28

THE IMPERIYA YOTNE: THE GRAY ROAD

Cobie, Anya, and I walked a hundred nights behind the wagons carrying the soldiers and their gear.

It couldn’t have been a hundred. Of course I knew that.

But then, it had to have been a hundred. A thousand. In no fewer than a thousand nights could the black gown in which I’d sat down to negotiate with Gretel have become the rag I wore, ripped along its hem, stinking with my sweat, muddy with the dirt of the road and the rain that beat down on us mercilessly. Our wrists chafed under the shackles binding us to the wagon, growing first sore, then raw, then bloody when the skin broke.

Anya’s fair hair became matted and filthy; Cobie had to hack a slit in her dress so she could walk. My elegant party shoes grew dusty in the dirt, filthy in the mud, breaking against the cobblestones where the road was paved. Anya was worst off; she’d been barefooted when we’d been captured.

We took turns wearing the two pairs of shoes between us. Whoever went without padded her soles in fabric ripped from our gowns. It didn’t matter; our feet were soon torn and bleeding. A trail of red leaked behind us on the Gray Road.

That was the English for what the soldiers called the path we walked. They spoke only Yotne, which neither Cobie nor I understood. Anya knew a little, and what she heard made her face grow pale. After a few days of asking her what she could gather from them—where we were going, how long we would be on our way—I stopped asking her to translate.

They’d said our destination was Stupka-Zamok, and I already knew what that meant. It was the tsarytsya’s capital, the name of her house and of the city in its shadow, of the heart of her empire.

It meant that we were lost already.

Every step we took through the Imperiya’s conquered lands felt like a step I would never be able to take back. We crossed out of Shvartsval’d and across the rest of old Deutschland, which the Imperiya had sectioned off into new terytoriy. From there, I didn’t know where we went; I didn’t recognize the names of the places.

Anya, Cobie, and I spent our nights in barns and farmyards and cellars, hungry and cold. But the soldiers wanted for nothing. In every village we passed, they walked into farms and pubs and shops, demanding they be served immediately, taking bottles of wine or loaves of bread or fresh clothes or shoes. They never paid.

In one hamlet, they found a stash of books hidden in its headwoman’s home. They cut her throat.

Just beyond the edges of a village, they found a squad of deserted Imperiya soldiers living alone in the woods. They locked them inside their hut and set it ablaze.

Once, perhaps worst of all, they found a couple had been harboring three children in secret and had not informed the town’s governor, another one of the tsarytsya’s puppets. As the soldiers surrounded the house, I’d gotten to my feet, horrified, as if to chase them away like stray dogs.

I’d passed out from rising too quickly.

Anya and Cobie wouldn’t tell me what happened to the children.

I had heard of the Imperiya’s cruelty. But to witness it, unchecked and unbounded, was another thing entirely. I prayed for the souls of the dead every night before I fell asleep.

After they emptied a farm’s larder or walked from a pub having eaten and drunk until their bellies were swollen and their lips stained, the soldiers marched on, caring nothing for what they left behind them, tipping their heads back at the sky and howling at the moon.

The road wound one night through a beautiful, antique city with buildings of ancient stone and lampposts out of a fairy tale. But the lampposts were clouded with ash, as useless by night as by day, and the stones were black and sour pink with mold and mildew. My heart ached at the sight of a lovely old building whose rainbow windows had been smashed and boarded up.

It put me in mind of Winchester Cathedral. Here, as there, I couldn’t tell if it was a church or a library. But it didn’t matter. The tsarytsya’s soldiers had sacked it.

A gray sky hovered above, as if the clouds were worried enough to want to keep close but afraid to come too near. They, too, saw what the Imperiya had done.

We crossed a river to enter the city, traveling via the only bridge still standing. Anya broke into sobs when she heard the soldiers call the city Prakha.

One of them slapped her across the face and told her, in words even I understood, to stop making noise. Anya put her tears away then.

