“It’s perfection,” Zoya said. She’d entrusted Genya with its design. “Thank you.”
“Oh, we’re not done yet.”
Genya vanished into the dressing room and emerged with what looked like a mile of spangled silver lace.
Zoya lifted it in her hands. It was nearly weightless and glinted like captured lightning. “Did you actually skin a dragon?”
“Didn’t have to,” said Genya, attaching the cape to the shoulders of Zoya’s gown. “I told him it was for the queen of Ravka and he shrugged right out of it.”
“You’re absurd.”
“I’m delightful.”
“The train is too long.”
“Someone once told me the chapel demands spectacle.” Her tone was all mirth, but Zoya could see Genya’s sad smile in the mirror.
She snagged her friend’s hand. “I wish he could be here with us.”
Genya brushed a tear from her cheek and they stood together, as they had in the mountains. “David would have hated every minute of this. But I wish it too.”
* * *
The chapel would never be a place of celebration for Zoya. She had seen Nikolai crowned in this room, but she had also stood beside Alina here, behind this very altar on the night the Darkling had laid waste to the Little Palace and murdered half the people Zoya had ever known. They had gone underground that night, but it had been years before Zoya had really let herself emerge into the light. The wounds had been too deep, the fear too profound. She hadn’t believed she could ever feel safe again.
And now? She let Vadik Demidov, the last of the Lantsovs, who had been granted a glorious estate and a considerable amount of treasure—most of it courtesy of Count Kirigin—settle Sankt Grigori’s bear skin around her shoulders. She listened to Vladim Ozwal, the priest who would serve as her Apparat, preach the words of the old Saints and the new. Work had begun on a small chapel in the lush quince grove that had once been the Fold, and it was said that little altars to the Starless One had already begun to spring up in the places where the blight had struck, but that were now blooming. Zoya wasn’t sure that she could make peace with the Darkling as a Saint, but she had tried to fulfill her vow.
When the time was right, she let Vladim place a crown upon her head. It was a crown born of battle—forged from their remaining scraps of titanium, set with sapphires, and formed into the shape of curving dragon’s wings.
She looked out at this crowd of strangers and friends, at Genya with her single amber eye, her red kefta now emblazoned with a golden dragon; at Leoni, the Fabrikator David had so admired—now one of the Grisha Triumvirate—holding hands with Adrik, who had not abandoned their demon king after all, and who would take Zoya’s place to represent the Etherealki.
Dignitaries had come from all over the world: delegates from the Kerch Merchant Council, including that oaf Hiram Schenck, who had done all he could to give Ravka’s throne to Fjerda; the marshal from the Wandering Isle; Zemeni’s ministers, without whom Ravka would not have survived the war; and even the Shu princesses and their guards—Ehri and Mayu, who had embraced Nikolai as an old friend, and Makhi, who had taken one look at the white flowers festooning the palace balustrades, the glittering courtiers at every doorway, the banners snapping in the winter wind, and said, “All the Heavens, do none of you understand ceremony?”
They had made sure Tamar and the khergud were long gone before the Shu delegation arrived. Zoya would never feel easy in their presence, but she was grateful to them nonetheless. They had been engineered to hunt and capture Grisha, but that meant they were perfectly suited to saving Grisha as well. Locust, Harbinger, Scarab, and Nightmoth had agreed to join with Bergin, a Fjerdan Grisha, to locate Jarl Brum’s secret laboratories, all under Tamar’s command.
Fjerda’s crown prince had sanctioned the covert operation, and he was in attendance at the wedding too—along with the woman who would be his bride, Mila Jandersdat. She wore a gown of cream silk with a neckline that could only be described as scandalous and opals the size of walnuts at her throat.
“Fjerda suits you,” Zoya had whispered to Nina when they’d managed to steal a few moments alone outside the chapel.
“The food is still terrible, but we manage.”
“Your prince isn’t at all what I expected from our intelligence. Far kinder and less arrogant.”
“He is all that Fjerda or I could want in a ruler.”
Zoya didn’t need to let her dragon’s eye open to sense the conviction in Nina’s words. “I’m sending you back to that Saintsforsaken country with a gift.”