“Squallers!” Nadia bellowed, her face beaming now, her cheeks wet with tears, as Ravkan flyers in the air and Grisha soldiers on the ground directed the powdery antidote onto the regiment of addicted Grisha.
The antidote drifted down onto them like a fine coating of frost and Nikolai saw them turn their palms up, confused. Then they tilted their heads to the sky, breathing deeply. They were like children seeing snow for the first time. They opened their mouths, held out their tongues. He saw them turn to one another as if waking from a nightmare.
“To us!” commanded Tamar as she and Tolya advanced, laying down cover for the Grisha prisoners with their rifles.
Arm in arm, the sickly Grisha stumbled toward the Ravkan lines, toward home and freedom.
The Fjerdan officers called for their soldiers to open fire on the deserting Grisha, but Nikolai’s flyers were ready. They strafed the Fjerdan lines, forcing them to take cover.
Ravkan Grisha and soldiers moved forward to guide their weakened friends. Now they really did look like ghosts, strange spirits coated in silvery powder.
“Your Majesty?” Amelia said in confusion as Nikolai slung her arm around his shoulders. Her lashes were dusty with antidote, her pupils dilated.
Around them, Nikolai saw the Fjerdan ranks breaking in the tumult the Zemeni arrival had caused. The skies were thick with Ravkan and Zemeni flyers. Fjerda had lost their Grisha assassins, and half their tanks lay in smoldering pieces.
Nikolai and the others plunged back through the field, taking the Grisha prisoners with them. He handed Amelia off to a Healer, and then he was commandeering a horse and shouting to Tolya, “Come on!”
He wanted to see this from the air. When they reached the runway, they leapt into his flyer. It roared to life and they soared skyward.
The view from above was both heartening and terrible. The Fjerdan lines had broken and they were in retreat, but brief as the battle had been—barely a battle, a skirmish, really—the damage was shocking. The muddy basin below had been carved up by Grisha Fabrikators, the landscape pocked with deep wounds and furrows. The dead lay scattered in the mud: Fjerdan soldiers, Ravkan soldiers, Grisha in their bright kefta, the frail bodies of the sickly prisoners who hadn’t made it off the field.
It was just a taste of what was coming.
“This is going to be a different kind of war, isn’t it?” Tolya asked quietly.
“If we don’t stop it,” said Nikolai as they watched the Fjerdans fall back.
This tiny victory wouldn’t solve the problem of his parentage or fill their coffers or swell the ranks of their army, but at least the Fjerdans would have to recalibrate. Ravka couldn’t afford to rig the entire northern border with mines. But Fjerda had no way of knowing that, so they would have to waste valuable time sweeping potential incursion points. They could no longer rely on parem as a weapon against Ravka’s Grisha. And more importantly, the Zemeni had shown that Ravka was not alone. The Fjerdans had wanted to play quick and dirty. This day had shown them what this fight would really look like. See what your country thinks of war now that your soldiers will have to bleed too.
Nikolai let his flyer coast gently into the landing bay at the base of the largest airship, bringing it to an abrupt stop that taxed the little craft’s brakes.
Kalem Kerko was there to greet him and Tolya. He wore blue fatigues, his hair in short twists.
“Your Highness,” he said with a sharp bow.
Nikolai clapped Kerko on the back. “Let’s not stand on ceremony.” He had trained with Kerko’s family when he was learning the work of gunsmiths, and he was not remotely surprised to see the ways in which the Zemeni had improved upon Ravkan airships. “You just saved our asses.”
“You gave us the skies,” said Kerko. “We can at least help you keep this miserable country. Will you pursue the Fjerdans? They’re in retreat.”
“We can’t afford to. Not yet. But you’ve granted us valuable time.”
“We’ll travel with you to Poliznaya.”
“The stockpile of antidote?” Nikolai asked.
Kerko gestured to a wall of what looked like grain sacks. “You can say that you hoped there would be more. I won’t be offended. Your soldier’s face shows the truth of it.”
“Tolya always looks that way. Except when he’s reciting verse, and no one wants that.” Nikolai tallied the sacks of antidote and sighed. “But yes, we hoped there would be more.”
“Parem is fairly easy to manufacture if someone manages the formula. But the antidote?” Kerko shrugged. “It requires too much raw jurda. Perhaps your Fabrikators can find a new way to process the plant.”
The formula had been the work of David Kostyk, Ravka’s most talented Materialnik, working with Kuwei Yul-Bo, the son of the very man who had invented parem. But the idea had come from the source of jurda, Novyi Zem, and a young boy who had grown up on a farm there. He’d told Kuwei that during the harvest, mothers would put balm from the stalks of the jurda plant on babies’ lips and eyelids to prevent the pollen from affecting them.
“It takes a tremendous amount of the crop to create the antidote,” said Kerko. “Worse, the harvesting of the stalks ruins the fields. If we keep pushing, our farmers will revolt. And there’s something else. One of our suppliers reported a bizarre occurrence in his fields, a blight that seemed to come from nowhere. It turned two of his pastures to barren wasteland, and the livestock grazing there vanished like—”
“Smoke,” finished Nikolai. So the vampire had sunk its teeth into Novyi Zem.
“Then you know of this plague? It’s the second event of this kind our country has seen in two months. Are you witnessing its like in Ravka?”
“Yes,” Nikolai admitted. “There was an occurrence near Sikursk and another south of Os Kervo. We’re running experiments on the soil. We’ll let you know what we discover.”
But Nikolai knew what they would find: death. Nothing would grow in that soil again. And if this blight kept spreading, who knew where it might strike next or if it could be stopped? Even the thought of it was enough to rile the demon inside him, as if it recognized the power that had created it in the source of this destruction.
“Is it connected to the Fold?” asked Kerko.
Tolya looked surprised. “You’ve been there?”
“After the unification. I wanted to see it for myself. A cursed place.”
That word again: cursed.
“There’s a connection,” said Nikolai. “We just don’t know what it is yet.” That much was true. And Nikolai wasn’t prepared to tell Kerko that the Darkling had returned. “I’ll escort you to Poliznaya. We can store the antidote on base.”
“There will be retribution from the Kerch,” warned Kerko as they walked back to the flyer. “For all of us. They’ll find a way.”
“We know,” said Tolya solemnly. “And we know the risk you’ve taken by coming to our aid.”
Kerko grinned. “They were willing to attack our ships and our sailors without ever raising the flag of war. The Kerch have never been friends to the Zemeni, and it’s best they know we’re not without friends either.”