40

Fear and nausea shot through me. I fought to control my reaction. “What does that mean?” I asked again slowly.

“Tonight, we will sharpen our claws.” Polunoshchna’s smile was dark. “Every full moon, we meet in the courtyard to winnow the pack. The best rise. The worst fall.”

“We fight,” Vechirnya said evenly, rolling her eyes at Polunoshchna. “We open the ring, and members of every class participate.”

I met the eyes of my two best friends in utter horror. Blood still painted the walls and the floor; its copper scent had sent my stomach reeling. “No,” I said to Baba Yaga, horrified. “No, I can’t.”

What kind of fighting would it be? How long would it last—till first blood, to the death? My brain raced with questions, and I fought not to let them show. I didn’t dare look at Aleksei beside me, for fear of giving myself away.

Both Anya and Cobie watched me, their expressions guarded. Were they each asking me to choose them, or wishing it wouldn’t be them, or both? My panic rose.

Could I ask to fight, myself? Or if I refused, would Baba Yaga simply pick one of them for me?

“I will choose.” Across from me, Midnight stood up, eager.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “You lost worse than she did.”

I glanced between Midnight and Sunset, loathing the way Baba Yaga pitted them against one another—for what? Her own entertainment? To keep them malleable and dependent on her? To keep them from uniting against her?

Did she mean to make me treat my friends—my sisters—the same way?

I assessed the facts as calmly as I could, and chose.

“Cobie.” The word broke from my mouth. “Cobie will fight tonight.”

I felt Aleksei relax at my side. Anya clenched her teeth and shook her head.

“Very good,” Baba Yaga said, almost smiling at me. “Well and quickly chosen.”

I said nothing.

“Now,” she said, waving a hand at the blood spattered on the floor and the wall. “Clean this up.”

The empress and her generals swept from the room without a backward glance.

We scrubbed the stones on our hands and knees. The blood of the dead men was everywhere. Neither Anya nor Cobie spoke to me.

I hoped the murdered men would find peace. I prayed theirs were the last deaths I would be forced to watch for a long, long time.

With the full moon so close at hand, I doubted that prayer would be answered as I hoped.

“I can’t believe you didn’t pick me,” Anya muttered in the direction of the floor. “I can fight. You know I can fight.”

“Of course I know you can fight,” I said. “I’ve seen you take down every single one of your brothers and my first mate. You’re a shield-maiden.”

Anya, fighting with her brothers. Torden, teaching me to shoot, his broad hands on my shoulders. The memories and the moments of racking loss came again and again, and they never hurt any less.

“And yet you still picked Cobie, because she—what? She used to wear a knife everywhere?”

“I’m right here,” Cobie protested, sitting back on her knees. Both of us shushed her.

Anya’s wrists were scraped and abraded from the shackles she still wore, but she was an excellent fighter. I’d never seen Cobie fight, but I’d seen the friendly grip she kept on her knife, and I knew she was strong.

But I had also seen the eyes of the court on Anya when we arrived, and that was what had decided for me.

I worked at a congealed patch of blood on the floor, fighting back nausea. “This wasn’t about who was the better fighter,” I finally replied.

Anya said nothing, only scrubbed harder, her chains clanking against the floor.

“You’re the prinsessa from the North, and the Wolves hate the Shield,” I pressed. “What if the tsarytsya or the generals had used that to start something with the crowd? Or to pit you against someone unbeatable? It would have been a hundred times worse for you out there. They would be delighted to watch you fall.”

“She’s right,” Cobie said. “No one knows who I am. They’ll fight me, but they won’t hate me.”

Anya winced as the lye soap burned her ruined wrists. “Of course Selah is right,” she said flatly. “I am still angry.”

The three of us watched each other for a long moment. “I was never angry, before,” I finally said, swallowing. “Now it feels like I’m angry all the time.”

Cobie, Anya, and I cleaned the blood from the floor and the walls, but it clung to our hands and knees when we were done.

I wanted nothing more than to bathe myself and burn the rags we’d used. But we found our way down the stairs blocked again.

I was beginning to believe Baba Yaga was everywhere.

We drew against the railing, hoping she would continue climbing and we could carry on. But she stepped close to me—too close. The diamonds in her stolen crown winked at me. “Do you think you’re special, Selah, seneschal-elect?”

I stiffened. “No, moya tsarytsya.” The honorific was bitter in my mouth.

“You are.” She climbed up one, two steps, until she could lean over me. “You are the girl in a story.”

My limbs shook as I lifted my eyes to hers. “There are many girls in many stories.”

Baba Yaga laughed. “True. But only heroines are tested.”

I shook my head. “Am I being tested?” I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know what she wanted. Cobie and Anya hesitated behind me. The book I’d stolen hours ago screamed out in the silence from its place in Cobie’s basket.

“Vasylysa was tested, too,” Baba Yaga said, narrowing her eyes. “Once upon a time. Her stepmother sent her to a town over the border called Medved, bearing nothing more than a sack of potatoes with which to make trade, and told her to come back with all they and their neighbors needed. It was training, she said, for her future as the leader of her village.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she was talking about, or why she continued to harp on the story of a girl in the kitchens I’d hardly spoken to.

Was the girl a particularly hated prisoner? Was she kin to Baba Yaga, some kind of spy? What was the tsarytsya trying to tell me?

“And did she?” I asked.

Baba Yaga scoffed. “Of course she didn’t.” She pushed past me up the stairs, making for her chambers. “She was captured, just as you were.”