“Of course.”

After nightfall, they hitched a wagon to two of their horses and traveled to the old fort. Getting past the guards was easy enough. The only challenge had been summoning shadow to cloak their movements without revealing his power to Brother Azarov.

But their luck had quickly turned.

“This is it?” Aleksander asked, looking at the crates of decrepit weapons. He picked up one of the old, single-shot rifles. “We might as well try to slap them to death.”

“The Starless One will protect us.”

Aleksander studied Brother Azarov in the dark room. “You’re a soldier—”

“I was a soldier.”

“Very well. You were once a soldier and you would walk onto a battlefield with nothing but your faith to protect you?”

“If that is what our Saint requires.”

Aleksander should be glad of that faith, that all it had taken was a bit of shadow play to get these people to march into a war with him. So why was he left uneasy?

Will you protect them?

He could. He would if need be. His powers had returned to him. He could form nichevo’ya to fight on his behalf. His pilgrims could enter the field with picks and shovels and they would still emerge victorious.

And yet, his mind was troubled.

They packed up the few weapons that looked like they might be of use and rode back toward Adena in silence. Since they had the cart, they would meet with Brother Chernov and some of the others outside the village to help them transport supplies from the market.

Aleksander couldn’t help but think of the first army he’d built. Yevgeni Lantsov had been king then, and he’d been at war with the Shu for the entirety of his reign. He couldn’t hold the southern border and his forces were stretched to their very limit. Aleksander had gone by a different name then. Leonid. The first Darkling to offer his gifts in service to the king.

His mother had warned him not to go. They’d been living near an old tannery, the stink of the chemicals and the offal always thick in the air.

“Once you are known, you cannot be unknown,” she’d warned him.

But he’d been waiting for a ruler like Yevgeni—practical, forward-thinking, and desperate. Aleksander traveled to the capital and sought an audience with the king, and there he’d let his shadows unfurl. The Grand Palace hadn’t even been built then, only a ramshackle castle of rickety wood and ragged stone.

The king and his court had been frightened. Some had called him a demon, others had claimed he was a trickster and a fraud. But the king was too pragmatic to let such an opportunity pass him by.

“You will take your talents to the border,” he’d told Aleksander. “Be they true sorcery or mere illusion, you will use them against our enemies. And if our army finds victory, you will be rewarded.”

Aleksander had marched south with the king’s soldiers, and when they’d faced the Shu in the field, he’d unleashed darkness upon their opponents, blinding them where they stood. Ravka’s forces had won the day.

But when Yevgeni had offered Aleksander his reward, he had refused the king’s gold. “There are others like me, Grisha, living in hiding. Give me leave to offer them sanctuary here and I will build you an army the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Aleksander had traveled throughout Ravka, to places he and his mother had visited before, to distant lands where he’d gone on his own to study. He knew the secret ways and hiding places of Grisha, and wherever he went, he promised them a new life lived without fear.

“We will be respected,” he’d vowed. “Honored. We will have a home at last.”

They hadn’t wanted to come with him to the capital at first. They’d been sure it was some kind of trick and that once they were within the city’s double walls, they would be killed. But a few were willing to make the journey with him, and they had become the soldiers of the Second Army.

There had been objections from noblemen and priests, of course, accusations of dark magic, but as their military victories had continued, the arguments grew weaker.

Only King Yevgeni’s Apparat continued to campaign against the Grisha. He railed that the Saints would forsake Ravka if the king continued to harbor witches beneath his roof. Each day he would stand before the throne and rant until he was short of breath and red in the face. One day, he simply keeled over. If he’d been helped to his death by a Corporalnik posted by a shaded window, no one was the wiser.

But the next Apparat was more circumspect in his objections. He preached the tale of Yaromir and Sankt Feliks at the First Altar, a story of extraordinary soldiers who had helped a king unify a country, and two years later, Aleksander began work on the Little Palace.

He had thought he’d accomplished his task, that he’d given his people a safe haven, a home where they’d never be punished for their gifts.

What had changed? The answer was everything. Kings lived and died. Their sons were honest or corrupt. Wars ended and began again—and again and again. Grisha were not accepted; they were resented in Ravka and hunted abroad. Men fought them with swords, then guns, then worse. There was no end to it, and so he had sought an end. Power that could not be questioned. Might that could not be reckoned with. The result had been the Fold.

His first soldiers were dead now. Lovers, allies, countless kings and queens. Only he continued on. Eternity took practice, and he’d had plenty of it. The world had changed. War had changed. But he had not. He’d traveled, learned, killed. He’d met his half sister, who had herself passed into legend and Sainthood. He’d searched the world for his mother’s other children, hungry for kinship, for a sense of himself in others. He’d discarded his past lives like a snake shedding its skin, becoming sleeker and more dangerous with every new version of himself. But maybe he’d left some part of who he was behind in each of those lives.

Brother Azarov startled awake as Aleksander brought the cart to a stop on the sloping road that led into Adena. The monk yawned and smacked his lips. It was early morning, and Aleksander could see it was market day in the little town. Even from a distance, he could tell the mood was somber, the threat of war creeping ever closer, but the square was still full of people stocking up on provisions, children playing or working the stalls with their parents, neighbors calling their greetings.

Aleksander hopped down to stretch his legs and make sure the weapons were secure at the back of the wagon.