It was Liliyana who took Zoya, still dressed in her wedding finery, to Os Alta. They had no money for inns, so they slept in ditches and tucked into copses, shivering in the cold. “Imagine we are on a ship,” Liliyana would say, “and the waves are rocking us to sleep. Can you hear the masts creaking? We can use the stars to navigate.”
“Where are we sailing to?” Zoya had asked, sure she could hear something rustling in the woods.
“To an island covered in flowers, where the water in the streams tastes sweet as honey. Follow those two stars and steer us into port.”
Every night, they traveled somewhere new: a coastline where silver seals barked on the shores, a jeweled grotto where they were greeted by the green-gilled lord of the deep—until at last they arrived at the capital and made the long walk to the palace gates.
They were filthy by then, their hair tangled, Zoya’s golden wedding dress torn and covered in dust. Liliyana had ignored the guards’ sneers as she made her requests, and she’d kept her back straight as she stood with Zoya outside the gates. They’d waited, and waited, and waited some more, shivering in the cold, until at last a young man in a purple kefta and an older woman dressed in red had come down to the gates.
“What village are you from?” the woman had asked.
“Pachina,” Liliyana replied.
The strangers murmured to each other for a moment, about tests and when the last Examiners had traveled through those parts. Then the woman had pushed up Zoya’s sleeve and laid her palm on the bare skin of her arm. Zoya had felt a surge of power race through her. Wind rattled the palace gates and whipped through the trees.
“Ah,” the woman had said on a long breath. “What gift has arrived at our doorstep looking so bedraggled? Come, we’ll get you fed and warmed up.”
Zoya had grabbed Liliyana’s hand, ready to begin their new adventure together, but her aunt had knelt and said gently, “I can go no further with you, little Zoya.”
“Why not?”
“I need to go home to tend to my chickens. You don’t want them to get cold, do you? Besides,” she said, smoothing the hair away from Zoya’s face, “this is where you belong. Here they will see the jewel you are inside, not just your pretty eyes.”
“For your troubles,” the young man said, and dropped a coin into Liliyana’s palm.
“Will you be all right?” Zoya asked her.
“I will be fine. I will be better than fine knowing you are safe. Go now, I can hear the chickens clucking. They’re very cross with me.” Liliyana kissed both of Zoya’s cheeks. “Do not look back, Zoya. Do not look back at me or your mother or Pachina. Your future is waiting.”
But Zoya looked back anyway, hoping for one last glimpse of her aunt waving through those towering gates. The trees had crowded the path. If Liliyana was still there, Zoya could not see her.
That very day, her training had begun. She’d been given a room at the Little Palace, started classes in language and reading, started to learn Shu, studied with the miserable wretch of a woman known only as Baghra in the hut by the lake. She’d written every week to her aunt and every week received a long, newsy letter back with drawings of chickens in the corners and tales of the interesting traders who came through Novokribirsk.
By law, the parents of Grisha students were paid a stipend, a rich fee to keep them in comfort. When Zoya learned this, she petitioned the bursar to send the money to her aunt in Novokribirsk instead.
“Liliyana Garin is my guardian,” she’d told him.
“Are your parents dead, then?”
Zoya had cast him a long look and said, “Not yet.”
Even at ten she’d had such cold command in her eyes that he’d simply put his pen to paper and said, “I will need an address and her full name.”
It would be six years before Zoya made her first crossing of the Shadow Fold, as a junior Squaller in the Second Army. The Grisha around her had been trembling, some even weeping as they’d entered the darkness, but Zoya had shown no fear, not even in the dark where no one would see her shake. When they’d arrived at Novokribirsk, she’d stepped down from the skiff, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and said, “I’m going to go find a hot bath and a proper meal.”
It was only once she’d cleared the docks and left her companions behind that she’d broken into a run, her heart lifting, carrying her on light feet over the cobblestones to Liliyana’s small corner shop.
She’d burst through the door, alarming Liliyana’s one customer, and Liliyana had emerged from the back room, wiping her hands on her apron and saying, “What is causing such fuss—?”
When she saw Zoya, she’d pressed her hands to her heart as if it might leap from her chest. “My girl,” she said. “My brilliant girl.” And then Zoya was hugging her aunt tight.
