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.”
They all sat. The Darkling somehow managed to make his rickety old chair look like a throne. “I knew that you would come.”
“I hate to be predictable.” Nikolai turned to Zoya. “Maybe we should go? Keep him on his toes?”
“He knows we won’t. He knows we need something.”
“I’ve felt it,” said the Darkling. “The blight coming on. The Fold is expanding. And you feel it too, don’t you, Lantsov? It’s the power that resides in my bones, the power still seeping black in your blood.”
A shadow passed over Nikolai’s face. “The power that created the Fold in the first place.”
“I’m told some people consider it a miracle.”
Zoya pursed her lips. “Don’t let it go to your head. There are miracles everywhere these days.”
The Darkling tilted his head to the side, watching them both. The weight of his gaze made Zoya want to leap through one of the glass walls, but she refused to show it. “I’ve had a lot of time to think in this place, to look back on a long life. I made countless mistakes, but always I found a new path, a new chance to work toward my goal.”
Nikolai nodded. “Until that little bump in the road when you died.”
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.
“The only way to heal the rupture in the Fold is to finish what you started and perform the obisbaya.”
Tolya had made the same suggestion. The Ritual of the Burning Thorn. They had been lured into attempting it by Elizaveta, who had only wished to use the opportunity to kill Nikolai and resurrect the Darkling. If they wanted to attempt it again, this would be the time, when the Darkling was still powerless, and the Fjerdans were licking their wounds. But the risk was simply too great. And even if they were willing to take it, they didn’t have the means.
“We have no thorn wood,” said Zoya. “It crumbled to ash when the Saints died and the boundaries of the Fold fell.”
“But we might acquire one,” said the Darkling.
“I see. From whom?”
“Monks.”
She threw up her hands. “Why is it always monks?”
“There was fruit taken from the thorn wood when it was still young. Its seeds were preserved by the Order of Sankt Feliks.”
“And where are they?”
Now the Darkling looked less certain. “I don’t know exactly. I’ve never had need of them. But I can tell you how to find them.”
“I smell a bargain in the works,” Nikolai said, rubbing his hands together. “What will this knowledge cost us?”
The Darkling’s eyes glittered, gray quartz beneath a false sun. “Bring me Alina Starkov and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
All the humor left Nikolai’s face. “What do you want with Alina?”
“A chance to apologize. A chance to see what became of the girl who drove a knife into my heart.”
Zoya shook her head. “I don’t believe a word that leaves your mouth.”
The Darkling shrugged. “I might not either. But you know my terms.”
“And if we don’t agree to them?” she asked.
“Then the Fold will keep expanding and swallow the world. The young king will fall and I will sing myself to sleep in my prison cell.”
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.”