Chapter 17 #2
There was nothing to do but stand here, tomato-splattered and filthy, to face her fate…and then find a way to escape it somehow.
“Katerina Ivanova.” The slovetnik’s voice carried on the wind, heavy with the scent of burning herbs and rotten fruit. “To the charge of fornicating with your Shadow and breaking the covenant, how do you plead?”
Katerina swallowed hard. She had imagined they would ask her these questions, of course, but to hear her relationship with Niko reduced to this—no more than lust and lies—made her chest ache. Bracing her shoulders, she answered, “Guilty.”
The crowd inhaled collectively, as if her answer had shocked them…or as if they hadn’t thought she’d admit the truth so freely. But Katerina was not ashamed of her love for Niko. She was not about to lie.
That said, she also wasn’t about to go down without a fight.
“Yes,” she said, raising her voice to be heard, “it’s true I lay with my Shadow.
But that is not the cause of the chaos within Iriska.
I’ve said this over and over, until I’m blue in the face, but no one will listen.
” She lifted her bound hands, as if to demonstrate her defenselessness.
“Perhaps you will heed me now, for what do you have to lose?”
As if she hadn’t spoken, the slovetnik barreled on. “To the charge of consorting with demons and descending to the Underworld to retrieve your corrupted Shadow from the realm of the sullied dead, how do you plead?”
Again, Katerina tried to argue her case.
“I am not the one who consorted with demons! The blame for that can be laid at the feet of the Vila Elena Lisova. She is the one who gave herself to Sammael, mind, body, and soul. She violated her oath to the Light, and invited the Darkness in. Even now, she is still confined belowground because of the curse I placed on her to drive the Darkness back and save Kalach.”
She turned to face the prince regent, who lounged in his seat, the picture of privileged indolence. Did he not care that Iriska was falling? “Niko and I are not the cause of this,” she said, speaking directly to him. “We are the solution. If you would just listen—”
But Prince Mikael ignored her. She might as well have been speaking to the tykva that lay, splintered, at her feet.
“How do you plead?” the slovetnik demanded again, his tone implacable.
“I did not consort—”
“How do you plead?”
The crowd’s eyes bored into her, and still, Niko did not speak a word in her defense or his. Would not, or could not; she had no way to tell.
The truth was a matter of semantics; she had gone down to the Underworld, after summoning a demon to open the way.
She had retrieved her Shadow, even though he was not quite himself.
And if, together, they had saved Kalach, if they intended to save Iriska, no one in this arena cared to know the nuances that had made it so.
“Guilty,” she said at last, the word reverberating in the air of the arena, carried upward by Dimi Novikova’s witchwind.
A grim silence fell as the slovetnik turned his attention to Niko. “Niko Alekhin, former alpha Shadow of Kalach,” he said. “Walker between worlds.”
Her Shadow gave no outward acknowledgment that he had heard, his eyes still fixed on the sand between his feet.
Berezin and his second grabbed Niko’s arms, pulling him upright.
He stood steady, the white streak in his dark hair gleaming in the sunlight, the scar that ran from his temple to his jaw bisected by that purple bruise.
A peculiar stillness emanated from him, as if though his body stood here, in this arena, the rest of him was somewhere else entirely.
He looked, Katerina thought, like a stranger.
“Niko,” she whispered, but though a tremor wracked him from head to toe, he didn’t turn.
In the silence of the arena, now so still that Katerina could swear she heard the ripples in the lake that surrounded Rivki, she lifted her gaze and sought Alexei.
Of all the others in this arena, he had known her Shadow best. He knew Niko was good.
During the battle in Kalach, Niko had hurled himself between Alexei and a demon to save his former second’s life.
Alexei was staring at Niko, his expression desolate. Katerina tried to imagine what he must be thinking, to see his former alpha reduced to this. Or maybe he was simply a spectator, waiting to see Niko get what he deserved.
But then—why would Ana feel the need to conceal herself? Surely, she and Alexei would flaunt their presence here if that were the case. They would do anything possible to distance themselves from the Dimi and Shadow who had once been their closest friends.
Could they have come…to help?
A hum had spread through the crowd now, as if a contagious energy had passed from one person to the next. Even Prince Mikael had slid to the edge of his seat. His eyes were riveted to Niko, as if he expected inky tendrils to streak from her Shadow’s fingertips and plunge the arena into Darkness.
“Niko Alekhin,” the slovetnik said again. “To the charge of fornicating with your Dimi and violating your sacred covenant, how do you plead?”
Niko’s throat worked. And then he spoke for the first time since entering the arena, his voice rusty and unused. “Guilty,” he said, and locked his jaw again.
