BOOK QUOTES.

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Shadow and Bone • Siege and Storm • Ruin and Rising • Six of Crows • Crooked Kingdom • King of Scars • Rule of Wolves
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SPOILERS FOR ALL BOOKS

SHADOW AND BONE.

I looked up and my stomach lurched as I recognized the raven-haired girl who had found Mal so fascinating back in Kribirsk.

“Who is she?” I whispered, watching the girl glide among the other Grisha, saying her hellos, her high laugh echoing off the golden dome.

“Zoya,” muttered Marie. “She was a year ahead of us at school and she’s horrible.”

“Thinks she’s better than everyone,” added Nadia.

I raised my eyebrows. If Zoya’s sin was snobbery, then Marie and Nadia had no business making judgments. Marie sighed. “The worst part is that she’s kind of right. She’s an incredibly powerful Squaller, a great fighter, and look at her.”

I took in the silver embroidery on Zoya’s cuffs, the glossy perfection of her black hair, the big blue eyes fringed by impossibly dark lashes. She was almost as beautiful as Genya. I thought of Mal and felt a pang of pure jealousy shoot through me. But then I realized that Zoya had been stationed at the Fold. If she and Mal had … well, she might know if he was there, if he was all right. I pushed my plate away. The prospect of asking Zoya about Mal made me a little nauseated.

*

I pulled back the curtains as we rode through Kribirsk and felt a pang of sadness as I remembered walking this same road so many months ago. I’d nearly been crushed by the very coach I was riding in. Mal had saved me, and Zoya had looked at him from the window of the Summoners’ coach. I’d wished to be like her, a beautiful girl in a blue kefta.

[ Back to top ]

SIEGE AND STORM.

As soon as I heard that silky voice, I knew who it belonged to, but my heart still lurched when I caught sight of her raven’s wing hair. Zoya stepped through the crowd of Etherealki, her lithe form swathed in blue summer silk that made her eyes glow like gems—disgustingly long-lashed gems.

It took everything in me not to turn around and watch Mal’s reaction. Zoya was the Grisha who had done all she could to make my life miserable at the Little Palace. She’d sneered at me, gossiped about me, and even broken two of my ribs. But she was also the girl who had caught Mal’s interest so long ago in Kribirsk. I wasn’t sure what had happened between them, but I doubted it was just lively conversation.

“I speak for the Etherealki,” said Zoya. “And we will follow the Sun Summoner.”

I struggled not to show my surprise. She was the last person I’d expected to support me. What game might she be playing?

“Not all of us,” Marie piped up weakly. I knew I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still hurt.

Zoya gave a disdainful laugh. “Yes, we know you support Sergei in all his endeavors, Marie. But this isn’t a late-night tryst by the banya. We’re talking about the future of the Grisha and all of Ravka.”

Snickers greeted Zoya’s pronouncement, and Marie turned bright red.

“That’s enough, Zoya,” snapped Sergei.

*

“He’s right,” said Fedyor. “The Corporalki are the Grisha’s first line of defense. We’re the most experienced in military affairs and should be more fairly represented.”

“We’re just as valuable to the war effort,” declared Zoya, her color high. Even in a snit, she looked gorgeous. I’d suspected she would be chosen to represent the Etherealki, but I certainly wasn’t happy about it. “If there are going to be three Corporalki on the council,” she said, “then there should be three Summoners, too.”

*

Then there was Fedyor, and Zoya beside him, gorgeous as always in Etherealki blue.

*

Zoya gave a graceful wave of her hand. “What would be the point? He seems bent on spreading word of the Sun Summoner and claiming she’s a Saint. It’s about time the people had some appreciation for the Grisha.”

“Not the Grisha,” said Pavel, jutting his chin truculently in my direction.

“Her.”

Zoya lifted one elegant shoulder. “It’s better than them reviling us all as witches and traitors.”


*

I stole a glance at Zoya. She was gazing at Mal with those impossibly blue eyes. It seemed like she’d spent half the meeting batting her lashes at him. Or maybe I was imagining things. She was a powerful Squaller and, potentially, a powerful ally. But she’d also been one of the Darkling’s favorites, and that certainly made her difficult to trust.

I almost laughed out loud. Who was I kidding? I hated even sitting in the same room with her. She looked like a Saint. Delicate bones, glossy black hair, perfect skin. All she needed was a halo. Mal paid her no attention, but a twisting feeling in my gut made me think he was ignoring her a little too deliberately. I knew I had more important things to worry about than Zoya. I had an army to run and enemies on every side, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

*

[ Alina obsessing over Zoya ]

I stiffened. Zoya was standing there. Even in the heat, she never seemed to sweat.

*

Baghra’s voice echoed in my ears: You’re taking to power well.… As it grows, it will hunger for more. And yet, did I believe Zoya? Was the sheen in her eyes real or pretense? She blinked her tears back and glared at me. “I still don’t like you, Starkov. I never will. You’re common and clumsy, and I don’t know why you were born with such power. But you’re the Sun Summoner, and if you can keep Ravka free, then I’ll fight for you.”

[ Back to top ]

RUIN AND RISING.

As we turned down the passage that would take us to the archives, I looked over my shoulder. Zoya had flipped a soldier on his back and was spinning him like a turtle, her hand making lazy circles in the air.

*

“You could have at least let me blow something up,” added Harshaw.

Zoya gave an elaborate shrug. “I’m so sorry you felt excluded. Never mind how closely we’ve been watched and that it was a miracle we weren’t found out. We definitely should have jeopardized the whole operation to spare your feelings.”

*

“Well, I’m going,” said Zoya. “The humidity down here is murder on my hair.”

Harshaw rose and pushed off from the wall. “I’d prefer to stay,” he said with a yawn. “But Oncat says we go.” He hefted the tabby onto his shoulder with one hand.

“Are you ever going to name that thing?” Zoya asked.

“She has a name.”

“Oncat is not a name. It’s just Kaelish for cat.”

“Suits her, doesn’t it?”

Zoya rolled her eyes and flounced out the door…

*

Silence, the shift of gravel.

“Let me try something,” said Zoya. She raised her hands.

I heard a crackling in my ears, and the air seemed to grow damp. “Sergei?” she said. Her voice sounded weirdly distant.

Then I heard Sergei’s voice, weak and trembling, but clear, as if he were speaking right beside me. “Here,” he panted.

Zoya flexed her fingers, making adjustments, and called to Sergei again.

This time, when he replied, David said, “It sounds like it’s coming from below us.”

“Maybe not,” Zoya replied. “The acoustics can be misleading.”

*

“How did you even do that?” Nadia asked Zoya. “That trick with the sound?”

“It’s just a way of creating an acoustical anomaly. We used to play with it back in school so we could eavesdrop on people in other rooms.”

Genya snorted. “Of course you did.”

“Could you show us how to do it?” asked Adrik.

“If I’m ever bored enough.”

*

“Zoya isn’t great at working in a team,” Tamar replied, “but we need Squallers, and she and Nadia are our best options…"

*

[ Zoyalai ]

I took out Nikolai’s ring and set it on the table.

“Saints,” breathed Genya. “That’s the Lantsov emerald.”

It seemed to glow in the lamplight, the tiny diamonds twinkling around it.

“Did he just give it to you? To keep?” asked Nadia.

Genya seized my arm. “Did he propose?”

“Not exactly.”

“He might as well have,” Genya said. “That ring is an heirloom. The Queen wore it everywhere, even to sleep.”

“Toss him over,” Zoya said. “Break his heart cruelly. I will gladly give our poor prince comfort, and I would make a magnificent queen.”

I laughed. “You actually might, Zoya. If you could stop being horrible for a minute.”

“With that kind of incentive, I can manage a minute. Possibly two.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s just a ring.”

Zoya sighed and held the emerald up so it flashed. “I am horrible,” she said abruptly. “All these people dead, and I miss pretty things.”

*

[ Nikolai about Zoya ]

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to him or myself. “I could lead the Second Army, and you could have pretty much any girl you want.”

“A Shu princess? A Kerch banker’s daughter?”

“Or a Ravkan heiress or a Grisha like Zoya.”

“Zoya? I make it a policy never to seduce anyone prettier than I am.”

I laughed. “I think that was an insult.”

*

There was a brief silence. Then Harshaw said what I knew a lot of them had to be thinking. “We could run. Every time we face those monsters, more of us die. We could take this ship anywhere. Kerch. Novyi Zem.”

“Like hell,” muttered Mal.

“This is my home,” said Zoya. “I won’t be chased out of it.”

*

By the time dusk came, Zoya didn’t have the energy to bicker. She and Nadia were entirely focused on keeping us aloft.

David was able to take over the wheel for brief periods of time so Tamar could see to the wound on Mal’s leg. Harshaw, Tolya, and Mal alternated on the lines to give each other a chance to stretch.

Only Nadia and Zoya had no relief as they toiled beneath a crescent moon, though we tried to find ways to help. Genya stood with her back to Nadia’s, bracing her so she could rest her knees and feet a bit. Now that the sun had set, we had no need for cover, so for the better part of an hour, I buttressed Zoya’s arms while she summoned.

“This is ridiculous,” she growled, her muscles shaking beneath my palms.

“Do you want me to let go?”

“If you do, I’ll cover you in jurda juice.”

*

The descent was slow and tricky, and as soon as the hulls scraped the crater floor, both Nadia and Zoya crumpled to the deck. They had pushed the limits of their power, and though their skin was flushed and glowing, they were completely exhausted.

*

That night, the temperature dropped enough that we had to set up tents. Zoya seemed to think I should be the one to put ours together, even if we were both going to sleep in it.

*

Zoya lifted one elegant shoulder. “I’d rather have the emerald.”

I stared at her, then shook my head and released something between a laugh and a sigh. My anger went out of me, leaving me feeling petty and embarrassed. Mal hadn’t deserved that. None of them had.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Maybe you’re hungry,” said Zoya. “I always get mean when I’m hungry.”

“Are you hungry all the time?” asked Harshaw.

“You haven’t seen me mean. When you do, you’ll require a very big hanky.”

He snorted. “To dry my tears?”

“To stanch the bleeding.”

*

This time my laugh was real. Somehow a little of Zoya’s poison was exactly what I needed. Then, despite all my better judgment, I asked the question I’d wanted to ask for nearly a year. “You and Mal, back in Kribirsk—”

“It happened.”

I knew that and I knew there had been plenty of others before her, but it still stung. Zoya glanced at me, her long black lashes sparkling with rain. “But never since,” she said grudgingly, “and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. If a man can say no to me, that’s something.”

I rolled my eyes. Zoya poked me in the arm with one long finger. “He hasn’t been with anyone, you idiot. Do you know what the girls back at the White Cathedral called him? Beznako.”

A lost cause.

“It’s funny,” Zoya said contemplatively. “I understand why the Darkling and Nikolai want your power. But Mal looks at you like you’re… well, like you’re me.”

*

Another shape appeared between the trees, then another.

“I do not like this,” said Harshaw. “I do not like this at all.”

“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” sneered Zoya. “You really are peasants.”

She lifted her hands, and a massive gust of wind tore up the mountain. The white shapes seemed to retreat. Then Zoya hooked her arms, and they rushed at us in a moaning white cloud.

“Zoya—”

“Relax,” she said.

I threw up my arms to ward off whatever horrible thing Zoya had brought down on us. The cloud exploded. It burst into harmless flakes that drifted to the ground around us. “Ash?” I reached out to catch some of it on my fingers. It was fine and white, the color of chalk.

“It’s just some kind of weather phenomenon,” Zoya said, sending the ashes rising again in lazy spirals. We looked back up the hill. The white clouds continued to move in shifts and gusts, but now that we knew what they were, they seemed slightly less sinister. “You didn’t really think they were ghosts, did you?”

*

I scowled. “How about I slice you open and see how your bones fit?”

Zoya fluffed her hair. “I bet they’re just as gorgeous as the rest of me.”

*

“You made the mess,” said Zoya. “You clean it up.”

“Need two hands to swab,” Adrik retorted, taking a place at the sails instead. Adrik seemed to relish Zoya’s taunts over Nadia’s constant fussing.

*

I joined the other Etherealki: Zoya, Nadia, Adrik, and Harshaw. It felt somehow right that we should be the first to enter and that we would do it together. The Squallers raised their arms, summoning current and dropping the pressure as Zoya had done back in the caves. My ears crackled as they layered the acoustic blanket. If it didn’t hold, Harshaw and I were ready to summon light and fire to drive the volcra back. We spread out in a line, and with measured steps, we entered the darkness of the Fold.

*

“I am surrounded by fools,” Zoya said, but she was smiling.

*

“A job offer.” It had taken some convincing, but in the end Nikolai had seen the sense in my suggestions. I cleared my throat. “Ravka still needs its Grisha, and Grisha still need a safe haven in the world. I want you to lead the Second Army, along with David. And Zoya.”

“Zoya? Are you punishing me?”

“She’s powerful, and I think she has it in her to be a good leader. Or she’ll make your life a nightmare. Possibly both.”

*

The nichevo’ya blew apart, scattering like ashes in wind, leaving startled soldiers and Grisha staring at the places where they’d been. I heard a wrenching cry and looked up in time to see Nikolai’s wings dissolve, darkness spilling from him in black wisps as he plummeted to the gray sand. Zoya ran to him, trying to slow his fall with an updraft.

*

That first winter, when it was time for her friends to leave, the girl ventured out into the snow to say goodbye, and the stunning raven-haired Squaller handed her another gift.

“A blue kefta,” said the math teacher, shaking her head.

“What would she do with that?”

“Maybe she knew a Grisha who died,” replied the cook, taking note of the tears that filled the girl’s eyes. They did not see the note that read, You will always be one of us.

[ Back to top ]

SIX OF CROWS.

She sounded like a little girl who didn’t know what she was doing. And that was exactly how she felt. Her training had been too short. She’d been sent out on her first mission too soon. Zoya had said as much at the time, but Nina had begged to go, and they’d needed her, so the older Grisha had relented.

Zoya Nazyalensky – a powerful Squaller, gorgeous to the point of absurdity, and capable of reducing Nina’s confidence to ash with a single raised brow. Nina had worshipped her. Reckless, foolish, easily distracted.

Zoya had called her all those things and worse.

“You were right, Zoya. Happy now?”

*

Annoying as he was, Nina was almost tempted to call him back. With Jesper gone, there was nothing but Zoya’s voice in her head and the reminder that her best wasn’t good enough.

*

Nina spoke Kaelish like a native and loved the challenge of taking on a new identity in every town. But for all their triumphs, Zoya hadn’t been pleased. “Being good with languages isn’t enough,” she’d scolded. “You need to learn to be less … big. You’re too loud, too effusive, too memorable. You take too many risks.”

“Zoya,” said the Examiner they were travelling with. “Go easy.” He was a living amplifier. Dead, his bones would have served to heighten Grisha power, no different from the shark teeth or bear claws that other Grisha wore. But alive, he was invaluable to their mission, trained to use his amplifier gifts to sense Grisha power through touch.

Most of the time, Zoya was protective of him, but now her deep blue eyes flattened to slits. “My teachers didn’t go easy on me. If she ends up chased through the woods by a mob of peasants, will you tell them to go easy?”

Nina had stomped off, pride smarting, embarrassed by the tears filling her eyes. Zoya had shouted at her not to go past the ridge, but she’d ignored her, eager to be as far away from the Squaller as she could get – and walked right into a drüskelle camp.

*

“Everything. Stuffed cabbage, potato dumplings, blackcurrant cakes, blini with lemon zest. I can’t wait to see Zoya’s face when I come walking into the Little Palace.”

“Zoya Nazyalensky?”

Nina had stopped short. “You know her?”

“We all know of her. She’s a powerful witch.”

It had hit her then: For the drüskelle, Zoya was a little like Jarl Brum – cruel, inhuman, the thing that waited in the dark with death in her hands.

Zoya was this boy’s monster. The thought left her uneasy.

*

She didn’t risk so much as a nod of acknowledgement, but continued up the stairs to the balcony on the second floor where she could get a better look at the flow of the crowd. It was a trick she’d learned in school from Zoya Nazyalensky. There were patterns in the way people moved, the way they clustered around power. They thought they were drifting, milling aimlessly, but really they were being drawn towards people of status.

[ Back to top ]

CROOKED KINGDOM.

Nina rested her chin atop Inej’s silky hair. “Zoya used to say that fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”

*

A young woman stood at the doorway to the kitchen, black hair shining nearly blue in the dim light.

“Zoya?” Nina gasped as she stared down, trying to catch her breath.

Zoya stepped into the light, a vision in sapphire silk, her cuffs and hem embroidered in dense whorls of silver. Her heavily lashed eyes widened. “Nina?” Zoya’s concentration wavered, and they all dropped a foot through the air before she tossed her hands up and they were once more slammed against the beams.

Zoya stared up at Nina in wonder. “You’re alive,” she said. Her gaze slid to Matthias, thrashing like the biggest, angriest butterfly ever pinned to a page. “And you’ve made a new friend.”

*

Matthias knew exactly who he was dealing with. Zoya Nazyalensky was one of the most powerful witches in Ravka. She was a legendary Squaller, a soldier who had served first the Darkling, then the Sun Summoner, and who had ascended to power as a member of King Nikolai’s Grisha Triumvirate. Now that he’d experienced a taste of her abilities for himself, he wasn’t surprised at how quickly she’d risen.

*

Genya stepped back, brushing the blonde strands of Nina’s wig from her face to get a better look at her. “Nina, how is this possible? The last time Zoya saw you—”

“You were throwing a tantrum,” said Zoya, “stomping away from camp with all the caution of a wayward moose.”

To Matthias’ surprise, Nina actually winced like a child taking a scolding. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her embarrassed before.

“We thought you were dead,” Genya said.

“She looks half-dead.”

“She looks fine.”

“You vanished,” Zoya spat. “When we heard there were Fjerdans nearby, we feared the worst.”

“The worst happened,” Nina said. “And then it happened some more.” She took Matthias’ hand. “But we’re here now.”

Zoya glared at their clasped hands and crossed her arms.

“I see.”

Genya raised an auburn brow. “Well, if he’s the worst that can happen—”

“What are you doing here?” Zoya demanded. “Are you and your Fjerdan … accessory trying to get out of Ketterdam?”

“What if we were? Why did you ambush us?”

“There have been attacks on Grisha all over the city. We didn’t know who you were or if you might be colluding with the Shu, only that you used the code on the peddler. We always station soldiers in the tavern now. Anyone looking for Grisha is a potential threat.”

Given what Matthias had seen of the new Shu soldiers, they were right to be wary.

“We came to offer our help,” Nina said.

“What kind of help? You have no idea what forces are at work here, Nina. The Shu have developed a drug—”

“Jurda parem.”

“What do you know about parem?”

Nina squeezed Matthias’ hand. She took a deep breath.

“I’ve seen it used. I’ve … experienced it myself.”

Genya’s single amber eye widened. “Oh, Nina, no. You didn’t.”

“Of course she did,” said Zoya. “You’ve always been like this! You sink into trouble like it’s a warm bath. Is this why you look like second-day gruel? How could you take a risk like that, Nina?”

“I do not look like gruel,” Nina protested, but she had that same chastened look on her face. Matthias couldn’t stand it.

“She did it to save our lives,” he said. “She did it knowing she might be dooming herself to misery and even death.”

“Reckless,” Zoya declared.

“Zoya,” said Genya. “We don’t know the circumstances—”

“We know that she’s been missing nearly a year.” She pointed an accusing finger at Nina. “And now she shows up with a Fjerdan in tow, one built like a soldier and who uses drüskelle fighting techniques.” Zoya reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of bones. “She attacked our soldiers with these, with bone shards, Genya. Have you ever heard of such a thing being possible?”

Genya stared at the bones and then at Nina. “Is this true?”

Nina pressed her lips together. “Possibly?”

“Possibly,” said Zoya. “And you’re telling me we should just trust her?”

Genya looked less certain but said, “I’m telling you we should listen.”

“All right,” said Zoya. “I wait with open ears and a ready heart. Entertain me, Nina Zenik.”

*

In Fjerdan, Matthias whispered, “If Ravka’s spies are worth their salt, your friends are going to realize we were the ones who broke out Kuwei.”

“Don’t whisper,” Nina replied in Fjerdan, but in a normal tone of voice. “It will just make the guards suspicious. And I’ll tell Zoya and Genya everything eventually, but remember how keen we were on killing Kuwei? I’m not sure Zoya would make the same choice to spare him, at least not until he’s safely on Ravkan soil. She doesn’t need to know who’s on that boat until it docks in Os Kervo.”

*

Nina must have sensed his unease, because she said, “Ravka is the safest place for Kuwei. He needs our protection.”

“Just what does Zoya Nazyalensky’s protection look like?”

“She’s really not that bad.” Matthias shot her a skeptical look. “Actually, she’s terrible, but she and Genya saw a lot of death in the civil war. I don’t believe they want more bloodshed.”

*

Zoya tossed her glorious black mane and said, “We are the Triumvirate. We do not take orders from Kerch street rats with dubious haircuts.”

“I can phrase it as a question if it will make your feathers lie flat,” Kaz said.

“You insolent—”

“Zoya,” said Sturmhond smoothly. “Let’s not antagonize our new friends before they’ve even had a chance to cheat us. Lead on, Mister Brekker.”

*

Zoya looked him up and down as if she was considering tossing him into a pool and boiling him alive. “If you want to waste your time and talent on these wretches, feel free. Saints know there’s room for improvement.”

“Zoya—”

“I’m going to go find a dark room with a deep pool and try to wash some of this country off.”

“Don’t drown,” Genya called as Zoya flounced off, then said conspiratorially, “Maybe she’ll do it just to be contrary.”

*

[ Zoya uses lightning to restart Kuwei's heart. ]

“Zoya,” said Sturmhond. His voice had the ring of command.

Zoya sighed and pushed up her sleeves. “Unbutton his shirt.”

“What are you doing?” Kaz asked as Genya undid Kuwei’s remaining buttons. His chest was narrow, his ribs visible, all of it spattered with the pig’s blood they’d encased in the wax bladder.

“I’m either going to wake up his heart or cook him from the inside out,” said Zoya. “Stand back.”

They did their best to obey in the cramped space. “What exactly does she mean by that?” Kaz asked Nina.

“I’m not sure,” Nina admitted. Zoya had her hands out and her eyes closed. The air felt suddenly cool and moist.

Inej inhaled deeply. “It smells like a storm.”

Zoya opened her eyes and brought her hands together as if in prayer, rubbing her palms against each other briskly.

Nina felt the pressure drop, tasted metal on her tongue.

“I think … I think she’s summoning lightning.”

“Is that safe?” asked Inej.

“Not remotely,” said Sturmhond.

“Has she at least done it before?” said Kaz.

“For this purpose?” asked Sturmhond. “I’ve seen her do it twice. It worked splendidly. Once.” His voice was oddly familiar, and Nina had the sense they’d met before.

“Ready?” Zoya asked.

Genya shoved a thickly folded piece of fabric between Kuwei’s teeth and stepped back. With a shudder, Nina realized it was to keep him from biting his tongue.

“I really hope she gets this right,” murmured Nina.

“Not as much as Kuwei does,” said Kaz.

“It’s tricky,” said Sturmhond. “Lightning doesn’t like a master. Zoya’s putting her own life at risk too.”

“She didn’t strike me as the type,” Kaz said.

“You’d be surprised,” Nina and Sturmhond replied in unison. Again, Nina had the eerie sensation that she knew him.

She saw that Rotty had squeezed his eyes shut, unable to watch. Inej’s lips were moving in what Nina knew must be a prayer.

A faint blue glow crackled between Zoya’s palms. She took a deep breath and slapped them down on Kuwei’s chest.

Kuwei’s back bowed, his whole body arcing so sharply Nina thought his spine might snap. Then he slammed back down against the stretcher. His eyes didn’t open. His chest remained motionless.

Genya checked his pulse. “Nothing.”

Zoya scowled and clapped her palms together again, a light sweat breaking out over her perfect brow. “Are we absolutely sure we want him to live?” she huffed. No one answered, but she kept rubbing her hands together, that crackle building once more.

“What is this even supposed to do?” said Inej.

“Shock his heart into returning to its rhythm,” said Genya. “And the heat should help denature the poison.”

“Or kill him,” said Kaz.

“Or kill him,” conceded Genya.

“Now,” said Zoya, her voice determined. Nina wondered if she was anxious for Kuwei to survive or if she just hated to fail at anything.

Zoya jolted her open palms against Kuwei’s chest. His body bent like a green branch caught by an unforgiving wind, and once more collapsed against the stretcher.

Kuwei gasped, eyes flying open. He struggled to sit up, trying to spit out the wad of fabric.

“Thank the Saints,” said Nina.

“Thank me,” said Zoya.

Genya moved to restrain him, and his eyes widened further as panic seized him.

*

Zoya placed her hands on her hips. “Is anyone going to thank me—or Genya, for that matter—for this little miracle?”

“Thank you for nearly killing and then reviving the most valuable hostage in the world so you could use him for your own gain,” Kaz said. “Now you need to go. The streets are almost empty, and you need to get to the manufacturing district.”

Zoya’s beautiful blue eyes slitted. “Show your face in Ravka, Brekker. We’ll teach you some manners.”

[ Back to top ]

KING OF SCARS.

The doors behind Dima blew open, the storm demanding entry. A loud crack sounded as the gust knocked the creature from its clawed feet and hurled its winged body against the far wall. The wooden beams splintered with the force, and the thing slumped to the floor in a heap.

A figure strode into the barn in a drab gray coat, a strange wind lifting her long black hair. The moon caught her features, and Dima cried harder, because she was too beautiful to be any ordinary person, and that meant she must be a Saint. He had died, and she had come to escort him to the bright lands.

But she did not stoop to take him in her arms or speak soft prayers or words of comfort. Instead she approached the monster, hands held out before her. She was a warrior Saint, then, like Sankt Juris, like Sankta Alina of the Fold.

“Be careful,” Dima managed to whisper, afraid she would be harmed. “It has … such teeth.”

But his Saint was unafraid. She nudged the monster with the toe of her boot and rolled it onto its side. The creature snarled as it came awake, and Dima clutched his lantern tighter as if it might become a shield.

In a few swift movements, the Saint had secured the creature’s clawed hands in heavy shackles. She yanked hard on the chain, forcing the monster to its feet. It snapped its teeth at her, but she did not scream or cringe. She swatted the creature on its nose as if it were a misbehaving pet.

The thing hissed, pulling futilely on its restraints. Its wings swept once, twice, trying to lift her off her feet, but she gripped the chain in her fist and thrust her other hand forward. Another gust of wind struck the monster, slamming it into the barn wall. It hit the ground, fell to its knees, stumbled back up, weaving and unsteady in a way that made it seem curiously human, like Papa when he had been out late at the tavern. The Saint tugged on the chain. She murmured something, and the creature hissed again as the wind eddied around them.

Not a Saint, Dima realized. Grisha. A soldier of the Second Army. A Squaller who could control wind.

She took the shawl from her shoulders and tossed it over the creature’s head and shoulders, leading her captured prey past Dima, the monster still struggling and snapping.

She tossed Dima a silver coin. “For the damage,” she said, her eyes bright as jewels in the moonlight. “You saw nothing tonight, understood? Hold your tongue or next time I won’t keep him on his leash.”

Dima nodded, feeling fresh tears spill down his cheeks. The Grisha raised a brow. He’d never seen a face like hers, more lovely than any painted icon, blue eyes like the deepest waters of the river. She tossed him another coin, and he just managed to snatch it from the air.

“That one’s for you. Don’t share it with your brothers.”

*

“A king cannot remain locked up in his own castle,” he’d declared when he’d decided to resume travel away from the palace. “One risks looking less like a monarch and more like a hostage.”

“You have emissaries to manage these matters of state,” Zoya had argued, “ambassadors, underlings.”

“The public may forget how handsome I am.”

“I doubt it. Your face is on the money.”

*

Nikolai’s glib demeanor vanished. “I cannot take a wife while I am in this state. I cannot forge a marriage founded on lies.”

“Aren’t most?”

“Ever the romantic.”

“Ever practical.”

*

“I will,” he said wearily. “I’ll do all of it. But not tonight. Tonight let’s pretend we’re an old married couple.”

If any other man had said such a thing, she would have punched him in the jaw. Or possibly taken him to bed for a few hours. “And what does that entail?”

“We’ll tell each other lies as married couples do. It will be a good game. Go on, wife. Tell me I’m a handsome fellow who will never age and who will die with all of his own teeth in his head. Make me believe it.”

“I will not.”

“I understand. You’ve never had a talent for deception.”

Zoya knew he was goading her, but her pride pricked anyway. “How can you be so sure? Perhaps the list of my talents is so long you just haven’t gotten to the end.”

“Go on, then, Nazyalensky.”

“Dearest husband,” she said, making her voice honey sweet, “did you know the women of my family can see the future in the stars?”

He huffed a laugh. “I did not.”

“Oh yes. And I’ve seen your fate in the constellations. You will grow old, fat, and happy, father many badly behaved children, and future generations will tell your story in legend and song.”

“Very convincing,” Nikolai said. “You’re good at this game.” A long silence followed, filled with nothing but the rattling of the coach wheels. “Now tell me I’ll find a way out of this. Tell me it will be all right.”

His tone was merry, teasing, but Zoya knew him too well. “It will be all right,” she said with all the conviction she could muster. “We’ll solve this problem as we’ve solved all the others before.” She tilted her head up to look at him. His eyes were closed; a worried crease marred his brow. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

*

[ Nikolai and Tolya on Zoya ]

“Kirigin, old friend,” said Nikolai, “you’re a good fellow. Why not find yourself a nice girl who likes hunting and can feel warmly toward a wastrel?”

Kirigin shuffled his feet like a schoolboy. “I just can’t help but feel that Commander Nazyalensky’s icy demeanor masks a tender spirit.”

Tolya snorted. “She’ll pulp your heart and drink it.”

Kirigin looked aghast, but Nikolai suspected Tolya was right. He’d come to recognize the bizarre phenomenon of Zoya’s beauty, the way men loved to create stories around it. They said she was cruel because she’d been harmed in the past. They claimed she was cold because she just hadn’t met the right fellow to warm her. Anything to soften her edges and sweeten her disposition—and what was the fun in that? Zoya’s company was like strong drink. Bracing—and best to abstain if you couldn’t handle the kick.

