The confession hit her like a physical blow. She turned away from him, her chest heaving. “You nevermeantto,” Ana grated out. “So you killed my father by accident? As anafterthought?”
“It was no accident,” Tetsyev whispered. “But I never meant to, either. I was manipulated. She took control of my mind for years…I had no idea what I was doing—”
A word snagged her attention. “ ‘She’?” Ana repeated. “What are you talking about?”
Tetsyev passed a trembling hand over his face. “Deities, you don’t even know.”
Her heart stuttered. “Know what?”
“Kolst Contessya Morganya planned it.”
For a moment, Ana only stared at him, the meaning of his words sinking into her.
Ana barked a humorless laugh. “You killed my father, and now you’re trying to blame my aunt for it? You are truly…” Words failed her, and she slashed a hand through the air.“Sick.”
“You’re right. It isn’t fair of me to blame it all on Morganya,” Tetsyev whispered. “I was in it with her, at first, before it all went wrong.”
“You’re mad,” Ana snarled.
Butmadwasn’t the word she was looking for, she realized, as the flickering orange flames carved out Tetsyev’s gaunt cheekbones and faraway eyes. He didn’t look mad, he looked haunted.
“Morganya and I met each other many years ago,” he began softly, and Ana found herself pulled along in the flow of his words, rooted in horror and helplessness and the conviction that, against all her greater instincts, he spoke the truth. “You must know by now, Kolst Pryntsessa, that life in the Empire isn’t easy for an Affinite. I had lost both my Affinite parents, and Morganya had just come out of months of captivity and abuse at the hands of non-Affinites. We were damaged, broken, but not enough that we couldn’t put together the pieces and dream. We envisioned a great future, a better one, where Affinites could walk freely and would no longer be reviled. But neither of us was strong enough yet to begin to create that future. Together, we practiced our Affinities: mine, in the merging and morphing of elements, and hers, in the manipulation of flesh and mind.”
Tetsyev’s voice sounded distant to Ana, as though she were listening to a strange, surreal story. Mamika. He spoke of her mamika—Morganya, with soft eyes the color of warm tea, her long dark braid, her devotion to the Deities.
He spoke of her, her Affinity, and her plan…to murder Ana’s father.
“One incident changed Morganya’s life forever—in many ways,” Tetsyev said, and Ana knew, with a chilling premonition, the incident he spoke of. It was the day Mama and Papa had been touring the Empire with the Imperial Patrols. They had discovered a girl, barely into womanhood, bruised and half-naked and crying, crawling out from the ruins of a dacha. “We planned it all. When the Empress took pity on Morganya and brought her to the Palace, we knew we had set in motion something great…and that we were going to change the world.”
The next sequence of events tumbled from Tetsyev’s lips, unfolding before Ana like a nightmare. “She grew close to the Empress. She was appointed the Countess of Cyrilia, first in line to the throne after the Imperial family. She hired me into the Palace. She hid her Affinity with daily doses of Deys’voshk. Years had passed, but Morganya was patient. Her goal was the throne.
“I had, by then, devised the perfect poison. It was slow-working; we had to ensure that it didn’t kill the Palace taste-testers and the poisoning couldn’t look suspicious. It was invisible, untraceable but for a bitter stench that we could mix into meals and pass off as medicine.
“Within one year, Kateryanna was dead, and we were one step closer to the throne.”
Ana’s knees were weak; she felt as though she might collapse. Images flitted through her mind—a white-cloaked alchemist, a beautiful young countess, a kind empress, a brokenhearted emperor: pieces of a story set in motion, careening toward an inevitable doom.
“But Morganya’s history had left a wound in her,” Tetsyev continued. “One that had festered and rotted into something twisted. I didn’t realize it until it was too late that her plan wasn’t to balance the scales. It was to tip them. Morganya wanted to overturn the world as it was, subjecting non-Affinites toourrule…or eliminating them.”
No. No, she wouldn’t accept this—shecouldn’taccept it, this story of her gentle, pious mamika as a vengeful, calculating murderess…and a flesh Affinite capable of manipulating minds?
Ana shook off the strange spell of his story. The world flooded back into focus, the blood in Tetsyev’s body pulsing hot as she latched her Affinity to it and slammed him against the wall. “You lie,” she growled.
Tetsyev was breathing hard; the whites of his eyes flashed against the torchlight. “I have been a prisoner in the lies of my own making,” he rasped. “This is the first time in many years that I have told the truth.”
“Liar!”she screamed as she pressed him against the wall, her Affinity turning cruel in her wrath, cutting off his circulation. “I willkillyou.”
Tetsyev scrabbled at the wall behind him. “P-please, Kolst Pryntsessa,” he half-wheezed, half-sobbed. “If I am lying—if I am the only culprit—then who is poisoning your brother at the Palace?”
Luka.
At the mention of her brother, Ana’s fury settled into cold dread in her chest.
“I tell the truth, Kolst Pryntsessa,” Tetsyev whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek. “And you must decide what you do with this truth.”
Ana flung him to the ground. She was shaking as she turned, tears blurring her world out of focus. Tetsyev’s story continued, washing over her like the dull roaring of a river.
“I left Morganya after Kateryanna died.” Tetsyev’s voice trembled, and Ana closed her eyes. She found herself matching his story to the fragments of reality that she had known. Together they wove a broken tapestry, and somewhere within that was the truth. “I remained in hiding for years—but she found me again.
