“And what do you think of the king’s war?” he asked a group of old men gathered on the porch.
The gray grandfather who answered was so wizened he looked more walnut than man. “Our Nikolai didn’t ask for a war, but if it’s what them cold northern bastards want, he’ll give it to them.”
His wrinkled companion spat onto the wooden slats. “You’ll be kissing the icy asses of those northern bastards when they march through. We don’t have the tanks and guns the Fjerdans have, and sending our children to die won’t change that.”
“You saying we should just let them drop bombs on our cities?”
On and on it went, the same old story. But they did love their king.
“You’ll see, he’ll find a way out of this trap, same as the last. The too-clever fox always does.”
Aleksander wondered if they’d actually read that particular story. He seemed to recall it had a very bloody end. The fox had lost his hide to the hunter’s knife. Or maybe he’d been rescued? Aleksander couldn’t recall.
He sat at the end of a table in the beer hall, ate tough rye bread and strips of lamb stewed so long they tasted like they’d already been chewed. This was what it meant to be alive. Elizaveta should count herself lucky. To think Zoya had been the one to kill her. He supposed it saved him the trouble of doing it himself. And if Zoya ever learned to harness the power she’d been given? She was still vulnerable, still malleable. Her anger made her easy to control. When this war was done and the casualties counted, she might once more be in need of a shepherd. She had been one of his best students and soldiers, her envy and her rage driving her to train and fight harder than any of her peers. And then she’d turned on him. Like Genya. Like Alina. Like his own mother. Like all of Ravka.
She will return to you.
He didn’t want Yuri’s sympathy. He drank sour beer and listened to the customers gossip. All the talk was of the war, the bombing of Os Alta, and of course, the blight that had vexed the king and his general so.
“Pilgrims camped in Gayena. They tried to set up their blasted black tents here, but we drove them out. We’ll have none of that unholy talk.”
“They say the blight’s a punishment for not making the Darkling a Saint.”
“Well, I say make him a Saint if it will bring that pasture back to life. Where am I supposed to graze my cattle?”
“If he can get my lazy husband out of bed, I’ll make a pilgrimage to the Fold myself.”
Gayena. At last he had word of the Starless. He finished his awful meal and ducked out of the beer hall, but not before he’d used his shadows to help him snatch a pair of spectacles from one of the tables. As he walked, he let Yuri’s features return to the fore, the long face, the weak chin. No beard, of course. He was no Tailor. And the weak body would remain in exile too. Aleksander would need every bit of his strength. He placed the spectacles on his nose. He would have to look over the lenses. Yuri’s faulty eyesight from all those years bent over books was another thing he didn’t care to restore.
He could feel the boy’s elation at the prospect of rejoining the faithful. This is my purpose. This is the reason for all of it.
Yuri wasn’t wrong. Everyone had a part to play.
Aleksander found the Starless camped under a bridge like a gathering of trolls, their black banners raised over their tents. He took quick stock of their defenses and assets. It was a surprisingly young group, and almost all men, all of them dressed in black, many in tunics clumsily embroidered with his symbol—the sun in eclipse. He spotted a mule, a few scrawny horses, a box covered with a tarp in a wagon—a weapons cache, he assumed. This was what he had to work with? He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. If not an army, then the makings of one, but not this pathetic gathering.
I shouldn’t have left them. Yuri again. His presence was more insistent now, as if allowing the little monk’s features to emerge had made Yuri’s voice stronger—less a single gnat than a swarm of them.
“Yuri?” A barrel-chested man with a salt-and-pepper beard approached.
Aleksander searched for his name and Yuri’s memories provided it. “Chernov!”
He was swept up in a musty, muscular embrace that nearly lifted him off his toes. It was like being hugged by a bearskin rug badly in need of cleaning.
“We feared you were dead!” Chernov cried. “We’d heard you were traveling with the apostate king and then, not a word from you.”
“I have returned.”