“And who is that?” Zoya asked, because she truly didn’t know. All she’d ever had was anger.

“We build the rockets,” said Genya. “We make them understand what we can do. We give them a choice.”

Zoya wondered who would get to make that choice. Parents who didn’t wish to send their children off to die? Jarl Brum and his hateful drüskelle? Royals eager to keep their position at any cost?

“This has always been about stopping a war,” said Nikolai. “If the Fjerdans don’t think we can hold back the tide, they’ll roll right over us.”

Nadia shifted in her chair. “But without titanium—”

“We’ll have the titanium,” said Nikolai.

Zoya couldn’t hide her surprise. “The Zemeni have agreed to provide it?”

“No,” he said. “They don’t have it to sell, not processed. But the Kerch do.”

Adrik snorted. “There’s no way they’ll sell it to us, not at any kind of price we can afford.”

“That’s why I don’t intend to ask. I happen to know someone who can help with this particular kind of negotiation.”

Tolya frowned. “Negotiation?”

“He means we’re going to steal it,” said Zoya.

Genya’s cup clattered in her saucer. “If the Kerch find out we’re involved in something like this, it will be a diplomatic disaster.”

Nikolai gave Genya’s shoulder a brief squeeze and stood. He looked less a king with a country to rule than a privateer about to unleash his cannons on an enemy ship.

“Maybe so,” he said. “But Ketterdam is the right place to gamble.”

21

THE MONK

HE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE TO GO. He hadn’t thought past the need to become whole again and finally return to himself. He hadn’t even been entirely certain his plan would work. But he had clung to that piece of the thorn wood, and the orphans had offered him the perfect chance to try.

Alina.

She’s alive. Yuri’s voice an echo in his head, a gnat he couldn’t quite seem to swat. Sankta Alina, Daughter of Dva Stolba, Alina of the Fold. She lives.

Yes, Alina Starkov was well and happy and living with her tracker. If you could call that living. Yuri’s babbling awe droned on and on.

Her questions had troubled him, but Alina always had a talent for getting under his skin. Why do you have to be the savior? The answer to her question was as obvious as it had always been: Who else could protect the Grisha and Ravka? A reckless boy who liked to play pirate? A vengeful girl too afraid of her own heart to master the tremendous power she’d been granted? They were dangerous. Dangerous to him, to his country, even to themselves. Children.

His shadow soldiers carried him through forest and glade as his mind wandered too, until at last he arrived in a town by a river. This place was familiar, but most places were. He knew every pebble and branch of Ravka. But the guns and tanks and flying machines that had overwhelmed this world were new to him and unwelcome. Had his plan succeeded, had he managed to weaponize the Fold with Alina by his side, Ravka never would have been vulnerable to this march of brutality.

She is alive. Sankta Alina who gave her life for Ravka.

“I gave my life for Ravka,” he snarled at no one but the trees, and Yuri, finally chastened, went silent.

He had the nichevo’ya deposit him by a high bridge over the river gorge and walked the rest of the way into the village, unsure of where he was headed. His feet were bare and he still wore Yuri’s ragged black robes and trousers, the fabric bloodied where a bullet had grazed him. He longed for a bath and clean clothes. Human things.

Shopkeepers stared worriedly at him from their doorways, but they had nothing to fear from him. At least not yet. It wasn’t much of a town, but he noted icons in nearly every window. Most of these backwaters were religious and had grown more so during the civil war. Alina was certainly popular, always shown with her white hair and lit as if she’d swallowed the sun. Very dramatic. He saw Juris too—a wartime Saint if there ever was one—and Sankta Marya, patron saint of those far from home. No signs of the Starless One.

All in due time, he told himself, and Yuri joined in. They could be of one mind about that.

Names crowded into his thoughts. Staski. Kiril. Kirigan. Anton. Eryk. An avalanche of memories. He’d been all of them, but who should he become now? He’d had plenty of time to consider such things in the isolation of his glass cell, but now that he was free, truly free to choose, he found that only one name suited. The oldest of them: Aleksander. He had no reason to hide his strangeness anymore. Saints were meant to live forever.

He passed into a muddy town square and saw a small church capped by a single whitewashed dome. Through the open door, he glimpsed the priest, tending to something by the altar, as a woman lit candles for the dead. It would do for sanctuary. They couldn’t very well turn a barefoot beggar away.

It wasn’t until Aleksander was inside, the cool shadows of the church thick and comforting around him, that he realized where he was. Above the altar hung a painting of a man with iron fetters at his wrists and a collar at his neck, his eyes looking up at nothing. Sankt Ilya in Chains.

He really did know this place. He had come back to the beginning: This church had been raised over the ruins of the home of Ilya Morozova, Aleksander’s grandfather, a man thrown to his death from the very bridge Aleksander had crossed on his way into town. He had been known as the Bonesmith, the greatest Fabrikator to ever live. And yet he had been much more than that.

“Hello?” the priest said, turning toward the doorway.

But Aleksander had already sunk into the shadows, gathering them like a shroud around his body in the darkness of the side aisle.

He moved quietly to the door that he knew would lead him down into the basement, down the rickety stairs to where old pews and rotted wall hangings had been stacked. His memories were as dark and dusty as this place, but the plan of the church and what had come before it was buried in his mind, and he knew there was yet another room beneath this one. He located a lantern and went looking for the hatch.

It didn’t take long. When he pulled on the metal ring, the hinge let loose a shriek. Maybe the priest would hear and try to pray away the ghosts.

Yuri rattled around in his skull at that little bit of sacrilege, but Aleksander ignored him.