TANGLED, genya safin

chapter seventeen.

David twitched, glancing around the nearly empty room. Most of the Fabrikators were still at dinner. He was clearly nervous, maybe even frightened. He looked at the table, picked up his compass, and put it down.

Finally, he whispered, "They called him the Bonesmith."

A quiver passed through me. I thought of the fingers and vertebrae lying on the peddlers' table in Kribirsk.

"Why?" I asked. "Because of the amplifiers, he discovered?"

David looked up, surprised. "He didn't find them. He made them."

I didn't want to believe what I was hearing. "Merzost?"

He nodded. So that was why David had looked at Alina's collars and my hand when Zoya asked if any Grisha had ever had such power. Morozova had been playing with the same forces as the Darkling. Magic. Abomination.

"How?" I asked.

"No one knows," David said, glancing over his shoulder again. "After the Black Heretic was killed in the accident that created the Fold, his son came out of hiding to take control of the Second Army. He had all of Morozova's journals destroyed."

His son? Again, I was faced with the knowledge of how few people knew the Darkling's secret. The Black Heretic had never died— there had only ever been one Darkling, a single powerful Grisha who has ruled the Second Army for generations, hiding his true identity. As far as I knew, he'd never had a son. And there was no way he would destroy something as valuable as Morozova's journals. Aboard the whaler, he'd said not all the books prohibited the combination of amplifiers. Maybe he'd been referring to Morozova's own writings.

"Why was his son hiding?" I asked, curious as to how the Darkling had managed to frame such deception.

This time David frowned as if the answer were obvious.

"A Darkling and his heir never live at the Little Palace at the same time. The risk of assassinations is too great."

"I see," I said. Plausible enough, and after hundreds of years, I doubted anyone would question such a story. The Grisha did love their traditions, and Genya couldn't have been the first Tailor the Darkling had kept in his employ. "Why would he have had the journals destroyed?"

"The documented Morozova's experiments with amplifiers. The Black Heretic was trying to re-create those experiments when something went wrong."

The hair rose on my arms. "And the result was the Fold."

David nodded. "His son had all of Morozova's journals and papers burned. He said they were too dangerous, too much of a temptation to Any Grisha. That's why I didn't say anything at the meeting. I shouldn't even know they ever existed."

"So how do you?"

David looked around the almost empty workshop again. "Morozova was a Fabrikator, maybe the first, certainly the most powerful. He did things that no one's ever dreamed of before or since." He gave a sheepish shrug. "To us, he's kind of a hero."

"Do you know anything else about the amplifiers he created?"

David shook his head. "There were rumors of others, but the stag was the only one I'd ever heard of."