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Chapter Text

In the third year of the reign of the King of Scars, Fjerda declared for Vadik Demidov and prepared to march on Ravka under the golden double eagle of the Lantsovs. Various undercurrents began to stir, and twenty-two attempts were made on the young king’s life.

In the end, perhaps as a result of the twenty-two failed assassinations, or possibly because it was, in all honesty, prodigiously difficult to rescue a nation that was determinedly dragging itself underwater, Nikolai Lantsov vomited blood in the middle of a war council, before all of his stunned ministers, and collapsed.

When the king retired to a royal hunting lodge on the outskirts of Os Alta to recuperate, the capital went off like a firecracker.

“Bleh! He can’t even handle a few rabid, tree-hugging ice dogs? I bet he’s run away, the coward.”

“How can you say that, after all he has done for this country?”

“Humph, assassination attempt, what rubbish. He’s probably just spent one too many nights at Lazlayon.”

“Ai, and after barely three years of peace…”

On the outskirts of Os Alta, a subdued river crept through a narrow gorge. The green shadows of rustling willow trees crept across the windows of a hunting lodge, perched above its soaring cliffs.

In a room filled with the mild, sweet scent of chamomile, the mainstay of the colourful rumours spreading across Os Alta was sprawled across a divan, languidly flipping through a scroll of parchment. It was the beginning of summer, but still a heavy furred cloak rested across his shoulders. In a brazier, a fire crackled happily away.

“Mikhail, more tea please,” Nikolai said. He was rubbing his temples, apparently beset by a headache, when the servant knocked quietly and entered.

“Moi tsar,” Mikhail said, carefully refilling the cup of tea, keeping his gaze respectfully confined to the wooden floorboards before his feet. When Nikolai made no move to dismiss him, Mikhail risked a glance upwards, and found that the king had already fallen asleep in a lazy puddle of afternoon sun.

~

“I’m flattered by your enthusiasm,” Nikolai said, frowning faintly. “But it’s a little too late to produce an heir now, don’t you think?”

Perched behind his desk, swamped in a heavy stack of animal furs, Nikolai looked pitifully wan, but that didn’t stop Zoya from wanting to throttle him.

“I don’t care if you fish an heir out of the True Sea, but you will write that decree today. I’ve been reminding you to do it for the past week, and Ravka cannot afford to be without a line of succession for much longer, especially given your condition.”

“Already plotting my death, are we?” Nikolai perked up. “How many artillery salutes are we planning for the state funeral?”

Zoya decided that talking to Nikolai when he was like this was only good for nursing a hernia, so after a few more inquiries into scattered affairs of state, she stood and bowed slightly.

“I will return in the evening to collect the decree,” Zoya said, and left with a swish of her long blue kefta.

Nikolai gazed after her thoughtfully, but his attention was quickly captured by a sheaf of papers by his elbow, which largely resembled the scribblings of drunk toddler. As he bent over the haphazard calculations and began to write anew, he called absently, “Mikhail, some tea?”

Nikolai worked his way steadily through his blueprints for refining the use of dvigat’sya for the greater part of the afternoon. They had discovered dvigat’sya accidentally—by fashioning two objects from two halves of the same raw material, Fabrikator craft could forge a connection between the hearts of both and have them move as one. The principle was fascinating, and so only when the first tendrils of dusk slanted into the room did Nikolai recall with a start that he quite valued his life.

With all the urgency of an elderly turtle, Nikolai got to his feet and shuffled back and forth across his study. He rifled through cabinets and drawers, pausing every few minutes to rest, and finally extracted a bronze tiger figurine, two unremarkable copper coins, and four keys.

Three quatrefoil locks turned, two wooden panels slid apart noiselessly, and huffing with effort, Nikolai prised the Great Seal of the Realm out from beneath the floorboards. In the process, he accidentally jangled some bottles of the kvas he had stuffed there, and patted them apologetically.  With the same incredible slowness, Nikolai shambled back to his desk, dipped a quill into ink, and began to write a decree.

After sealing the decree in cinnabar-red and reburying the Great Seal in his makeshift wine cellar, Nikolai pinched the bridge of his nose, flopped down on his divan, and closed his eyes.

Presently, the door to the study opened silently, and a figure slipped inside. Lightly, he approached the desk and seized the decree, eyeing the space beneath the floorboards where the Great Seal was hidden.

Nikolai did not stir. He lay still, his breaths shallow and stuttering, as if he were on the verge of expiring.

The intruder crept towards him, drawing his blade as he did so. For a heartbeat he stood motionless above the king. Then he slashed down and found the path of his knife deflected neatly by a slender metal nib of a quill.

Nikolai was smiling up at him. His face was still bloodless, but gone was the slow, trembling weakness and and the tired, cloudy cast to his eyes. With the silver arc of the knife’s descent, something cold and serpentine had uncoiled in their hazel depths.

“Evening, Mikhail,” Nikolai said mildly.

Gradually, cries and sporadic bursts of gunfire began to issue from the grounds outside, broken by the howling of the wind. Inside the hunting lodge, Nikolai ducked underneath the swing of Mikhail’s knife, twisted away nimbly, and reached out below the divan. His fingers closed around the hilt of his rapier, and he met Mikhail’s next blow with a ring of metal on metal.

The Lantsov sigil was a golden double eagle, but Nikolai fought like a serpent, cunning and lithe. He darted backwards, feinted left, and sent Mikhail’s knife thudding into the wall with a flick of his rapier.

Nikolai tipped his head to the side, as if listening to the shriek of the wind, and rested the tip of his blade lightly against Mikhail’s throat.

“Good for you to send word for your fellow conspirators,” Nikolai said brightly. “Were they expecting you to deliver a forged decree naming Ivan Petrov as crown prince?” Ivan Petrov was the Lantsov pretender presently backed by Shu Han.

A blood vessel twitched in Mikhail’s temple. “When did you know?” Mikhail hissed.

“When you had the lids of my tea kettles infused with he-ding-hong and believed you’d gotten away with it? After all the effort you spent trying to poison me, I could hardly refuse to play along.”

“Snake,” Mikhail spat.

“Kill me once, shame on you,” Nikolai shrugged. “Kill me, what, twenty-three times? Shame on me.”

Nikolai ignored the misplaced indignation that flashed through Mikhail’s furious eyes—after all, he and his cronies were hardly responsible for all of the attempts on Nikolai’s life—and deftly relieved him of his head. Moving quickly, he rummaged around the room, stuffing various lumpy bundles into his sleeve, and vaulted over the windowsill.

His personal guard was entangled with sixteen black-clad intruders, and on the perimeter of the hunting lodge, Zoya and a small unit of Second Army soldiers battled Shu Grisha warriors, their eyes almost completely black from parem.

The Second Army fought in efficient teams of three, pivoting around one another with practiced ease, their hands weaving through the air in time to a song he would never be able to hear. At their head, Zoya stood alone, a whirlwind raging at her feet. The trees around her reeled, knocked askew like a pile of abandoned matchsticks, but the small mountain of tea kettles behind her remained neatly stacked.

Slapping an attacker on the side of the head with the pommel of his rapier, Nikolai’s lips twitched. So she had taken him up on his suggestion after all.