They’d closed up the shop, and Liliyana had cooked them dinner and introduced Zoya to the child she’d taken in whose parents hadn’t made it back from their last crossing—a scrawny snub-nosed girl named Lada, who demanded Zoya help her draw the Little Palace in extensive detail. They’d shelled hazelnuts by the fire and discussed the personalities of the chickens and all the gossip of the neighborhood. Zoya had told her aunt about her teachers, her friends, her chambers. She’d given Liliyana gifts of calfskin boots, fur-lined gloves, and an expensive gilded mirror.
“What will I do with this? Look at my old face?” said Liliyana. “Send it to your mother as a peace offering.”
“It’s a gift for you,” Zoya replied. “So you can look into it each morning and see the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”
When the Darkling had used Alina to gain control of the Fold and expand it, he’d destroyed Novokribirsk to show his enemies his power. The darkness had consumed the city, turning its buildings to dust and its people to prey for the unnatural monsters that roamed its depths.
In the wake of the disaster, all crossings had ceased, and it had taken weeks for news of the casualties to reach Kribirsk. The Second Army was in chaos, the Sun Summoner had disappeared or been killed, and the Darkling was said to have emerged somewhere in West Ravka. But Zoya did not care. She could only think of Liliyana. She’ll be sitting in her little shop with Lada and the chickens, she told herself. All will be well. Zoya waited and prayed to every Saint, returning to the Kribirsk drydocks day after day, begging for news. And finally, when no one would help her, she’d commandeered a small skiff on her own and entered the Fold with no one to protect her.
She knew that if the volcra found her, she would die. She had no light or fire with which to fight them. She had no weapons but her power. But she’d taken the tiny craft and entered the dark alone, in silence. She had traveled long miles to the broken remnants of Novokribirsk. Half the town was gone, swallowed by the darkness that reached all the way to the fountain in the main square.
Zoya had run to her aunt’s shop and found no one there. The door was unlocked. The chickens squawked in the yard. A cup of bergamot tea, Liliyana’s favorite, sat on the counter, long since gone cold.
The rest of the town was quiet. A dog barked somewhere, a child cried. She could find no word of Liliyana or her ward until at last she spotted the same customer she’d seen that long ago day in her aunt’s shop.
“Liliyana Garin? Have you seen her? Is she alive?”
The old customer’s face paled. “I … She tried to help me when the darkness came. She pushed me out of the way so that I could run. If not for her—”
Zoya had released a sob, not wanting to hear any more. Brave Liliyana. Of course she had run toward the docks when the screaming began, ready to help. Why couldn’t you be a coward this one time? Zoya could not help imagining the dark stain of the Fold bleeding over the town, the monsters descending from the air with their teeth and claws, shrieking as they tore her aunt apart. All her kindness had meant nothing, her generosity, her loving heart. She’d been nothing but meat to them. She’d meant even less to the Darkling, the man who had unleashed his horrors just to make a point, the man she had as good as worshipped.
“She should have let you die,” Zoya spat at the old customer, and turned her back on him. She found a quiet street, curled up against a low stone wall, and wept as she had not done since she was a child.
“Smile, beautiful girl,” said a stranger passing. “We are still alive! There is still hope!”
She snatched the air from his lungs and drove him to his knees. “Smile,” she commanded as his eyes watered and his face turned red. “Smile for me. Tell me again about hope.”
Zoya left him on the ground, gasping.
She’d made the crossing once more, silent and unnoticed in her craft, back to Kribirsk and the remnants of the Grisha camp. There she’d learned that the Darkling had raised his banner and called his loyal Grisha to him. Members of the Second Army were deserting, flocking to the Darkling’s side or returning to Os Alta to try to mount a campaign against him.
Zoya had stolen a horse and ridden through the night to the capital. She would find the Darkling. She would destroy him. She would take away his dream of ruling Ravka even if she had to lead the Second Army herself.
Zoya never told Alina the details of why she had chosen to fight beside her, why she’d turned against the man she’d once revered. It didn’t matter. She’d stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sun Saint. They’d fought and they’d won. They’d watched the Darkling burn.
“And still the wound bleeds,” said the dragon. “You will never be truly strong until it closes.”
“I don’t want it to heal,” Zoya said angrily, her cheeks wet with tears. Below, she saw the version of Novokribirsk that existed in this twilight world, a black scar across the sands. “I need it.”
The wound was a reminder of her stupidity, of how readily she’d been willing to put her faith in the Darkling’s promise of strength and safety, of how easily she’d given up her power to him—and no one had needed to force her down the aisle to make her do it. She’d done it gladly. You and I are going to change the world, he’d told her. And she’d been fool enough to believe him.