23
NIKOLAI
NIKOLAI HAD MEANT TO SLEEP, and when he had tossed and turned sufficiently to determine that he could not, he rose from his unfamiliar bed in the Iris Suite with every intention of working. But he had no success with that either. He had penned a message to Ketterdam and there was nothing to do but wait for a reply. Though he tried to focus on the rocket schematics he’d had brought to him from Lazlayon, it was impossible to look at the plans David had drawn, the notations in his cramped handwriting filling the margins, and not lose his thoughts to sadness, to the endless what-ifs that might have saved his friend’s life. He couldn’t stop seeing David’s broken body being pulled from the rubble, the blood and dust on his crushed chest.
Nikolai walked to the window. The palace grounds were covered in snow. From this vantage point, none of the damage from the bombing was visible. The world seemed quiet, ordinary, and at peace. He had sent word to Tamar to see if she could find out if the Shu queen had known about the bombing, if the Shu and the Fjerdans had come together to forge an alliance against Ravka—the bone they’d been fighting over for centuries. But he didn’t think that was the case. Makhi had her own agenda. She’d seen Ravka as weak and she’d moved to claim it through subterfuge before Fjerda could claim it by force. If not for Isaak’s courage and fate’s love of a good plot twist, the Shu queen might have done just that. But while Makhi had failed with a scalpel, Fjerda might well succeed with a hammer. They would celebrate the buildings they’d crushed, the ships and flyers they’d destroyed, never knowing the true death blow they’d dealt Ravka: David Kostyk was gone.
Nikolai’s friendship with David hadn’t been a loud one. There had been few shared confidences, no raucous nights spent singing dirty drinking songs. Most of their time together had been spent in silence, grappling with difficult engineering problems, reviewing each other’s work, pushing each other forward. With David, Nikolai’s power and charm had been meaningless. He’d only cared about the science.
He should have been safe here, tucked away in his workshop, far from enemy lines. But there was no safety anymore. Somewhere to the north, the Fjerdans were toasting their surprise attack and waiting to see how Ravka would respond. When Ravka couldn’t answer, they would wait no longer. They would invade. But where? When?
Movement in the gardens below caught his eye. He glimpsed dark hair, a cloak of blue wool. Zoya. She passed beyond the hedges and fountains to the shadow of the woods.
He hadn’t had a chance to speak to her since she’d returned. He couldn’t blame her for avoiding him. He’d sent her into the field without proper backup. He’d let enemies violate their home. But where was she going now? Nikolai hadn’t let himself think too much on Zoya’s late-night excursions across the grounds. He hadn’t wanted to. If she had a lover, it was none of his business. And yet his mind spun possibilities, each somehow worse than the last. A member of the royal guard? A handsome Inferni? She was friendly with General Pensky, and that was Nikolai’s own fault. He’d forced them to work closely together. Of course, the general was twenty years her senior and had what could only be described as an effusive mustache, but who was Nikolai to question her taste?
He yanked trousers over his nightshirt, lunged for his coat and boots, and was out the door and down the hallway in seconds, ignoring concerned glances from the palace guards.
“Everything’s fine! As you were,” he called. They were all on edge after the Fjerdan attack, and there was no reason to panic anyone as he raced off to act like an infatuated schoolboy.
What exactly was he going to say to her? I see you’re headed to an assignation, stop in the name of the king?
Her boots had left tracks in the snow, and he followed her into the woods. But it was dark beneath the trees, hard to find the trail. This is a mistake. She had a right to her privacy. And he damned well didn’t want to find her in the embrace of another man.
He caught a flash of movement between the branches. Zoya stood facing the thicket that bordered the western side of the gardens, her breath pluming in the night air, her face framed by the silver fox fur of her hood. Where the hell could she be going out here?
She was following a wall on the far side of the water gardens, where he’d played as a child and where the secret tunnel to Lazlayon was located. He opened his mouth to call out to her—then stopped as Zoya pushed aside a heavy mass of vines to reveal a door in the wall.
