Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3)

by Leigh Bardugo

“Impressive,” Mal said. I shook my head in wonder. “How does he do it?” “Want to know my secret?” Nikolai asked from behind us. We both jumped. He leaned in, looked from left to right, and whispered loudly, “I have a lot of money.” I rolled my eyes. “No, really,” he protested. “A lot of money.”

“Saints,” I swore. “I forgot how often I want to stab you.” “So I haven’t lost my touch.”

The room was teeming with people. Some bunched in groups where drafting tables and bits of machinery had been set up. Others were marking crates of supplies in a kind of makeshift warehouse. Another area had been set aside for training; soldiers sparred with dulled swords while others summoned Squaller winds or cast Inferni flame. Through the glass, I saw terraces protruding in four directions, giant spikes like compass points—north, south, east, west. Two had been set aside for target practice. It was hard not to compare it to the damp, cloistered caverns of the White Cathedral. Everything here was bursting with life and hope. It all bore Nikolai’s stamp.

“It was originally a pilgrimage site, back when Ravka’s borders extended farther north,” Nikolai replied. “The Monastery of Sankt Demyan.” Sankt Demyan of the Rime. At least that explained the winding staircase we’d glimpsed. Only faith or fear could get anyone to make that climb. I remembered Demyan’s page from the Istorii Sankt’ya. He’d performed some kind of miracle near the northern border. I was pretty sure he’d been stoned to death.

I was impressed, but also unnerved. Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I’d played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious. Tomorrow, he’d probably tell me he’d built a pleasure palace on the moon. Tough to get to, but quite a view.

wanted.” “That’s hardly limiting,” he said. “Alina, I’ll be back to fetch you for dinner, but should you grow restless, do feel free to run screaming from the room or take a dagger to her. Whatever seems most fitting at the time.” “Are you still here?” snapped Baghra. “I go but hope to remain in your heart,” he said solemnly. Then he winked and disappeared. “Wretched boy.” “You like him,” I said in disbelief. Baghra scowled. “Greedy. Arrogant. Takes too many risks.” “You almost sound concerned.” “You like him too, little Saint,” she said with a leer in her voice. “I do,” I admitted. “He’s been kind when he might have been cruel. It’s refreshing.” “He laughs too much.” “There are worse traits.”

“But you did something to the King, something from which the court doctors said he’d never recover. What was it?” “Poison.” “Surely it could have been traced.” “Not this. I designed it myself. If given in small enough doses over a long enough time, the symptoms are mild.” “A vegetable alkaloid?” asked David. She nodded. “Once it builds up in the victim’s system, a threshold is reached, the organs begin to fail, and the degeneration is irreversible. It’s not a killer. It’s a thief. It steals years. And he will never get them back.”

“I poisoned my skin,” Genya said harshly, “my lips. So that every time he touched me—” She shuddered slightly and glanced at David. “Every time he kissed me, he took sickness into his body.” She clenched her fists. “He brought this on himself.”

“Father?” he asked. “Did you?” “She is a servant, Nikolai. I didn’t have to force her.”

After a long moment, Nikolai said, “Genya Safin, when this war is over, you will stand trial for high treason against this kingdom and for colluding with the Darkling against the crown.” The King broke into a smug grin. But Nikolai wasn’t done. “Father, you are ill. You have served the crown and the people of Ravka, and now it is time for you to take the rest you deserve. Tonight, you will write out a letter of abdication.” The King blinked in confusion, eyelids stuttering as if he couldn’t quite comprehend what he was hearing. “I will do no such—” “You will write the letter, and tomorrow you will leave on the Kingfisher. It will take you to Os Kervo, where you’ll be seen safely aboard the Volkvolny and across the True Sea. You can go someplace warm, maybe the Southern Colonies.” “The Colonies?” the Queen gasped. “You will have every luxury. You will be far from the fighting and the reach of the Darkling. You will be safe.” “I am the King of Ravka! This … this traitor, this—” “If you remain, I will see you tried for rape.” The Queen clutched a hand to her heart. “Nikolai, you cannot mean to do this.” “She was under your protection, Mother.” “She is a servant!” “And you are a queen. Your subjects are your children. All of them.”

