HE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE TO GO. He hadn’t thought past the need to become whole again and finally return to himself. He hadn’t even been entirely certain his plan would work. But he had clung to that piece of the thorn wood, and the orphans had offered him the perfect chance to try.

Alina.

She’s alive. Yuri’s voice an echo in his head, a gnat he couldn’t quite seem to swat. Sankta Alina, Daughter of Dva Stolba, Alina of the Fold. She lives.

Yes, Alina Starkov was well and happy and living with her tracker. If you could call that living. Yuri’s babbling awe droned on and on.

Her questions had troubled him, but Alina always had a talent for getting under his skin. Why do you have to be the savior? The answer to her question was as obvious as it had always been: Who else could protect the Grisha and Ravka? A reckless boy who liked to play pirate? A vengeful girl too afraid of her own heart to master the tremendous power she’d been granted? They were dangerous. Dangerous to him, to his country, even to themselves. Children.

His shadow soldiers carried him through forest and glade as his mind wandered too, until at last he arrived in a town by a river. This place was familiar, but most places were. He knew every pebble and branch of Ravka. But the guns and tanks and flying machines that had overwhelmed this world were new to him and unwelcome. Had his plan succeeded, had he managed to weaponize the Fold with Alina by his side, Ravka never would have been vulnerable to this march of brutality.

She is alive. Sankta Alina who gave her life for Ravka.

“I gave my life for Ravka,” he snarled at no one but the trees, and Yuri, finally chastened, went silent.

He had the nichevo’ya deposit him by a high bridge over the river gorge and walked the rest of the way into the village, unsure of where he was headed. His feet were bare and he still wore Yuri’s ragged black robes and trousers, the fabric bloodied where a bullet had grazed him. He longed for a bath and clean clothes. Human things.

Shopkeepers stared worriedly at him from their doorways, but they had nothing to fear from him. At least not yet. It wasn’t much of a town, but he noted icons in nearly every window. Most of these backwaters were religious and had grown more so during the civil war. Alina was certainly popular, always shown with her white hair and lit as if she’d swallowed the sun. Very dramatic. He saw Juris too—a wartime Saint if there ever was one—and Sankta Marya, patron saint of those far from home. No signs of the Starless One.

All in due time, he told himself, and Yuri joined in. They could be of one mind about that.