Ruin and Rising (The Grisha Trilogy)(7)

In this one, Ilya was a mason, and the neighbor boy was crushed beneath a horse—that was new. Usually, the boy was cut down by a plow blade. But the story ended as all the tellings did: Ilya brought the child back from the brink of death, and for his trouble, the villagers threw him into the river, bound by iron chains. Some tales claimed he never sank but floated out to sea. Others vowed his body had emerged days later on a sandbank miles away, perfectly preserved and smelling of roses. I knew them all, and none of them said a word about the firebird or indicated that Dva Stolba was the right place to start looking for it.

All our hope for finding the firebird resided in an old illustration: Sankt Ilya in Chains, surrounded by the stag, the sea whip, and the firebird. Mountains could be glimpsed behind him, along with a road and an arch. That arch had long since fallen, but I thought the ruins could be found at Dva Stolba, not far from the settlements where Mal and I had been born. At least, that’s what I believed on my good days. Today, I felt less sure that Ilya Morozova and Sankt Ilya were the same man. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the copies of the Istorii Sankt’ya anymore. They lay in a moldy stack in a forgotten corner, seeming less like portents of some grand destiny than children’s books that had fallen out of fashion.

David picked up his watch, put it down, reached for it again, knocked over a bottle of ink then righted it with fumbling fingers.

“What’s with you today?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said sharply.

I blinked at him. “Your lip is bleeding.”

He wiped his palm across it, and the blood beaded up again. He must have bitten it. Hard.

“David—”

He rapped his knuckles against his desk, and I nearly jumped. There were two guards behind me. Punctual and creepy as always.

“Here,” David said, handing me a small tin. Before I could take it, a guard had snatched it up.

“What are you doing?” I asked angrily. But I knew. Nothing passed between me and the other Grisha without being thoroughly inspected. For my safety, of course.

The Priestguard ignored me. He ran his fingers over the top and bottom of the tin, opened it, smelled the contents, investigated the lid, then closed it and handed it back without a word. I plucked it from his hand.

“Thanks,” I said sourly. “And thank you, David.”

He had already bent back over his notebook, seemingly lost in whatever he was reading. But he gripped his pen so hard I thought it might snap.

* * *

GENYA WAS WAITING for me in the Kettle, the vast, almost perfectly round cavern that provided food for all those in the White Cathedral. Its curved walls were studded with stone hearths, reminders of Ravka’s ancient past that the kitchen staff liked to complain weren’t nearly as convenient as the cookstoves and tile ovens above. The giant spits had been made for large game, but the cooks rarely had access to fresh meat. So instead they served salt pork, root vegetable stews, and a strange bread made from coarse gray flour that tasted vaguely of cherries.

The cooks had nearly gotten used to Genya, or at least they didn’t cringe and start praying when they saw her anymore. I found her keeping warm at a hearth on the Kettle’s far wall. This had become our spot, and the cooks left a small pot of porridge or soup there for us every day. As I approached with my armed escort, Genya let her shawl drop away, and the guards flanking me stopped short. She rolled her remaining eye and gave a catlike hiss. They dropped back, hovering by the entrance.

“Too much?” she asked.

“Just enough,” I replied, marveling at the changes in her. If she could laugh at the way those oafs reacted to her, it was a very good sign. Though the salve David had created for her scars had helped, I was pretty sure most of the credit belonged to Tamar.

For weeks after we’d arrived at the White Cathedral, Genya had refused to leave her chambers. She simply lay there, in the dark, unwilling to move. Under the supervision of the guards, I’d talked to her, cajoled her, tried to make her laugh. Nothing had worked. In the end, it had been Tamar who lured her out into the open, demanding that she at least learn to defend herself.

“Why do you even care?” Genya had muttered to her, pulling the blankets up.

“I don’t. But if you can’t fight, you’re a liability.”

“I don’t care if I get hurt.”

“I do,” I’d protested.

“Alina needs to watch her own back,” Tamar said. “She can’t be looking after you.”

“I never asked her to.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we only got what we asked for?” Tamar said. Then she’d pinched and prodded and generally harassed, until finally Genya had thrown off her covers and agreed to a single combat lesson—in private, away from the others, with only the Priestguards as audience.

“I’m going to flatten her,” she’d grumbled to me. My skepticism must have been evident, because she’d blown a red curl off her scarred forehead and said, “Fine, then I’ll wait for her to fall asleep and give her a pig nose.”

But she’d gone to that lesson and the next one, and as far as I knew, Tamar hadn’t woken up with a pig nose or with her eyelids sealed shut.

Genya continued to keep her face covered and spent most of her time in her chamber, but she no longer hunched, and she didn’t shy away from people in the tunnels. She’d made herself a black silk eye patch from the lining of an old coat, and her hair was looking distinctly redder. If Genya was using her power to alter her hair color, then maybe some of her vanity had returned, and that could only mean more progress.