“What a relief,” he said. “Please tell me you can make sense of these.” He shoved a towering stack of ledgers across the table.

“What is this?” Vasily asked.

“A proposal for repairs to an aqueduct outside of Chernitsyn.”

“All this for an aqueduct?”

“Don’t worry,” said Nikolai. “I’ll have the rest delivered to your room.”

“There’s more? Can’t one of the ministers—”

“You saw what happened when our father let others take over the business of ruling Ravka. We must remain vigilant.”

Warily, Vasily lifted the topmost paper from the pile as if he were picking up a soiled rag. It took everything in me not to burst out laughing.

“Vasily thinks he can lead as our father did,” Nikolai confided to me later that afternoon, “throwing banquets, giving the occasional speech. I’m going to make sure he knows just what it means to rule without the Darkling or the Apparat there to take the reins.”

It seemed like a good enough plan, but before long, I was cursing both princes beneath my breath. Vasily’s presence ensured that meetings ran twice as long. He postured and preened, weighed in on every issue, held forth at length on patriotism, strategy, and the finer points of diplomacy.

“I’ve never met a man who can say so much without saying anything at all,” I fumed as Nikolai walked me back to the Little Palace after a particularly wretched session. “There’s got to be something you can do.”

“Like what?”

“Get one of his prize ponies to kick him in the head.”

“I’m sure they’re frequently tempted,” Nikolai said. “Vasily’s lazy and vain, and he likes to take shortcuts, but there’s no easy way to govern a country. Trust me, he’ll tire of it all soon enough.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll probably die of boredom before he does.”

Nikolai laughed. “Next time, bring a flask. Every time he changes his mind, take a sip.”

I groaned. “I’d be passed out on the floor before the hour was up.”

* * *

WITH NIKOLAI’S HELP, I’d brought in armaments experts from Poliznaya to help familiarize the Grisha with modern weaponry and give them training in firearms. Though the sessions had started out tensely, they seemed to be going more smoothly now, and we hoped that a few friendships might be forming between the First and Second Armies. The units of Grisha and soldiers who had been assembled to hunt down the Darkling when he approached Os Alta made the fastest progress. They returned from training missions full of private jokes and new camaraderie. They even took to calling each other nolniki, zeroes, because they were no longer strictly First or Second Army.

I’d been worried about how Botkin might respond to all the changes. But the man seemed to have a gift for killing, no matter the method, and he delighted in any excuse to spend time talking weaponry with Tolya and Tamar.

Because the Shu had a bad habit of taking a scalpel to their Grisha, few survived to make it into the ranks of the Second Army. Botkin loved being able to speak in his native tongue, but he also loved the twins’ ferocity. They didn’t rely only on their Corporalki abilities the way Grisha raised at the Little Palace tended to. Instead, Heartrending was just one more weapon in their impressive arsenal.