With unerring precision, Zoya shot him an ominous glare and sliced a hand in his general direction. As if to make good on her threat, the surrounding woods rippled and a Shu Squaller plummeted from the sky like a smashed fly.

A dark figure detached itself from the forest shadows and darted across the grounds. Nikolai spared it a passing glance, and did a double take. “Is that Kaz Brekker?”

Tolya sent a Shu assassin’s head and body flying in opposite directions. “What?”

“Have Tamar do the accounts again after this is over and see what we’re missing,” Nikolai said. Then, he added hopefully, “Maybe he took that ugly statue of Sankta Anastasia that old Popov gave me for my Saint’s day?”

As if nursing a grudge, there was a sound like rolling thunder, and the dam broke.

Inej likely did not foresee that her invitation to Kaz Brekker would end up more or less amounting to treason, but Kaz Brekker had a knack for taunting fate, and he had never managed to scuff even the border of the word ‘well-behaved’. Two days after stepping foot into Os Alta, he was already padding through the woods of the royal hunting lodge, sleeves full of ill-gotten lingzhi.

The royal hunting lodge was fairly well-guarded, particularly after Nikolai Lantsov moved there, ostensibly to regain his health. But lingzhi commanded very respectable prices on the Shu Han black market, and that was reason enough for Kaz to burgle the King of Ravka.

Lingzhi liked to grow at the base of ancient trees, and the woods of the royal hunting grounds were amongst Ravka’s oldest, but lingzhi were so rarely found outside Novyi Zem that no one had ever bothered to comb through them. Kaz, however, had nothing if not patience for making money, and so spent his excursion to Ravka amassing a small fortune.

He was in the middle of plucking the last of the knobbly little mushrooms—pity there were so few—when Nikolai decided to get himself assassinated.

Kaz had watched the battle with interest from a well-hidden vantage point in the woods, and he would have stayed hidden if not for a strange gust of wind. It had whistled past him, and almost immediately, the grass beneath his feet had begun to yellow. Belatedly, he had clamped a sleeve over his nose, but by then the ground was already spinning.

Forced out of the cover of the trees, Kaz stole across the grounds, but his attempt to leave was interrupted by a Shu Heartrender. Over the distant roar of a swelling river, the assassin thrust a hand towards him, and tossed him into the gorge.

The river slammed into him, a wild thing irate at having been restrained, and threw him aside like so much flotsam. He tumbled head over heels, thrust deep below the surface by a fast-flowing current, so cold he could barely feel his own limbs. Kaz kicked out, trying to right himself and point his feet downstream, but the river had little patience for the antics of mortal men and sent a branch snapping against his head.

White noise. Kaz’s vision narrowed to a pinpoint, filling with black spots, and he bit down on his cheek before they could swallow him completely. The sharp coppery tang that filled his mouth forced the darkness back, but it retreated only to the edge of his consciousness, and with every heartbeat his head throbbed with sharp, dissonant pain.

Now fighting only to hold his breath, Kaz let the water sweep him along.

Just when the pressure in his lungs became almost unbearable, the current slackened. Choking, Kaz reared out of the water, snatching a breath before waters again closed over his head, drawing him into their cold embrace. 

What was that flash of gold he had seen, out there amidst the dark, churning waves?

There was a sharp tug around his middle, and he broke the water’s surface again.

“Breathe!”

Drunkenly, Kaz blinked, trying to remember what it was like to draw air into his lungs. But he was floating now, hovering high above a body that wasn’t his, warm and safe. With calm, piercing conviction he felt that if he breathed, he would be thrust back, bones broken by a wrathful river and the piercing cold.

His cheek burned with a sharp slap. With a start, Kaz jerked upright, and the dense, white fog that shrouded his mind retreated somewhat.

Nikolai Lantsov was glaring at him, hazel eyes brimming with the fury of a summer storm. He had somehow contrived for the river to pin him against a jagged spar of rock that jutted out of the water, and he was clinging to it now, holding Kaz above a roiling river.

Nikolai snarled, “Breathe!”

Kaz sucked in air in a frantic gasp and immediately hunched over, coughing, as river water left his lungs and trickled from his mouth. Revulsion rose in the wake of his growing lucidity. Lantsov was the only thing between Kaz and the water, churning white at their waist, and still Kaz wanted desperately to shove him away. Clenching his fists, Kaz shuddered and swallowed the bile that soured his mouth. What was this but another kind of drowning?

“Can you swim?” Nikolai shouted above the driving rain.

Not trusting himself to speak, Kaz nodded, because he suspected that if he said otherwise, Nikolai  Lantsov would let go.

“I am going to push away,” Nikolai said. “We make for the left bank. Your left.”

With that, Nikolai struck out from the rock, swimming with one arm, his strokes fast and decisive. He was still holding tightly onto Kaz with his left arm.

Kaz attempted to help him sidestroke, but quickly found that he had vastly underestimated that peculiar gust of wind. A growing wave of nausea licked at the back of his throat with every stroke, until at last it was all he could do to close his eyes and keep out of Nikolai’s way. The odd, misplaced warmth he had felt earlier was returning, and as they inched towards the bank, the river’s savage strength seemed to dull. Its pull was almost lulling. With a sigh, Kaz felt himself drift.

“Brekker, I cannot hold you up,” Nikolai’s voice was tight, as if he were forcing the sound out.

Kaz’s eyelashes fluttered.

“Stay… awake,” Nikolai said. Distantly, his thoughts sluggish and viscous as honey, Kaz realised that Nikolai was tiring. “Else, I buy Dregs… sell to Tante Haleen.”

Finally, something stirred inside him. “You don’t have the money,” Kaz whispered, his voice stolen by the cold.

Nikolai managed a weary laugh. He was dunking Kaz into the river with every stroke now, too spent to hoist him above the water, and grimly, Kaz twisted numb fingers into Nikolai’s tunic. As if by silent agreement, Nikolai let go of his waist, redoubling his efforts to reach shore, while Kaz manoeuvred himself by increments so that he was resting against Nikolai’s back.

Still, despite his best efforts, Kaz realised with a twinge of irritation that his field of vision was again narrowing. Even the river’s thundering cry grew muffled, until he was conscious only of the cold and Nikolai’s pained, shallow breathing, which grew steadily more ragged as time wore on. And so, a heartbeat before they slammed into the bank, he felt Nikolai sigh, a low sound of relief.

Motionless, they hung there, clutching the gnarled tree roots that protruded from the riverbank, as the current parted around them and hurried downstream.

“Safe,” Nikolai finally said, his voice almost as hoarse as Kaz’s own.

“Good,” Kaz agreed, and fainted.

~

Kaz drifted in and out of consciousness as snakes writhed through his bloodstream. His mouth was dry and hot, and an anvil struck angry, red sparks into his head. A feverish heat smothered him, leaching away any strength left in his wandering mind, and dazedly, Kaz wondered how it was possible for his eyelids to be so heavy, and yet for sleep be so far beyond reach.

Dimly, he was aware of the fact that someone was speaking to him, the cadence of their voice low and soothing. A cool hand rested on his forehead, chasing away some of the fire. Discomfort prickled distantly at his scalp, he felt as though he should pull away. But the promise of cold relief was too tempting for Kaz’s half-cooked brain to bear, and instead, Kaz pressed closer.

