Rule of Wolves (King of Scars #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,22
your lap. Or mine.”
“Is there any hope?” Kirigin asked. “For Ravka?”
She didn’t reply. She’d been told there was always hope, but she was too old and too wise for fairy tales.
Zoya sensed movement before she actually saw it.
She whirled and glimpsed light glinting off the blade of a knife. The man was lunging at her from the shadows. She threw up her hands and a blast of wind hurled him backward into the wall. He struck with a bone-breaking crunch, dead before he hit the ground.
Too easy. A decoy—
Kirigin sprang forward, knocking the second assassin to the ground. The count drew his pistol to fire.
“No!” Zoya shouted, using another hard gust of wind to redirect the bullet. It pinged harmlessly off the hull of a nearby ship.
She leapt onto the assassin, pressing his chest into the deck with her knees, and closed her fist, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He clawed at his throat, face turning red, eyes bulging and watering.
She opened her fingers, letting air flood into his lungs, and he gasped like a fish freed of a hook.
“Speak,” she demanded. “Who sent you?”
“A new age … is coming,” he rasped. “The false Saints … will be … purged.”
He looked and sounded Ravkan. Again she sucked the air from his lungs, then let it return in the barest trickle.
“False Saints?” said Kirigin, clutching his bloody arm.
“Who sent you?” she demanded.
“Your power … is unnatural and you will … be punished, Sankta Zoya.” He spat the last two words like a curse.
Zoya hauled back and punched him in the jaw. His head drooped.
“Couldn’t you have choked him unconscious?” asked Kirigin.
“I felt like hitting someone.”
“Ah. I see. I’m glad it was him. But what did he mean by ‘Sankta Zoya’?”
“As far as I know, I’ve worked no miracles nor claimed to.” Zoya’s eyes narrowed. She knew exactly who to blame for this. “Damn Nina Zenik.”
6
NIKOLAI
“BLESS NINA ZENIK,” Nikolai murmured as he walked the line of silent Ravkan troops camouflaged with mud and scrub. In the near dark before dawn, he’d taken his flyer up with Adrik—one of Zoya’s most skilled Squallers—on board to dampen the sound of the engine. Fjerda thought they had the element of surprise, and Nikolai wanted to keep it that way.
But he had to wonder if his enemy needed it. From his vantage in the skies, he’d watched the line of tanks rolling toward Ravka in the gray dawn light. He supposed he should be praying, but he’d never been much for religion—not when he had science and a pair of well-made revolvers to cling to. Right now, though, he hoped that each Ravkan Saint, Kaelish sprite, and all-powerful deity was looking down with some fondness in their hearts for his country, because he needed every bit of help he could get against these odds.
“At least I only have one arm to lose,” Adrik said glumly. For all his Grisha talent, he had to be the most depressing person Nikolai had ever encountered. He had sandy hair and a boyish freckled face, and he was the human equivalent of a head cold. Nikolai had no idea what Leoni saw in him. That woman was a delight and a hell of a Fabrikator too.
“Cheer up, Adrik,” Nikolai had called back from the cockpit. “We may all be dead soon, and then it will be up to your disembodied spirit to make gloomy prognostications.”
To avoid giving away their location, they’d set down on a makeshift airstrip two miles south of camp and ridden the rest of the way to join the Ravkan forces.
“How many?” asked Tolya as he approached and handed Nikolai a rifle, another slung over his enormous shoulders. They’d already had reports from their scouts, but Tolya still had hope. The same hope Nikolai had let himself entertain before his own eyes had been cruel enough to dash it.
“Too many,” he said. “I was hoping it was a trick of the light.” The ranks of Fjerdan war machines were far larger than their intelligence had suggested.
Tamar and Nadia greeted them silently, Nadia giving her brother a nod of acknowledgment. She and Adrik were both Squallers, both green-eyed and wiry. But Nadia was an optimist, and Adrik was a member of the doomsayers club—the one they didn’t allow at meetings because he brought the mood down.
Nikolai checked the sight on his repeating rifle. It was the right weapon for when they needed to engage, but the revolvers at his hips gave him more comfort.