“The only danger to me will be an overabundance of menu planning,” said Genya with a laugh. She drew back, and Zoya was both horrified and touched to see tears in Genya’s amber eye. “Do you really believe a cure is possible?”
“I have to. Ravka can’t endure another power grab, another coup, another war. Nikolai is insufferable, but he’s the only option we have.”
“He’s a good king,” Genya said. “I know the difference. Bring him back to us whole.”
“I will,” Zoya promised, though she didn’t know if it was a promise she could keep.
“And be careful, Zoya. Ravka needs you too.”
Zoya felt a suspicious prickling behind her eyes and hurried out the door before the situation became more maudlin than she could abide.
They traveled in luxury, surrounded by outriders and soldiers who carried the double-eagle flag. Yuri was kept in the coach, sequestered with Tolya as they scoured old scrolls and religious texts for information on the obisbaya. Another coach had been devoted to the books they’d gathered from the libraries at the Grand Palace and the Little Palace—and a few Tamar had obtained by stealth from the catacombs of the Priestguard—scholarly treatises bound in leather, crumbling hymnals, even old children’s books, illustrations of what might have been a thorn wood curling at the borders of their yellowing pages.
Though Yuri had wrung his hands and protested in querulous tones, he had been convinced to set aside his black robes for the brown roughspun of an ordinary monk so he could travel with them anonymously. He’d given in readily enough. Yuri believed that the secret agenda of this trip—the visits to the miracle sites and the Fold—was to determine whether the Starless One should be made a Saint and a church built on the site of his martyrdom.
“But for that to happen,” Nikolai had warned, “I need to know everything you can determine about the obisbaya—the ritual, the location of the thorn wood, this whole notion of purification.”
Yuri’s eyes had lit at that last word. “Purification,” he’d repeated. “A return to true belief. The faith of the people restored.”
Zoya knew Nikolai hoped the monk’s research would lead them to a ritual that might purge him of the monster, but even if they were somehow successful, she had to wonder where all of it would end.
“What are you going to do with him when this is over?” she’d asked Nikolai. “The people will revolt outright if you actually try to make the Darkling a Saint. You could start a holy war and give the Apparat the perfect chance to challenge you outright—and he’ll do it beneath Alina’s banner.”
“We’ll find a way to compromise,” Nikolai had said. “We’ll set Yuri up in a nice snug hermitage to prepare a treatise on the Darkling’s good works with all the books he wants. We’ll tell him the matter has to be put before the people. We’ll send him to the Wandering Isle to spread the gospel of the Starless One.”
“That sounds suspiciously like exile.”
“You say exile, I say extended holiday.”
“We should send him to Ketterdam to preach to Kaz Brekker and the rest of those reprobates,” suggested Zoya.
Nikolai winced. “He’d certainly get his martyrdom.”
The king hadn’t toured the country since immediately after the Darkling had been vanquished, when he’d stepped into the gap left by his exiled parents and onto the throne. Instead of remaining in the capital as the aristocracy had expected, Nikolai had taken to the roads and the skies, traveling without rest. Zoya had barely known the king then, and she certainly hadn’t trusted him. She’d understood that he was their fractured country’s best hope of survival, and she could admit that he’d shown ingenuity during the civil war, but he was also a Lantsov, and his father had brought nothing but misery to Ravka. For all Zoya knew at the time, the new king might be little more than a handsome, fast-talking catastrophe in the making.
But Nikolai had done what so many men had failed to do: He’d surprised her. He had shored up Ravka’s borders, negotiated new loans with Kerch, reestablished their military outposts, and used the fleet he’d built in his secret life as the privateer Sturmhond to keep the Fjerdans stymied at sea. He had visited cities and towns, distributing food, talking to local leaders and nobility, marshaling every ounce of his appeal to win their support and cement public opinion in his favor after the destruction of the Fold. When he had finally returned to Os Alta, he had created a new flag with the sun in ascendance behind the Lantsov double eagle and been crowned by the Apparat in the newly built royal chapel. Zoya had felt the stirrings of what might have been hope.
She had been hard at work with the Triumvirate, trying to reassemble the Second Army and make a plan for its future. Some days Zoya had felt proud and full of excitement, but on others she’d felt like a child masquerading as a leader. It had been harrowing, thrilling to know that they were all standing at the precipice of something new.
But now, as they traveled from town to town, Zoya understood that the task of unifying Ravka and building a new foundation for the Second Army had been the easy part. Dragging the country into the future was proving harder. Nikolai had spent his life waiting to govern and learning how to do it, but while Nikolai craved change, Ravka fought it. His reforms to the tithing and land ownership laws had led to grumbling among the nobility. Of course the serfs should have rights, they protested, eventually. The king went too far and moved too fast.
Zoya knew Nikolai was aware of the resistance that had grown up against him, and he intended to use this trip to help defeat it. The days were given to travel and winning the commoners through spectacle and gifts of coin or food. In the evenings, their party took up lodging in the homes of noblemen and local governors and joined grand dinners that went late into the night. After the meals, Nikolai would sequester himself with the head of the house, talking through reforms, requesting aid, smoothing feathers ruffled by the peril of change. Sometimes Nikolai would ask Zoya to join them when all she wanted was to fall into bed.
“Why should I bother?” she grumbled at Baron Levkin’s dacha in Kelink. “Your charm is enough to carry the day.”
“They need to see my general,” he said.
It was true enough. The nobles still thrilled to tales of warfare and the strength of the Second Army. But Zoya also knew that her presence—tart-tongued and sour as it might be—changed the atmosphere in the room, made the conversation seem less a negotiation than a friendly exchange. It was another reason Nikolai desperately needed a queen. So she did her best to paste a smile on her face and be pleasant, and occasionally offered a word regarding the Grisha forces if anyone thought to ask. It exhausted her.
“How do you do it?” she spat at Nikolai one night as they left a particularly productive session with a duke in Grevyakin. He’d begun the conversation determined to reject Nikolai’s suggestion to use his fields for cotton farming, calling for a return to the old ways. His entire home was full of peasant woodcrafts and handwoven textiles, the props of a simpler time in which a serf might be counted upon to create pretty objects for his master and politely starve in silence. But two hours and several glasses of strong spirits later, the old duke was roaring with laughter at Nikolai’s jokes and had agreed to convert two more of his farms to cotton. Another hour gone and he promised to allow a new mill and cotton gin to be built on his property. “How do you change their minds and make them thank you for the experience?”