The faint, calming scent of chamomile curled around him, and then darkness swallowed him once more.

Under a rocky outcropping trailing moss and fern, Nikolai eyed the spluttering flames of his little campfire and wondered whether feeding it another branch would smother it entirely. Dubiously, he prodded the fire, and it spat petulant sparks at him. Shaking his head, Nikolai nudged his damp boots closer to the heat and winced when pain lanced through his fractured ribs.

Mournfully, he inspected the impressive bruising that mottled his chest. Why were there so many people throwing themselves at the crown? He seemed to have spent most of the last three years doggedly courting death.

But the exercise with the he-ding-hong had at least given him ample opportunity to take a pair of shears to his wild, unruly court. Absent-mindedly, he rubbed at a slender scar that lay over his heart. The Minister of Rites would be the first to go. The wretch had had the nerve to suggest that they dose some Fabrikators with jurda parem to pay off their debts to the Kerch. Nikolai had been magnanimous enough not to have lopped off his head on the spot, but did he really think Nikolai wasn’t aware of the fact that his wife was Mikhail’s aunt?

When a rustle finally came from the corner where Kaz Brekker slept, Nikolai blinked, coming back to himself. He watched smoke twist into the air in slender grey ribbons, and waited patiently.

“What happened to me?” Brekker spoke at last, in that rough rasp that sounded like desert sands, shifting in the wind.

“Poison. You should feel honoured. He-ding-hong is a Shu Han national secret.”

Feeling vaguely guilty, Nikolai flicked a twig at his campfire. It had been his idea for Zoya to draw away the he-ding-hong left in his tea kettles, dissolve the poison into the wind, and feed it back to the Shu. Brekker had likely been hit by an errant blast, and so indirectly, Nikolai had accidentally engineered his poisoning, but Nikolai certainly wasn’t telling him that.

“Has it been neutralised?” Brekker scrutinised him calmly. He was nestled in Nikolai’s oilskin cloak, which the river had generously spared, and did not look remotely grateful.

Even completely still, Brekker gave an impression of coiled movement, a crow waiting to take wing. Nikolai bit back a snort. Who did Brekker think he was fooling with that cool self-possession? He had been flapping about on death’s doorstep like a beached whale not two hours ago.

“No. I’ve stopped its progress towards your heart, but that’s about it,” Nikolai said bluntly. Brekker did not seem surprised.

“What is it then?”

“What?” Nikolai feigned ignorance.

“What do you want?” Brekker’s voice was flat.

“Oh, you wound me, Brekker. My heart is in tatters,” Nikolai said indifferently. “Given my generous, noble spirit, if I could cure you here and now, I would.”

Brekker certainly hadn’t been skulking around his backyard to pray for Nikolai’s good health, so while Nikolai had been guilty enough to fish him out of the river, he didn’t have enough conscience left over to play nursemaid. The impish light in Nikolai’s eyes grew hard.

“I am not returning to Os Alta in the near future,” he said. “You have two choices. You could leave and attempt to find someone both willing and able to help you. In your current state, your eyes, nose, and ears will start oozing blood by the three hour mark, so you’d better be able to locate a cure within four hours.”

Brekker tilted his head, his dark eyes dancing with the reflection of the flames. “Or?”

“You could accompany me,” Nikolai said tepidly. “I have matters of state to attend to. Fortunately for you, I am a man of many talents.”

He waved a spindly silver needle at Kaz. “I’d have to stick you full of needles every few hours. After a couple weeks, give or take, depending on how far the poison has spread, you should be good as new.”

Brekker fell silent. “And how good a medik are you?”

“A half-baked one,” Nikolai said, wholly unembarrassed. “But then you’d be surprised how terribly motivating regular assassination attempts can be.”

Brekker arched an eyebrow, and readily, Nikolai answered his unspoken question.

“Unless you have the flexibility of a Suli acrobat and an intimate knowledge of acupuncture points, you can’t do it yourself.”

“Aren’t you worried I’ll sell you out to the Shu in exchange for the antidote?” Brekker tipped his head to the side.

“You could,” Nikolai acknowledged. “But I think you’d rather place your bets with the king who has already saved you twice than the hostile nation you’ve already managed to offend.”

With that, Nikolai returned to poking at his little fire. If Brekker wanted to hurl himself at death, Nikolai wasn’t going to stand in his way. But Kaz Brekker was a clever man, and because he was clever, Nikolai already knew his decision.

After all, national secrets only stayed national secrets because they were wrought in blood.

Sure enough, Brekker’s shoulders stiffened. Nikolai finally glimpsed an undercurrent of thinly veiled anger in his eyes. Brekker’s composure, which even nearly drowning had barely shifted, was slipping, and Nikolai pretended not to notice.

Woefully, Nikolai wondered why he was cursed with a saviour complex. He didn’t know Dirtyhands well. Even so, he could tell that Kaz Brekker had steel in his bones, and being in Nikolai’s debt would eat away at him like maggots at rotting wood.

Nikolai was seriously considering taking pity on him and just slitting his throat, when Brekker spoke at last. “I offer you a deal.”

“Oh?” Nikolai’s ears pricked up.

“You mentioned you have matters of state to attend to,” Kaz Brekker said quietly. “To the north and south, Fjerda and Shu Han sharpen their claws. Ravka can ill afford more bloodshed. Your Highness intends to stop this war before it has begun, and I can help.”

Nikolai regarded him with some interest.

“I will help,” Kaz said evenly. “In exchange for Your Highness’ assistance.”

Nikolai wanted to ask why Brekker was so sure he needed his help, but then again, Kaz Brekker had managed to smash a hole through the outer wall of the Ice Court. He had a fair bit of respect for that alone. Silently, Nikolai studied Brekker’s pale, resolute face, and suddenly, he felt incredibly weary.

He didn’t have the kind of time to make more enemies than he had to.

“Very well,” Nikolai offered Kaz one gloved hand. “The deal is the deal.”

“The deal is the deal,” Kaz said. They shook, Kaz’s leather-clad fingers clasping Nikolai’s own. A smile flashed across Kaz’s face, like lightning darting through a thunderhead.

“Now, go to sleep,” Nikolai waved a hand at him. “What good are you to me with a hole in your head?”

With that, he flopped backwards with a yawn.

As the fire burned low, Kaz Brekker said quietly, “I still don't understand.”

“Hmm?”

“How come the King of Ravka to be trapped in a flooding river?”

Nikolai blinked innocently at him.

“Judging by your control of the situation, you weren’t flung in, and you certainly did not jump in to save my inconsequential life,” Kaz said, and started when Nikolai bolted upright indignantly, hazel eyes blazing. 

“Why not?” Nikolai demanded. “Am I not the living embodiment of a hero?”

Chapter Text

Kaz awoke to the smell of burning.

Nikolai was kneeling quietly before the remnants of the fire, tracing something in the ashes. His rakish air had disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only the stern, imperious bearing of a monarch. He appeared almost impressively regal, even if he was only glaring intently at the ground.

Then Nikolai looked up with a grin, his eyes crinkling into half-moons.

“Are you hungry?” he said, and swept away his scribbles with a careless twitch of his sleeve.