Nikolai hoisted himself back into the saddle. “Commander Nazyalensky’s icy exterior masks an even icier interior, but I will most certainly let her know you wish her health.”

*

She had dressed in the blue wool kefta that most Etherealki wore in cold weather, silver embroidery at its cuffs and hem, gray fox fur at its collar. She showed little sign of fatigue despite the days and nights of travel that had brought them back to Os Alta. Zoya was always a general, and her impeccable appearance was part of her armor. Nikolai glanced at his perfectly shined boots. It was a trait he respected.

*

Zoya stilled. She glowed like a painted icon in her kefta, the firelight clinging to her like a halo. He swore no woman had ever looked better in blue. “So it’s true, then?”

“As true as any story,” Nikolai said. The rumors of his bastardy had circulated since well before his birth, and he’d done his best to make peace with them. But he’d only ever spoken the truth of his parentage to one person—Alina Starkov. Why was he telling Zoya now? When he’d told Alina, she’d reassured him, said he would still make a great king. Zoya would offer no such kindness. But still he unlocked the top of his desk and removed the miniature his mother had passed along to him. She’d given it to him before she’d been forced into exile, when she’d told him who his father really was—a Fjerdan shipping magnate who had once served as emissary to the Grand Palace.

“Saints,” Zoya said as she stared down at the portrait. “The likeness—”

“Striking, I know.” Only the eyes were different—tiny daubs of blue instead of hazel—and the beard, of course. But looking at the miniature was like gazing into the future, at a Nikolai grown a bit older, a bit graver, with lines at the corners of his eyes.

Zoya hurled it into the fire.

“Zoya!” Nikolai shouted, lunging toward the grate.

“What kind of fool are you?” she spat.

He reached his hand out, but the flames were too high, and he recoiled, his rage igniting at the sight of the tiny canvas melting in its frame.

He whirled on her. “You forget yourself.”

“That portrait was as good as a loaded gun pointed at your heart.” She jabbed her finger into his chest. “Ravka’s heart. And you would risk it all for what? Stupid sentiment?”

He seized her hand before she could jab him again. “I am not one of your boys to be trifled with and lectured to. I am your king.”

Zoya’s blue eyes flashed. Her chin lifted as if to say, What is a mortal king to a queen who can summon storms? “You are my king. And I wish you to remain my king. Even if you’re too daft to protect your claim to the throne.”

Maybe so, but he didn’t want to hear it. “You had no right.”

“I am sworn to protect you. To protect this realm. I had every right.” She yanked her hand from his. “What if Magnus Opjer came to this palace? Or was invited to some banquet with you in Kerch? All it would take is a single glance for people to know—”

“They already know,” Nikolai said, feeling suddenly weary. “Or they’ve guessed. There have been whispers since before I was born.”

“We should consider eliminating him.”

He clenched his fists. “Zoya, you will do no such thing. I forbid it. And if I find you’ve acted without my consent, you will lose your rank and can spend the rest of your days teaching Grisha children how to make cloud animals.”

For a moment, it looked like she might lift her hands and raise a storm to blow the whole palace down. But then she bobbed a perfect curtsy that still somehow conveyed her contempt. “Of course, moi tsar.”

“Are you really so ruthless, Zoya? He is an innocent man. His only crime was loving my mother.”

“No, his crime was bedding your mother.”

Nikolai shook his head. Leave it to Zoya to cut right to the truth.

*

[ How she feels about Nina Zenik ]

“Why did you send Nina away?”

“What?” The question took him by surprise—even more the rapid, breathless way Zoya had spoken the words, as if forcing them from her lips.

She did not look at him. “We almost lost her before. We barely had her back, and you sent her into danger again.”

“She’s a soldier,” he said. “You made her one, Zoya. Sitting idle in the palace with nothing but her grief to occupy her mind was no good for her.”

“But she was safe.”

“And all of that safety was killing her.” Nikolai watched Zoya carefully.

“Can you forgive me for sending her away?”

“I don’t know.”

*

[ Bell tower ]

The monk, she thought. I knew we shouldn’t have let him into the palace. But as soon as Zoya slid the bolt and opened the door, Tamar said, “Nikolai is out.”

“Impossible,” Zoya protested, though she was already reaching for her boots.

Tamar’s brows rose as Zoya tossed a coat over her nightdress, cobwebs of silver silk that flickered like lightning in a storm cloud when the lamplight struck the sheer fabric just right. “Who did you dress for
tonight?” she asked.

“Myself,” snapped Zoya. “Do we know where he headed?”

“Tolya saw him fly west toward Balakirev.”

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t think so. No alarm sounded. But we can’t be sure. We’re lucky this didn’t happen in the summer.”

When the sun never properly set and anyone would be able to see a monster in the skies.

“How?” Zoya asked as she nudged a panel in the wall and it slid open to reveal a long flight of stairs. When she’d had her chambers refurbished, she’d had a tunnel dug to connect it to the network of passages beneath Os Alta. “Those chains are reinforced with Grisha steel. If he’s gotten stronger—”

“They weren’t broken,” said Tamar from behind her. “They were unlocked.”

Zoya stumbled and nearly toppled down the stairs. Unlocked? Then someone knew Nikolai’s secret? Had sought to sabotage their work to keep it undiscovered? The implications were overwhelming.

Long moments later they were pushing into the basement of the Convent of Sankta Lizabeta. Tolya waited in the gardens with three horses.

“Tell me,” Zoya said as she and Tamar mounted.

“I heard glass breaking,” Tolya replied. “When I ran inside, I saw the king take flight from the window casement. No one had come or gone through his door.”

Damn it. Then had the monster somehow managed to pick the locks? Zoya kicked her horse into a gallop. She had a thousand questions, but they could worry about how Nikolai had gotten free once they’d retrieved him.

They rode hard over the bridge and through the streets of the lower town. At a signal to the guards, they thundered through the gates and Os Alta’s famous double walls. How far had Nikolai gotten? How far would he go? Better that he flew away from the city, away from anywhere heavily populated. Zoya reached for the invisible currents that flowed around them, higher and higher, seeking the disruption on the wind that was Nikolai. It was not only the weight and size of him but the very wrongness of him that brushed against her power. Merzost. Abomination. The taint of something monstrous in his blood.

“He’s still headed west,” she said, feeling his presence bleed across her senses. “He’s in Balakirev.” A pretty little spot. One of the favored places for Grisha to visit for sleigh rides and festivals in better times.

They slowed their horses as they approached the outskirts of town and the dirt roads gave way to cobblestones. Balakirev slept, its windows dark and houses quiet. Here or there Zoya saw a lantern lit through the glass, a mother tending to a fussy infant, a clerk working late into the predawn hours. She turned her awareness to the skies and gestured the twins forward. Nikolai was moving toward the town center.

[ … ]

“The roof,” she whispered, pointing to the town hall. “I’ll watch the perimeter.”

Tamar and Tolya slipped silently from their horses, shackles in hand, and disappeared into the building. If Nikolai took flight, she could try to bring him down or at least track him. But dawn was coming on. They had to move quickly.

She waited in the shadows, eyes trained on the spires of the town hall.

The night felt too still. Zoya had the uncomfortable sense that she was being watched, but the shops and buildings surrounding the square showed no signs of life. High above, the roofline of the town hall seemed to shift. A shadow broke from the roof, wings spread against the moonlit sky. Zoya lifted her hands and prepared to bring Nikolai down, but he circled once, then settled on the towering spike of the church’s bell tower.

“Damn it.”

Tolya and Tamar would be racing up the stairs of the town hall only to find their quarry escaped. If Zoya attempted the church stairs, Nikolai could well make another leap and be long gone before she reached the top. The sky was already turning gray, and if he broke for open countryside they might never catch him. There was no time to hesitate.

She eyed the open notches in the stonework of the bell tower. Even with her amplifier, she’d never managed the control necessary for flight. Only Grisha flush with the effects of jurda parem could accomplish that feat.

“This is going to hurt,” she muttered, and spun her hands in tight circles, summoning the current, then arced her arms. The gust hit her from behind, lofting her upward. It took all her will to resist the urge to pinwheel her arms and let the wind take her higher. She thrust her hand forward and the gust threw her toward the gap in the stone—too hard, too fast. There was no time to adjust her aim.

Zoya covered her head and face, then grunted as her shoulder cracked against the edge of a column. She tumbled to the floor of the bell tower in a graceless heap and rolled to her back, trying to get her bearings.

There, high above, perched in the eaves, she caught the glint of the monster’s eyes in the dark. She could just make out his shape. His chest was bare, his torn trousers slung low on his hips. His taloned feet curved over the beams of the bell tower.

A low growl reached her, seemed to reverberate through the floorboards. Something was different tonight. He was different.

Oh Saints, she realized. He’s hungry.

In the past Zoya had been slower to find Nikolai, locating him after he had hunted and fed. He’s never killed a human before, she reminded herself.

Then amended, That we know of. But she felt, in her bones, that tonight she was the prey.

Like hell.

She pushed to her feet and hissed in a breath at the throb in her shoulder.

She’d dislocated it, maybe broken the bone. Pain rolled through her in a wave that set her stomach churning. Her right arm was useless. She’d have only her left arm to summon with, but if Adrik could do it, so could she.

“Nikolai,” she said sternly.

The growl stopped, then picked up again, lower and louder than before.

A tendril of fear uncurled in her belly. Was this what it was to be a small creature pinned helpless in the wood?

“Nikolai,” she snapped, not letting her terror enter her voice. She thought it might be a very bad thing if he knew she was afraid. “Get down here.” The growl rippled and huffed. Almost like a laugh.

Before she could make sense of that, he launched himself at her.

Zoya threw up her hand and a blast of wind pummeled the creature, but her attempt had only half the strength of her usual summoning. It drove him backward and he struck the wall, but with little force.

She saw the monster register her injury, her weakness. It drew in a long breath, muscles tensing. How many nights had she kept it from its fun? How long had it been waiting for a chance to hurt her? She needed help.

“Tolya!” she shouted. “Tamar!” But could they even hear her at such distance? Zoya eyed the bell.

The monster lunged. She dove right and screamed as her injured shoulder hit the slats, but threw her other arm up with all the force she could muster, begging the storm to answer. Wind seized the bell and sent its massive metal shell swinging. The clapper struck, a reverberant clang that shuddered through her skull and made the monster snarl. The bell struck a second time, far more weakly, before it slowed its arc.

Zoya was sweating now, the pain turning her vision black at the edges. She dragged herself toward the wall.

Nikolai—the monster—was prowling toward her in a low crouch, its clawed feet silent over the slats of the floor, the movement eerily inhuman. It was Nikolai and yet it was not Nikolai. The elegant lines of its face were the same, but its eyes were black as ink. The shadows of its wings seemed to pulse and seethe.

“Nikolai,” she said again. “I’m going to be furious if you try to eat me. And you know what I’m like when I’m mad.”

Its lips drew back in a smile—there was no other word for it—revealing needle-sharp fangs that gleamed like shards of obsidian.

Whatever was stalking her was not her king.

“Captain,” she tried. “Sturmhond.” Nothing. It stalked closer.

“Sobachka,” she said. Puppy, the nickname he’d had as a child, one she’d never used with him before. “Stop this.”

From somewhere far below she heard a door slam. Tolya? Tamar? It didn’t matter. They weren’t going to make it in time. Zoya could summon lightning, but without both arms to control the current, she knew she would kill him.

She raised her arm again. The gust drove the creature back, but its claws gripped the wooden floor and it plowed forward, wings pinned tight to its body, dark gaze focused on her.

It batted her good arm aside, hard enough that she thought it might have broken that bone too. The wind fell away and the monster’s wings flared wide.

It opened its mouth—and spoke.

“Zoya.”

She flinched. The monster did not speak. It could not. But it wasn’t even the shock of speech coming from the creature’s lips that so frightened her. That was not Nikolai’s voice; it was soft, cool as glass, familiar.

No. It couldn’t be. Fear was clouding her mind.

The creature’s lips parted. Its teeth gleamed. It seized her hair and yanked her head back as she struggled. It was going to tear her throat out. Its lips brushed the skin of her neck.

A thousand thoughts crowded into her mind. She should have brought a weapon. She shouldn’t have relied on her power. She shouldn’t have believed she wasn’t afraid to die. She shouldn’t have believed that Nikolai would not harm her.

The door to the bell tower slammed open and Tamar was there, Tolya behind her. Tamar’s axes flew. One lodged in the creature’s shoulder, the other in the meat of one of its wings. The thing turned on them, snarling, and Tolya’s hands shot out.

Zoya watched, torn between lingering dread and fascination as the creature’s legs buckled. It growled, then fell silent as Tolya slowed its heart and sent the monster into unconsciousness.

Zoya rose, cradling her dislocated arm, and looked down at the thing on the floorboards as its claws receded, the dark veins retracting and fading, its wings dissolving into shreds of shadow. The king of Ravka lay on the bell tower floor, golden hair disheveled, boyish and bleeding.

“Are you all right?” asked Tamar.

“Yes,” Zoya lied.

Zoya. The sound of his voice in that moment, smooth as glass, neither human nor inhuman. Did that mean that whatever was inside him was not the mindless monster they’d assumed? It hadn’t just been hungry; there had been something vengeful in its desire. Would Nikolai have woken with her blood on his lips?

“You know what this means,” said Tamar.

They couldn’t control him. The palace was no longer safe, and Nikolai was no longer safe in it. And right now, ambassadors, dignitaries, noblemen, and wealthy merchants were packing their best clothes and preparing to travel to Os Alta—to say nothing of the eligible princesses and hopeful noblewomen who accompanied them.

“We’ve invited emissaries from every country to witness this horror,” said Tolya. To watch Nikolai descend into bloodlust, to play audience as a king became more monster than man.

Zoya had given her life to the Second Army, to a dream that they could build something better. She had believed that if her country was strong enough, the world might change for her kind. Now that dream was collapsing. Zoya thought of the stories Nina had told them of the prison at the Ice Court. She thought of the khergud emerging from the skies to steal Grisha from the safety of their lands. She remembered bodies littering the grounds of the Little Palace the night of the Darkling’s attack. She would not let it happen again. She refused.

Zoya took a breath and slammed her shoulder back into place, ignoring the jolt of nausea that came with the pain.

“We find a cure,” she said. “Or Ravka falls.”

*

[ Darkling + Liliyana ]

But Zoya had survived by being honest with herself, and she had to acknowledge that there was another fear lurking inside her—beneath the anxieties that accompanied the preparations for this journey, beneath the ordeal of looking into the eyes of the demon and seeing its hunger. She was afraid of what they might find on the Fold. What if the genuflecting twits who worshipped the Starless One were actually right, and these bizarre occurrences heralded the Darkling’s return? What if he somehow found a way back?

“This time I’ll be ready for him.” Zoya whispered the words in the dark, beneath the roof of the chambers the Darkling had once occupied, in the palace he had built from nothing. She wasn’t a naive girl anymore, desperately trying to prove herself at every turn. She was a general with a long body count and an even longer memory.

Fear is a phoenix. Words Liliyana had spoken to her years ago and that Zoya had repeated to others many times. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return. She would not be governed by her fear. She did not have that luxury. Maybe so, she thought, but it hasn’t kept you from avoiding Nikolai since that night in the bell tower. She hated this frailty in herself, hated that she now kept Tolya or Tamar close when she was chaining the king to his bed at night, that even in meeting rooms she found herself on guard, as if expecting to look across a negotiating table and see his hazel eyes glimmer black. Her fear was useless, unproductive—and she suspected it was something the monster might enjoy.

*

Instead, he kept his easy demeanor and offered up his right wrist to Zoya. “And what are your plans for the evening, darling jailer? Headed to a secret rendezvous?”

Zoya blew out a disgruntled breath as she bent to fasten the last fetter and check the security of the locks. “As if I have the time.”

“I know you go somewhere late at night, Zoya,” he prodded. He was curious but also eager for distraction. “You’ve been seen on the grounds, though no one seems to know where you go.”

“I go a lot of places, Your Highness. And if you keep prying into my personal life, I’ll have some suggestions as to where you can go.”

“Why keep your dalliance a secret? Is he an embarrassment?” Nikolai flexed his fingers, trying to even his breathing. Zoya turned her head and the lamplight caught the crescent of her cheekbone, gilding the dark waves of her hair. He’d never quite managed to make himself immune to her beauty, and he was glad his arms were chained to the bed or he might have been tempted to reach for her.

“Keep still,” she snapped.

*

“Adrik, if the choice is between taking orders from you or Zoya Nazyalensky, you’re always going to win.”

His breath plumed in the cold air. “I used to be completely in love with her.”

“Weren’t we all? Even when she’s slicing you in two with a few well-chosen words, it’s hard to focus on anything but how good she looks doing it.”

“Appalling,” Adrik mused. “I once saw a student set fire to his own hair because he was so busy looking at Zoya. She didn’t even spare him a second glance.”

Nina fixed Adrik with a contemptuous stare, and in her most disdainful Zoya voice drawled, “Someone throw a bucket on that idiot before he burns down the palace.”

He shuddered. “That was far too convincing.” He consulted his map as they reached a crossroads. “Zoya was nice enough to look at,” he said as he led them farther west. “But there was more to it. She was the only one who treated me the same after I lost my arm.”

“Horribly?”

“She couldn’t have shown me more contempt. Her insults were a lot easier to bear than Nadia constantly fussing over me.”

*

[ About parem and amplifiers ]

“Tell me something, Nazyalensky. David said transgressing the boundaries of Grisha power has repercussions. But doesn’t an amplifier do just that? Is parem any different?”

Zoya brushed her fingers over the metal, her face thoughtful. “I’m not sure parem is so different from merzost. Like merzost, the drug requires a terrible sacrifice for the power it grants—a Grisha’s will. Even her life. But amplifiers are something else. They’re rare creatures, tied to the making at the heart of the world, the source of all creation. When an amplifier gives up its life, that is the sacrifice the universe requires. The bond is forever forged with the Grisha who deals the killing blow. It’s a terrible thing, but beautiful as well. Merzost is—”

“Abomination. I know. It’s a good thing I have such a fondness for myself.”

“All Grisha feel the pull toward merzost, the hunger to see just what we might do if we had no limits.”

“Even you?”

A small smile touched Zoya’s lips. “Especially me. Power is protection.” Before Nikolai could ask what she meant, she added, “But the price for that particular kind of power is too high. When the Darkling tried to create his own amplifiers, the result was the Fold.” She held up her arm, the cuff glinting in the lamplight. “This is enough for me.”

*

[ Relationship with mother ]

“Little Zoya with her bayonet?”

Zoya sniffed. “I always had the makings of a general.” But her mother had seen only the value in her daughter’s beauty. Zoya’s face had been her dowry at the tender age of nine. If not for Liliyana, she would have been bartered away like a new calf. But could she blame her mother? She remembered Sabina’s raw hands, her tired eyes, the gaunt lines of her body—perpetually weary and without hope. And yet, after all these years, Zoya found no scrap of forgiveness for her desperate mother or her weak father.

They could rot. She gave her reins a snap.

*

There were times like this, when they worked side by side, when the rhythm between them was so easy that her mind would turn traitor. She would look at the tousle of Nikolai’s gilded head bent over some correspondence or his long fingers tearing into a roll and she would wonder what it would be like when he finally married, when he belonged to someone else, and she lost these moments of peace.

Zoya would still be Nikolai’s general, but she knew it would be different. He would have someone else to tease and lean on and argue over the herring with. She’d made men fall in love with her before, when she was young and cruel and liked to test her power. Zoya did not desire; she was desired. And that was the way she liked it. It was galling to admit that she wasn’t at all sure she could make Nikolai want her, and more galling to think that a part of her longed to try, to know if he was as impervious to her beauty as he seemed, to know if someone like him, full of hope and light and optimistic endeavor, could love someone like her.

But even when her mind played these unkind games, Zoya knew better than to let them go too far. Her careful dealings with the First Army, her monitoring of Grisha matters all over Ravka, made it perfectly clear that-even if Nikolai had seen her as something more than an able commander—Ravka would never accept a Grisha queen. Alina had been different, a Saint, treasured by the people, a symbol of hope for the future. But to Ravka’s common folk, Zoya would always be the raven-haired witch who ruled the storms. Dangerous. Untrustworthy. They would never give up their precious golden son to a girl born of lightning and thunder and common blood. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. A crown was well and good, and sentiment made for moving melodramas, but Zoya had learned the power of fear long ago.

*

Zoya kept her shawl up but watched the Squallers closely as they lifted their arms and summoned air currents to fill the sails. It was hard not to think of her early days in the Second Army, of the terror of her first crossing, surrounded by darkness, holding her breath and waiting to hear the shriek of the volcra, the flap of their wings as they came seeking prey.

“They’re listing left,” she muttered to Nikolai as the skiff surged forward over the sand.

“They’re doing their best, Zoya.”

Their best won’t keep them alive, she wanted to bark. “I watched my friends die on these sands. The least these young dullards can do is learn to pilot a half-empty skiff across them.”

Saints, she hated being here. Nearly three years had passed since the destruction of the Fold, but a strange quiet remained at its borders, the stillness of a battleground where good soldiers had fallen. The glass skiffs the Darkling had used to enter the Fold had long since been plundered and picked apart, but the wreckage of other vessels lay scattered over the many miles of the Fold. Some people treated the snapped masts and broken hulls as shrines to the dead. But others had scavenged what they could from them—timber, canvas, whatever cargo the lost skiffs had carried.

*

[ Feelings about Saints and Sainthood ]

And yet as they traveled deeper into the gray sands, Zoya wondered if the reverent quiet at the edges of the Unsea had been pure imagination, the ghosts of her past clouding her vision. Because as they journeyed farther west, the Fold came alive. Everywhere she looked, she saw altars dedicated to the Sun Saint. Ramshackle businesses had sprouted like pox over the sands: inns and restaurants, chapels, peddlers selling holy cures, pieces of Alina’s bones, pearls from her kokoshnik, scraps of her kefta. It made Zoya’s skin crawl.

“They’ve always liked us better dead,” she said. “No one knows what to do with a living Saint.”

*

“This is the place where the Starless One fell,” said Yuri, reverence in his voice.

Was it? Zoya couldn’t be sure. The battle was a memory of violet flames and fear. Harshaw bleeding on the ground, the skies full of volcra. “Centuries before,” Yuri continued, “the Starless One stood on this very spot and challenged the rules that bound the universe. Only he dared to try to re-create the experiments of the Bonesmith, Ilya Morozova. Only he looked to the stars and demanded more.”

“He dared,” said Zoya. “And the result of his failure was a tear in the world.”

“The Shadow Fold,” said Nikolai. “The one place where his power became meaningless. The Saints do love a bit of dramatic irony.”

Zoya cut her hand through the air in irritation. “Not the Saints. This was no divine retribution.”

Yuri turned pleading eyes upon her. “How can you be sure? How can you know that the Fold was not a challenge the Saints set before the Darkling?”

“You said it yourself. He defied the rules that bind the universe, that govern our power. He violated the natural order.”

“But who created the natural order?” insisted Yuri. “Who is responsible for the making at the heart of the world?”

How she envied this boy’s certainty, his visions, his ridiculous belief that pain had a purpose, that the Saints had some kind of plan.

“Why does it have to be a who?” demanded Zoya. “Maybe this is simply how the world functions, how it works. What matters is that when Grisha overreach their power, there is a price. The lesson is built into all our stories, even the tales told to little otkazat’sya children like you.”

Yuri shook his head stubbornly. “The Black Heretic chose this place with care. There has to be a reason.”

“Maybe he liked the view,” she shot back.

*

[ Losing her shit about the Darkling ]

“Welcome, fellow pilgrims!” said a man wearing black robes and a beatific smile.

“Why, thank you,” said Zoya. Nikolai cast her a warning glance that she happily disregarded. “Are you in charge here?”

“I am just one more among the faithful.”

“And you put your faith in the Darkling?”

“In the Saint without Stars.” The pilgrim gestured to the gleaming disk of stone. It showed no imperfections, blacker than any night. “Behold the signs of his return.”

Zoya ignored the shiver that slid up her spine. “And can you tell me why you worship him?”

The man smiled again, clearly elated at the opportunity. “He loved Ravka. He wanted only to make us strong and save us from weak kings.”

“Weak kings,” mused Nikolai. “Almost as vexing as weak tea.”

But Zoya was in no mood for nonsense. “He loved Ravka,” she repeated. “And what is Ravka? Who is Ravka?”

“All of us. Peasant and prince alike.”

“Of course. Did the Darkling love my aunt who died beside countless innocent civilians in Novokribirsk so that he could show the world his might?”

“Leave them be,” Nikolai murmured, laying a hand on her arm.

She shook him off. “Did he love the girl he forced to commit those murders? What about the girl he tossed into the old king’s bed for his own purposes, then mutilated when she dared to challenge him? Or the woman he blinded for failing to offer him unswerving devotion?” Who would speak for Liliyana, for Genya and Alina and Baghra if she did not? Who will speak for me?

*

[ Continues losing her shit about the Darkling ]

Zoya didn’t care what the pilgrims wanted. If she had to look at them and their black banners another minute, she thought she might well lose her mind.

She pushed up her sleeves, feeling the weight of the amplifier at her wrist. “Enough politicking. Enough diplomacy. They want darkness? I’ll give it to them.”

“Zoya—” warned Nikolai.

But her anger had slipped its leash, and she could feel the storm rise. All it took was the barest twist of her wrists and the sands shifted, forming ripples, then dunes, rising higher and higher. She saw Genya huddled in her black shawl, her arms thick with scars. She saw Harshaw dead in the sand, his red hair like a fallen flag. Zoya’s nostrils were full of the scent of bergamot and blood. The wind howled, as if it were speaking her rage.

“Zoya, stop this,” Nikolai hissed.

The pilgrims shouted to one another, taking shelter, huddling together.

She liked their fear. She let the sand form shapes, a shining sun, the face of a woman—Liliyana’s face, though no one there would know it. The wind screamed and the sands rose in a tidal wave, blocking out the sun and plunging the camp into darkness.

The pilgrims scattered and ran.

“There’s your Saint,” she said with grim satisfaction.

“Enough, Zoya,” said Nikolai in the deep shadow her power had cast. “That is an order.”

She let the sands drop.

*

[ Meeting the Saints, ft. Juris as a dragon (!!!), Zoyalai teamwork, and Juris destroying Zoya's amplifier ]

“Zoya, say something spiteful.”

“Why?” she asked faintly.

“Because I’m fairly certain I’m hallucinating, and in my dreams you’re much nicer.”

“You’re an idiot, Nikolai.”

“Not your best work.”

“I’m sorry I can’t deliver better wordplay right now. I seem to be paralyzed with fear.”

Her voice was trembling—and if ruthless, unshakable Zoya was that frightened, then everything he was seeing was real: the bees, the grotesque, and yes, impossible but there nonetheless, the dragon, vast in size, its arching wings leathery, its scales glinting black, green, blue, gold in the flat gray light.

“Zoya, whatever you did to bring us here, this would be the time to undo it.”

“If I could, I would,” she growled, then hurled a wall of wind upward.

The bees struck it, like water parting around a rock in a stream, their loud buzz filling Nikolai’s ears.

“Do something!” said Zoya.

“Like what?”

“You have guns!”

“I’m not going to shoot at bees.”

“Then shoot at that thing.”

Nikolai opened fire at the grotesque. His bullets struck its shifting body—a head, an arm, another arm, a distended chest. Now that the thing was closer, he glimpsed claws, jaws thick with canines, the dense brown pelt of what looked like a bear. All of his bullets were absorbed in the grotesque’s body, then emerged a second later as if the writhing flesh had simply spat them out.

High above, the dragon roared and spread its enormous wings. A fountain of flame erupted from the beast’s mouth and blasted toward them. Zoya’s hands shot upward, and a dome of air formed over their heads. The flames beat at the barrier. Nikolai could feel the heat singeing his brows.

The blast relented and the dragon shrieked again, wheeling above them.

“I think it’s fair to say we’re outgunned,” said Nikolai.

“Lay down your arms,” the grotesque said in a chorus of voices from a hundred mouths. “In a moment,” replied Nikolai. “I’m finding them very reassuring right now. Yuri, get off of your damned knees and at least try to look like you can fight.”

“You don’t understand,” said Yuri, his eyes full of tears.

“That is entirely correct.”

“I’m going to raise the sands again,” said Zoya. “If I bring a big enough storm, we’ll have cover to get … somewhere. You’ll need to work the sails; I won’t be able to control the storm and direct the skiff.”

“Do it,” said Nikolai, eyeing the lines. They were primitive at best, but he had managed rockier seas than these.

He opened fire, trying to lend Zoya cover as she swept her arms forward and the sands of the Fold—or wherever they were—rose with a whoosh.

There was no subtlety now, no need to mask her actions to fool the pilgrims. Instead the storm came to life with a start like a man waking from a bad dream, a sudden wall of force that thrust the creatures back, the sands forming a whirling wall to hide the skiff’s escape.

Nikolai holstered his revolvers and seized the lines, releasing the sail. The canvas snapped, filling with air, driving them east and back toward what he hoped were still the borders of the Fold. Whatever these creatures were, their power had to be tied to this place.

Suddenly the ground beneath them seemed to buckle. The skiff listed precariously starboard as one of its runners peeled away from the sand. Zoya and Yuri lost their footing, but Zoya did not falter. Even on her back, she kept the winds in motion. Nikolai held tight to the lines, trying to use the storm to help right the skiff. But the ground was bucking like a wild animal, as if the very sands beneath them had life.

The skiff tilted higher on its single runner. “We’re going over!” Nikolai shouted. He had the uncanny sense that a giant hand was deliberately tipping them out onto the sands.

They landed in an unceremonious heap. Nikolai was on his feet in an instant, grabbing for Zoya and Yuri to roll all of them to safety. But the skiff thumped harmlessly down to its other side, and the sands instantly calmed.

Without Zoya’s storm raging, the skies were clear again. A shape emerged out of the sand before them, then another, then another—a regiment of sand soldiers. They were faceless, but their uniforms were elaborately detailed. They looked like the paintings of ancient Ravkan soldiers, the army of Yaromir the Determined, dressed in furs and bronze, but all of it wrought in sand. Zoya raised her hands and sent a fierce gust of wind slamming into the ranks of soldiers, but they stood solid and unmoving.

