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Ana sat alone in the darkness, waiting for the keep to settle into the slumber hours. She hadn’t slept, eaten, or drank, beyond finishing the grimizhna tea Ludya had left for her.
The defiant smile Ana wore as she stepped into her trousers lacked the fire she usually felt when engaging in disobedient acts. For years, she’d been wearing Niko’s clothes on the sly. There was something so energizing, so freeing, about pants—about flaunting her disdain for what had always been a stupid rule made by stupid men.
Though she’d regret it later when her room turned to ice, she opened the window and took flight from there. She didn’t have the heart for another illusion, not until she had time to catch up on sleep, and she couldn’t count on her luck in subterfuge to continue.
Ana soared back toward the foothills, flying over the sleepy village. The row of taverns made her heart hurt. Even from the sky, she knew which one was his. She still remembered the day he’d shown up, a few years after his family had opened the Tavern at the Top of the World. He’d worn the world’s burdens in his haunted eyes, and her soul recognized kin. She’d been drawn to him from the start, watching him bat snow from his hair as he stood outside his modest cabin, staring at the stars like they held all the answers.
Maybe that had been the beginning of her falling for him. Maybe it had come later. All she knew was it had happened along the thread of thousands of tiny moments, and there were no shears sharp enough to sever the resulting knot.
And now Magda knew. Sheknew.It didn’t matter that she didn’t have Tyreste’s name yet. She would. The Cross was a small village, and it would take so little to find out who Ana had been spending her afternoons with.
Soaring past the observatory, she tried to grab a glimpse of either the Ravenwood or Magda. But the recently fallen snow blanketed the glass dome, obscuring her view of everything inside.
Ana hadn’t stopped thinking about Varradyn either. She wanted to believe he’d escaped, but if he wasn’t already dead, he would be. Desperately she wanted to help him, but the cost would be higher than she could bear. She had no defense against Magda. Not yet.
Ana climbed higher, all the way to the hidden outcropping near the top of the peak. It was small, easy to miss, and challenging to reach from the ground. The Shrine of the Ancestors had been built for the heirs to pay homage to all who had come before, and entreat them for strength and wisdom. Sometimes she made the climb the traditional way, a sort of pilgrimage of penance, but tonight she’d have collapsed on the first switchback if she’d even tried to hike the path on foot.
When she reached the ledge, she shifted back and dusted her clothes before heading into the cave. From the outside, the door was deceiving; it seemed little more than a nook. But stepping beneath the arches revealed an entire world of wonder. The ceiling stretched stories high, all the way into the slope of the peak itself. Along the sides were statues of the heirs past, including her brother, Stepan, whose likeness had been completed that past springtide. The other Wynters were buried in the crypts, but not the heirs of Darek Summerton. They were brought to the shrine upon their deaths, for their descendants to preserve their immortality through the gift of memory.
The tall, deep cave glittered with crystals crowning the stalactites and stalagmites the shrines had been built around. Some grew up and around the statues, but others were in the way altogether. But the Vjestik Wynters respected the land they’d chosen, and they had never cut down a single protrusion more than was needed.
Echoes from Ana’s boots as she started down the long approach to the back kept her grounded. She was still there. Still real. There was yet fight in her, though she didn’t know where or how to excavate it.
At the end of the cavern were three shrines so large, they stretched nearly to the ceiling. As a girl, she’d tried climbing one and had fallen, breaking her arm. Niko was the better climber, though he’d never liked visiting the shrines. Stepan had always been willing to go, until he got older and spent all his time training for the Vuk od Varem.
On the left was Darek Summerton himself, the one who had communed with the wulves and fashioned the arrangement that had allowed the nomadic Vjestik to settle in Witchwood Cross. Next was Drazhan Wynter, and beside him, his wife, Imryll of Glaisgain, the rogue princess from Duncarrow. Darek was considered the father of the Vjestik, but most of their people revered Drazhan and Imryll more. They’d rebuilt the town after the Nok Mora and had restored hope when it had been believed irreparably lost. Imryll, the mother behind Books of All Things, had reinvigorated learning and education. Children of the Cross learned to read and to appreciate the world they lived in beyond the town walls.
Their phoenix form had also come from Imryll, who, it was said, carried inside her the blood of the otherworldly sorcerers of Duncarrow, the Meduwyn.
“Imryll, give me strength. Show me how to find the way, as you found yours all those years ago when you came into your wings. Show me how to save Father and Niko. Tyreste. I accept my own demise if it means preventing theirs. I’ve been waiting to die for years, and my only regret would be doing so before I find the means to save them.” Tears flooded Ana’s eyes, dropping onto the dusty cave floor in dark spots. She pressed her hands along Imryll’s intricately carved boots. “I don’t know where the koldyna came from. I don’t know what she wants... why she’s chosenusfor her evildoing. All I do know is if she cannot be stopped, it will be the end of us. And perhaps the Ravenwoods as well.”
Ana sank to her knees. Her shaking hands cupped the toes of Imryll’s boots as she sobbed. “Show me how to stop her. I will doanything.”
A dense shadow slowly slithered up the lower half of Imryll’s stone gown. Ana shot to her feet, wiping at her eyes, and turned to face the koldyna with the last of her bravery.
But it wasn’t Magda. It was her uncle, Grigor.
The man who had always seemed like a giant to her was perfectly at home among the shrines. He’d always been all muscle and grit, and every time he returned from wherever it was he went, he seemed a little harder, a little tougher. He was made for his role of overseeing the Wynter guards, even though he was an Arsenyev and not a Wynter.
“Onkel. Hej.” Ana bowed her head in deference to her elder. “Why are you here?”
He shifted his eyes toward the side and scoffed. His hand passed across his mouth as he looked around and then back at her. “You’re troubled,” he said simply. “I followed you.”
“I’m fine,” she lied, squinting her remaining tears away. She dusted her dress at the knees, marveling at how he’d scaled the mountain so quickly. “Sometimes I just need to be in the presence of the Ancestors. To feel grounded in their wisdom.”
Grigor studied her, stone-faced. He looked up at Imryll, then back at her. “You’re troubled, Ana,” he said again.
Something in his voice—it wasn’t quite kindness, not the way others would define it, but it was the closest thing he could offer—made her heart constrict, and her tears returned. She tried to hide them, but he pinned his hawklike eyes onto her, offering her no pardon. “I...” The lie didn’t come so easily this time. The deceptions of the past years were coming together to suffocate her, so she decided upon the truth instead. “I feel like I’m... like I’m drowning, Onkel.”
Grigor considered this. He crossed his arms. Nodded. “Then start swimming.”
“It’s not that simple.” With a stilted laugh, she turned her head toward the cave ceiling. “How I wish it were.”
“Soldiers drown. Warriors rise. Strike. Defend.”
Ana couldn’t help but laugh again. “I’m no warrior, Onkel. I’m hardly...” She didn’t know how to finish the thought.
“Youarea warrior.” He set his jaw and swept his gaze over the three shrines. “You descend from warriors.”