Kaz sat up, drawing in a sharp breath as his multiple injuries protested, and peered at the charred, black thing Nikolai handed him. “What’s this?”  

“Food.”

Kaz arched an eyebrow, and then turned back to stare at the scorched wooden spit in his hands. “Or firewood?”

“Charbroiled fresh rabbit,” Nikolai said seriously, without an ounce of sheepishness. “Seasoned with cherry wood smoke.” 

Kaz eyed him. “Did you charbroil your hair too?”

Nikolai ran a hand through his hair, now an alarmingly muddy shade of brown.

“I was originally attempting to make myself uglier,” he said blithely. “But I realize now that that would be doing the impossible.”

Kaz’s eye twitched. Lowering his head, he studiously applied himself to the rabbit.

“Are you ready?” Nikolai asked, when Kaz had finally choked down the last of Nikolai’s ground-breaking, teeth-shattering concoction. He was unrolling a slender bundle of silver needles.

“Yes,” Kaz said, and dug his fingernails into his palms.

Nikolai nodded at him. “You will have to remove your shirt. And your gloves.”

Kaz’s heartbeat stuttered. Roughly, before the indiscernible quiver in his hands could give way to uncontrolled shaking, Kaz shrugged off his shirt and his gloves. With a touch of bleak self-mockery, he wondered how he had managed to make a practice of stripping in front of strangers.

Nikolai settled down beside him. The strangely familiar scent of chamomile filled his lungs, and already, Kaz felt dizzy. It was one thing to cling to Nikolai in the middle of a raging river. It would be another one entirely to let Nikolai push and prod at him like he was a wet clump of clay. A drop of cold sweat slid down his forehead. He had to do this.

He had been all confidence and swagger when he had proposed the deal last night, but Kaz was only too aware of his own position. Nikolai had humored him by agreeing, maybe because he didn’t deign to squabble with a dying eighteen year-old with three fractured ribs and a concussion, but if he was right, even if he hadn’t been in the picture, Nikolai Lantsov had been prepared to throw himself down a gorge.

The man burned with a sort of manic intensity that Kaz both scorned and grudgingly admired. With or without him, Nikolai’s plans would go on. There was nothing stopping Nikolai Lantsov from walking away except his misguided sense of honour, and Kaz had swum the murky depths of the Barrel long enough to know precisely how little honour was worth.

If Nikolai noticed how close Kaz was to snapping, he didn’t show it. His brows were furrowed in concentration, and sometimes his hand hovered lengthily over a pressure point, as if not completely sure where it was. But when he lowered the needle, he moved cleanly and quickly, never touching Kaz’s skin for a heartbeat longer than was necessary. Still, Kaz jerked slightly whenever the needle entered his skin.

Nikolai’s touch was cold as ice.

“Two left,” Nikolai said. He sounded as strained as Kaz felt, and dully, Kaz noted that Nikolai seemed to dislike skin contact almost as much as he did. He glanced at the faint black lines that crept over the back of Nikolai’s hands. There was a story there.   

When the last needle sank in, the unruly tendrils of pain that writhed through his blood grew still. Kaz sighed, and the tension left his body so abruptly that he swayed, black spots dancing through his vision. Nikolai groaned and slumped bonelessly to the ground.

“I am a goddamn genius,” he muttered to the dirt.

Once Kaz’s head stopped ringing, they set off through the Ravkan countryside. From the start, Kaz had suspected that Nikolai didn’t have an actual itinerary, and indeed they spent the next few hours looping in wide circles, occasionally taking detours when Nikolai caught sight of pretty waterfalls, or strange-shaped rocks.

He seemed to take especial pleasure in chucking stones with vaguely canine silhouettes into the river. He also retrieved parcels of all shapes and sizes from inside hollow tree trunks and shallow caves like an oversized squirrel. Kaz watched of all this and said nothing. 

Kaz stepped lightly over a protruding tree root, his footfalls muffled by the thick carpet of pine needles that blanketed the forest floor. Streams of sunlight fell through the treetops, bringing out the gold in the budding spring leaves. It was quiet here, a clear emptiness unmarked by the rise and fall of human voices, the sounds of rolling dice and clinking mugs that rang even deep into the Ketterdam night.

Ahead, he glimpsed Nikolai’s tall, lean profile through the trees. Even with no one but Kaz to see, his back was painfully straight. He moved with the easy grace and none of the entitlement of someone used to command.

In Kaz’s short, eight-year career as the Barrel’s worst nightmare, he had come across a variety of colourful characters. Some people were about as opaque as stained glass. Others fancied themselves difficult to read, and so hid their thoughts behind a thin veneer of inscrutability, as if faking an air of mystery was the same as the real thing.  

But Kaz felt as though he could see through the depths of Nikolai’s clear hazel eyes—and that alone troubled him more than all of Jan Van Eck’s schemes put together, because it meant that Nikolai’s open, unclouded gaze was as enigmatic as Kaz’s own.

Wrinkling his brow, Kaz closed his eyes, letting his mind fill with the sound of sighing leaves.

After two more acupuncture sessions, as late afternoon light began to tint the leaves in gold, Nikolai glanced sharply to the left. “What is that?”

Still trying to even out his breathing, Kaz lifted his head. He heard it too. A faint scrabbling sound, followed by the sound of splashing, as if a rat were trapped in a pail of water. By silent agreement, they slipped noiselessly around a copse of trees. In the depths of the Ravkan countryside, they found a lonely well, perched before a small plot of wheat. Their tall, green stalks rustled listlessly, as if trying to mask the increasingly frantic scrabbling coming from inside the well.

Nikolai peered over its edge, and his eyebrows rose. “Hmm.”

The ashen face of a little boy, no more than four or five, gazed tremulously up at them. He was sitting in the bucket used for drawing water, his small frame shaking with residual and renewed fright.

“What’s your name?” Nikolai said gently, once they had hauled him out.

The boy shied away from them, pressing himself against the well as if trying to squeeze himself into the spaces between the bricks. He was so scrawny that for a moment it looked like he might succeed.

Nikolai pointed to himself. “I’m a pirate, and this is my butler.”

Kaz barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes.

The boy’s eyes darted from Nikolai to Kaz and back again, and then he ran. He made it two steps before lurching forwards and pitching face-first towards the ground. Nikolai caught him easily and scooped him up, murmuring softly as the boy shuddered and shook in his arms.

They left the well behind, following an uneven dirt path that led through the little wheat field, and crested a small hill.

“Ah,” Nikolai breathed, a faint note of sadness. Kaz said nothing, his face expressionless. Together, they looked upon the bones of a burned village. With a mournful groan, a charred pole slowly toppled to the ground by their feet.

The fire had mostly burnt itself out, leaving only the blackened shells of humble homesteads. Without a word, Nikolai deposited the boy lightly in Kaz’s unwilling arms and strode lightly into the nearest dwelling, seemingly oblivious to the cinders still spitting sparks below his feet.  

As he searched through each house, Kaz quietly walked down the row of homes, holding the boy as gingerly as he might a flash bomb.

He heard nothing but birdsong and the faint crackle of crumbling wood. This was a small village, with no more than ten to fifteen buildings, but a fire of this magnitude would have taken days to die down, and only the low stone wall encircling the village had saved the surrounding forest from the flames. Nikolai would not find any survivors; they were surrounded only by embers.

