Most of the soldiers didn’t know the traditional reply, but the Grisha did. “As he returns, so will we all.”

There was some small comfort in those words, in that murmured reply. Could she be a soldier like David? Zoya didn’t know. She was afraid of what might happen when this moment of quiet was over, when David’s ashes had been gathered and interned in the white walls that circled the palace grounds. A space beside him would be left for Genya. Thousands of bodies, thousands of bricks, thousands of ghosts standing watch over generations of Grisha. For what?

The Fjerdans had shoved them all into uncharted territory. Zoya knew her rage was waiting on the other side of this sorrow, and when it was unleashed, she wasn’t certain what she would do.

“I need to go to him,” Genya whispered. “One last time.”

She had pulled a notebook from her pocket, the pages held open. It took Zoya a moment to understand what it was. She glimpsed a few words in David’s scrawl: Ideas for compliments—hair (color, texture), smile (causes and effects), talents (tailoring, tonics, sense of style—inquire on “style”), teeth? size of feet?

“His journal,” Zoya said. Where David had written down all his little reminders for how to make Genya happy.

Genya looked out at the lake. “I need to get across.”

Zoya could signal a Tidemaker, but the dragon was near and she wanted to be the one who held Genya in this moment. She lifted her arms, moving her palms slowly together. Are we not all things? If the science is small enough. There’d been no time to hone her gifts or shape the power Juris had granted Zoya with his life. But her Squaller talents were not so far from the abilities of a Tidemaker. I need to give her this. The dragon demanded it. Zoya’s grieving heart required it.

Ice formed on the surface of the lake, a shimmering white path that spread with each step Genya took, leading her from the shore to David’s pyre. She stood before the flames, her red hair gleaming like the feathers of a firebird. She pressed a kiss to the cover of the notebook.

“So you’ll remember when I meet you in the next world,” she said softly. She tossed the notebook onto the fire.

Zoya shouldn’t have been able to hear the words, not at this distance. She didn’t want to know this private thing, this painful thing. But she saw with the dragon’s eyes, heard with its ears. For every life Zoya had grieved, the dragon had grieved a thousand.

How? How do you survive a world that keeps taking?

There was no answer from the dragon, only the crackle of flames and the cold silence of the stars, lovely, bright, and uncaring.

* * *

After the ceremony ended, Zoya intended to escort Genya back to her rooms, but Genya refused.

“I can’t be alone. Are you meeting with the king?”

“I am, but—”

“I can’t be alone,” Genya repeated.

“Leoni and Nadia will be there.”

“I know. The Fjerdans won’t wait for us to mourn our dead. We’ll need to select someone to represent the Materialki on the Triumvirate.”

“We have time.”

Genya’s eyes were haunted. “Do we? I keep seeing the way he looked when they pulled him from the rubble. He was still dressed in his wedding clothes and … he had a pen in his hand. His fingertips…” Genya held up her own hand, touched her fingers to her lips. Fresh tears filled her eyes. “They were stained with ink.”

Zoya hadn’t been there. She had returned to Os Alta too late to help, too late to fight. “If you don’t feel ready to—”

Genya wiped away her tears. “I’m a member of the Triumvirate, not just a grieving widow. I need to be there. And I can’t sit alone with my thoughts.”

That much Zoya understood.

Everyone gathered in her sitting room, at the table where the Darkling’s oprichniki and then Alina’s guards had once sat. The king’s chambers were still intact, but the halls around them weren’t yet cleared of rubble.

Tolya wrapped a shawl around Genya’s shoulders and settled her by the fire while Zoya paced, unsure of what came next. Nadia and Leoni had brought a stack of files with them, most likely the work they’d been doing on the missiles. Adrik was there too. Zoya wondered if Nikolai intended to demote her and give Nadia’s little brother her command. He had every right to.

“Forgive the delay,” Nikolai said when he entered at last. “It’s hard to keep up with correspondence since … Well.” He poured a cup of tea and brought it to Genya, placing it on a saucer in her hands. “Are you hungry?”

She shook her head.

He moved a chair so that he could sit beside her. No one said anything for a long time.

At last, the king sighed. “I don’t know where to begin.”

There had been funerals held all over Os Alta in recent days, once the danger had passed and the bodies could be found, some burned, some buried. The king had attended as many as he could, slipping into churches where prayers were spoken to the Saints, helping to move families out of areas of the city that had become unsafe. Zoya had seen little of him since she’d returned to the capital, and she was glad of that. Facing him would mean facing her failure. Instead she’d tried to help make sense of the chaos that had followed the bombings, setting up new protocols for blackouts across Ravka, lodging formal diplomatic protests with Fjerda, joining the Grisha in the lower town to help with cleanup and rescue efforts, grateful to be busy.

She hadn’t been ready for the terrible quiet of the funeral, or this moment that required an accounting of what they’d suffered. No one wanted to add it up.

“Where else was hit?” asked Tolya. Better to speak of war than of love lost.

“Poliznaya took the brunt of it,” said Nikolai. “We lost over half our flyers, most of our airships. Our stores of titanium are gone.”

He delivered the news with little emotion, a man reporting on the weather. But Zoya knew him too well. The look in his eyes was as unmistakable as it was unfamiliar: He looked defeated.

“All of it?” asked Nadia. “We haven’t begun construction on the missile shells.”

“We’ll have to use another metal.”

But even Zoya knew what that meant. The missiles would be too heavy to attack from a safe range, and far harder for Squallers to aim at a distance.