They slept that night in the cabins belowdecks, curled up on cold pallets dusty from disuse and tucked under moth-eaten blankets. Ana dreamt of fire, of shapes and shadows in smoke.
—
She awoke to patches of sunlight warming her face. The air was warm when she emerged on the deck, the sea stretching turquoise and flecked with caps of white everywhere she looked. Voices drifted to her on the wind, from the bar.
She found Ramson and Daya hunched over a yellowing map at the counter, plates of bliny and cheese and various other tins of food set out. A bit farther away, Linn was balanced impeccably on the bowsprit, her face tilted to the sun, her hair billowing in the breeze. A few white-tipped blueswallows were circling the air around her, and she was sending little puffs of wind into their midst. The blueswallows would spin up like tiny feathered balls before diving down again, their chirps mixing with Linn’s quiet laughter. Ana watched for a few moments, her lips curving in a smile. Moments like these were moments when she remembered what a better world might look like, what kind of an after she fought for.
“One fortnight to Bregon,” Ramson announced when she joined them. “That means you have one fortnight to learn everything you can from me.”
Ana took a piece of bliny. It was cold, but delicious. “And two weeks to come up with a plan. Is that caviar?”
“Good thing we had some left over from when this was still a pub,” Daya said cheerfully. “Figured everyone could use a treat to celebrate our first day here.”
Ramson leaned into Ana. “I just paid her,” he muttered.
“And for good reason, you lying son of a pig,” Daya snapped, her sunny disposition vanishing instantly. “You never mentioned guests in our original deal, not to mention—” She began to gesture at Ana, but her eyes flicked up and the playfulness vanished from her gaze.
When footsteps sounded behind them and a shadow fell over them, Ana saw why.
Kaïs had appeared. He stood between the steps to the cabins in the hold and the bar. Without his two swords, he suddenly looked much younger than the imposing Patrol figure that had been seared into her mind since they’d met. The sun warmed his face, lending a shine to his oil-black hair, and there was more of a spring to his step.
He surveyed them awkwardly for several moments. Then he stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Let me help you,” he said, and his gaze landed on Ana. “Let me train your Affinity with you.”
Ana was about to snap back a retort—I don’t need your help—when she felt a hand touch her wrist. Ramson leaned over the bar top and gave her a meaningful look.
Use your enemies.
“You have a crude control over your Affinity,” Kaïs continued, and she knew they both thought of the incident at Kyrov’s Vyntr’makt, when she’d seized his blood in fury and almost killed him. “There is much that you can do, with an Affinity like yours. Power is a double-edged sword. In the right hands, it is a shield of valor and honor, used for saving lives and for mercy. In the wrong hands, it is a weapon of destruction, used for suffering and killing.”
Ana thought of Morganya, of how eerily similar their Affinities were. One, an Affinity to flesh and mind; the other, an Affinity to blood. They held power over the very makeup of human bodies.
Kaïs’s eyes bore into hers. “I can teach you to use itforpeople,” he said. “I can teach you to heal. I can teach you to draw away pain. I can teach you to fight for those you seek to protect.”
It was as though he’d reached into her and drawn out her deepest desires, or heard her most fervent prayers over many long nights. Papa’s convulsing body, May’s blank eyes, Luka’s fading smile—all those deaths she’d blamed on herself, for not being able to save them when she alone had control over their blood. How many times had she wished to heal instead of hurt, to save instead of kill?
Luka’s words stirred in her mind.Your Affinity does not define you. What defines you is how you choose to wield it.
The decision lay there, before her.
“All right,” she said. “Teach me.”
The winters in Southern Cyrilia had always been milder than those up north. Yet this year, snow fell like ashes.
Or perhaps theywereashes, Shamaïra thought as she canted her head to skies swollen with gray clouds.
They had blindfolded her and locked her in the back of a blackstone wagon for days. The soldiers had slipped bowls of cold borscht and hardened bread through the barred window of her moving prison. She’d counted six, seven days, before the wagon had stopped.
The doors were flung open.
The light was blinding at first, the grip of hands hard against her bones as she was escorted out. She was dizzy from the weight of blackstone binding her wrists and ankles, but Shamaïra stood straight and proud.
They were in a Southern Cyrilian town, marked by the colors of the houses and winding streets, messy compared to the straight, wide roads of northern towns. The air tasted of sea.
Yet what had once been a vibrant, thriving city had turned to a smoldering ruin of a town. The wind carried an acrid smell and the bitterness of death. The dachas around them had burned black. As far as the eye could see, smoke snaked toward the sky in jagged coils.
A long procession of Imperial Patrols lined the street before her. They seemed to be waiting. Shamaïra didn’t even bother trying to reach her Affinity, her connection to the Brother and the Sister and the flow of Time. The blackstone manacles chafed unbearably cold against her skin.
And then, an eerie stillness seemed to fall upon the world around them. Far down the line of Whitecloaks, between the swirls of gray dotting the sky, emerged a shadow. She was outlined in a colorless shade of white, her hair as black as liquid night against ruby-red lips. The wind held its breath and the falling snow seemed to part for her as she rode her horse, seeming to cleave through the two lines of her army as though she were parting waves.
