54

“Put these on. Quickly.” Torden shoved gray uniforms at us, then turned away, rifle lifted.

It felt like madness to uncover myself on a night like this. But I stripped out of my shift alongside Cobie and Anya and put on the loathsome gray uniform, tucking my hair under its cap, trying to ignore the bloodstain splashed across its ribs.

Cobie unwrapped the knife from her leg. Torden handed Anya a blade of her own and produced a small gun from his hip for me.

“Do you know how to use this?” he asked.

The metal of the gun felt hot under my fingers, as though it were cursed. More likely, it had recently been fired. I met his eyes but didn’t speak.

“Point it. Shoot it.” Torden pressed his forehead to mine, swallowing. “Can you do that?”

I would have you far, far from your enemies, he had told me once.

But my enemies—people who’d gladly kill my friends—were here. I couldn’t use a knife the way Anya and Cobie could. But I could lift the gun. I could shoot it.

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I can.”

“Then let’s go.”

We followed Torden up the stairs and found the tower in chaos. Men and women—mainly men—ran up and down Baba Yaga’s impractical stairs. On one of the landings, two soldiers fought with swords, laughing and bleeding, one wearing the tsarytsya’s emerald-studded crown lopsidedly over his head. Another gray-uniformed guard burst through the front door with two guns under one arm and three burlap sacks stuffed under the other.

There were always sentries at the front door—always. But tonight, its guardians were the threat. The danger was inside and out and locks and keys made no matter.

Coins spilled against the floor and shots cracked against the walls. Blood spattered the stairs and the floor. The women in the basement would be scrubbing it from the stones tomorrow morning if they survived the night.

“Come on.” Torden hurried us toward the door.

All was dark outside but for torches and the moon. Its pale face was a deep sunset red against the midnight sky.

It was every ill omen I’d ever feared.

Aleksei met us in the courtyard. “You took long enough,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Then,” Torden said, “we’d better run.”

“Shadows keep us,” Aleksei murmured, half a prayer, half a curse. And then, we ran.

We raced through the streets of Stupka-Zamok, past private fortresses where fires burned against the night. On one side, men threw a battering ram against an iron-girded door. On another, a crowd of gray-clad soldiers lit a match and set a moat to blazing.

A trunk of gold and gems spilled in the street and a crowd descended upon it. When a young woman tried to snatch a precious stone from the pocket of the old woman beside her, the old woman struck her across the face and began to shove the gold and gems into her mouth, swallowing them whole. They would be hers come morning and hers thereafter—unless someone cut them from her insides before dawn.

Soldiers and citizens raced to and fro, stolen animals on leads behind them and stolen coins rattling in their pockets and stolen bottles of alcohol souring the night with their stench. We were far from the only ones running, seeking to hide their deeds and the things they had carried away.

All around us, howls rang up from men who had become animals. The moon burned low and threatening against the black sky, leering at the violence below.

On and on we ran. Sprinting down the dark street, we nearly slammed into them. Ivan and his friends, their gray uniforms and their hands smeared with sunset-red blood.

“Ivan!” he crowed at Torden, his face lit with unwearied delight at their shared name.

“Ivan!” Torden returned. His throat bobbed, tense and uncomfortable, beneath his smile. They exchanged a few words, slapping one another on the back, and Torden made to leave. But then Ivan spotted Anya.

“Shcho vidbuvayet’sya?” he asked. What’s going on?

I’d heard the phrase often enough in the Mortar. But the expression on Ivan’s boyish face, shifting from pleasure to confusion, was new.

Anya hesitated only a moment—the barest half second while she collected herself, arranged her features, pitched her voice just right. Then she darted forward, squeezing Ivan’s arm, squealing something that hinted at marvelous games and secrets.

I knew Ivan wanted Anya. He’d flirted with her, favored her.

But I hadn’t realized how far a captor’s trifling fancy was from real kindness.

And Anya had been a second too late.

For the first time, Ivan saw behind her performance. Ugliness replaced the bafflement in his expression as he realized he’d been tricked.

It was the change that had come over the entire city playing out on one boy’s face, Wolf Night in miniature.

Ivan wrenched Anya close by her arm, so hard and abrupt she stumbled. The other soldiers jeered as he kissed her, roughly, with no affection.

If Anya would not give herself to Ivan, he would steal her.

My stomach bottomed out.

I yanked the pistol from my hip and cocked it and pointed it at Ivan. “Stop.” I hardly recognized my own voice.

Ivan blinked at me, as if he’d never noticed me before. It was entirely possible he hadn’t.

A single shot hit him in the shoulder, and he staggered back, fresh blood blooming across his arm. Anya didn’t flinch. She ran toward Torden, who was securing his gun back at his hip.

He’d spared me the shot. But my hands still shook.

Cobie took the gun from my trembling fingers and holstered it for me. “Come on,” she urged, tugging me away. “We need to get off the street.”

I followed her and didn’t look back.

“Here!” Aleksei led us into a narrow, unlit alley, noisy with yowling cats and stinking of garbage. Panting, we slowed, creeping through the shadows, picking our way around bins and broken buildings, hoping the night would hide us. Minutes stretched out like hours.

My heart pounded and the dark was thick and my breaths were so loud that I didn’t hear or see them until they were upon us.

The women were so quiet.

They must have followed us, waiting for our guard to slip. And after our brush with Ivan, it had.

