Ruin and Rising

Misha nodded once.

  “You know what that means, don’t you? You’re a soldier. Soldiers don’t get to go where they want to. They go where they’re needed.”

  “You just don’t want me with you.”

  “No, we need you here to take care of the others. You know David is hopeless, and Adrik is going to need help too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. You’ll have to be careful with that one, help him without letting him know you’re helping. Can you manage that?”

  Misha shrugged.

  “We need you to take care of them the way you took care of Baghra.”

  “But I didn’t take care of her.”

  “Yes you did. You watched over her, and you made her comfortable, and you let her go when she needed you to. You did what had to be done, even though it hurt you. That’s what soldiers do.”

  Misha looked at him sharply, as if considering this. “I should have stopped her,” he said, his voice breaking.

  “If you had, none of us would be here. We’re grateful that you did the hard thing.”

  Misha frowned. “David is kind of a mess.”

  “True,” Mal agreed. “So can we trust you?”

  Misha looked away. His expression was still troubled, but he shrugged again.

  “Thank you,” Mal said. “You can start by getting water boiling for breakfast.”

  Misha nodded once, then jogged back through the gravel to get the water on.

  Mal glanced at me as he rose and shouldered his pack. “What?”

  “Nothing. That was just … really well done.”

  “Same way Ana Kuya got me to stop begging her to keep a lantern lit at night.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said starting the climb. “Told me I had to be brave for you, that if I was scared, you’d be scared.”

  “Well, she told me I had to eat my parsnips to set a good example for you, but I still refused to do it.”

  “And you wonder why you were always getting the switch.”

  “I have principles.”

  “That means, ‘If I can be difficult, I will.’”

  “Unfair.”

  “Hey!” Zoya shouted over the edge of the crater above. “If you’re not up here before I count to ten, I’m going back to sleep and you can carry me to Dva Stolba.”

  “Mal,” I sighed. “If I murder her in the Sikurzoi, will you hold me accountable?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then added, “That means, ‘Let’s make it look like an accident.’”

  * * *

  DVA STOLBA TOOK ME by surprise. I’d somehow expected that the little valley would be like a graveyard, a grim wasteland of phantoms and abandoned places. Instead, the settlements were bustling. The landscape was dotted with burned-out hulks and empty fields of ash, but new homes and businesses had sprung up right beside them.

  There were taverns and hostelries, a storefront advertising watch repair, and what looked like a shop that lent books by the week. Everything felt oddly impermanent. Broken windows had simply been boarded over. Many of the houses had canvas roofs or holes in the walls that had been covered with wool blankets or woven mats. Who knows how long we’ll be here? they seemed to say. Let’s make do with what we have.

  Had it always been this way? The settlements were constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, governed by the Shu Han or Ravka, depending on how the borders had been drawn at the end of a particular war. Was this how my parents had lived? It was strange to picture them this way, but I didn’t mind the idea. They might have been soldiers or merchants. They might have been happy here. And maybe one of them had been harboring a power, the latent legacy of Morozova’s youngest daughter. There were legends of Sun Summoners before me. Most people thought they were hoaxes or empty stories, wishful thinking born of the misery wrought by the Fold. But there might be more to it than that. Or maybe I was clinging to some dream of a heritage I had no real claim to.

  We passed through a market square crowded with people, their wares displayed on makeshift tables: tin pans, hunting knives, furs for the trek over the mountains. We saw jars of goose fat, dried figs sold in bunches, fine saddles, and flimsy-looking guns. Strings of freshly plucked ducks, their skin pink and dimpled, hung above one stall. Mal kept his bow and repeating rifle bundled in his pack. The weapons were too finely made not to draw attention.

  Children played in the dirt. A squat man in a sleeveless vest was smoking some kind of meat in a big metal drum. I watched him toss a juniper branch inside it, sending up a fragrant, bluish cloud. Zoya scrunched up her nose, but Tolya and Harshaw couldn’t dig out their coins fast enough.

  This was where Mal’s family and mine had met death. Somehow the wild, cheerful atmosphere seemed almost unfair. It certainly didn’t match my mood.

