Nina spread her hands wide, helpless. “I cannot explain these things.”
“You are a liar and a heretic. You are unnatural with your trances and your predictions. You—”
Nina threw back her head, letting her eyes roll white in their sockets. “You bled and bled. You knew you were going to lose this child like all the others. You sent sweet Linor to the dungeons and had a Grisha Healer brought to you. Her name was Pavlina. You promised her freedom. But you never intended to set her free. She sat with you for hours, long into the night. She stayed with you, day after day, healing you, healing your princeling, even in the womb. She told you stories when you were restless. And when you wept, she sang you a lullaby.”
“No.” The word emerged as a moan.
Nina had a terrible singing voice, but she did her best to follow the melody of the dead woman crooning to her. “Dye ena kelinki, dya derushka, shtoya refkayena lazla zeya.” It was an old Ravkan folk song. Up in the mountains, high in the trees, the firebird sleeps on a golden bough.
“You … you know Ravkan?”
“I have never spoken a word before now. I know only what Djel shows me. Pavlina told you she had a daughter, a little girl you promised she would see again.”
The queen released a sob. “I needed her help!”
“Djel forgives you all of it.” I don’t, thought Nina. Your tree god is far more magnanimous. “But he will not forgive the murder of more Grisha. Not when your son owes his life to one.”
“I … how am I to stop it? Our people want war.”
“Is that what you’ve been told or what you know? Your generals want war. The people want their sons and daughters to live. They want to sleep in their beds and tend the crops in their fields. Will you listen to your generals or to Djel? The choice is yours.” Nina remembered a line from one of the Saints’ stories she’d read in an old children’s book: You can choose faith or you can choose fear. But only one will bring you what you long for.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You do. Listen closely. The water hears and understands.” She bowed and made to leave.
“You dare turn your back on me?”
A bold move, but Nina needed to show Agathe she wore the armor of faith. She couldn’t afford to show fear.
“It is Djel you should be worried about, my queen,” she said. “Take care lest he turn his back on you.”
She slipped out of the throne room and hurried down the hall. Had she gone too far or just far enough? Would the seeds she’d planted yield a move toward peace? Or had she only endangered herself and maybe Hanne too?
She couldn’t contemplate that now. She’d made her choices and there was more work to be done tonight. Earlier, she’d been too bleary to make sense of what she’d heard Brum say outside her room, but now the word rang through her head—Drokestering. The drüskelle would be in the woods tonight, far from the Ice Court, celebrating the sneak attack on Ravka.
This was her chance to break Magnus Opjer out of the drüskelle sector. Ravka was bleeding, and she was powerless to undo the damage their enemies had wrought. But Nikolai Lantsov still lives. That meant there was still hope. She could deal Fjerda a blow and maybe give her king a small advantage in this fight.
It was time to make some trouble.
23
NIKOLAI
NIKOLAI HAD MEANT TO SLEEP, and when he had tossed and turned sufficiently to determine that he could not, he rose from his unfamiliar bed in the Iris Suite with every intention of working. But he had no success with that either. He had penned a message to Ketterdam and there was nothing to do but wait for a reply. Though he tried to focus on the rocket schematics he’d had brought to him from Lazlayon, it was impossible to look at the plans David had drawn, the notations in his cramped handwriting filling the margins, and not lose his thoughts to sadness, to the endless what-ifs that might have saved his friend’s life. He couldn’t stop seeing David’s broken body being pulled from the rubble, the blood and dust on his crushed chest.
Nikolai walked to the window. The palace grounds were covered in snow. From this vantage point, none of the damage from the bombing was visible. The world seemed quiet, ordinary, and at peace. He had sent word to Tamar to see if she could find out if the Shu queen had known about the bombing, if the Shu and the Fjerdans had come together to forge an alliance against Ravka—the bone they’d been fighting over for centuries. But he didn’t think that was the case. Makhi had her own agenda. She’d seen Ravka as weak and she’d moved to claim it through subterfuge before Fjerda could claim it by force. If not for Isaak’s courage and fate’s love of a good plot twist, the Shu queen might have done just that. But while Makhi had failed with a scalpel, Fjerda might well succeed with a hammer. They would celebrate the buildings they’d crushed, the ships and flyers they’d destroyed, never knowing the true death blow they’d dealt Ravka: David Kostyk was gone.