Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
KATERINA
Ten bowls of repulsive soup after Sofi’s visit, they came for her.
That morning, a guard had rubbed her body all over with the same herbs that burned in the prison’s corridor, until the scent seared her nostrils and she felt like a chicken bound for the pot…
if said chicken possessed magical gifts in need of stifling.
Every time she moved, the reek of it wafted into the air around her, and by her side, Zinaida Novikova gave a small, disgusted cough.
Well, the woman had no one to blame but herself.
If she’d allowed Katerina to bathe and given her some fresh clothes, she could’ve attended this tribunal smelling like a rose, rather than the concoction of a misguided chef intent on poisoning the masses.
Dimi Novikova and her second, Dimi Orlova, had marched her from her cell without a word, taking her through a tunnel that led from the prison to the chamber that lay below Rivki’s arena. It was to be a public shaming, then.
The last time she had entered this arena, it had been as a contestant in the Bone Trials, pitted against a Shadow and Dimi pairing from each of the other six villages in Iriska.
Never in a million years had she imagined that in just a few short months, she would be standing beneath the arena again, about to enter it not as a warrior, but as a condemned prisoner.
Once again, she was fighting for her life in this arena. It had a certain ragged symmetry.
Aboveground, a bell tolled, the sound round and full and final. “Let’s go,” Dimi Novikova said, her witchwind shoving Katerina over the threshold, just as Trina Samovar’s magic had done all those months ago.
With her hands bound, it was all Katerina could do to keep her balance.
She managed it somehow, though it was a near thing: the toe of her boot caught the edge of a jagged stone and nearly sent her sprawling.
Cheers rose from around her in a mocking wave, and she lifted her eyes to discover every seat occupied, other than the box reserved for the prince regent—the one that had once belonged to the Kniaz.
Men, women, and children alike had come to witness her humiliation, their gazes hard and their features rigid with disgust. Many of them clutched rotten fruit and vegetables, arms raised and ready to let fly as Katerina stepped from the stones of the entryway onto the sand of the arena’s floor.
They had prepared for her arrival. A Shadow and Dimi pairing stood at each of the exits, armed and ready.
Someone had taken the trouble to sprinkle the arena’s borders with a thick line of salt, lined with iron shavings.
Torches stabbed the sand every few feet, their flames redolent of the same herbs that had burned outside Katerina’s cell.
“Stand there,” Dimi Novikova said, pointing to the center of the pit. And then, when Katerina didn’t move, “Are you expecting an engraved invitation?”
“There’s no need to be nasty,” Katerina muttered, allowing Dimi Orlova to prod her onward as she scanned the arena for her Shadow. But he was nowhere to be seen. Did they intend to try the two of them separately?
“Shadow-lover,” came a murmur from somewhere above her.
The crowd picked up the chant: “Shadow-lover! Shadow-lover! Shadow-lover!” Even the children took up the cry, their high-pitched voices joining the adults’ full-throated shouts in a symphony of contempt, fury, and satisfaction.
The Kniaz was dead, Iriska was falling, and finally, finally they had someone to blame.
“King-killer!” a gnarled woman called from one of the lower tiers, her cracked voice breaking through the melee.
Her rheumy eyes met Katerina’s as she drew back her thin arm and let a wizened apple fly.
It bounced harmlessly off the ground below, but a moment later, the crowd joined her, their ammunition plummeting toward the arena floor in a hail of half-rotted tomatoes, apples, and plums. Gods, the spoilage alone could’ve fed Kalach for a week.
If these people would shut up for two seconds, Katerina would’ve informed them that the Kniaz had been a duke, not a king. But she supposed ‘duke-killer’ didn’t have the same alliterative ring to it. And besides, she was too busy trying to avoid sustaining a concussion.
“You could stop this,” she muttered to Dimi Novikova.
One blast of the woman’s witchwind, and the cannonade of food would be borne up and away, over the highest bleachers of the arena and into the streets beyond, where some lucky creatures could feast on their unexpected bounty.
But instead, the woman stood as still as one of the columns that supported the arena, her face a mask.
“I could,” was all she said.
Irritation crested within Katerina, and yet again, she reached for her magic.
It was there—she could feel it, like the lava that coursed beneath the rocks in Povorino, hot and eager to be used.
But when she tried to grasp it, that damned barrier rose up to block her.
In her mind’s eye, she threw herself against the wall again and again, to no avail.
And when she tried to tap into her bond with Niko, only hollowness met her, as if her voice echoed down a long, empty tunnel.
What had they done to him?
She opened her mouth to demand answers, just as one of her assailants got lucky. The tomato they’d hurled found its mark, splattering against her cheek. Its pulpy fruit dripped onto her bound hands, viscous and red as clotting blood.
The crowd’s howling intensified, a fresh fusillade of rotting ammunition peppering the floor of the arena.
Katerina wished she could incinerate all of them, but even if she could access her dampened magic, with her bond to Niko stifled this way, there was no telling how her gifts would behave.
They were likely as unpredictable as they had been when Niko was a prisoner of the Underworld.
For all she knew, they would rebound on her and burn her alive.
So she did the only thing she could. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and stared her assailants down, the same way she’d done when the villagers had stoned her in Kalach.
Around her, shocked whispers rose: “She dares to look us in the eye!
“She shows no remorse! Hang her!” And then, as the crowd picked up the rhythm: “Hang her! Hang her! Hang her!”
Next to Katerina, Dimi Orlova cleared her throat. “Zinaida,” she said, a note of alarm in her voice, “this is getting out of hand. Much as I hesitate to agree with the prisoner, perhaps we should—”
The rest of her sentence was lost in the roar of the crowd, as two enterprising urchins hurled a pair of bright orange tykva through the air.
The gourds split open at Katerina’s feet, revealing their stringy, fibrous guts.
A spray of tangerine-colored goo and seeds arced from the point of impact, splattering Katerina, Dimi Orlova, and Dimi Novikova in equal measure.
The crowd roared their approbation, and Zinaida Novikova’s face hardened even further. She attempted to pluck the seeds from her crimson gear, but they clung, emboldened by the goop that encased them.
“King-killer!” came the cry again, this time accompanied by a green projectile that whistled through the air.
Katerina dodged, but Dimi Novikova, still occupied with deseeding her uniform, wasn’t so lucky.
The melon struck her forearm with enough force to bruise the bone, and the leader of the Druzhina lifted her head, murder in her eyes.
“Cease,” she roared, amplifying her voice with her witchwind.
For a moment, the crowd fell silent. But then they started up again, this time with low, uneasy murmurs that rippled through the stadium like wind through the trees: a breeze that preceded a gale. As one, their gazes turned toward the door through which Katerina had emerged.
Katerina looked, too. And then her breath caught in her throat.
There, flanked by Shadow Berezin and his second, stood Niko.