“What are they?” Zoya asked.

The soldiers continued to emerge in a rippling wave, an army that stretched to the horizon, where the castle still loomed.

“I think we’re being shown just how overmatched we are,” Nikolai said.

“By whom?”

The sand soldiers stepped forward as one, and the sound was like a shotgun blast. Zoya and Nikolai stood back-to-back, surrounded. Next to them, Yuri remained on his knees, his face filled with a kind of manic elation.

“I don’t know how to fight this,” Zoya said. She’d somehow steadied her voice, but he could hear the fear in it anyway. “Is this the part where we die well?”

The dragon was wheeling overhead. If these creatures wanted Nikolai dead, they’d chosen an elaborate means of making it happen, so something else had to be in play—hopefully something that would allow him to negotiate for Zoya’s and Yuri’s safety.

“No, this is the part where the king of Ravka surrenders himself, and the love we never had lives on in ballads and song.”

“Nikolai,” snapped Zoya, “don’t you dare.”

“Give me another option, Nazyalensky. One of us needs to survive this.”

Then he lowered his voice. “Get back to the capital and rally the Grisha.”

Assuming she could even get back to Os Alta from here.

He tossed his revolvers to the sand and raised his hands, scanning the rows of sand soldiers, the figures in the sky, the mountainous body of the grotesque hovering behind their ranks. “I’m not sure who I’m surrendering to—”

The dragon turned sharply in the air and dove for them. Maybe they did intend to kill him, after all.

“Zoya, get down!” Nikolai shouted, lunging for her.

“Like hell,” she muttered, and knocked him into the sands, bracing before him with her feet planted and her arms raised.

The dragon unleashed its fire and Zoya let loose the storm. For a moment they seemed evenly matched—a golden cascade of flame buffeted by a wall of wind. Then Zoya swept her arms in a loop and cast them to the sides like a conductor concluding a symphony. For a moment Nikolai didn’t understand, but then the flames collapsed. The dragon reared back, a choked wheeze emerging from its throat. Zoya had stolen its breath; she’d banished the air from the fire, depriving it of fuel, and left the dragon gasping.

Nikolai leapt for his guns, ready to seize the opportunity she’d offered, but before he could even aim, the dragon released a deafening roar. Its jaws opened and fire spurted forth. This time the flame burned blue, brighter and hotter than before, hot enough to melt stone—or sand.

“Zoya!” Nikolai shouted, but Zoya had already fisted her hands and raised them again, driving an icy wind against the dragon’s onslaught. Blue fire lit her face. Her hair rose like a black crown around her head, and her eyes blazed cobalt as if she too burned with the dragon’s fire.

Zoya screamed as the dragon’s flames pounded against the force of her power. She gritted her teeth, and Nikolai saw beads of sweat bloom on her brow. He opened fire on the dragon, but his bullets seemed to melt before they even came near the creature’s scales. Ice crystalized on the fallen skiff, coated Nikolai’s hands and the ranks of the sand soldiers surrounding them.

And then Zoya collapsed. She fell to her knees, and the winter storm evaporated, leaving nothing but a thin shell of melting frost in its wake.

Nikolai was on his feet, stumbling toward her, certain he was about to see her consumed by flame. But the dragon withdrew its fire. It hovered in the air, watching.

“Zoya,” Nikolai said as he went to his knees beside her, catching her in his arms before she could topple. Her skin was aglow with the light of Grisha power, but her nose was bleeding and she was shaking.

The dragon landed before them, folding its vast wings. Perhaps it wanted to play with its food.

“Stay back,” Nikolai said, though he had no way of preventing the beast’s advance. His weapons were as good as toys. Yuri was still on his knees, swaying like a drunk who couldn’t decide whether it was worth the effort to try to stand.

“The boy king,” said the dragon, prowling forward, tail lashing the air. Its voice was a low rumble, like thunder on a distant peak. “The war hero. The prince with a demon curled inside his heart.” Nikolai wasn’t sure if he was more startled that the creature could speak or that it knew what had brought them on this cursed journey.

The dragon leaned forward. Its eyes were large and silver, its pupils black slits.

“If I wanted to harm her, she would be ashes, boy. So would you all.”

“It sure looked like you wanted to harm her,” Nikolai said. “Or is that how your kind says a friendly hello?”

The dragon rumbled what might have been a laugh. “I wanted to see what she could do.”

Zoya released a howl of pure anguish. It was a sound so desperate, so raw, Nikolai could hardly believe it was coming from his general’s mouth.

“What is it?” he pleaded, his arm tightening around her as he scanned her body for wounds, for blood.

But she cast him off, scrabbling in the sand, another wail of rage and pain tearing from her chest.

“For Saints’ sake, Zoya, what’s wrong?”

She snatched up something that glinted in her hand and clutched it to her chest, her sobs like nothing he had heard before. It took him a moment to force her fingers open. Cradled in her palm, he saw the broken halves of her silver cuff. Her amplifier had shattered.

“No,” she sobbed. “No.”

“Yes,” hissed the dragon.

“Juris, stop this,” said a woman, emerging from between the rows of soldiers. She wore a dress of blooming roses that blossomed and died in curling vines around her body. Her golden hair was a buzzing mass of bees that swarmed and clustered around her radiant face. “You got your battle. They know what they are facing.”

“The first bit of excitement we’ve had in years, Elizaveta, and you seem determined to deny me my fun. Very well.”

The dragon heaved its shoulders in a shrug, and then, before Nikolai’s bewildered eyes, it seemed to shift and shrink, becoming a towering man in finely wrought chain mail that glittered like black scales. The sand soldiers parted to reveal the grotesque, his body still shifting and changing, now covered in eyes as if to better take in every inch of them.

“What is this?” Nikolai demanded. “Who are you?”

“Do the people not pray for Saints?” asked the man called Juris.

“At last,” wept Yuri, still kneeling. “At last.”

“Come,” said Elizaveta, extending a hand, the bees buzzing gently around her in a hum that was almost soothing. “We will explain all.”

But Nikolai’s mind had already leapt a chasm into preposterous territory. Sankta Lizabeta, who had been martyred in a field of roses. Sankt Juris, who …

“You slew the dragon,” said Nikolai. “It’s … it’s in all of the stories.”

“Sometimes the stories are rough on the details,” said Juris with a gleaming smile. “Come, boy king. It’s time we talked.”

*

[ Isaak on Zoya ]

Then the summons had come. Isaak had been on duty at the entrance to the southern wing when Tamar Kir-Bataar had sought him out. Isaak had been confused and more than a little frightened. It was not every day one was called before the Grisha Triumvirate—though he was relieved to find that Zoya Nazyalensky was still traveling with the king, so he could at least avoid her scathing look of disdain. She could wither a man’s balls just by raising a brow.

*

[ Zoya on the Saints and her destroyed amplifier ]

“Probably genuflecting somewhere. Nikolai, is this a bargain we want to make?”

“We came here for a cure, and now we’ve been offered one.”

“You could die.”

“A risk we’ve long been willing to take. In fact, I believe you offered to put a bullet in my head not so long ago.”

“We have less than three weeks before the party in Os Alta,” she protested.

“Then I will have to master the monster in that time.”

“You saw what they can do. What if we shatter the bounds of the Unsea and unleash them on Ravka? Are you willing to make that gamble?”

Nikolai ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know.”

“And yet you agreed to dance at the first asking like a boy at a country ball.”

“I did.”

And he didn’t sound remotely sorry about it. “We can’t trust them. We don’t really even know who they are.”

“I understand that. Just as you understand that is the choice we must make. Why are you fighting it, Zoya?”

Zoya leaned her head against the edge of the window and looked out at the nothing beyond. Had the Saints been staring at this same empty view for hundreds of years?

“If these are the Saints,” she said, “then who have we been praying to all this time?”

“Do you pray?” Nikolai couldn’t conceal his surprise.

“I did. When I was young. They never answered.”

“We’ll get you another.”

“Another … ?” It took her a moment to understand what he meant.

Without realizing it, Zoya had let her hand return to the place where her amplifier had been. She forced herself to release her wrist. “You can’t get me another,” she said, her voice thick with scorn. Good. Better that than self-pity. “It doesn’t work that way. I’ve worn that cuff, those bones, since I was thirteen years old.”

“Zoya, I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t know who these Saints really are. All I know is that they’re the last hope we have.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Elizaveta could be as gracious as she liked. It didn’t change the fact that they’d been abducted. “We’re prisoners here, Nikolai. We don’t know what they may ask of us.”

“The first thing will be to banish your pride.”

Nikolai and Zoya jumped. Juris stood in the doorway. He was in human form, but the shape of the dragon seemed to linger over him.

“Come, Zoya Nazyalensky, little storm witch. It’s time.”

“For what?” Zoya bit out, feeling anger ignite inside her—familiar, welcome, so much more useful than grief.

“For your first lesson,” he said. “The boy king isn’t the only one with something to learn.”

*

[ Zoya and Juris (!!!) ]

Zoya did not want to go with the dragon, but she made herself follow him down the twisting halls of the mad palace. She told herself she’d be able to learn more about the ritual Nikolai was expected to endure and determine the Saints’ true motives. The stronger voice inside her said that if she got to know Juris, she could find a way to punish him for what he’d taken from her. She was too aware of her pulse beating beneath the skin of her bare wrist. It felt naked, vulnerable, and utterly wrong.

Still, as much as she would have liked to give her thoughts over to revenge, the path they were taking required all her attention. The palace was vast, and though some individual rooms seemed to have specific characteristics, most of the hallways, stairs, and passages were wrought of the same glittering, colorless sand. It didn’t help that no matter where you were inside the massive structure, you always had the same view: a wide gray expanse of nothing.

“I can feel your anger, storm witch,” Juris said. “It makes the air crackle.”

“That word is offensive,” she said to his back, soothed by the thought of shoving him down the long flight of stairs.

“I can call you whatever you like. In my time, witch was the word men used for women they should steer clear of. I think that describes you very well.”

“Then perhaps you should take your own advice and avoid me.”

“I think not,” said Juris. “One of the only joys left to me is courting danger, and the Fold offers few opportunities for it.”

Would he even tumble if she pushed him, or just sprout wings and float gently to the bottom of the stairway? “How old are you anyway?”

“I’ve long since forgotten.”

Juris looked to be a man of about forty. He was as big as Tolya, maybe larger, and Zoya could imagine he must have cut a daunting figure with a broadsword in his hand. She could see a tracery of scales over his shaven scalp, as if his dragon features had crept into his human body.

Her curiosity got the better of her. “Do you prefer your human form?”

“I have no preference. I am both human and dragon always. When I wish to read, to argue, to drink wine, I take the form of a man. When I wish to fly and be free of human bother, I am a dragon.”

“And when you fight?”

He glanced over his shoulder and his eyes flashed silver, the pupils slitting as he smiled, his teeth slightly too long and predatory for his human mouth. “I could best you in either form.”

“I doubt that,” she said with more confidence than she felt. If she’d still had her amplifier, there would have been no hesitation.

“Do not forget I was a warrior in my first life.”

Zoya raised an unimpressed brow. “Sankt Juris who slew the dragon was really a Grisha who made it his amplifier?” She knew the story well; every Ravkan child did—the warrior who had gone to best a beast and fought it three times before finally vanquishing it. But now she had to wonder how much was legend and how much was fact.

Juris scowled and continued down the stairs. “Amplifier. Like that pathetic bauble you clung to so desperately? When I slew the dragon, I took his form and he took mine. We became one. In the old times, that was how it was. What you practice now is a corruption, the weakest form of the making at the heart of the world.”

[ … ]

“What is it you want from me?” she asked.

“When I pass into the mortal world, my magic will go with me, but my knowledge need not. You will carry it.”

“What an honor,” she said without enthusiasm.

“All of the rules the Grisha have created, that you live by, the colors you wear. You think you’ve been training to make yourself stronger, when really you’ve been training to limit your power.”

Zoya shook her head. First this oversized lizard had robbed her of the amplifier she’d earned with her own blood, and now he was insulting the training she’d dedicated her life to. She’d taken her education at the Little Palace seriously, the theory she’d read in the library, the poses and techniques she’d learned in Baghra’s hut by the lake. She’d practiced and honed her abilities, forged her raw talent into something more. There had been other Etherealki who had started with more natural ability, but none had worked as hard. “You can say that, but I know that training made me a better Squaller.”

“Yes, but did it make you a better Grisha?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Not quite. But I began in ignorance as deep as yours and—just like you—with nothing but the wild wind at my fingertips.”

“You were a Squaller?” Zoya asked, surprised.

“There was no name for what I was.”

“But you could summon?” she pushed.

“I could. I did. It was one more weapon in my arsenal.”

“In what war?”

“In countless wars. I was hero to some. Others would have called me an invader, a barbarian, a sacker of temples. I tried to be a good man. At least, that’s what I remember.”

How men liked to recount their deeds.

“Not all of us take to nobility as well as your king.”

Zoya strolled the perimeter of the room. There was little to look at. Other than the weapons collected on the wall, everything was black stone—the mantel of the great fireplace where blue flame leapt and danced, the decorations atop it, the crest upon the wall. “If you expect me to damn Nikolai for his goodness, you’ll have to wait awhile.”

“And if I tell you Ravka needs a more ruthless ruler?”

“I’d say that sounds like the excuse of a ruthless man.”

“Who said anything about men?”

Was that this creature’s game? “You wish me to steal my king’s throne? You mistake my ambitions.”

Juris rumbled a laugh. “I mistake nothing. Do you really believe you were meant to spend your life in service? You cannot tell me you have not contemplated what it would mean to be a queen.”

Zoya picked up a tiny agate horse on the mantel, one of a herd of what might be hundreds that flowed over the stone. Was this how Juris spent his eternity? Using fire to fashion tiny reminders of another life? “As if a queen does not live her life in service too. I serve the Grisha. I serve Ravka.”

“Ravka.” He rolled the R in a growl. “You serve a nation of ghosts. All those you failed. All those you will continue to fail until you become what you were meant to be.”

*

[ Yuri and Nikolai talk about Zoya's hatred for the Darkling ]

He could see Yuri was ill at ease as they crossed the bridge. “Is it that you don’t like heights or that you don’t approve of Commander Nazyalensky?”

“Your Highness, I would never say I don’t approve.”

“Answer enough. Why don’t you like her?” Zoya didn’t aspire to likability. It was one of her most endearing qualities. Still, he wanted to know.

“Those things she said to the pilgrims …” Yuri shook his head. “I don’t understand her anger. The Darkling’s crimes are many, but she was one of his favorites.”

It wasn’t something Zoya liked to discuss. She liked to burn her past like the fuse on a stick of dynamite.

“What do you suppose fuels her anger?” said Nikolai.

“Hate?”

“Of a kind. All fuels burn differently. Some faster, some hotter. Hate is one kind of fuel. But hate that began as devotion? That makes for another kind of flame.”

Yuri ran a bony hand over the roughspun of his robes. “I’ve read thehistories. I know he did wicked things, but—”

“The books do not tell the whole story.”

“I know, of course, yes. Yes. But I find … I find I don’t entirely disagree with his motives.”

“And his methods?”

“They were extreme,” Yuri conceded. “But perhaps … perhaps in somecases necessary?”

“Yuri, if you wish to keep your head attached to your body, I recommend never saying that within Commander Nazyalensky’s hearing. But you’re not entirely wrong.”

*

[ Relationship with Liliyana + ending of trust in the Darkling ]

In the wake of the disaster, all crossings had ceased, and it had taken weeks for news of the casualties to reach Kribirsk. The Second Army was in chaos, the Sun Summoner had disappeared or been killed, and the Darkling was said to have emerged somewhere in West Ravka. But Zoya did not care. She could only think of Liliyana. She’ll be sitting in her little shop with Lada and the chickens, she told herself. All will be well. Zoya waited and prayed to every Saint, returning to the Kribirsk drydocks day after day, begging for news. And finally, when no one would help her, she’d commandeered a small skiff on her own and entered the Fold with no one to protect her.

She knew that if the volcra found her, she would die. She had no light or fire with which to fight them. She had no weapons but her power. But she’d taken the tiny craft and entered the dark alone, in silence. She had traveled long miles to the broken remnants of Novokribirsk. Half the town was gone, swallowed by the darkness that reached all the way to the fountain in the main square.

Zoya had run to her aunt’s shop and found no one there. The door was unlocked. The chickens squawked in the yard. A cup of bergamot tea, Liliyana’s favorite, sat on the counter, long since gone cold. The rest of the town was quiet. A dog barked somewhere, a child cried. She could find no word of Liliyana or her ward until at last she spotted the same customer she’d seen that long ago day in her aunt’s shop. “Liliyana Garin? Have you seen her? Is she alive?”

The old customer’s face paled. “I … She tried to help me when the darkness came. She pushed me out of the way so that I could run. If not for
her—”

Zoya had released a sob, not wanting to hear any more. Brave Liliyana.

Of course she had run toward the docks when the screaming began, ready to help. Why couldn’t you be a coward this one time? Zoya could not help imagining the dark stain of the Fold bleeding over the town, the monsters descending from the air with their teeth and claws, shrieking as they tore her aunt apart. All her kindness had meant nothing, her generosity, her loving heart. She’d been nothing but meat to them. She’d meant even less to the Darkling, the man who had unleashed his horrors just to make a point, the man she had as good as worshipped.

“She should have let you die,” Zoya spat at the old customer, and turned her back on him. She found a quiet street, curled up against a low stone wall, and wept as she had not done since she was a child.

“Smile, beautiful girl,” said a stranger passing. “We are still alive! There is still hope!”

She snatched the air from his lungs and drove him to his knees. “Smile,” she commanded as his eyes watered and his face turned red. “Smile for me. Tell me again about hope.”

Zoya left him on the ground, gasping.

*

[ Our man Juris + amplifiers ]

Juris leaned his big body against the basalt wall. “The dragon was the first true challenge I’d ever known as a warrior, the only creature able to meet me as an equal in the field. I could not help but respect him. As he sank his jaws into me, I knew he felt just as I did. The dragon and I were the same, connected to the heart of creation, born of the elements, and unlike any other.”

“Like calls to like,” she said softly. She knew that feeling of kinship, of ferocity. If she closed her eyes, she would feel the ice on her cheeks, see the blood in the snow. “But in the end, you killed him.”

“We both died that day, Zoya. I have his memories and he has mine. We have lived a thousand lives together. It was the same with Grigori and the great bear, with Elizaveta and her bees. Have you never stopped to wonder how it’s possible that some Grisha are themselves amplifiers?”

Zoya hadn’t really. Grisha who were born amplifiers were rare and often served as Examiners, using their abilities to test for the presence of Grisha power in children. The Darkling had himself been an amplifier, as had his mother. It was one of the theories for why he had been so powerful. “No,” she admitted.

“They are connected to the making at the heart of the world. In the time before the word Grisha had ever been spoken, the lines that divided us from other creatures were less firm. We did not just take an animal’s life, we gave up a part of ourselves in return. But somewhere along the way, Grisha began killing, claiming a piece of the power of creation without giving anything of ourselves. This is the pathetic tradition of your amplifiers.”

“Should I feel shame for claiming an amplifier?” Zoya said. He had no right to these judgments. How often had Zoya cried? How many futile prayers had she spoken, unable to rid herself of that stubborn, stupid belief that someone would answer? “It must be easy to ponder the universe, safe in your palace, away from the petty, brutal dealings of man. Maybe you don’t remember what it is to be powerless. I do.”

“Maybe so,” said Juris. “But you still wept for the tiger.”

Zoya froze. He couldn’t know. No one knew what she had done that night, what she had seen. “What do you mean?”

“When you are tied to all things, there is no limit to what you may know. The moment that bracelet dropped from your wrist, I saw it all. Young Zoya bleeding in the snow, heart full of valor. Zoya of the lost city. Zoya of the garden. You could not protect them then, and you cannot protect them now, not you and not your monster king.”

Do not look back at me. The well within her had no bottom. She tossed a stone into the darkness and she fell with it, on and on. She needed to get out of this room, to get away from Juris. “Are we done here?”

“We haven’t yet begun. Tell me, storm witch, when you slew the tiger, did you not feel its spirit moving through you, feel it take the shape of your anger?”

Zoya did not want to speak of that night. The dragon knew things he could not know. She forced herself to laugh. “You’re saying I might have become a tiger?”

“Maybe. But you are weak, so who can be certain?”

Zoya curled her lip. She kept herself still though the rage inside her leapt.

“Do you mean to goad me? It will take more than the slights of an old man.”

“You showed courage when we fought—ingenuity, nerve. And still you lost. You will continue to lose until you open the door.”

He turned suddenly and lunged toward her, his body growing larger, blotting out the light as his wings spread. His vast jaws parted and flame bloomed from somewhere inside him.

Zoya threw her arms over her head, cowering.

Abruptly the flames banked and Juris stood looking at her in his human form. “Have I chosen a weakling?” he said in disgust.

But now it was Zoya’s turn to smile. “Or maybe just a girl who knows how to look like one.”

Zoya stood and thrust her hands forward. The storm thundered toward him, a straight shot of wind and ire that knocked Juris from his feet and sent him tumbling, skating along the smooth stone floor and right out of the cave mouth. Weak. A fraction of the strength she had commanded with her amplifier. But he rolled over the edge and vanished, the surprise on his face like a balm to Zoya’s heart.

A moment later the dragon rose on giant wings. “Did I break your will when I broke your silly bauble?”

Had he? Without her amplifier, summoning her power was like reaching for something and misjudging the distance, feeling your fingers close over nothing but air. She had always been powerful, but it was the tiger’s life that had given her true strength. And now it was gone. What was she—who was she without it? If they ever got free of this place, how was she supposed to return to her command?

“Choose a weapon,” said Juris.

“I’m too tired for this.”

“Give me a worthy fight and you can go hide wherever you like. Choose a weapon.”

“I am the weapon.” Or she had been. “I don’t need a cudgel or a blade.”

“Very well,” said Juris, shifting smoothly into his human form. “I’ll choose one for you.” He grabbed a sword from the wall and tossed it to her.

She caught it awkwardly with both hands. It was far too heavy. But she had no time to think. He was already springing toward her, a massive broadsword in his hands.

“What is the point of this?” she asked as he struck her blade with a blow that reverberated up her arms. “I’ve never been any good at swordplay.”

“You’ve spent your life only choosing the paths at which you knew you could excel. It’s made you lazy.”

Zoya grimaced and parried, trying to remember her long-ago education with Botkin Yul-Erdene. They’d used knives and rapiers and even taken target practice with pistols. Zoya had enjoyed all of it, particularly the hand-to-hand combat, but she’d had little cause to practice her skills since. What was the point of using her fists when she could command a storm?

“Not bad,” he said as she succeeded in dodging one of his thrusts. “Using your power has become too easy for you. When you fight this way, you have to focus so entirely on surviving that you stop thinking about everything else. You cannot worry about what came before or what happens next, what has been lost or what you might gain. There is only this moment.”

“What possible advantage is that?” Zoya said. “Isn’t it better to be able to predict what comes next?”

“When your mind is free, the door opens.”

“What door?”

“The door to the making at the heart of the world.”

Zoya feinted right and stepped close to deny Juris the advantage of his longer reach. “That is already what I do when I summon,” she said, sweat beginning to drip from her brow. “That’s what all Grisha do when we use our power.”

“Is it?” he asked, bringing his sword down again. The clash of metal filled her ears. “The storm is still outside you, something you welcome and guard against all at once. It howls outside the door. It rattles the windows. It wants to be let in.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Let the storm in, Zoya. Do not summon. Do not reach for it. Let it come to you. Let it guide your movements. Give me a proper fight.”

Zoya grunted as his blade struck hers. She was already breathless, her arms aching from the weight of her weapon. “I’m not strong enough to beat you without using my power.”

“You do not use it. You are it. The storm is in your bones.”

“Stop. Talking. Nonsense,” she snarled. It wasn’t fair. He was forcing her to play a game she couldn’t win. And Zoya always won.

Very well. If he wanted her to fight without summoning, she would, and she would best him at it too. Then Juris could hang his big ugly head in shame. She charged him, giving in to the thrill of the fight, the challenge of it, ignoring the pain that shivered up her arms as his blade met hers again and again. She was smaller and lighter, so she kept to the balls of her feet and stayed well within his guard.

His blade hissed against the flesh of her arm, and she felt the pain like a burn. Zoya knew she was bleeding, but she didn’t care. She only wanted to know he could bleed too.

Lunge. Parry. Attack. React. React. React. Her heart pounded like thunder. In her blood she felt the roaring of the wind. She could feel her body move before she told it to, the air whistling past her, through her. Her blood was charged with lightning. She brought her sword down, and in it she felt the strength of the hurricane, tearing trees up by their roots, unstoppable.

Juris’ blade shattered.

“There she is,” he said with his dragon’s smile.

Zoya stood quaking, eyes wide. She had felt her strength double, treble, the strength of a whirlwind in her limbs. It shouldn’t have been possible, but she couldn’t deny what she’d felt—or what she’d done. The proof was in the broken weapon that lay at her feet. She flexed her hand around the grip of her sword. The storm is in your bones.

“I see I finally have your attention,” said the dragon.

She looked up at him. He’d stolen her amplifier, broken some part of her.

She would repay him for that—and he would help her learn to do it.

“Is there more?” she asked.

“So much more,” said Juris.

Zoya dropped back into fighting stance and lifted her blade—light as air in her hands. “Then you’d better get yourself a new sword.”

*

[ Riding Juris as a dragon ]

But what if there was another way?

“Show me.”

Juris shifted, his bones cracking and re-forming as he took on his dragon form. “Climb on.” Zoya hesitated, staring up at the massive beast before her. “It is not an offer I make to just anyone, storm witch.”

“And if a foul mood strikes you and you decide to cast me from your back?” Zoya asked as she laid her hands on the scales at his neck. They were sharp and cool to the touch.

“Then I have made you strong enough to survive the fall.”

“Reassuring.” She pressed her boot into his flank and hitched herself onto the ridge of his neck. It wasn’t comfortable. Dragons had not been made for riding.

“Hold on,” he said.

“Oh, is that what I’m supposed to—” Zoya gasped and clung tight as Juris’ wings flapped once, twice, and he launched himself into the colorless sky.

The wind rushed against her face, lifting her hair, making her eyes water.

She had flown before, had traveled on Nikolai’s flying contraptions. This was nothing like that. She could feel every shift Juris made with the currents as he rode the wind, the movement of the muscles beneath his scales, even the way his lungs expanded with each breath. She could feel the force of a stampede in the body beneath her, the heaving power of a storm-tossed sea.

There was nothing to see in the Saints’ Fold. It was all barren earth and flat horizon. Maybe that was maddening for Juris—to fly for miles and yet go nowhere. But Zoya didn’t care. She could stay this way forever with nothing but sky and sand surrounding her. She laughed, her heart leaping.

This was the magic she’d been promised as a child, the dream that all those fairy stories had offered and never delivered. She wished the girl she’d been could have lived this.

“Open the door, Zoya.” The dragon’s words rumbled through his body.

“Open your eyes.”

“There’s nothing to see!” But that wasn’t entirely true. Up ahead, she glimpsed a jagged blot on the landscape. She knew instantly what it was.

“Turn around,” she demanded. “I want to go back.”

“You know you cannot.”

“Turn around.” The strength of the storm filled her bones, and she tried to move the dragon’s head.

“Zoya of the lost city,” he said. “Open the door.”

[ … ]

Zoya never told Alina the details of why she had chosen to fight beside her, why she’d turned against the man she’d once revered. It didn’t matter. She’d stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sun Saint. They’d fought and they’d won. They’d watched the Darkling burn.

“And still the wound bleeds,” said the dragon. “You will never be truly strong until it closes.”

“I don’t want it to heal,” Zoya said angrily, her cheeks wet with tears. Below, she saw the version of Novokribirsk that existed in this twilight world, a black scar across the sands. “I need it.”

The wound was a reminder of her stupidity, of how readily she’d been willing to put her faith in the Darkling’s promise of strength and safety, of how easily she’d given up her power to him—and no one had needed to force her down the aisle to make her do it. She’d done it gladly. You and I are going to change the world, he’d told her. And she’d been fool enough to believe him.

“Zoya of the lost city. Zoya of the broken heart. You could be so much more.”

“Why didn’t you come?” she sobbed, surprised at the fresh tears that rose in her. She’d believed them long since shed. “Why didn’t you save her? All of them?”

“We didn’t know what he intended.”

“You should have tried!”

She would always be that girl weeping into her pillow, whispering prayers no one would answer. She would always be that child dressed in gold being led like an animal to slaughter. It was power that had saved her that day in the church, and that was what she had learned to rely on, to cultivate. But it had not been enough to save Liliyana. After the war, she’d gone in search of Lada, hoping the child might have survived. She found no trace. Zoya would never know what had become of that bright-eyed, pugfaced girl.

“Can you forgive us?” Juris asked. “For being foolish? For being frail? For being fallible despite our great powers? Can you forgive yourself?”

For loving the Darkling. For following him. For failing to save Liliyana. For failing to protect the Second Army. The list of her crimes was too long. Zoya, the dragon rumbled. It was less a spoken word than a thought that entered her head, a sense of eternity. Open the door. Connect your past to your future.

Zoya rested her head on the dragon’s neck and felt strength flow through her. She heard her heart beating in time with his, slow and relentless, and beneath it, a deeper sound, lower, one that touched everything, the sound of the universe, the making at the heart of the world. She wished she could be strong enough for this, but whatever Juris wanted from her, she could not find her way to it.

You are the conduit, Zoya. You will bring the Grisha back to what they were meant to be before time and tragedy corrupted their power. But only if you can open the door.

Why me? she wondered.

Because you chose this path. Because your king trusts you. Juris tipped his wing and wheeled back to the palace. Because you are strong enough to survive the fall.

*

[ Swordplay with Juris ]

He’d left Ravka unforgivably vulnerable. There were ministers who could rule in his stead, but he hadn’t made any order of succession clear. He had no heir. He had no wife to step forward as a rallying symbol. And who would protect her anyway, this imaginary girl he was to wed? The answer was obvious: Zoya Nazyalensky could do the job—assuming she could get free of this purgatory.

