“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.”