The walls of Os Alta stood mournfully.
Nikolai dismounted with a thud as his boots hit the cobblestones. Far from the bloodstained ruins he'd been described; Os Alta was a city still standing. The door to the guardhouse beside the gates was open. Someone had expected to return. Nikolai walked up to the door and peered inside, finding a jacket slung across the back of a chair covered in a thick layer of dust. On the desk sat a heavy leather volume and an assortment of weapons hung from pegs. Curiously, though dusty, nothing looked like it had deteriorated. The jacket was in good condition, and not moth-eaten or decomposed. The blades and guns still shone like new.
The other rumor was that the city was haunted. Nikolai backed out of the guardhouse, his heart beating quickly from where it had wedged itself in his mouth. What he could only describe as something evil lingered around him, a cold fear that left him looking over his shoulder for another living soul. He didn't believe in ghosts. Superstition saved no man.
Nikolai walked through the open gates, past houses and shops. Butchers, bakers, jewelers, and carpenters; their signs still bright and legible. Outside one house a doll lay abandoned on the curb. Dropped from a child's small hands. He bent down beside it, picking up the soft toy with button eyes. An incredible weight pierced his chest and made itself home wrapped around his ribs. He brushed the dust off the flowery handmade dress the doll was wearing and replaced a pink shoe on its foot. Nikolai got to his feet and walked to the house's window, setting the doll down on the window ledge so the little girl could find her again.
The city felt like something out of a fairytale, a place with time so fragile and still. He stopped at the beginning of the townhouses in the memory of a grand square. Nikolai was gripped by the unexplainable feeling that he had seen the city before, been in it. It was impossible - there were no images of the city, not in any books made after the revolution. But he had seen it in his dreams; massive celebrations, women and children waving handkerchiefs from windows and throwing flower petals from baskets as he passed. He could smell the fresh bread and pastries wafting into the square from the bakeries and cafes. There was no trace of that revelry in the square he stood in.
The townhouses on the Northern side of the square were where the aristocracy had lived. Their proximity was a sign of their favor to the crown, their great houses rising into the hill where the palace watched over Ravka. Dukes and Lord's city dwellings, far from their vast country estates, stood tall and proud and sad. Family crests lay carved above doors as gold candelabras watched from the windows for their owner's return. A flag stood limp on a flagpole atop the church, the ends torn and ragged and the colors pale and ghastly.
He stood in the center of the square in a deafening silence. There were no birds; not on the statues or the houses, not clinging to the streetlamps or scrounging for food among the buildings.
There was no life in Os Alta at all.
Nikolai continued on weary feet, his hands stuffed into his pockets as a bitter wind whistled through the square. He didn't believe in ghosts or myths or Saints. If there were Saints, his crewmates said, they had forsaken Ravka long ago. The people had killed her Saint, relinquished dawn and hope to create an altar in the form of his city. A mad prince, a forsaken saint, a Lantsov puppet; whatever he was in life had been transformed into something worse in death.
The Curse of the Saint