When he reached the end, Nikolai ducked out from inside the last cottage. He was alone.

“Who did this?” Nikolai said. He voice was low and tight with rage.

“They had Grisha with them,” Kaz said quietly. “Squallers, at the least.”

Nikolai nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose. “To hide the smoke. Otherwise, the patrols would have caught sight of a fire this big, someone would have been sent to investigate, and I would have known.”

“An entire village,” Kaz said, observing Nikolai impassively. “Someone has something to hide.”

Not many other motives prompted a hushed up, coldly premeditated extermination of this scale. Quietly, Kaz crumbled a lump of blackened wood in his fingers, and watched as the wind carried  the ashes away. He didn’t say it outright, but the individual behind the massacre was probably Ravkan, and powerful, because it was far less likely that the Fjerdans or the Shu held a grudge against a nameless Ravkan village in the middle of nowhere.  

Evidently, Nikolai was coming to this same conclusion, because a troubled expression stole across his face, riming his features in frost.

The nameless child had stopped quivering. He gazed silently back at the row of ruined houses, and his eyes were full of tears. Nikolai plucked him from Kaz, and before he could even open his mouth, Kaz interjected with all the keen premonitory instincts of a wild animal.

“No,” Kaz said. “We cannot take it with us.”

“He isn’t an ‘it’,” Nikolai said, deliberately misreading the hard edge in Kaz’s words. “His name is Kolya.” 

Kolya, the diminutive of Nikolai. Kaz’s lips curled back in a sneer that held all the cold disdain of Fjerdan glaciers, but Nikolai barely seemed to notice. Instead, running a hand lightly through the boy’s tufty red hair, Nikolai whipped out a knife the length of the child’s forearm. The boy was still young enough to be distracted by parlour tricks, and in spite of his grief, his eyes widened as Nikolai twirled the blade in his long fingers, throwing off flashes of light that scattered across the trees like copper coins. 

“Someone wants him dead.”

“Luckily for him, we don’t.”

“You are supposed to be on the run.”

“Yes,” Nikolai said, smiling, but in that instant he had shed the roguish privateer and assumed the precise, military bearing of the king. “We are taking him with us.”

His quiet tone brooked no argument. Unperturbed, Kaz gazed back evenly, the beginnings of an expectant, mocking smile touching his lips. But as quickly as it had appeared, the keen, piercing light left Nikolai’s eyes. He whispered something into the child’s ears, and Kolya giggled through his tears. The threat Kaz was waiting for did not come.

Knitting his brows, Kaz gave Nikolai a long, considering look, and inclined his head slightly. 

“Any self-respecting townsfolk will think we’re slavers,” Kaz mused, as they headed into the woods and left the village behind. It was fairly atypical for two men to go traipsing through the woods with a child.

“Oh. You could pretend to be my wife?” Nikolai suggested, completely oblivious to the heat of Kaz’s glare.

“Or,” he went on, humming one of those infernal Ravkan lullabies whose lyrics probably trumpeted martyrdom and selflessness, “I could pretend to be yours?”

Kaz discovered that it was possible to kill someone eighteen ways with his lock picks.

As Nikolai trotted on ahead and tried to feed Kolya some of his rabbit-flavoured charcoal, Kaz tipped his face up to the sky. It was still bright with the light of an early summer evening. For a long time, he stared at the emerging stars, as if committing them to memory.

A small army of ducks waddled down the main street, a tawny tide of squabbling feathers, while their owner brought up the rear, leisurely swinging a cane as he herded them along. The soft lowing of cattle melded in with the cheerful murmur of running water. The bustling little town was the very picture of bucolic charm. It was big enough that travellers from far away wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, and yet sufficiently remote to have been largely disregarded by foreign spies.

Nikolai grinned brightly back at Kaz. “Don’t I have a good eye for property investment?”

Walking silently by his side, Kaz Brekker stuck out like a lone storm cloud in the middle of endless blue skies. Even arrayed in the plain cotton garments Nikolai had had the foresight to stash in the woods, he resembled a harmless farmer about as well as a cougar did a house cat. He was taller than Nikolai was, and Nikolai hoped that if anything, Kaz’s unnerving air would at least discourage people from looking closely enough to notice that Kaz’s sleeves ended a good two inches shy of his wrist.

Nikolai needed to find him new clothes, and preferably give him a good thrashing. Maybe a black eye would help grind the haughtiness out of him?

Kaz was holding Kolya serenely by the scruff of his neck. After Kolya had gnawed, drooled, and vomited his way all over the both of them, Kaz had exchanged his initial disgust for Saint-like calm. He kept his gaze blank, as if he were trying his best to forget that he was stranded in the middle of nowhere with two thoroughly distasteful companions.

Kolya tugged insistently on Kaz’s sleeve, and the latter drifted vacantly towards a kindly old lady selling strawberries. While their backs were turned, Nikolai pressed a palm against his eye and blinked away reflexive tears.

When Genya had passed him the eyedrops, she had warned him half-jokingly that he might go blind. Now, trying to rub away the blurriness in his vision, he was beginning to suspect that she had meant it. They stung like salt water.

Still teary-eyed, Nikolai sidled up to the both of them.

“Would you like some strawberries?” he said benevolently, gently picking out a fat, plump strawberry and holding it out to Kolya.

Dignity forgotten, a long string of drool dangled from the corner of Kolya’s mouth and he reached out for the strawberry, eyes wide and beseeching. Grinning heartlessly, Nikolai snatched his hand back.

“I have no money!” he sang, and he wasn’t just talking about the strawberries. Kolya’s bottom lip trembled, but he remained staunchly silent.

Nikolai sighed softly. The boy still hadn’t spoken a single word since they had found him. 

Kaz was still doing his best to stare right through the both of them, but as if registering the threat of imminent tears, he stirred and passed a few copper coins to the old lady with a soft note of thanks. He stuffed the strawberries unceremoniously into Kolya’s hands, rolling his eyes when Nikolai immediately helped himself to some, and casually struck up a conversation with a roadside cobbler.

Kaz’s Ravkan wasn’t very good, but he was fluent enough so long as the conversation was in standard Ravkan and stuck strictly to uncomplicated concepts like violence and the weather. The cobbler’s Ravkan was harsh with the dialect of the Ravkan south, so he doubted Kaz understood even half of what the cobbler was saying. He was asking for him, and so Nikolai munched shamelessly on Kolya’s strawberries and listened closely.  

“… good harvest,” the cobbler nodded. “Not that it’ll matter when the Fjerdans kill us all.” 

“Have you no faith in the king?” Kaz said, his tone an effortless blend of faint indignation and adoring naiveté. He was the perfect picture of a righteous Ravkan citizen.

“Tch, the king?” the cobbler said, slamming a hammer into the sole of a shoe as if imagining it were Nikolai’s head. “What king runs away to a hunting lodge when the Fjerdans come knocking on our front door? Heard he’s missing now. Long time coming, if you ask me, he nearly popped his clogs in court a while ago. Blood everywhere.”

Nikolai blinked. Trust Tolya to give any story a melodramatic flair.

