festered and rotted into something twisted. I didn’t realize it until it was too late that her plan wasn’t to balance the scales. It was to tip them. Morganya wanted to overturn the world as it was, subjecting non-Affinites to our rule…or eliminating them.”
No. No, she wouldn’t accept this—she couldn’t accept it, this story of her gentle, pious mamika as a vengeful, calculating murderess…and a flesh Affinite capable of manipulating minds?
Ana shook off the strange spell of his story. The world flooded back into focus, the blood in Tetsyev’s body pulsing hot as she latched her Affinity to it and slammed him against the wall. “You lie,” she growled.
Tetsyev was breathing hard; the whites of his eyes flashed against the torchlight. “I have been a prisoner in the lies of my own making,” he rasped. “This is the first time in many years that I have told the truth.”
“Liar!” she screamed as she pressed him against the wall, her Affinity turning cruel in her wrath, cutting off his circulation. “I will kill you.”
Tetsyev scrabbled at the wall behind him. “P-please, Kolst Pryntsessa,” he half-wheezed, half-sobbed. “If I am lying—if I am the only culprit—then who is poisoning your brother at the Palace?”
Luka.
At the mention of her brother, Ana’s fury settled into cold dread in her chest.
“I tell the truth, Kolst Pryntsessa,” Tetsyev whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek. “And you must decide what you do with this truth.”
Ana flung him to the ground. She was shaking as she turned, tears blurring her world out of focus. Tetsyev’s story continued, washing over her like the dull roaring of a river.
“I left Morganya after Kateryanna died.” Tetsyev’s voice trembled, and Ana closed her eyes. She found herself matching his story to the fragments of reality that she had known. Together they wove a broken tapestry, and somewhere within that was the truth. “I remained in hiding for years—but she found me again.
“This time, she took my mind, too.”
Anything you want in this world, you have to take it for yourself, Morganya had said.
“She’d grown even stronger in the time we’d been apart. You and your brother had almost come of age, and time was running out for Morganya. She kept me imprisoned in my own mind for a year, making the poison for the Emperor this time. She came up with the plan to frame you on the night we were to administer the killing dose.”
Ana knew, too well, what came next. She’d relived it in her mind a thousand times over—the single night that had altered the course of her life forever.
“I was administering the final dose to the Emperor when you burst into the chambers and seized my blood.” Tetsyev’s voice shifted, as though he’d finally leveled his face to her. “With your Affinity, you broke the control that Morganya had over me. You didn’t know it, but you saved me.”
The moonlight. The alchemist, outlined against the open windows. The sobbing, so faint it had sounded like the wind. The silver Deys’krug on his chest.
Ana turned to face him at last. In the maelstrom of her thoughts, her mind latched on to a single sentence. “What do you mean, I ‘broke the control’ Morganya had over you?”
Tetsyev raised his eyes to her. He sat on the ground, his white robes dirtied with grime, his frame hunched and broken. “Morganya is strong, but she is not invincible. She can control only one mind at a time. And her control can be broken. When you used your Affinity on me, it cut through Morganya’s Affinity. You broke her control over my mind; you saved me, and then you condemned me, for in the moments after the murder, I was fully myself.”
She watched his pitiful face, her anger settling into cold, logical fury. “And you ran.”
He lowered his head. “I am a coward, Kolst Pryntsessa. That is something I’m not afraid to admit.”
Ana’s mind swirled, cold clarity cutting through the chaos of her anger.
Tetsyev spoke of a decade-long conspiracy in the making, orchestrated by none other than Ana’s aunt. And she was one step away from succeeding.
Ana needed to go back, with Tetsyev. Reveal everything to the Imperial Court. Sentence Morganya. Save Luka. And then, with Yuri, they would begin to reverse the wheels of a great machine that had allowed this empire to thrive at the cost of the Affinites.
But first, she needed her brother to live.
“An antidote,” she said. “I need you to make an antidote to