The King’s eyes narrowed. “Vasily was twice the man you are. You are a weakling and a fool, full of common sentiment and common blood.” Nikolai flinched. “Maybe so,” he said. “But you will write that letter, and you will board the Kingfisher without protest. You will leave this place, or you will face trial, and if you are found guilty, then I will see you hang.” The Queen let out a small sob.

“It is my word against hers,” the King said, waving his finger at Genya. “I am a King—” I stepped between them. “And I am a Saint. Shall we see whose word carries more weight?”

“Escort my father and mother to their rooms. Keep them under watch and ensure that they speak to no one. I will have your abdication by morning, Father, or I will have you in irons.” The King looked from Nikolai to the guards who now flanked him. The Queen clutched at his arm, her blue eyes panicked. “You are no Lantsov,” snarled the King. Nikolai merely bowed. “I find I can live with that fact.”

“Genya—” David tried. “Don’t you dare,” she said roughly, tears welling up again. “You never looked at me twice before I was like this, before I was broken. Now I’m just something for you to fix.” I was desperate for words to soothe her, but before I could find any, David bunched up his shoulders and said, “I know metal.” “What does that have to do with anything?” Genya cried. David furrowed his brow. “I … I don’t understand half of what goes on around me. I don’t get jokes or sunsets or poetry, but I know metal.” His fingers flexed unconsciously as if he were physically grasping for words. “Beauty was your armor. Fragile stuff, all show. But what’s inside you? That’s steel. It’s brave and unbreakable. And it doesn’t need fixing.”

At the stairs, I grabbed Genya’s hand. “What did you whisper?” I asked quietly. “To the King.” She watched the others move up the steps, then said, “Na razrusha’ya. E’ya razrushost.” I am not ruined. I am ruination.

“Nikolai’s a born leader. He knows how to fight. Knows how to politic. But he doesn’t know what it is to live without hope. He’s never been nothing. Not like you or Genya. Not like me.”

The door closed behind him. I doused the lanterns and lay down on the bed, pulling the blankets around me. The window wall was like a great round eye, and now that the room was dark, I could see the stars. I brushed my thumb over the scar on my palm, made years ago by the edge of a broken blue cup, a reminder of the moment when my whole world had shifted, when I’d given up a part of my heart that I would never get back. We’d made the wise choice, done the right thing. I had to believe that logic would bring comfort in time. Tonight, there was just this too-quiet room, the ache of loss, knowledge deep and final as the tolling of a bell: Something good has gone.

“Suffering is cheap as clay and twice as common. What matters is what each man makes of it.

“It’s too far,” I grumbled. “And it’s huge.” Couldn’t we have started smaller? Say, with a house? “It is not too far,” she sneered. “You are as much there as you are here. The same things that make the mountain make you. It has no lungs, so let it breathe with you. It has no pulse, so give it your heartbeat. That is the essence of the Small Science.” She thumped me with her stick. “Stop huffing like a wild boar. Breathe the way I taught you—

“Ten coins says she doesn’t make it,” called one of Nikolai’s rogue Grisha. “Twenty says she does,” shouted Adrik loyally. I could have hugged him, though I knew for a fact he didn’t have the money. “Thirty says she can hit the one behind it.” I whirled. Mal was leaning against the archway, his arms crossed. “That peak is over five miles away,” I protested.

I pushed up my sleeves and raised my hands. The crowd went silent. I focused on the peak in the distance, so far away I couldn’t make out its details. I called the light to me and then released it, letting myself go with it. I was in the clouds, above them, and for a brief moment, I was in the dark of the mountain, feeling myself compressed and breathless. I was the spaces between, where light lived even if it could not be seen. When I brought my arm down, the arc I made was infinite, a shining sword that existed in a moment and in every moment beyond it. There was an echoing crack, like thunder from a distance. The sky seemed to vibrate. Silently, slowly, the top of the far mountain began to move. It didn’t tip, just slid inexorably to the side, snow and rock cascading down its face, leaving a perfect diagonal line where a peak had once been, a ledge of exposed gray rock, jutting just above the cloud bank.