“To the charge of consorting with demons in the Underworld, how do you plead?”
Katerina seethed at the unfairness of these questions. Did they not care that Niko had been bound to Elena against his will? That none of this had been his doing?
“If you wish to blame someone for his descent into the Underworld, and you choose not to accept Elena Lisova’s role in all of this, then accuse me!
” she burst out, unable to contain herself.
“It was my curse that vanquished the Vila and the demons, and took him with them. Had Elena not chained his soul to hers, he would have remained aboveground. None of this was his doing. He died protecting me.”
“Enough!” The slovetnik’s voice cut across her words, slicing them like a blessed blade through flesh. “You will answer the questions you were asked, and nothing more.”
Katerina bit her tongue to keep from speaking, so hard she tasted blood. There was no justice to be found here, only scapegoats.
But why would Niko not speak in his own defense? Was he so under Berezin’s thrall that even his voice was not his own?
The slovetnik was speaking again, this time to Niko. “To the charge that your soul is corrupted, that the Darkness lurks within you and rises at your command, how do you plead?”
Lie, Katerina begged him. Say you’re innocent. Tell them you need time, tell them you don’t understand what’s happened to you, tell them you are still a warrior for the Light.
As if he could divine her thoughts, even with their bond compromised, Niko lifted his head at last and his eyes fixed on hers.
For a moment, she saw everything in their depths: his love for her, his ache for all they’d lost, the war that raged inside him.
His gaze raked over her, taking in her tattered gear, her bound hands, her stained cheek—and then went cold with rage.
Something flashed in his eyes, so quickly she could choose to deny it had ever been there at all: a flash of Darkness, there and then gone. A storm within the storm.
Katerina had never feared her Shadow, in all of his many forms: fierce warrior, desperate lover, broken man caught between worlds. Now, though, she feared for him.
She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the prince regent would ever let him live.
His gaze held Katerina’s for a long beat before he spoke, as if the words were intended for her and her alone. “Guilty,” he said.
Pandemonium broke loose in the arena. Some people fled, bursting through the rear doors to the street beyond in terror.
Others scooted to the edge of their seats, slack-jawed, as if they’d finally been delivered the spectacle they’d come to see, and they intended to make the most of it.
But Katerina paid no attention. She held her Shadow’s gaze, wishing she could know what in all the realms of Saints and demons he was thinking.
If this were some type of misguided plan to sacrifice himself to save her—if he let himself die again in her name—she would never forgive him.
Even if she had to hunt him down in the darkest corners of the demon realms, she would do it, just to slap him across the face and tell him how furious she was at him for not believing in them. For giving up without a fight.
“Order!” The slovetnik’s voice resounded throughout the arena, the doors to the street slamming shut as the windwitches used their powers to stem the fray. “Silence for your prince!”
At long last, the arena quieted, the remaining citizens taking their seats once more. Niko was no longer looking at her, but at Alexei, far up in the gallery, who hadn’t moved an inch. His throat worked once, twice, as he stared at his former second, his face giving nothing away.
“Now,” the slovetnik announced, his tone replete with self-importance, “we will have our prince’s verdict.
Should he rule in favor”—he clenched his fist, pointing his thumb toward the sky above the arena—“this pair will be imprisoned once more, to be interrogated and tortured in Rivki’s dungeons for the benefit of the realm.
But shall he rule against them”—here, he indicated a downturned thumb—“they shall be hung side-by-side from the gallows in this very arena, as a reminder to all of how fragile our commitment to the Light is, and how easily even the strongest among us can be corrupted.”
His voice rang with the sincerity of a zealot.
“Should our prince decree, they shall die tomorrow, as the sun sinks below the horizon, to symbolize their descent into Darkness. Then we shall burn their corpses, and from their ashes shall come the knowledge of our strength: that we have banished an emissary of the Darkness and his accomplice from our ranks.”
All eyes fell upon the prince in his velvet, gold-trimmed finery, his raised hands winking with bejeweled rings. The moment hung like fog over the waters of the Vohdanya, heavy and filled with portent.
The prince’s thumb hovered, parallel to the ground. And then it moved, pointing downward with mute finality.
Ice-cold sweat broke over Katerina’s body as the crowd roared their approval. The arena fell into sharp relief, each moment strung together like beads on a chain, so that it seemed she had all the time in the world to notice what came next.
Inside her mind, her Shadow spoke at last, each syllable strained with effort. Have faith, he said, though he didn’t look her way.
High in the upper gallery, Ana mouthed something again and again, desperate for Katerina to understand.
And, concealed by the folds of her robes, Sofi’s fingers moved, forming a single, unmistakable word.
Tonight.