He would make her his First Minister and Protector of the Realm, not just the commander of the Grisha forces. If Nikolai died before his heir came of age, she would be there to watch over Ravka and the line of succession. The people had come to trust her—as much as they could trust a Grisha. And despite her dark moods and vindictive heart, he had come to trust her. She was maturing into a steady, confident leader.

Or not, he thought as the bear cub led them into Juris’ inner sanctum and the presence of two fighters locked in combat. Zoya’s teeth were bared, and she wielded twin axes of the type Tamar favored, though these looked older and less refined. Juris was bearing down on her with a huge broadsword. Yuri tugged nervously at his scrap of beard. “That doesn’t seem at all safe.”

“For either of them,” Nikolai said.

Storm clouds gathered around the fighters, and thunder shook the floor. The bear rolled away, little paws held over its ears as if fleeing the sound. For a moment, as unlikely as it seemed, they appeared evenly matched. But Nikolai knew Zoya’s talents didn’t lie in this type of warfare, and sure enough, when Juris feinted left, Zoya made the mistake of trying to move with him.

“Guard your flank!” Nikolai shouted.

Juris turned sharply and brought his broadsword down in a sweeping arc. Zoya brought her axes up, and they seemed to glow with blue fire. As the blades met the thrust of Juris’ sword, lightning crackled from the axe blades, and the big warrior roared, smoke rising from his black scale armor.

What had Zoya just done? And how had she withstood the power of Juris’ strike?

“Good!” Juris said as they drew apart. He rolled his shoulders as if nearly being cooked alive was a commonplace experience. Maybe for an ancient dragon it was.

Zoya’s hair was damp with perspiration, her shirt clung to her skin, and her grin was pure exhilaration—a smile he’d never seen from her before.

Nikolai found his mood souring.

He cleared his throat. “If you’re done trying to cleave my general in two, I have need of her.”

Zoya whirled, wiping the sweat from her brow with her sleeve. “What is it?” Her eyes were so blue they seemed to glow.

“We’ve been summoned to Elizaveta. I want you there to learn about the ritual.”

The dragon huffed. “Her time is better spent with me. The thorn wood is a path you walk alone, boy king.”

“But it’s a very arduous path,” Nikolai said. “Who will carry my snacks?”

Juris shook his head and turned to Zoya, who had already hung her axes on the wall. “You waste your time with trifles.”

“My country’s future is not a trifle.”

“King and country are not the same.”

Zoya unrolled her sleeves, fastening the buttons at the wrist. “Close enough.”

*

[ Nikolai thinking about Zoya as Queen of Ravka ]

Nikolai knew that Grisha lived long lives and that the greater their power, the longer they survived. How many years might Zoya live to protect Ravka and the Lantsov line? Could she shepherd Ravka wisely, or would she succumb to the madness of eternity the way the Darkling had? And would Ravka’s people accept her? Or in time, would they deem her unnatural? He’d be dead by then, these problems well beyond his care or control, but that was not a cheerful thought.

*

[ How Zoya got her back scars ]

Nikolai hesitated. He wasn’t anxious to spoil her goodwill. “Your amplifier …” Zoya’s hand twitched, and he knew she was resisting the urge to touch her bare wrist. “Will you tell me how you got it?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I don’t know that it does.” But he wanted to know. He wanted to sit here and listen to her talk. For all the time they’d spent together, Zoya was still a mystery to him. This might be his last chance to unravel her.

She smoothed the silk of her kefta over her knees. He thought she might not speak, just sit there, silent as a stone until he gave up waiting. Zoya was perfectly capable of it. But at last she said, “I was thirteen. I had been at the Little Palace for almost five years. The Darkling took a group of Grisha to Tsibeya. There were rumors the white tigers of Ilmisk had returned, and he suspected at least one of them was an amplifier.”

“Near the permafrost?”

“A little farther south. I was the youngest of the group and so proud to be chosen to go. I was half in love with him already. I lived for the rare moments he appeared at the school.” She shook her head. “I was the best, and I wanted him to see that … The older Grisha were all in contention for the amplifier. It was up to them to track the tigers and see who would earn the right to the kill. They followed a female for nearly a week and cornered her in the woods near Chernast, but she somehow escaped their grasp.”

Zoya wrapped her arms around her legs. “She left her cubs. Abandoned the three of them. The Darkling’s men penned them in a cage so the Grisha could squabble over who deserved their teeth the most. All night we could hear the mother prowling the perimeter of the camp, snarling and yowling. My friends talked about going into the dark to pursue her. I knew they were all bluster, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the cubs. So when the camp was asleep, I created a distraction for the guards by knocking over one of the tents with a gust of wind, and I chased the cubs out of the cage. They were so little,” she said with the smallest smile. “They couldn’t really run, only roll a bit, stumble, right themselves. I just kept them moving away from the camp. Saints, I was scared.” Her eyes were far away now, as if looking into that long-ago night. “We were still in sight of the torches when I realized I wasn’t alone.”

“The mother?”

She shook her head. “A male. I don’t know why, but he went straight for the cubs. I panicked. I should have fought, used my power, but all I could think to do was cover their bodies with mine. When the male attacked, his claws tore clean through my coat and my kefta all the way to the skin of my back.” Zoya’s fists clenched. “But I protected those cubs. I remember … I remember I had my eyes squeezed shut, and when I opened them the snow looked black in the moonlight.” She turned her face to the fire. “It was stained with my blood. I could feel the cubs wriggling against me, yowling their terror, their little claws sharp as needles. That was what brought me back to sense—those tiny, vicious little pinpricks. I gathered the last of my strength and summoned the most powerful gust I could. I threw open my arms and sent the male flying. That was when the Darkling and his guards came running. I guess I’d been screaming.”

“Did they kill the tiger?”

“He was already dead. He’d struck a tree when I threw him. It snapped his neck. The cubs escaped.”

Zoya rose. She turned her back to him and, to his astonishment, shrugged the silk of her kefta from her shoulders, letting it pool at her hips. An unwelcome bolt of desire shot through him, and then he saw—along the smooth skin of her back lay eight long, furrowed scars.

“The other Grisha were furious,” she said, “but I had killed the white tiger. The amplifier could only belong to me. So they bandaged my wounds, and I claimed the tiger’s teeth for my wrist. He left me with these.”

The firelight caught the pearly surface of the scars. It was a miracle that she’d survived.

“You never had them healed? Tailored?”

She drew the kefta back up to her shoulders and fastened the clasps. “He left his mark on me and I on him. We did each other damage. It deserves to be remembered.”

“And the Darkling didn’t deny you the amplifier, despite what you’d done?”

“It would have been a fair punishment, but no. An amplifier that powerful was too rare to waste. They put the fetter on me, bound the old cat’s teeth in silver so that I could never remove it. That’s how all of the most powerful amplifiers are fashioned.”

She gazed out the open frame of the window to the flat gray expanse of the sky. “When it was all over, the Darkling had me brought to his tent and said, ‘So, Zoya, you freed the tiger cubs. You did the selfless thing. And yet somehow you are the one who has finished the day with greater power. More than any of your betters who have patiently waited their turn. What do you say to that?’

“His disapproval was more painful than any wound from a tiger’s claws. Some part of me always feared that he would send me away, banish me forever from the Little Palace. I told him I was sorry.

“But the Darkling saw me clearly even then. ‘Is that really what you wish to say?’ he asked.”

Zoya pushed a dark strand of her hair behind her ear. “So I told him the truth. I put my chin up and said, ‘They can all hang. It was my blood in the snow.’”

Nikolai stifled a laugh and a smile played over Zoya’s lips. It dwindled almost instantly, replaced by a troubled frown. “That pleased him. He told me it was a job well done. And then he said … ‘Beware of power, Zoya. There is no amount of it that can make them love you.’”

The weight of the words settled over Nikolai. Is that what we’re all searching for? Was that what he’d hunted in all those library books? In his restless travels? In his endless pursuit to seize and then keep the throne?

“Was it love you wanted, Zoya?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. I wanted … strength. Safety. I never wanted to feel helpless again.”

“Again?” It was impossible to conceive of Zoya as anything less than mighty.

But all she said was, “When Juris broke that fetter, it was like he’d torn a limb from my body. You cannot imagine it.”

He couldn’t. And he couldn’t imagine what words might bring her comfort. “What became of the cubs?”

Zoya ran her finger over the window ledge, sand trailing from it in a glittering fall. “He told me … The Darkling said that because they had my scent on them, their mother wouldn’t raise them.” Her voice wobbled slightly. “He said that I’d doomed them as surely as if I’d taken a knife to their throats myself. That she’d leave them to die in the snow. But I don’t believe that, do you?”

Her face was composed, but her eyes were imploring. Nikolai felt as if he were looking at the young girl she’d been on that cold and bloody night. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe that at all.”

“Good,” she said. “Good …” She gave her cuffs a firm tug, seeming to return to herself. “Every lover I’ve taken has asked about those scars. I make up a new story for each of them.”

He found he did not want to think of Zoya’s lovers. “And what did I do to earn the truth?”

“Offered me a country and faced imminent death?”

“It’s important to have standards, Nazyalensky.”

Zoya bobbed her chin toward the sealed order that still lay on the floor.

“It’s not too late to burn that.”

Nikolai thought of the smooth planes of her back striped by those furrowed scars. He thought of the stubborn tilt of her chin. He imagined her huddled in the snow, risking her position with the mentor she worshipped, risking her very life to save those cubs.

“The more I know of you,” he said, “the more I am sure you are exactly what Ravka needs.”

In that moment, he wished things might have been different. That he might not die tomorrow. That he could be led by his heart instead of duty. Because Zoya was not kind and she was not easy. But she was already a queen.

*

[ Zoya in danger triggers Nikolai's monster ]

Elizaveta was studying them. She flicked her fingers and the thorn tree receded. “I had intended to torture the monk to force your darkness to the fore,” she said contemplatively. “But best to cut to the chase.”

She lifted a hand and the floor rose around Zoya, encasing her in glistening panels of amber.

Zoya shouted, her face startled and frightened before her instincts took hold. She threw her hands out, buffeting the luminous walls with the force of her power. A golden substance began to rise from her feet, filling the chamber.

Nikolai reached for Zoya, but the thorn wood grew up between them in a wild, impenetrable tangle. There were thorns all around him, a wall of deadly gray spikes.

“Stop this, Elizaveta,” he shouted, though he could no longer see the Saint.

He heard Zoya scream.

“I know you’re not going to kill her,” he said, though he knew no such thing. “Juris needs her.”

Elizaveta appeared from the thicket surrounded by a bloom of roses. “Do you think I care what Juris needs? It’s freedom I require. And if losing her will drive you to act, that seems a small price.”

Nikolai lunged at her, but Elizaveta vanished into the thorn wood. He leapt onto the brambles, ignoring the pain as the thorns jabbed at him through his clothes. They were wickedly sharp, sinking into his flesh like teeth.

“You will have to fly, my king,” said Elizaveta’s voice. “Or you will never be free, and neither will we.”

Zoya’s screams rose.

[ … ]

The Saint will not harm her, Nikolai told himself. It’s a ploy.

And then Zoya’s screams stopped.

Yuri was sobbing.

“Zoya?” Nikolai shouted. “Zoya!”

He hurled himself against the barbed thicket. “Zoya!” he yelled, but it emerged as a snarl.

[ … ]

Zoya floated in a golden sarcophagus, like an angel caught in amber, her eyes closed, her body still.

He did not recognize the sound that tore from his throat as he hurled his body at Zoya’s prison. He struck it with a bone-crunching thud, but it did not budge.

[ … ]

But Elizaveta only smiled, gentle, beneficent. With a wave of her hand, the amber walls containing Zoya collapsed and the thorn wood wilted into the floor.

He seized Zoya’s limp body before it could fall. She was covered in golden sap. Elizaveta closed her fist and Zoya began to cough. She opened her eyes, lashes thick with resin, blinked in confusion, then her face flooded with terror and she began to thrash in his arms.

He wanted to soothe her. He wanted to … The smell of her fear mingled with the sap. It made him feel drunk. It made him feel hungry.

All he wanted was to dig his claws into her flesh. All he wanted was to consume her.

[ … ]

A growl of pure appetite rumbled through him as Zoya tried to scramble away, her movements stunted by the weight of the sap.

Remember who she is. Zoya sitting beside him writing correspondence. Zoya glowering at a new crop of students. Zoya holding him in the confines of a coach as he shook and shook and waited for the monster to leave him.

[ … ]

He couldn’t bear to look at Zoya’s face and see the disgust there. There would be no coming back from this. He felt her hands on his shoulders and forced himself to meet her gaze.

She was beaming.

“You did it,” she said. “You called him up and then you sent him packing.”

“You were almost killed,” he said in disbelief.

She grinned wider. “But I wasn’t.”

Elizaveta tapped the table. “So I am forgiven, Squaller?”

“That depends on how hard it is to get this stuff out of my hair.”

Elizaveta raised her hands, and the sap slid from Zoya in golden rivulets, returning to the floor, where it solidified.

Yuri wiped the tears from his face. “Will … will Commander Nazyalensky have to endure this ordeal every time?”

“I’ll do it if I have to.”

Elizaveta shrugged. “Let us hope not.”

Zoya offered him her hand. “You opened the door.”

*

Yes, crooned the demon. I will see Ravka safe to shore.

Zoya would never forgive him, but Zoya would keep marching on. With losses and wounds of her own. Zoya would not rest.

Steel is earned, Your Highness, she had said, his ruthless general.

*

[ Speaking about the Darkling to Elizaveta + how Zoya views herself + Zoyalai ]

“You were one of his students, weren’t you?”

Zoya jumped at the sound of Elizaveta’s voice. The Saint stood by the table where the thorn tree she’d grown still sprawled over the surface.

Zoya knew Elizaveta meant the Darkling, though student was not the right word. Worshipper or acolyte would have been more accurate. “I was a soldier in the Second Army and under his command.”

Elizaveta slanted her a glance. “You needn’t play coy with me, Zoya. I knew him too.” Zoya’s surprise must have shown, because Elizaveta said, “Oh yes, all of us crossed paths with him at one time or another. I met him when he had only just begun his service to the Ravkan kings. When I was still in my youth.”

Zoya felt a shiver at the thought of just how ancient Elizaveta must be. Her connection to the making at the heart of the world had granted her eternity. Was she really ready to reject it?

“Did he know what you were?” Zoya asked instead. “What you could do?”

“No,” said Elizaveta. “I barely did. But he knew I had great power, and he was drawn to that.”

He always was. The Darkling prized power above every other trait. Zoya sometimes worried if she might be very much the same.

“Count yourself lucky,” she said. “If he had known the extent of your gifts, he would have pursued you until he could use them for himself.”

Elizaveta laughed. “You underestimate me, young Zoya.”

“Or you underestimated him.”

The Saint gave a skeptical bob of her head. “Perhaps.”

“What was he like then?” Zoya could not resist asking.

“Arrogant. Idealistic. Beautiful.” Elizaveta smiled ruefully, her fingers trailing the spine of the thorn tree. It curled to meet her like a cat arching its back. “I met him many times throughout the years, and he adopted many guises to hide his true self. But the faces he chose were always lovely. He was vain.”

“Or smart. People value beauty. They can’t help but respond to it.”

“You would know,” said Elizaveta. “The fairy stories really aren’t true, are they? They promise that goodness or kindness will make you lovely, but you are neither good nor kind.”

Zoya shrugged. “Should I aspire to be?”

“Your king values such things.”

And should Zoya seek his approval? Pretend to be something other than she was? “My king values my loyalty and my ability to lead an army. He will have his wife to smile and simper and cuddle orphans.”

“You’d give him up so readily?”

Now Zoya’s brows rose in surprise. “He isn’t mine to keep.”

“There is a reason I use you and not the monk to provoke his demon.”

“The king would fight to save anyone—princess or peasant in the field.”

“And that’s all there is to it? I see the way his eyes follow you.”

Was something in Zoya pleased at that? Something foolish and proud?

“Men have been watching me my whole life. It’s not worth taking note of.”

“Careful, young Zoya. It is one thing to be looked at by a mere man, quite another thing to garner the attention of a king.”

Attention was easy to come by. Men looked at her and wanted to believe they saw goodness beneath her armor, a kind girl, a gentle girl who would emerge if only given the chance. But the world was cruel to kind girls, and she’d always appreciated that Nikolai didn’t ask that of her. Why would he? Nikolai spoke of partnerships and allies, but he was a romantic. He wanted love of a kind Zoya could not give and would never receive. Maybe the thought stung, but that prick of pain, the uneasy sense that something had been lost, belonged to a girl, not a soldier.

Zoya glanced down one of the tunnels. It seemed darker than the others.

The smell of honey and sap that emanated from it was not quite right, sweetness punctured by the taint of rot. It might have been her imagination, but the bees even sounded different here, less the buzz of busy insects than the lazy, glutted hum of battlefield flies sated on the dead.

“What’s down there?” Zoya asked. “What’s wrong with them?”

“The bees are every part of me,” said Elizaveta. “Every triumph, every sadness. This part of the hive is weary. It is tired of life. That bitterness will spread to the rest of the hive until all existence will lose its savor. That is why I must leave the Fold, why I will take on a mortal life.”

“Are you really ready to give up your power?” Zoya asked. She couldn’t quite fathom it.

Elizaveta nodded at the dark chamber. “Most of us can hide our greatest hurts and longings. It’s how we survive each day. We pretend the pain isn’t there, that we are made of scars instead of wounds. The hive does not grant me the luxury of that lie. I cannot go on this way. None of us can.”

The thorny vine curling beneath Elizaveta’s hand suddenly sprouted with white blossoms that turned pink and then blood red before Zoya’s eyes.

“Quince?” she asked, thinking of the tales of beasts and maidens she had heard as a child, of Sankt Feliks and his apple boughs. What had Juris said? Sometimes the stories are rough on the details.

Elizaveta nodded. “Most women suffer thorns for the sake of the flowers. But we who would wield power adorn ourselves in flowers to hide the sting of our thorns.”

Be sweeter. Be gentler. Smile when you are suffering. Zoya had ignored these lessons, often to her detriment. She was all thorns.

“Your king is late,” said Elizaveta.

Zoya found she wasn’t sorry. She did not want to drown today.

*

[ Relationship with mother, Aunt Liliyana + using powers for first time | cw: child bride ]

And yet it was the memory of her mother’s face that filled Zoya’s mind.

Sabina’s beauty had been astonishing, the kind that stopped men and women alike on the street. But she had made a bad bargain. She had married for love—a handsome Suli boy with broad shoulders and few prospects. For a time, they were poor but happy, and then they were just poor. As they starved and scraped by, the affection between them wasted away too. Long days of work and long months of winter wore at Sabina’s beauty and her spirit. She had little love to give to the daughter she bore.

Zoya worked hard for her mother’s affection. She was always first in her lessons, always made sure to eat only half of her supper and give Sabina the rest. She was silent when her mother complained of headaches, and she stole peaches for Sabina from the duke’s orchards.

“You could be whipped for that,” her mother said disapprovingly. But she ate the peaches one after another, sighing contentedly, until her stomach turned and she vomited them all beside the woodpile.

Everything changed when Zoya caught the eye of Valentin Grankin, a wealthy carriage maker from Stelt. He was the richest man for a hundred miles, a widower twice over, and sixty-three years old.

Zoya was nine. She did not want to be a bride, but she did not want to displease her mother, who petted her and cooed at her as she had never done before. For the first time, Sabina seemed happy. She sang in the kitchen and cooked elaborate meals with the gifts of meat and vegetables that Valentin Grankin sent.

The night before the wedding, Sabina made orange cakes and laid out the elaborate pearl kokoshnik and little gold lace wedding gown Zoya’s bridegroom had provided. Zoya hadn’t meant to cry, but she hadn’t been able to stop.

Aunt Liliyana had come all the way from Novokribirsk for the ceremony —or so Zoya had thought until she heard her aunt pleading with Sabina to reconsider.

Liliyana was younger than Sabina and rarely spoken of. She had left home with scant fanfare and braved the deadly journey across the Shadow Fold to make a life for herself in the hardscrabble town of Novokribirsk. It was a good place for a woman alone, where cheap property could be had and employers were so desperate for workers they gladly offered positions to women that would otherwise be reserved for men.

“He won’t hurt her, Liliyana,” Sabina said sharply as Zoya sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet brushing the wooden slats of the floor, the perfect circle of her untouched orange cake uneaten on the plate before her. “He said he would wait for her to bleed.”

“Am I to applaud him?” Liliyana had demanded. “How will you protect her if he changes his mind? You are selling your own child.”

“We are all bought and sold. At least Zoya will fetch a price that will give her an easy life.”

“Soon she will be old enough to be a soldier—”

“And then what? We’ll live off her meager pay? She’ll serve until she’s killed or injured so that she can go on to live alone and poor like you?”

“I do well enough.”

“Do you think I don’t see your shoes tied together with string?”

“Better to be a woman alone than a woman beholden to some old man who can’t manage a wife his own age. And it was my choice to make. In a few years Zoya will be old enough to make her own decisions.”

“In a few years Valentin Grankin will have found some other pretty girl to occupy his interests.”

“Good!” retorted Liliyana.

“Get out of my house,” Sabina had seethed. “I don’t want to see you anywhere near the church tomorrow. Go back to your lonely rooms and your empty tea tins and leave my daughter alone.”

Liliyana had gone, and Zoya had run to her room and buried her face in her blankets, trying not to think of the words her mother had said or the images they’d conjured, praying with all the fervor in her heart that Liliyana would come back, that the Saints would save her, even as she soaked her pillow with tears.

The next morning Sabina had muttered angrily about Zoya’s blotchy face as she dressed her in the little gold gown and the attendants came to walk the bride to church.

But Aunt Liliyana was waiting at the altar beside a flummoxed priest.

She refused to budge.

“Someone do something about this madwoman!” Sabina had screamed. “She is no sister of mine!”

Valentin Grankin’s men had seized Liliyana, dragging her down the aisle.

“Lecher!” Liliyana had shouted at Grankin. “Procurer!” she yelled at Sabina. Then she’d turned her damning eyes on the gathered townspeople.

“You are all witness to this! She is a child!”

“Be silent,” snarled Valentin Grankin, and when Liliyana would not, he took up his heavy walking stick and cracked it against her skull.

Liliyana spat in his face.

He hit her again. This time her eyes rolled back in her head.

“Stop it!” cried Zoya, struggling in her mother’s arms. “Stop!”

“Criminal,” gasped Liliyana. “Filth.”

Grankin lifted his stick again. Zoya understood then that her aunt was going to be murdered before the church altar and no one was going to prevent it. Because Valentin Grankin was a rich, respected man. Because Liliyana Garin was no one at all.

Zoya screamed, the sound tearing from her, an animal cry. A wild gust of wind slammed into Valentin Grankin, knocking him to the ground. His walking stick went clattering. Zoya fisted her hands, her fear and rage pouring from her in a flood. A churning wall of wind erupted around her and exploded into the eaves of the church, blowing the roof from its moorings with an earsplitting crack. Thunder rumbled through a cloudless sky.

The wedding guests bellowed their terror. Zoya’s mother gazed at her daughter with frightened eyes, clutching the pew behind her as if she might collapse without its support.

Liliyana, one hand pressed to her bleeding head, cried, “You cannot sell her off now! She’s Grisha. It’s against the law. She is the property of the king and will go to school to train.”

But no one was looking at Liliyana. They were all staring at Zoya. Zoya ran to her aunt. She wasn’t sure what she’d done or what it meant, only that she wanted to be as far away from this church and these people and the hateful man on the floor as she could get.

“You leave us alone!” she shouted at no one, at everyone. “You let us go!”

Valentin Grankin whimpered as Zoya and Liliyana hurried past him down the aisle. Zoya looked down at him and hissed.

*

[ Zoya joins the Little Palace + making me cry with Liliyana and the mirror ]

It was Liliyana who took Zoya, still dressed in her wedding finery, to Os Alta. They had no money for inns, so they slept in ditches and tucked into copses, shivering in the cold. “Imagine we are on a ship,” Liliyana would say, “and the waves are rocking us to sleep. Can you hear the masts creaking? We can use the stars to navigate.”

“Where are we sailing to?” Zoya had asked, sure she could hear something rustling in the woods.

“To an island covered in flowers, where the water in the streams tastes sweet as honey. Follow those two stars and steer us into port.”

Every night, they traveled somewhere new: a coastline where silver seals barked on the shores, a jeweled grotto where they were greeted by the green-gilled lord of the deep—until at last they arrived at the capital and made the long walk to the palace gates.

They were filthy by then, their hair tangled, Zoya’s golden wedding dress torn and covered in dust. Liliyana had ignored the guards’ sneers as she made her requests, and she’d kept her back straight as she stood with Zoya outside the gates. They’d waited, and waited, and waited some more, shivering in the cold, until at last a young man in a purple kefta and an older woman dressed in red had come down to the gates.

“What village are you from?” the woman had asked.

“Pachina,” Liliyana replied.

The strangers murmured to each other for a moment, about tests and when the last Examiners had traveled through those parts. Then the woman had pushed up Zoya’s sleeve and laid her palm on the bare skin of her arm. Zoya had felt a surge of power race through her. Wind rattled the palace gates and whipped through the trees.

“Ah,” the woman had said on a long breath. “What gift has arrived at our doorstep looking so bedraggled? Come, we’ll get you fed and warmed up.”

Zoya had grabbed Liliyana’s hand, ready to begin their new adventure together, but her aunt had knelt and said gently, “I can go no further with you, little Zoya.”

“Why not?”

“I need to go home to tend to my chickens. You don’t want them to get cold, do you? Besides,” she said, smoothing the hair away from Zoya’s face, “this is where you belong. Here they will see the jewel you are inside, not just your pretty eyes.”

“For your troubles,” the young man said, and dropped a coin into Liliyana’s palm.

“Will you be all right?” Zoya asked her.

“I will be fine. I will be better than fine knowing you are safe. Go now, I can hear the chickens clucking. They’re very cross with me.” Liliyana kissed both of Zoya’s cheeks. “Do not look back, Zoya. Do not look back at me or your mother or Pachina. Your future is waiting.”

But Zoya looked back anyway, hoping for one last glimpse of her aunt waving through those towering gates. The trees had crowded the path. If Liliyana was still there, Zoya could not see her.

That very day, her training had begun. She’d been given a room at the Little Palace, started classes in language and reading, started to learn Shu, studied with the miserable wretch of a woman known only as Baghra in the hut by the lake. She’d written every week to her aunt and every week received a long, newsy letter back with drawings of chickens in the corners and tales of the interesting traders who came through Novokribirsk.

By law, the parents of Grisha students were paid a stipend, a rich fee to keep them in comfort. When Zoya learned this, she petitioned the bursar to send the money to her aunt in Novokribirsk instead.

“Liliyana Garin is my guardian,” she’d told him.

“Are your parents dead, then?”

Zoya had cast him a long look and said, “Not yet.”

Even at ten she’d had such cold command in her eyes that he’d simply put his pen to paper and said, “I will need an address and her full name.”

It would be six years before Zoya made her first crossing of the Shadow Fold, as a junior Squaller in the Second Army. The Grisha around her had been trembling, some even weeping as they’d entered the darkness, but Zoya had shown no fear, not even in the dark where no one would see her shake. When they’d arrived at Novokribirsk, she’d stepped down from the skiff, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and said, “I’m going to go find a hot bath and a proper meal.”

It was only once she’d cleared the docks and left her companions behind that she’d broken into a run, her heart lifting, carrying her on light feet over the cobblestones to Liliyana’s small corner shop.

She’d burst through the door, alarming Liliyana’s one customer, and Liliyana had emerged from the back room, wiping her hands on her apron and saying, “What is causing such fuss—?”

When she saw Zoya, she’d pressed her hands to her heart as if it might leap from her chest. “My girl,” she said. “My brilliant girl.” And then Zoya was hugging her aunt tight.

They’d closed up the shop, and Liliyana had cooked them dinner and introduced Zoya to the child she’d taken in whose parents hadn’t made it back from their last crossing—a scrawny snub-nosed girl named Lada, who demanded Zoya help her draw the Little Palace in extensive detail. They’d shelled hazelnuts by the fire and discussed the personalities of the chickens and all the gossip of the neighborhood. Zoya had told her aunt about her teachers, her friends, her chambers. She’d given Liliyana gifts of calfskin boots, fur-lined gloves, and an expensive gilded mirror.

“What will I do with this? Look at my old face?” said Liliyana. “Send it to your mother as a peace offering.”

“It’s a gift for you,” Zoya replied. “So you can look into it each morning and see the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”

*

[ Nikolai being gross about Zoya ]

Nikolai watched Zoya watching the flames. She flexed her fingers, and the sparks leapt. He still could not quite fathom what Juris had taught her in this short time. She wore the same clothes she’d worn the morning they’d disappeared, though the roughspun cloak had long since been discarded. He was grateful for the familiarity of the deep blue silk of her kefta.

She sat with a knee tucked up, one cheek resting against it. Nikolai realized he’d never seen her look so at ease. At court, Zoya always moved with grace, her steps smooth, her gaze sharp and unforgiving as the blade of a knife. But he realized now it was the grace of an actress on the stage. She was always performing, always on guard. Even with him.

Nikolai released a startled laugh, and she glanced over at him. “What is it?”

He shook his head. “I think I’m jealous.”

“Of what?”

“A dragon.”

“Don’t let Juris hear that. He thinks enough of himself as it is.”

“He should. He can fly and breathe fire, and he’s probably got piles of gold stashed somewhere.”

“That’s an unfair cliché. It could very well be jewels.”

“And he made you look like that.”

Zoya raised a brow. “Like what precisely?”

“Comfortable.”

Zoya’s back straightened, and he felt tremendous regret at seeing her armor lock back into place.

[ … ]

Maybe, he thought. Or maybe it will be left to you to set Ravka to rights.

He removed a folded document from his pocket and placed it beside her hand.

She picked it up and turned it over, frowning at the wax seal he’d impressed with his signet ring. “What is this?”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t written you a love letter.” She turned her face to the fire. Was even the mention of love too much for Zoya’s ruthless sensibilities? “This is a royal order declaring you Ravka’s protector and making you commander of both the First and Second Armies.”

She stared at him. “Have you lost your wits entirely?”

“I’m trying to do the responsible thing. I think it’s giving me indigestion.”

Zoya tossed the letter to the floor as if the paper had singed her fingers.

