41

Aleksei descended to the kitchens that afternoon. “Do you have your knife?” he asked Cobie, with no preamble.

She didn’t look at him. “What do you care?”

“I want you to have a fair chance.” Aleksei crossed his arms, shifting uncomfortably.

“Why the full moon?” I demanded. “And what’s happening on the eclipse?”

“Zatemnennya?” Aleksei shrugged, abstract. “It’s a lunar eclipse, one month from now. It’s . . . significant. Busy, and bordering on religious, I think.”

Anya dropped the dish she’d been washing. It clattered in the sink. A few of the maids and cooks glanced over, concerned, then dropped their gazes quickly at the sight of Rankovyy in their midst.

“And what will you be doing tonight, Aleksei?” Anya asked, expression hard.

“Seeing to the little pestykk.” His eyes darted away, guilty.

“To the children?” Anya fired back at him. “To the children she calls her little pestles, who will grind those who resist into dust? The children she’s indoctrinated?”

“Every member of the pestykk comes of their own volition,” Aleksei said, righteously indignant.

“We’ve all seen that there’s only one answer when the tsarytsa asks a question,” I said, pitching my voice low. “Besides, there are some choices children can’t make.”

“They choose what you were spared!” Anya raged. I put out a hand to quiet her, but she was not to be soothed. “You were allowed to grow up happy and free with a family. We were taught discipline, humility, hard work—in safety.”

At this, Aleksei finally seemed to grow frustrated. “And I will teach these children the same!”

“Can you teach them justice?” Anya demanded. “When the tsarytsya tells her people that they will never grow hungry, because the whole world is theirs to eat? That whatever they can take belongs to them by right, because that is the way of Wolves? Can you teach them kindness, when the tsarytsya tells them that the world is brutal and their teeth and claws must be kept sharp?”

“How do you know—?” Aleksei began.

“Because I ran from it!” Anya shouted. “Because she came for Varsinais-Suomi and killed my parents and changed our country’s name! Because I looked over my shoulder while I ran, and I saw—I saw—what she did.” Anya was breathing hard, a vein in her forehead pulsing.

“Anya.” Aleksei swallowed, face looking drawn in the dim kitchens. “I have a place, and I’m proud of it. I have power now. I can use it to help you.”

A few nights before, I’d fallen asleep by the fire, thinking about how the kings and the fae and the gods of the old stories rewarded the good, the brave, the kind.

I hadn’t let myself think that night of who else they sometimes seemed to reward.

It was not only the virtuous, the generous, the hospitable, the humble.

Sometimes fools and liars won the day. Sometimes con men’s tricks succeeded.

Sometimes the wolves were sated, and the innocent were lost.

“If you are proud of this, then you are not the brother I knew, and I don’t want your help,” Anya bit out. “I never wanted to draw lines between us. But if you can’t see how horrible this is—the things she wants to teach them, the things you are going to help teach them—then I don’t know who you are anymore.”

Aleksei’s face hardened, and he paused for a long moment before tugging a knife from his waistband and passing it hilt-first to Cobie. “Take this, anyway.”

Vasylysa and another pair of maids saw her take it from his hands. But I saw from their looks that they would say nothing. As they said nothing of Wash’s prayers, or of mine. As they must have taken in Vasylysa herself after she failed her stepmother’s “testing.”

I’d never seen Anya cry before. But after Aleksei left, tears began to roll down her cheeks.

And dread took shape inside me, pale and sharp as the light of the full moon on a blade.