Burning Glass (4 page)

I raced to them and lifted the closest one, then whirled back to the man as water sloshed at my feet. I was too late. He fled the kitchen. The flames overtook him as they clawed up his tunic.

My heart seized. I chased after him, my movements clumsy as I lugged the heavy bucket. “Stop! Come back!” His panic had enough hold over me to amplify my own.

He didn’t slow his pace. His shrieking bounced off the corridor walls. I stumbled behind him, leaving a trail of water. Soon all I’d have left would be ice.

He veered right, headed for the dining hall. At least there I could corner him. “Feya, please,” I prayed. “I’ll offer you my soul if he doesn’t die.”

I hadn’t intentionally burned him. It was an accident.
Wasn’t it?

He flew past an archway into the dining hall, his body nearly encompassed by flames. I rushed into the room and followed him to the large windows at the far wall.

“Stop! I can help.” I tossed the contents of my bucket at him. A feeble amount of water splashed his face. The ice clunked at his feet.

He threw himself backward. The flames on his clothes—untouched by the water—caught the window draperies. My stomach plummeted with dread.

“Don’t move!” I shouted as he did the opposite and
smothered himself with another curtain. He only succeeded in spreading the fire.

I jumped back as the flames raged higher. They fed off the curtains like they’d been soaked in oil. The man crumpled to the ground, moaning and twisting and rapidly losing his battle to live. The curtains fanned in the flames, and the fire next caught a rug.

Growing frantic to find a quick exit and help the man, I hefted a wooden bench and charged the window. Glass shattered all around me. I barreled past it and tumbled outside. The bench crashed in the snow, and I along with it. Coldness sliced through my nightgown. I welcomed it, needed it. The man needed it, too. I would save him, then do something about the fire. What, I didn’t know.

I lumbered through the snow, back to the broken window. Before I could enter, the curtain rod fell and landed at an angle to create a flaming barrier. There was space to leap over it, but not from where I stood at the foundations of the convent.

“Jump!” I shouted, hoping my voice carried to the man above the roar of the fire. “Please! Save yourself!”

I couldn’t hear him moving. I crept closer, coughing on the smoke, and struggled to see past the flames burning spots in my vision. “Jum—”

A dark figure crashed through the jagged hole. Shards of glass fell over me like glittering snow. I threw my arms up to protect my face. Nothing could protect me from what came
next—the bony, flaming leg of the man as it connected to my skull and knocked me backward. My spine hit the wooden bench. My head whiplashed back, taking a second blow. The snow crunched as I ricocheted into it.

The last thing I saw were the writhing flames devouring the dining hall.

I
OPENED MY EYES TO DAYLIGHT.
T
O A DEAD MAN
LYING BESIDE
me. To fire-eaten stone walls. Scattered, smoking wooden beams.

Half of the convent was in ruins.

I gasped in horror. Head throbbing, I sat up slowly. My heart trembled a stuttering rhythm that reflected my confounding awareness. Growing more panicked, I scanned the convent and tried to orient myself from the outside.

Which half was destroyed?
Which half?

I located the library chimney—the library below the infirmary. My lungs expanded, allowing a breath. The half with Yuliya had survived. The half with Sestra Mirna, Tola, Dasha. But the bell tower was gone. The half with the east wing. With every other Auraseer and sestra. The half with gentle Basil.

The half I’d locked inside.

My hand clapped to my mouth to stifle a ragged sob. Only four had escaped.
Four.
The rest of the Auraseers were dead.
I knew it. I felt it. The pulse of their auras was absent. The remaining flickers of energy buzzing along my nerves could only belong to the ill and the sestra who watched over them.

So much life had been snuffed out while I slept without dreaming. While a stranger died beside me. So much death and destruction.

All because of me.

A soft keening arose from my throat. It grew louder as I curled my legs to my chest and rocked back on my heels. I hid my face in the folds of my skirt. Why hadn’t I unlocked the door to the east wing? Why hadn’t I let everyone out?

The pain inside me was unbearable. It crushed me to the core. It made me rip up clumps of half-frozen grass. Slam my fists on my breastbone. Wail like a lost child. I didn’t know it was possible for one person to feel so much sorrow and regret. Such rage. This was me down to my horrible depths. No borrowed auras were necessary to complete my misery.

I saw myself as if outside my body. I watched the smile on my face when I barred the door to the east wing, how I’d casually sipped my soup with a man I didn’t know while my sister Auraseers pounded the floor above me, begging for release.

I’d wanted to help the peasants. I thought I had so much empathy, but I didn’t. A compassionate person could never have done such a terrible thing.

The shame, the shock, rooted me to the spot. I sat balled with my legs bent up, the nightdress over my knees wet with
tears. The rest of me was strangely dry. It had been from the moment I’d awakened. The heat from the burning convent, which had ended the lives of so many, had saved me from freezing to death while unconscious. The irony did little to bring me comfort. Neither did the man lying beside me on the thawed ground. He died after all the risk I had taken. His skin was black and blistered. His face burned beyond recognition. The remnants of his half-eaten clothes were seared to his body. I’d never seen anything so horrific. Still, I couldn’t make myself leave his side. Some part of me waited for his eyes to open, as if that could also awaken me from this nightmare.