“Pity that,” a maiden said, overhearing. She sighed tearfully, tapping her basket of apples. “He was so handsome!”  

Nikolai nodded approvingly.

“Really?” Kaz said to the cobbler, allowing worry to creep into his voice. “Who is the new king?”

Mildly impressed, Nikolai nibbled on a strawberry seed. Kaz Brekker was keeping pace with the drift of the conversation merely from having heard “king”, “missing”, and “blood” said in the same breath. 

“Adrian? Andrei? Why does it matter?” the cobbler shrugged. “Our lives go on, no matter who sits on that throne.”

As they wandered away from the town center, Kolya’s adorableness, which Kaz had yet to fully appreciate, began drawing some doting glances from passing townsfolk.

“What a lovely child!” a young countrywoman called out to them, looking up from her washing. She looked at Nikolai, then Kaz, and a bemused expression crossed her face.

“Yours?” she said, directing her question to the space between the two of them.

“Yes,” Kaz said, because Nikolai looked lost in thought, and sighed. It was a single word, and yet he hadn’t lied with such a spectacular lack of finesse in years. Kolya’s bright red hair resembled exactly neither of them.

Clearly, this did not escape her, because her eyebrows rose. After a short pause, she nodded knowingly. “I see. Oh, you two must be so happy together. Good on you! ”

Kaz smiled politely at her in wordless misery.

“Did she say something?” Nikolai said a few minutes later, looking up at him. His brow was faintly furrowed, as if he was finding it difficult to focus on Kaz, and silently, Kaz filed this observation away. He was still unused to those odd grey-brown eyes. They looked turbid in the sunlight, as though someone had swirled a basin of river water, sending up clouds of silt. 

“Nothing important,” Kaz said shortly. 

They turned into a crooked lane lined with fir trees. Under their cool, patchwork shadows, Kaz caught his first glimpse of Nikolai’s idea of property investment.

“How enlightening,” Kaz marvelled. “I wasn’t aware that the state of Ravka’s coffers was quite so bleak.”

Nikolai’s cottage, much like his country, appeared one good thunderstorm away from falling apart. Its worn, grey walls were slanted at a slight angle, as if leaning on one another for support. The little plot of land it sat on was being slowly and eagerly reclaimed by a jungle of weeds. A crumbling stone wall ringed the whole thing, ideal if one wished to keep out nothing larger than a particularly fat weasel.

“It has a quaint sort of charm,” Nikolai said cheerily. He strode up the path to the cottage and gave the door a gentle push. It promptly fell off its hinges. 

They stared at it.  

“It has character,” Nikolai decided.

Chapter Text

Wielding a pair of scissors, Nikolai snipped at the wick of his tallow candle. It gave a reluctant ‘pop’, but its golden glow steadied. Turning back to the papers sprawled across his desk, Nikolai  dipped a blue-feathered quill in ink and began to write in his graceful, court-trained hand.

“The night darkens and beckons snow.” He ended the sentence with two neat slashes.

His tutors had never liked his writing. His strokes were as unrestrained as the squalls of the True Sea, his tutors had said. Too bold for a second son who would never be king and whose greatest duty was to know his own place. Nikolai smiled wryly. He hadn’t agreed with them then.

After a brief pause, as if alive, the quill straightened in his hand and darted across the page. Words spilled across the paper.

“Will you join me for a glass of wine?” Zoya’s words. Only lines on a page, and yet in the subtle strength of her pen strokes, he could see the lightning that danced between her fingers.

“Report, General Nazyalensky.” Again, he made two slashes, to indicate the end of the message.

“Moi tsar.” A hundred miles away, Zoya was tracing these words into paper, and as her quill moved, so did his. Twin nibs, conjoined by dvigat’sya.

“Tolya has been zealously fanning rumours regarding your apparent demise.”

“I’ve heard. Tolya missed his true calling as a playwright.”

“The most popular version seems to feature you stealing the heart of a common girl—”

He snatched the quill. “What a perfectly realistic scenario, Tolya has outdone himself—”

“—and being stabbed to death by her jealous lover. In any case,” she steamrollered on, ignoring the way Nikolai’s quill convulsed in indignation, “the many different versions should make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to pinpoint an exact cause of death, and the Grand Palace’s only official statement is that you are missing, presumed dead. For now, no one will know the part Shu Han played, except the Shu king, and ourselves.”

“Good.” Nikolai tapped a finger against the paper. “Have the rest of the assassins returned to the Shu capital?”

That day, Nikolai had cut down two assassins before spitting out a mouthful of purplish blood. He had staggered theatrically, his eardrums shattered by Tolya’s dramatic cries of, “Your Highness, Your Highness!”, and with that signal, Zoya had unleashed the river with a discrete twist of her wrist.

In the resulting confusion, Tamar had contorted an unsuspecting Shu Heartrender’s limbs into a vaguely offensive posture, before hurling Nikolai up and over the gorge. The poor assassin barely had enough time to register his own shock before Zoya speared him through the chest with a bolt of lightning.

To onlookers, it appeared as if a brave Shu Heartrender had managed to toss Ravka’s gravely ill monarch to his death shortly before being killed himself. The handful of assassins they had allowed to escape would carry the story back to Shu, and give their masquerade an added layer of credibility.

“Yes. You must have looked convincingly close to death, because the Shu king seems more or less to have accepted their account of events. Tamar’s informants say the Shu are already selecting an ambassador to bear a message of condolences. He should arrive in Os Alta within the next week.”

“And now the really hard work begins. I hope this attempt to woo to the Shu works better than the last one did,” Nikolai mused. “Genya, have you spoken to Orlov about meeting with the Shu ambassador?”

After assuming the throne, Ravka’s financial woes had smacked Nikolai in the face like a ton of bricks, and then he’d been thoroughly walloped by the mammoth task of reforming the country’s government, economy, and military. He’d ended up leapfrogging across the nation, industriously putting out one fire after another. At this critical juncture, Magnus Opjer, his saboteur of a sire, had decided that Nikolai had too much spare time on his hands, and so he had ended up with a military invasion on his list of problems.

After examining Ravka’s empty treasury, Nikolai had sagaciously concluded that the wisest way forward would be to cower behind a strong ally. But the Kerch’s time-honoured principle was to remain neutral to everything apart from the concept of making more money, and the Zemeni weren’t much good at fighting anything except crop failure. With that, Nikolai was left eyeballing the country that had last tried to marry a fake princess to his preferably dead body, because the only thing worse than a war with Fjerda was a war on two fronts.

Given Fjerda’s staunch belief that Grisha were abominations of nature, their fundamental disagreement with the existence of the Ravkan state was a little difficult to resolve. On the other hand, Nikolai surmised that the Shu king didn’t want Vadik Demidov on the Ravkan throne any more than he did. A successful invasion would extend the Fjerdan sphere of influence right up to Shu’s doorstep. With the Shu, there was at least room for negotiation.

The issue, however, was that the Shu king, quite shrewdly, considered Nikolai, in his own words, ‘a sly, good-for-nothing fox’. Nikolai found this rather flattering, because it meant he was proving to be exceedingly problematic, especially in the face of Shu's ambition to ultimately transform Ravka into a vassal state. Unfortunately, this assessment, coupled with twelve assassination attempts, made it abundantly clear that the Shu weren’t going to negotiate as long as Nikolai Lantsov wore the crown.

