Page 36 of Rule of Wolves

Tamar’s hands were trembling as she monitored Ehri’s pulse. “We gave her too much freedom. We should have kept her in the dungeons, sent the Tavgharad to the brig at Poliznaya.”

“She didn’t know,” said Nikolai, looking down at Ehri’s ruined flesh, the hitching rise and fall of her chest. They had to get her to the infirmary. “She didn’t know. I saw it on her face. The accelerant was only on the hem of her robes.”

“Where did they even get it?” asked Zoya.

Nikolai shook his head. “From the kitchens when they escaped? It’s possible they made it themselves.”

Tamar rose as Tolya returned with a stretcher borne by two Corporalki in their red kefta. Their faces showed their dismay, but if anyone could heal Ehri, the Grisha could.

Nikolai stood on the steps, surrounded by death, watching Ehri and her keepers disappear in the direction of the Little Palace.

“Why?” Zoya said again.

“Because they are Tavgharad,” Tamar replied. “Because they serve their queen unto death. And Ehri is no queen.”

9

ZOYA

ZOYA HOVERED BY THE WINDOW in Nikolai’s bedroom, watching the winter wind play over the palace grounds, as it made the bare branches rattle and sigh as if resigned to the dark days to come. The gardens looked bleak at this time of year, before snow fell to soften them. Ehri had been taken to the Little Palace, where she would be seen to by the same Grisha Healers who had brought her double, Mayu Kir-Kaat, back from the brink of death only weeks before.

Behind her, she heard Nikolai draw a swift breath. He was lying atop his covers as a Healer tended to his burns. He’d seen to his hands first, where the worst of the damage had been, but the rest would take far longer.

Zoya went to his side. “Can’t you give him something more for the pain?”

“I gave him the strongest draught I could,” said the Healer. “Anything else he won’t wake up from. I could put him into a coma, but—”

“No,” Nikolai said, his eyes fluttering open. “I hate that feeling.”

Zoya knew why. When he’d been fighting the demon, she’d used a powerful sleeping tonic to knock him out every night for months. He’d said it felt like dying.

The Healer filled a bowl with some sharp-smelling solution. “It would be easier to put him under. I can’t have him moving around while I work.”

Zoya sat down beside Nikolai on the bed, trying not to jostle him.

“You must be still,” she murmured.

“Don’t go.”

He shut his eyes and gripped her hand in his. Zoya knew the Healer had noticed it, knew he would probably gossip about it later. But she could weather the gossip. Saints knew she’d endured worse. And maybe she needed to feel his hand in hers after the shock of what they’d witnessed. She couldn’t stop seeing those women burn.

“You shouldn’t be here for this,” said the Healer. “It’s an ugly process.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The Healer flinched and Zoya wondered if the dragon had emerged, shining silver in her eyes. Let him gossip about that too.

Nikolai clung to her hand as the Healer stripped the ruined flesh from his arm. Only then could it be replaced with healthy skin. It seemed to take hours, first one arm, then the other. Whenever Zoya left the king’s side—to fetch a cool cloth for his head, to turn up the lanterns so that the Healer had better light—Nikolai would open his eyes and mutter, “Where is my general?”

“I’m here,” she repeated, again and again.

Once the Healer had dealt with the singed flesh of his arms, no hair remained on them, but the scars on his hands—the veins of shadow the Darkling had left—were still visible.

“He’ll need to rest,” said the Healer, rising and stretching when the work was done. “But the damage was fairly superficial.”

“And Princess Ehri?” Zoya asked.

“I don’t know. Her burns were much more severe.”