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.
I will show you wonders, he promised.
This is a holy place, Yuri protested.
Aleksander nearly laughed. What made a church holy? The gilded halos of the Saints? The words of its priest?
The prayers said beneath its roof.
He scowled in the darkness. The boy’s piousness was exhausting.
Aleksander lowered himself into the room beneath the basement. Here, the floor was dirt and the lantern showed nothing but earthen walls, roots trying to push their way through.
But he knew what this room had once been—the workshop at the back of Morozova’s home, the place where his grandfather had tampered with the boundaries between life and death, had resurrected creatures with the hope of building power into their bones. He’d tried to make his own amplifiers and he’d succeeded.
Aleksander had attempted to follow in Morozova’s footsteps. He’d cajoled his mother into bringing him to this town, to the home she’d occupied as a child. When she’d seen the church built in the place where her father’s workshop had been, she’d laughed for the better part of an hour.
“They killed him, you know,” Baghra had said, tears of mirth leaking from her eyes. “The ancestors of the very men and women walking this town and praying in this church threw him into the river. Real power frightens them.” She’d waved at the painted altarpiece. “They want the illusion of it. An image on a wall, silent and safe.”
But power was exactly what Aleksander had found, tucked away in this basement—his grandfather’s journals, the records of his experiments. They had become his obsession. He’d been sure that he could do what Ilya Morozova had done, and so he’d tried. The result was the Fold.
A gift, whispered Yuri’s voice, and Aleksander was suddenly standing in Novokribirsk, watching the tide of the Fold rush toward him, hearing the screams around him. You saved me that day.
Aleksander peered into the darkness of the basement room. He certainly hadn’t meant to save Yuri. But he was glad someone remembered the good he’d done for this country.
He felt along the wall, the soil cold and moist beneath his palm, to the niche where he’d found the journals, bound up in oilcloth. Empty now. No, not entirely. His fingers fastened around something—a piece of wood. Part of a child’s toy. The curving neck of a swan fashioned with exquisite care, broken at the base. Useless.
Why did you go to Alina? Yuri buzzed away. Why seek her out? To reclaim his power, of course. The universe wanted to humble him, to force him to appeal to a pair of pathetic orphans like a beggar on his knees.
Why did you go to her?
Because with her he was human again. She had once been naive, lonely, desperate for approval, all the things that had made it so easy for him to manipulate his soldiers in the past. So how had she bested him? Sheer stubbornness. That pragmatic impulse that had allowed her to survive the orphanage, to endure so many years without using her power. Something more. He’d known the name for it once, a hundred lifetimes ago. It’s not too late for you. Alina might be right, but he hadn’t fought his way back from death for the sake of being saved.
There was no penance for him to make. Everything he’d done was for the Grisha, for Ravka.
And the blight? Could he add that to the list of his supposed crimes? He had to admit that it was partially his fault. Though if the boy king had been good enough to lie down and die as he was meant to, the obisbaya would have been completed and the Fold never would have ruptured. But how terrible could it be? Ravka had been through worse and so had he.
Aleksander looked down at the broken toy in his hands. He shouldn’t have come here. He smelled the turned earth, the incense from the church above. This place was nothing but another grave.
He wanted to be out of the darkness, back beneath the watery winter sun. He closed the trapdoor behind him and swept up the stairs from the basement, but he paused at the door to the church. He could hear the priest speaking, the shuffle and murmur of a crowd. They must have entered while he’d been sunk in his thoughts.
What day was it? Had they all assembled for morning services?
The priest was telling the tale of Sankt Nikolai—the little boy nearly eaten by cannibal sailors, who had gone on to minister to the poor and hungry. It was as bloody and odd as all the Saints’ lives.
Perhaps it was time for a new story, a single Saint, greater than all those who had come before him, who didn’t dole out his power like some kind of banker keeping a ledger of prayers and good deeds. Perhaps it was time for a new kind of miracle.
From his hiding place behind the door, he raised his hands and focused on the painted icon behind the priest. Slowly, shadows curled from Sankt Ilya’s open hands; they began to bleed from his mouth.
A gasp went up from the congregation. The priest turned and fell to his knees. Aleksander drank their fear and wonder. Heady as that cheap cherry wine he’d had in … he could not quite recall.
You see, Yuri. Your age of miracles has begun.
He gusted through the church, disguising himself in a whirling cloud of shadow, and the congregants screamed.
Aleksander couldn’t simply appear again, resurrected. There were too many old grudges and there would be too many questions. No, there was a better story here. He would become Yuri, let the boy do the talking for him, and when the time came, the monk would be his chosen one—a boy who came from nothing, endowed with great power. They’d loved Alina’s little fairy tale. They’d love this one too.
He would go to the Fold. He would find those who followed the Starless Saint.
He would teach the world awe.
22
NINA
NINA DIDN’T WANT TO MOVE from her bed. Hanne had told her parents that she was ill, that the oysters at the previous day’s breakfast hadn’t agreed with her.
“I forget she’s not used to the luxuries of the Ice Court,” Brum had said, his voice carrying through the gap in the door. “But she must join us to celebrate.”