MARYNKA STARED AT ZOSIA.
Zosia stared at Marynka.
Prince Józef of Lechija snapped out of his trance, stared back and forth between them both, and screamed. A high-pitched strangled sound. His hand flew to the jeweled hilt of his saber.
Marynka stood frozen, seemingly unable to tear her eyes away from Zosia. But Zosia was finished hesitating. She darted toward the prince as swift as shadow.
A sudden, violent gust of heat slammed her backward. The heels of her boots drove black lines in the snow, her shoulders hit the snow-covered hedge behind her. She looked up, eyes narrowed.
Marynka met her gaze, eyes glowing molten gold. Her stare felt hot enough to dissolve Zosia’s flesh. Her iron teeth were too sharp to make the smile slowly spreading across her face anything but a threat.
Zosia drew a sharp breath. Her own face gave away nothing, but her blood pulsed with a new and strange excitement.
The prince drew his saber with a snick. The curved edge caught the moonlight. He went for Marynka, who was closest. His sword slashed down.
Marynka slid her foot backward, twisting out of the way—fast. But not fast enough. The blade scored a vicious line through the fabric of her cloak, across her forearm. Her devil’s mask had fallen to the ground. Blood ran down her wrist, dripping with a sizzling hiss from her fingertips to the snow.
Only, like Zosia, she didn’t feel pain like a normal person.
Marynka didn’t flinch or slow. Instead she immediately swerved and slashed at the prince’s chest with her glowing scythe, sending Józef darting back out of reach, cursing. Already her wound was healing. By the time morning came, any sign of it would be gone. The skin smooth, unscarred, flawless once more. The prince’s eyes were wide with shock.
Marynka threw her head back and laughed, an all-too-familiar sound.
They came together with a clash. Marynka catching the downstroke of the prince’s blade with her scythe, orange sparks flying, the shriek of metal on metal ringing through the winter night.
That, coupled with the prince’s earlier scream, warned Zosia that the three of them wouldn’t be alone for long.
Their blades slid along each other, singing a lethal duet as they sprang apart and danced in together. The sight was surreal. A monster and a prince going head-to-head in the frozen castle gardens, both dressed in fancy Karnawał costumes. A dragon and a turoń dueling to the death in the falling, whirling snow. Zosia held her breath as they matched each other strike for strike. Unsure who she feared would win. Unsure who she wanted to.
The prince whose heart she needed, or Marynka—no Midday—because that couldn’t truly be Marynka, could it? Marynka—the first friend she’d ever made, the girl with a smile like summer—couldn’t be the stubborn, destructive, childish, impulsive, complete disaster of a servant who served the witch Red Jaga, who was always getting in Zosia’s way.
A fresh whistle of steel brought her back to herself. The sound of a second saber singing out of its sheath followed by frantic crunching footsteps. She dragged her attention away from Marynka.
“Józek!”
Zosia and the prince both whirled at the shout to find Kajetan, the boy in the priest costume she’d first mistaken for the prince, racing through the garden toward them. He was holding the wooden storm cloud Zosia had left behind, or had been, until the moment he drew his weapon.
Kajetan and Józef’s eyes met for the briefest instant, but it was shock not relief that lit the prince’s face, and the emotion turned quickly to incandescent fury. For a wild second it seemed he might abandon his fight with Marynka and Zosia all together and launch himself instead upon the boy who’d joined them.
Marynka seized on his distraction, catching the prince’s saber with her scythe, shoving the blade back, and forcing him off-balance with inhuman strength. Before he could recover, she came at him with her free hand as if intending to rip his pure heart straight from his chest.
Zosia reached for the night, and the night reached for Marynka. Thin, snakelike arms of darkness rose from the shadows to seize her, binding her in their embrace. The prince shot Zosia a look of surprise, but she didn’t see what happened next because Kajetan launched himself at her.
He drove her away from the prince, away from Marynka, down a path between the garden’s snowbound hedges.
Zosia ducked, sidestepping, his blade slicing within a breath of her neck. The next blow she staved off with her claws, the force reverberating up her wrist.
Vexed, she fell back, ice splintering beneath her boots, irritation surging as she considered her opponent. She was taller by inches, but he was broader through the shoulders and, despite his delicate, saintly appearance, moved with a soldier’s sure footing and a dancer’s fluid grace.
His expression was fierce. There was no hesitation in his hand.
Worse, he didn’t care to dodge. He was as reckless as Midday in his attack. He fights, thought Zosia suddenly, like someone hoping to die.
She could barely move fast enough to avoid the blade slashing at her throat, her face, her chest. She yielded a step, and another, and another. Kajetan swung his sword in an arc that would’ve carved her open from shoulder to hip if at that moment she hadn’t dived behind a sundial.
Breathing hard, Zosia plunged the world into full darkness. A wave of night crashed over them, vanishing the moon and stars from the sky. For a heartbeat, Zosia’s body was solid and then it was pure shadow. A second sweep of the blade cut through her harmlessly, as if she were no more than a ghost, while Kajetan spun in a bewildered circle.
She could hear his hoarse breathing as he groped blindly in the all-consuming blackness. The amber beads of his rosary, part of his priest’s costume, clicked anxiously. Words of a prayer whispered from his lips, a plea to the saints, to the Holy Mother.
Zosia smiled softly as she gathered herself out of nothingness, re-forming a mere step behind him—dark separating from dark, shadow from shadow, coalescing into the solid shape of a girl with a silver braid and long, ink-black claws held at the ready.
But then, light sparked. Red-gold flames flared to life along the curve of Kajetan’s saber, fire searing through the veil of night she’d wrapped around them.
Zosia stood rooted to the ground as he turned to face her.
Divine magic.
The kind wielded by prophets, priests, and saints. She could feel the heat of that holy fire scorch her cheeks. She took a staggered step back. She wasn’t a fool. She knew when to pick her battles. She hadn’t come to Warszów to risk herself fighting suicidal soldiers wielding blessed blades. And there was the prince—what was happening to him? And Marynka?
Zosia cut her losses, dissolving into swirling shadow before Kajetan’s eyes, circling around him once in a whirl of air and darkness, taking one final look at this strange boy before she fled.
Kajetan let out an angry cry and slashed his flaming sword at the empty space where she’d just been.
Let him waste his time slicing his way through the dark. Zosia let the night breeze carry her away with the falling snow. She felt like she was caught in a fever dream; her thoughts were wild, spinning, unfocused. Her mind raced with a thousand questions and one she kept coming back to: That couldn’t really have been Marynka back there, could it? She couldn’t really be Midday?