Nikolai gave a rueful laugh. “The worst part is I don’t think she would have fallen for his scheme. She would have taken one look at Elizaveta and turned right back around. Orphans, you know. Very wily.”
Zoya contemplated another glass of brandy, but she didn’t want to make herself ill. “We can’t bring her here, not with all the guests arriving. And there’s no way I’m letting him near Keramzin.”
“We’ll need a secure location. Isolated. And plenty of Sun Soldiers on hand.”
“Not good enough. If Alina agrees, I’ll take him to see her myself. I’ll find whatever we need to raise the thorn wood.”
Nikolai paused with his hand on the bottle. “The wedding is in less than two weeks. I … I need you here.”
Zoya studied her empty glass, turning it clockwise, counterclockwise. “It would be better if I wasn’t here. The rumors about us … No doubt Queen Makhi has heard them. My presence would only complicate things.” That was some part of the truth. “Besides, do you trust anyone else to travel with him? To contain him if things go wrong?”
“I could go with you. At least part of the way.”
“No. We need a king, not an adventurer. Your work is here. With Princess Ehri. Talk to her. Build the bond between you. We need her trust.”
“You say that as if earning her trust will be easy.”
“Her injuries could be a boon. Sit by her side dutifully. Read her stories, or have Tolya pick some poetry.”
Nikolai shook his head. “All Saints, you’re callous. She was almost burned alive.”
“I know. But I’m also right. The Darkling knew how to use the people around him.”
“And are we to behave as he did?”
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.
* * *
Early the next morning, Zoya sat down with Tamar to plan which Sun Soldiers would travel with her and to find the right location for this misbegotten meeting. They considered a decommissioned military base and a vineyard that had been struck by the blight. But the base was next to a town, and Zoya was wary of putting the Darkling near anything resembling the Fold. It might be an unreasonable fear, but she didn’t want to risk the possibility that those dead sands might somehow trigger his powers. Eventually they decided on an abandoned sanatorium between Kribirsk and Balakirev. It was only a day’s travel from Keramzin—assuming Alina was willing to help them.
As Zoya rolled up the map, Tamar placed a hand on her shoulder. “This is the right thing.”
“It feels like a mistake.”
“He can be bested, Zoya.”
If that was the case, Zoya had yet to see the evidence. Even death hadn’t beaten the Darkling. “Maybe.”
“We have to make a move. Last night I had word that the blight struck near Shura. It covered ten square miles.”
“Ten?” So it was getting worse.
“We’re out of time,” said Tamar.
Zoya rubbed a hand over her face. Just how many wars could they fight at once?
“You won’t be here for the wedding,” Tamar said, her lips curved in a sad half smile. “Everything will be different when you return.”
Zoya didn’t want to think about that. “Promise me you’ll be careful,” she said briskly. “There’s no way to predict what Makhi might do. Or Princess Ehri, for that matter.”
“It’s a gamble,” Tamar said, then grinned and flicked her thumbs over her axe handles. “But I’m ready for a good fight.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Tamar shrugged. “I can keep hope in my heart and a blade in my hand.”
There was more Zoya wanted to say, but it all amounted to the same impossible thing: Be safe.
Zoya sent scouts to patrol the area around the sanatorium and make sure they’d have a clear place for their airship to land. The other preparations would have to wait. She needed to talk to Genya and David.
She found them in the Materialki workshops. When the Triumvirate had rebuilt the Little Palace after the Darkling’s attack, they’d expanded these chambers to reflect the Fabrikators’ greater role in the war effort. David had his own workroom and three assistants to help interpret and execute his plans. He split his time between here and the secret laboratory at Kirigin’s estate, and Genya often shared this space, tailoring spies, helping people to remove scars, and concocting poisons and tonics when called for.
Now Zoya found her curled up on a settee beside David’s desk, the light from his lamp making a circle around them. Her boots were off and she had tied her bright auburn hair into a knot. She had a half-eaten apple in one hand and a book on her lap, the sun emblazoned on her eye patch glinting. She looked like a beautiful, rakish pirate who had wandered off the pages of a storybook, a bit of sparkling chaos in David’s carefully ordered world.
“What are you reading?” Zoya asked as she sat down by Genya’s stockinged feet.
“It’s a Kerch book on the detection of poisons. I had to send away for a Ravkan translation.”
“Useful?”
“We’ll see. The case studies are wonderfully gory. The rest is mostly moralizing about the perfidy of women and the dangers of the modern age, but it’s giving me some ideas.”
“For poisons?”
“And medicines. They’re one and the same. The only difference is the dose.” Genya frowned. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“The Darkling wants to see Alina.”
Genya set aside her apple. “Are we meeting his demands now?”
“He claims he knows how to stop the Fold from expanding further.”
“Do we believe him?”
“I don’t know. He says we need to restage the obisbaya.”
Genya’s look of worry made perfect sense to Zoya. “The ritual that almost killed Nikolai.”
“The very one. But to do it, we need to bring back the ancient thorn wood. Or so he says. What do you think, David?”
“Hmm?”
Genya shut her book with a snap. “Zoya would like to know if our greatest enemy should be allowed to try to kill the king again in order to possibly return stability to the Fold. Will it work?”
David put down his pen, picked it up again. His fingers were ink-stained. “Possibly.” He thought for a moment. “The Fold was created through failed experiments in resurrection, attempts to raise animals from the dead as Morozova did and make them into amplifiers. He managed it with the stag and the sea whip.”
And then with his own child. Alina had told them all the story, the truth behind the ancient legend. Ilya Morozova, the Bonesmith, had intended that the third amplifier would be the firebird. Instead it had been his daughter, a girl he had raised from the dead and imbued with power. That power had passed down through her descendants to a tracker—Alina’s tracker, Malyen Oretsev—who had himself died and been brought back to life on the sands of the Fold.