He couldn’t help but take offense. That Zoya had kept secrets from him was no surprise, but that the palace should?
“I thought we were past that,” he muttered.
Zoya slipped a key from her pocket and opened the door, vanishing inside. He hesitated. She hadn’t closed it behind her. Turn back, he told himself. No good can come of this.
There were two stars carved into the wood—just like the stars in the mural in her rooms, two small sparks painted onto the flag of a storm-tossed boat. He’d never asked what they meant.
He needed to know what was on the other side of that door. Really, it could be a matter of national security.
Nikolai passed through the tangle of vines and into what he realized was the old vegetable garden. He’d thought it had been left to rot, abandoned to the woods after the raised beds were moved closer to the kitchens. It didn’t exist on any of the new palace plans.
Whatever this place had been, it was something very different now. There were no tidy rows of cabbages, no orderly patterns of hedges favored by the palace gardeners. Willows bordered the paths, like women bent in mourning, their branches shod in ice and brushing the soft white ground like strands of hair. Flowers and shrubs of every variety overflowed their beds, all of them white with frost, a world made of snow and glass, a garden of ghosts. Zoya had lit lanterns along the old stone walls and now she stood, her back to him, her figure still as an ornamental statue, as if she’d been part of this garden all along, a stone maiden waiting to be discovered at the center of a maze.
“I’m running out of room,” she said without turning to face him.
She’d known he was there all along. Had she wanted him to follow her?
“You tend this place?” He tried to imagine Zoya sweating in the sun, dirt beneath her nails.
“When my aunt was killed and I came back to the Little Palace to fight the Darkling … I needed someplace to be alone. I used to walk in the woods for hours. No one bothered me there. I don’t remember when I found the door, but I felt as if my aunt had left it here for me to discover, a puzzle for me to solve.”
She stood with her perfect profile turned to the glittering night sky, her hood sliding back. Snow was beginning to fall, and it caught in the dark waves of her hair. “I plant something new for every Grisha lost. Heartleaf for Marie. Yew for Sergei. Red Sentinel for Fedyor. Even Ivan has a place.” She touched her fingers to a frozen stalk. “This will blossom bright orange in the summer. I planted it for Harshaw. These dahlias were for Nina when I thought she’d been captured and killed by Fjerdans. They bloom with the most ridiculous red flowers in the summer. They’re the size of dinner plates.” Now she turned and he could see tears on her cheeks. She lifted her hands, the gesture half-pleading, half-lost. “I’m running out of room.”
This was where Zoya had been seen sneaking off to all those nights—not to a lover, but to this monument to grief. This was where she had shed her tears, away from curious eyes, where no one could see her armor fall. And here, the Grisha might live forever, every friend lost, every soldier gone.
“I know what I did is unforgivable,” she said.
Nikolai blinked, confused. “No doubt you deserve to be punished for your crimes … but for what precisely?”
She cast him a baleful look. “I lost our most valuable prisoner. I’ve allowed our most deadly enemy to regain his powers and … run amok.”
“‘Amok’ seems an overstatement. Wild, perhaps.”
“Don’t pretend to shrug this off. You’ve barely looked at me since I returned.”
Because I am greedy for the sight of you. Because the prospect of facing this war, this loss, without you fills me with fear. Because I find I don’t want to fight for a future if I can’t find a way to make a future with you.
But he was a king and she was his general and he could say none of those things.
“I’m looking at you now, Zoya.” Her eyes met his in the stillness of the garden, vibrant blue, deep as a well. “You need never ask forgiveness of me.” He hesitated. He didn’t want to tie himself more closely to the man she hated, but he also didn’t want there to be secrets between them. If they survived this war, if they somehow found a way to keep the Fjerdans from invading Ravka, he would need to forge a real marriage, a real alliance, with someone else. He would have to secure his peace with Fjerda by marrying from their nation, or soothe Kerch’s ruffled pride by binding himself forever to Hiram Schenck’s daughter. But that was a future that might never come. “I sensed it when the Darkling broke free. The demon … the demon knew somehow. And for a moment I was there in the room with you.”
