take measures to cure your condition. It is … for your own good.”
Ana clung to that tiniest sliver of hope. Perhaps, if she was cured, Papa would love her again.
Within a moon, Papa had hired a tutor to “cure” Ana of her Affinity. Konsultant Imperator Sadov, they called him, and from the moment Ana met him, she knew he was made of nothing but nightmares. He seemed to grow out of the shadows: a silhouette stretched tall and slim, with hair and eyes as dark as blackstone, and fingers long and sickly white. His cure centered on the theory that fear and poison would wash the Affinity from her.
And so Ana’s world had shrunk to the corners of the Palace and the depths of the dungeons, where the blackstone walls sucked all light and warmth from the air, and the darkness pressed against her like a living thing.
“Most Affinities manifest slowly, as an awareness to the elements of one’s Affinity,” Sadov had said, his voice smooth and cold as silk. “But yours exploded, completely out of your control. Do you know why that is?”
Ana shivered. “Why, Konsultant Imperator?”
“Because you control blood.” He touched a finger to her chin, and it took all her willpower not to shrink back. “Because you are a monster.”
By that time, Mama had fallen sick, and within a year of the Vyntr’makt incident, she passed away. The Palace courtiers had whispered that it had been a mistake for the Emperor to take a wife of one of the southern ethnicities of Cyrilia; something about her tawny skin and dark hair made her different. Something that her offspring had inherited. There had already been veiled murmurs of the Prince and Princess’s distinctly southern looks, which stood out among the pale-faced, fair-haired Northern Cyrilians who dominated the ruling classes of Cyrilia. With Mama’s death and Ana’s confinement, the rumors grew louder.
Humans, it seemed, tended to fear things that were different.
Yet it was her brother’s words on that terrible day that stayed with Ana throughout those long years, in the stretches of darkness and loneliness, during Sadov’s worst rages and Papa’s callous coldness.
Your Affinity does not define you.
The bitter taste of Deys’voshk, burning her throat and twisting her stomach.
What defines you is how you choose to wield it.
The nauseating fear, the cold of the blackstone, the blood pulsing through the small rabbits Sadov used to test her abilities, which never diminished in the ten years after.
You are not a monster, sistrika.
She had so, so desperately wanted to believe that.
Perhaps the Deities had willed for her to live after all—and if not the Deities, then Ana had willed herself to live.
It was this thought that she clung to now, half-frozen and half-dead from the battering current of the Ghost Falls river. This, and the memory of her brother, like a steady, unwavering flame in her heart, guiding her onward.
For there was a reason for her to live, Ana realized, as she began to surface through the bouts of sleep and groggy wakefulness that claimed her in turn. Her thoughts rose through the darkness and the cold, stubbornly, willfully, as she had that day from the icy depths of the river.
Yes, there was a reason for her to live. And that was to find Papa’s murderer.
The second time Ana had almost drowned, it had been beneath a bone-white moon—not unlike the one that hung above the Syvern Taiga tonight—that had carved the world in monochrome. The winter night of eleven moons past had been cast in the color of death. She had walked into her father’s chambers to see him convulsing, his face leached of color, his eyes rolling into his head, the poison and the blood roaring through him like the distorted screaming of a river. She had seen his murderer, dressed in white prayer robes, bent over her papa and tipping the vial of poison.
She’d caught sight of the man’s face in the moments before he ran: a peculiar yet familiar face, like that of a dead man, with bulging eyes and a bald head. In the moonlight, his Deys’krug had cut silver like a scythe. The Palace alchemist.
Alchemist. Murderer. Traitor.
He was the reason she had been arrested that night. She had been found long after he had run, still clinging to Papa’s body, covered in his blood—the poisoned blood she’d tried to pull from his body to save him. In the end, she’d lost control of her Affinity, and Papa had still died, right in front of her.
And she should have died, too, accused of murdering the Emperor and of being a traitor to the Crown. Curled against the cold bars of the Palace dungeons that night, her father’s blood still staining her hands, she’d never wished more that she did not exist, that she never had.
Because you are a monster.
And yet again, on that night, fate, or the Deities, or whatever perverse dictator of the courses of lives, decided to spare her. She’d woken to the rattle of keys and the creak of her cell door opening. A weathered face out of the darkness with eyes the gray of clouds, and salt-and-pepper hair.
“I’ve followed you since the day you were born, so don’t ask me to stand aside and just watch as you die,” Markov had told her.
“It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me,” she’d babbled, clutching at him and sinking to her knees.
Markov’s face softened. “I believe you. Take the tunnel and run, Princess. I’ll tell them you escaped when I was escorting you here, and that you drowned in the Tiger’s Tail.” He stroked her tears away with his callused thumbs. “Run, and live.”
Live. That felt like an impossible task.
But Ana shut her eyes, and that face came to her again: moon-pale, with owlishly large eyes. The alchemist, who’d left the Palace so many years ago, after her diagnosis. It had seemed like a dream—no, a nightmare—to see him there again, a ghost of the past.
But a ghost was all the reason she had left to live. That alchemist was the reason she’d run through that secret passageway in the dungeons that night and thrown herself into the Tiger’s Tail for the second time in her life; the reason she’d crawled onto the shore of the Syvern Taiga, half-frozen on the outside and dead on the inside, waiting for the Deities to claim her. Yet he was also why she’d stood again that night, staring at the Palace and the Kateryanna Bridge in the distance and vowing that she would return only when she had found him.
Yes, she did have a reason to live after all these long years, Ana realized suddenly, her thoughts sharpening into lucidity. She lived to find the owner of that face, to hunt down the person who had murdered her father and diagnosed her with this evil affliction, sealing her fate for ten years past. She lived to redeem herself, to prove that, beyond the monstrosity of her power, she could be good.
I will find you, alchemist, she thought over and over again, like a vow. I will find you.
Ana woke with a start and the ghost of a face scattering from her dreams. It took her several moments to grasp her surroundings: the crackle of a fire burning low in the hearth, the musty smell of old pinewood floors, and the scratch of a coarse cloth pillow beneath her cheek.
She remembered flashes of the evening—the cold, the dark, the scent and silver of snow, a warm bathtub. She’d made it. She’d made it back to the dacha.
Ana clutched the ragged fur blanket tighter, surprise twanging in her stomach. How had she gotten back? She remembered the fall into the river, the feeling of utter helplessness beneath the battering current, and then crawling onto an empty, frozen shore. Her clothes had been colder than ice, and she’d barely been able to move.
Can you walk, darling?
Ana