Chapter XII #2
Most left, choosing allegiance to Raea and moving to the plains, while others fled to Song Royale or Corrin.
Some decided to swear the Inver oaths and keep their worship of the Three secret.
But a few stayed, stubbornly, and tightened their belts.
It had been generations since the Invers’ rise, and there was still an occasional building in the faithful district with curtains at the upper windows, and shadowy figures working in the gloom.
“Foolish,” Fia muttered under her breath as she walked past a row of ghost houses. “A place fit for pride and empty stomachs and not much else.”
But when she passed a rare figure on the streets, she drew close and palmed a token so that they might see it.
A small circle of metal, imprinted with the emblem of a drowning flame.
Several looked away, their faces becoming stern and closed off.
Once, she was nodded eastward, and at last, an old man muttered to her beneath his breath. “Two streets over. The old foundry.”
Following his instructions, Fia located the building.
It was squat and rambling, out at the elbows and with thick dirt smearing what glass was left in its window frames.
Critically, Fia eyed the roofline above her, examining the slate tiles missing from it, searching for a familiar pattern.
Satisfied with what she found, she pushed forward.
The foundry’s heavy door groaned open on unoiled hinges, revealing a cavernous, damp space filled with the sounds and smell of roosting pigeons.
All around the walls, old bellows and crucibles and scrap metal had been piled, creating monstrous shapes among the shadows.
The whole place seemed empty. Derelict and devoid of purpose.
But then again, it was meant to.
Warier now, Fia picked her way across the foundry floor.
Her nerves jangled at the prospect of what was to come, but she moved on doggedly.
At the room’s far end, there was another door, and as she set her hand to the latch, Fia thought she heard a faint noise from the other side.
But when the latch lifted and the door swung open, the space beyond was a lightless pit.
Swallowing, Fia wiped her damp palms against Ariana’s too-short skirts.
Of course it was dark. Of course. It threw her back to childhood, and she could already hear the way the door would slam shut if she took a step forward, feel the futility of beating her fists against it as it locked.
She’d be alone and helpless—left with gnawing thirst and hunger, surrounded by the scent of her own waste and the awareness of her siblings’ lifeless bodies, but none of that worse than the presence of the dark, which seemed like a living and malicious thing.
With a sickening sense of inevitability, Fia crossed the threshold.
Just as she’d feared, there came a resounding crack of noise as the door shut. But this was not history repeating itself—there was something new here. She was not alone.
A lean, muscled arm pinned her fast to the bulk of someone else’s body, as the cool steel of a knife’s edge kissed her throat.
“Raea’s light, Fia, give me one reason not to kill you where you stand,” a furious, familiar voice said.
The knife’s contact grew insistent, and its razor tip pierced Fia’s skin. She could feel a thin trickle of blood and fought the urge to dab at it with her sleeve so that the blood could be soaked out later and offered to Raea.
“Hello, Nikolau,” she answered evenly, balling her hands into fists to hide how panic made them tremble. “It’s been a while.”
Tension sang through the darkness, finally broken by the small, sharp sound of a patch box striking sparks to tinder.
Light flared. A flame caught. And Fia found herself in a windowless storeroom surrounded by empty shelves and half a dozen weatherbeaten men, every one of them armed and on edge.
She recognized a few of them, though the venom in their gazes was new.
“I have a proposition for you,” Fia went on, with Nikolau still behind her, his knife still at her throat. “I swear by my mark and by Raea herself, hearing me out will be worth your time.”
After a moment, Fia felt him nod to the others. Her pulse slowed by a scant fraction.
“Leave,” Nikolau ordered. “I’ll deal with this.”
“But what if she’s sold us out, like before?” one of the men protested. “We ought to—”
“Leave,” Nikolau repeated, sharper this time. “Everyone keep to the back of the foundry, except Adrin, who’ll watch the front. If he sees anything—anything—untoward, he’ll signal and we all disappear. Good enough?”
Though there was some ill-tempered grumbling, the room cleared. The door opened, and shut once more, closing Fia in. Though she had the torchlight this time to bolster her, she was scarcely less afraid when Nikolau let her go and moved to sit at a small table.
