Kingmakers, Year Four

Chapter 2

2

Nix Moroz

Present Day

I was born on an island in the Black Sea.

My mother had come boar hunting with my father and his men. She didn’t know she was pregnant.

She had always been a tremendous athlete—hurdles, high jump, and the four-hundred-meter dash. Later she turned to long-distance swimming.

She swam the English Channel in less than eight hours and set a record for the 25 km open water race at the European Aquatics Championships. She swam from Florida to Cuba withou t a shark cage, stung on the face and hands three separate times by jellyfish, but never stopping.

That’s how she met my father—when she returned to Kyiv, she was invited to a dinner hosted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was a country girl, and though she didn’t mind donning a gown for formal affairs, she found the conversation tedious and the canapés highly unsatisfying for someone accustomed to eating a lunch of twenty potato pancakes smothered in sour cream and fried onions, and then an entire herring for dinner.

My father had never seen a woman like that, with a back almost too broad to zip into a dress, and welts from the jellyfish tentacles still marking her cheeks and throat and the backs of her hands like whiplashes. She was scowling at everyone because she was hungry.

When he tried to approach her, she rudely rebuffed him, having no idea that she was speaking to a man far more powerful than the minister hosting the party.

“Where’s your manners, girl?” my father said.

“I don’t have any manners,” she replied, tossing down her drink in one gulp. “I never said I did.”

He liked her boldness and the strong column of her throat as she threw back that drink.

“How did it feel swimming with all those sharks?” he demanded.

My mother had been followed for several miles of the swim by two hammerheads, and later by an ugly bull shark .

She regarded my father and his two lieutenants with a cool stare. “It felt very like this,” she said. “Only my wetsuit was more comfortable.”

My father had already decided he would marry her. He simply had to convince her to come to dinner with him first.

She said she would, if he took her somewhere with proper Georgian food.

“None of this foreign shit,” she said, sniffing at a passing tray of spinach puffs.

They married within the year. My mother agreed to it on the condition that my father wouldn’t interfere with her athletic pursuits. She had dreams of crossing the Adriatic next.

In the meantime, she joined my father skiing in Bukovel and hunting red deer in Manchuria. She was six feet tall, built like an Amazon, and so relentlessly active that she hadn’t menstruated in years.

That, combined with her love of food, meant that she disregarded any changes to her figure, thinking that the bit of belly she had grown was simply the result of my father spoiling her with honey cake and toffee.

The boar hunting was closer to home—on Dzharylhach island, which some call the Ukrainian Maldives because of the clear turquoise water. Warm sea, clean sand, and four hundred salty lakes scattered all over the island—a lonely and beautiful place, perfect for pig-sticking .

They hunted the boars in the old way, with spears. The spears had a cross guard to prevent the enraged pig from driving its own body further down the spear so it could at least have the satisfaction of mauling you as it died.

By that time, my father knew my mother well enough to be concerned when she failed to charge after the boars with her spear upraised, fleet as Artemis on the hunt.

Instead, she pressed her hand against the cramp on her side, telling my father to go on with the men. She planned to sit and soak in one of the warm, salty pools.

She thought it was indigestion. As the cramps worsened, she considered that perhaps she was about to have the long-delayed period in spectacular fashion.

It was only when the pain overtook her to the point that she could no longer stand that she began to realize how deserted the long section of beach really was, with barely a gull in sight, let alone any humans.

She wondered if her appendix was the issue, or her gallbladder. The sight of blood in the salt pool disgusted her more than it alarmed her. She forced herself to hobble down to the ocean instead, where the waves would wash her clean.

The steady surf was immensely soothing to her, the rhythm of the waves as familiar as her own heartbeat.

And then, out of nowhere, the irresistible impulse to bear down . . .

The birth itself took less than ten minutes.

She reached between her legs and felt the curve of the infant skull—my skull—with comical surprise. She made a sound halfway between a shriek and a laugh of pure astonishment. It seemed like I had played a trick on her, appearing out of nowhere, uninvited, and unexpected.

She lifted me out of the water, as if it were the sea that had birthed me. The placenta she left for the crabs to eat.

Though she had never seen it done before, she successfully knotted the cord and severed it with the edge of a scallop shell.

When my father returned an hour later, triumphant with a bloody boar carcass strung up on a pole, he found his new bride sitting topless in the sand, her shirt wrapped around the infant at her breast.

I was small, having arrived, by the doctor’s estimate, at least a month early.

My father thought it was just as good a joke as my mother.

He marveled at my copper-colored hair and appetite all out of proportion to my size.

He wanted to name me after his grandmother.

But my mother had already named me Nix, the word for a water sprite that can shift back and forth to human form.

My father liked that even better. He said, without any evidence to the contrary, and whether I shared his red hair or not, he could never be entirely sure that my mother hadn’t found me on the beach.

That’s the first bedtime story I remember: the story of how I was born.

It was my favorite, and I begged to hear it again and again, though my father had dozens of tales to tell, all equally full of mystery and adventure. He’s a fantastic storyteller to this day. Even his men shout for their favorites when they’ve all been drinking together.

My father’s stories center on himself and his soldiers: legendary tales of bravery, bloodshed, and revenge, epic in scale and rich in detail.

