Rule of Wolves (King of Scars #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,103

patron saint of those far from home. No signs of the Starless One.

All in due time, he told himself, and Yuri joined in. They could be of one mind about that.

Names crowded into his thoughts. Staski. Kiril. Kirigan. Anton. Eryk. An avalanche of memories. He’d been all of them, but who should he become now? He’d had plenty of time to consider such things in the isolation of his glass cell, but now that he was free, truly free to choose, he found that only one name suited. The oldest of them: Aleksander. He had no reason to hide his strangeness anymore. Saints were meant to live forever.

He passed into a muddy town square and saw a small church capped by a single whitewashed dome. Through the open door, he glimpsed the priest, tending to something by the altar, as a woman lit candles for the dead. It would do for sanctuary. They couldn’t very well turn a barefoot beggar away.

It wasn’t until Aleksander was inside, the cool shadows of the church thick and comforting around him, that he realized where he was. Above the altar hung a painting of a man with iron fetters at his wrists and a collar at his neck, his eyes looking up at nothing. Sankt Ilya in Chains.

He really did know this place. He had come back to the beginning: This church had been raised over the ruins of the home of Ilya Morozova, Aleksander’s grandfather, a man thrown to his death from the very bridge Aleksander had crossed on his way into town. He had been known as the Bonesmith, the greatest Fabrikator to ever live. And yet he had been much more than that.

“Hello?” the priest said, turning toward the doorway.

But Aleksander had already sunk into the shadows, gathering them like a shroud around his body in the darkness of the side aisle.

He moved quietly to the door that he knew would lead him down into the basement, down the rickety stairs to where old pews and rotted wall hangings had been stacked. His memories were as dark and dusty as this place, but the plan of the church and what had come before it was buried in his mind, and he knew there was yet another room beneath this one. He located a lantern and went looking for the hatch.

It didn’t take long. When he pulled on the metal ring, the hinge let loose a shriek. Maybe the priest would hear and try to pray away the ghosts.

Yuri rattled around in his skull at that little bit of sacrilege, but Aleksander ignored him.

I will show you wonders, he promised.

This is a holy place, Yuri protested.

Aleksander nearly laughed. What made a church holy? The gilded halos of the Saints? The words of its priest?

The prayers said beneath its roof.

He scowled in the darkness. The boy’s piousness was exhausting.

Aleksander lowered himself into the room beneath the basement. Here, the floor was dirt and the lantern showed nothing but earthen walls, roots trying to push their way through.

But he knew what this room had once been—the workshop at the back of Morozova’s home, the place where his grandfather had tampered with the boundaries between life and death, had resurrected creatures with the hope of building power into their bones. He’d tried to make his own amplifiers and he’d succeeded.

Aleksander had attempted to follow in Morozova’s footsteps. He’d cajoled his mother into bringing him to this town, to the home she’d occupied as a child. When she’d seen the church built in the place where her father’s workshop had been, she’d laughed for the better part of an hour.

“They killed him, you know,” Baghra had said, tears of mirth leaking from her eyes. “The ancestors of the very men and women walking this town and praying in this church threw him into the river. Real power frightens them.” She’d waved at the painted altarpiece. “They want the illusion of it. An image on a wall, silent and safe.”

But power was exactly what Aleksander had found, tucked away in this basement—his grandfather’s journals, the records of his experiments. They had become his obsession. He’d been sure that he could do what Ilya Morozova had done, and so he’d tried. The result was the Fold.

A gift, whispered Yuri’s voice, and Aleksander was suddenly standing in Novokribirsk, watching the tide of the Fold rush toward him, hearing the screams around him. You saved me that day.

Aleksander peered into the darkness of the basement room. He certainly hadn’t meant