The Tavgharad guard with the rifle set down her weapon, but it was hardly a gesture of peace. Her expression looked carved from stone.
“What is that smell?” said Zoya.
“I don’t smell anything,” said Tolya.
Zoya fluttered her fingers and a bare breeze wafted toward them from the steps.
“Accelerant,” said Tamar, edging closer to the stairs. “Their clothes are soaked.”
Understanding and terror struck Nikolai. They couldn’t mean to …
“Set us free!” demanded Ehri. “Queen Makhi will never stand for—”
“Ehri, move away from them,” he said, watching one of the Tavgharad reach into her pocket. “This is not an escape. This is—”
“I will never—”
“Ehri!”
But it was too late. The Tavgharad guard who had put down her rifle shouted something in Shu. Nikolai glimpsed the match in her hand.
One by one, the Tavgharad burst into flame, each of them a torch engulfed in golden fire. All of it too fast, a slide of keys on the piano, a sudden doomed flourish.
“No!” Nikolai cried, rushing forward. He saw Ehri’s shocked face, the flames racing up her skirts as she screamed.
Zoya acted in an instant, a rush of cold wind extinguishing the fire in a single icy blast. It wasn’t enough. Whatever the Tavgharad had doused themselves with had worked too well. Ehri was on the ground, screaming. The others were silent heaps of charred flesh and ash. His servants were crying out in terror and the palace guards stood frozen in disbelief.
Nikolai’s hands and forearms were badly burned where he’d tried to grab Ehri, his clothing clinging to his smoking flesh. But it was nothing compared to what had happened to the princess. Her skin was scorched black, and where the top layer of flesh was burned away, her limbs were red and wet. Nikolai could feel the heat radiating from her body. She was shaking, her screams stuttering as she convulsed, her body going into shock.
“Tamar, drop her pulse and put her into a coma,” Nikolai commanded. “Tolya, get a Healer.”
Ehri’s screams went silent as Tamar knelt and did her work.
“Why would they do this?” Zoya said, her face stricken as she took in the sudden carnage, the burned piles of blood and bone that had been women mere moments before.
Tamar’s hands were trembling as she monitored Ehri’s pulse. “We gave her too much freedom. We should have kept her in the dungeons, sent the Tavgharad to the brig at Poliznaya.”
“She didn’t know,” said Nikolai, looking down at Ehri’s ruined flesh, the hitching rise and fall of her chest. They had to get her to the infirmary. “She didn’t know. I saw it on her face. The accelerant was only on the hem of her robes.”
“Where did they even get it?” asked Zoya.
Nikolai shook his head. “From the kitchens when they escaped? It’s possible they made it themselves.”
Tamar rose as Tolya returned with a stretcher borne by two Corporalki in their red kefta. Their faces showed their dismay, but if anyone could heal Ehri, the Grisha could.
Nikolai stood on the steps, surrounded by death, watching Ehri and her keepers disappear in the direction of the Little Palace.
“Why?” Zoya said again.
“Because they are Tavgharad,” Tamar replied. “Because they serve their queen unto death. And Ehri is no queen.”
9
ZOYA
ZOYA HOVERED BY THE WINDOW in Nikolai’s bedroom, watching the winter wind play over the palace grounds, as it made the bare branches rattle and sigh as if resigned to the dark days to come. The gardens looked bleak at this time of year, before snow fell to soften them. Ehri had been taken to the Little Palace, where she would be seen to by the same Grisha Healers who had brought her double, Mayu Kir-Kaat, back from the brink of death only weeks before.
Behind her, she heard Nikolai draw a swift breath. He was lying atop his covers as a Healer tended to his burns. She’d seen to his hands first, where the worst of the damage had been, but the rest would take far longer.
Zoya went to his side. “Can’t you give him something more for the pain?”
“I gave him the strongest draught I could,” said the Healer. “Anything else he won’t wake up from. I could put him into a coma, but—”
“No,” Nikolai said, his eyes fluttering open. “I hate that feeling.”
Zoya knew why. When he’d been fighting the demon, she’d used a powerful sleeping tonic to knock him out every night for months. He’d said it felt like dying.