My father looks like he should be carved on the side of a mountain. He’s seven feet tall with a ginger mane of hair and a flaming red beard. He’s ferocious and clever. All girls idolize their fathers I suppose, but none with better reason than me.

Right now, however, we’re in a hell of a fight.

He doesn’t want me going to Kingmakers.

It’s not the first fight we’ve had, but it’s the most vicious.

It’s not like the time I broke the ankle of his favorite horse, or the time he said I ought to stay a virgin until I was married and I laughed in his face and told him that ship had already sailed.

This time, it seems that we’re both ready to defend this particular hill until all else is a flaming ruin .

“I told you, I won’t discuss it again!” he roars at me, storming around the oak-slab table in the huge farmhouse kitchen.

I’m leaned back in my chair, arms crossed, feet propped up on the table to annoy him.

“It doesn’t need any more discussion,” I say. “Because I’m going.”

“Good luck getting on the ship without my fingerprint on that contract!” he growls, disdainfully flinging down the handwritten list of rules and regulations to attend Kingmakers.

I leap to my feet, knocking my chair backward on the flagstone floor.

“Enjoy growing old and decrepit all alone without me if you won’t!” I holler back at him.

“Where do you think you’re going to go?” he snorts, folding his cable-like arms across his broad chest.

“Anywhere you’re not! You can’t keep me a prisoner here!” I shout.

“You’re not a prisoner! You’ve got a hundred acres of land, horses, dune buggies, a private plane in which I’ve taken you all over the goddamned world! You’re spoiled,” he says, in a disgusted tone.

“And you’re a coward! You’ve gotten as paranoid as an old woman—why shouldn’t I go to school, the same school you went to yourself?”

Stepan Pavluk comes into the kitchen, then makes an about-face so abrupt that he must have given himself whiplash. He hustles back o ut again, not wanting to get in the middle of another epic row between me and my father.

Too late—Dad already saw him.

He shouts, “Get back here, Stepan. Explain to Nix why it’s the worst possible time for her to go swanning off to school all on her own with no bodyguards and no security whatsoever.”

Stepan winces, looking back and forth between my father’s furious face and mine. He’s only a bookkeeper, though a damn good one. He prefers the silence of pen and paper to the smashed dishes and hurled insults that are surely about to erupt between my father and me.

“Nix,” he says carefully, “with your father’s deal with the Princes and Romeros, and his expansion of?—”

“Don’t tell me it’s not a good time,” I hiss at my father, completely ignoring Stepan. “It’s never a good time. When will it be the right time for me to go to college? When exactly are you planning to retire?”

“When I’m dead,” he barks.

“Exactly! So either I’m going to school, or I guess I’ll have to fucking kill you!” I yell.

Stepan is trying to sneak away again. This time my father lets him go, distracted by this new outrage coming out of my mouth.

“You think that’s funny, girl?” he snarls. “I’d cut out a soldier’s tongue if he said that to me. ”

“I’m not one of your soldiers,” I remind him. “I know you forget that sometimes.”

This is how we fight—with wild accusations and savage personal attacks. In an hour we might eat a bowl of ice cream together, but right now we want to strangle each other.

That’s what happens when you grow up in a family of two, always together, no time or space apart.

Which I know will be his next point of attack.

Sure enough, the very next thing out of his mouth is, “If something were to happen to you on that island where I can’t protect you, your mother would never forgive?—”

“Oh, don’t bring her into this!” I shout. “First of all, you know damn well she wanted me to get an education. And second, she doesn’t get a vote because she doesn’t exist anymore.”

Now my dad is really pissed. He raises one thick finger and points it right in my face, warning me.

“ Don’t,” he snarls.

He likes to think my mother is waiting for him in his version of Valhalla.

I take a deep breath, trying to bring us back to sanity before we both say something we regret—worse than the usual things.

“You know she would want me to go to school,” I say quietly. “And you know if she were in my position . . . nothing and no one would stop her from going to Kingmakers. ”

This is the best way to appeal to him. To remind him that my mother was just as stubborn and adventurous as I am, and he loved her for it.

I can see the war taking place inside of him—his inability to counter my point, battling with his overprotective impulses, and his absolute abhorrence at the idea of letting me out of his sight. Not to mention his refusal to ever back down or admit when he’s wrong.

His face is almost as red as his beard, his fists balled up like Christmas hams.

It’s now or never. School starts in a week.

Pushing hard one last time, I say, “The whole damn island is only eight miles across. You’ll know exactly where I am the whole time. You might as well have me in a snow globe in your pocket. It’s the safest place on earth, isn’t it?”

“Rocco Prince was killed there only a year ago!” my father barks.

“Dieter Prince isn’t you. Nobody would lay a finger on your daughter.” I grin. “Even when I want them to.”

My father snorts. He’s well aware that my dating opportunities have been as dismal as the rest of my social life, and it’s his fault.

Making him laugh is the second-best way to get what I want.

The best way is straight up begging.

“Please, Dad,” I say. “I want to go to school. I want to be normal, for once in my life. Or normal-adjacent, at least. ”

He sighs, his massive shoulders dropping an inch. “I’ll think about it,” he says.

I heroically resist the urge to jump up and down.

“Thank you, Dad!”

“I said I’ll think about it!” he reminds me.

“I know,” I say, righting the kitchen chair and stepping up on the seat so I can kiss him on the cheek.

We both know that means I’m going.