyrant. His name was Tomek, and he changed everything at the foundling home. He wasn’t the tallest or the strongest, he was simply the meanest, willing to strike and bite even the littlest orphans. If someone had a toy, he would break it. When a child was sleeping soundly, he would pinch them awake. He was all manners and dimples when the staff were near, but as soon as they were gone, cruel Tomek would return.
As if they’d just been waiting for a leader, a group of bullies coalesced around him—boys and girls who had always seemed nice enough until they developed a taste for others’ tears. Nina did her best to avoid them, but it was as if Tomek could smell her happiness like smoke from a kitchen fire.
One morning just after the Feast of Sankt Nikolai, Baba Inessa gave Nina an orange to share with the other children. Nina warned them to be silent, but they’d giggled and whooped until of course Tomek had marched over to investigate and snatched it from her hands.
Give it back! she’d shouted as he’d dug his thumbs into the orange’s waxy skin. It’s for everyone!
But Tomek and his friends had just jeered. You’re fat enough already, he’d said, and pushed her so hard she’d fallen on her backside.
Tomek had shoved the whole orange into his mouth and bitten down, laughing as pulp and juice dribbled over his chin. He laughed even harder when, to Nina’s great shame, she started crying.
“Look how red you are,” Tomek said, his mouth still full. “You look like a rotten apple.”
He and his friends crowded around Nina, poking her belly, her arms, her legs. “Look how rotten she is!”
Nina had been scared, but more than anything, she’d been angry. Curled up on the floor, she’d felt something in her shift, a long, luxurious stretch, like a cat yearning toward a sunbeam. All her breathlessness and fear rushed out of her, and it was as if she could feel Tomek’s lungs as they expanded, contracted. She squeezed her fists tight.
“Look how—” Tomek hiccuped. Then his friends hiccuped. It was funny. At first. They stopped poking Nina. They looked at one another and giggled, the sound broken by startled little huffs.
They kept hiccuping. “It hurts,” said one, rubbing his chest.
“I can’t stop,” said another, bending double.
It went on that way, all of them hiccuping and moaning long into the night, like an assembly of discontented frogs.
Nina found she could do all kinds of things. She could soothe a crying infant. She could ease her own tummy ache. She could make Tomek’s nose run and run and run until his whole shirt was wet with snot. Sometimes she had to stop herself from doing anything too terrible. She didn’t want to be a tyrant too. Only a few months later, the Grisha Examiners had come to the foundling home and Nina had been taken to the Little Palace.
“Goodbye!” she’d called as she’d run through the halls, saying her farewells. “Goodbye! Write me lots of letters, please! And be nice,” she’d warned Tomek.
“She’s a merry child,” Baba Inessa had told the Grisha woman in her red kefta. “Try not to break her of it.”
No one has, Nina. No one ever will.
I’m not so sure, Matthias. War hadn’t done it. Captivity. Torture. But loss was something different, because she saw no end to it, only the far horizon, stretching on and on.