He’d thought she might be repelled, even fearful, but Zoya just said, “I wish you’d been there.”
“You do?”
Now she looked nothing but annoyed. “Of course I do. Who else would I rather have my back in a fight?”
Nikolai struggled not to break out in song. “That may be the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. And I was once told I waltz like an angel by the lead dancer of the royal ballet.”
“Maybe if you’d been there…” Her voice trailed off. But they both knew Nikolai wouldn’t have made a difference in that particular fight. If Zoya and the Sun Soldiers couldn’t stop the Darkling, it was possible he couldn’t be stopped. One more enemy we don’t know how to fight.
She bobbed her chin toward the walls. “Do you see what grows around this place?”
Nikolai peered at the twisting gray branches that ran along the perimeter of the garden. “A thorn wood.” An ordinary one, he assumed, not the ancient trees they needed for the obisbaya.
“I took the cuttings from the tunnel that leads to the Little Palace. It’s all prickles and spines and anger, covered in pretty, useless blossoms and fruit too bitter to eat. There is nothing in it worth loving.”
“How wrong you are.”
Zoya’s gaze snapped to his, her eyes flashing silver—dragon’s eyes. “Am I?”
“Look at the way it grows, protecting everything within these walls, stronger than anything else in the garden, weathering every season. No matter the winter it endures, it blooms again and again.”
“What if the winter is just too long and hard? What if it can’t bloom again?”
He was afraid to reach for her, but he did it anyway. He took her gloved hand in his. She didn’t pull away but folded into him like a flower closing its petals at nightfall. He wrapped his arm around her. Zoya seemed to hesitate, and then with a soft breath, she let herself lean against him. Zoya the deadly. Zoya the ferocious. The weight of her against him felt like a benediction. He had been strong for his country, his soldiers, his friends. It meant something different to be strong for her.
“Then you’ll be branches without blossoms,” he whispered against her hair. “And you let the rest of us be strong until the summer comes.”
“It wasn’t a metaphor.”
“Of course it wasn’t.”
He wished they could stand there forever in the silence of the snow, that the peace of this place could protect them.
She wiped her eyes and he realized she was crying.
“If you had told me three years ago that I would shed tears over David Kostyk, I would have laughed at you.”
Nikolai smiled. “You would have hit me with your shoe.”
“He and I … we had nothing in common. Our decision to side with Alina was what bound us—the choice to fight beside her when we knew the odds were in the Darkling’s favor. He had the more experienced fighters, years of understanding and planning.”
“But we won.”
“We did,” she said. “For a while.”
“So how did you do it? How did we do it?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe Alina really is a Saint.”
“Grief has made you delirious. But if we got lucky with one miracle, maybe we’ll get lucky again.”
They left the garden and walked back through the woods. On the path, they parted as they always did—she to the Grisha, and he to the Grand Palace. He wanted to call her back. He wanted to follow her through the snow. But his country didn’t need a heartsick boy chasing after a lonely girl. It needed a king.
“And a king they will have,” he said to no one at all, and strode back to the dark rooms of the palace.
24
MAYU
AFTER QUEEN MAKHI HAD CLAIMED she would think on revealing the laboratories—the laboratories she still wouldn’t admit existed—Tamar and Mayu had escorted Ehri to her chambers in the wing of the palace known as the Nest. They were the rooms that Ehri had grown up in, where all Taban children were raised. The boys were educated and trained alongside the girls before they were old enough to choose a professional path—medicine, religion, the military. The girls were all considered possible heirs, though the eldest daughters were often favored.
Tamar and Mayu alternated shifts watching over Ehri. They didn’t think Makhi would act against the princess, not with so much suspicion hanging over her, but they weren’t taking any chances. Tamar had warned Ministers Nagh and Zihun to strengthen their household security as well.