“You don’t think you’re going to survive tomorrow.”

“Ravka’s hopes shouldn’t live and die with me.”

“So you’re pinning them on me instead?”

“You are one of the most powerful Grisha the world has ever known, Zoya. If anyone can protect Ravka, it’s you.”

“And if I tell you I don’t want the job?”

“We both know better. And did I mention the position comes with some truly spectacular sapphires?” Nikolai rested his hands on his knees. “If the twins and the Triumvirate weren’t able to hide our disappearance, Ravka may already be in turmoil. We both know it’s possible I won’t survive the ritual and someone will have to restore order. Every man and woman who claims to have a drop of Lantsov blood will make a bid for the throne, and our enemies will seize the chance to tear the country apart. Pick one of the pretenders to back, the smartest or the most charming or—”

“The most easily controlled?”

“You see? You were made for this. Rally the Grisha. Try to save our people.”

Zoya gazed into the fire, her expression troubled. “Why is it so easy for you to contemplate your death?”

“I’d rather look at a thing squarely than let it catch me by surprise.” He grinned. “Don’t tell me you’d miss me.”

Zoya looked away again. “I suppose the world would be less interesting without you in it. I wouldn’t let myself be drowned in amber for just anyone, you know.”

*

[ Genya and Tolya missing Zoya ]

“How can there be no sign of them at all?” Genya asked with a soft sniffle. “It’s been nearly three weeks. People don’t just disappear. I never thought I would say this, but I miss Zoya.”

“Me too,” said Tolya. “Even though I know she’d kick me for wasting
time worrying about her.”

*

[ Juris dies + Zoya takes him on as an amplifier ]

“No,” Zoya said. “No.” Her heart was too full of loss. “I’ll get Grigori. He can heal you.”

“It’s too late.” Juris seized her wrist with surprising force. “Listen to me. We thought we had convinced Elizaveta to give up her power, but that was never her intent. If she breaks free of the bounds of the Fold, nothing will be able to control her. You must stop her.”

“How?” Zoya pleaded.

“You know what you must do, Zoya. Wear my bones.” She recoiled, but he did not release his grip. “Kill me. Take my scales.”

Zoya shook her head. All she could think of was her aunt’s resolute face. Zoya had been responsible for her death. She could have stopped the Darkling, if she’d looked closer, if she’d understood, if she hadn’t been consumed by her own ambition. “He doesn’t get to take you from me too.”

“I am not your aunt,” Juris growled. “I am your teacher. You were an able student. Prove to me that you are a great one.”

She could not do it. “You said it was a corruption.”

“Only if you give nothing of yourself in return.”

The truth of that hit her, and Zoya knew she was afraid.

“A little faith, Zoya. That is all this requires.”

A bitter laugh escaped her. “I don’t have it.”

“There is no end to the power you may obtain. The making at the heart of the world has no limit. It does not weaken. It does not tire. But you must go to meet it.”

“What if I get it wrong all over again?” What if she failed Juris as she had failed the others? Her life was crowded with too many ghosts.

“Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself, just as you did with your training.”

“Please,” Zoya said. She was the thing she’d always feared becoming: a lost girl, helpless, being led up the aisle of the chapel in Pachina. “Don’t leave me. Not you too.”

He nudged his broadsword with one hand. “Zoya of the lost city. Zoya of the garden. Zoya bleeding in the snow. You are strong enough to survive the fall.”

Juris released a cry that began as a scream and became a roar as his body shifted from man to dragon, bones cracking, scales widening, until each was nearly the size of her palm.

He enfolded her in his wings, so gently. “Now, Zoya. I can hold on no longer.”

Zoya released a sob. To live is to grieve. She was a lost girl—and a general too. She hefted the broadsword in her hands and, with the power of the storm in her palms, drove the blade into his heart.

At the same instant, Zoya felt the dragon’s claws pierce her chest. She cried out, the pain like the fork of a lightning bolt, splitting her open. She felt her blood soaking the silk against her body, a sacrifice. Juris released a heavy sigh and shut his glowing eyes. Zoya pressed her face to his scales, listening to the heavy thud of his heart, of her own. Was this death, then?

She wept for them both as the rhythm began to slow.

A moment passed. An age. Juris’ claws retracted. She could hear only one heartbeat now, and it was her own.

Zoya felt no pain. When she looked down, she saw her kefta was torn, but the blood flowed no longer. She touched her fingers to her skin. The wounds Juris had made had already healed.

There was no time for mourning, not if Juris’ sacrifice was to mean something, not if she had any hope of saving Nikolai and stopping Elizaveta. Zoya would have her revenge. She would save her king.

She grabbed a dagger from the wall. Before her tears could begin anew, she scraped the scales from the ridge that ran over Juris’ back.

But what was she to do now? She wasn’t a Fabrikator. That was Elizaveta’s gift.

Are we not all things?

Zoya had broken the boundaries within her order, but did she dare challenge the limits of the orders themselves?

Anything worth doing always starts as a bad idea. Nikolai’s words.

Terrible advice. But perhaps it was time to heed it. She focused on the scales in her hand, sensed their edges, the particles that comprised them. It felt alien and wrong, and she knew instantly that this work would never be natural to her, but in this moment her meager skill would have to be enough. Zoya let the scales guide her. She could feel the shape they wanted to take, could see it burning clearly in her mind like a black wheel—no, a crown. Juris. Pushy to the last. She shoved the image aside and forced the scales to form two cuffs around her wrists instead.

As soon as the scales touched, sealing the bond, she felt Juris’ strength flow through her. But this was different than it had been with the tiger. Open the door. She could feel his past, the eons both he and the dragon had lived flooding through her, threatening to overwhelm the short speck of her life.

Take it, then, she told him. I am strong enough to survive the fall.

She felt Juris’ restraint, felt him draw back, protecting her and guiding her as he had done over the past weeks. As he always would.

The dragon was with her. And they would fight.

*

Zoya sped across the sands, praying she was not too late. She had once thought only a Grisha in the grip of parem could fly. Now she arrived on the storm, borne aloft by thunderheads. It was almost as if she could feel Juris beneath her.

*

[ Zoya kills Elizaveta + guilt from Civil War ]

Zoya took two broken pieces of obsidian from her sleeve and cracked them together. The spark was all she needed. A gout of flame roared toward Elizaveta, who reared back in surprise.

Then the Saint’s lips quirked in amusement. “I thought you were wise enough to run, Zoya. You’re too late. The Darkling’s spirit will soon reenter his body. There’s no reason for you to be a casualty of this battle.”

“My king lies bleeding. I am his subject and his soldier, and I come to fight for him.”

“You are Grisha, Zoya Nazyalensky. You need be subject to no one and nothing.”

Zoya could feel the pull of power even now. It would always be with her, this hunger for more. But she had made the acquaintance of tyrants before.

“Subject to no one but you? The Darkling?”

Elizaveta laughed. “We will not be rulers. We will be gods. If it’s a crown you want, take it. Sit the Ravkan throne. We will hold dominion over the world.”

“I saw his body on the pyre. I watched him burn.”

“I stole him from the sands of the Fold and left a facsimile in his place. It was well within my power.” Just as Zoya had suspected. And she didn’t care about the particulars. But she wanted to keep Elizaveta talking.

“You preserved his body?”

“In the hopes that he might be resurrected. I stored him in my hives. Yes, I know you were ready to believe my little story about my wound, my weariness. But you didn’t dare walk down that dark corridor, did you? No one wants to look too closely at another person’s pain. Did you really believe I would sacrifice an age of knowledge and power to become a mortal? Would you, Zoya?”

No. Never. But the power she was tied to now did not need to be seized or stolen. “And what will you do with the world once you possess it?”

“Is this where I present my grand vision for peace? For a unified empire without border or flag?” Elizaveta shrugged. “I could make that speech. Perhaps the Starless One will make that our endeavor. I know only that I want to be free and that I want to feel my power once more.”

It was a need Zoya understood, and she knew the questions to ask, the same questions she had posed to herself when the dark crept in.

“You don’t have enough of it?” Zoya asked, moving slowly around the circle of the wood. The shadow creature’s chest no longer glowed—so someone had managed to remove the thorn. Its shape was leeching slowly into the Darkling’s supine body. Nikolai lay dying, impaled on the thicket as his blood drained into the soil.

“What is power without someone to wield it over? I have lived in isolated splendor for too many lifetimes. What is it to be a god without worship? A queen without subjects? I was the witch in the wood, the queen on her throne, the goddess in her temple. I will be once more. I will savor fear and desire and awe again.”

“You’ll get none from me,” said Zoya. She raised her hands and her sleeves fell back. Black scales glittered in the twilight.

Elizaveta gave a beleaguered sigh. “I should have known Juris would hold on long enough to do something noble and misguided. Well, old friend,” she said, “it will not matter.” With a sweep of her arm, two ironcolored stalks shot toward Zoya, their thorns gleaming like the barbed tail of a sea creature.

Zoya drove her hands upward, and a ferocious whirlwind caught the stalks, twisting them around each other and yanking them from the thorn wood by the root. Zoya flung them back at Elizaveta.

“How fierce you are,” said the Saint. “Juris was right to make you his student. I’m sorry his knowledge will die with you.”

This time half the wood seemed to rise up, a snarling mass of fat, thorny stalks. Zoya pulled moisture from the air in a cold wave, coating the stalks in frost, freezing their sap from the inside out. With a rumbling gust of air, she shattered them on the wind.

“Such power. But you cannot defeat me, Zoya. I have the advantage of eternity.”

“I’ll settle for the advantage of surprise.”

Zoya raised the sands for cover and let herself plummet in a flash to the thorn wood. As Elizaveta had talked, Zoya had drifted to the far side of the circle, to the bier on which the Darkling’s perfectly preserved body rested.

She had the briefest moment to take in the beautiful face, those elegant hands. Zoya had loved him with all the greedy, worshipful need in her girlish heart. She had believed he prized her, that he cared for her. She would have done anything for him, fought and died for him. And he had known that. He had cultivated it as he had cultivated his own mystery, as he had nurtured Alina Starkov’s loneliness and Genya’s desire to belong. He used us all, just as he is using Elizaveta now. And I let it happen.

She would not let it happen again. She lifted her arms. “No!” cried Elizaveta.

“Burn as you were meant to,” Zoya whispered. She thrust her arm down, and, as easily as if she were summoning a soft breeze, lightning flowed in a precise, earsplitting crack. It struck the bier in a blaze of sparks and blooming flame. Zoya saw a shadow emerge from the fire, as if trying to flee the heat.

“What have you done?” Elizaveta screamed. She hurtled at the Darkling as the thorn wood tried to lift him to safety, away from the blaze.

But Zoya focused the heat of her flames until they burned blue as Juris’ dragon fire. The thorn wood began to collapse in on itself.

Stalks twisted around Zoya’s ankles, but she gathered her sparks and burned them away, singeing herself in the process. Fire was going to take some practice.

[ … ]

All around her, the thorn wood burst into bloom as Elizaveta rose shrieking from the Darkling’s final funeral pyre. She was a swarm of bees.

She was a meadow in blossom. She was a woman mad with grief. The thorn wood twisted around Zoya’s wrists, binding her tight as Elizaveta hurtled toward her, locusts streaming from her mouth, her hands extended, reaching for Zoya’s throat.

It’s all right, Zoya thought. I saved Nikolai. I kept Elizaveta confined to the Fold. She had stopped the Darkling at last. Let Elizaveta take her heart. But Juris’ voice roared within her, and she could almost see his sneer: I gave up my scales for this? We are the dragon. We do not lie down to die.

Zoya felt the branches squeeze tighter. The thorn wood was Elizaveta’s creation. But the sap within it flowed like blood, like a river moved by tides.

Elizaveta screamed her rage, and the buzz of insects filled Zoya’s ears. Zoya focused on the sap running through the branches of the thorn wood, the sap that had drowned her again and again, and she pulled.

The stalks turned, the vicious spikes of their thorns jutting toward Elizaveta too quickly for her to change course or shift form. Her body struck the lances of the thorns with a dull, wet thud. She hung, bare inches from Zoya, impaled on the claws of her own creation.

Zoya twisted the thorns and watched the light vanish from Elizaveta’s eyes. She could have sworn she heard the dragon snarl his approval.

Ravka might fall. The Grisha and the Second Army might scatter. But the world would be safe from Elizaveta and the Starless One.

She thought of the cubs in the snow, of Liliyana shelling hazelnuts by the fire, of the Hall of the Golden Dome back at the Little Palace, crowded with Grisha, laughter echoing off its walls before the Darkling attacked. She thought of Nikolai facing the demon, the thorn like a dagger in his hands.

This time I saved you, she thought as she collapsed. This time, I got it right.

*

He knelt beside Zoya and checked her pulse. It was steady. He was surprised to see two fetters of black scales at her wrists.

“Zoya,” he said, shaking her gently. “Commander Nazyalensky.”

Her lashes fluttered and she looked up at him. Nikolai reared back. For a moment, he thought he’d seen … No, that was impossible. Zoya gazed at him with vibrant blue eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” she replied.

“You’re sure?”

“Which one of us gets to kill the monk?”

“You’re fine.”

He helped her to her feet and they made their way to where Yuri lay buried up to his neck in sand. At some point the rat had fainted. Blood trickled from his nose.

Nikolai sighed. “I hate to say it, but we’re going to have to let him live. I need all the information we can garner on the Cult of the Starless and how the Saints brought us here. I think it may have been Elizaveta who unlocked my chains the night I got free from the palace.”

“How?”

“She said their power could extend beyond the Fold, but only where the people’s faith was strongest. Yuri was at the palace that night. Maybe Elizaveta used him to send her vines or her insects past my guards.”

Zoya snorted. “You’re the one who invited him in.”

“You can choose our next dinner guest. I want answers, so the monk lives. For now.”

“Perhaps some light torture, then? Or you could just let me kick him in the head for the next hour.”

“I’d like nothing better, but I’m not feeling my best, and I’d prefer not to die in these clothes. We need to see if we can find our way out of here.”

Zoya pulled the dunes away from Yuri, and they dragged him onto his back. They bound his hands with strips of fabric from Zoya’s kefta and gagged him for good measure.

“Nikolai,” Zoya said, laying a hand on his arm as she summoned a pallet of air on which to carry the monk. “Did it work at least? Are you free?”

Nikolai winked at her. “As free as I’ll ever be.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her he could still feel the monster somewhere inside him—weakened, licking its wounds, but waiting for the opportunity to rise again.

*

Zoya rode up to the guards on duty, tossed back her hood, and said, “Open for your commander.”

The guards instantly came to attention. “Moi soverenyi.”

“I am weary and I have prisoners to present to the other members of the Triumvirate.”

“Do they have papers?”

“I will take responsibility for them. But if you make me wait any longer for a hot bath, I will also take responsibility for your slow death.”

The guard cleared his throat and bowed. “Welcome home, Commander.”

The gates swung open.

*

Zoya heard the uproar and ran toward it. She’d sensed the wrongness of the night even before she heard Tolya’s shout. She felt it on the air, as if the crackle of lightning she controlled so easily now was everywhere, in everything. It had been that way since she’d claimed Juris’ scales. He was with her, all of his lives, all he had learned, the crimes he’d committed, the miracles he’d performed. His heart beat with her—the dragon’s heart—and she could feel that rhythm linking her to everything.

The making at the heart of the world. Had she really believed in it before? Maybe. But it hadn’t mattered to her. Power had been protection, the getting of it, the honing of it, the only defense she could grasp against all the pain she had known. Now it was something more.

Everything was different now. Her vision seemed sharper, as if light limned each object. She could smell the green grass outside, woodsmoke on the air, even the marble—she’d never realized marble had a scent. In this moment, running down these familiar halls toward the clamor in the conservatory, she didn’t feel fear, only a sense of urgency to make some kind of order out of the trouble she knew she’d find.

But she couldn’t have anticipated the mess awaiting her. She closed the doors to the conservatory behind her and clouded the glass with mist in case of passersby. Security had fallen to pieces without her here. No surprise.

*

[ Confirmation Zoya looks hot blonde ]

Zoya silenced them with a thunderclap.

As one the group turned to her, and instantly they had their hands up, ready to fight.

“How do we know it’s really you?” said Genya.

“It’s really her,” said Nikolai.

“How do we know it’s really you?” Tamar growled, not interrupting her work on the Shu girl. It seemed a hopeless cause. The girl still had color in her cheeks, but the dagger looked as if it had pierced her heart. Zoya refused to look more closely at the other body. It was too hard not to think of Nikolai pinned to the thorn wood, his blood watering the sands of the Fold.

“Genya,” said Zoya calmly. “I once got drunk and insisted you make me blond.”

“Intriguing!” said Nikolai. “What were the results?”

“She looked glorious,” said Genya.

Zoya plucked a bit of dust from her sleeve. “I looked cheap.”

Genya dropped her hands. “Stand down. It’s her.” Then she was hugging Zoya fiercely as Tolya clasped Nikolai in his massive arms and lifted him off his feet. “Where the hell have you been?”

“It’s a long story,” said Nikolai, and demanded Tolya set him down.

Zoya wanted to hold tight to Genya, take in the flowery scent of her hair, ask her a thousand questions. Instead, she stepped back and said, “What happened here?”

*

[ Zoya in denial about her feelings for Nikolai ]

“Am I to be your hostage?”

“I’m not much for pet names, but as you like.”

“You truly mean to keep me here?”

“Oh, indeed. Not as my prisoner but as my queen.”

Zoya was surprised at the way those words pricked at—what? Her heart? Her pride? She had known this end was inevitable. It was the course she had fought and harangued for. So why did she feel like she’d left her flank open yet again?

RULE OF WOLVES.

“Tell me I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing,” he said, meager hope in his heart.

“What do you think you’re seeing?” asked Tamar.

“Mass destruction. Certain doom.”

“Not entirely certain,” said Zoya.

Nikolai cut her a glance. She’d tied back her black hair with a dark blue ribbon. It was eminently practical, but it had the unfortunate effect of making him want to untie it. “Do I detect optimism in my most pessimistic general?”

“Likely doom,” Zoya corrected, pulling gently on her white mare’s reins. All the horses were nervous.

*

[ Suli culture + Zoya's relationship with it ]

But the man behind him was less convinced. “I don’t want my children fighting in another war. Put them witches out front.”

Now Zoya let lightning crackle through the air around them. “The Grisha will lead the charge and I will take the first bullet if I have to.”

Mirov’s men took a step back.

“I should thank you,” Nikolai said with a smile. “When Zoya takes it into her head to be heroic, she can be quite frightening.”

“I’ll say,” squeaked the butcher.

“People died here,” said Mirov, trying to regain some authority.

“Someone has to answer for—”

“Who answers for the drought?” asked Zoya. Her voice cut through the air like a well-honed blade. “For earthquakes? For hurricanes? Is this who we are? Creatures who weep at the first sign of trouble? Or are we Ravkan—practical, modern, no longer prisoners of superstition?”

Some of the townspeople looked resentful, but others appeared downright chastised. In another life Zoya would have made a terrifying governess—straight-backed, sour-faced, and perfectly capable of making every man present wet his trousers in fear. But a Suli woman was staring at Zoya, her expression speculative, and his general, who could usually be counted upon to meet any insolent look with a glare powerful enough to scorch forests, was either oblivious or deliberately ignoring her.

“Khaj pa ve,” the woman said. “Khaj pa ve.”

Though Nikolai was curious, he had more pressing matters to attend to.

“I know it is little comfort, but we should discuss what aid the crown can offer in recompense for your lost land and homes. I will—”

“I’ll speak to the governor,” Zoya said briskly.

Nikolai had intended to talk with Mirov himself, since the man’s interest in status might make him susceptible to attention from royalty. But Zoya was already directing her mount his way.

“Be charming,” he warned her under his breath.

She flashed him a warm smile and a wink. “I will.”

“That was very convincing.”

The smile vanished in an instant. “I’ve had to watch you smarm all over Ravka for years. I’ve learned a few tricks.”

“I don’t smarm.”

“Occasionally you smarm,” said Tolya.

“Yes,” conceded Nikolai. “But it’s endearing.”

He watched Zoya slide down from her horse and lead Mirov away. The man looked nearly slack-jawed, a frequent side effect of Zoya’s beauty and general air of murderousness. Perhaps there were some things more intoxicating than status for Mirov after all.

But Zoya hadn’t been pressing an advantage with Mirov. She was running away. She hadn’t wanted that Suli woman to confront her, and that wasn’t like his general. At least, it hadn’t been. Since she’d lost Juris, since their battle on the Fold, Zoya had changed. It was like he was viewing her from a distance, like she’d taken a step away from everyone and everything. And yet she was sharp as always, armor firmly in place, a woman who moved through the world with precision and grace, and little time for mercy.

*

[ Zoya being the Darkling's #1 hater ]

“Fine. You’re to blame,” said Tamar. “How do we stop it?”

“Kill the Darkling,” said Zoya.

Tolya rolled his eyes. “That’s your answer to everything.”

Zoya shrugged. “How do we know if we don’t try?”

*

[ Relationship with Nina + some more Suli culture ]

At least Nina’s message had arrived in time for them to prepare. At least Nina was still alive.

“Order her home,” Zoya had urged, determined to keep the pleading from her voice.

But the king had refused. “We need her there.”

It was true, and she hated it.

Let the Fjerdans come by sea, Zoya thought, let Jarl Brum and the rest of his bloody witchhunters come to us on the waves. My Squallers and I will give them a warm welcome.

She rested her head against the cool stone of the window casement.

Some part of her had been glad to leave the king. To avoid Tamar’s knowing gaze. She could still hear the Suli woman’s voice, still see her standing fearless beneath the cedar tree. Khaj pa ve. We see you. Zoya was a warrior, a general, a Grisha who wore the scales of a dragon around her wrists. So why did those words fill her with so much fear?

*

[ Empathy + letting Count Kirigan down as gently as Zoya can ]

“He’s late,” she bit out.

“Perhaps he got lost,” offered Count Kirigin nervously. He was always nervous around her. It was tiresome. But he was very wealthy, and his interminably jolly mood made him a perfect foil. When Kirigin was in the room, it was impossible to take anything too seriously. Besides, his father had been a war profiteer, which made him a villain in Ravka but quite popular among the noblemen of West Ravka who had enriched themselves with the help of the elder Kirigin. “My watch says he’s still got two minutes until he’s strictly considered late.”

“Our king needs every minute.”

Kirigin’s cheeks flushed. He tapped his fingers on the table. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Zoya turned back toward the window.

She felt his shame, his eagerness, his longing. They came on like a sudden storm, a gust that swept her off solid ground and into free fall. One moment she was standing, sure-footed in a sunlit room in Os Kervo, looking out at the sea. The next she was gazing at a beautiful girl before her, raven-haired, her blue eyes distant. She reached out to touch the girl’s smooth cheek.

“Zoya?”

Zoya slammed back into her own consciousness just in time to smack Kirigin’s hand away. “I did not give you leave to touch me.”

“My apologies,” he said, cradling his hand as if she’d broken one of his fingers. “You just looked so … lost.”

And she had been lost. She glanced down at the shimmering black fetters on her wrists. They looked like shackles but they felt natural, as if they’d always been meant to lie cool against her skin. Power. The hunger for it like a heartbeat, steady and unrelenting. It was the temptation of all Grisha, and the acquisition of an amplifier only made it worse. Open the door, Zoya.

She could never be sure if it was her own voice or Juris’ that spoke in her head. She only knew that his presence within her was real. No figment of her imagination could be so irritating. Sometimes, beneath Juris, she could sense another mind, another presence that was not human, had never been human, something ancient—and then the world would shift. She would hear a servant whispering gossip in the kitchens, smell apple blossoms in the orchard at Yelinka—nearly fifteen miles away. All that she could bear, but the emotions, this sudden drop into someone else’s pain or joy… It was too much.

Or maybe you’re losing your mind, she considered. It was possible. After what she’d seen on the Fold, what she’d done—murdered a Saint bent on destruction, driven a blade into the heart of a dragon, into the heart of a friend. She had saved Nikolai’s life. She had saved Ravka from Elizaveta.

But she hadn’t stopped the Darkling from returning, had she? And now she couldn’t help but wonder if there was any chance she could save her country from war.

“I was lost in thought,” Zoya said, shaking out the sleeves of her blue kefta. “That’s all.”

“Ah,” said Kirigin. But he didn’t look convinced.

“You never served, did you?”

“No indeed,” said the count, seating himself at the end of a long rectangular table engraved with the West Ravkan crest—two eagles bracketing a lighthouse. He was wearing a custard-yellow coat and a coral waistcoat that, in combination with his pallid skin and bright red hair, made him look like an exotic bird seeking a perch. “My father sent me away to Novyi Zem during the civil war.” He cleared his throat. “Zoya—” She flashed him a look and he hastily corrected himself. “General Nazyalensky, I wonder if you might consider a visit to my holdings near Caryeva.”

“We are at war, Kirigin.”

“But after the war. In the summer, perhaps. We could go for the races.”

“Are you so sure there will be an after?”

Kirigin looked startled. “The king is a brilliant tactician.”

“We don’t have the numbers. If he fails to stop the Fjerdans at Nezkii, this war will be over before it begins. And to win, we need reinforcements.”

“And we will have them!” Kirigin declared. Zoya envied his optimism.

“One day there will be peace again. Even in a time of war, we might slip away for a moment. For a quiet dinner, a chance to talk, to get to know each other. Now that the king is to be married—”

“The king’s plans are none of your concern.”

“Certainly, but I thought that now you might be free to—”

Zoya turned on him. She felt current crackle through her, felt the wind lift her hair. “Be free to what, exactly?”

Kirigin held up his hands as if he could ward her off. “I simply meant—”

She knew what he meant. Rumors had surrounded her and Nikolai for months, rumors she had encouraged to hide the secret of the demon that lived inside him and what it took to keep the monster under control. So why did it make her so angry to hear these words now?

She took a slow breath. “Kirigin, you are a charming, handsome, very… amiable man.”

“I … am?” he said, then added with more surety, “I am.”

“Yes, you are. But we are not suited in temperament.”

“I think if you just—”

“No just.” She took another breath and forced herself to rein in her tone. She sat down at the table. Kirigin had been a loyal friend to the king and had put himself at considerable risk over the last few years by letting his home be used as a base for their weapons development. He wasn’t a bad sort. She could try and be pleasant. “I think I know the way you see this playing out.”

Kirigin flushed even redder. “I highly doubt that.”

Zoya suspected it involved bodies entwined and possibly him playing her a song on the lute, but she would spare them both that particular image. “You will invite me to a fine dinner. We’ll both drink too much wine. You’ll get me to talk about myself, the pressures of my position, the sadness of my past. Perhaps I’ll shed a tear or two. You’ll listen sensitively and astutely and somehow discover my secret self. Something like that?”

“Well, not precisely. But … yes!” He leaned forward. “I want to know the true you, Zoya.”

She reached out and took his hand. It was clammy with sweat.

“Count Kirigin. Emil. There is no secret self. I’m not going to reveal another me to you. I’m not going to be tamed by you. I am the king’s general. I am the commander of the Second Army, and right now my people are facing down the enemy without me there.”

“But if you would only—”

Zoya dropped his hand and slumped back in her chair. So much for pleasant. “War or not, if I ever hear another amorous word or invitation leave your mouth, I will knock you unconscious and let a street urchin steal your boots, understood?”

*

Zoya was not made for diplomacy, for closed rooms and polite talk. She was made for battle. As for Schenck and Duke Radimov and every other traitor who sided against Ravka, there would be time to deal with them after Nikolai found a way to win this war. We are the dragon.

*

“Is there any hope?” Kirigin asked. “For Ravka?”

She didn’t reply. She’d been told there was always hope, but she was too old and too wise for fairy tales.

Zoya sensed movement before she actually saw it.

She whirled and glimpsed light glinting off the blade of a knife. The man was lunging at her from the shadows. She threw up her hands and a blast of wind hurled him backward into the wall. He struck with a bone-breaking crunch, dead before he hit the ground.

Too easy. A decoy—

Kirigin sprang forward, knocking the second assassin to the ground. The count drew his pistol to fire.

“No!” Zoya shouted, using another hard gust of wind to redirect the bullet. It pinged harmlessly off the hull of a nearby ship.

She leapt onto the assassin, pressing his chest into the deck with her knees, and closed her fist, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He clawed at his throat, face turning red, eyes bulging and watering.

She opened her fingers, letting air flood into his lungs, and he gasped like a fish freed of a hook.

“Speak,” she demanded. “Who sent you?”

“A new age … is coming,” he rasped. “The false Saints… will be… purged.”

He looked and sounded Ravkan. Again she sucked the air from his lungs, then let it return in the barest trickle.

“False Saints?” said Kirigin, clutching his bloody arm.

“Who sent you?” she demanded.

“Your power … is unnatural and you will … be punished, Sankta Zoya.”

He spat the last two words like a curse.

Zoya hauled back and punched him in the jaw. His head drooped.

“Couldn’t you have choked him unconscious?” asked Kirigin.

“I felt like hitting someone.”

“Ah. I see. I’m glad it was him. But what did he mean by ‘Sankta Zoya’?”

“As far as I know, I’ve worked no miracles nor claimed to.” Zoya’s eyes narrowed. She knew exactly who to blame for this. “Damn Nina Zenik.”

*

[ Nikolai simping ]

Nikolai was dictating a reply to General Raevsky, and trying to ignore the noise of Tolya and Tamar sparring outside the stables, when he sensed her. What they had endured on the Fold had connected them in some way, and he knew he would see Zoya when he turned—yet the sight of her struck like a sudden change in the weather. A drop in temperature, the crackle of electricity in the air, the feeling of a storm coming on. The wind lifted her lack hair, the blue silk of her kefta whipping around her frame.

“Your heart is in your eyes, Your Highness,” murmured Tamar, wiping the sweat from her brow.

Tolya poked his twin in the arm with a sparring sword. “Tamar knows because that’s the way she looks at her wife.”

“I am free to look at my wife any which way I please.”

“But Zoya is not Nikolai’s wife.”

“I’m standing right here,” said Nikolai. “And there is nothing in my eyes except the never-ending dust you two kick up.”

