Page 51 of Rule of Wolves

“We’re out of time,” said Tamar.

Zoya rubbed a hand over her face. Just how many wars could they fight at once?

“You won’t be here for the wedding,” Tamar said, her lips curved in a sad half smile. “Everything will be different when you return.”

Zoya didn’t want to think about that. “Promise me you’ll be careful,” she said briskly. “There’s no way to predict what Makhi might do. Or Princess Ehri, for that matter.”

“It’s a gamble,” Tamar said, then grinned and flicked her thumbs over her axe handles. “But I’m ready for a good fight.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Tamar shrugged. “I can keep hope in my heart and a blade in my hand.”

There was more Zoya wanted to say, but it all amounted to the same impossible thing: Be safe.

Zoya sent scouts to patrol the area around the sanatorium and make sure they’d have a clear place for their airship to land. The other preparations would have to wait. She needed to talk to Genya and David.

She found them in the Materialki workshops. When the Triumvirate had rebuilt the Little Palace after the Darkling’s attack, they’d expanded these chambers to reflect the Fabrikators’ greater role in the war effort. David had his own workroom and three assistants to help interpret and execute his plans. He split his time between here and the secret laboratory at Kirigin’s estate, and Genya often shared this space, tailoring spies, helping people to remove scars, and concocting poisons and tonics when called for.

Now Zoya found her curled up on a settee beside David’s desk, the light from his lamp making a circle around them. Her boots were off and she had tied her bright auburn hair into a knot. She had a half-eaten apple in one hand and a book on her lap, the sun emblazoned on her eye patch glinting. She looked like a beautiful, rakish pirate who had wandered off the pages of a storybook, a bit of sparkling chaos in David’s carefully ordered world.

“What are you reading?” Zoya asked as she sat down by Genya’s stockinged feet.

“It’s a Kerch book on the detection of poisons. I had to send away for a Ravkan translation.”

“Useful?”

“We’ll see. The case studies are wonderfully gory. The rest is mostly moralizing about the perfidy of women and the dangers of the modern age, but it’s giving me some ideas.”

“For poisons?”

“And medicines. They’re one and the same. The only difference is the dose.” Genya frowned. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“The Darkling wants to see Alina.”

Genya set aside her apple. “Are we meeting his demands now?”

“He claims he knows how to stop the Fold from expanding further.”

“Do we believe him?”

“I don’t know. He says we need to restage the obisbaya.”

Genya’s look of worry made perfect sense to Zoya. “The ritual that almost killed Nikolai.”

“The very one. But to do it, we need to bring back the ancient thorn wood. Or so he says. What do you think, David?”

“Hmm?”

Genya shut her book with a snap. “Zoya would like to know if our greatest enemy should be allowed to try to kill the king again in order to possibly return stability to the Fold. Will it work?”

David put down his pen, picked it up again. His fingers were ink-stained. “Possibly.” He thought for a moment. “The Fold was created through failed experiments in resurrection, attempts to raise animals from the dead as Morozova did and make them into amplifiers. He managed it with the stag and the sea whip.”

And then with his own child. Alina had told them all the story, the truth behind the ancient legend. Ilya Morozova, the Bonesmith, had intended that the third amplifier would be the firebird. Instead it had been his daughter, a girl he had raised from the dead and imbued with power. That power had passed down through her descendants to a tracker—Alina’s tracker, Malyen Oretsev—who had himself died and been brought back to life on the sands of the Fold.

“You remember Yuri?” she asked. “The Darkling wants to use the ritual to drive whatever remains of the little monk out of his body and absorb the king’s demon. He thinks it will allow him to reclaim his power.” A kind of shadow shell game. Zoya hated even thinking about it.

Genya’s fists bunched, crushing the fabric of her kefta. “And we’re going to let him?”