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“Don’t lecture me.”
Ramson raised his hands. “All right, I was prying. But as you said, we made a Trade, so what’s the point of being stuck with each other for the next six weeks if we can’t trust each other?”
Behind them, on the bed, May had sat up and was listening with her head cocked to one side. The witch’s eyes flickered to the girl and her expression softened momentarily. “All right,” she said, lowering her voice as she turned back to Ramson. “Since you mention ‘trust.’ Here.”
Ramson took the drawing she offered him. This sketch was swathed in shadows. Whereas the others had seemed to capture moments and memories, this one had captured the subject like a portrait. He recognized the man on the page: bald, with distrustful large eyes that were set far apart from his thin nose. It was a sketch of the same man she’d shown him in prison.
Her alchemist.
This sketch bore the same painstaking detail as the other one, which had likely been destroyed in their waterfall escapade. Ramson studied the drawing more closely, taking in the man’s white priest’s robes and the circlet of the four Deities that hung around his neck. “This is a good start, Witch. I need you to tell me everything you know about him.”
“He worked in the Salskoff Palace ten years ago. He disappeared and was back in … in Salskoff eleven moons ago.”
He waited for more, but she clamped her mouth tightly shut. “That’s it?”
“I know nothing else,” she said curtly. Her eyes burned, and her hands had curled into fists as she spoke. Whoever this man was, this girl had a debt to settle with him.
He’d find out why soon enough. For now, Ramson settled on a different question. “An alchemist, you say,” he mused. “Was he an Affinite?”
Many alchemists possessed unique Affinities and were hired by the upper crust of Cyrilia to lengthen and strengthen lives with their peculiar practices. Some of the most powerful alchemists, Ramson had heard, had metaphysical Affinities. Pain. Calm. Happiness. Intangibles, coveted by those who had coins to spare.
“I’m not certain,” the witch said, looping a strand of her hair behind her ear. Ramson had already picked this up as a nervous tic of hers—like the way she fidgeted with her hood. “He brewed Deys’voshk and other elixirs.”
Likely an Affinite, then. His mind snagged on another detail, on the Deys’krug and the prayer robes. “Was he a priest—or a devout man? Have you tried starting from there?”
“He wasn’t a devout man,” she said bitterly, and then sighed. “I’ve tried that. I’ve looked all over the Empire for him, but I haven’t found a thing. The bounty hunters I hired never even got close.”
“Amateurs.”
She looked as though she wanted to slap him. “I wouldn’t be so confident. If this man isn’t standing in front of me in three weeks, I’ll bleed you dry.”
“Relax,” he said lazily, waving the sketch in front of her. “I have a plan.”
Ramson tapped his fingers on the sketch. Two sightings, ten years apart—the trail was colder than death by now. But he had two leads: First, this man used to work at the Palace. And that the man was likely an Affinite on the run meant he might’ve had to reinvent his identity and reestablish himself.
But if there was one source that tracked Affinites’ movements as closely as an eagle tracked its quarry, it was Kerlan’s brokers. The thought of strolling into their territory was one he didn’t care for. Ramson glanced at the witch and the child, unease twinging in his stomach. Could it be that they were victims of the very brokers that they needed in order to find this alchemist?
“Good.” Ana launched herself from the table and marched toward the bed, where she retrieved a small satchel from beneath the furs. May glared at Ramson, and then promptly began folding the few items of clothing on the bed and slipping them into the satchel. “We leave in one hour. I assume you’ll have figured out where we’re going by then.”
“I already have.” There was only one city in the vicinity of Ghost Falls that was crawling with ruthless Affinite traffickers hungry for information and bounty. “We’re going to Kyrov.”
7 (#uf981c1fc-be5d-5581-950f-ba8c4b297fbf)
The morning air was crisp, the snow glittering and dusted with gold from a distant sun by the time they set out. The quiet was broken only by the huff of their breath, that clouded in the cold air, and the crunch of their boots through snow. The boreal forest stretched from the Krazyast Triangle at the northernmost tip of Cyrilia to the Dzhyvekha Mountains that bordered Nandji in the south. Here, up north, the snow never melted, but farther south, Ana knew, summer saw the tips of green grasses and conifer pines peeking out from beneath a veil of white.
Ana hoisted her rucksack farther up her shoulders, the rustle of her parchments and the clinks of her remaining globefires strangely calming. By her side, May plodded along, turning her head this way and that to whatever sensations she felt coming from the earth buried deep below. She held a freshly lit globefire between her hands, the flames inside crawling along the oil that coated the glass, warming hands and providing light during nights. They’d spent many moons traveling like this, just her and May, a globefire, the compass she held in her hands, and the eternal silence of the forest.
