They gazed at each other a moment longer, the inevitable truth hanging between them. Yuri opened his mouth. Before he could speak, a shadow fell across the window at their booth. Ana turned to look.
Standing outside, on the cobblestone street, was a Kemeiran girl, made of shadows and wind.
Linn.
Ana stood so abruptly that she knocked against the table, rattling cups and saucers. But whatever joy she’d felt dried on her tongue when a second figure appeared around the corner.
Sprinting across the street was a tall, dark-haired man. Linn had half turned, shock registering on her face, when he bowled her over, knocking her to the ground. He looked up, and when Ana looked into his eyes—the blue of ice and fire—recognition locked into place.
Ana had just taken two steps toward the door of the restaurant when the windows before her exploded.
Everything hurt, gods be damned—and the air smelled of smoke, singed and cloying. Ramson groaned as he picked himself up from the cobblestones, glass clinking as he brushed it aside and climbed to his feet. His ears were ringing, the world was swaying, and when he looked down at his hands, there was blood on them.
As though from a distance, he heard shouting. High-pitched…screaming.
He looked up, the world blurring in and out of sight as he struggled to focus. It wasn’t until someone crashed into him, screaming and covered in blood, that he realized what was going on.
The dust settled and Ramson saw, advancing down the streets, bulldozing through the crowds, Imperial Patrols, blackstone-infused armor shining, white cloaks billowing behind them, astride their sharp-eyed valkryfs.
Except it wasn’t just a squad of them, or even a platoon of them.
No, there were hundreds of them, stretching as far as the eye could see, a snaking army of silver white slithering through the streets.
Cold ran down Ramson’s spine.
The Imperial Inquisition was here.
Ramson squinted, shaking his head to clear it of the ringing. His snowhawk. Where was his snowhawk? He’d been following it through Goldwater Port because it had found Linn—Linn,whom he’d thought he would never see again—when the restaurant across the street had exploded.
Amid the columns of black smoke and clouds of dust, the snowhawk was nowhere to be seen.
Ramson looked at the approaching Whitecloaks. The kapitan, leading the charge, was close enough that he could make out Morganya’s unmistakable new emblem on his breastplate.
There was no way he would find Linn now, with his snowhawk gone and the Imperial Inquisition wreaking havoc in this town. And Ana…
The poster was crumpled in his hands, covered in a layer of soot and dust, the red of the painting barely visible.
Ramson smoothed the parchment over, his fingers lingering on the image of the girl. If he ran now, he could get far enough away to avoid capture. Daya was waiting for him; he could board her boat and leave for Bregon and never look back at the doomed Northern Empire again.
Ramson scanned the frantic crowds one more time. He paused, only for a brief moment, before he slipped into them, disappearing like a fish into water.
The world was muted but for a distant ringing, the scent of smoke in her nose and burning in her lungs. Ana squeezed her eyes closed, then open, then closed again, waiting for the world around her to stop spinning. There was blood drenching her breeches and the back of her shirt—she could feel it all, bright spots of light against her Affinity, warm and flowing. But none of it was hers.
She forced her eyes open again. Across from the wrecked booth, Yuri lay facedown on the floor in a pool of crimson.
“Yuri!”The cry tore from her throat as she scrambled up, and the world came crashing back in a whirl of smoke and sound. Rubble covered the restaurant floor, interspersed with broken glass and shattered kitchenware. The breakfast they had been enjoying just moments ago—pelmeny and pirozhky and pies—was splattered across the floor.
Ana knelt and wrapped her Affinity around Yuri, trailing the familiar hints of smoke and fire and, at last, faint but fluttering like a dying butterfly, the soft gasps of his pulse. Without her help, he would die.
And if he dies,a very small voice whispered inside her,your path is clear of political rivals. The resistance movement will rally to you.
Yet in this moment, she looked down and only saw the familiar edges of his face. She touched her fingers to the bright red of his hair that she’d loved since as far back as she could remember, now dirty with blood and debris.
Ana looked at her friend, and in her heart of hearts, she knew that this was one of the moments Shamaïra had seen for her. The choice that she made now would begin to define which path she walked. Which of the Anastacyas she chose tobe.
Ana rested a hand on her friend’s chest, closed her eyes, and applied her Affinity. The moments crawled by; the blood pouring from Yuri’s wounds slowed to a leak, and then a drip. She sensed someone crouching next to her, and when she opened her eyes, she saw Raisa, medical kit out, already pressing against some of Yuri’s wounds with her clean gauze. The woman raised her eyes to Ana’s. “You saved his life,” she whispered.
Ana touched a finger to Yuri’s wrist. It was warm. Beneath the pale, freckled skin she’d known her entire life, something fluttered. A pulse: weak, but fighting.