I tried to ask her what was wrong—Cobie had raised her eyebrows and glanced around us, as if to ask what isn’t wrong?—but Anya couldn’t bring herself to explain. Not then, and not as we lay in our cell while the soldiers went out. By the time they returned, smelling of wine and making filthy-sounding jokes, Anya had cried herself to sleep.

Only a night later, as we lay huddled together a few yards away from a campfire, did she explain.

“My mother always told me Prakha was a city of magic,” she whispered, tears chasing trails down her filthy cheeks, clinging to her fair lashes. “When I was little, I asked if she would take Fredrik and me someday. She said that of course she would—that I could go to the city and wander its bridges and its streets and hear its musicians play. That even its stones would love me.”

Something low and terrible clenched in the pit of my stomach.

The city would have loved Anya. It was impossible not to love Anya.

But its bridges were too ruined for happy wandering, and its stones were too shattered to care for her beauty and kindness.

“That was before, of course,” she finished brokenly. “And now my mother is gone, and now Prakha is, too.”

We didn’t speak after that. We just scooted closer together, the three of us with our rag-wrapped feet and our torn dresses, like a litter of hungry pups waiting for their mother to come home.

Day after day we walked the road.

In another life, I might have thought the country beautiful. The leaves on the trees that lined our way were green where they hadn’t been cut down; the villages we passed looked utterly idyllic, where they weren’t reduced to ash.

Some days, we climbed mountains covered in stones that stabbed at our sore feet; others, we were forced to ford rivers of muddy water that stung the cuts in our skin. Nightly, I worried over our scrapes and blisters, afraid infection would set into the places where we were broken. Cobie brushed me off, trying to be strong for all of us; but I woke up in the middle of the night and found her missing, once. I came upon her near the place the soldiers had established as a latrine, leaning against a tree, staring away into nothing.

She wasn’t crying. I took her by the arm and led her back to camp.

Cobie just lay down next to me, her back against the stony ground, eyes wide on the stars that shone down on us without mercy.

I tried to sleep. But I was ravenous, my stomach filled with nothing but the grasping pains that plagued me all day and the few bites of hard bread the soldiers fed us at night. We had learned better than to try and gather anything on the road; one day, the three of us had picked up acorns as we hurried behind the wagon, scarfing them as the soldiers paused for lunch.

The soldiers had not let us stop hours later when we could hardly walk for retching, for the cramps that racked our stomachs.

And though my legs burned—we were covering twenty or twenty-five miles a day, at least—the ache in my heart was more potent.

For Potomac, its warm summer nights and fireflies. For the Beholder, its gentle rocking like a lullaby. For food, and my books, and candles at night to see by.

I missed my rosary. The soldiers had taken it, and Margarethe’s crown, when they had searched us on the road that first day. My ring was safe only because I’d braided it hurriedly into my hair the first time the guards had stopped to relieve themselves.

Most of all, I missed my family. My father. My godmother. Lang, and the rest of the crew, and Torden.

I carried his ring in my hair and Lang’s kiss on my lips and wondered if either of them ever thought of me, if Perrault had gotten word to our friends or my godmother.

I wondered if I’d drop into the Imperiya’s jaws and be forgotten entirely.

I chose this, I reminded myself, with every step throbbing in my swollen feet. I chose this. I chose this.

Leirauh’s freedom gave me confidence that I’d done what was right. But only the comfort of Cobie’s and Anya’s presence was enough to keep me moving forward.

We walked on. My throat was dry from thirst. My feet throbbed and bled. My wrists chafed with even the slightest movement, as if glass were buried beneath my skin.

The same, day after day.

But one night, as the sun began to set, a new sight appeared on the horizon.

A city, jagged as a wolf’s claws, its stones gray as ash. It rose over a gate made of black iron spears, a skull atop each one.

Anya wept as she had in Prakha. But I knew she had never hoped to wander these stones.

“They call her house Stupka-Zamok,” she said quietly, wiping her face with the backs of her dirty hands. “They call it the Mortar.”

We had fallen off the edge of the world we had known. We had come to the source of the decay we had so long feared.

We had come to the land of shadows.