Over the course of the journey, Mayu had listened to Tamar and Ehri talk and scheme, unwinding the different threads of their mission, then binding them up again, a bit cleaner, a bit tighter than they had been before. She knew she was only glimpsing a fraction of their plans, and she said little because she had little to say. She had never needed to take much interest in politics, and she wasn’t meant to eavesdrop on the conversations of her betters.
But everything had changed now, and if she was going to survive, if she was going to find a way to save her twin, she had to learn. It wasn’t easy. The way Ehri and Tamar spoke of the players in the Taban court made her feel like she was looking through a foggy lens focusing, then blurring, then focusing again, as it showed her a picture she’d never quite been able to see before.
“We will have no luck with Minister Yerwei,” Ehri said. “He’s the wiliest of Makhi’s advisers and her most valued confidant.”
“Was he close to your mother as well?” Tamar asked, though Mayu had the sense she already knew the answer to this question, that she was testing Princess Ehri.
“Oh yes. He was smart, very ambitious. He comes from a long line of doctors who serve the Taban queens.”
“Doctors,” said Tamar flatly.
Ehri nodded. “You’ve guessed rightly. Those same doctors who began the attempts to root out and harness Grisha power.” Ehri must have seen the way Tamar’s jaw set. “I know how it sounds and you’re not wrong, but it began innocently enough.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Ehri spread her hands wide, the gesture graceful. She wore a green velvet traveling dress with a high neck and tiny buttons that ran all the way from her wrists to her elbow. The Grisha Healers and Genya Safin had done their job well. Her body was fully healed, her hair regrown. She would never be a great beauty like Makhi, but she had an easy elegance that made her look completely out of place in the hold of this airship, with its heaps of coiled rope and the crates of weapons Tamar’s crew had stockpiled. Mayu resisted the urge to stretch her legs, test the muscles in her arms. The king had been as good as his word and she’d had her strength restored. There wasn’t so much as a scar on her chest to mark the place where she’d tried to plunge the knife into her heart.
“They began with autopsies performed on the dead,” said Ehri. “Attempts to study the organs and brains of Grisha, to see if there were biological differences between them and ordinary people.”
“And when you couldn’t find any differences, you thought, why not take a closer look at the living?”
“You say ‘you’ as if these were my practices. I have played no part in my sister’s government.”
Tamar folded her arms. “Is that your idea of an excuse? Turning away from atrocity isn’t something to be proud of.”
Queen Makhi would have struck Tamar where she sat for such insolence—regardless of those silver axes slung at her hips like sickle moons. But Ehri looked only thoughtful. She didn’t have a queen’s pride.
“It was an ugly practice,” she admitted. “My mother put an end to those experiments for a reason.”
“Then where did the khergud come from?” asked Mayu, unable to hold her tongue any longer. It felt strange to speak this way to a Taban princess, and yet Ehri didn’t look scandalized or offended.
“I don’t know. I had never heard of them until a few weeks ago.”
“How can that be?” Mayu couldn’t keep the resentment from her voice. “You are a princess.”
“You were a princess for a time,” said Ehri gently. “Did you find much meaning in it?”
Mayu had no reply to that, but it did nothing to quell her anger. Nikolai, Makhi, all the kings and queens and generals made their grand decisions, decided who should live, who should die, who should suffer. She had never cared, not really. She’d been happy to follow, happy to have found her place in the world. Until she’d lost Reyem and then Isaak.
Tamar unsheathed one of her axes, letting it spin in her palm. “The khergud hunted Grisha indentures in Ketterdam. They’ve attacked behind Ravka’s own borders. You’re saying you didn’t know about them?”
“No,” said Ehri. “And I doubt most Shu did.”
“And Makhi’s advisers?”
“That I can’t be certain of.”
That was part of the problem. There was too much Ehri didn’t know. Just how was she supposed to give Queen Makhi any kind of a fight?