Ruin and Rising Read Online Free Page B

word. I plucked it from his hand.
    “Thanks,” I said sourly. “And thank you, David.”
    He had already bent back over his notebook, seemingly lost in whatever he was reading. But he gripped his pen so hard I thought it might snap.
    *   *   *
    GENYA WAS WAITING for me in the Kettle, the vast, almost perfectly round cavern that provided food for all those in the White Cathedral. Its curved walls were studded with stone hearths, reminders of Ravka’s ancient past that the kitchen staff liked to complain weren’t nearly as convenient as the cookstoves and tile ovens above. The giant spits had been made for large game, but the cooks rarely had access to fresh meat. So instead they served salt pork, root vegetable stews, and a strange bread made from coarse gray flour that tasted vaguely of cherries.
    The cooks had nearly gotten used to Genya, or at least they didn’t cringe and start praying when they saw her anymore. I found her keeping warm at a hearth on the Kettle’s far wall. This had become our spot, and the cooks left a small pot of porridge or soup there for us every day. As I approached with my armed escort, Genya let her shawl drop away, and the guards flanking me stopped short. She rolled her remaining eye and gave a catlike hiss. They dropped back, hovering by the entrance.
    “Too much?” she asked.
    “Just enough,” I replied, marveling at the changes in her. If she could laugh at the way those oafs reacted to her, it was a very good sign. Though the salve David had created for her scars had helped, I was pretty sure most of the credit belonged to Tamar.
    For weeks after we’d arrived at the White Cathedral, Genya had refused to leave her chambers. She simply lay there, in the dark, unwilling to move. Under the supervision of the guards, I’d talked to her, cajoled her, tried to make her laugh. Nothing had worked. In the end, it had been Tamar who lured her out into the open, demanding that she at least learn to defend herself.
    “Why do you even care?” Genya had muttered to her, pulling the blankets up.
    “I don’t. But if you can’t fight, you’re a liability.”
    “I don’t care if I get hurt.”
    “I do,” I’d protested.
    “Alina needs to watch her own back,” Tamar said. “She can’t be looking after you.”
    “I never asked her to.”
    “Wouldn’t it be nice if we only got what we asked for?” Tamar said. Then she’d pinched and prodded and generally harassed, until finally Genya had thrown off her covers and agreed to a single combat lesson—in private, away from the others, with only the Priestguards as audience.
    “I’m going to flatten her,” she’d grumbled to me. My skepticism must have been evident, because she’d blown a red curl off her scarred forehead and said, “Fine, then I’ll wait for her to fall asleep and give her a pig nose.”
    But she’d gone to that lesson and the next one, and as far as I knew, Tamar hadn’t woken up with a pig nose or with her eyelids sealed shut.
    Genya continued to keep her face covered and spent most of her time in her chamber, but she no longer hunched, and she didn’t shy away from people in the tunnels. She’d made herself a black silk eye patch from the lining of an old coat, and her hair was looking distinctly redder. If Genya was using her power to alter her hair color, then maybe some of her vanity had returned, and that could only mean more progress.
    “Let’s get started,” she said.
    Genya turned her back to the room, facing the fire, then drew her shawl over her head, keeping the fringed sides spread wide to create a screen that would hide us from prying eyes. The first time we’d tried this, the guards had been on us in seconds. But as soon as they’d seen me applying the salve to Genya’s scars, they’d given us distance. They considered the wounds she bore from the Darkling’s nichevo’ya some kind of divine judgment. For what, I wasn’t sure. If Genya’s crime was siding with the Darkling,