But no matter how long I remained, his emotions didn’t stir. No one’s did but my own.

I’d often wished for solitude, to be alone with my thoughts and not bear the weight of someone else’s feelings.

I would never wish for anything again.

The sun bled through the skeletal branches of a tree in the west garden of the convent, casting long shadows that crept toward me with the fading light. I stood on shaking legs. I needed to go inside. Face Sestra Mirna. Resign myself to a life of penance. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough.

I crossed my arms over my chest to trap in any remaining warmth from my body and made my way around the convent, climbing over fallen, charred pieces of who knew what. Perhaps the bed I would have shared with Yuliya if she weren’t in the infirmary.

If there were something to be grateful about, it was that she had survived.

The debris from the fire still smoldered with heat. As it scorched my toes and became too cumbersome to climb over, I widened my circle around the convent and searched for a safe place to enter. I lifted my hem above my ankles and trudged through the snow. My nightdress was smudged with black from ash and smoke, and my hair was singed at the ends. I could only imagine how disheveled the rest of my appearance was. Sestra Mirna would suspect the worst. And she would be right.

My head hung low, my gaze trapped on the ground, when the sound of sleigh bells made me glance up. The sleigh wasn’t yet visible on the snow-drifted road, and the gate to the convent was still ajar from last night. I hadn’t troubled myself to close it. Between then and now, enough snow had melted beneath it so the gate fell wide open on its uneven hinges.

My muscles tensed as I waited for any emotion to take hold, to warn me of who might be coming—or at the very least reveal the energy of their aura, which might clue me in to their motive. We shouldn’t have visitors now. Couriers for food and supplies were the only people who came here, and we’d received a large delivery five days ago.

The sleigh bells jangled louder. Around the bend, gliding through the snow, came a brightly painted troika. The three-horse sleigh made my lips part with surprise . . . until my jaw locked as a rush of protectiveness flooded through me. I had to think of those still alive in the convent. A troika meant whoever
had come here needed to do so urgently. And that someone—a man, if I’d judged correctly from this distance—was a noble. Only the highborn in Riaznin had a legal right to be the sole passenger of a troika. It was a luxury reserved for the wealthy. But why was no driver seated on the center horse? No noble would stoop to drive a sleigh on his own.

My heart quickened, but I couldn’t be certain if it was my own apprehension—I didn’t trust anyone but Yuliya—or if the emotion came from the visitor.

The man raised his arms to whip the horses, but just as he did so, his hands fell and his head lifted as he took in the view of the burned convent. The three horses slowed to a trot, and I saw the man in greater detail. He was clean-shaven like the men from Estengarde, though his features looked more Riaznian. Dark eyebrows set low near his eyes, and a long and well-defined nose centered his face. His prominent feature was a handsomely sculpted mouth, even if his upper lip was too thin. It was a mouth that didn’t look suited to smiling.

As the troika drew closer, he looked younger, no older than Nadia. His dusty-brown hair fell in well-groomed waves that reached his cheekbones. He was definitely noble born; a commoner wouldn’t trouble himself with frequent haircuts. The man brushed a lock from his eye and stared at the convent in amazement. I felt the awe of the horrible sight, the awe within him, the awe still lingering in me. As if sensing my connection to him, his gaze shifted to where I stood in the snowy field. His eyes never left me, not while the horses continued down the
road, not while they trotted through the gates and kicked up snow from their hooves. I had a keen idea of what I looked like, but did my appearance reveal all I had done?

I couldn’t say what urged me to show this stranger I was more than the pitiful girl staring back at him, looking no better than the charred bones of the convent. I was. At least as far as he should believe. I pulled my spine erect, elongated my neck, and met his stare with every ember of fire burning within me.

Dare to think of me what you will
, I hoped the look I gave him said.
I am Sonya Petrova. And I am not broken.

He didn’t blink from our connection. Not even with the wind in his eyes. As the horses guided the sleigh into the stables, and right before he passed out of sight, I felt a spark of admiration, though his stern face hadn’t cracked. It made me stand even taller.

When the stables swallowed him from view, I caught my reflection in a pane of broken glass, flames still smoldering behind me. That admiration, which must have been nothing more than my own foolish pride, vanished like a puff of ashes. My eyes were bloodshot from tears, and the many I had shed today left paths down the sooty planes of my cheeks.

I
was
broken. Through and through.

I padded on numb toes across the stone floor leading to the infirmary. I hoped to visit Yuliya undetected before I endured the wrath of Sestra Mirna.

Candlelight shone from the library, the predominant room
on the ground floor that had survived the fire. Voices came from within. Sestra Mirna’s and a young man’s, surely the stranger from the troika.

“Poisoned?” she said when I was just shy of the library’s open entrance. My interest was piqued, and I pressed myself to the corridor wall to keep listening.

“Four days ago,” the man replied in the rich timbre and style that spoke to an aristocratic upbringing. “She drank from a cup intended for the emperor.”