He was glad to see his general. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Her presence brought a perfectly understandable relief, a feeling of calm that came with knowing that whatever the problem was, they would best it, that if one of them faltered, the other would be there to drag them along. That comfort was not something he could afford to get used to or rely on, but he would enjoy it while he might. If only she weren’t wearing that damned blue ribbon again.

*

[ Zoyalai being GROSS ]

Zoya sat down beside Nikolai on the bed, trying not to jostle him.

“You must be still,” she murmured.

“Don’t go.”

He shut his eyes and gripped her hand in his. Zoya knew the Healer had noticed it, knew he would probably gossip about it later. But she could weather the gossip. Saints knew she’d endured worse. And maybe she needed to feel his hand in hers after the shock of what they’d witnessed.

She couldn’t stop seeing those women burn.

“You shouldn’t be here for this,” said the Healer. “It’s an ugly process.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The Healer flinched and Zoya wondered if the dragon had emerged, shining silver in her eyes. Let him gossip about that too.

Nikolai clung to her hand as the Healer stripped the ruined flesh from his arm. Only then could it be replaced with healthy skin. It seemed to take hours, first one arm, then the other. Whenever Zoya left the king’s side—to fetch a cool cloth for his head, to turn up the lanterns so that the Healer had better light—Nikolai would open his eyes and mutter, “Where is my general?”

“I’m here,” she repeated, again and again.

Once the Healer had dealt with the singed flesh of his arms, no hair remained on them, but the scars on his hands—the veins of shadow the Darkling had left—were still visible.

“He’ll need to rest,” said the Healer, rising and stretching when the work was done. “But the damage was fairly superficial.”

“And Princess Ehri?” Zoya asked.

“I don’t know. Her burns were much more severe.”

Once the Healer was gone, Zoya waited for Nikolai’s breathing to turn deep and even. Dusk had fallen. Outside the lanterns in the garden were being lit, a string of stars strewn across the grounds. She had missed this room, who Nikolai became in this room, the man who for a moment might let the mantle of king fall away, who trusted her enough to close his eyes and fall into dreams as she stood watch. She needed to get back to the Little Palace, check on Princess Ehri, talk to Tamar, forge a plan. But this might be the last time she saw him this way.

At last she rose and turned down the lights.

“Don’t go,” he said, still half asleep.

“I have to bathe. I smell like a forest fire.”

“You smell like wildflowers. You always do. What can I say to make you stay?” His words trailed off into a drowsy mumble as he fell back asleep.

Tell me it’s more than war and worry that makes you speak those words. Tell me what they would mean if you weren’t a king and I weren’t a soldier. But she didn’t want to hear any of that, not really. Sweet words and grand declarations were for other people, other lives.

She brushed the hair back from his face, placed a kiss on his forehead. “I would stay forever if I could,” she whispered. He wouldn’t remember anyway.

*

[ Feelings re: family and the Second Army ]

Zoya bristled at that. “The Second Army was a refuge.”

“Maybe for some,” said Tolya. “The Darkling took Grisha from their parents when they were only children. They were taught to forget the places they came from, the people they knew. They served the crown or their families suffered. What kind of choice is that?”

“But no one experimented on us,” said Zoya. And some of us were perfectly happy to forget our parents.

“No,” said Tolya, resting his huge hands on his knees. “They just turned you into soldiers and sent you out to fight their wars.”

“He’s not wrong,” said Genya, looking down at her wine. “Don’t you ever think about what life you might have led if you hadn’t come to the Little Palace?”

Zoya leaned her head back against the silk of the couch. Yes, she wondered. As a little girl, the thought had haunted her dreams and hounded her into waking. She would close her eyes and find herself walking down the aisle. She would see her aunt bleeding on the floor. And always, her mother was there, coaxing Zoya forward, reminding her not to trip on the hem of her little golden wedding dress, as Zoya’s father sat silent in the pews. He’d hung his head, Zoya remembered. But he hadn’t said a word to save her. Only Liliyana had dared to speak. And Liliyana was long dead.

Murdered by the Fold and the Darkling’s ambition.

“Yes,” said Zoya. “I think about it.”

Tamar ran a hand through her short hair. “Our father promised our mother that we would have a choice. So when she died, he took us to Novyi Zem.”

Would that have been the better thing? Should Liliyana have put her on a ship to cross the True Sea instead of bringing her to the palace gates to join the Grisha? Nikolai had abolished the practice of separating Grisha from their parents. There was no mandatory draft to pull children from their homes. But for the Grisha who had no homes, who had never felt safe in the places they should feel safe, the Little Palace would always be a refuge, somewhere to run to. Zoya had to preserve that sanctuary, no matter what the Fjerdans or the Shu or the Kerch threw at them. And maybe, somewhere on the other side of this long fight, there was a future where Grisha wouldn’t have to fear or be feared, where “soldier” would just be one of a thousand possible paths.

*

[ Zoya feeling the dragon ]

As Zoya climbed the stairs behind Nikolai, she felt the ancient intelligence inside her rouse—thinking, calculating. It always seemed to come alive with her anger or her fear.

*

[ Zoya, the dragon, and hating the Darkling ]

The Darkling’s new residence was empty, but there was quite a view. Through the glass walls, Zoya could see the palace grounds, the rooftops and gardens of the upper town, lights from the boats drifting on the river that ringed it, and the lower town below. Os Alta. This had been her home since she was only nine years old, but she’d rarely had the chance to see it from this angle. She felt a rush of dizziness, and then she was remembering. Of course. She knew this city, the countryside that surrounded it. She had flown over it before.

No. Not her. The dragon. It had a name, one known only to itself and long ago to the others of its kind, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was. It was right on the tip of her tongue. Infuriating.

“I am eager for company,” said the Darkling.

Zoya felt a sudden rush of his resentment, his rage at this captivity—the Darkling’s anger. The dragon’s presence in her head had left her vulnerable. She drew in a breath, grounding herself, here, in this strange glass cell, the stone floor beneath her boots. What might you learn—Juris’ voice, or was it her own?—what might you know, if only you would open the door?

Another breath. I am Zoya Nazyalensky and I am getting truly sick of the cocktail party in my head, you old lizard. She could have sworn she heard Juris chuckle in reply.

Nikolai leaned against the wall. “I’m sorry we don’t visit more often.

There’s a war on and, well, no one likes you.”

The Darkling touched a hand to his chest. “You wound me.”

“All in due time,” said Zoya.

The Darkling raised a brow. A faint smile touched his lips—there in that expression, there was the man she remembered. “She’s afraid of me, you know.”

“I’m not.”

“She doesn’t know what I may do. Or what I can do.”

Nikolai gestured to one of the Sun Soldiers for chairs to be brought in. “Maybe she’s afraid of being spoken of as if she’s not standing right in front of you.”

*

[ #1 Darkling hater ]

Now the Darkling’s expression soured. “When I look back on where things went wrong, where my plans all unraveled, I can trace the moment of disaster to the trust I placed in a pirate named Sturmhond.”

“Privateer,” said Nikolai. “And I wouldn’t know, but if the privateer you’ve hired is entirely trustworthy, he’s probably not much of a privateer.”

Zoya couldn’t just brush past with a joke. “That’s the moment? Not in manipulating a young girl and trying to steal her power, or destroying half a city of innocent people, or decimating the Grisha, or blinding your own mother? None of those moments feel like an opportunity for self-examination?”

The Darkling merely shrugged, his hands spread as if indicating he had no more tricks to play. “You list off atrocities as though I’m meant to feel shame for them. And perhaps I would, were there not a hundred that preceded those crimes, and another hundred before those. Human life is worth preserving. But human lives? They come and go like so much chaff, never tipping the scales.”

“What a remarkable calculation,” said Nikolai. “And a convenient one for a mass murderer.”

“Zoya understands. The dragon knows how small human lives are, how wearying. They are fireflies. Sparks that dwindle in the night, while we burn on and on.”

There were not enough deep breaths in the world to keep a leash on Zoya’s anger. How did Nikolai maintain that air of glib composure? And why did they bother trying to prick the Darkling’s conscience? Her aunt, her friends, the people he had sworn to protect meant nothing in the long expanse of his life.

She leaned forward. “You are stolen fire and stolen time. Don’t look to me for support.” She turned to Nikolai. “Why are we here? Being around him makes me want to break things. Let’s take him to the Fold and kill him. Maybe that will set things right.”

“It won’t work,” said the Darkling. “The demon lives on in your king. You’d have to kill him too.”

“Don’t give her ideas,” said Nikolai.

*

Zoya stood. “I don’t like any of this. He’s up to something. And even if we find the monastery and the seeds, what would we do with them? We would need an extraordinarily powerful Fabrikator to bring forth the thorn wood the way that Elizaveta did.”

The Darkling smiled. “Does this mean you have not mastered all Juris set out to teach you?”

Zoya felt the dam containing her rage give way. She lunged toward the Darkling as Nikolai seized her arms to hold her back. “You do not speak his name. Say his name again and I’ll cut the tongue from your mouth and wear it as a brooch.”

“Don’t,” Nikolai said, his grip strong, his voice low. “He’s not worth your anger.”

The Darkling watched her as he had when she was a pupil, as if there was something only he could see inside her. As if it amused him. “They all die, Zoya. They all will. Everyone you love.”

“Is that right?” said Nikolai. “How tragic. Can you be still, Zoya?”

Zoya shook Nikolai off. “For now.”

“How she struggles,” the Darkling said, his voice thick with mirth. “Like an insect pinned by her own power.”

*

[ #1 Nikolai fan + Zoya backstory ]

“You’re wearing the watch I gave you.”

Zoya looked down at the little silver dragon. “You should have given me a raise instead.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“Then you should give me a shiny medal. Or a nice estate.”

“When the war is over, you shall have your pick of them.”

Zoya took another sip of her brandy. “I choose the dacha in Udova.”

“That’s my ancestral home!”

“Are you taking back your offer?”

“Absolutely not. It’s too hot in the summer and hell to heat in the winter. Why do you want it?”

“I like the view.”

“There’s nothing to see from that dacha except a broken-down mill and a muddy little town.”

“I know,” she said. She could have stopped at that. Maybe she should have. Instead, she continued, “I grew up there.”

Nikolai did his best to hide his surprise, but Zoya knew him too well. She never spoke of her childhood.

“Oh?” he said too casually. “Do you have family there?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t spoken to my parents since they tried to sell me off to a rich nobleman when I was nine years old.” She’d never told anyone about what had happened that day. She’d let her life, her family, and her losses stay in the past. But lately it felt hard not to be known, like keeping herself together was all the more difficult without someone to see who she truly was.

Nikolai set down his glass. “That isn’t—that’s not … The laws prohibit—”

“Who enforces the laws?” Zoya asked softly. “Rich men. Rich men who do what they wish. Power doesn’t make a man wise.”

“I’m proof enough of that.”

“You’re occasionally a useless podge. But you’re a good man, Nikolai. And a good king. I will not serve another.”

“I don’t like that word.”

“Serve? It’s an honest word. You are the king I’ve chosen.” She took another sip of her drink and turned to face the fire. It was easier to speak her worry to the flames. “The last time we attempted the obisbaya, you almost died. You can’t render yourself defenseless like that again. For Ravka’s sake.”

*

Zoya’s laugh sounded brittle to her ears. “A king with a demon inside him. A monk with the Darkling inside him. A general with a dragon inside her. We’re all monsters now, Nikolai.” She pushed her glass aside. It was time to say good night. She moved toward the door.

“Zoya,” Nikolai said. “War can make it hard to remember who you are. Let’s not forget the human parts of ourselves.”

Did she want to forget? What a gift that would be. To never feel as humans did, to never grieve again. Then it wouldn’t be so hard to leave this room. To shut the door on what might have been.

To say goodbye.

*

[ Genya/David, feelings re: love, and the Darkling ]

Genya drew a handkerchief from her pocket, leaned over the back of the settee, and dabbed at David’s lips. “My love, there’s ink all over your face.”

“Does it matter?”

“The correct response is, ‘Beautiful wife, won’t you kiss it away?’”

“Spontaneity.” David nodded thoughtfully and drew out a journal to make note of this latest instruction. “I’ll be ready next time.”

“It’s technically later. Let’s try again.”

How comfortable they were together. How easy. Zoya ignored the pang of jealousy she felt. Some people were built for love and some were built for war. One did not lend itself to the other.

“I’ll write to Alina,” Genya said. “The news should come from me. But … does that mean you won’t be here for the wedding?”

“I’m sorry,” Zoya said, though that was not entirely true. She wanted to be there for Genya, but she had spent her life standing on the outside of moments, unsure of where she belonged. She was at her best with a mission to accomplish, not in a chapel festooned with roses and echoing with declarations of love.

“I forgive you,” said Genya. “Mostly. And people should be staring at the bride, not the gorgeous General Nazyalensky. Just take care of our girl. I hate the thought of the Darkling being near Alina again.”

“I don’t like it either.”

“I hoped we wouldn’t have to tell her he’s returned.”

“That we could put him in the ground and she’d never have to find out?”

Genya scoffed. “I would never bury that man. Who knows what might spring up from the soil?”

“He doesn’t have to survive this trip,” Zoya mused. “Accidents happen.”

“Would you be killing him for you or for me?”

“I don’t honestly know anymore.”

Genya gave a little shiver. “I’m glad he’ll be gone from this place. Even for a short while. I hate having him in our home.”

Our home. Was that what this place was? Was that what they had made it?

“He should have a trial,” said David.

Genya wrinkled her nose. “Or maybe he should be burned on the pyre as the Fjerdans do and scattered at sea. Am I a monster for saying so?”

“No,” said Zoya. “As the king likes to remind me, we’re human. Do you … I look back and I hate knowing how easy I was to manipulate.”

“Hungry for love and full of pride?”

Zoya squirmed. “Was I that obvious?”

Genya looped her arm through Zoya’s and leaned her head against her shoulder. Zoya tried not to stiffen. She wasn’t good at this kind of closeness, but some childish part of her craved it, remembered how easy it had felt to laugh with her aunt, how glad she’d been when Lada had climbed into her lap to demand a story. She’d pretended to resent it, but she’d felt like she belonged with them.

“We were all that way. He took us from our families when we were so young.”

“I don’t regret that,” Zoya said. “I hate him for many things, but not for teaching me to fight.”

Genya looked up at her. “Just remember, Zoya, he wasn’t teaching you to fight for yourself but in his service. He had only punishment for those who dared to speak against him.”

He was the reason for Genya’s scars, for all the pain she’d endured. No, that wasn’t true. Zoya had known what Genya was forced to suffer when they were just girls. Everyone had. But the other Grisha hadn’t comforted her or cared for her. They’d mocked her, sneered at her, excluded her from their meals and the circle of their friendship. They’d left her unforgivably alone. Zoya had been the worst of them. The Darkling wasn’t the only one who owed penance.

But I can change that now, Zoya vowed. I can make sure he never returns here.

She let herself rest her cheek against the silky top of Genya’s head and made them both a promise: Wherever this adventure led, the Darkling wasn’t coming back from it.

*

[ Zoyalai ]

Zoya hadn't waited to say goodbye. Alina had been contacted and—thanks to her generosity or an unhealthy taste for martyrdom—had agreed to the meeting. Zoya had arranged the mission with predictably ruthless efficiency, and a week later, she was gone. Before dawn, without fanfare or parting words. Nikolai was both stung and grateful. She was right. The gossip around them had become a liability, and they had enough of those already. Zoya was his general and he her king. Best for everyone to remember it. And now he could visit the Little Palace without having to worry about bumping into her and enduring her acid tongue.

Excellent, he told himself as he made the walk from the Grand Palace. So why do I feel like I’ve had my guts gently gnawed on by a volcra?

*

[ Feelings on Saints/matyrdom + Darkling dropping a bomb re: Zoya possibly being unkillable ]

“It’s also possible no one has spoken to or heard from these monks for another three hundred years before that.”

“Saints’ blood,” she swore. “You have no idea if these monks have thorn-wood seeds.”

“I know they had them.”

“You don’t even know if they really exist!”

“Perhaps it’s a matter of faith. Are you thinking of killing me, Zoya?”

“Yes.”

“Your king wouldn’t be pleased.”

“I’m not going to do it,” she lied. “I just enjoy thinking about it. It’s soothing, like humming myself a little melody. Besides, death is too good for you.”

“Is it?” He sounded almost curious. “What would make my atonement complete? An eternity of torture?”

“It would be a start. Though letting you live a long life without your power isn’t a bad beginning either.”

Now his face went cold. “Make no mistake, Zoya Nazyalensky. I did not live a hundred lives, die, and return to this earth, to live as an ordinary man. I will find a path back to my power. One way or another, I’ll cast out the remainders of Yuri’s soul. But the obisbaya is your king’s only chance to be free of his demon and for the world to be free of the Fold.” He leaned back against the seat. “I hear tell there was an attempt on your life.”

Damn it. Which guards had been talking? What had he overheard?

“The more powerful you become, the more enemies you acquire,” he said. “And the Apparat is not a good enemy to have.”

“How do you know the Apparat was behind the attack?” They’d gotten little information from the assassin, but he was definitely one of the Apparat’s Priestguard. Zoya suspected the Apparat cared less about people calling her a Saint—though that was disconcerting enough—and more about eliminating her to weaken Ravka’s forces. His zealot followers had been happy to make the attempt.

A smug smile touched the Darkling’s mouth. “After hundreds of years, one becomes a very good guesser. The Apparat wants Saints he can control. A weak girl, or better yet a dead one. This assassination was meant to be your martyrdom.”

“I’m no Saint. I’m a soldier.”

He tried to spread his hands, the chains at his wrists clanking. “And yet, do we not make miracles?”

“Yuri really is still in there, prattling on, isn’t he?” This journey already felt interminable. “I’m not in the business of miracles. I practice the Small Science.”

“You know as well as I that the line between Saint and Grisha was once blurred. It was a time of miracles. Maybe that time has come again.”

Zoya wanted nothing to do with it. “And when one of the Apparat’s assassins slips through my guard or a Fjerdan bullet lodges in my heart, will I be resurrected like Grigori? Like Elizaveta? Like you?”

“Are you so very sure you can be killed at all?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The power that I possess, that Elizaveta and Grigori and Juris possessed, that now crackles through your veins, is not so easily wiped from the world. You can strike a bird from the sky. It’s far harder to vanquish the sky itself. Only our own power can destroy us, and even then it’s not a sure thing.”

“And your mother?”

The Darkling’s gaze slid back to the covered window. “Let us not speak of the past.”

She had been Zoya’s teacher, feared and beloved, powerful beyond measure. “I watched her throw herself from a mountaintop. She sacrificed herself to stop you. Was that her martyrdom?”

The Darkling said nothing. Zoya couldn’t stop herself.

“Grigori was eaten by a bear. Elizaveta was drawn and quartered. Still they returned. There are stories whispered in the Elbjen mountains of the Dark Mother. She crowds in when the nights grow long. She steals the heat from kitchen fires.”

“Liar.”

“Maybe. We all have stories to tell.”

*

Is she afraid? Zoya wondered. Eager? Angry? She felt the dragon stir as if called. No. She didn’t want to feel what Alina was feeling. Her own emotions were enough of a burden. Mal placed a shawl around Alina’s shoulders, wrapping his arms around her as they looked out over the old vineyard.

“Charming.”

Zoya studied the Darkling’s face. “You can sneer, but I see your hunger.”

“For the life of an otkazat’sya?”

“For a life of the kind you and I have never known and will never know—quiet, peace, the surety of love.”

“There is nothing sure about love. Do you think love will protect you when the Fjerdans come to capture the Stormwitch?”

She didn’t. But maybe she wanted to believe there was more to life than fear and being feared.

*

“Keep eyes on the door,” Zoya commanded. “If you hear anything out of the ordinary—anything at all—do not wait for my orders.”

“I’ve guarded him in the sun cell,” the tattooed soldier said. “He seems harmless enough.”

“I didn’t ask for an assessment of the threat,” Zoya bit out. “Stay alert, and respond with deadly force. If he gets free, we won’t have a second shot at him, understood?”

The soldier nodded, and Zoya dismissed her with a disgusted flick of her hand.

“Still making friends?” Alina said with a laugh.

“These children are going to get themselves and us killed.” Mal smiled. “Are you nervous, Zoya?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

He turned to Alina. “She’s nervous.”

“You’re not?” asked Alina.

“Oh, I’m terrified, but I didn’t expect Zoya to be.”

Alina yanked her shawl tighter. “Let’s get this over with.”

*

[ Darkling hater + Alina standing up for her ]

“You dragged us out to this miserable place,” said Alina. “What is it you want now?”

“What I have always wanted, to make a safe place for the Grisha.”

“Do you think you could manage it?” she asked, echoing the Darkling’s taunt to Misha. “It’s not like you didn’t get a fair try before. Hundreds of tries.”

“If not me, then who?”

“Nikolai Lantsov. Zoya Nazyalensky.”

“Two monsters, more unnatural than anything either Morozova or I ever created.”

Zoya’s brows rose at that. Being called a monster by a monster somehow felt like a badge of honor.

“I’m pretty sure I’m talking to a dead man,” said Alina. “So maybe this isn’t the time to throw stones.”

The Darkling’s shackles clinked. “They are children, barely able to understand themselves or this world. I am—”

“Yes, we know, eternal. But right now, you’re a man without a scrap of power sitting in a house full of ghosts. Zoya has been fighting for years to keep the Grisha safe. She rebuilt the Second Army from the tatters you left behind. Nikolai has unified the First and Second Armies in a way never seen in Ravka’s history. And what about the innovations of Genya Safin and David Kostyk?”

Zoya stirred her tea, afraid to show how much Alina’s words meant to her. After the war, she had begun her journey as a member of Alina’s chosen Triumvirate, unplagued by hesitation. She’d thought she was born to lead. But through time, and trial, and failure, doubt had crept in.

*

[ Darkling trauma ]

Gunshots shattered the air as the flyers overhead opened fire on the Darkling from above. One found its target, and the Darkling gave a yelp of rage and pain. He can still bleed.

But the nichevo’ya swarmed around him in a mass of wings and writhing bodies, absorbing bullets as if they were nothing at all.

Two of the shadow soldiers surged skyward, and a moment later the flyers were plummeting toward the earth.

Zoya screamed, hurling her power in a wave of wind to break their fall.

Not one more, she vowed. She would not lose a single soldier more to this man.

[ … ]

Darkness swirled around him, as if the shadows were glad in their dancing, returned to their beloved keeper. The Sun Soldiers pushed against the darkness with their light. But Zoya saw his hands in motion—the Darkling was going to use the Cut. He would kill them all.

We are the dragon. Juris’ consciousness tugged at hers, pulling her toward something more, even as her own heart refused it. No. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

She threw her arms out in a circle of wind that flattened the trees and threw the Sun Soldiers off their feet but away from harm. Not one more.

She drew a bolt of pure crackling lightning from the sky, a spear of fire to end the Darkling as they should have ended him years ago.

But darkness enveloped her, and in the next minute, when the shadows cleared, he was gone.

*

[ Zoyalina + Darkling being afraid of Zoya ]

She rested her bandaged hand on Zoya’s cheek and Zoya stilled, feeling suddenly like she was with her aunt again, in that kitchen in Novokribirsk. I could stay here, Zoya had said. I could stay with you and never go back. Her aunt had only smoothed Zoya’s hair and said, Not my brave girl. There are some hearts that beat stronger than others.

“Zoya,” Alina said, drawing her back to the present, to her fear, to this wretched place. “You are not alone in this. And he can be beaten.”

“He is immortal.”

“Then why did he flinch when you brought down the storm?”

“It did nothing!”

“He sees something in you that frightens him. He always has. Why do you think he worked so hard to make us doubt ourselves? He was afraid of what we might become.”

We are the dragon. We do not lie down to die. Some tiny fraction of the fear in her receded.

“Zoya, you know we’re here if you need us.”

“But your power—”

“I can still pick up a rifle. I was a soldier before I was a Saint.”

I like this one. She’s unafraid. Juris’ whisper, an echo of Zoya’s own grudging thoughts about the orphan girl she’d once resented and despised. The dragon’s laugh rumbled through her. Loss has made her bold. If only I could say the same of you.

Zoya sighed. “That’s all well and good,” she said. “But how am I going to tell the king?”

*

But who was the villain? The Darkling had created the Fold, but Nikolai and Zoya and Yuri had all played a part in bringing him back. What had Zoya said? We’re all monsters now.

Nikolai could only offer a half-truth. “If that becomes clear, vengeance will be yours to take.”

“I look forward to it.” Makhi stepped into the coach. “You may be surprised at how long I can hold a grudge.”

“A pity you didn’t meet General Nazyalensky. I think you two would have found plenty to talk about.”

*

[ Thinking about interpersonal relationships ]

They stood on the shore of the lake at the Little Palace, watching David’s body burn.

Inferni ignited the flames. Squallers protected the fire from the cold and damp. When the time came, Durasts would fashion a brick from David’s ashes. That was the ritual, the proper way of caring for the dead. When there was a body. When there was time. So many had been left on battlefields, had died in prisons or laboratories far from people who might tend to them, who might speak words of love and remembrance.

Who will speak for me? Zoya wondered. Nikolai? Genya? And what would they say? She was impossible and vain, bitter and poisonous as yewberries. She was brave. It didn’t add up to much.

*

[ Zoya backstory re: parents, mother and love ]

“I know,” said Zoya. “He loved you more than anything.” The dragon’s eye had opened and Zoya felt that love, the enormity of what Genya had lost. It was too much to endure knowing she could do nothing to erase that pain.

“Tell them, Zoya. I can’t … I can’t.”

Genya looked frail, curled in on herself, the frond of some delicate flower hiding from winter.

What could Zoya say to her? To any of them? How could she give them hope she didn’t have?

This is what love does. That had been one of her mother’s favorite sayings. When the larder was bare, when her husband couldn’t find work, when her hands cracked from taking in the neighbors’ washing. This is what love does.

Zoya could see Sabina, her hands red from lye, her beautiful face carved with lines, as if the sculptor who had wrought her loveliness had lost control, dug too deep beneath the eyes, the corners of the mouth. You cannot imagine how handsome he was, Sabina would say, looking at Zoya’s father, her voice bitter. My own mother warned me I would have no life with a Suli, that she and my father would turn their backs on us. But I didn’t care. I was in love. We met by moonlight. We danced to the music his brothers played. I thought love would be our armor, wings to fly with, a shield against the world. She’d laughed, the sound like bones rattling in a fortune-teller’s cup, ready to spill and show only disaster. Sabina spread her cracked hands, gesturing to their meager home, the cold stove, the piles of laundry, the earthen floor. Here is our shield. This is what love does. Her father had said nothing.

Zoya had seen her Suli uncles only once. They’d arrived after dark by her mother’s order. Sabina had already retired to bed and told Zoya to stay with her, but as soon as her mother had nodded off to sleep, Zoya had snuck out to see the strangers with their black hair and their black eyes, their brows thick and dark like hers. They looked like her father, but they didn’t. Their brown skin seemed lit from within. Their shoulders were straight and they held their heads high. Beside them, her father looked like an old man, though she knew he was the youngest brother.

“Come away with us,” Uncle Dhej had said. “Now. Tonight. Before that shrew wakes.”

“Don’t speak of my wife that way.”

“Then before your loving wife wakes to claim you. You will die here, Suhm. You’re nearly dead already.”

“I’m fine.”

“We’re not meant to live among them, locked up in their houses, wilting beneath their roofs. You were meant for the stars and open skies. You were meant for freedom.”

“I have a child. I cannot just—”

“The mother is spoiled fruit and the daughter will grow up sour. I can see the sorrow hanging around her already.”

“Be silent, Dhej. Zoya has a good heart and will grow up strong and beautiful. As her mother might have. In a different life. With a different husband.”

“Then bring her with us. Save her from this place.”

Yes. Take me away from here. Zoya had clapped her hands over her mouth as if she’d spoken the words aloud, released some kind of curse into the world. Guilt flooded her, choking her, bringing tears to her eyes. She loved her mother. She did, she did. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. She didn’t want to leave her alone to fend for herself. She’d crept back into Sabina’s bed and hugged her close and cried herself to sleep. But she’d dreamed she was riding in a Suli wagon and she’d woken the next morning, confused and disoriented, still sure she could smell hay and horses, still certain she could hear the happy chatter of sisters she didn’t have.

She’d never seen her uncles again.

This is what love does. Love was the destroyer. It made mourners, widows, left misery in its wake. Grief and love were one and the same. Grief was the shadow love left when it was gone.

I’ve lived too long in that shadow, Zoya thought, gazing out at the lakeshore, at the soldiers huddled against the cold, waiting for someone to say something.

“Please,” Genya whispered.

Zoya racked her brain for a message of hope, of strength. But all she had was the truth.

*

[ Grief ]

Genya looked out at the lake. “I need to get across.”

Zoya could signal a Tidemaker, but the dragon was near and she wanted to be the one who held Genya in this moment. She lifted her arms, moving her palms slowly together. Are we not all things? If the science is small enough. There’d been no time to hone her gifts or shape the power Juris had granted Zoya with his life. But her Squaller talents were not so far from the abilities of a Tidemaker. I need to give her this. The dragon demanded it. Zoya’s grieving heart required it.

Ice formed on the surface of the lake, a shimmering white path that spread with each step Genya took, leading her from the shore to David’s pyre. She stood before the flames, her red hair gleaming like the feathers of a firebird. She pressed a kiss to the cover of the notebook.

“So you’ll remember when I meet you in the next world,” she said softly. She tossed the notebook onto the fire.

Zoya shouldn’t have been able to hear the words, not at this distance. She didn’t want to know this private thing, this painful thing. But she saw with the dragon’s eyes, heard with its ears. For every life Zoya had grieved, the dragon had grieved a thousand.

How? How do you survive a world that keeps taking?

There was no answer from the dragon, only the crackle of flames and the cold silence of the stars, lovely, bright, and uncaring.

*

“But?” said Zoya.

He held her gaze. “What we do next will determine not only what kind of war this is, but what every war will look like after. Launching a rocket without ever needing to put a soldier or a pilot in harm’s way? War is meant to have costs. At what point are we as bad as the Fjerdans?”

“Maybe that’s what we need to be,” said Zoya. “This is a world where villains thrive.” Where men like David died buried beneath a heap of stone in their wedding clothes while the Darkling and the Apparat somehow still drew breath.

“Does that mean we become villains too?” Tolya asked, and Zoya could hear the pleading in his voice.