  I was relieved when Mal said, “I thought it would be more grim.”

  “Did you see how small the graveyard was?” I asked under my breath. He nodded. In most of Ravka, the cemeteries were bigger than the towns, but when the Shu had burned these settlements, there had been no one left to mourn the dead.

  Though we’d been well provisioned from the stocks at the Spinning Wheel, Mal wanted to buy a map made by a local. We needed to know which trails might be blocked by landslides or where the bridges had been washed out.

  A woman with white braids peeking from beneath her orange wool hat sat on a low, painted stool, humming to herself and beating a cowbell to catch the attention of passersby. She hadn’t bothered with a table, but had laid a rug displaying her stock—canteens, saddlebags, maps, and stacks of metal prayer rings—directly on the ground. A mule stood behind her, its long ears twitching off flies, and occasionally, she would reach back and offer it a pat on the nose.

  “Snow’s coming soon,” she said, squinting up at the sky as we poked through the maps. “Need blankets for the journey?”

  “We’re set,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Lot of people headed over the border.”

  “But not you?”

  “Too old to go now. Shu, Fjerdans, Fold…” She shrugged. “You sit still, trouble passes you by.”

  Or it smacks right into you, then comes back for seconds, I thought bleakly.

  Mal held up one of the maps. “I’m not seeing the eastern mountains, only the west.”

  “Better off keeping west,” she said. “You trying for the coast?”

  “Yes,” Mal lied smoothly, “then on to Novyi Zem. But—”

  “Stay west. People don’t come back from the east.”

  “Ju weh,” said Tolya. “Ey ye bat e’yuan.”

  The woman answered back, and they looked over a map together, conversing in Shu while we waited patiently.

  Finally, Tolya handed a different map to Mal. “East,” he said.

  The woman jabbed her cowbell at Tolya and asked me, “What are you going to feed that one in the hills? Better make sure he doesn’t put you on a spit.”

  Tolya frowned, but the woman laughed so hard she nearly fell off her stool.

  Mal added some prayer rings to the maps and gave over his coins.

  “Had a brother who went to Novyi Zem,” the woman said, still chuckling as she returned Mal’s change. “Probably rich now. It’s a good place to start a new life.”

  Zoya snorted. “Compared to what?”

  “It’s really not bad,” said Tolya.

  “Dirt and more dirt.”

  “There are cities,” Tolya grumbled as we walked away.

  “What did that woman have to say about the eastern mountains?” I asked.

  “They’re sacred,” said Tolya, “and apparently haunted. She claims the Cera Huo is guarded by ghosts.”

  A shiver ran up my spine. “What’s the Cera Huo?”

  Tolya’s golden eyes glinted. “The Firefalls.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE the ruins until we were almost directly beneath them. They were that nondescript—two worn and weather-beaten spires of rock that flanked the road leading southeast out
of the valley. They might have once been an arch. Or an aqueduct. Or two mills, as their name indicated. Or just two pointy bits of rock. What had I expected? Ilya Morozova by the side of the road in a golden halo, holding up a sign that read “You were right, Alina. This way to the firebird”?

  But the angles seemed correct. I’d scrutinized the illustration of Sankt Ilya in Chains so often that the image was branded in my mind. The view of the Sikurzoi beyond the spindles matched up to my memory of the page. Had Morozova drawn it himself? Was he responsible for the map left behind in that illustration or had someone else pieced together his story? I might never know.

  This is the place, I told myself. It has to be.

  “Anything familiar?” I asked Mal.

  He shook his head. “I guess I hoped…” He shrugged. He didn’t have to say more than that. I’d been carrying the same hope lodged in my heart, that once I was on this road, in this valley, more of my past might suddenly become clear. But all I had was my same worn set of memories: a dish of beets, a broad pair of shoulders, the sway of ox tails ahead of me.

  We spotted a few refugees—a woman with a baby at her breast riding in a pony cart while her husband walked alongside, a group of people our age who I assumed were First Army deserters. But the road beneath the ruins was not crowded. The most popular places to try to enter the Shu Han were farther west, where the mountains were less steep and travel to the coast was easier.