“And Izolda did not sense the danger?”

The name of the emperor’s Auraseer made my chest constrict. Something must have happened to her. Had she been poisoned? I’d never met the woman, but she had served the crown for fifteen years. Half of the girls at the convent wished to take her place; the other half lived in fear of it.

The weight of their deaths pressed down upon my shoulders. I would never live without that guilt.

“She did not,” the man said.

“I see.”

I did, as well. After all her service to the emperor, Izolda had fallen to the fate of every sovereign Auraseer before her: execution for failing in her duty.

But if Izolda had not been poisoned, who had?

“Then you can be here for only one reason.” Sestra Mirna’s voice was clipped. If her emotions were anything like mine, bitter anger had taken root. What kind of life was granted any Auraseer of Riaznin if it meant an end like Izolda’s after
pursuing the only occupation allotted to her? Even in the convent, Auraseers were threatened with death. The law mandated we face the noose if we ever refused to serve to the emperor. The sestras shared decades-old stories of the women who had hung from the convent bell tower for rejecting their duty. “But I’m afraid I cannot comply in light of our tragedy.”

“These past few days have borne tragedies for us all. It does not change the law.”

“I have lost over twenty girls!”

A
boom
sounded within the library, like the man slammed his hand against a table. I flinched as the anger stewing inside me tripled with his emotion. “And I’ve lost my mother!”

An amazed gasp tumbled out of me. He must mean the dowager empress.
She
was the one who had been poisoned—poisoned when she drank from Emperor Valko’s cup. Izolda would only be sentenced to death for failing to protect someone in the royal family. The man in the library must be the emperor’s younger brother, Anton Ozerov. But why had the prince come on a servant’s errand?

“So I must ask you, unfortunate though the situation may be.” Prince Anton’s tone was measured as he fought to collect himself. “Who is the eldest at this convent?”

My lips parted as the full implication of the prince’s visit—of the fire I had caused—dawned on me with stark and terribly clarity. I burst into the room, my heart hammering so hard I could scarcely breathe.

“You cannot take Yuliya!” I said without preamble of a curtsy or any ridiculous nicety afforded to a man of his rank.
He was one thing only, a viper sent to take away my friend.

Anton whirled to meet my icy gaze. His eyes sparked with recognition from the moment we’d shared outside. He still wore his cloak, flecked with snow. The fact he hadn’t removed it meant his visit was intended to be as brief as possible. He planned to take an Auraseer tonight.

“Yuliya, is it?” His brows lifted, and I cursed myself for giving him his answer.

“Sonya?” Sestra Mirna gasped. She moved past him to me, her eyes so wide the whites showed above her irises. “Praise the gods, you’re alive!” She embraced me, something she had never done before. My arms hung stiffly at my sides, not because I wasn’t touched by her sentiment, but it gnawed away at me with shame. How would she react when she knew what I’d done? As she held me closer with trembling arms, I glanced past her to Anton, who observed us with interest. My hands balled into fists. He would not take Yuliya. Somehow I’d help her escape. We would find the Romska, be free.

“How did you ever survive, child?” Sestra Mirna pulled back and cupped my face. “When Basil locked everyone in the east wing, I assumed . . .” Her words drifted away as she waited for my explanation.

“I . . .” My thoughts warred between saving Yuliya—my priority—and justifying myself. “I was never locked in the east wing. Basil . . . he . . .” My throat grew thick with emotion. My gaze flitted to the library’s empty fireplace. Would no one in this convent dare to kindle a fire again?

“Yes? Where is he?” Sestra Mirna swallowed. The
foreboding she felt, belying the hope in her voice, pounded through my body like a death toll.

“Basil died in the fire,” I said softly, slowly, unable to look away from her, though I wanted to. “A—a peasant man died, as well.”

The walls of the library seemed to shrink in as the sestra contemplated me, piecing together what I did say with what I didn’t. The ash-choked air grew thinner, my legs weaker. She took two steps back, shock and horror and profound disappointment etched across her wrinkled face. Only then did I notice her nursing apron and kerchief. They were stained with more blood . . . too much blood.

I forced a ragged breath. Turned my attention to the prince. And drew back my shoulders to feign strength. “Yuliya is unwell. She cannot serve the emperor.”
She is only unwell, she is only unwell.

“Yuliya is dead,” the sestra said flatly.

The air siphoned from my lungs. I gripped a chair for support and waited for the prince, the sestra—anyone—to contradict the words she’d just spoken. My tongue was a foreign object in my mouth. I couldn’t make it form words. All I could do was point an accusing finger at the abundance of red on Sestra Mirna’s apron. She did this. She bled Yuliya to death.

“The blood-letting worked,” she said, her voice still emotionless. “Yuliya’s fever broke. Then when the convent started burning and the flames barricaded me from assisting those in the east wing, Yuliya could no longer endure the suffering she felt from so
many. She took a knife to her leg and”—she briefly looked down before returning her detached gaze—“she hit a large artery. The blood came too fast. She was gone within minutes.”