As a result, Nikolai Lantsov had graciously removed himself from the stage, and continued to do his plotting behind the wings. Shu was their only viable ally. Still, when he had first proposed this plan, Genya had earnestly offered to rearrange his features for him without the help of the Small Science.

“Done.” By his elbow, a red-feathered quill leapt upright. “It’s a strange thing—Orlov used to grit his teeth every time you so much as breathed in his presence, but he seems genuinely upset, now that you’re dead.”

“Please. He’s upset because someone murdered Ravka’s sovereign, not because they murdered Nikolai,” Zoya wrote, and he could imagine her rolling her eyes.

Nikolai’s lips twitched in a faint smile. Orlov was his minister of finance. He had craggly, eloquent eyebrows, spent most of his time around Nikolai huffing and puffing, and deep lines were etched into his face from fifty years of giving his life’s blood to the Ravkan state.

Even white-haired and venerable, Orlov was sharp and discerning, and for that, Nikolai could forgive him for his tragic lapse in judgement with regards to Nikolai himself. Only that old jackal would be able to present revised trade terms to Shu Han in a way that was both tantalising and dignified.

“He’s loyal to a fault, it’s true.” Genya sounded thoughtful. “But if word eventually gets out that the Shu were behind Nikolai’s death, he’d resign before agreeing to negotiate with them.”

“That’s why Zoya’s investigation into my disappearance is eventually going to uncover the fact that I was killed as a result of a Fjerdan conspiracy. Tamar still has the two Fjerdan assassins from the flaming cat incident locked up somewhere—I’ve instructed her to extract a false confession from them by tomorrow.

“Prince Sven won’t deny credit for the assassination, particularly as he doesn’t know whether he actually did have a hand in my death. The Shu won’t have any reason to jump out and muddy the waters, because they’ll be far too eager to sheath their claws and wrap their fingers around the new monarch.”

Hopefully, that way, all parties involved would be too busy congratulating themselves and furthering their own agendas to think too deeply into Nikolai’s disappearance.

“And the Crown Prince?” Nikolai asked. After his impromptu sparring session with Mikhail, he had stashed his decree beneath the floorboards, alongside the Great Seal, for Zoya to retrieve.

“He is now prince regent. In a week, we will lower the flags for mourning, and he will ascend the throne as king.” Zoya fell silent for a heartbeat. “Nikolai, why did you choose Alexei Lantsov? The boy is an idiot.”

“What use would I have for a puppet with political acumen? Alexei is kind-hearted, follows instructions, and more importantly, thinks I’m the best thing since David invented that clever little thing that chops bread.”

“He wouldn’t be able manoeuvre his way out of a political shoebox,” Genya commented, blunt as ever.

“He doesn’t need to. His only job right now is to bat those long eyelashes and sweep Princess Ehri off her feet. Thank goodness he doesn’t take after my uncle, or we’d have no chance at all. Have Tolya read him a stack of Shu poetry, and arrange a chance meeting between the two of them. You know, preferably under the moonlight, in a pavilion somewhere, as the plum blossoms are falling.”

“Plum blossoms? At the beginning of summer?” The red-feathered quill jerked as if in laughter.

“Tolya is good at that kind of stuff.” Nikolai’s candle gave another little ‘pop’, and absently, he messaged his side. The ribs he had fractured during the fall were beginning to ache again.

“One last thing,” he wrote. “Zoya, I want you to send soldiers to investigate a burnt village approximately seven leagues southwest of Os Alta.” He roughly described its position with reference to the stars. Kaz Brekker had a very good memory.

“The important thing,” he continued, “isn’t unearthing evidence to identify who did it. Find someone to let out information that you managed to find a survivor. A severely injured man with red hair and ah, light-coloured eyes.”

“Bait?”

“For some rather large prey. If I’m right, and I usually am, our arsonist is likely a nobleman or high-ranking member of government.”

“Why can’t we go one day without some kind of enormous conspiracy?”

“Because it’s Ravka.”

“Are the eyedrops working?” Genya asked, after Zoya left, presumably to train troops or eat children, whatever it was she did at night.

The words on the page before him were blurring, and with an effort, Nikolai regathered his focus. “Yes.”

“So they aren’t really working.” He could hear her sigh. “Nikolai, are you sure it’s wise to keep your location a secret from us? If something happens, we’ll be too far away to help.”

“Too great a risk. If the Shu find out I’m alive, we’ll ruin our only chance at an alliance.” Nikolai yawned. “Genya, if I don’t sleep soon I really will drop dead, and I still need to wake up early tomorrow morning. We have a great deal of housekeeping to do.”

“We?”

“Rather, I have a lot of housekeeping to do. I doubt he’ll want to help.”

“Who are you with?”

“Dirtyhands, I think he’s called, along with a child,” Nikolai waved an aimless hand at the grimy wall before him. “Before you start to worry, I have this under control. More specifically, if I die, he dies too, and then the child is as good as dead.”

“Nikolai!” Genya howled.

Humming vaguely to himself, Nikolai set his quill down.

“A few more times, and we should be able to bring this down to twice a day,” Nikolai said, plucking the last needle from Kaz’s forearm. As it slipped free, the single-minded focus in his eyes dissolved like smoke on the wind, and he resumed his air of easy-going insouciance.

“Thanks,” Kaz said, shrugging on his shirt. Calmly, he shook out his long sleeves, and hid his shaking hands.

“Indeed,” Nikolai said happily. “I have now redeemed myself as a medik.”

“How many times have you successfully cured someone of he-ding-hong?”

“None. Hungry, Kolya?” Nikolai called. He crouched down before the fireplace and gave the pot bubbling in the fireplace a hearty stir. Kolya, who was cheerfully drawing stick figures in the thick layer of dust that blanketed the floor, shivered and inched away.

“You’re right,” Nikolai agreed. After a moment of thought, he rooted around in the satchel of supplies he had purchased that morning and flung a handful of spices into the pot. “Needs more herring.”

The pot belched an angry mouthful of black smoke at them, and Kaz squinted. “I thought you were making oatmeal?”

Nikolai regarded the ladle contemplatively. “Maybe a touch more pepper?”

“Shouldn’t you taste it first?” Kaz said.

“Ah,” Nikolai offered him the ladle. “Would you like to try it?”

“No.”

“There you go,” Nikolai said reasonably, and emptied a ladle of pepper into the pot. Kolya looked at him mournfully and traced a sad face onto the ground.

Dust motes spun idly in the weak sunlight streaming in from two narrow, dirt-streaked windows.  They were in the largest room in the cottage, which Nikolai had the gall to dub a sitting room. Truth be told, Kaz was mildly impressed, because it had managed to accomplish the immensely difficult task of making the Slat look like a grand manor house in comparison.

“Here,” Nikolai thumped a bowl down before him. Without looking too closely at the discoloured specks floating in the gruel, Kaz took it mechanically and began to eat. When he returned to Ketterdam, he was going to blackmail the Kooperom for their waffle recipe.

Kolya took a bite of Nikolai’s oatmeal and immediately keeled over.