  The beauty of the Sikurzoi came on me suddenly. The only mountains I’d known were the icy peaks of the far north and the Petrazoi—jagged, gray, and forbidding. But these mountains were gentle, rolling, their soft slopes covered in tall grasses, the valleys between them crossed with slow-moving rivers that flashed blue and then gold in the sun. Even the sky felt welcoming, a prairie of infinite blue, thick white clouds stacked heavy on the horizon, the snowcapped peaks of the southern range visible in the distance.

  I knew this was no-man’s-land, the dangerous boundary that marked the end of Ravka and the beginning of enemy territory, but it didn’t feel that way. There was ample water, space for grazing. If there hadn’t been a war, if the lines had somehow been drawn differently, this would have been a peaceful place.

  We made no fire and camped in the open that night, our bedrolls spread beneath the stars. I listened to the sigh of the wind in the grasses and thought of Nikolai. Was he out there, tracking us as we tracked the firebird? Would he know us? Or had he lost himself completely? Would a day come when we’d simply be prey to him? I peered into the sky, waiting to see a winged shape blotting out the stars. Sleep did not come easily.

  The next day, we left the main road and started to climb in earnest. Mal took us east, toward the Cera Huo, following a trail that seemed to appear and disappear as it wended through the mountains. Storms came on without warning, dense bursts of rain that turned the earth beneath our boots to sucking mud, then vanished as quickly as they’d arrived.

  Tolya worried about flash floods, so we left the trail completely and headed for higher ground, spending the rest of the afternoon on the narrow back of a rocky ridge where we could see stormclouds chasing each other over the low hills and valleys, their dark swells glinting with brief flashes of lightning.

  The days dragged on, and I was acutely conscious that every step we took deeper into the Shu Han was a step we would have to retrace back to Ravka. What would we find when we returned? Would the Darkling have already marched on West Ravka? And if we found the firebird, if the three amplifiers were brought together at last, would I be strong enough to face him? Mostly, I thought of Morozova and wondered if he’d once walked these same paths, gazed on these same mountains. Had his need to finish the task he’d begun driven him the way my desperation drove me now, forcing me to put one foot in front of the other, to take another step, ford another river, climb another hill?

  That night, the temperature dropped enough that we had to set up tents. Zoya seemed to think I should be the one to put ours together, even if we were both going to sleep in it. I was cursing over the pile of canvas when Mal hushed me.

  “Someone’s out there,” he said.

  We were in a wide field of feather grass that stretched between two low hills. I peered into the dusk, unable to make anything out, and lifted my hands questioningly.

  Mal gave a shake of his head. “As a last resort,” he whispered.

  I nodded. I didn’t want us in another situation like the one we’d had with the militia.

  Mal picked up his rifle and signaled. Tolya drew his sword, and we formed up, back to back, waiting. “Harshaw,” I whispered.

  I heard Harshaw’s flint being struck. He stepped forward and spread his arms. A blazing gout of fire roared to life. It swept around us in a shining ring, illuminating the faces of the men crouched low in the field beyond. There were five, maybe six of them, golden-eyed and dressed in shearling. I saw bows drawn and the glint of light off at least one gun barrel.

  “Now,” I said.

  Zoya and Harshaw moved as one, throwing their arms out in wide arcs, the flames flaring across the grass like a living thing, borne by their combined power.

  Men shouted. The fire licked out in hungry tongues. I heard a single shot of gunfire, and the thieves turned and ran. Harshaw and Zoya sent the fire after them, chasing them across the field.

  “They might come back,” said Tolya. “Bring more men. You get good money for Grisha in Koba.” It was a city just south of the border.

  For the first time, I thought about what it must have been like for Tolya and Tamar, never able to return to their father’s country, strangers in Ravka, strangers here too.

  Zoya shivered. “They aren’t any better in Fjerda. There are witchhunters who don’t eat animals, won’t wear leather shoes or kill a spider in their homes, but they’ll burn Grisha alive on the pyre.”