Given time, I was sure Baghra could teach me to push my power further, but she would never help me master merzost, and on my own, I had no idea where to begin. I remembered the feeling I’d had in the chapel, the sense of connection and disintegration, the horror of feeling my life torn from me, the thrill of seeing my creatures come into being. But without the Darkling, I couldn’t find my way into that power, and I couldn’t be sure the firebird would change that.

How many lives had the Darkling taken? How many lives had he lived? Maybe after all this time, life and death looked different to him—small and unmysterious, something to be used.

Zoya sighed and held the emerald up so it flashed. “I am horrible,” she said abruptly. “All these people dead, and I miss pretty things.” Genya bit her lip, then blurted, “I miss almond kulich. And butter, and the cherry jam the cooks used to bring back from the market in Balakirev.” “I miss the sea,” said Tamar, “and my hammock aboard the Volkvolny.” “I miss sitting by the lake at the Little Palace,” Nadia put in. “Drinking my tea, everything feeling peaceful.” Zoya looked at her boots and said, “I miss knowing what happens next.” “Me too,” I confessed.

“You never considered it, did you?” said the Darkling. “You live in a single moment. I live in a thousand.” Are we not all things?

“I want you to know my name,” he said. “The name I was given, not the title I took for myself. Will you have it, Alina?”

His eyes narrowed. “I grow weary of this game, Alina.” I was surprised at the anger that surged to life in me. “Weary? You’ve toyed with me at every turn. You haven’t tired of the game. You’re just sorry I’m not so easily played.”

Despite being hauled out of bed in the middle of the night, Nikolai managed to look put together, even with his olive drab coat thrown over his nightshirt and trousers. It hadn’t taken long to update him on all I had learned, and I wasn’t surprised by the first question out of his mouth.

“Stop wriggling like a grub,” Baghra snapped, and Misha froze. She gave a wave. “Go on, you useless thing, but don’t be late with my lunch.”

“Aleksander,” I whispered. She stilled. “His true name is Aleksander. And if he takes this step, he’ll be lost forever. We may all be.” “That name…” Baghra leaned back in her chair. “Only he could have told you. When?”

“All right, little Saint, since you want to know about Morozova and his precious amplifiers, I’ll tell you a story—one I used to tell a little boy with dark hair, a silent boy who rarely laughed, who listened more closely than I realized. A boy who had a name and not a title.”

“Morozova was the Bonesmith, one of the greatest Fabrikators who ever lived, and a man who tested the very boundaries of Grisha power, but he was also just a man with a wife. She was otkazat’sya, and though she loved him, she did not understand him.”

“They spent over a year hunting the stag in Tsibeya, two years sailing the Bone Road in search of the sea whip. Great successes for the Bonesmith. The first two phases of his grand scheme. But when his wife became pregnant, they settled in a small town,

“He was a Healer?” I asked. “I thought he was a Fabrikator.” “Morozova did not draw those distinctions. Few Grisha did in those days. He believed if the science was small enough, anything was possible. And for him, it often was.” Are we not all things?

His wife wore rags, and his child … his child was rarely seen. Her mother kept her to the house and the fields around it. You see, this little girl had started to show her power early, and it was like nothing ever known.” Baghra took another sip of kvas. “She could summon darkness.”

“I am Morozova’s daughter, and the Darkling is the last of Morozova’s line.”

She hated to hold me, could hardly bear to be in the same room with me. It was only when her second child was born that she came back to herself at all. Another little girl, this one normal like her, powerless and pretty. How my mother doted on her!” Years had passed, hundreds, maybe a thousand. But I recognized the hurt in her voice, the sting of always feeling underfoot and unwanted.

I had been playing dolls and my sister had whined and howled and stamped her little feet until my mother insisted that I give over my favorite toy, a wooden swan carved by our father in one of the rare moments that he’d paid me any attention. It had wings so detailed they felt nearly downy and perfect webbed feet that kept it balanced in water. My sister had it in her hand less than a minute before she snapped its slender neck. Remember, if you can, that I was just a child, a lonely child, with so few treasures of my own.” She lifted her glass but did not drink. “I lashed out at my sister. With the Cut. I tore her in two.”

