“Ah, so you’re just being practical, of course.”
She could hear the skepticism in his voice, and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. But it was hard not to look at these muddy streets, the gray houses with their warped roofs and slanting porches, the tilting spire of the church, and not think of Pachina, the town she’d left behind. She refused to call it home.
“Do you know what changed everything in my village?” She kept her eyes on the road, rutted with holes and broken rocks from the previous night’s rain. “The draft. When the war was so dire that the crown was forced to start taking girls as well as boys to fight.”
“I thought the draft was seen as a curse.”
“For some,” Zoya conceded. “But for others of us it offered an escape, a chance at something other than being someone’s wife and dying in childbirth. When I was little, before my powers emerged, I dreamed of being a soldier.”
“Little Zoya with her bayonet?”
Zoya sniffed. “I always had the makings of a general.” But her mother had seen only the value in her daughter’s beauty. Zoya’s face had been her dowry at the tender age of nine. If not for Liliyana, she would have been bartered away like a new calf. But could she blame her mother? She remembered Sabina’s raw hands, her tired eyes, the gaunt lines of her body—perpetually weary and without hope. And yet, after all these years, Zoya found no scrap of forgiveness for her desperate mother or her weak father. They could rot. She gave her reins a snap.
Zoya and the rest of Nikolai’s party rode through the barley fields and inspected the new armaments factory, endured the singing of a children’s choir, and then had tea with the local council and the choirmaster.
“You should poison the choirmaster for inflicting that atrocity on us,” Zoya grumbled.
“They were adorable.”
“They were flat.”
Zoya was forced to put on a little demonstration of summoning for the local women’s group and resisted the urge to blow the town magistrate’s wig off his head.
At last they were permitted to ride out with the governor and see the great swath of forest that had supposedly been felled in a single night. It was an eerie sight. The smell of sap was heavy in the air, and the trees had fallen in perfect lines all the way to the crest of a hill that overlooked a tiny chapel dedicated to Sankt Ilya in Chains. The trees all lay in the same direction, like bodies laid to rest, as if pointing them west toward the Fold. They’d let Yuri emerge from the coach to stretch his legs and see the supposed miracle site, Tolya towering over him like the one tree that had refused to fall. According to Tolya, they’d begun to piece together a text that might well be the original description of the obisbaya.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Zoya said, watching the skinny monk talk animatedly to a beleaguered-looking Tolya, “that this is all contrivance? That the Apparat and the monk are not enemies at all? That they both wanted you away from the safety of the capital, and that they’ve gotten just that for their trouble?”
“Of course it has,” said Nikolai. “But such displays are beyond even the Apparat’s considerable reach. It pains my pride to say it, but there may be something at work here that’s bigger than both of us.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said. But looking out at the felled trees, she felt as if an invisible hand were guiding them, and she did not like it. “I don’t trust him,” Zoya said. “Either of them.”
“The Apparat is a man of ambition, and that means he can be managed.”
“And our monk friend? Is Yuri easily managed as well?”
“Yuri is a true believer. Either that or he’s the greatest actor who ever lived, which I know isn’t possible.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I managed to smile through that choir concert, so clearly I am the greatest actor who ever lived.” Nikolai nudged his horse with his heels. “On to the next town, Nazyalensky. We hope or we falter.”
Zoya was grateful when they rode into Adena, their last stop before the Fold. Soon they would have answers or they would be headed home. At least she’d be free of the anticipation and the fear of what they might find when they reached the Unsea.
The village was like all the others except for the pretty lake it overlooked. This time they’d been greeted by an off-key band and a parade of livestock and giant vegetables.
“That squash is as wide as I am tall,” Nikolai said beneath his breath as he smiled and waved.
“And twice as handsome.”
“Half as handsome,” he protested.
“Ah,” said Zoya, “but the squash doesn’t talk.”
At last they rose from their seats on the bandstand and made their way to the church. For once, the locals did not follow. Zoya, Nikolai, Yuri, and the twins were left to walk the path out of town with only the local priest for company.
“Are there no pilgrims?” Tolya asked him as they left the outskirts of town.
“The pilgrims are kept to the confines of the village,” said the priest. He was an older man with a tidy white beard and spectacles much like Yuri’s. “Visitors are only permitted access to the site under supervision and at certain hours. The cathedral is being repaired, and we wish to preserve Sankta Lizabeta’s work.”
“Is it so very fragile?” asked Yuri.
“It is extraordinary and not something to be picked apart for souvenirs.”
Zoya felt a chill creep over her. Something was different in the air here. The insects had gone silent. She heard no call of birds from the surrounding trees as they moved through the cool shadows of the wood and farther from the town. She met Tamar’s gaze and they exchanged a nod. Even at a supposed holy site, the king could be at risk of assassination.
They emerged at the top of a high, mounded hill next to a cathedral surrounded by scaffolding, its golden domes gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. A statue of Sankta Lizabeta stood before the entrance. A riot of red roses had burst through the stone, cracking open her veiled skull. The flowers tumbled over the statue in wild profusion, surrounding its marble skirts in a wide circle like a pool of blood. Their sweet smell pulsed in a thick, syrupy wave that seemed to glow with summer heat.
Yuri’s face was ecstatic. “I wanted to believe. I did believe, but this …”
Zoya realized he was weeping. “Be silent,” she bit out. “Or I’ll stuff you back into the coach myself.”
“Look,” said Tolya, and she heard new reverence in his voice.
Black tears ran from Lizabeta’s eyes. They gleamed hard as obsidian, as if they’d frozen there or been cast in stone themselves.
In the valley below, Zoya could just glimpse the sprawl of Kribirsk in the distance and the glimmer of the dead white sands that had once been the Shadow Fold beyond. They were close.
Nikolai hissed in a breath, and Zoya looked at him sharply. The others’ eyes were locked on the statue, but before Nikolai could yank the cuff of his glove back into place, Zoya glimpsed the dark veining at his wrist pulse black, as if … as if whatever was inside him had recognized something familiar here and woken. Part of her wanted to draw away, afraid that she would see the demon emerge, but she was a soldier and she would not waver.