SERGEI VALKE

TWENTY-SEVEN ❈ HUMAN DRÜSKELLE

He was raised with the wolves—taught their savage ways and shown what it is to survive on the remnants of what should’ve been, and it came as little surprise when he grew older and became one, cold as ice and twice as sharp. Sergei Valke was the sixth of eight children, cast aside and utterly forgotten even by those responsible for his very existence, and he became the sort of independent that seldom leads children anywhere they want to go. He was a good son when he wanted to be and a bad son when he damn well shouldn’t have been, and his father’s scolding, though it provided a semblance of the attention he’d craved like air for years, did little to dissuade him. He had nothing to lose from the time he learned what, exactly, that meant, and he made it abundantly clear—to his parents, to his siblings, and most of all, to himself, that he owed nothing to the family that had given him nothing in return. A peasant boy with no real knowledge of the world except for how it bit, he struck out on his own the first chance he got, armed with little more than a stolen kitchen knife, one of the pups that loved to nip at his heels, and his own steel nerve, and though he could never be sure what he was looking for, he was gifted with the certainty that wherever it was, he’d find it. His childhood was marked by the winters he’d endured, but one would find that his were remarkably few when he became a man. This was the making of a soldier; this was the unbecoming of a boy.

It was the hand of fate, or perhaps the work of a higher power, that led him to the Ice Court, a scraggly boy and his scraggly wolf-dog caught stealing and spared their hands, but only just. He’d made a life of it, of taking what wasn’t his and running with it, and though he knew, deep down, that it was wrong—for his mother’s preaching had never left him, even as he left her—he couldn’t bring himself to deem himself a sinner, to throw himself down at the feet of his superiors and beg for forgiveness they’d never been taught how to forgive. It was his stubbornness that saved him, the sort of salvation whose weight can prove grounding in one instance and crushing in the next, and he was sworn in as a trainee that same night, under the penalty of death and dishonor. He would become a drüskelle, this lost boy, this rotten soul—or he would die trying. It was a fate he refused to accept for months, fighting nearly every order they gave him like the beasts they sought to train—wild-eyed, teeth bared, reckless in the way all wild things are. But he was a natural, whether he realized it or not—seemingly born and cast out for the sole purpose of filling the void left by all those who had gone before him, and he played his role well. His resilience, when molded into the sort of devotion gods create whole worlds in search of, earned him the favor of his commanders even as he tried to spite them, and in two short years—the briefest training period of any soldier to come through the compound in generations—he became a man his father would’ve been proud to know, had he been given the privilege.

But there was a high price to pay for such an honor, and Sergei Valke would spend the rest of his life trying to even the score. The drüskelle were hand-picked by their god himself to carry out his bidding, but theirs was a righteous god, a spirit who believed in humility and the natural order, and thus, the same was demanded of the men who served in his name. The life of a drüskelle was not at all glamorous—quite the contrary; he spent his days patrolling the compound and the outlying villages, with fatigue clinging to his bones and the sort of hunger no amount of spiritual reward could dispel gnawing at him from the inside out. What he did in the dark, though, was enough to make a grown man shudder—or it would have been, had he not been enlightened, shown the truth in the fractured light of dozens of bitterly cold mornings. They were unnatural, the men and women they hunted—abominations and enemies of the truth, and they were to be done away with at any and all cost. He robbed so many families of their children that he lost count—stole them from their beds, tore them from their mothers’ arms, and burned them like reverse martyrs on the pyre, but his own sins were lost on him, drowned in tainted holy water and buried under the weight of false divinity. The Grisha were but sacrificial lambs in his mismatched eyes, and little more; he was doing his duty as a soldier, a Fjerdan, and little more. He could stand tall knowing that if one day he had to answer for the crimes he’d committed against his own kind, he would have nothing to fear but the notion that he hadn’t done enough.

It was honor that drove him from his homeland’s embrace to the hearth of his sworn enemies—to Ravka, on a mission unlike any he’d ever been on but one eerily familiar just the same. Young boys dream of the day they’ll set out on a hunt of this caliber, and he, too, allowed himself to be a little struck by it all—a bolt of lightning straight to his fiercely beating heart. But the novelty of being handpicked to be the harbinger of all things holy has worn off, replaced with a somber sort of acceptance, the knowledge that every day he remains, he takes one step closer to blasphemy, one step closer to the abyss. He is not here to make merry, to admire the sights and play nice like a good ambassador should; he is here to set Ravka ablaze, to make of it a funeral pyre for the world to see—to make of it an example. This is what happens when you break the laws of nature, when you let your people play god—wrath, fury, oblivion. And in rode death on a pale horse.

CONNECTIONS

GEMMA PAVLOVA:  She’s Ravka’s best-kept secret, its prized blade waiting to be sharpened, and he’s made it his personal mission to make sure she breathes her last before she ever lays her pretty blue eyes on the Shadow Fold. It’s ambitious, he knows, but there’s no time to waste or effort to be spared when dealing with what the enemy seems to think may be a fighting chance, a living saint. Let them call out her name as she burns, the first in a long line of martyrs for his cause; let them turn their eyes toward the sun as he reduces their kingdom to ash. He’ll destroy her in the holiest of ways, and the world will neglect to thank him for it; such is the unsung tragedy of heroes. 

OYUN KIR-NARAN: The only thing his people and the Shu have ever had in common is their profound hatred of Ravkans, but he and the diplomat can’t even enjoy such small pleasures, a small tragedy owing to the fact that he’s undercover and she comes—so she claims—in the name of peace, as if peace can be won by anything less than conquering, than spilling blood for honor’s sake. He’s seen the way she looks at him, the way she seems to see right through his facade, but he’s nothing if not determined, and he’d sooner die—or see to it that she precedes him—than let a half-hearted enemy be the end of him. He was trained by men who knew not what lukewarm was, taught that the only two acceptable extremes were scalding and freezing, fire and ice; there’s only room at court for one of them to be so cold.

ISKRA RAEVSKY: She’s a pain, that one—the sort his brothers would’ve put an end to on sight, with no hope of a trial she could talk her way out of and no chance of her turning her stake into a wildfire. But his position leaves him with no choice but to be subtle, and fortunately for him, subtlety is utterly lost on her, the crown prince’s very own hand grenade in a royal guard’s uniform, and as it turns out, nearly everything is. She was chosen for her fire, not for her intellect, and she’s unwittingly made it known through nearly every word she says. There’s much to be done with a fire that burns with what seems to be no direction; he’ll make use of her yet.