“What?” the girl said, and then she gasped. “Deities.”
“It’s…it’s her,” the boy whispered, awe and fear coloring his voice. “What do we do?”
“What do you mean?” the girl snapped. “We save her!”
“But we’re meant to rescue the Affinites Morganya has imprisoned here—”
“Well, she’s definitely an Affinite. They don’t call her the Blood Witch of Salskoff for nothing.”
The boy sounded uncertain. “I can’t sense her Affinity, Lil. And it’s not the blackstone on her wrists.”
“We take her to my brother.” The girl’s tone brooked no argument.
Ana had the sensation of being lifted, of several unsteady footsteps, and then they were outside. The winter air caressed her face.
Sensation flooded back into her limbs as she drew lungful after lungful of fresh, clean air—ice-tinged and winter-scented, just like her empire.
Ana forced her eyes open.
Flames rose from the square they were in, blazing higher and hungrier than any fire she’d seen. The midnight sky overhead churned orange, choked by a mixture of clouds and smoke. Flakes twirled down gently, and it wasn’t until they landed on her cheeks, small blooms of delightful cold, that she realized they weren’t ashes.
They were snow.
The boy’s steps slowed, and he deposited Ana by the brick wall of a dacha in the square. “Lil,” he called. “Can you bring him here? I can’t carry her much farther.”
Ana hated that she couldn’t even stand; could barely even summon enough energy to open her eyes.
Her savior knelt before her, watching her with open curiosity. He was a boy several years younger than her, Southern Cyrilian by the looks of his sandy-brown hair and tan skin close to her own. His eyes were a warm shade of gold. They reminded her of liquid honey.
Ana swallowed, pushed her voice past her cracked lips. “Who…are you?”
He cleared his throat, blinking and averting his gaze, and then drew a circle over his chest. “Konstantyn Yerdev of the Northern Crimson Forces,” he declared. “You can call me, um, Kons. Like my friends. Except you’re not…”
He trailed off as Ana squeezed her eyes shut, pain lancing along her skull. “Northern Crimson Forces?” she repeated.
“Yes.” He nodded, and then as he spoke next, his words were broken by the sound of approaching footsteps. “Of the Redcloaks.”
Shock jolted through Ana. She blinked, taking in the boy’s outfit for the first time: plain tunic and breeches and cheap commoner’s boots, all wrapped beneath a dark cloak with a bright red interior. The Redcloaks were a revolutionary group that had risen against the Empress Morganya, intent to overthrow the monarchy and hand over power to the people. Their uneasy relationship with Ana had collapsed when one of their members—their deputy, Seyin—tried to assassinate Ana in order to destroy the last living member of the fallen Cyrilian monarchy.
The knife wound had hurt less, though, than the knowledge that the Redcloaks were led by none other than Ana’s childhood friend, Yuri, once a servant at the Salskoff Palace.
A shadow fell over them. Someone stood behind Konstantyn.
The boy turned and jumped. “Commander!” he exclaimed, saluting as he scrambled aside, revealing the figure behind.
From her vantage point, sitting against the corner of a dacha wall, he looked even taller than the last time they’d met. Flames swirled in the square behind him, eating away at the wooden scaffold and curling into Morganya’s flags until they crumbled to ash. With his back to the fire, his face was swathed in shadows, but it was one Ana would have recognized anywhere.
“Red Tigress,” Yuri Kostov said. There was no trace of mercy, no glint of forgiveness, nothing of the boy she’d known, in his steel-gray gaze. “I’m glad they found you.” From the scabbard at his hip, he drew a blade and lifted it into the air. “This way, I can end things with my own two hands.”
“No!”
The cry came sharp and clear. A figure darted out from behind Yuri, stopping between him and Ana.
As the ripple of her cloak settled, Ana saw the outline of a familiar profile: freckled cheeks and gray eyes as fierce as Yuri’s, glaring back at him. She was the voice Ana had heard earlier, and Ana now realized why it had sounded so familiar.
Liliya Kostov held up her hand, her mouth a firm line, her eyes narrowed. Her red hair, which had once been tied in two girlish pigtails, now hung at her chin, cut in a clean line at the bottom.
It was as though, in a moon, she had aged years.
