Shadow and Bone: Before–Chapter 3

In the summer, they endured long hours of chores followed by even longer hours of lessons in stifling classrooms.

In the winter, the Duke left for his city house in Os Alta, and as the days grew shorter and colder, the teachers grew lax in their duties, preferring to sit by the fire and play cards or drink kvas.

Ana Kuya was already there, birdlike in her black dress, pouring tea from the samovar, her large key ring jangling at her waist.

Two of the Grisha sat by the fire: a handsome man in blue and a woman in red robes with a haughty, refined air.

The woman in red stiffened, but after a moment she conceded, “As does the King’s Army.”

I’d lost sight of the yellow flag of the surveyors’ cart hours ago, and I knew I was far behind.

I’d seen the Shadow Fold on many maps, a black slash that had severed Ravka from its only coastline and left it landlocked. Sometimes it was shown as a stain, sometimes as a bleak and shapeless cloud.

One day it was a place where farmers tended crops and sheep grazed in green fields. The next, a dark slash had appeared on the landscape, a swath of nearly impenetrable darkness that grew with every passing year and crawled with horrors.

“Yes. Faint, get trampled, grievous injuries all around.”

“But how can you be so...so jaunty?”
“Jaunty? I’ve never been jaunty. I hope never to be jaunty.”
“Well, then what’s all this?” I asked, waving a hand at him. “You look like you’re on your way to a really good dinner instead of possible death and dismemberment.”

Mal gave me a bemused glance. “What’s with you lately? You’re even grumpier than usual. And you look terrible.”

“Thanks,” I groused. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

When Mal realized I wasn’t with him, he gave a great beleaguered sigh and marched back to me.

Another coach, this one lacquered red, rumbled past us at a more leisurely pace.

You were just mooning over him, I chided myself.

But now it had become a kind of ramshackle port city, growing up around a permanent military encampment and the drydocks where the sandskiffs waited to take passengers through the darkness to West Ravka.

“Peasant,” Alexei said, and dismissed her with a wave. Eva gave him an affronted look and deliberately turned away from him to talk to her friends.

The Grisha pavilion really was the size of a cathedral, covered in black silk, its blue, red, and purple pennants flying high above. Hidden somewhere behind it were the Darkling’s tents, guarded by Corporalki Heartrenders and the Darkling’s personal guard.

There, Mal and the other trackers would hunt for red wolves and sea foxes and other coveted creatures that could only be found in the west.

I would stay with the cartographers in Os Kervo to finish my training and help draft whatever information we managed to glean in the Fold.

“Gotta go,” he said, his brash grin sliding back into place.

The skiffs were loaded with grain, timber, and raw cotton, but on the trip back they would be stocked with sugar, rifles, and all manner of finished goods that passed through the seaports of West Ravka.

I careened backward, barely avoiding its grasp, my knife held out before me with trembling hands.

The flames of the Grisha were growing weaker, more sporadic, and worst of all, I realized the skiff had stopped moving.

I huddled over Mal, shielding his body with mine. I knew it was futile, but it was all I could offer.

I smelled the fetid stench of the volcra, felt the air gusting from their wings.

I glanced nervously at the Corporalnik, who had apparently forgotten her feud with the captain and was scrutinizing me once again.

“Let’s go,” he said tersely.

The soldiers marched me down a long carpeted aisle at the end of which I could see a black pavilion on a raised dais.

At the head of the table was an ornately carved, high-backed chair of blackest ebony, and upon it lounged a figure in a black kefta, his chin resting on one pale hand.

I looked back at the dais and my elation withered.

When the bedraggled group of survivors reached the base of the dais, Colonel Raevsky ordered, “Kapitan, report.”

The Grisha erupted into exclamations of disbelief and derision.

“I saw it!” he shouted over the din.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the girl laughed, her voice thick with scorn.

I just knew this was all some kind of terrible mistake, and at the end of this farce, I would be the one looking foolish.

The man’s lips had been grafted together and he had starved to death.

Soft murmurs of assent rose from the crowd, but he ignored them, watching me closely.

He paused and waited as if he expected me to solve this conundrum for him.

I gasped as undulating darkness spread from his clasped hands, spilling in a black wave over me and the crowd.