“Well,” he said scornfully, setting the knife down before him and stretching out his legs to their full length. “You have my attention, Fia, if not an ounce of my trust. What could possibly be urgent enough to make you come crawling back to me?”
Fia looked him up and down. He was, in many ways, just as she remembered. Same blistering air of self-confidence. Same golden hair and lean, muscled body. Same far-seeing cobalt gaze and wind-burnt skin.
The only difference was that once, he’d looked at her as if the sun rose and set at her command.
Now, when Fia met his eyes, there was nothing but bitterness behind them.
Nikolau despised her, and Fia knew him well enough to understand that she might never undo that change.
Once, when Nikolau of Vesper had looked at Fia, there’d been want and admiration and loyalty in his gaze. Now, there was only suspicion.
“I require the help of Honoria’s deserters,” Fia said, coming straight to the point.
Nikolau had a great distaste for formalities—she was better off airing her intentions at once.
“And all of you, though you’re not aware of it yet, require my help as well.
I’m sure you’ve heard that Orden means to go to war with Caervallion come autumn.
If he does, there will be a great deal of trouble for your people.
The pursuit of those who’ve sought to avoid the king’s pressers will grow far more determined, and the ranks of those unwillingly pressed into service will swell like never before.
You will be overrun by people wanting your help, Nikolau, and plagued constantly by others who wish you dead.
I don’t like your chances, if war breaks out on the Hand. ”
Nikolau watched her closely, twining his hands together behind his head.
“Since when have you ever been concerned about trouble coming to my people, rather than your own interests? What game is this you’re playing, Fia?
Is there a contingent of guards waiting in the shadows outside, until you signal that they’re able to lay hands on me?
They nearly managed to keep me in custody last time—what a triumph it would be for Orden, to finally decorate his walls with my head on a spike.
I suppose he’d pay you handsomely for bringing the figurehead of his country’s most shameful faction to justice. ”
Fia let out a frustrated sound. “Don’t be such a fool, Nikolau. I took every precaution in coming here. And what happened in the mountains—I didn’t want any of it. I’m not the one who sold you out.”
“No, you swore up and down it was your mother. But without you, she’d never have known where to find us. You know Axom is dead? So are Morin and Bastinet. By the Three, Fia, Ander was killed in that raid. Your own brother.”
Fia shut her eyes tight, blocking out the little storeroom and the disdain on Nikolau’s face.
She could see Ander as she remembered him—a laughing boy, who’d made the best of their mountain life, and who’d been proud to join Nikolau’s network of deserters.
He’d died without knowing that Fia bought him his place there, through her hard-won knowledge of the harsh land they lived upon and the comforts of her body.
“I know Ander was killed,” Fia murmured. “The pressers brought him home in four pieces and nailed them up at the village crossroads. I’m sorry about the others.”
“They’d all be alive if it wasn’t for you,” Nikolau said viciously.
“If you’d kept your word, none of it would have happened.
I’ll never forgive that, Fia. You know what it means to me, to be able to safeguard the people in my care.
I put some of them in danger for your sake, and they died because I was mistaken about you.
Everything that happened to me pales in comparison to those deaths. ”
Fia’s eyes flew open, and she fixed Nikolau with a piercing look. “Everything that happened to you? Did the pressers hurt you?”
He met her gaze with a withering stare. “Of course they did. But as you see, I came out alive and in one piece. I always do. You always do. That’s the only thing the two of us share anymore—a talent for survival.”
Nikolau said it as if the possession of that attribute was a terrible failing.
Once, it had been something they joked over darkly together—that he’d lived through a childhood as difficult as Fia’s own, through being raised and shaped for the express purpose of clandestine service in Honoria, through years of determined pursuit by Honoria’s pressers.
And that Fia had lived when all her siblings save Ander had died, surviving her mother’s cruelty and the privations of mountain life.
It had been fate, Nikolau insisted, that kept the two of them alive. Fate that meant them to be together.
He’d been so certain. Fia was less sure, but she never spoke of her hesitance. She’d been starving for power back then, and for kindness and care. Nikolau had, in his own way, treated her like a queen. Been willing to take any risk for her.
It wasn’t until the very end that Fia learned she wasn’t willing to risk as much for him.