Nikolai grunted, a pen between his teeth, then yanked it free and said, “I’ll write to Pensky. But does that mean we should reassign the Grisha near Halmhend? And can you requisition me a napkin? I’ve spilled tea all over this note to the Kaelish ambassador.”
Zoya sent two napkins fluttering over the side table and dropped them into a pile beside Nikolai’s elbow. She was grateful for the quiet this morning, the easy return to routine.
There were times like this, when they worked side by side, when the rhythm between them was so easy that her mind would turn traitor. She would look at the tousle of Nikolai’s gilded head bent over some correspondence or his long fingers tearing into a roll and she would wonder what it would be like when he finally married, when he belonged to someone else, and she lost these moments of peace.
Zoya would still be Nikolai’s general, but she knew it would be different. He would have someone else to tease and lean on and argue over the herring with. She’d made men fall in love with her before, when she was young and cruel and liked to test her power. Zoya did not desire; she was desired. And that was the way she liked it. It was galling to admit that she wasn’t at all sure she could make Nikolai want her, and more galling to think that a part of her longed to try, to know if he was as impervious to her beauty as he seemed, to know if someone like him, full of hope and light and optimistic endeavor, could love someone like her.
But even when her mind played these unkind games, Zoya knew better than to let them go too far. Her careful dealings with the First Army, her monitoring of Grisha matters all over Ravka, made it perfectly clear that—even if Nikolai had seen her as something more than an able commander—Ravka would never accept a Grisha queen. Alina had been different, a Saint, treasured by the people, a symbol of hope for the future. But to Ravka’s common folk, Zoya would always be the raven-haired witch who ruled the storms. Dangerous. Untrustworthy. They would never give up their precious golden son to a girl born of lightning and thunder and common blood. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. A crown was well and good, and sentiment made for moving melodramas, but Zoya had learned the power of fear long ago.
A sharp rap at the door drew Zoya from her reverie, and she found Tamar and Tolya in the hall—their uniforms concealed beneath heavy, nondescript coats—bracketing Yuri, his earnest face half hidden by a scarf. They would all travel to the Fold in disguise: high-collared coats and cloaks of peasant roughspun.
“Why can’t we ever go undercover as wealthy people?” Zoya complained, taking the hideous cloak Tamar had brought her and fastening it over her kefta.
“A silk merchant and his glamorous model?” Nikolai asked.
“Yes. I’ll even play the merchant. You can be my handsome muse.”
“Zoya, did you just call me handsome?”
“All part of the act, Your Highness.”
He clutched his heart in mock despair and turned to the others. “We’ll take our first trip slowly. Do we know exactly where we’re going? The Fold doesn’t have many landmarks.”
“The followers of the Starless Saint will be waiting,” said the monk, practically dancing. “They know where he fell. They remember.”
“Do they?” Zoya retorted. “I don’t recall any of them being there. If they had been, they would remember all of the names of the dead, not just your precious Darkling.”
“I was at the drydocks earlier,” said Tamar quickly. “There’s talk of a new encampment about ten miles due west.”
“I told you,” said Yuri.
Nikolai must have sensed Zoya’s desire to snap every bone in the monk’s body, because he stepped between them and said, “Then that’s where we’ll start. Yuri, you will remain with us and you will not interact with the pilgrims.”
“But—”
“I do not want you recognized. I don’t want any of us recognized. Keep in mind what’s at stake here.” He placed a hand on Yuri’s shoulder and shamelessly added, “The very soul of a nation.”
At least if Zoya vomited it would be on this awful cloak.
A skiff had been readied for them at the drydocks—a wide, flat craft on chubby sled rails designed to bear the weight of cargo over the sands. These old vehicles were built for silence since sound had risked drawing the attention of the volcra—and constructed cheaply since they were so frequently destroyed. The skiff was little more than a platform with a sail.
Two junior Squallers stood at the ready by the mast, looking eager and ludicrously young in their blue kefta. It was an easy assignment for students preparing to graduate—far from the fighting but where they could practice their languages and get the feel of following commands. Tolya stood at the prow. At the stern, Zoya and Yuri flanked Nikolai. Tamar stood guard at the monk’s other side, in case he was compelled to try to commune with his fellow zealots.
Zoya kept her shawl up but watched the Squallers closely as they lifted their arms and summoned air currents to fill the sails. It was hard not to think of her early days in the Second Army, of the terror of her first crossing, surrounded by darkness, holding her breath and waiting to hear the shriek of the volcra, the flap of their wings as they came seeking prey.
“They’re listing left,” she muttered to Nikolai as the skiff surged forward over the sand.
“They’re doing their best, Zoya.”
Their best won’t keep them alive, she wanted to bark. “I watched my friends die on these sands. The least these young dullards can do is learn to pilot a half-empty skiff across them.”
Saints, she hated being here. Nearly three years had passed since the destruction of the Fold, but a strange quiet remained at its borders, the stillness of a battleground where good soldiers had fallen. The glass skiffs the Darkling had used to enter the Fold had long since been plundered and picked apart, but the wreckage of other vessels lay scattered over the many miles of the Fold. Some people treated the snapped masts and broken hulls as shrines to the dead. But others had scavenged what they could from them—timber, canvas, whatever cargo the lost skiffs had carried.
And yet as they traveled deeper into the gray sands, Zoya wondered if the reverent quiet at the edges of the Unsea had been pure imagination, the ghosts of her past clouding her vision. Because as they journeyed farther west, the Fold came alive. Everywhere she looked, she saw altars dedicated to the Sun Saint. Ramshackle businesses had sprouted like pox over the sands: inns and restaurants, chapels, peddlers selling holy cures, pieces of Alina’s bones, pearls from her kokoshnik, scraps of her kefta. It made Zoya’s skin crawl.
“They’ve always liked us better dead,” she said. “No one knows what to do with a living Saint.”
But Nikolai’s gaze was trained on the horizon. “What is that?”
Far ahead, Zoya could see a dark blot. It looked like a shadow cast by a bank of heavy cloud, but the sky above was clear. “A lake?”
“No,” said Yuri. “A miracle.”