Nikolai’s friendship with David hadn’t been a loud one. There had been few shared confidences, no raucous nights spent singing dirty drinking songs. Most of their time together had been spent in silence, grappling with difficult engineering problems, reviewing each other’s work, pushing each other forward. With David, Nikolai’s power and charm had been meaningless. He’d only cared about the science.
He should have been safe here, tucked away in his workshop, far from enemy lines. But there was no safety anymore. Somewhere to the north, the Fjerdans were toasting their surprise attack and waiting to see how Ravka would respond. When Ravka couldn’t answer, they would wait no longer. They would invade. But where? When?
Movement in the gardens below caught his eye. He glimpsed dark hair, a cloak of blue wool. Zoya. She passed beyond the hedges and fountains to the shadow of the woods.
He hadn’t had a chance to speak to her since she’d returned. He couldn’t blame her for avoiding him. He’d sent her into the field without proper backup. He’d let enemies violate their home. But where was she going now? Nikolai hadn’t let himself think too much on Zoya’s late-night excursions across the grounds. He hadn’t wanted to. If she had a lover, it was none of his business. And yet his mind spun possibilities, each somehow worse than the last. A member of the royal guard? A handsome Inferni? She was friendly with General Pensky, and that was Nikolai’s own fault. He’d forced them to work closely together. Of course, the general was twenty years her senior and had what could only be described as an effusive mustache, but who was Nikolai to question her taste?
He yanked trousers over his nightshirt, lunged for his coat and boots, and was out the door and down the hallway in seconds, ignoring concerned glances from the palace guards.
“Everything’s fine! As you were,” he called. They were all on edge after the Fjerdan attack, and there was no reason to panic anyone as he raced off to act like an infatuated schoolboy.
What exactly was he going to say to her? I see you’re headed to an assignation, stop in the name of the king?
Her boots had left tracks in the snow, and he followed her into the woods. But it was dark beneath the trees, hard to find the trail. This is a mistake. She had a right to her privacy. And he damned well didn’t want to find her in the embrace of another man.
He caught a flash of movement between the branches. Zoya stood facing the thicket that bordered the western side of the gardens, her breath pluming in the night air, her face framed by the silver fox fur of her hood. Where the hell could she be going out here?
She was following a wall on the far side of the water gardens, where he’d played as a child and where the secret tunnel to Lazlayon was located. He opened his mouth to call out to her—then stopped as Zoya pushed aside a heavy mass of vines to reveal a door in the wall.
He couldn’t help but take offense. That Zoya had kept secrets from him was no surprise, but that the palace should?
“I thought we were past that,” he muttered.
Zoya slipped a key from her pocket and opened the door, vanishing inside. He hesitated. She hadn’t closed it behind her. Turn back, he told himself. No good can come of this.
There were two stars carved into the wood—just like the stars in the mural in her rooms, two small sparks painted onto the flag of a storm-tossed boat. He’d never asked what they meant.
He needed to know what was on the other side of that door. Really, it could be a matter of national security.
Nikolai passed through the tangle of vines and into what he realized was the old vegetable garden. He’d thought it had been left to rot, abandoned to the woods after the raised beds were moved closer to the kitchens. It didn’t exist on any of the new palace plans.
Whatever this place had been, it was something very different now. There were no tidy rows of cabbages, no orderly patterns of hedges favored by the palace gardeners. Willows bordered the paths, like women bent in mourning, their branches shod in ice and brushing the soft white ground like strands of hair. Flowers and shrubs of every variety overflowed their beds, all of them white with frost, a world made of snow and glass, a garden of ghosts. Zoya had lit lanterns along the old stone walls and now she stood, her back to him, her figure still as an ornamental statue, as if she’d been part of this garden all along, a stone maiden waiting to be discovered at the center of a maze.
“I’m running out of room,” she said without turning to face him.
She’d known he was there all along. Had she wanted him to follow her?