had built around that black well of grief threatened to crumble.
Ask him about Luka. Tell him you’re taking him back to Salskoff. And get out.
But different words, words that she had wanted to ask for so long, that she had dreamt of over and over again, clawed at her chest. Ana turned to her father’s murderer, her breathing ragged. “Why did you do it?”
Tetsyev’s face was twisted away from the torchlight. “I never meant to.”
The confession hit her like a physical blow. She turned away from him, her chest heaving. “You never meant to,” Ana grated out. “So you killed my father by accident? As an afterthought?”
“It was no accident,” Tetsyev whispered. “But I never meant to, either. I was manipulated. She took control of my mind for years…I had no idea what I was doing—”
A word snagged her attention. “ ‘She’?” Ana repeated. “What are you talking about?”
Tetsyev passed a trembling hand over his face. “Deities, you don’t even know.”
Her heart stuttered. “Know what?”
“Kolst Contessya Morganya planned it.”
For a moment, Ana only stared at him, the meaning of his words sinking into her.
Ana barked a humorless laugh. “You killed my father, and now you’re trying to blame my aunt for it? You are truly…” Words failed her, and she slashed a hand through the air. “Sick.”
“You’re right. It isn’t fair of me to blame it all on Morganya,” Tetsyev whispered. “I was in it with her, at first, before it all went wrong.”
“You’re mad,” Ana snarled.
But mad wasn’t the word she was looking for, she realized, as the flickering orange flames carved out Tetsyev’s gaunt cheekbones and faraway eyes. He didn’t look mad, he looked haunted.
“Morganya and I met each other many years ago,” he began softly, and Ana found herself pulled along in the flow of his words, rooted in horror and helplessness and the conviction that, against all her greater instincts, he spoke the truth. “You must know by now, Kolst Pryntsessa, that life in the Empire isn’t easy for an Affinite. I had lost both my Affinite parents, and Morganya had just come out of months of captivity and abuse at the hands of non-Affinites. We were damaged, broken, but not enough that we couldn’t put together the pieces and dream. We envisioned a great future, a better one, where Affinites could walk freely and would no longer be reviled. But neither of us was strong enough yet to begin to create that future. Together, we practiced our Affinities: mine, in the merging and morphing of elements, and hers, in the manipulation of flesh and mind.”
Tetsyev’s voice sounded distant to Ana, as though she were listening to a strange, surreal story. Mamika. He spoke of her mamika—Morganya, with soft eyes the color of warm tea, her long dark braid, her devotion to the Deities.
He spoke of her, her Affinity, and her plan…to murder Ana’s father.
“One incident changed Morganya’s life forever—in many ways,” Tetsyev said, and Ana knew, with a chilling premonition, the incident he spoke of. It was the day Mama and Papa had been touring the Empire with the Imperial Patrols. They had discovered a girl, barely into womanhood, bruised and half-naked and crying, crawling out from the ruins of a dacha. “We planned it all. When the Empress took pity on Morganya and brought her to the Palace, we knew we had set in motion something great…and that we were going to change the world.”
The next sequence of events tumbled from Tetsyev’s lips, unfolding before Ana like a nightmare. “She grew close to the Empress. She was appointed the Countess of Cyrilia, first in line to the throne after the Imperial family. She hired me into the Palace. She hid her Affinity with daily doses of Deys’voshk. Years had passed, but Morganya was patient. Her goal was the throne.
“I had, by then, devised the perfect poison. It was slow-working; we had to ensure that it didn’t kill the Palace taste-testers and the poisoning couldn’t look suspicious. It was invisible, untraceable but for a bitter stench that we could mix into meals and pass off as medicine.
“Within one year, Kateryanna was dead, and we were one step closer to the throne.”
Ana’s knees were weak; she felt as though she might collapse. Images flitted through her mind—a white-cloaked alchemist, a beautiful young countess, a kind empress, a brokenhearted emperor: pieces of a story set in motion, careening toward an inevitable doom.
“But Morganya’s history had left a wound in her,” Tetsyev continued. “One that had