“The Druzhina,” Katerina signed.
Her friend nodded, her shoulders rising and falling in a deep sigh. “Damien hasn’t been able to see Niko, but he’s heard the whispers. They say your Shadow is capable of terrible things. That he can summon the Darkness at will and force it to do his bidding. They say he is a nezhit, that he died and rose again, that he is unclean and infects all he touches. That he is wicked, and that the two of you are in league to destroy Iriska and the world beyond.”
Katerina bit her lip, at a loss. What if Sofi hadn’t come to offer comfort or aid, but to condemn her?
“Do you—?” she began, but Sofi slashed a finger through the air, cutting her off.
“I don’t believe it, Katerina, of course I don’t! But Damien and I are just two voices among many, and refugees in Rivki, at that. I want nothing more than to help you, but you’re being watched more closely than you can imagine. I bribed a guard to let me in with the finest kvass my coin could buy, but even still, a quarter-hour was all I could claim.”
A tear ran down Sofi’s cheek, gleaming red-black in the torchlight. “I’ve lost so much. Everyone I love, save my Shadow. I can’t bear to lose you and Niko, too.”
Katerina swallowed hard around the lump in her throat. She knew exactly what Sofi had lost—she’d seen it firsthand when she and Niko arrived in the aftermath. Sofi’s friends, her family, the other Dimis, Shadows, and Vila that called Drezna home… The Darkness had consumed all of their souls to fuel its power.
“I-I feared you’d hate me,” she managed, fighting back tears of her own. Then she gave up and let them fall, cascading down her cheeks onto her filthy clothes. “That you believed Drezna’s destruction was my fault. That you’d blame me?—”
Sofi shook her head again, sending her curls flying. “I know you, Katerina. If you believe that you and Niko are not the cause of the Darkness’s rise, then I shall believe it, too. For as terrible as some of the rumors are, there are others: that you and Niko singlehandedly held off a demon army in the woods outside Drezna. That days ago, your Shadow channeled whatever strange power he possesses to save Kalach rather than to aid in its destruction.”
She let her hands fall and peered into Katerina’s tear-wet eyes, and Katerina let her look, for once hiding nothing. Sofi deserved that much.
“All of that is true,” she told her friend. Her wrists had begun to chafe with the effort of signing, but she pressed on nonetheless. “Gadreel is behind all of this, and Niko is under a terrible curse. We were on our way to the Magiya to seek answers when we were captured. All I want is to set him free and to save Iriska. All I want is to make things right…”
A sob escaped her, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her lips, trying to hold it in. “Please, Sofi. There has to be someone the prince regent will listen to. Dimi Zakharova hates me, and the Druzhina just want to make an example out of us, but there has to be someone…”
Sofi lifted her hands as if to speak—but then she froze. From down the hall, a man’s gruff voice echoed off the stone walls. “You’ve had your quarter-hour with the prisoner. Time to go.”
A moment later, the guard himself appeared—not a Shadow, but a mercenary, broad-shouldered and hulking, a club holstered at his belt. Katerina had seen his ilk before in the capital, lurking in the streets to police the commonfolk.
The man’s gaze flicked from Sofi’s tearstained face to Katerina’s, and he snorted. “Say your goodbyes, for I’ll not be letting you in here a second time, lest you want to pay in a finer coin than kvass.” His eyes dropped from Sofi’s face to her body, scanning it with an avarice that sickened Katerina.
“Don’t you dare,” she signed to Sofi, disgust sharpening each word.
The man’s eyes narrowed, and he stepped closer to the bars, one meaty hand falling to the wooden club. “What are you doing? If it’s some sort of spell, I’ll thank you not to try it. The wards will hold”—he gestured to the line of salt at Sofi’s feet and the burning herbs—“and if they don’t, there’s always this.” Pulling the club free, he raised it in a threat.
“What a fool,” Sofi signed back, just as Katerina spoke aloud.
“No spell. Just civil conversation, a notion that’s clearly beyond your grasp.”
The man’s jaw gaped, and he stepped closer still—then thought better of it as his foot nearly scattered the line of salt. The look of terror on his face was comical, and Katerina didn’t bother suppressing a laugh. What did she have to lose, after all?
His face reddened, a vein in his forehead bulging. “You dare speak to me that way, after you’ve befouled Iriska’s principles and endangered all our lives? I ought to come in there and teach you a lesson. Shadow-lover,” he said, and spat at her through the bars.
Katerina dodged, and the splatter of saliva fell on the stones at her feet. “You’re welcome to,” she said, offering him her sweetest smile. “Perhaps the wards will hold; perhaps they won’t. But if you best me in one-on-one combat, imagine the tales they’ll tell of you in the taverns. A human guard with no magic at his command, defeating the strongest Dimi to walk in three centuries. Your name will live forever.” Bound gifts or not, this pathetic excuse for a man would be no match for her, especially with Sofi at her side.
Indecision flickered across the guard’s thick features, darkening his eyes and drawing his lips upward in a small, self-satisfied grin. But then he shook his head as if to clear it and stepped back, glaring at Katerina.
“I wouldn’t waste my time on you, Dimi bitch. You’ll swing from the gallows soon enough.”
Disappointment churned inside Katerina, though she hadn’t actually expected him to swing her cell door wide and waltz inside. Rather than letting it show, though, she fluttered her lashes at him. “Such a shame. I would have so enjoyed our time together.”
The guard grunted with disgust. “That time is at an end. As is yours,” he said to Sofi, gesturing down the hallway. “No amount of kvass is worth sullying myself with company such as this.”
He stalked off down the hall, looking back over his shoulder to make sure Sofi followed. She signed one last message to Katerina as she went, her blue eyes pleading.
“Don’t give up hope. I’ll think of something.”
For all their sakes, Katerina hoped that she was right.
Chapter Fourteen