Which, at the moment, was being disrupted in the most irritating way possible.
“So, how did you two beautiful damas end up all the way over here?” Quicktongue’s cheerful voice drifted to them from a dozen paces behind.
Ana gritted her teeth. May shot her a knowing look and rolled her eyes.
“Rather far north for a girl from the Aseatic Isles,” the con man continued. A flock of pine harriers burst into flight from some shrubs ahead.
Ana was about to spin around and snap at him, but the meaning behind his words settled into her with a chill. Everything Ramson Quicktongue said was deliberate, every word carefully chosen—it could hardly be coincidence that he was questioning May’s origin. And the last thing Ana wanted was for the con man to know about May’s status: a lost Affinite with no identity and no protection.
“It’s none of your business,” she replied.
“Oh, but it is,” Quicktongue pressed on in that tone of voice that made Ana want to strangle him. “Seeing as we’re going to be partnering together for six weeks.”
“Let’s keep it at that. A partnership, where we don’t speak to each other unless absolutely necessary.”
“This is necessary.” He was catching up to them now, his voice growing louder and more obnoxious by the second. The crunch of snow beneath his boots drew closer. “I’ll have to keep you both safe, especially if we run into Whitecloaks.”
Ana whirled around. His last sentence had set off a series of sparks in her head that ignited into fury. “Keep us safe?” she repeated, ignoring the way the compass arrow spun in her hands to readjust. “Listen, you arrogant man. May and I have survived this long by ourselves, and we don’t need you to keep us safe or whatever you think you need to do. This was a Trade, and I will hold you to getting your part of it done. No more, no less.”
She was breathing hard when she finished, and she realized she’d closed the distance between her and Quicktongue so that they were barely two steps apart. He’d stopped where he was, his face a mask frozen like the forest around them. His hazel eyes, however, watched her with the intent and cunning of a fox.
“All right,” he said softly, his breath unfurling in a small plume between them. “But let me ask you this: Have you ever been to Kyrov?”
Ana thought of all that she’d read of the trade town that thrived for its proximity to the Krazyast Triangle and its commerce of coveted blackstone. The truth was, she could recite an entire tome’s worth of facts about Kyrov … yet she had never seen it for herself.
“No,” she admitted sourly. “But I’ve studied it.”
Quicktongue’s face warped into a smile, and it was not a pleasant one. “The winners write history, love. Ever wondered why the topic of Affinite indenturement is so scarcely seen in a Cyrilian textbook?”
It felt like a slap to her face. She recalled the plush carpets of Salskoff Palace, the crackle of the fireplace and the smell of leather chairs and old books in Papa’s study. She and Luka had spent half their days sitting at his tall oak desk, listening to him read through Cyrilia’s histories with them in his low, steady voice.
Before he’d fallen sick, Papa had personally seen to her education. He hadn’t been able to love her Affinity … but he had loved her, in his own way.
She really believed he had.
“If you have a point, make it,” she found herself saying, though her heart wasn’t in the argument anymore.
“Kyrov’s a dangerous place. I’d normally caution any Affinite to stay away from it, but seeing as I’m being held to getting my part of the Trade done, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.” Quicktongue shrugged and plowed past her, snow flying in the wake of his steps. “Especially as I’m not an Affinite.”
He spoke as though there could be a large city in her own empire that was dangerous for an Affinite to cross into. Ana knew corruption existed in her empire, but it wasn’t as though Affinites were pulled off the streets.
The tip of the compass spun unsteadily as she turned to follow Quicktongue northeast, toward Kyrov.
Half a day’s journey left, by her calculations. Somehow the forest looked less peaceful, the sunlight cold and the pines’ shadows jarring as they stretched across the snow. It was only when May slipped a small hand in hers that Ana’s breathing steadied slightly.
A small ball of mud rose from the ground, hovering above May’s palm. With a flick of her fingers, it shot toward Quicktongue, hitting him squarely on his back.
“I know you like to hear yourself talk, arrogant man,” May said as they marched past him, “but speak again and I’ll aim for your face.” She paused and grinned viciously. “You’d look better, too.”
8 (#ulink_ee4ca6a6-1f49-5aab-ad5b-23d390424e4f)
Ana’s first glimpse of Kyrov was a bundle of silver-white spires that rose above the snow-covered trees. After almost a day’s travel, the sun hung low in the west, painting the city in a sheen of dusky gold. When the red-brown bricks of the dacha cottages came into view, Ana thought of the gingerbread houses she used to make as a child every year in celebration of the arrival of the Deity of Winter.
Ana tugged at her hood as the dirt roads gradually turned to slate-gray cobblestones and the sounds of city life thrummed into existence. May kept close to her side, eyes wide and head turning from side to side. After they had fled from May’s employer, they’d kept to small villages and abandoned hunters’ cabins. The crowds and noise and smells of large towns made Ana anxious, and even now, she tried to quiet the unease roiling in her stomach as they walked.
