“Once you are known, you cannot be unknown,” she’d warned him.
But he’d been waiting for a ruler like Yevgeni—practical, forward-thinking, and desperate. Aleksander traveled to the capital and sought an audience with the king, and there he’d let his shadows unfurl. The Grand Palace hadn’t even been built then, only a ramshackle castle of rickety wood and ragged stone.
The king and his court had been frightened. Some had called him a demon, others had claimed he was a trickster and a fraud. But the king was too pragmatic to let such an opportunity pass him by.
“You will take your talents to the border,” he’d told Aleksander. “Be they true sorcery or mere illusion, you will use them against our enemies. And if our army finds victory, you will be rewarded.”
Aleksander had marched south with the king’s soldiers, and when they’d faced the Shu in the field, he’d unleashed darkness upon their opponents, blinding them where they stood. Ravka’s forces had won the day.
But when Yevgeni had offered Aleksander his reward, he had refused the king’s gold. “There are others like me, Grisha, living in hiding. Give me leave to offer them sanctuary here and I will build you an army the likes of which the world has never seen.”
Aleksander had traveled throughout Ravka, to places he and his mother had visited before, to distant lands where he’d gone on his own to study. He knew the secret ways and hiding places of Grisha, and wherever he went, he promised them a new life lived without fear.
“We will be respected,” he’d vowed. “Honored. We will have a home at last.”
They hadn’t wanted to come with him to the capital at first. They’d been sure it was some kind of trick and that once they were within the city’s double walls, they would be killed. But a few were willing to make the journey with him, and they had become the soldiers of the Second Army.
There had been objections from noblemen and priests, of course, accusations of dark magic, but as their military victories had continued, the arguments grew weaker.
Only King Yevgeni’s Apparat continued to campaign against the Grisha. He railed that the Saints would forsake Ravka if the king continued to harbor witches beneath his roof. Each day he would stand before the throne and rant until he was short of breath and red in the face. One day, he simply keeled over. If he’d been helped to his death by a Corporalnik posted by a shaded window, no one was the wiser.
But the next Apparat was more circumspect in his objections. He preached the tale of Yaromir and Sankt Feliks at the First Altar, a story of extraordinary soldiers who had helped a king unify a country, and two years later, Aleksander began work on the Little Palace.
He had thought he’d accomplished his task, that he’d given his people a safe haven, a home where they’d never be punished for their gifts.
What had changed? The answer was everything. Kings lived and died. Their sons were honest or corrupt. Wars ended and began again—and again and again. Grisha were not accepted; they were resented in Ravka and hunted abroad. Men fought them with swords, then guns, then worse. There was no end to it, and so he had sought an end. Power that could not be questioned. Might that could not be reckoned with. The result had been the Fold.
His first soldiers were dead now. Lovers, allies, countless kings and queens. Only he continued on. Eternity took practice, and he’d had plenty of it. The world had changed. War had changed. But he had not. He’d traveled, learned, killed. He’d met his half sister, who had herself passed into legend and Sainthood. He’d searched the world for his mother’s other children, hungry for kinship, for a sense of himself in others. He’d discarded his past lives like a snake shedding its skin, becoming sleeker and more dangerous with every new version of himself. But maybe he’d left some part of who he was behind in each of those lives.
Brother Azarov startled awake as Aleksander brought the cart to a stop on the sloping road that led into Adena. The monk yawned and smacked his lips. It was early morning, and Aleksander could see it was market day in the little town. Even from a distance, he could tell the mood was somber, the threat of war creeping ever closer, but the square was still full of people stocking up on provisions, children playing or working the stalls with their parents, neighbors calling their greetings.
Aleksander hopped down to stretch his legs and make sure the weapons were secure at the back of the wagon.
“Have you been to Adena before?” Brother Azarov asked.
“Yes,” he replied before he thought better of it. Yuri had never been. “No … But I always wanted to visit.”