Three or four dragged Torden aside. A crowd of them descended upon Aleksei.

I was sick at the prospect of even lifting my gun again. But I yanked it from its holster once more, my hands shaking. Sweat dripped down my back. Torden was very still in his captors’ arms.

“Stij,” barked one. She had a knife to Aleksei’s throat. A woman, cast in red moonlight. More than a dozen of them. I recognized them at once.

They were the mothers. The Rusalki.

I shoved my pistol in my belt and threw my hands up. “Wait. Wait! He’s a friend!” Torden began to speak to them in Yotne; Aleksei didn’t risk talking with a blade so close to his neck.

“He is not a friend,” spat the woman with the knife. She was young, dark-haired, and far too thin. “He is Rankovyy, Baba Yaga’s cursed General Dawn, and he has stolen our children.”

The parade ranks of little pestykk. The miniature gray uniforms. The choices and the childhood that had been ripped from them.

“Baba Yaga stole your children,” I said, my hands still up, palms open. “Aleksei did not know what she would demand when he accepted his post.”

The women murmured among themselves, restive. “Ignorance is no excuse,” snarled their leader.

“No.” I shook my head violently. “No, it’s not. It’s all despicable.”

“Selah . . .” Aleksei’s voice shook.

I shot him a glance. Shut up.

“But he’s one of us now,” I said. “We’ve been looking for you. We want to give you back your children. We want to help you take back your city—Aleksei, too.”

“Lies,” the Rusalka woman hissed.

The women’s whispers grew louder. My pulse spiked.

“He is the prins of Norge and she is the prinsessa of Varsinais-Suomi, and we are prisoners!” I gestured wildly at my friends, my voice rising with my panic. “We hate this place! Please, please let us help you!”

“What?” The woman scowled. The mothers were confused, their brows furrowing.

I had tried to explain too much. I was losing them. My heart dropped.

And slowly, slowly, so did their weapons.

The women were distracted, exchanging baffled glances and whispered words, and Torden and Aleksei knew one another—knew how to speak without speaking, knew what the other would do in a match before he did it.

In a single burst, the boys broke away from the Rusalki and rushed to Anya and Cobie and me. “Please let us help you,” I said to the women once more.

Safe at my side, Torden lifted his gun again, grimacing, but I doubted he would use it on these women, even to defend himself.

I knew he was wishing for Mjolnir tonight.

If I have to break another’s body, I deserve at least to feel his suffering in my own arm, he had said. I think the powerful would love less the fruits of violence if they had to deal it out by hand.

Besides, these women were not the powerful. They were the broken. The suffering. They had lost too much already.

“We will never accept help from you. We will hate you forever,” their spokeswoman raged, tears in her eyes. She nodded at Aleksei; a thin red cut ran across his neck, and blood dripped down his cheek from a row of jagged scratches. “Look at your scars and remember that.”

Torden fired a shot at the stones well above their heads, and when the women ducked and scattered, we ran.

My heart was sick. I hated to leave the Rusalki behind in this city of death.

And yet—I’d tried and failed. What else could I do? Who was I to think I could aid them in this war they’d waged so fiercely for who knew how long? What place was it of mine to think I could help them find justice for all they’d lost?

On and on I ran after the others, my heart and my breathing growing ragged, until we came to a house near the edge of town. We raced inside and slammed the door behind us.

All was dark within, the only sounds our footsteps on stone and our breathing.

“Anya!” Fredrik broke from the shadows, his voice cracking, and caught his sister in his arms. I hugged them both, Torden and Aleksei and Cobie with us. We bound ourselves to their shaking embrace, a cluster of limbs and torsos and cheeks traced with tears.

As I clung to my friends, I tried not to think of how I had nearly lost each of them tonight.

I tried not to think about the gun at my hip and the way it had felt in my hands.

We listened to the howls and the screams for hours, waiting for dawn. Anya would not let go of Fredrik’s hand, even when she fell asleep slumped against the wall. Cobie and I kept watch at a window at the back of the house with a few of Torden’s drengs.

I tried not to let visions of the night play in my mind.

The cruelty and selfish lust on Ivan’s face. The tears in the Rusalka’s eyes. I knew they would haunt me in dark moments for years to come.

Fires burned long into the night. The city quieted as the sky lightened, but only a little. When the shattering of glass and the report of bullets had slowed, Torden gathered us all in the front room and told his drengs how to proceed.

I reached beneath my cap and touched the ring hidden in my hair for luck. Soon, we could wear our secrets openly, and not fear they’d put us in danger.

“Walk like a soldier,” Torden whispered to me, pressing his palms into my shoulders, anchoring me to the earth. “Don’t speak to anyone.”

He kissed me and let out a long, shaking breath as we drew apart. Then I followed him out the front door.

Ahead of us, the drengs carried away the house’s treasures under their arms, crowing in Yotne like feasting wolves, like sated vultures. The skulls atop the nearby gates were every color of bone. Their eyes watched me, empty and lifeless.

A dilapidated little fortress blinded the last bend in the road. A dog was chained just outside its door, fur chafed away beneath its iron collar. The skinny mutt snapped at us as we passed. I paused, wishing I could unchain it.

“Come on, Selah.” Aleksei tugged at my hand, pulling me forward. But the drengs had stopped short ahead of us. Confusion, and then horror, swept over me.

Dawn glowed on the horizon. But Midnight waited at the gates.