Leigh Bardugo - Ruin and Rising

The night wore on. We knew we needed to sleep, but no one much felt like it. Some people decided to bed down by the fire in the receiving room while others trickled out into the house in pairs. Nobody wanted to be alone tonight. Genya and David had work to do in the kitchens. Tamar and Nadia had disappeared early. I thought Zoya might take her pick of the Soldat Sol, but as I slipped out the door, she was still watching the fire, Oncat purring in her lap.

I made my way down the dark hall to the parlor, where Mal was making a final check of the weapons and gear. It was a strange sight, to see the piles of guns and ammunition stacked on a marble tabletop next to the framed miniatures of the lady of the house and a pretty collection of snuffboxes.

“We’ve been here before,” he said.

“We have?”

“When we came out of the Fold the first time. We stopped in the orchard, not very far from the house. I recognized it earlier when we were out shooting.”

I remembered. It seemed like a lifetime ago. The fruit on the trees had been too small and sour to eat.

“How did the Soldat Sol do today?”

“Not bad. Only a few of them have much range. But if we’re lucky, that’s all we’ll need. A lot of them saw action in the First Army, so at least there’s a chance they’ll keep their heads.”

Laughter drifted back to us from the receiving room. Someone—Harshaw, I suspected—had started singing. But in the parlor, it was quiet and I could hear that it had begun to rain.

“Mal,” I said. “Do you think… do you think it’s the amplifiers?”

He frowned, checking the sight on a rifle. “What do you mean?”

“Is that what’s between us? My power and yours? Is that why we became friends, why…” I trailed off.

He picked up another gun, sighted down the barrel. “Maybe that brought us together, but it didn’t make us who we are. It didn’t make you the girl who could get me to laugh when I had nothing. It sure as hell didn’t make me the idiot who took that for granted. Whatever there is between us, we forged it. It belongs to us.” Then he set down the rifle and wiped his hands on a rag.

“Come with me,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me behind him.

We moved through the darkened house. I heard voices singing something bawdy down the hall, footsteps overhead as someone ran from one room to the next. I thought Mal might lead me up the stairs to the bedrooms; I guess I hoped he would, but instead he took me through the east wing of the house, past a silent sewing room, a library, all the way to a windowless vestibule lined with trowels, spades, and dried cuttings.

“Um… delightful?”

“Wait here.” He opened a door I hadn’t seen, tucked into the wall.

In the dim light, I saw it led to some kind of long, narrow conservatory. The rain beat a steady rhythm against the vaulted roof and glazed glass walls. Mal moved deeper into the room, lighting lanterns that rested on the edge of a slender reflecting pool. Apple trees lined the walls, their boughs dense with clusters of white flowers. Their petals lay like a smattering of snow on the red tile floor and floated on the surface of the water.

I trailed Mal down the length of the pool. The air inside was balmy, sweet with apple blossoms and loamy with the rich scent of soil. Outside, the wind rose and howled with the storm, but in here it was as if the seasons had been suspended. I had the strangest sense that we could be anywhere, that the rest of the house had simply fallen away, and we were completely alone.

At the far end of the room, a desk was tucked into the corner. A shawl had been thrown over the back of a scrollwork chair. There was a basket of sewing things resting on a rug patterned with apple blossoms. The lady of the house must have come here to do her needlework, to sip her morning tea. In the daytime, she would have had a perfect view of the orchards through the big arched windows. A book was open on the desk. I peered at the pages.

“It’s a diary,” Mal said. “Statistics on the spring crop, the progress of hybrid trees.”

“Her glasses,” I said, picking up the gold wire frames. “I wonder if she’s missing them.”

Mal leaned against the stone rim of the pool. “Do you ever wonder what it might have been like if the Grisha Examiners had discovered your power back at Keramzin?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ravka would be different.”

“Maybe not. My power was useless before we found the stag. Without you, we might never have located any of Morozova’s amplifiers.”

“ You’d be different,” he said.

I put the delicate frames aside and flipped through the columns of numbers and tidy handwriting. What kind of person might I have been? Would I have become friends with Genya or simply seen her as a servant? Would I have had Zoya’s confidence? Her easy arrogance? What would the Darkling have been to me?

“I can tell you what would have happened,” I said.

“Go on.”

I closed the diary and turned back to Mal, perching on the edge of the desk. “I would have gone to the Little Palace and been spoiled and pampered. I would have dined off of golden plates, and I never would have struggled to use my power. It would have been like breathing, the way it always should have been. And in time, I would have forgotten Keramzin.”

“And me.”

“Never you.”

He raised a brow.

“Possibly you,” I admitted. He laughed. “The Darkling would have sought Morozova’s amplifiers, fruitlessly, hopelessly, until one day a tracker, a no one, an otkazat’sya orphan, traveled into the ice of Tsibeya.”

“You’re assuming I didn’t die on the Fold.”

“In my version, you were never sent into the Fold. When you tell the story, you can die tragically.”

“In that case, carry on.”

“This nobody, this nothing, this pathetic orphan—”

“I get it.”

“He would be the first to spot the stag after centuries of searching. So of course the Darkling and I would have to travel to Tsibeya in his great black coach.”

“In the snow?”

“His great black sleigh,” I amended. “And when we arrived at Chernast, your unit would be led into our exalted presence—”

“Are we allowed to walk, or do we wriggle in on our bellies like the lowly worms we are?”

“You walk, but you do it with a lot of deference. I would be seated on a raised dais, and I would wear jewels in my hair and a golden kefta. ”

“Not black?”

I paused. “Maybe black.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Mal said. “I still wouldn’t be able to stop looking at you.”

I laughed. “No, you would be making eyes at Zoya.”

“Zoya’s there?”

“Isn’t she always?”

He smiled. “I would have noticed you.”

“Of course you would. I’m the Sun Summoner, after all.”

“You know what I mean.”

I looked down, brushing petals off of the desk. “Did you ever notice me at Keramzin?”

He was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced at him, he was looking up at the glass ceiling. He’d gone red as a beet.

“Mal?”

He cleared his throat, crossed his arms. “As a matter of fact, I did. I had some very… distracting thoughts about you.”

“You did?” I sputtered.

“And I felt guilty for every one of them. You were supposed to be my best friend, not…” He shrugged and turned even redder.

“Idiot.”

“That fact is well established and adds nothing to the plot.”

“Well,” I said, taking another swipe at the petals, “it wouldn’t matter if you noticed me, because I would have noticed you.”

“A lowly otkazat’sya ?”

“That’s right,” I said quietly. I didn’t feel like teasing him anymore.