Yet she found her eyes lingering on objects unwittingly: the traditional silver-blue of a kechyan cloak, the bright red of a damashka nesting doll, the glint of white-gold hoop earrings. She could, so clearly in her mind’s eye, see these objects as she’d known them back in her world, in the Salskoff Palace. Luka, donning his Imperial kechyan with the white tiger’s emblem; Papa, kneeling by her bed with her first damashka in his large hands; Mama, sitting on a settee beneath a high Palace window, her earrings catching the sun as she swept her beautiful dark hair over her shoulder.
Her throat burned with the unexpected ache of tears. She blinked and turned her attention to the nearest object of distraction: an open-door warehouse.
Sultry heat rolled out in welcome waves, and the strike of a hammer against molten metal rang against the early-evening sounds of the town. Yet in the shadows, there was something else.
A young boy with black hair and tired eyes knelt by a furnace, his palms upturned, his back bent like a hook. Soot covered his face, but even from here, his features marked him as coming from one of the Aseatic Isles. But his midnight eyes sat atop sunken cheeks, drained of life and whittled down to bone.
“You, boy!” shouted the blacksmith, his hammer pausing in the air. “The fire needs to be stronger!”
The boy’s eyes flicked to the blacksmith. Hunching over, he turned his palms to the flames. They brightened, dancing bursts of gold and orange that melted into a bloodred core.
A year ago, her gaze might have swept over this scene as an ordinary aspect of daily life in her empire. Just another Affinite at work, earning his living like Yuri and the other Affinites at the Palace. She remembered how Yuri would go to town and bring back treats for her, sneaking into her chambers late at night when Markov took up his shift by her door. Yuri had been content; he’d been earning enough to feed a mother and a younger sister in some village down south.
But now, watching the Aseatic Isles boy huddle over the fire, his soot-stained face streaked with sweat and misery, she found a shadow of doubt creeping over her thoughts.
A little under a year ago, she had seen the same sadness in the lines of May’s eyes, in the hollows of her cheeks, in the sag of her skinny shoulders that tried to pitch up the dirty, ill-fitting tunic she’d been given to wear. The quiet despair in the Aseatic boy’s eyes cast a mirror image to May’s back then.
A cold foreboding spread through her; Ana found her steps slowing. The streets were filled with people laughing, chattering, passing the blacksmith’s shop without a care in the world. Had she been just like them one year past? She wanted to reach out to the boy, to speak to him, to do something.
A hand wrapped around her wrist, pulling her from her thoughts. The world flooded back in a whirl of colors and sounds, and she realized that Ramson Quicktongue had been saying her name. Before she could jerk away, he drew her and May into the nearest shop.
The door clicked shut behind her, a bell chimed overhead, and the smell of wood wafted over to them from a fireplace in the back.
They stood in a shop for lacquer art. Tigers and vases lined the shelves while swans and icehawks and phoenixes twirled gently before the windows, all painted with swirling patterns of leaves, snowflakes, and fruits. Instinctively, Ana wedged herself between May and Ramson, glaring at the con man. “What are you doing?”
He stooped, his eyes trained on something moving outside the windows.
Beyond the lacquered fowl figurines, on the cobblestone streets outside, a procession passed by. Three horses trotted through the streets, their riders’ snowy-white cloaks flowing proudly behind. Silver tiger crests flashed on the riders’ chests, and blackstone swords gleamed at their belts.
“Whitecloaks,” Ramson muttered by her ear.
Imperial Patrols—the highest order of soldiers in the Cyrilian Imperial Army, they were peacekeepers, intended to monitor and quell any clashes between citizens and Affinites. Most important, though, armed with blackstone and Deys’voshk, they were trained to fight Affinites should they get out of hand.
Ana remembered visiting cities in her childhood, before her Affinity had manifested. She’d felt inexplicably safe in the presence of the Patrols’ billowing cloaks and gleaming helmets outside her carriage window. She remembered thinking that the Whitecloaks would protect her from any monsters that could hurt her.
Except now she was the monster.
“Ramson,” she said quietly, watching the procession. “Earlier, you said you would need to protect us from the Imperial Patrols. What did you mean by that?”
She didn’t want to hear the answer. But she knew she had to.
Ramson cast her a glance, and for a moment, she thought he would make a snide remark at her. Instead, he flicked his wrist, and a single bronze copperstone appeared between his knuckles. “It all comes down to this,” he said, and began flipping the coin between his fingers, making it appear one moment and disappear the next. “In a broken system, which way does the blade point?” Ramson pinched the copperstone and held it up. “Who do you think pays them more? The Empire? Or profitable businesses that rely on them to exploit Affinites in need of work?”