“You’ve never been the weakest person in the room, Tolya. Mercy means nothing if we can’t protect our own.”
“But where does it end?”

Zoya didn’t have an answer to that. Nikolai had said it enough times: Once the river was loosed, it could not be called back.

*

[ Garden scene ]

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?

[ … ]

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.

*

[ Darkling on Zoya ]

He sat at the end of a table in the beer hall, ate tough rye bread and strips of lamb stewed so long they tasted like they’d already been chewed. This was what it meant to be alive. Elizaveta should count herself lucky. To think Zoya had been the one to kill her. He supposed it saved him the trouble of doing it himself. And if Zoya ever learned to harness the power she’d been given? She was still vulnerable, still malleable. Her anger made her easy to control. When this war was done and the casualties counted, she might once more be in need of a shepherd. She had been one of his best students and soldiers, her envy and her rage driving her to train and fight harder than any of her peers. And then she’d turned on him. Like Genya. Like Alina. Like his own mother. Like all of Ravka.

She will return to you.

*

[ Zoya sucks at spywork ]

Zoya was waiting on the deck of the Volkvolny. She had dressed as a common sailor in trousers and a roughspun shirt, and braided her hair, but she looked completely ill at ease out of her kefta. Nikolai had seen the way Nina disappeared into a role, changed the way she walked, the way she spoke, seemingly without effort. Zoya did not have this gift. Her posture remained razor sharp, her chin lifted slightly, less like a rough-and-tumble sailor than a beautiful aristocrat who had taken it into her head to spend the day among commoners.

*

She cast him a curious glance. “Could you do it? Give up the throne?”

“I don’t know. When you’ve wanted something so long, it’s hard to imagine a life without it.” He supposed he wasn’t just talking about Ravka.

Zoya stood a little straighter, all propriety. “Growing up means learning to go without.”

“What a depressing thought.”

“It’s not so bad. Starve long enough, you forget your hunger.”

He leaned closer. “If it’s so easy to lose your appetite, maybe you were never truly hungry at all.” She looked away, but not before he saw the faintest blush tinge her cheeks. “You could come with me, you know,” he said idly. “A Squaller is always welcome on a ship’s crew.”

Zoya wrinkled her nose. “Live on salt cod and pray to the Saint of Oranges that I don’t get scurvy? I think not.”

“No small part of you wishes for this kind of freedom?” Because, all Saints, he did.

She laughed, tilting her face to the salt breeze. “I long for boredom. I would gladly sit in a drawing room at the Little Palace and sip my tea and maybe fall asleep in the middle of a tedious meeting. I’d like to linger over a meal without thinking of all the work yet to be done. I’d like to get through one night without…”

She trailed off, but Nikolai understood too well how to finish her thought. “Without a nightmare. Without waking in a cold sweat. I know.”

Zoya rested her chin in her hands and looked out at the water. “We’ve been promised a future for so long. A day when the Grisha would be safe, when Ravka would be at peace. Every time we try to grab for it, it slips through our fingers.”

Nikolai had sometimes wondered if it was in his nature to be restless, in Zoya’s nature to be ruthless, and in Ravka’s nature to be forever at war beneath the Lantsov banner. Was that part of what drew him to this life as king? He longed for peace for his country, but did some part of him fear it as well? Who was he without someone to oppose him? Without a problem to solve?

“I promised you that future.” He wished he’d been able to make that dream come true for both of them. “I didn’t deliver.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she clipped out, haughty and imperious as a queen. But she didn’t look at him when she said, “You gave Ravka a chance. You gave me a country I could fight for. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

Gratitude. Was that what he wanted from her? Nevertheless, Nikolai found he was pleased.

*

[ Zoya backstory ft. child bride + wanting to be stationed elsewhere ]

“Because you’re Grisha?”

“Because I know what it is to be sold.” She gestured to the busy street and the canal teeming with gondels and market boats. “I know we need this. Jobs for our people, money in our coffers. But Ketterdam was built on the backs of the vulnerable. Grisha indentures. Suli and Zemeni and Kaelish who came here for something better but weren’t permitted to own land or hold positions on the Merchant Council.”

“Then we take what we like from the Kerch and leave the rest. We build something better, something for everyone.”

“If fate gives us half a chance.”

“And if fate doesn’t give us the chance, we steal it.”

“Ketterdam is rubbing off on you.” A small smile curled her lips. “But I think I believe you. Maybe it’s the coat.”

Nikolai winked at her. “It’s not the coat.”

“Come closer so I can push you into the canal.”

“I think not.”

“I do want prosperity for Ravka,” said Zoya. “But for all of Ravka. Not just the nobles in their palaces or the merchants with their fleets of ships.”

“Then we build that future together.”

“Together,” Zoya repeated. Her expression was troubled.

“What doomsaying is happening behind that gorgeous face, Nazyalensky?”

“If we survive the war … Once peace is struck, you should station me elsewhere.”

“I see,” he said, unwilling to show how much those words bothered him. “Did you have someplace in mind?”

“Os Kervo. We’ll need a strong presence there.”

“You’ve thought it all out, then.”

She nodded, two quick bobs of her chin. “I have.”

All for the best. Peace would mean seeking a new alliance, a bride who could help keep Ravka independent. A memory came to him, the fleeting image of Zoya at his bedside. She’d pressed a kiss to his forehead. Her touch had been cool as a breeze off the sea. But that had never happened and never would. He must have dreamed it.

“Very well. You may have any command you wish. Assuming we survive.”

“We had better,” she said, tugging at her roughspun sleeves. “It’s going to take me two days to wash off the stench of cheap perfume and bilgewater. How can we be sure Brekker will help us at all?”

*

[ Zoya hates Kaz ]

He was grateful when Brekker turned his attention back to Zoya.

“For the record, General Nazyalensky, Kerch is a country without mercy or law, but it is at least a place where a man might make something of himself without noble blood or magic in his veins.”

“The Grisha do not practice ‘magic,’” Zoya said with disdain. “It is the Small Science. And it’s rude to eavesdrop.”

“Better to get fat on information than starve on good manners. Shall we?”

*

Zoya picked up a swatch of fabric that looked like the color had been bled from it. “Is there a Fabrikator living here?”

“A friend of ours,” said Jesper, throwing his lanky frame down in a chair.

“An indenture who likes to pop by for meals. Quite the sponger.”

“Has he never been trained? The work seems rudimentary.”

Jesper sniffed. “I thought it had a certain rustic elegance.”

“No,” said Wylan. “He hasn’t been trained. He’s stubborn that way.”

“Independent,” corrected Jesper.

“Pigheaded.”

“But stylish.”

*

[ Powers ]

“I can manage that,” said Zoya. She could silence a storm as easily as she could summon one.

*

[ delulu Zoyalai ]

Zoya felt a sudden sharp sting to her heart. It was too easy to imagine David in this room, his head bent over those plans, the pleasure he would have felt encountering another person who could speak his language. She knew from the look in Nikolai’s eyes that he was thinking the exact same thing. The knowledge of what they’d lost was like a tether between them, a hook in both of their hearts. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked to be reassigned to Os Kervo. She wanted to work with him for the future they both dreamed of. She wanted to build a peace with him. Even when he married, she could stay at the palace, serve by his side. That was the right choice, the noble one—and the thought of it made her feel like snatching a bottle of whiskey from the sideboard and downing the whole thing. It didn’t help that the idea of losing her hadn’t seemed to bother Nikolai a bit. That’s good, she told herself. That’s the way it should be. And what was there to lose, really? They were compatriots, friends; anything else was illusion, as cheap and false as the performances on East Stave.

*

[ Grisha feelings ]

Nikolai winked. “The king of Ravka will be grateful for what you’re doing, and he has plenty of airships. Os Alta’s gates will always open to you.”

“To all Grisha,” Zoya murmured as she drifted past. If Jesper wanted to hide his gift, that was his business, but the dragon had smelled his power the minute they’d entered the house. Zoya couldn’t blame him for wanting to keep his abilities secret, to live his life full of love and misadventure without forever looking over his shoulder. Maybe someday being Grisha wouldn’t mean being a target.

*

[ Suli background + internalised racism ]

“Suli,” whispered Jesper.

“You’re not welcome in this place,” said a gruff voice. It was impossible to tell which side of the circle it had come from. That same low, crawling hiss followed.

“We don’t mean any harm,” Jesper began.

“That’s why you snuck up on our camp in the dead of night?”

“We should let the sea have them,” said another voice. “Send them screaming over the cliff tops.”

“My apologies,” Nikolai said, stepping forward. “We had no intention of —”

Click click click. Like fingers snapping. The sound of triggers being cocked.

“No,” said Zoya, putting a hand out to stop him. “Don’t apologize. That will only make it worse.”

“I see,” said Nikolai. “Then what is protocol for an ambush?”

Zoya turned to the circle. “Our goal is to stop a war. But this place was not ours to trespass on.”

“Perhaps you came looking for death,” said another voice.

Zoya reached for the words her father had taught her, that she hadn’t spoken since she was a child. Even then, they had only been whispered. Her mother hadn’t wanted Suli spoken in their house. “Mati en sheva yelu.”

This action will have no echo. The phrase felt sticky and unfamiliar on her tongue. She sensed Nikolai’s surprise, felt the stares of the others.

“You speak Suli like a tax collector,” said a man’s voice.

“Hush,” said a woman in a jackal mask, stepping forward. “We see you, zheji.”

Zheji. Daughter. The word knocked the breath from her, an unexpected blow. The mask was the type worn all over the Barrel, but those were cheap knockoffs, souvenirs for tourists who didn’t know what they meant. Among the Suli, the jackal mask was sacred and worn only by true seers. Daughter. It wasn’t a word she’d wanted from the mother who had betrayed her, so why should it mean so much from the lips of a stranger?

“We see the walls raised round your heart,” the woman continued.

“That’s what comes of living far from home.” The jackal turned, surveying them. “Shadows all around.”

“What did you say?” Nikolai asked Zoya beneath his breath. “How do you know those words?”

A hundred lies came to her lips, a hundred easy ways to walk away from this, to keep being the person she’d always been.

“Because I’m Suli.” Simple words, but she’d never said them aloud. She could feel her mother’s hands combing out her hair, placing a hat on her head to keep her out of the sun. You’re pale like me. You have my eyes. You can pass. The family had kept her mother’s name so that they wouldn’t draw attention. Nabri, her father’s name, was rubbed away like a stain.

It was as if the woman in the jackal mask had heard her thoughts. “Your father faded as we all do when we don’t live among our own.”

“I haven’t,” Zoya said. A protest? A plea? She hated the tremble in her voice. These people didn’t know her. They had no right to speak about her family.

“But think how brightly you might have burned if you hadn’t always walked in shadow.” She waved them forward. “Come with us.”

“Are they going to march us to our death now?” asked Jesper.

“No idea,” said Kaz.

Jesper cursed. “I wish I’d worn a nicer suit.”

“Might be worth playing the king card now,” Kaz said to Nikolai. “Don’t you think?”

“What king card?” asked Wylan.

The jackal’s voice carried through the mist. “There are no kings we recognize here.”

“I might find that humbling,” said Nikolai. “If I’d any practice with humility.”

They descended a long path down the cliffside as the wind shrieked up from the water. Zoya’s heart thumped wildly, a small creature caught in a snare. This was panic—skittering, mindless panic. Why? She knew Nikolai didn’t disdain the Suli. He never would. And she didn’t care what these Barrel rats thought. So why did she feel as if the rock was about to crumble beneath her feet? Just because she’d told them what she was? Was that all it took? Was this the terror of being seen?

[ … ]

“How could you be sure I spoke Suli?” she called after him.

“That was a spin of Makker’s Wheel. Lucky for me, my number came up.”

“One day your luck will run out, Mister Brekker.”

“Then I’ll just have to make some more.” He paused and turned to look back over his shoulder at her. “The Suli never forget their own, General Nazyalensky. Just like crows.”

*

[ Zoyalai + Suli ]

Nikolai heard the door open, scented wildflowers somewhere in the
cargo hold.

“Are you hiding?” Zoya asked as she shut the door behind her.

“I’m skulking. It’s much more purposeful.” He patted the floor next to him. “Join me?”

He expected her to roll her eyes and tell him to get off his ass. Instead she lay down beside him, her shoulder almost touching his own. All Saints, Nikolai thought. I’m lying next to Zoya Nazyalensky. Somewhere Count Kirigin was crying into his soup. They stared up at the shadowy roof of the hold, at nothing at all.

“Did you sleep?” she asked.

“Of course not. Someday we’ll see an end to war, and then you and I will take a nap together.”

“Is that your idea of seduction?”

“These days? Yes.”

“I’ll be honest—it’s incredibly compelling.”

[ … ]

“I haven’t spoken to my mother since I was nine.”

When she’d tried to marry Zoya off to some rotten old noble with bags full of money. “Always wise to get a head start on estrangement.”

“The terrible thing is … I didn’t miss her. I still don’t. Maybe I miss something I never had.”

Nikolai knew that feeling, the longing for a father he could trust, an older brother who might have been his companion instead of his rival. A real family. “I wish my parents had been different people, but they owe me nothing. If my mother chooses to speak against my parentage, I can’t blame her.” But it would still hurt like hell.

Zoya pushed herself up on her elbows. “None of it will matter if we win, truly win. Ravka loves victory more than it loves royal blood.”

And it had been a very long time since Ravka had been given much cause to celebrate.

“That’s why the Darkling expanded the Fold, isn’t it?” Nikolai mused.

“He was looking for a weapon that would leave no one in doubt of Ravka’s power. He knew if he gave the people victory, they would finally love him. What did your Grisha say about what happened at the base?”

“About your demon?” She sighed and lay back down. “They’re shaken. Adrik lost his arm to one of the Darkling’s nichevo’ya. It’s hard for him to see that creature and not go back to those terrible days. I remember Tolya trying to heal him, the blood … He left a lake of it on the deck of the ship we escaped on.”

“Will Adrik leave?”

“I don’t think he’ll desert. But I can’t vouch for the others. Some secrets need to be kept.”

“Do they?” He turned his head, trying to decipher the dark slash of her brows, the black of her hair. She looked just as she always had—beautiful, impossible Zoya. “Why didn’t you tell me you were Suli?”

“I think you know, Nikolai.”

“You really believe it would have changed the way I see you?”

“No. Not you. But ask yourself, would your First Army generals treat me so respectfully if they knew I was Suli?”

“If they didn’t, they would stop being my generals.”

“Do you really think it’s as simple as that? That they would make it that easy?” She shook her head. “They never come at you with hatred. They come at you with pity. Did you learn to read in the Suli caravans? Was it hard growing up in such squalor? They giggle about the dark hair on your arms or say that you look Ravkan like it’s some kind of compliment. They don’t make it easy to fight them.” Zoya closed her eyes. “I passed because it was safer to be Zoya Nazyalensky than Zoya Nabri. I guess I thought it would keep me safe. Now I’m not so sure. The woman on the cliffs called me daughter. That word … I didn’t know I needed that word. I don’t regret turning my back on my parents. But it’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if my father had stood up for me. If we’d gone to live with his people. If I’d had someplace other than the Little Palace to run to, someone other than the Darkling to make me feel capable and strong.”

“It isn’t too late, Zoya. They chose to help you on the cliffs, not me, not Kaz Brekker.”

Now Zoya’s laugh was harsh. “But they don’t really know me, do they?”

“I would choose you.” The words were out before he thought better of them, and then there was no way to pull them back.

Silence stretched between them. Perhaps the floor will open and I’ll plummet to my death, he thought hopefully.

“As your general?” Her voice careful. She was offering him a chance to right the ship, to take them back to familiar waters.

And a fine general you are.

There could be no better leader.

You may be prickly, but that’s what Ravka needs.

So many easy replies.

Instead he said, “As my queen.”

He couldn’t read her expression. Was she pleased? Embarrassed? Angry? Every cell in his body screamed for him to crack a joke, to free both of them from the peril of this moment. But he wouldn’t. He was still a privateer, and he’d come too far.

“Because I’m a dependable soldier,” she said, but she didn’t sound sure. It was that same cautious, tentative voice, the voice of someone waiting for a punch line, or maybe a blow. “Because I know all your secrets.”

“I do trust you more than myself sometimes—and I think very highly of myself.”

Hadn’t she said there was no one else she’d choose to have her back in a fight?

But that isn’t the whole truth, is it, you great cowardly lump. To hell with it. They might all die soon enough. They were safe here in the dark, surrounded by the hum of the engines.

“I would make you my queen because I want you. I want you all the time.”

She rolled onto her side, resting her head on her folded arm. A small movement, but he could feel her breath now. His heart was racing. “As your general, I should tell you that would be a terrible decision.”

He turned onto his side. They were facing each other now. “As your king, I should tell you that no one could dissuade me. No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you.”

Nikolai felt drunk. Maybe unleashing the demon had loosed something in his brain. She was going to laugh at him. She would knock him senseless and tell him he had no right. But he couldn’t seem to stop.

“I would give you a crown if I could,” he said. “I would show you the world from the prow of a ship. I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride. I would give you a sapphire the size of an acorn.” He reached into his pocket. “And all I would ask in return is that you wear this damnable ribbon in your hair on our wedding day.”

*

[ Boiling Fjerdans ]

Nina bent to a long glass and trained it on the Ravkan forces. It was hard to make out much from this distance, but they seemed unnaturally still. As if they were simply waiting. She focused the lens on the figures she saw standing on the rocks—and recognized a familiar head of raven hair, lifted by the wind.

Not an ordinary soldier. Not a Tidemaker. Zoya Nazyalensky. Ravka’s most powerful Squaller and Grisha general. If Ravka was making its stand on the northern front, what was Zoya doing here?

“Does it trouble you, Mila?” said Ylva. “I have long been a soldier’s wife. I’m used to the realities of battle. But we don’t have to watch.”

“No,” said Nina. “I want to see.”

“At last a bit of spine!” Redvin crowed. “You’ll enjoy this first taste of victory.”

The Fjerdan soldiers leapt into the waves, rifles in hand, charging toward the beach, a tide of violence.

One by one the soldiers on the rocks raised their hands. An army of Squallers.

Zoya was the last. Lightning forked through the skies—not the single bolts Nina had seen Squallers summon before, but a crackling web, a thousand spears of jagged light that turned the sky a vivid violet before they
struck the water.

The crowd around Nina gasped.

“Sweet Djel,” shouted Redvin. “No!”

But it was too late.

The sea was suddenly alight, seething like a boiling pot, steam hissing off its surface. Nina could not hear the men in the shallows scream, but she could see their mouths open wide, their bodies shaking as current passed through them. The Fjerdan tank carriers seemed to crumple in on themselves, roofs collapsing in heaps of melted metal, treads welded together.

*

“So many dead,” Genya murmured as Zoya approached the Triumvirate command tent and called for fresh water.

“It had to be done.” She couldn’t stop to grieve for soldiers she’d never known, not when her own people were mobilizing on the northern front. She had warned Nikolai that she’d been made to be a weapon. This was what she was good at, what she understood.

She strode toward the flyer they’d readied. She needed to get in the air. “You’re all right?” Genya asked, pulling on her flying goggles. She’d posed that question a lot since they’d lost David, as if the words could somehow protect them from harm.

“Just covered in salt. Word from the northern front?”

“They’ve engaged.”

“Then let’s get moving.” Zoya tried to ignore the fear that seized her. They would travel low and inland to avoid being intercepted by any Fjerdans in the air. A regiment of Grisha and First Army soldiers would remain behind in case Fjerda decided to make another attempt at the beach, but Zoya thought they’d send their naval base to the northern front to bolster the invasion there.

“We do have some news,” said Genya, drawing Zoya from her thoughts.

“The Starless have been spotted on the field.”

Zoya smacked her fist against the flyer’s metal hull. “Fighting for Ravka or Fjerda?”

“Hard to tell. They’ve hung back from the fray.” Genya paused. “He’s with them.”

Of course the Darkling had found his way to the field, surrounded by his followers. But what did he intend? Nikolai had said the Darkling had a gift for spectacle.

“The battle is just the backdrop for him,” she realized. “He’s going to stage his return with some kind of miracle.” She remembered what Alina had said to him. Why do you have to be the savior? The Darkling would wait for his moment, maybe even for Nikolai’s death, and then the Saint would appear to lead them all to—what? Freedom? He’d never had to face Fjerda’s new war machines. He couldn’t beat them on his own, no matter what he believed. And Zoya would dose herself with parem before she followed him again.

“General!” A soldier was running toward her with a note in his hand. “I was asked to deliver this to you.”

Genya plucked it from his fingers.

“By whom?” said Zoya.

“A man in monk’s robes. He came ashore a little ways up the coast.”

“Were his robes brown or black?”

“Brown and bearing the Sun Summoner’s symbol.”

Genya’s eyes moved over the paper. “Oh, Saints.”

“Give it to me.”

“Zoya, you must keep your head.”

“What the hell does it say?” She snatched it from Genya’s hand. The note was brief and in Ravkan: I have Mila Jandersdat. Come to the eastern observation tower aboard Leviathan’s Mouth. She will await you in the cells.

Zoya crushed the note in her hand. The Apparat had Nina.

“This is a trap,” said Genya. “Not a negotiation tactic. He wants you to do something rash. Zoya? Zoya, what are you doing?”

Zoya stalked back to the tent. “Something rash.”

“We have a strategy,” Genya argued, hurrying to follow. “It’s working. We need to stick to it. And Nikolai needs you to help guide our rockets.”

Zoya hesitated. She didn’t want to leave her king without the resources he needed. And damn it, she wanted to be beside him in this fight. Every time she thought of him lying on the floor of the Cormorant, his arm cushioning his head as he spoke those words, those absurd, beautiful words … No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you. The memory was like drinking something sweet and poisonous. Even knowing the misery it would cause her, she couldn’t stop craving the taste. You should have said yes, she thought for the hundredth time. You should have told him you loved him. But what good was that word to people like her? Nikolai deserved more. Ravka required more. But for an hour, for a day, he might have been hers. And if something happened to him on that battlefield? She’d been too afraid to say yes to him, to show him the truth of her longing, to admit that from the first time she’d seen him, she’d known he was the hero of all her aunt’s stories, the boy with the golden spirit full of light and hope. All Saints, Zoya wanted to be near that light, she wanted to feel the warmth of it for as long as she could.

She shook her head and plunged into the tent, stripping off the First Army uniform she’d worn to disguise her identity. “There are other Squallers,” she said as she dug through her trunk for something less recognizable. “Adrik can guide the missiles. And I’ll be back in plenty of time. With Nina Zenik in tow.”

“She may not even be alive.”

Zoya nearly tore the roughspun shirt she’d drawn from her trunk. “She is not dead. I forbid it.”

Genya planted her hands on her hips. “Don’t flash those dragon eyes at me, Zoya. Nina isn’t a child. She’s a soldier and a spy and she wouldn’t want you to sacrifice yourself for her.”

“She’s alive.”

“And if she isn’t?”

“I’ll kill every living thing Fjerda can throw at me.”

“Zoya, stop this. Please. I don’t want to lose you too!”

At the break in Genya’s voice, Zoya froze. The sound scraped against her heart, the pain sudden and overwhelming. There were tears in Genya’s single amber eye.

“Zoya,” she whispered. “I can’t do this alone. I … I can’t be the last of us.”

Zoya felt a tremor move through her. She could see her friend suffering, but she didn’t know how to fix it, who to be in this moment. Genya was the one who offered kindness, who wiped away tears, who soothed and mended. Give me something to fight. Something to swing at, to destroy. That was the only gift she had.

Zoya felt like she was choking on her grief and shame, but she forced the words out. “I should have been there to protect him. Both of you.”

“Protect me now. Don’t go.”

“I have to, Genya. The Apparat is a threat to Nikolai and always will be until he’s eliminated.”

Genya’s laugh rang with disbelief. “You’re not going to fight the Apparat. You’re going to save Nina.”

Zoya pressed her palms to her eyes. “It was my mission, Genya. When Nina was first captured on the Wandering Isle, I was her commanding officer. I pushed her harder than I should have. I let her stomp off in a huff. If it wasn’t for me, Nina never would have been captured by Fjerdans. She never would have ended up in Ketterdam or fallen in love with a witchhunter. I can’t lose her again.” She drew in a long breath. “If the Apparat has Nina, her cover is blown. He could turn her over to Jarl Brum. I won’t let her be tortured, not when I have the chance to stop it.”

Genya cast her hands out. “All of the people in this camp have been put on this path because of decisions the Triumvirate made. They’re choosing to stand between Ravka and destruction. That was Nina’s choice too. We are all soldiers. Why were you so hard on Nina if you didn’t want her to use her skills?”

“Because I wanted her to survive!”

“Zoya, do you know why the Darkling lost the civil war? How Alina stopped him?”

Zoya pinched the bridge of her nose. “No. I wish I did.”

“Because he always fought alone. He let his power isolate him. Alina had us. You have us. You push us away, keep us at arm’s distance so that you won’t mourn us. But you’ll mourn us anyway. That’s the way love works.”

Zoya turned away. “I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know how to just go on.”

“I don’t know either. There are days when I don’t want to. But I can’t live a life without love.”

Zoya slammed the trunk lid shut. “That’s the difference between you and me.”

“You don’t know what you’re walking into. You’re powerful, Zoya. Not immortal.”

“We’ll see.”

Genya blocked her path. “Zoya, the Apparat knows you’re an asset who can turn the tide of this war.”

Now the dragon inside her bared its teeth, and Zoya smiled. “He doesn’t know anything about me. But he’s going to learn.”

*

[ CH 39 - Nina + Apparat ]

Zoya knew she was being imprudent, indulging in the same recklessness she’d scolded Nina for again and again, but she wasn’t going to let one of her soldiers be used as a pawn. The Apparat had a game to play, and he would play it. Zoya intended to dictate the rules.

At the edge of the beach, she pulled down cloud cover slowly to avoid drawing attention, then wreathed herself in sea mist. She summoned the wind, letting it carry her low over the waves as she skated across the water. This was the power that the amplifiers at her wrists, Juris’ scales, had given her. It was not quite flight and it required every bit of her focus, but the Apparat would be anticipating a disguised flyer or raft. She had a better chance of getting Nina out if she caught the priest and his men off guard.

And if Nina is dead?

Zoya had lost as many allies as she’d sent enemies to the grave. Nina wasn’t even a friend. She was a subordinate, an upstart student with a gift for languages who could always be counted on to make trouble if she couldn’t find some to get into. But Zoya had been her commander and her teacher, and that meant she was under Zoya’s protection.

Juris’ laugh rumbled through her. Zoya of the garden, when will you cease your lies?

As she approached the monstrous Fjerdan base, a chill swept through her. It was even bigger than it had seemed from the beach. She circled it slowly, peering through the mist she’d summoned, trying to get her bearings. The eastern tower was obvious enough, but it had to be twenty stories tall. Where was the Apparat keeping Nina? He’d said the cells and … there, nearly at the top of the structure, an expanse of smooth wall, its surface unbroken by windows. Those must be the holding cells.

But how was she meant to get up there? She could vault herself on the currents of the air, but not without being seen, and a sudden thunderstorm would be more than a little suspicious. She circled the base slowly and spotted a series of piers on its lower level, where small craft could dock. On one of them, two Fjerdan soldiers were repairing the battered hull of an armed boat.

Zoya stepped onto the dock and lifted her hands, clenching her fists. The soldiers gasped and clawed at their throats as the air left their lungs. She let them drop unconscious to the deck and set about stripping one of his uniform. She bound and gagged them both, then rolled them out of sight.

She was grateful for the soldier’s heavy coat and hat. Women didn’t serve in Fjerda’s military.

She crept up the dock and climbed a metal staircase onto the main deck. She kept her head down and tried to make her walk determined. Zoya was not an actress and had no gift for subterfuge, but she only needed to make it to the tower. The naval base was moving through the waves, picking up speed, heading north, she was sure, to lend support to the rest of Fjerda’s forces.

Zoya reached the eastern observation tower and slipped inside. It didn’t seem safe to take the elevator, but when she ducked her head inside the stairwell, she heard the clamor of footsteps coming from above. She couldn’t speak Fjerdan. She didn’t want to risk meeting fellow soldiers. The elevator it would have to be.

She entered and jabbed the number for the floor just below the observation deck, unsure of what she would find there. On the tenth floor, the elevator jolted to a stop. Zoya kept her eyes on the ground as a pair of shiny black boots entered. Whoever it was pushed a button and they were moving upward again. He said something in Fjerdan.

She grunted a reply, her heart racing.

Now his voice was angry. He grabbed Zoya’s chin and shoved her head up.

Grizzled face. Black uniform emblazoned with the white wolf. Drüskelle.

He drew his sidearm, but Zoya’s hands were faster. Her gust struck his chest and he slammed against the elevator wall with a clang, then fell in a lifeless heap to the floor.

All Saints. Now she had a body on her hands.

[ … ]

She took the hallway to the right and dropped the pressure, dampening the sound of her steps. But she needn’t have bothered. When she rounded the corner, she saw a thick-waisted woman with silky blond hair seated in a chair at the end of the hall, the Apparat behind her, bracketed by two Priestguards in their brown robes. Nina. Zoya hadn’t seen her since she’d left the Little Palace for her mission, and she’d forgotten the extent of Genya’s tailoring. It was like looking at a stranger—except for the stubborn glint in her eyes. That was pure Zenik.

The Apparat had a knife to her throat.

“Easy, General Nazyalensky. You see where you are, don’t you?” He gestured to the windowless walls. “A dead end. I doubt even the inimitable Nina Zenik would survive having her jugular cut.”

“Will it be so easy to explain a dead girl whom everyone knows to be a good and pious member of Jarl Brum’s household?”

The Apparat smiled. His gums were black. “When I show him the bone darts we took from her clothing and expose her spies in the Hringsa, I imagine Jarl Brum will give me a medal. We’ve taken Nina’s weapons, and her power is useless against my healthy Priestguards. Shall we see if she’d like to use her twisted gift to call some corpses to do her bidding?”

Nina said nothing, only pressed her lips together, her gaze focused on Zoya.

“I don’t think she will,” the Apparat continued. “She can’t call the dead without destroying her cover and putting dear Hanne Brum in danger of being charged with collusion. That would spoil her betrothal to the crown prince, now wouldn’t it?”

