Something in him seized, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. His head spun.
“She’s alive.” Daya’s voice was gentle. “She’ll be all right.”
No,whispered a voice in his head.She won’t be.
They all die.
The dizziness was overwhelming. Pain slicked up his body, and nausea churned in his stomach. Gods be damned, his stomach…
“She needs rest,” Daya continued, authority returning to her tone. “And so do you. Look, you’re swaying—agh!” She rushed forward and caught him under his armpits as he toppled forward and threw up.
Blood and vomit splashed on the ground, complementing the mouthful of colorful curses Daya spewed.
“I’ve always admired people who swore like sailors,” Ramson muttered woozily, attempting a grin as his men surrounded him, lowering him into a cloth gurney.
“Iama sailor, you arse,” came the reply. “And a captain, don’t you forget. You there, let’s get him into the dacha with Ana before he ruins another part of my uniform, Amara curse him and his breakfast.”
He drifted in and out of consciousness, dimly aware of his men shifting him to a bed, of the air growing warm. He woke several times to find Iversha and another medic bending over him, their hands weaving over the flesh of Ramson’s abdomen. The pain grew fainter each time he came around, until, at one point, it faded to no more than a dull memory.
—
Ramson opened his eyes. The room was silent. Somebody had lit a fire in the hearth; the flames cast a warm light over a tray of food on the floor, a tub of water by the hearth. Checking his wound, he saw that someone had removed his bandages. The flesh over hisstomach was taut, a jagged white line cleaving neatly between his ribs. It fit beneath the puckered, marred flesh of his chest, where the brand of the Order of the Lily gleamed in the firelight. Spatters of blood and mud clung to his skin.
Ramson wolfed down the dinner of salted fish and hard bread and cheese, suddenly voracious now that his wound was mostly healed. Then he bathed himself with the water by the fire and a bar of soap, pulled on a clean shirt and his breeches and boots. He strapped his misericord to his waist and left through the door.
He was on a second-floor landing. A set of wooden stairs led down to the first floor, illuminated by a fire from somewhere below. Voices drifted up, and he froze halfway down the staircase.
There, sitting up on a bed, draped with furs by a low fire, was the girl he had crossed oceans for.
Ana awoke to the crackle of flames across a hearth. Light stirred, orange chasing shadows across her eyelids, and something smelled pleasant, like pine needles, lavender, and rosewater.
She opened her eyes. The ceiling overhead was low and sloping, wooden beams supporting a clay roof. She was in a dacha, barren but for the pallet she lay on, curled in a bundle of blankets and furs. A set of stairs led to a second-floor landing; beyond that, darkness. The world had stilled from earlier, the ground solid beneath her, the cracked walls steady.
Memories tumbled back to her. A bridge, someone’s weight slung across her shoulders, a familiar face—Daya—emerging from the fog, catching her just as her legs had given way.
“Daya?” she croaked.
“She’ll be by in a moment,” came a familiar reedy voice. “She asked me to stay by your side.”
Tetsyev came into view, clutching a globefire. The light painted over the harsh ridges in his face, the thinness of his skin that stretched like vellum over bone. For a moment, fear seizedher, stalling her breath—and then she remembered that he had saved her life.
“You came with us,” she intoned. A question.
He bowed his head. “I…only wished I’d had the courage to sooner.”
Ana studied him, old memories resurfacing. She shoved them down. If Tetsyev had wanted her dead, he’d had many, many chances to ensure that happened. Instead, at each turn, he’d saved her life. The things he had done to her family—poisoning her father and her brother—he’d done under Morganya’s mind control. It didn’t make up for any of it, nor did it excuse him from his cowardice and denial afterward—but looking back, he’d helped her at several crucial points throughout her journey. He’d saved her at the Salskoff Palace, when Morganya had ordered him to kill her. Then he’d found her and warned her of the siphon scheme.
The siphons.
She twisted to look down. Someone had taken her black gloves off. Her wound appeared to have mostly healed. There was a faint pain deep in her bone, but she could move.
On her left wrist, a sea-green band twined tightly over her skin. Ana now felt something cold across her neck as well, something that weighed heavy against her collarbone. She touched a finger to it—
“Blackstone,” Tetsyev said. “Please accept my apologies. It wasthe only way to stabilize you, after…” He gestured to her wrist.
It was a horrible reminder of what Sorsha Farrald had gone through: used as an experiment for siphons and restrained her entire life with a similar blackstone collar.
“It was only a theory of mine, yet wearing blackstone should provide you refuge from the power of the siphon,” Tetsyev said quietly. “An Affinity is like an added sense, in the way that an Affinite learns to navigate the world with awareness to one’s element. I can only imagine how it must feel with the siphons suddenly enabling access to a dozen more Affinities.” He leaned forward and unfurled his palm. In the center was a small black key. “It’s for the blackstone. Whatever you choose to do with it.”