Three days after they arrived, two of Ehri’s sisters came to visit in a cloud of silk and perfume. Kheru with her coffee-colored eyes, always with a piece of needlework in her hands, and Yenye with the white streak in her hair and her sharp gaze. Jhem was missing, in mourning for her daughter Akeni, lost to the blight. Tamar had slipped into the neighboring room to eavesdrop but remained at the ready in case of trouble.
Mayu didn’t know the princesses well. She’d been assigned to Ehri’s household, and the sisters had their own Tavgharad to guard them. They were bright and loud, each striking in her own way. They looked like jewels in their dark winter silks—emerald, amethyst, sapphire. Ehri looked like a flower from a different garden, short and pale-petaled in a mint gown and a necklace of green agate, silver combs tucked into her hair.
The sisters asked Ehri for stories of Ravka, brought gifts of flowers and fruit to welcome her home, talked of their own marriage prospects and Makhi’s consorts. Both Kheru and Yenye were soon to marry, and once they did, they would no longer be possible heirs for the Taban throne.
“Kheru has delayed her wedding date,” said Yenye, working her needle through a pattern of violets.
“Only because I’m trying to find the right peach silk for my gown.”
Yenye lifted a brow and ran her hand through the white streak in her hair. “It’s because Makhi’s presumed heir died in that horrible blight.”
Princess Ehri gasped. “She was only eight years old.”
Yenye touched her hand to her hair again. “I … I didn’t mean to be callous. I only meant…”
Kheru swallowed a bite of plum. “You meant that I would take a child’s death as an opportunity for Makhi to name me her heir.”
“Don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind,” said Yenye.
“It did,” Kheru admitted. “But Makhi won’t name any of us.”
“There are rumors, though,” Yenye said slyly. “About you, sweet Ehri.”
Ehri kept her eyes on her unfinished plums. “Oh?”
“Rumors that you’ve returned without a Ravkan husband because you wish to challenge Makhi.”
“What foolishness,” said Ehri. “You all know I’ve never wanted to rule. I would happily sit on a hilltop on the coast and watch the waves roll in and tend to my garden like Grandmother.”
“Then why try to marry the Ravkan king in the first place?”
“Because Makh
i is the queen and she commanded me to.” She met their gazes, one then the other. “And we must all do as the queen commands.”
There were murmurs of agreement, and in time, the sisters finished their tea and went on their way, no doubt to dissect every word that had been exchanged.
When the door closed behind them, Ehri leaned against it with a sigh. “I can tell you don’t approve, Mayu.”
Mayu had no reason to deny it. “This was your chance to court them, to win them to your side and tell them what the queen attempted.”
“Mayu, my sisters have even less influence than I.” Ehri contemplated the vase full of orange roses that she had placed at the center of the tea table before her sisters arrived. “They would either take Makhi’s side or they would use the conflict between us to make their own bid for the throne, and that would leave Shu Han vulnerable.”
“Are they so ambitious?”
Ehri considered. She plucked a petal that had begun to lose its freshness and crumpled it in her palm. “No. None are born schemers. None were groomed for the throne. But power is compelling, and we’re better off keeping our secrets.”
Mayu watched the princess. “Are you close to your sisters?”
“The way that kebben are? No. I love them, but we’ve never fought.”
“Never?”
“Not really. Oh, we squabbled. I think all sisters do. But we’ve never had a proper fight. Because we never trusted the love we had to carry us through. We have always been very polite with one another. What are you smiling at?”
“I’m thinking of Reyem. The way we used to scream at each other. He bit me once. Hard enough to draw blood.”
“Bit you?”
“I did deserve it. I shaved one of his eyebrows off in his sleep.”
Ehri laughed. “What a monster you must have been.”
“I really was.” But thinking of Reyem was too painful. “He was never mean to me, and he had every chance to be spiteful. My parents favored him, but he always shared—his books, his sweets. He wanted to see me happy.”
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