Tolya set the chess piece down. “Time and translation may have muddied the facts.”
“Let’s hope they were very muddied,” said Nikolai. “Possibly sunk in a swamp.”
But now Tamar picked up the rook. “Feliks’ branches are always shown thick with thorns, not much like an apple bough. It could make a kind of sense,” she said. “If we’re right about the site of the thorn wood.”
“If any part of it remains,” added Zoya.
“If we can find enough of it to build the pyre,” said Tolya.
“Then there’s the small matter of surviving the flames,” said Zoya.
“You will,” said Yuri. “You will survive, and the Starless One will have his true martyrdom.”
“We ride for the Fold tomorrow,” Nikolai said.
“Come, Tolya,” said Yuri, rising, his face lit with fervor. “I have some ideas about the translation of the third passage. We must be ready.”
Tolya shrugged and unbent his massive body. “It’s a kind of poetry.”
Nikolai downed the last of his drink. “Isn’t everything?”
Tamar made to follow them from the room, but before she left she turned to Nikolai. In the firelight, her bronze arms glowed umber, the black lines of her sun tattoos stark against her skin.
“I know you said those things because of the effect they would have on the monk, but Tolya and I have never believed in coincidence,” she said. “Too much has happened in our lives for us to think that faith and fate didn’t play their parts. They may be playing their parts now too.” She bowed. “Good night, Your Highness.”
Zoya hopped down from her perch, prepared to dose him for the night. He was pained to find that after the events of the day, he was looking forward to a little oblivion.
“Fate,” Nikolai said as he opened the door to his bedchamber. “Faith. I fear we are in unknown territory, Nazyalensky. I thought you’d raise a louder protest to skewering me.”
“What is there to object to?” Zoya asked, rearranging the chess pieces the twins had left in disarray. “If the thorn wood is gone, our hopes crumble to dust, we return to the palace empty-handed, and we get through this party or summit or whatever you want to call it to the best of our ability.”
Nikolai sat down on the edge of his bed and pulled off his boots. “And if it is there? If fate has been guiding us all along?”
Zoya lifted a brow. “Then you’d best hope fate thinks you’ll make a good king.”
Nikolai had been told hope was dangerous, had been warned of it many times. But he’d never believed that. Hope was the wind that came from nowhere to fill your sails and carry you home. Whether it was destiny or sheer desperation guiding them onward, at least once they reached the Fold, he would have answers.
“We’ll send a decoy coach to Keramzin,” he said, “and travel in disguise. If we really do intend to dig a pit in the middle of the Fold, I don’t want it done under the Lantsov flag.”
“Do you think the Shu knew who we were? An attack on the king—”
“Is an act of war,” finished Nikolai. “But they weren’t after me. I don’t think they had any idea who we were. They were hunting Grisha, and they found three of you.”
“So far from the borders,” said Zoya, lingering in the bedroom doorway. “I feel like they’re taunting us.”
Nikolai set his boots by the side of the bed. “I owe you an apology.”
“You owe me an entire crop of them. Why start now?”
“I meant for the other night in Balakirev. For the bell tower.” He should have said something before, but the shame of hurting her had been more profound than he could have imagined. “Zoya, I’m sorry. For what I did—”
“It wasn’t you,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Don’t be daft.” But she stayed in the doorway.
“We cannot work side by side if you fear me.”
“I don’t fear you, Nikolai.”
But how much longer would he be himself?
Zoya crossed to the bed and sat down on the corner. Her elegant fingers made a smooth pleat in the blue silk of her kefta. “I asked how you do it all, but I’ve never asked you why.”
Nikolai wedged himself against the headboard and stretched out his legs, studying her profile. “I suspect for the same reasons you do.”
“I very much doubt that.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to will away his fatigue. It had been a day of too many revelations, but if Zoya was willing to sit here with him alone, in the quiet of this room, and if what he said might heal the breach between them, then he was not going to squander the opportunity.
But how to answer? Why did it matter to him what became of Ravka? Broken, needy, frustrating Ravka. The grand lady. The crying child. The drowning man who would drag you under rather than be saved. This country that took so much and gave nothing back. Maybe because he knew that he and his country were the same. Nikolai had always wanted more. More attention, more affection, something new. He’d been too much for his tutors, his nannies, the servants, his mother. No one had quite known what to do with him. No matter how they cajoled or what punishments they devised, he could not be still. They gave him books and he read them in a night. He sat through a lesson in physics and then tried to drop a cannonball off the palace roof. He took apart a priceless ormolu clock and reassembled it into a ghastly contraption that whirred and dinged without surcease, and when his mother wept over the ruined heirloom, Nikolai had looked at her with confused hazel eyes and said, “But … but now it tells the date as well as the time!”
The only person who could get the young prince to behave was his older brother. Nikolai had worshipped Vasily, who could ride and wield a saber, and who was allowed to sit at state functions long after Nikolai was sent off to bed. Vasily was important. Vasily would be king one day.
Everything his brother did, Nikolai wanted to do too. If Vasily rode, Nikolai wanted to ride. When Vasily took fencing lessons, Nikolai begged and pleaded until he was allowed to join. Since Vasily was to study statecraft and geography and military histories, Nikolai insisted he was ready for those lessons too. Nikolai only wanted his brother’s notice. But to Vasily, Nikolai was little more than a constantly gabbling, mop-headed barnacle that insisted on clinging to his royal hull. When Vasily favored Nikolai with a smile or a bit of attention, all was calm waters. But the more Vasily ignored his little brother, the more Nikolai misbehaved.
Tutors took jobs in the wilds of Tsibeya. My nerves, they said. The quiet will be good for them. Nannies gave up their posts to tend to their ailing mothers on the coast. My lungs, they explained. The sea air will be a tonic. Servants wept, the king raged, the queen took to her bed with her headache powders.
One morning, when he was nine, Nikolai arrived at his classroom feeling very excited about the mouse in a jar that he planned to release in his teacher’s bag, only to discover another chair and desk had been set out, and another boy was sitting in them.