“Did he save her?” “Yes,” said Baghra simply. “He was a great Healer, and he used every bit of his skill to bring her back—weak, wheezing, and scarred, but alive.”

“It was too much,” Baghra said. “The villagers knew what death looked like—that child should have died. And maybe they were resentful too. How many loved ones had they lost to illness or injury since Morozova had come to their town? How many could he have saved? Maybe it was not just horror or righteousness that drove them, but anger as well. They put him in chains—and my sister, a child who should have had the sense to stay dead. There was no one to defend my father, no one to speak on my sister’s behalf. We had lived on the outskirts of their lives and made no friends. They marched him to the river. My sister had to be carried. She had only just learned to walk and couldn’t manage it with the chains.”

“As my mother wailed and pleaded, as I cried and fought to get free from some barely known neighbor’s arms, they shoved Morozova and his youngest daughter off the bridge, and we watched them disappear beneath the water, dragged under by the weight of their iron chains.” Baghra emptied her glass and turned it over on the table. “I never saw my father or my sister again.”

We sat in silence as I tried to piece together the implications of what she’d said. I saw no tears on Baghra’s cheeks. Her grief is old, I reminded myself. And yet I didn’t think pain like that ever faded entirely. Grief had its own life, took its own sustenance.

“Baghra,” I said, pushing on, ruthless in my own way, “if Morozova died—” “I never said he died. That was the last I ever saw of him. But he was a Grisha of immense power. He might well have survived the fall.” “In chains?” “He was the greatest Fabrikator who ever lived. It would take more than otkazat’sya steel to hold him.” “And you believe he went on to create the third amplif...

For a brief moment, I glimpsed the ferocious girl she had been, fearless and wild, a Grisha of extraordinary ability. Then she sighed and shifted in her chair, and the illusion was gone, replaced by a tired old woman huddling by a fire.

“My son was not … He began so well. We moved from place to place, we saw the way our people lived, the way they were mistrusted, the lives they were forced to eke out in secrecy and fear. He vowed that we would someday have a safe place, that Grisha power would be something to be valued and coveted, something our country would treasure. We would be Ravkans, not just Grisha. That dream was the seed of the Second Army. A good dream. If I’d known…”

“Put your hunger aside, Alina. Do what Morozova and my son could not and give this up.” My cheeks were wet with tears. I hurt for her. I hurt for her son. But even so, I knew what my answer would be. “I can’t.” “What is infinite?” she recited. I knew that text well. “The universe and the greed of men,” I quoted back to her.

“He probably took his own life. It’s the way most Grisha of great power die.” I sat back, stunned. “Why?” “Do you think I never contemplated it? That my son didn’t? Lovers age. Children die. Kingdoms rise and fall, and we go on. Maybe Morozova is still wandering the earth, older and more bitter than I am. Or maybe he used his power on himself and ended it all. It’s simple enough. Like calls to like. Otherwise…” She chuckled again, that dry, rattling laugh. “You should warn your prince. If he really thinks a bullet will stop a Grisha with three amplifiers, he is much mistaken.”

I had two very different sets of luggage. One was nothing but a simple soldier’s pack that would be put aboard the Bittern. It was stocked with roughspun trousers, an olive drab coat treated to resist the rain, heavy boots, a small reserve of coin for any bribes or purchases I might need to make in Dva Stolba, a fur hat, and a scarf to cover Morozova’s collar. The other set was stowed on the Kingfisher—a collection of three matching trunks emblazoned with my golden sunburst and stuffed with silks and furs.

We’d just started up the stairs when Mal came bounding down in the opposite direction. He was beaming, his face alight with excitement. That smile was like a bomb going off in my chest. It belonged to a Mal I’d thought had disappeared beneath the scars of this war. He caught sight of me and Nikolai, arms entwined. It took the briefest second for his face to shutter. He bowed and stepped aside for us to pass.

All at once, the pain in my chest was so bad it nearly bent me double. Because this was what Mal had been coming to show me. Because that look—that open, eager, happy look—had been for me. Because I would always be the first person he turned to when he saw something lovely, and I would do the same. Whether I was a Saint or a queen or the most powerful Grisha who ever lived, I would always turn to him.