Ana snapped his head back, tilting it so he could just barely breathe. For some reason, Ramson Quicktongue’s face flashed before her. He wouldn’t blindly threaten—he would find his opponent’s weak point, find some kind of leverage…and push.
She knew next to nothing about this bastard, yet it was irreconcilable to her that he wore the Cyrilian tiger’s badge of honor on his chest…and that he had let his comrade shoot an arrow at a ten-year-old. Ana wanted to rip the insignia from his armor.
“I won’t ask again,” she said.
His next words surprised her. “You’re the Blood Witch of Salskoff,” he rasped.
Ana’s breath caught. In the legend, the Blood Witch had shown up in Salskoff’s Winter Market on Fyrva’snezh and murdered dozens of innocent people. Vaporized them, so that there was nothing left of them afterward but blood running red rivers on the cobblestones, staining the snow. She had red eyes that gleamed with her blood magic, and teeth sharper than a tiger’s. A deimhov from hell; a monster among humans.
Nobody had connected the Blood Witch to the sick princess who had been locked away in the Salskoff Palace since her childhood.
Ana tightened her grip on the yaeger’s blood. “Then you know what I can do,” she said quietly.
“I know you killed eight innocent people.”
It was an accident. I was seven years old. The words almost—almost—left her lips. Instead, she said, “And I’ll do it again, unless you give me what I want.”
He hesitated.
Ana tilted her head to the bloodred glow of the setting sun, so that the crimson of her eyes caught the light. “Look at where we are. Look at all of these people around you—mothers, fathers, and children. They could all be dead within seconds, and it’ll be because of you. You call yourself a soldier? Then protect your civilians.” She tightened her grip on his blood, just to prove her point. “Tell me where he’s taking the child.”
A muscle twitched in the yaeger’s jaw, and his eyes seemed to burn into hers for an eternity. Then he coughed once, and the fire went out. “Novo Mynsk,” he said quietly.
“Where in Novo Mynsk?” she pressed. When he was silent, she lifted her chin to scrutinize the few vendors and spectators who still lingered behind their stalls. “Shall I prove the veracity of my promise? Whom shall I pick first? A child? Or her mother? And how shall I torture them so that their screams—”
“The Playpen. He’s one of the Lilies. He’ll employ her there as a performer.”
She let go of him at once, turning away so he wouldn’t see her shaking. It felt like someone else had been speaking through her lips, murmuring those cruel, barbaric words. As if Sadov’s influence remained and she’d spoken his twisted thoughts.
As she drew her hood over her head, she wondered something darker—whether it was that Sadov’s voice had become her own.
“Don’t hurt them,” the yaeger said. “Please.”
The plea was soft, and she wished she hadn’t heard it. Ana looked back. The yaeger was still sitting in the same spot, but something in his expression had shifted. He was begging her. And he was afraid.
Ana thought of the helplessness of the grain Affinite, of the sadness she’d seen in May’s eyes when she’d first met her. And she saw an echo of that in this soldier’s eyes.
Her anger dissipated like steam in the cold. “Why do you do this?” she asked instead. “You’re one of them.” A pause. “One of us.”
“Do you think I have a choice?” His voice was raw. “In this empire, if I am not the hunter, then I become the hunted.”
She would never forget the way he gazed up at her, yaeger and Affinite in one. Trapped in a corrupt system.
Your choices, Luka’s voice whispered, but something in her brother’s words was broken now, changed with the year she had spent away from the Palace. Choices were for those with privilege and power. When you had none, all you could do was survive.
She left before he could see how much her encounter with him had shaken her. She’d threatened to kill innocent people. She’d tortured a man.
I did it to save May, she told herself.
But perhaps all monsters were heroes in their own eyes.
News of the fight in the Vyntr’makt had spread through Kyrov like wildfire. Ana hurried along the streets that had only moments earlier been celebrating the arrival of winter. Now the bricks of the dachas glowed bloodred in the