The pilgrims were staring at him as they lurched to their feet, climbing from the ditch they’d rolled into.
Aleksander looked down at the ground. Between his boots, he saw mud, pebbles, a scraggly patch of grass. To his left, to his right, nothing but dead gray sand. The cart was gone, all the weapons. And Brother Azarov.
Brother Chernov’s round face was full of wonder as he approached. “It spared you.”
“I don’t understand it,” Aleksander said, doing his best to sound dismayed. “Brother Azarov was not so lucky.”
The pilgrims didn’t seem to care. They were gazing at him with awe in their eyes.
“Truly, you have the Starless One’s blessing.”
A scrawny young pilgrim looked back at the town. “But why would the Starless One save Brother Vedenen from the blight and not those innocent people?”
“It’s not for us to question his ways,” said Brother Chernov as they began their long walk back to camp. “When the Darkling returns and is made a Saint, the blight will trouble us no more.”
Yet another thing Chernov was wrong about.
Aleksander glanced back at the town. He had done worse to Novokribirsk at the start of the civil war. But he had been in control. The vampire had no master. It could not be reasoned with or seduced. Why had it spared him? Perhaps it recognized the power that had created the Fold. Or maybe the blight was drawn to life and it had sensed something unnatural in him, something it did not thirst for.
The rest of the day was spent on the Fold, making a new plan for their travel north and where to acquire weapons and supplies. They trained, they prayed, they ate their meager supply of hardtack and salt pork, and lay down to sleep.
“Rest,” he told them. “Rest and we will await the sign.” When the right moment came on the battlefield, he would release his nichevo’ya and they would all know the Starless One had returned.
These people were outcasts, he realized, as he picked his way among the sleeping pilgrims. Just as the Grisha had once been.
It’s not too late for you. So Alina had said. Or was it his mother? Or the gnat? It didn’t matter. All his long life he’d been guided by clarity of purpose. It had let him kill without remorse and had given him the daring to seize power that should have been beyond his grasp. It had brought him back from the dead. That was the clarity he needed now.
Aleksander lay down in the blankets that had been set aside for him. They smelled powerfully of horse. He picked up a handful of the Fold’s dead sands and let them drift through his fingers. Was this his legacy? This wound where nothing would grow? A blight that spread even as his nation marched to war?
He looked up at the stars spread like spilled treasure across the night sky. The Starless One. His followers spoke his name in tones of reverence, and in the days to come, their numbers would grow. But people didn’t turn their eyes to the heavens in search of the dark. It was the light they sought.
All that will change, he vowed. I will give them salvation until they beg me to stop.
34
NIKOLAI
THE MOOD AT LAZLAYON was bleak. Nikolai had wanted to speak to Adrik before they landed, but he hadn’t seen the Squaller. There was little room not to bump into each other on a ship like the Cormorant—and that meant Adrik was avoiding him.
“A word,” Nikolai said as they disembarked at the misty landing strip beside the secret entrance to the labs.
Adrik looked wary but said only, “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“If you don’t feel you can serve any longer, you may put in your resignation. We’re desperate for trained Grisha, but I can’t afford a soldier whose heart isn’t in this fight.”
“I have no interest in resigning.”
“You’re sure? Think before you answer.”
Adrik was younger than Nikolai, but his consistently miserable demeanor made that easy to forget. Now he looked like a boy—the boy whose body had been savaged by the Darkling’s monsters and who had fought on when others had lost their will.
“Are you … how much of you is you and how much is that thing?”
“I don’t know,” Nikolai answered honestly. “But the demon isn’t the Darkling’s to command. It’s mine.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Nikolai had no reason to be. And yet he was. Maybe the darkness inside him had once belonged to the Darkling, a demon born of his enemy’s power. But they’d begun to make their peace when they’d faced each other in the thorn wood. It was his monster now.