“If you don’t eat, I’ll make more,” Nikolai said serenely. “Next time, I’ll put chili powder.”

Kolya stopped staring glassily up at the ceiling and popped up with a sulky pout. As Nikolai attempted to wrestle porridge into Kolya’s mouth, Kaz spoke quietly.

“Nikolai.” The word still felt clumsy on his tongue.

The glance Nikolai cast him was as keen as the edge of a knife, but his tone was light. “Who’s that?

“Nikita,” Kaz amended, without skipping a beat, and Nikolai grinned. “Will you interfere in the contest for the Fjerdan throne?”

Nikolai’s eyes twinkled. “Why would I?”

Prodding a herring eyeball, Kaz said, with feeling, “A fish rots from the head down.”

The King of Fjerda had two sons. As firstborn, Haakon was crown prince, and while his supporters praised him for his shrewd, cautious nature, there were many who saw his quiet, scholarly air as nothing more than cowardice. His younger brother, on the other hand, was far more warlike. Fjerda was a hawkish country, and so Sven was far more well-received by the common people.

Fjerdan monarchy generally observed primogeniture, but judging from the notes that Inej had left on his desk, the old king had been rethinking his choice of heir for quite some time.

“Sven has been particularly vexing, it’s true. He’s one of the strongest advocates for invading Ravka,” Nikolai said, and waved another spoonful of oatmeal at Kolya. He managed to make the gesture look threatening. “Do you think I will support Haakon instead?”

Kaz fell briefly silent. “No,” he said. “Haakon and Sven have been at each other’s throats for a long time. I think you want to set them against one another. Fjerda can’t focus on winning a war if they’re too busy fighting amongst themselves.”

“Oil and water,” Nikolai said, smiling faintly. “Do you know why Fjerda did not invade the moment news of my apparent death reached the Ice Court?”

“Haakon,” Kaz said. “Fjerdan king is considering appointing Sven as general of the invasion force. If Fjerda attacks at this juncture and succeeds, Sven’s political standing will increase tenfold. Haakon must’ve tried to delay the attack at all costs.”

“That, and the fact that Fjerda is still in the process of amassing grain and drafting soldiers for a southern invasion,” Nikolai said, and in the lift of his brow, Kaz saw fleetingly the lofty disdain of a sovereign. “They are not ready either.”

“There are two ways to ruin a man,” Kaz said. His gaze grew unfocused and settled somewhere low on the horizon. “By assassinating his character and by throwing his ability into question. Which one have you chosen, Nikita?”

“Why not both?” Nikolai said, looking up at him with those strange, mismatched eyes. Even in the feeble sunlight that fell through the dusty windowpanes, they gleamed.

“To that end,” Nikolai’s eyes crinkled in a smile, “you can help me spin lies to help destroy the upstanding moral fibre of our dear princes.”

“Bastards,” Kaz said readily.

“I don’t disagree,” Nikolai said. He tipped his head to one side. “Ah.”

“Sven visited Ketterdam five years ago. It’s very hard to say what even uptight Fjerdan princes do in the depths of the pleasure houses of West Stave, behind a mask from the Komedie Brute.”

“You really should consider writing some epic poetry,” Nikolai said admiringly. “Preferably melodrama. I know people who would really appreciate that sort of thing.”

“In any case, that should give Sven and his inordinately prudish countrymen something to worry about.”

Nikolai sighed.

His neck ached, and with some surprise, Kaz rolled his shoulders. He hadn’t realised how tense he had grown.

Both he and Nikolai were tacitly steering the conversation towards stable ground that did not concern the inner workings of the Ravkan government. It was the reason Kaz had chosen to discuss Fjerda. He dealt in deceit, and he suspected that tearing down foreign royalty was one of the few spheres where he could employ those talents without an intimate understanding of Ravkan politics.

A spoon appeared in Kaz’s line of vision and invaded his oatmeal. Reaching over, Nikolai fished out Kaz’s herring eyeball and plopped it into his own bowl, where it rejoined its missing twin. 

Kaz watched Nikolai rearrange the pair of eyeballs into a smiley face. “It must be going really badly,” he observed gravely.

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Nikolai said. “The Shu king is clever. Clever and cunning, a most galling combination. Rather like me, but far less handsome.”

It was at this point that Kolya, feeling decidedly neglected, tried to eat a spider. Waving his herring-pepper-spoon, Nikolai yelped and dove after Kolya, who scooted away in alarm and knocked over his oatmeal. Bowls rattled, dust flew, and in the end, it was Kaz who hooked the spider out from the boy’s mouth with a long pale forefinger, eyebrows scrunched in disgust.

Bare-chested, Nikolai knelt at the head of his straw mattress, staring silently at the small dagger he held in his hands. Bone-white, carved from a single thorn from Elizaveta’s woods, it gleamed dully in the moonlight. His little tallow candle lit the room, and just beyond its weak ring of light, the dagger’s shadow swayed sinuously against the far wall.

He turned the thorn blade over one last time and quietly, roughly wedged a strip of fabric between his teeth. His brow creased faintly. Saints, how many more times would it take before his hands stopped shaking?

Tightening his jaw, Nikolai closed his eyes, blew out the candle, and plunged the dagger deep into his heart.

At first, he only felt a cold prickle, like a trickle of ice water dripping down his chest, and then searing heat engulfed him. Choking, Nikolai doubled over, dropping the blade. He shoved his right hand against his breastbone, and immediately grabbed his wrist with his left hand, as if fighting the urge to tear his heart out.

As his vision went white at the edges, a shrill scream tore through his mind. It went on and on, an endless, mangled wail of agony and terrible hatred, and Nikolai couldn’t tell whether it was the monster’s voice or his own. This must be what it was like to be a falling star, he thought dazedly, to tumble from the sky, trailing ash and flame, and burn away to nothing.

Breathing laboredly, blinking hard to clear his blurring sight, Nikolai watched grimly as all the shadows in the room began to trickle towards him. They puddled before him like a pool of ink, which swirled and stretched until at last the monster was hovering in front of him. Nikolai was so dizzy he could not make out the monster’s face, but he felt its inarticulate rage and blinding pain all too clearly. It coursed through his own bloodstream.

The monster was pitch black, so dark it devoured even the moonlight, but where its heart should have been, there was a sliver of light instead. Instinctively, Nikolai’s hand tightened over his own heart, even though he knew there would be no wetness beneath his fingers. For a long time now, he had bled shadow in the place of blood.

Transfixed, Nikolai stared at that pale, flickering shard of light, the same way a drowning man might regard shore. Slowly, his eyes slid shut.

He awoke not too long before sunrise. For a while, he lay there, staring vacantly at the ceiling, so tired even his bones felt heavy. From somewhere deep within, the monster gave a sullen, feeble snarl, no more intimidating than a particularly sulky kitten.

“Shut up,” Nikolai murmured absently.

When the first orange lined the clouds, he pushed himself upright, swaying, and did his best to swallow the last dregs of nausea. As he pulled his shirt on, Nikolai glanced down at his chest. A thin, silver scar lay over his heart, the length of his little finger and tauntingly unimpressive. 

“All that, and still just a paper cut?” Nikolai muttered hoarsely, his voice overflowing with indignation. “Where’s my proper war wound?”