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?

“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.