The Wellmother eyed the soiled pinafore. “The mud seems fresh.”
“I went riding only this morning. You’ll see the clothes are my size, far too long for Mila. It is my fault, not hers.”
“Is this true?” the Wellmother asked Nina.
Nina looked at Hanne.
“Is it?” the Wellmother demanded.
Nina nodded.
The Wellmother huffed a frustrated breath. “Finish the search,” she instructed the Springmaidens. “Hanne, I cannot begin to express my disappointment. I will have to write to your father immediately.”
“I understand, Wellmother,” Hanne said, her misery clear. It was no performance. She had risked her future at the convent to save Nina.
“And you, Enke Jandersdat,” said the Wellmother. “Your role here is to instruct Hanne in the Zemeni language, not to enable her disruptive behaviors. I will have to reconsider this whole arrangement.”
“Yes, Wellmother,” said Nina contritely, and watched as the woman shuffled Hanne down the hallway, closing the door behind her.
Leoni flopped back on the pillows. “Please tell me whatever you learned inside the factory was worth it.”
Nina lay back, adrenaline still flooding her body. “It was worth it.” But she’d seen the look in Hanne’s eyes as the Wellmother led her away—she was going to want answers.
Nina thought of the punishment Hanne would take, what a letter home to her father might mean. She owed Hanne—maybe her life. She most certainly owed her the truth.
Help us.
But there was no way Nina could give it to her.
ZOYA HAD THOUGHT THEY would be led to new rooms that would serve as their living quarters. Instead, Juris and Grigori departed, and with a wave of Elizaveta’s hand, the table and chairs dropped into the floor. A moment later, new walls rose around them. The sand twisted and arched, forming three doorways around a central chamber—all of it the lifeless, sun-leached color of old bone.
Zoya was not sure how much more of this she could stand. The world felt like it had been torn open.
“I wish we could offer more comfortable accommodations,” said Elizaveta. “But this is a place of few comforts. Rest if you can.”
Zoya’s room looked like a bedchamber in a castle of old: pointed windows, heavy leather-backed chairs that sat before a vast fireplace, a huge canopied bed hung with velvet curtains. And yet there was no glass in the windows. There was no leather, no velvet. It was all that fine-grained sand, every item, every surface wrought in the same driftwood hue. The fire that burned in the grate flickered blue like that horrid dragon’s flames. It was a phantom room. Zoya’s hand went to her wrist. She needed to talk to Nikolai.
She opened the door—though it was hard to even think of it as a door when it hadn’t existed moments before.
Nikolai stood in the archway of a chamber identical to hers.
“It’s like looking at a sketch of something grand,” he said, turning slowly to take in his new quarters. He ran a hand over the gray sand mantel. “Luxurious in its details but devoid of anything that would actually make you want to stay here.”
“This is a mistake,” said Zoya. Her head hurt. Her heart hurt. She had to keep her fingers from wandering continuously to her wrist. But she needed to think clearly. There were larger things at stake than what she’d lost. There always were.
“Where’s Yuri?” he asked.
“Probably genuflecting somewhere. Nikolai, is this a bargain we want to make?”
“We came here for a cure, and now we’ve been offered one.”
“You could die.”
“A risk we’ve long been willing to take. In fact, I believe you offered to put a bullet in my head not so long ago.”
“We have less than three weeks before the party in Os Alta,” she protested.
“Then I will have to master the monster in that time.”
“You saw what they can do. What if we shatter the bounds of the Unsea and unleash them on Ravka? Are you willing to make that gamble?”
Nikolai ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know.”
“And yet you agreed to dance at the first asking like a boy at a country ball.”
“I did.”
And he didn’t sound remotely sorry about it. “We can’t trust them. We don’t really even know who they are.”
“I understand that. Just as you understand that is the choice we must make. Why are you fighting it, Zoya?”
Zoya leaned her head against the edge of the window and looked out at the nothing beyond. Had the Saints been staring at this same empty view for hundreds of years?
“If these are the Saints,” she said, “then who have we been praying to all this time?”
“Do you pray?” Nikolai couldn’t conceal his surprise.
“I did. When I was young. They never answered.”
“We’ll get you another.”
“Another … ?” It took her a moment to understand what he meant. Without realizing it, Zoya had let her hand return to the place where her amplifier had been. She forced herself to release her wrist. “You can’t get me another,” she said, her voice thick with scorn. Good. Better that than self-pity. “It doesn’t work that way. I’ve worn that cuff, those bones, since I was thirteen years old.”
“Zoya, I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t know who these Saints really are. All I know is that they’re the last hope we have.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Elizaveta could be as gracious as she liked. It didn’t change the fact that they’d been abducted. “We’re prisoners here, Nikolai. We don’t know what they may ask of us.”
“The first thing will be to banish your pride.”
Nikolai and Zoya jumped. Juris stood in the doorway. He was in human form, but the shape of the dragon seemed to linger over him.
“Come, Zoya Nazyalensky, little storm witch. It’s time.”
“For what?” Zoya bit out, feeling anger ignite inside her—familiar, welcome, so much more useful than grief.
“For your first lesson,” he said. “The boy king isn’t the only one with something to learn.”
Zoya did not want to go with the dragon, but she made herself follow him down the twisting halls of the mad palace. She told herself she’d be able to learn more about the ritual Nikolai was expected to endure and determine the Saints’ true motives. The stronger voice inside her said that if she got to know Juris, she could find a way to punish him for what he’d taken from her. She was too aware of her pulse beating beneath the skin of her bare wrist. It felt naked, vulnerable, and utterly wrong.
Still, as much as she would have liked to give her thoughts over to revenge, the path they were taking required all her attention. The palace was vast, and though some individual rooms seemed to have specific characteristics, most of the hallways, stairs, and passages were wrought of the same glittering, colorless sand. It didn’t help that no matter where you were inside the massive structure, you always had the same view: a wide gray expanse of nothing.
“I can feel your anger, storm witch,” Juris said. “It makes the air crackle.”