Rule of Wolves (King of Scars #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,153

at the old fort east of Ryevost,” Brother Azarov said. “I was stationed there for a time.”

“You think they’ll still be there?” Aleksander asked.

“If the Starless One watches over us, they will be.”

Aleksander had to fight not to roll his eyes. If he remembered correctly, the old fort had been all but decommissioned and used as an ammunitions stockpile.

“We’ll go there tonight,” he said.

“After services.”

“Of course.”

After nightfall, they hitched a wagon to two of their horses and traveled to the old fort. Getting past the guards was easy enough. The only challenge had been summoning shadow to cloak their movements without revealing his power to Brother Azarov.

But their luck had quickly turned.

“This is it?” Aleksander asked, looking at the crates of decrepit weapons. He picked up one of the old, single-shot rifles. “We might as well try to slap them to death.”

“The Starless One will protect us.”

Aleksander studied Brother Azarov in the dark room. “You’re a soldier—”

“I was a soldier.”

“Very well. You were once a soldier and you would walk onto a battlefield with nothing but your faith to protect you?”

“If that is what our Saint requires.”

Aleksander should be glad of that faith, that all it had taken was a bit of shadow play to get these people to march into a war with him. So why was he left uneasy?

Will you protect them?

He could. He would if need be. His powers had returned to him. He could form nichevo’ya to fight on his behalf. His pilgrims could enter the field with picks and shovels and they would still emerge victorious.

And yet, his mind was troubled.

They packed up the few weapons that looked like they might be of use and rode back toward Adena in silence. Since they had the cart, they would meet with Brother Chernov and some of the others outside the village to help them transport supplies from the market.

Aleksander couldn’t help but think of the first army he’d built. Yevgeni Lantsov had been king then, and he’d been at war with the Shu for the entirety of his reign. He couldn’t hold the southern border and his forces were stretched to their very limit. Aleksander had gone by a different name then. Leonid. The first Darkling to offer his gifts in service to the king.

His mother had warned him not to go. They’d been living near an old tannery, the stink of the chemicals and the offal always thick in the air.

“Once you are known, you cannot be unknown,” she’d warned him.

But he’d been waiting for a ruler like Yevgeni—practical, forward-thinking, and desperate. Aleksander traveled to the capital and sought an audience with the king, and there he’d let his shadows unfurl. The Grand Palace hadn’t even been built then, only a ramshackle castle of rickety wood and ragged stone.

The king and his court had been frightened. Some had called him a demon, others had claimed he was a trickster and a fraud. But the king was too pragmatic to let such an opportunity pass him by.

“You will take your talents to the border,” he’d told Aleksander. “Be they true sorcery or mere illusion, you will use them against our enemies. And if our army finds victory, you will be rewarded.”

Aleksander had marched south with the king’s soldiers, and when they’d faced the Shu in the field, he’d unleashed darkness upon their opponents, blinding them where they stood. Ravka’s forces had won the day.

But when Yevgeni had offered Aleksander his reward, he had refused the king’s gold. “There are others like me, Grisha, living in hiding. Give me leave to offer them sanctuary here and I will build you an army the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Aleksander had traveled throughout Ravka, to places he and his mother had visited before, to distant lands where he’d gone on his own to study. He knew the secret ways and hiding places of Grisha, and wherever he went, he promised them a new life lived without fear.

“We will be respected,” he’d vowed. “Honored. We will have a home at last.”

They hadn’t wanted to come with him to the capital at first. They’d been sure it was some kind of trick and that once they were within the city’s double walls, they would be killed. But a few were willing to make the journey with him, and they had become the soldiers of the Second Army.

There had been objections from noblemen and priests, of course, accusations of dark magic, but as their military victories had continued, the