  “Shu doctors might not be so bad,” said Harshaw. He was still playing with the flames, sending them shooting up in loops and snaking tendrils. “At least they clean their instruments. On the Wandering Isle, they think Grisha blood is a cure-all—for impotence, wasting plague, you name it. When my brother’s power showed itself, they cut his throat and hung him upside down to drain like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

  “Saints, Harshaw,” Zoya gasped.

  “I burned that village and everyone in it to the ground. Then I got on a boat and never looked back.”

  I thought of the dream the Darkling had once had, that we might be Ravkans and not just Grisha. He’d tried to make a safe place for our kind, maybe the only one in the world. I understand the desire to remain free.

  Was that why Harshaw kept fighting? Why he’d chosen to stay? He must have shared the Darkling’s dream once. Had he given its care over to me?

  “We’ll keep a watch tonight,” Mal said, “and head farther east tomorrow.”

  East to the Cera Huo, where phantoms stood guard. But we were already traveling with ghosts of our own.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE of the thieves the next morning, only a field scorched in bizarre patterns.

  Mal took us farther into the mountains. Early in our journey, we’d seen the curling smoke of someone’s cookfire or the shape of a hut on a hillside. Now we were alone, our only company the lizards we saw sunning themselves on rocks and, once, a herd of elk grazing in a distant meadow.

  If there were signs of the firebird, they were invisible to me, but I recognized the silence in Mal, the deep intent. I’d seen it in Tsibeya when we were hunting the stag and then again on the waters of the Bone Road.

  According to Tolya, the Cera Huo was marked differently on every map, and we certainly had no way of knowing if that was where we’d find the firebird. But it had given Mal a direction and now he moved in that steady, reassuring way of his, as if everything in the wild world was already familiar to him, as if he knew all of its secrets. For the others, it became a kind of game, trying to predict which way he would take us.

  “What do you see
?” Harshaw asked in frustration when Mal turned us away from an easy trail.

  Mal shrugged. “It’s more what I don’t see.” He pointed up to where a flock of geese were tacking south in a sharp wedge. “It’s the way the birds move, the way the animals hide in the underbrush.”

  Harshaw scratched Oncat behind the ear and whispered loudly, “And people say I’m crazy.”

  As the days passed, I felt my patience fraying. We had too much time walking with nothing to do but think, and there was no safe place for my thoughts to wander. The past was full of horrors, and the future left me with that breathless, rising panic.

  The power inside me had once seemed so miraculous, but each confrontation with the Darkling drove home the limitations of my abilities. There is no fight to be had. Despite the death I’d seen and the desperation I felt, I was no closer to understanding or wielding merzost. I found myself resenting Mal’s calm, the surety he seemed to carry in his steps.

  “Do you think it’s out there?” I asked one afternoon when we’d taken shelter in a dense cluster of pines to wait out a storm.

  “Hard to say. Right now, I could just be tracking a big hawk. I’m going on my gut as much as anything, and that always makes me nervous.”

  “You don’t seem nervous. You seem completely at ease.” I could hear the irritation in my voice.

  Mal glanced at me. “It helps that no one’s threatening to cut you open.”

  I said nothing. The thought of the Darkling’s knife was almost comforting—a simple fear, concrete, manageable.

  He squinted out at the rain. “And it’s something else, something the Darkling said in the chapel. He thought he needed me to find the firebird. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s why I know I can do it now, because he was so sure.”

  I understood. The Darkling’s faith in me had been an intoxicating thing. I wanted that certainty, the knowledge that everything would be dealt with, that someone was in control. Sergei had run to the Darkling looking for that reassurance. I just want to feel safe again.

  “When the time comes,” Mal asked, “can you bring the firebird down?”

  Yes. I was done with hesitation. It wasn’t just that we’d run out of options, or that so much was riding on the firebird’s power. I’d simply grown ruthless enough or selfish enough to take another creature’s life. But I missed the girl who had shown the stag mercy, who had been strong enough to turn away from the lure of power, who had believed in something more. Another casualty of this war.