Page 88 of My Trojan Horse Majesty

“I was busy learning, and I didn’t make sure you were alright.”

“Leh—” His dad chokes. “Lehnid. . .” He shakes his head. “Proud.”

A tear rolls down Leonid’s face. “If they won’t give me their powers, if they won’t share the water with these people who are dying, if they won’t heal the world, I’llmake them.”

His father’s eyes close, and he drags in a breath, but it sounds like it could be his last. It looks like any day could be his last. Leonid presses a kiss to his father’s miserable forehead, and then he stands. When he leaves his father, he looks terribly resolved.

He walks slowly, almost like he’s in a trance, until he reaches the empty wooden building. He stands there, looking around. “No water anywhere,” he mutters. “Except. . .” He ducks around the building and trots toward a circular stone structure behind it.

As he climbs up on the top of the stones, the wind whips through his hair. “You said I can’t,” he calls out in Russian. “You said I mustn’t force your powers, but they’re not yours. They’remine, and I won’t abuse them, not like they do. I know what it’s like to need. I know what it’s like to want. I watch the people they ignore, and I deserve the power to fix this, to care for them.” He spreads his hands wide.

The wind screams past.

He’s standing on a well, I realize. A water well. He grabs the rope and begins hauling it up. Once it hits the top, he plonks the bucket down on the side of the stone circle.

“Here I am,” he calls. “I’m Rurik’s child, and I can sense the power inside of me, but it’s blocked, much as this stone blocks the water and also keeps it safe.”

I wonder who he’s talking to?

Maybe Baba Yaga?

Himself?

He grabs the bucket, and he holds it up in the air. The wind whips past again and again, pulling on his hair and his face. The stones beneath his feet hold him up, but it honestly looks almost like something else is holding him aloft. He throws the water up in the air, and at the same time, lifts both hands. A bolt of lightning strikes one, and an explosion of flame engulfs the other.

And then I feel it—a great, sucking vortex sensation.

Leonid’s eyes shine like the sun, and his arms tremble, and the wind howls, and the ground beneath us shakes, and then the earth underneath his feet splits open in a long, terrifying line, and Leonid falls forward into the gap.

After he disappears, I expect to blink out.

But I don’t. I just keep staring at the gaping hole in the earth, a hole Leonid created, trying to claw the powers he desperately desired from the earth itself.

Just when I’m about to sit down and bawl, a large, terrifying grey horse clops his way out of the crack in the earth. Smoke streams from its flared nostrils. Every hoof strike causes the ground to tremble. When his head turns my direction, his eyes are flames. He snorts, and smoke billows toward me.

My child.

I scream, and he must hear me, even in this wraith form, because he laughs and laughs and laughs.

The sound scares me more than anything else ever has.

Chapter24

Leonid

When I wake up, I realize I must be in hell.

Surely heaven would be prettier than this, right? But as I look around, memories start to trickle back, and as I turn my aching neck, I see the limekiln, each of the walled-off entry points chock full of trash.

So I’m not in hell.

Just another place humans have treated like a landfill for no reason.

“He’s awake.” Katerina.

I groan as I shove myself into a seated position. “I didn’t die.”

“More’s the pity,” Alexei mutters.

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