should we do?” Dread bloomed in her as she thought of returning to the Palace, of facing her father and the reality of what she had done.
But her brother’s grip tightened and he brought her fingers to his lips, kissing her bloodstained nails. His brows were creased, his eyes stormy yet gentle at once. “We’ll go back through a secret passageway Markov showed me. You’ll wash off in your chambers. The truth of the incident at the Vyntr’makt was lost in the crowds and the confusion. No one has to know.” His jaw set and he lifted his chin slightly, in that stubborn way she knew so well. “I’ll speak to Papa. I’ll tell him that you need a tutor, like the ones that teach the Affinites employed at the Palace to hone their Affinities.”
Yet that night, Papa had come to her chambers, his brows creased. He oftentimes came with Mama to tuck her into bed, but this time, he’d stood at the foot of her bed, the distance between them stretching an ocean.
Quietly, he’d told her that she would have to stay indoors for a while—at least until her “condition” was gone. The official story to the outside world was that the Princess was sick, and her frail health had to be preserved within the walls of the Palace.
Ana had fallen to her knees, reaching for him—and he had remained where he was, his face carved of ice. It had broken her a little more. “Please,” she’d whispered. “It won’t happen again. I’ll never use my … my Affinity. I’ll be your good daughter.”
Papa’s eyes had clouded. “It … isn’t acceptable for you to be an Affinite,” he’d said. “Especially considering your particular Affinity It mustn’t be known widely, nor registered on your papers. We will 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.”
