Nina turned her back to erase the board and to hide her expression. It was possible she’d gotten carried away. You don’t know how easy it is to ruin your cover, Nina. She could just imagine Adrik’s singsong What did I tell you?
“Yes,” she said. “I paid close attention. But you’re also a natural. You’re picking up on the work very quickly.” That at least was true. Hanne had an ease with her power that was something special. But her face was troubled. “What is it?” Nina asked.
“That word. Natural.” Hanne ran her finger over one of the sheets where she’d scrawled the conjugation of another Zemeni verb. Her penmanship was tragic. “When I was younger, my father took me everywhere. To ride. To hunt. It was unorthodox, but he longed for a son, and I think he believed there was no harm in it. I loved it. Fighting, horsemanship, running free. But when I got older and it was time to present me at court … I couldn’t shake it off.”
And why should you have to? Nina thought. She didn’t have any great love for horses and preferred not to run anywhere unless being chased, but at least she was allowed those opportunities.
Hanne folded her arms, her shoulders hunching, looking like she wanted to crumple into herself. “Unnatural, they called me. A woman’s body is meant to be soft, but mine was hard. A lady is meant to take small, graceful steps, but I strode. I was a laughingstock.” Hanne gazed up at the ceiling. “My father blamed himself for corrupting me. I couldn’t sing or paint, but I could clean a deer and string a bow. I could build a shelter. All I wanted was to escape to the woods. Sleep beneath the stars.”
“That sounds … well, that sounds horrible,” admitted Nina. “But I think I can understand the appeal.”
“I tried to change. I really did.” Hanne shrugged. “I failed. If I fail again…”
Her gaze was bleak, and Nina wondered what grim future she was seeing. “What happens if you fail again?”
“The school was supposed to make me presentable. Good marriage material. If the Wellmother can’t fix me, I’ll never be allowed to go home, never be presented at court. It should have happened two years ago.”
“Would it be so bad not to go back?”
“And never see my parents? Live like an exile?”
“Are those the choices?”
“I find a way to fit in, or I take vows and live the rest of my life out here, in service to Djel among Women of the Well.” She scowled. “I wish I was an Inferni instead of a Heartrender.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nina said without thinking, her pride bristling. How could anyone want to be a Summoner instead of Corporalki? Everyone knows we’re the best Order. “I mean … why would anyone want to be an Inferni?”
Hanne’s bright eyes flashed as if in challenge. “So I could melt the Ice Court from the inside out. Wash the whole big mess into the sea.”
Dangerous words. And maybe Nina should have pretended to be scandalized. Instead she grinned. “The grandest puddle in the world.”
“Exactly,” said Hanne, returning her smile, that wicked edge curling her lips
Suddenly, Nina wanted to tell Hanne all of it. My friends and I blew a hole in the Ice Court wall! We stole a Fjerdan tank! All Saints, did she want to brag? Nina gave her head a shake. This is a chance to gain her confidence, she told herself. Take it.
She sat down at the desk next to Hanne’s and said, “If you could go anywhere, do anything, what would you choose for yourself?”
“Novyi Zem,” Hanne said instantly. “I’d get a job, make my own money, hire myself out as a sharpshooter.”
“You’re that good?”
“I am,” Hanne said without a hint of hesitation. “I think about it every time I ride out. Just disappearing. Making everyone believe I was lost in a storm or that I was carried away by the river.”
Beastly idea. Come to Ravka. “Then why not do it? Why not just go?”
Hanne stared at her, shocked. “I couldn’t do that to my parents. I couldn’t shame them that way.”
Nina narrowly avoided rolling her eyes. Fjerdans and their honor. “Of course not,” she said swiftly. But she couldn’t help but think of Hanne riding into the clearing, rifle raised, braids loose, a warrior born. There was gold in her, Nina could see it, the shine dimmed by years of being told there was something wrong in the way she was made. Those glimpses of the real Hanne, the Hanne who was meant to be, were driving her to distraction. You’re not here to make a new friend, Zenik, she chastised herself. You’re here for information.
“What if the Wellmother casts you out?” she asked.
“She won’t. My father is a generous donor.”
“And if she catches you flouncing about in men’s trousers?” Nina prodded.
“She won’t.”
“If my friends and I had been less generous, she might have.”
Now Hanne leaned back and grinned with easy confidence. There you are, thought Nina. “It would have been your word against mine. I would have been dressed neatly in my pinafore and back behind the convent walls before you’d knocked on the Wellmother’s door.”
Interesting. Nina put all the condescension she could summon in her tone and said, “Of course you would have.”
Hanne sat up straighter and jabbed her finger into the surface of the desk. “I know every step that creaks in this place. I know just where the cook stashes the key to the west kitchen door, and I have pinafores and changes of clothes stowed everywhere from the chapel to the roof. I don’t get caught.”
Nina held up her hands to make peace. “I just think you might consider more caution.”
“Says the girl teaching me Grisha skills in the halls of Djel.”
“Maybe I have less to lose than you do.”
Hanne raised a brow. “Or maybe you just think you’re better at being bold.”
Try me, thought Nina. But all she said was, “Back to work. Let’s see if you can make my heart race.”
ZOYA HAD SPENT LITTLE TIME IN Kribirsk since the war. There wasn’t much cause, and it held too many bad memories. In the days when Ravka had been split from its western coastline by the Shadow Fold, Kribirsk had served as the last place of safety, a town where merchants and bold travelers outfitted their journeys and where soldiers might spend a final night drinking away their terror or paying for comfort in a lover’s arms before they boarded a sandskiff and were launched into the unnatural darkness of the Fold. Many never returned.
Kribirsk had been a port, but now the dark territory known as the Unsea was gone, and Kribirsk was just another small town with little to offer but a sad history.
Vestiges of the town’s former glory remained—the jail and barracks, the building that had once housed officers of the First Army and where the Triumvirate had first met with Ravka’s new king. But the sprawling encampment of tents and horses and soldiers was no more. It was said you could still find unspent bullets in the dust, and occasionally scraps of silk from the black pavilion where the Darkling had once held court.
Though the darkness of the Fold and the monsters that populated it were gone, the sands were not, and the shifting ground could be tricky for wagons to navigate. Merchants traversing Ravka still came to the drydocks to book passage on sandskiffs, but now guards were hired to protect cargo from marauders and thieves, not from the threat of the flesh-eating volcra that had once terrorized travelers. The monsters had vanished, and all that remained was a long, barren stretch of gray sand, eerie in its emptiness. Nothing could grow in the lifeless terrain that the Darkling’s power had left behind.