Ana’s heart hammered; she felt as though she were in free fall, as though the ground were slowly disappearing beneath her. “But have you seen it?”
Ramson’s gaze was fixed on the coin, whose edges glinted like the curved blade of a scythe. “As I said, I’m a businessman.”
Her lips parted, but she had no words and no breath left to argue.
“This empire is falling apart,” Ramson continued. “The previous emperor and empress died, the princess died a year ago, and the vultures are simply waiting to see how long Lukas Mikhailov lasts.” He tossed the copperstone into the air; it winked in the firelight and disappeared in his palms. “It’s every man for himself; the time of profiteers and reapers. You always win if you choose the winning side.”
The rest of the world seemed distant and muted as she watched him turn toward the door. The Whitecloaks had disappeared. Crowds continued to mingle in the streets outside—but everything appeared different.
“Look, just do me a favor,” Ramson said, “and stay away from the Whitecloaks—especially if they have a yaeger with them.” The bell jingled again as he pulled open the door. “I suspect you and the kid aren’t in possession of identification … and I’m sure you know the consequences of being caught.”
Goose bumps rose on Ana’s arms, and it had nothing to do with the cold wind that swept into the shop. He had to be exaggerating—he spoke as though they could be in danger, in broad daylight, in the middle of her empire. Yet asking him to elaborate meant playing into his hand and revealing a gap in her knowledge, a weakness.
Ana clamped her lips shut and followed him out.
“This is where we part ways for now,” Ramson said. “The place I’m going isn’t Affinite-friendly. Luckily, the Winter Market is right ahead on this road.” He winked at May. “You’d like some candy, wouldn’t you, love?”
May bared her teeth at him. “Ana told me to never accept candy from strangers,” she said.
Ramson looked deflated.
“Wait.” Ana glared at him. “You have to tell us where you’re going.”
“Ah, always the vote of trust from you.” Ramson pointed down a side alley, away from the general flow of the crowds. “The Gray Bear’s Keep. Right there, with the red-shingled roofs. Thirty minutes is all I need; I’ll meet you back here.”
Ana watched him saunter down the street. If he’d wanted to betray her, he could have just left her to die on the riverbank back in the Syvern Taiga. She didn’t like it, but she would have to let him go for now.
“Ana!” May pointed, her voice rising in excitement. “The Vyntr’makt!”
The streets before them opened up, and for a moment, Ana thought she was gazing at one of the miniature town carvings she’d received as gifts in her childhood. Brightly colored dachas glowed dusk-gold against a late-afternoon sun, tinsel-lined tarpaulins erected over stalls displaying trinkets and food that would make a child squeal.
May did, squeezing Ana’s hand and pulling her forward, weaving through the crowds. A banner with a white tiger’s head rippled at the entrance. Vyntr’makt, it announced. And, beneath, the motto of the Cyrilian Empire: Kommertsya, Deysa, Imperya. Commerce, Deities, Empire.
The Winter Market—Vyntr’makt in Old Cyrilian—was a tradition across all Cyrilian towns. Each town decorated its largest square or plaza into late autumn to await the Fyrva’snezh—the First Snow, a night that marked the beginning of winter and the awakening of their patron deity.
Kyrov’s Vyntr’makt rivaled Salskoff’s with the richness of its food wafting from the stalls, the opulence of iridescent jewels and silks splayed across display stands, the intricacy of sacred Cyrilian figurines carved on white gold. Fish-baked bread lined bakery windows, and the outdoor stalls boasted cold cabbage soups, beef potato pies, and lamb skewers roasting with olives.
Inevitably, in the midst of all the joy, her gaze was drawn to a single pot of beet soup boiling at the side of a wooden stall. Hot vapor rose from its crimson surface, filling the air with a pungent smell.
Nausea twisted in her stomach as a familiar image flashed through her mind. Eight bodies, splayed like twisted works of art. Blood, dark and red in the snow.
Deimhov.
Monster.
“… Ana!”
She jerked out of the memory, the crimson pools and screams fading as Kyrov’s Vyntr’makt returned. May was tugging on her hand. Her eyes were fixed on a stall ahead, filled with rows of honey apple tarts, caramel fried dough, and a variety of other treats.
Ana ran through the meager sum she’d saved up. They had enough for at least two more nights’ lodging and meals, and she was reluctant to spend a single copperstone over their budget … and yet. She thought of the first time she’d seen May, her shock at how scrawny the girl had looked. Even then, May had split her paltry rations from her employer with Ana, walking a mile in the snow each day to the barn where she’d hidden Ana and kept her alive.