“What do you want?” Zoya said. “Take me as your prisoner and set Nina free.”

“No!” Nina cried.

“You mistake me, Zoya Nazyalensky. I do not want you as my captive, but as my comrade. Though be assured,” he said, “my monks stand at the ready. One step toward me and this whole room will be dosed with parem gas.”

Zoya’s eyes darted to the cells, the ceiling, the two Priestguards flanking the Apparat. There were vents in the walls, but he might be bluffing. She had antidote in her pocket. Was it worth the risk? She’d have to dose herself with antidote, then fight off the effects and the Priestguards at the same time.

Zoya shook her head. “Do you have any love for Ravka at all?”

“Ravka was meant to be ruled by holy men, and your king is not one. He is an abomination. The Saints must be freed from him.”

“I think you find abomination where it’s convenient. The same way you locate your Saints. What do you want? We’re short on time.”

“Were you seen?”

“I killed a man on the way up.”

“I see,” the Apparat said with some distaste. He nudged one of the monks. “Bring me the boy.”

The Priestguard moved to obey, opening the nearest cell and leading out an emaciated prisoner.

“This poor soul was taken from a Fjerdan village by Jarl Brum. He’s a Heartrender. Or maybe a Healer. He was never trained. But now he does whatever the drug parem tells him to.” The Apparat removed a packet from his robes and the Heartrender lifted his head, sniffing the air, a low moan escaping his throat. “You and I are going to leave this place together, Zoya Nazyalensky. You will declare your allegiance to Vadik Demidov, the true Lantsov king. And you will become my Saint, a symbol of the new Ravka.”

“And if I say no, Nina will be tortured by your monks?”

“She will be tortured by this Heartrender. One of your own. He will take the skin from her body inch by inch. And when her heart begins to fail, I’ll have him heal her and start all over. Maybe I’ll have Miss Zenik dosed with the drug. I understand she survived one encounter with parem. I doubt she’ll be so lucky again.”

For the first time, Zoya saw panic enter Nina’s eyes. I won’t let it happen, she vowed. I will not fail you.

“If Nina Zenik dies here today,” the Apparat continued, “who will remember her name? She is no Saint, has worked no miracles.”

“I’ll remember,” Zoya said, her fury growing. “I remember all their names.”

“You and I will leave this tower. You will announce you’ve defected to our side and offer your service to the true Lantsov heir. You will join us and see the false king deposed.”

“Where does this plan end, priest? You’ve told me what you intend, but what is your goal?”

“Demidov on the throne. Ravka purified and sanctified by the Saints.”

“And you?”

“I will attend to the matter of Ravka’s soul. And I will give you a gift that no one else can.”

“Which is?”

“I know the locations of Brum’s secret bases, all the hidden places where he’s keeping Grisha prisoners. Men, women, children, maybe even friends you once thought dead. Not even Fjerda’s king and queen know where to find them, only Jarl Brum and my spies. The witchhunter is far less stealthy than he thinks, and my followers have done their work well. I see I have your full attention.”

Grisha in cells. Grisha being tortured and experimented on. Grisha she could save. “You mean to make me choose between my king and my people.”

“Haven’t the Grisha suffered enough? Think of all the prison doors that would fly open if you joined my cause. Imagine all the suffering your people will endure until then.”

“Do you know what I think?” Zoya said, edging closer. If she could manage a lightning strike before the monks released the gas, she and Nina could make quick work of the rest of the Apparat’s men. “This has never been about the Saints or restoring Ravka to the faith—only your own desire to rule. Do you resent men born of royal blood? Women with power in their veins? Or do you truly think you know what’s best for Ravka?”

The priest’s eyes were dark as pits. “I have been waiting for the Saints to speak to me since I was a child. Maybe you recited the same prayers, had the same hopes? Most children do. But somewhere along the way, I realized no one would answer my prayers. I would have to build my own cathedral and fill it with my own Saints.” He held up the packet of parem. “And now they speak when I want them to. Speak, Sankta Zoya.”

[ … ]

“She’s like a sister to you, no? Maybe like a daughter?” The Apparat smiled gently, serenely. “Will you be the mother she deserves? The mother they all deserve?”

Zoya remembered her own mother marching her down the aisle of the cathedral to hand her to the rich old man who would be her groom. She remembered the priest standing behind him, ready to consecrate a sham marriage for the sake of a little coin. She remembered the Suli circling her on the cliff top. Daughter, they’d whispered. Daughter.

Zoya looked at the Heartrender, looked at the cells. How many of them were full? How many cells were there in military bases and secret laboratories? Whether she chose her king or her people, she would never be able to save them all. She could hear Genya’s voice, ringing in her ears: You push us away, keep us at arm’s distance so that you won’t mourn us. But you’ll mourn us anyway. That’s the way love works.

Understanding burned through her like fire from a dragon’s mouth, leaving her weightless as ash. She would never be able to save them all. But that didn’t mean she was Sabina leading her child to the slaughter.

Daughter. Why had that word frightened her so? She remembered Genya looping her arm through hers, Alina embracing her on the steps of the sanatorium. Nikolai drawing her close in the garden, the peace he’d granted her in that moment.

This is what love does. In the stories, love healed your wounds, fixed what was broken, allowed you to go on. But love wasn’t a spell, some kind of benediction to be whispered, a balm or a cure-all. It was a single, fragile thread, which grew stronger through connection, through shared hardship and honored trust. Zoya’s mother had been wrong. It wasn’t love that had ruined her, it was the death of it. She’d believed that love would do the work of living. She’d let the thread fray and snap.

This is what love does. An old echo, but it wasn’t Sabina she heard now. It was Liliyana’s voice as she stood fearless in the church, as she risked everything to fight for a child who wasn’t her own. This is what love does. How long had Zoya feared being bound to others? How little had she trusted that thread of connection? That was why she’d shied away from the gifts the dragon offered. They demanded she open her heart to the world, and she’d turned away, afraid of what she might lose.

Daughter. We see you.

She had failed to keep David safe, but Genya hadn’t turned away from her. She’d failed to keep the Darkling from returning, but Alina hadn’t damned her for it. And Nikolai had offered her a kingdom, he’d offered her the love she’d been seeking the whole of her life, even if she’d been afraid to take it, even if she’d been too much of a coward to look him in the eye and admit that it wasn’t Ravka’s future she sought to preserve, but her own fragile, frightened heart.

Juris had known. Juris had seen it all. Open the door.

Love was on the other side and it was terrifying.

Open the door. The dragon had seen this very moment, this very room.

[ … ]

She didn’t have to lift her hands to summon the current that suddenly crackled through the air. It ignited around the Apparat’s guards in sparks of blue fire. They shuddered and shook, burning from the inside, and collapsed.

“Nina!” Zoya shouted. In a flash the corpses of the guards were on their feet, commanded by Nina’s power. They seized the Apparat.

I’m sorry, she said to the nameless, faceless prisoners in their cells. I’m sorry I can’t save you. But I can avenge you. I can love you and let you go.

“Gas!” shouted the Apparat, his eyes wild.

Zoya heard the vents open, the whoosh of parem shooting toward them. She leapt, seizing Nina, feeling the strength of Juris and the dragon. The power of the lives they’d lived and the battles they’d fought flooded her muscles. She slammed through the wall with Nina in her arms, through stone and metal, and into the waiting sky.

Nina screamed.

You are strong enough to survive the fall.

They were plummeting toward the sea. Zoya felt Genya’s arms around her, Liliyana holding her tight. She felt Nikolai’s presence beside her and Juris’ sword in her hands.

With a wild, gasping breath, she felt her wings unfurl.


*

[ Zoya becomes a dragon ]

“Please, please, please don't drop me!”

If Zoya had the power of speech, she wasn’t using it.

Because she was a dragon.

A dragon.

[ … ]

“Zoya?” she said. “Zoya, what are you—”

Nina flattened herself against Zoya’s back as they hurtled into the fray. She saw the khergud scatter, breaking their ranks. She heard the rattle of the Fjerdan guns. A bullet skimmed her thigh and she cried out, but the gunfire seemed to have no effect on Zoya—or whatever Zoya had become.

The dragon shot skyward, whirled in the air, and dove back toward the bombers. Nina felt her stomach lurch. Zoya was going to kill her if she vomited.

The dragon opened her jaws, and it was as if the storm had been brewing in her belly. Silver lightning spewed from somewhere deep inside her. It crackled through the air, snaring the flyers in current. They burst into flame, dropping from the sky like crumpled insects. Nina smelled something sweet, almost chemical—ozone.

She clung to the dragon’s back, the scales pricking her skin, the ground impossibly far below. She could see their shadow on the battlefield, soaring over the ranks of Ravkans and Fjerdans, who looked up in terror.

Nina had the sudden thought that none of this was real, that when that poor, drugged Heartrender had begun torturing her, she’d simply passed out from the pain, her mind splintering and creating this wild scenario to hide in. It seemed more plausible than that her friend and mentor had become a creature from a storybook.

The dragon laid down a trail of silver lightning, creating a wall of fire, and as they banked east, Nina understood why. She’d cut off the Fjerdan retreat. Their forces were wedged between a wall of silver flame and Ravka’s soldiers.

The Fjerdan tanks turned their mighty guns on the dragon and Nina gasped as Zoya banked hard to the right, dodging their shells. Again she unleashed her lightning, the current sparking on Fjerda’s war machines, melting their gun barrels and sending men diving for safety.

The dragon’s vast wings beat the air. A roar thundered through her scaled body, and Nina felt it shudder through her too. She could see the corpses of fallen soldiers, Grisha with their gas masks on. She saw the Cult of the Starless Saint in their tunics emblazoned with the sun in eclipse. And there, not far from the king’s forces, a line of black uniforms, a mass of drüskelle with their whips and guns raised, moving toward King Nikolai.

[ … ]

Juris.

That was Nikolai’s first thought when the dragon appeared, sunlight glinting blue off its black scales. Until lightning sparked in jagged streaks across the sky. He knew Zoya’s power, recognized it instantly.

[ … ]

“But the Fjerdans were still standing. Zoya had spared them.

“Sankta!”

Nikolai wasn’t sure where the shout came from. He turned his head and saw a figure in black, kneeling in the field.

“Sankta Zoya!” the figure shouted again.

He lifted his head, and Nikolai met the Darkling’s gray gaze. The bastard winked at him.

“Sankta!” Another voice, wavering with tears.

“Sënje!” This time from the Fjerdan side.

“Sankta Zoya of the Storms!”

One of the drüskelle threw down his gun. “Sënje Zoya daja Kerken- ning!” he cried, crumpling to his knees. “Me jer jonink. Me jer jonink!”

Saint Zoya of the Lightning. Forgive me. Forgive me.

[ … ]

Zoya couldn't think over the sound of Juris’ laughter in her head.

Sankta Zoya.

She was no Saint. It was podge-headed nonsense.

[ … ]

“Are you in my head?” Nina squeaked, pressing her hands to her temples. “Can you read my mind?”

Blessedly not. But she could feel. So much. It was terrifying. This was what she had always feared, this deep connection to the world. But she had opened the door. She’d burst right through it. There was no closing it now.”

*

Zoya wondered if she would ever see Nina Zenik again.

She set out over the waves, then whirled back around, exploding through the mist as she arced over the naval base. She heard screams from below, felt the Fjerdans’ terror like an icy wave, and reveled in it. Fear was a language universally understood. She drew in a breath and released a crackling burst of lightning, then banked to the left and headed back to the mainland, her wings spread wide, feeling the salt spray against her belly, as she coasted low over the water. She could still sense Nina’s powerful heart, the steady beat of her courage.

When you are tied to all things, there is no limit to what you may know.

And apparently to what she would have to feel. All this emotion was exhausting. She was Zoya and she was the knight known as Juris and she was the dragon he had once slain.

She circled the battlefield, noted the Fjerdans in retreat. It was hard to see so many bodies on the ground, feel the grief emanating from soldiers as they tended to their wounded and mourned their dead. But she could find no sign of the Starless Saint or his followers. The Darkling had been the first to kneel, though she had no illusions that he’d suddenly come around to their side. He wasn’t done, and yet she couldn’t guess his intent. His presence on the battlefield had been like a gap in all that life and fear, a deep well of eternity.

Zoya turned toward the village of Pachesyana, where the Ravkan forces had set up their headquarters. The soldiers’ camp came into view and then the royal command tent. She knew she needed to focus to manage a landing in this small space, but she was more tired than she’d realized. She’d done too much, too fast. She could feel her control over the dragon’s shape slipping, and then she wasn’t flying, she was falling.

A gust of air caught her, buffering her descent. When she struck the earth, the impact was gentle, but it still came as a surprise, knocking the breath out of her. Some part of her wanted to just give in to her fatigue and slide into unconsciousness.

She felt arms encircle her and lift her head.

“Zoya?” Nikolai’s voice. The voice of a king. The voice of a brilliant, creative boy, left alone with his books and inventions, forever roaming an empty palace. His hurt and worry washed over her. “Please,” he whispered. “Please.”

The dragon’s mind receded, leaving her mind blessedly empty of any thoughts but her own. Zoya forced herself to open her eyes. Nikolai’s lip was bloodied. There was soot in his hair. But he was alive and for this brief moment, he was holding her. She wanted to curl into him and let herself cry. She wanted to lie beside him and just feel safe for an hour. She had so much to say to him and she didn’t want to wait.

[ … ]

“I wouldn’t say that,” Tamar mused. “An entire battlefield just declared you a Saint.”

“Actually, the Darkling declared you a Saint,” Nikolai corrected.

“Turning into a dragon probably helped,” added Tolya.

“Did you know you could do this?” Genya asked. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

Zoya shook her head. She felt impossibly cold, as if now that the dragon’s fire had banked inside her, she would never be warm until it was kindled again.

[ … ]

Nikolai’s eyes widened. “You are wearing the most extraordinary armor.”

Zoya looked down at herself. Her roughspun peasant clothes were gone. Her body was covered in a snug tunic and breeches made of metallic black scales that shimmered blue in the sun. She recognized this armor. It was what Juris had worn in human form, and it fit like a second skin. Her vanity didn’t mind the effect, but she’d bloody well better be able to take it off.

Leoni cocked her head to one side. “Is it comfortable?”

“It’s heavy,” Zoya said, offering up her arm so the Fabrikator could feel the metal.

“It will make quite the impression in Os Kervo,” said Nikolai. “Fjerda has called for talks.”

[ … ]

Tamar broke it with a click of her tongue. “Bastardy is the least of your worries.”

“They know what you are now,” said Zoya. She left for a few days and everything went to hell. He’d released his monster onto the field. He’d shown all of Ravka the demon king.

“True,” said Nikolai. “But they know what you are too, Sankta Zoya.”

“Do not call me that.”

“It has a nice ring to it,” said Tamar.

“Our Lady of Dragonfire?” suggested Nadia.

“Sweet scaly vengeance?” said Genya.

Zoya turned her back on all of them and strode toward the tents. “I’m going to go live in a cave.”

*

[ Zoya becomes Queen of Ravka ]

“Yaromir, the first king, had no claim to royalty until he united Ravka’s warring noblemen beneath his banner. He had the help of Sankt Feliks to do it. Only one person can unite this country and bring peace to our nations. Soldier, Summoner, and Saint.”

He threw open the shutters. The winter wind blew through and on it, the sounds of the people chanting below. Sankta Zoya. Rebe Dva Urga. Saint Zoya. Daughter of the Wind. The only person to whom he could entrust this country he had fought and bled for, who might finally bring them an age of peace.

“I will kneel to only one ruler, and I will see only one person crowned this day. The age of the Lantsovs is over.” He sank to one knee. “Let the Nazyalensky dynasty begin. All hail the Dragon Queen.”

[...]

“Then he heard a throat being cleared, and all the sweet Saints, a voice: “All hail the Dragon Queen! Moya Tsaritsa!”

Count Kirigin. The man did come through in a pinch.

Another voice shouted, “The Dragon Queen!”

[...]

He glanced up and met Zoya’s furious gaze.

“I am going to murder you in your sleep,” she seethed.

Nikolai winked. “Go on. Say something grand.”

[ … ]

“What say you, Zoya Nazyalensky? General of the Second Army?”

The Zemeni ambassador had asked her the question, but she had no idea how to answer. She only knew that as soon as she was alone with Nikolai, she was going to throttle him. When had he decided on this ridiculous, utterly nonsensical plan?

She remembered the image Juris had thrust into her head when she’d taken his scales as amplifiers: a crown. She’d thought it was the dragon’s arrogance, his wish for a Grisha queen, but now she had to wonder. Had Juris predicted this moment, just as he’d seen what would happen in the observation tower?

He’d hinted at it again and again, but she’d misunderstood at every turn.

You cannot tell me you have not contemplated what it would mean to be a queen.

Zoya had. Of course she had. When her foolish, dreaming mind had gone wandering. But this was something different. I can’t do this.

Can’t you? She was no humble girl plucked from obscurity. She was no young princess far from home. Her life had been given in service to the Grisha, to her country, to her king. Was this any different?

Of course it was different. She wasn’t thinking rationally

[ … ]

We are the dragon and this is our time.

Zoya felt the eyes of everyone in the audience chamber assessing her. She could hear people chanting outside the city hall far below. All right. She was no queen and she certainly wasn’t a Saint, but she was a general. She would attack this the way she would any other strategic campaign. If these were her allies, let them say so.

“I am a soldier,” she said. “I’ve been a soldier since I was a child. Would you have a girl who has spent her life down in the trenches of battle wear a crown? Will you have a soldier queen?”

It was Pensky, general of the First Army, who stepped forward. They had been forced to work together since Nikolai had taken the throne. He’d never particularly liked Zoya, but she hoped he respected her.

He straightened his jacket, stroked his voluminous white mustache. “Better a queen who knows the cost of battle. I will have a soldier queen.”

[...]

“I am a Squaller, a Grisha.” She cast a disdainful glance at Brum. “Some of our enemies will call me witch. And some of our own people will agree. Will you have a Grisha queen?”

“It’s true,” said the old duke from Grevyakin, whom she and Nikolai had visited with months ago. She’d been miserable through the whole evening, but now she was glad she’d managed to stay awake and civil. “Some will despise you. Others will call you Saint. I want to farm my land and see my children safe. I will bow to a Grisha queen if it will bring peace.”

Again she nodded, as if she had expected nothing less, as if her heart didn’t feel like it was about to hummingbird straight through her chest. Zoya paused. She understood the risk she was about to take, but the crown would be nothing but an unwanted weight if she didn’t. She knew the toll speculation around his birth had taken on Nikolai. She couldn’t attempt to rule that way. And she didn’t want to be the girl who hid any longer. We see you, daughter.

Zoya took a deep breath. “My father’s name was Suhm Nabri, and I am his only daughter. Will you have a Suli queen?”

A murmur of consternation and confusion rose from the crowd, but Zoya didn’t lower her chin. She met their gazes one by one. Some of them had probably had their servants chase Suli off their land, or maybe they’d hired them for their parties and never thought twice about them again. Others sent old clothes to Suli caravans and slept better that night, soothed by their show of generosity, while others praised the beauty of Suli women and children and patted themselves on the back for their open-mindedness. But maybe some of them knew they had Suli blood in their own families, and maybe a few would admit that the Suli had roamed this country before it had ever been called Ravka.

Count Kirigin stepped forward. He’d chosen an alarming cobalt-blue coat trimmed in scarlet ribbon today. “Are the Suli not known for their far-seeing and their resilience?” he asked the chamber.

Nikolai was going to have to give that man a medal. Or maybe Zoya would.

“That’s right,” said the duchess of Caryeva. “I don’t care where she’s from. I will bow to the only queen who can take to the skies on black wings and put terror in our enemies’ hearts.”

Nikolai rose. “I say yes!” he cried to the chamber, his face alight with optimism and triumph. “We will have a Suli queen, a Grisha queen, a Ravkan queen!” He had never looked more golden or more grand.

A cheer went up from the Ravkans as the Fjerdans looked on with some concern.

Maybe that could be enough. Maybe. This moment was made of glass, fragile, ready to shatter into nothing if she made the wrong move.

“If this is the wish of the Ravkan people,” said Zoya slowly, “I will serve my country in whatever way I can.”

*

[ Zoya/Nikolai being gross ]

With a sweep of her hand, Zoya sent a gust to slam the shutters closed, blocking out the sound of that infernal chanting.

She turned to Nikolai. “Are you quite out of your mind?”

“On occasion. I find it bracing. But I have never been more sane or sober, Zoya.”

“I can’t do this, Nikolai. You’re the diplomat, the charmer. I’m the…”

“Yes?”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “I’m the muscle.”

“The crown was never meant for me. You’re a military commander, you’re Grisha, and thanks to Nina’s work and Juris’ gift, you are a living Saint.”

Zoya slumped down on one of the benches. “No matter what they said in this chamber, you know they’ll never accept me. All those vows and cheers will mean nothing when they don’t get what they want.”

Nikolai knelt before her and reached for her hand.

“Stop doing that,” she snapped. “Stop kneeling.” But she didn’t keep him from taking her hand. His touch was comforting, familiar, something to hold on to.

“I can’t. It’s just what my knees do now. I noticed your tricky little turn of phrase back there. You said that you would serve Ravka, but you didn’t actually say you would accept the crown.”

“Because I’m hoping you’ll come to your senses and see this is impossible.”

Nikolai grinned. “You know how I feel about that word.”

He looked positively giddy.

*

“I am a queen,” Zoya said. “I should be borne aloft on a litter so that my delicate feet never touch the ground.”

“I could ask the demon to carry you.”

Zoya sniffed. “Thank you, no. The last time you let it out, it tried to bite me.”

“I think it was meant affectionately.”

“Are you certain?” asked Genya.

“Not entirely,” he admitted.

*

[ More gross Zoyalai! ]

He glanced back at Zoya trudging along, her silver fur hat pulled down low over her ears, her nose red from the cold. Why think of the next world when she was in this one? Over the past weeks he’d watched her navigate meetings, diplomatic dinners, the tricky early negotiations of the Fjerdan treaty. He was there to charm and to offer guidance when she needed it, but Zoya’s role as general of the Second Army had forced her to learn the ins and outs of Ravka’s foreign policy and internal workings. She might never have a real passion for agricultural reform or industrial development, but her ministers would be there to help. And so would Nikolai, if she let him.

They weren’t married. They weren’t even engaged. He wanted to ask, but he wanted to court her first. Maybe build her something. A new invention, something lovely and useless and ill-suited to war. A music box or a mechanical fox, a folly for her garden. Part of him was certain that she would simply change her mind about him and that would be the end of it. He had wanted her for so long that it seemed impossible he should actually have her beside him every day, that he might lay down beside her every night. Not impossible, he supposed. Just improbable.

He turned, sending pebbles scattering off the mountainside.

“Kiss me, Zoya,” he said.

“Why?”

“I need reassurance that you are real and that we survived.”

Zoya went up on her toes and pressed her warm mouth to his. “I’m right here and I’m freezing, so move before I toss you into a gully.”

He sighed happily. There she was. Bitter and bracing as strong drink. She was real, and at least for now, she was his.

*

[ Honouring the Darkling's wish ]

Zoya’s eyes had gone silver, the pupils slitted. “Can I kill him before we shove him in the tree?”

Nikolai didn’t doubt that the Darkling deserved that and much worse, but he hesitated. “Something’s off here. What’s the catch?”

The Darkling lifted one shoulder. “An eternity of suffering as penance for my crimes. I ask but one thing.”

“Here it comes.”

“Build me an altar, so that I may be remembered.”

Zoya scowled. “As a tyrant? A killer?”

“As the Starless One. Give me a place in your books. When night comes, let there be one more candle lit for one more Saint. Can you agree to that, merciful queen?” he drawled. The Darkling seemed almost disinterested, but the demon in Nikolai sensed it was a pose.

“He means it,” Nikolai said in disbelief. “He’s willing to die.”

“It is not death,” said the monk. “Death would be a kindness.” Genya tilted her head to the side. She was watching the Darkling closely.

“But it’s not death you fear, is it? He’s afraid he’ll disappear.”

Nikolai remembered what Genya had said. All the Darkling ever wanted was to be loved by this country. He knew that feeling well. He’d had to face it when he’d stared down his demon. There were few men Ravka loved. Saints were another matter.

“Zoya?” Nikolai asked. The Darkling wanted them to raise an altar in his name, to write his story and his legacy anew, but it was not Nikolai’s choice to make. “Genya?”

Zoya and Genya stood hand in hand, and as they looked at each other, he knew they were remembering every loss they’d endured at this man’s whims. He had seen Zoya’s torment when she’d witnessed the Starless at their worship, when they’d stood on the Fold that had devoured her aunt and cost countless others their lives, praising his name. The woman she’d been in that moment could not have bent to this request.

“Do we let him play the hero?” Zoya asked.

Genya nodded once. “Let him do it. Let our suffering have meant something.”

Zoya stood framed by red blossoms and thorns, a queen who needed no crown. “It will be done.”

*

[ LITERALLY THE GROSSEST ZOYALAI EXCHANGE ]

“As long as I live, the demon will remain inside you,” said the Darkling as Nikolai used a knife to saw through the ropes at his wrists.

“We’ve made our peace.”

“Some treaties do not last.”

“You do love a dire prophecy, don’t you?”

“Zoya will live a very long life,” the Darkling said. “Despite the demon, you may not do the same.”

“Then I will love her from my grave.”

A smile touched the Darkling’s lips. “Brave words. Time may tell a different tale.”

Nikolai almost laughed. “I’m really not going to miss you.”

*

[ More Zoyalai being gross ]

“There’s a mural in my room,” she said hesitantly, unsure of what she meant to say, afraid of the words that might come. “A stormy sea. A boat. A flag with two stars. Did you ever wonder—”

“What they mean? Only when I thought of your bedchamber. So, roughly every night.”

“Can you be serious for once?”

“Once and only once.”

“Those stars are me and my aunt. Liliyana. She was the bravest woman I ever knew and she … she fought for me, when no one else would, without any weapon. She was a woman with no status or wealth, but she risked her own life to protect me. She thought I was worth saving. She thought … She thought I was worth loving.” When Liliyana’s star was gone, Zoya had believed she would reckon with that stormy sea on her own, forever. That if she was lucky enough to be loved by one person in this life, that should be enough. Or that was what she’d told herself. “I can’t do this alone, Nikolai.”

“I will be by your side.”

“As my adviser?”

“If that’s what you wish.”

“She didn’t want to ask. Her pride forbade it. But her damn pride had cost her enough. She looked away. “And if … if I wished for more?”

She felt his fingers on her chin, turning her head. There was an unwanted ache in her throat. Zoya forced herself to meet his gaze. In this light, his hazel eyes looked almost golden.

“Then I would gladly be your prince, your consort, your demon fool.”

“You will grow to hate me. I’m too sharp. Too angry. Too spiteful.”

“You are all of those things, but you are so much more, Zoya. Our people will come to love you not despite your ferocity, but because of it. Because you showed mercy in our darkest hour. Because we know “that if danger comes again, you will never falter. Give us that chance.”

Love. The word was not made for people like her. “I don’t know how to believe you,” she said helplessly.

“What if I say I can’t bear to lose you?”

“A smile tugged at her lips. “I’d say you’re a liar. That claims like that belong to romantic ninnies.” She raised her hand and let her fingertips trace the line of his beautiful jaw. He closed his eyes. “We would go on, you and I. If I couldn’t be queen, you would find a way to win this battle and save this country. You would make a sheltering place for my people. You would march and bleed and crack terrible jokes until you had done all you said you would do. I suppose that’s why I love you.”

His eyes flew open and his face lit in an extraordinary grin. “All Saints, say it again.”

“I will not.”

“You must.”

“I’m the queen. I must do nothing but please myself.”

“Would it please you to kiss me?”

[...]

“You do realize you just referred to yourself as the queen. That means you agreed.”

“I am going to kill you.”

“So long as you kiss me again before you do.”

She obliged him.

*

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Zoya said. “Nikolai hasn’t asked.”

“Can you blame him?” Genya said. “He hasn’t had much luck with proposals.”

Alina snorted. “Maybe he should have offered me a dynasty and not a piddly little emerald.”

“Poor boy,” said Zoya. “But I do intend to dangle the possibility of my hand in marriage in front of every eligible politician, merchant, and minor aristocrat while we forge our new trade agreements and treaties.”

Genya rolled her eye. “Very romantic.”

“I can’t just stop being a general,” said Zoya. “It’s good strategy.” Her romance with Nikolai would never be bouquets of flowers and pretty declarations of love. It lived in the quiet they’d found in each other, in the hours of peace they were stringing together one by one.

“But you will get married,” Genya insisted.

“I can’t help but notice,” Alina said. “The too-clever fox gave up his throne, but still managed to stay a king.”

“A prince,” Genya corrected. “Prince consort. Or is he your general?”

Zoya didn’t really care what title he took. He was hers, and that was all that mattered. Her eye caught on the blueprints she’d found waiting for her on her desk that morning, designs for an extraordinary structure Nikolai had designed to protect her garden. The plans had been bound with her blue velvet ribbon and accompanied by a note that read, I will always seek to make it summer for you. Zoya had been courted by men of wealth and power, offered jewels, palaces, the deed to a diamond mine. This was a different kind of treasure, one she could not believe she’d been lucky enough to find.

*

“Has a decision been reached?” he asked. “I can’t decide if you all look ruthless or beneficent. Maybe just hungry.”

“Is Captain Ghafa still here?”

“I believe she left an hour ago in the company of Prince Rasmus and his betrothed.”

“Perhaps that’s a sign,” Zoya ventured.

“Zoya,” Alina said warningly. “We did agree.”

“Oh, all right,” Zoya said. “I need Sturmhond to take a message to Ketterdam for me.”

“I hear he’s very busy these days.”

“I think he’ll appreciate the reward.”

He lowered his voice. “If it involves you out of that dress, I have no doubt I can convince him.”

“You won’t stop until you’ve created a scandal, will you?”

“The demon made me do it. What vital message will the world’s most handsome privateer be taking to Ketterdam?”

Zoya sighed. Tragic to think a woman might have everything she desired and still have need of a thief.

“Get a message to the Crow Club,” she said. “Tell Kaz Brekker the queen of Ravka has a job for him.”

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— FANART. —

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— META. —

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— ZOYALAI. —

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— MEME. —

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