“Djel is angry,” said someone in the crowd.
“The Saints are angry,” called someone else.
“You will disperse!” Brum said, shouting over the rumble of the oncoming storm.
“Look!” a voice cried.
A wave was racing toward them from the harbor, looming higher and higher. Instead of breaking against the sea wall, it leapt the quay. It towered over the crowd, a wall of seething water. The people screamed. The wave seemed to twist in the air, then crashed down onto the quay—directly into Brum and his soldiers, sending them sprawling across the cobblestones in a rush of water.
The crowd gasped, then burst into laughter.
“Jarl!” cried Ylva, trying to go to him.
Hanne held her back. “Stay here, Mama. He will not want to be seen as weak.”
“Sankta Zoya!” someone yelled. “She brought the storm!”
A few people in the crowd went to their knees.
“The Saints!” another voice said. “They see and they protect the faithful.”
The sea roiled and the waves seemed to dance.
Brum stumbled to his feet, his face red, his clothes soaked with seawater. “Get up,” he snarled, yanking his young soldiers to their feet. Then he was in the crowd, pulling the penitent up by the collars of their shirts. “Get off your knees or I will arrest you all for sedition and heresy!”
“Do you think we went too far?” Hanne whispered, sliding her hand into Nina’s and giving it a squeeze.
“Not far enough,” murmured Nina.
Because the performance and even the wave had only been a distraction. The play had been staged by the Hringsa network. The wave had arrived courtesy of a Tidemaker undercover in one of the harbor boats. But now as Jarl Brum and his men rampaged through the crowd, the honeywater vendor, who had slipped into an alley when the play began, gave a quick wave of his hands, parting the clouds.
Sunlight poured from the sky onto the butcher shop that had been raided a few nights before. The wall looked blank at first, but then the vendor uncorked the bottle Nina had slipped into his cart. He gusted a cloud of ammonia at the paint and a message appeared, as if by magic, scrawled across the storefront: Linholmenn fe Djel ner werre peje.
The Children of Djel are among you.
It was a cheap party trick, one she and the other orphans had used to send each other secret messages. But as Nina had learned not so long ago in Ketterdam, a good con was really about spectacle. All around her she could see the people of Djerholm gaping at the message emblazoned on the storefront, pointing to the sea that had now calmed, to the clouds that were rolling back into place as the honeywater vendor casually wiped his hands and returned to his stall.
Would it matter? Nina didn’t know, but little miracles like these had been happening all over Fjerda. In Hjar, a damaged fishing boat had been about to sink when the bay froze solid and the sailors were able to walk safely back to shore, their catch intact. The next morning, a mural of Sankt Vladimir’s sacred lighthouse had appeared on the church wall.
In Felsted, an apple orchard had burst into full fruit despite the cold weather, as if Sankt Feliks had laid a warming hand upon the trees. The branches had been found festooned with ash boughs—a symbol of the blessing of Djel.
Half the town of Kjerek had fallen ill with firepox, a near-certain death sentence. Except the morning after a farmer witnessed a vision of Sankta Anastasia hovering above the town well with a wreath of ash leaves in her hair, the townspeople had woken free from sickness, their skin clear of sores, their fevers gone.
Miracle after miracle created by the Hringsa and Second Army spies. Tidemakers had frozen the bay, but they’d also created the storm to wreck the fishing boat. Squallers had brought on the early frost in Felsted, but Sun Soldiers had made the trees bloom. And while Hringsa agents hadn’t created the firepox, they had made sure Grisha Corporalki had been there to heal the victims. As for the vision of Anastasia, it was amazing what a little theatrical lighting and a red wig could do.
Then there was the strange blight that had struck north of Djerholm. Nina didn’t know where that had come from, a natural phenomenon or the work of some rogue Hringsa operative. But she did know there’d been murmurs it was the work of the Starless Saint, retribution for the religious raids and arrests by Brum’s men.
At first Nina had doubted that their miracles were making any difference at all, had feared that their efforts amounted to little more than childish pranks that would lead to nothing. But the fact that Brum had been devoting more and more resources to attempting to root out worship of the Saints gave her hope.
Brum stomped back to them, his face a mask of rage. It was hard to take him too seriously when he was soaked to the bone and it looked like a fish might wriggle out from one of his boots. Still Nina kept her head down, her eyes averted, and her face expressionless. Brum was dangerous now, a mine waiting to detonate. It was one thing to be hated or confronted, quite another to be laughed at. But that was what Nina wanted, for Fjerda to stop seeing Brum and his drüskelle as men to be feared and to acknowledge them for what they were: scared bullies worthy of scorn, not adulation.
“I’ll see my family back to the Ice Court,” he muttered to his soldiers. “Get names. All of the performers, everyone who was in the marketplace.”
“But the crowd—”
Brum’s blue eyes narrowed. “Names. This stinks of the Hringsa. If there are Grisha in my streets, in my capital, I will find out.”
There are Grisha in your house, Nina thought gleefully.
“Don’t get cocky,” murmured Hanne.
“Too late.”
They climbed into the roomy coach. The king and queen had gifted Brum one of the noisy new vehicles that didn’t require horses, but Ylva preferred a coach that didn’t belch black smoke and wasn’t likely to break down on the steep climb to the Ice Court.
“Jarl,” Ylva attempted once they were ensconced in the velvet seats. “What is the harm? The more you react to these theatrics, the more emboldened they will be.”
Nina expected Brum to explode, but he was silent for a long time, staring out the window at the gray sea below.
When he spoke again, his voice was measured, his anger leashed. “I should have held my temper.” He reached out and clasped Ylva’s hand.
Nina saw the effect that small gesture had on Hanne, the troubled, guilty look that clouded her eyes. It was easy for Nina to hate Brum, to see him as nothing but a villain who needed to be destroyed. But he was Hanne’s father, and in moments like these, when he was kind, when he was reasonable and gentle, he seemed less like a monster than a man doing his best for his country.
“But this is not a matter of a few people making trouble in the marketplace,” Brum continued wearily. “If the people begin to see our enemies as Saints—”
“There are Fjerdan Saints,” offered Hanne, almost hopefully.
“But they are not Grisha.”
Nina bit her tongue. Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t. Sënj Egmond, the great architect, was said to have prayed to Djel to buttress the Ice Court against the storm. But there were other stories that claimed he’d prayed to the Saints. And there were some who believed that Egmond’s miracles had nothing to do with divine intervention, that they had simply been the result of his Grisha gifts, that he had been a talented Fabrikator who could manipulate metal and stone at will.