The antidote drifted down onto them like a fine coating of frost and Nikolai saw them turn their palms up, confused. Then they tilted their heads to the sky, breathing deeply. They were like children seeing snow for the first time. They opened their mouths, held out their tongues. He saw them turn to one another as if waking from a nightmare.

“To us!” commanded Tamar as she and Tolya advanced, laying down cover for the Grisha prisoners with their rifles.

Arm in arm, the sickly Grisha stumbled toward the Ravkan lines, toward home and freedom.

The Fjerdan officers called for their soldiers to open fire on the deserting Grisha, but Nikolai’s flyers were ready. They strafed the Fjerdan lines, forcing them to take cover.

Ravkan Grisha and soldiers moved forward to guide their weakened friends. Now they really did look like ghosts, strange spirits coated in silvery powder.

“Your Majesty?” Amelia said in confusion as Nikolai slung her arm around his shoulders. Her lashes were dusty with antidote, her pupils dilated.

Around them, Nikolai saw the Fjerdan ranks breaking in the tumult the Zemeni arrival had caused. The skies were thick with Ravkan and Zemeni flyers. Fjerda had lost their Grisha assassins, and half their tanks lay in smoldering pieces.

Nikolai and the others plunged back through the field, taking the Grisha prisoners with them. He handed Amelia off to a Healer, and then he was commandeering a horse and shouting to Tolya, “Come on!”

He wanted to see this from the air. When they reached the runway, they leapt into his flyer. It roared to life and they soared skyward.

The view from above was both heartening and terrible. The Fjerdan lines had broken and they were in retreat, but brief as the battle had been—barely a battle, a skirmish, really—the damage was shocking. The muddy basin below had been carved up by Grisha Fabrikators, the landscape pocked with deep wounds and furrows. The dead lay scattered in the mud: Fjerdan soldiers, Ravkan soldiers, Grisha in their bright kefta, the frail bodies of the sickly prisoners who hadn’t made it off the field.

It was just a taste of what was coming.

“This is going to be a different kind of war, isn’t it?” Tolya asked quietly.

“If we don’t stop it,” said Nikolai as they watched the Fjerdans fall back.