At the far end of the room, a desk was tucked into the corner. A shawl had been thrown over the back of a scrollwork chair. There was a basket of sewing things resting on a rug patterned with apple blossoms. The lady of the house must have come here to do her needlework, to sip her morning tea. In the daytime, she would have had a perfect view of the orchards through the big arched windows. A book was open on the desk. I peered at the pages.

“It’s a diary,” Mal said. “Statistics on the spring crop, the progress of hybrid trees.”

“Her glasses,” I said, picking up the gold wire frames. “I wonder if she’s missing them.”

Mal leaned against the stone rim of the pool. “Do you ever wonder what it might have been like if the Grisha Examiners had discovered your power back at Keramzin?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ravka would be different.”

“Maybe not. My power was useless before we found the stag. Without you, we might never have located any of Morozova’s amplifiers.”

“You’d be different,” he said.

I put the delicate frames aside and flipped through the columns of numbers and tidy handwriting. What kind of person might I have been? Would I have become friends with Genya or simply seen her as a servant? Would I have had Zoya’s confidence? Her easy arrogance? What would the Darkling have been to me?

“I can tell you what would have happened,” I said.

“Go on.”

I closed the diary and turned back to Mal, perching on the edge of the desk. “I would have gone to the Little Palace and been spoiled and pampered. I would have dined off of golden plates, and I never would have struggled to use my power. It would have been like breathing, the way it always should have been. And in time, I would have forgotten Keramzin.”

“And me.”

“Never you.”

He raised a brow.

“Possibly you,” I admitted. He laughed. “The Darkling would have sought Morozova’s amplifiers, fruitlessly, hopelessly, until one day a tracker, a no one, an otkazat’sya orphan, traveled into the ice of Tsibeya.”

“You’re assuming I didn’t die on the Fold.”

“In my version, you were never sent into the Fold. When you tell the story, you can die tragically.”

“In that case, carry on.”

“This nobody, this nothing, this pathetic orphan—”

“I get it.”

“He would be the first to spot the stag after centuries of searching. So of course the Darkling and I would have to travel to Tsibeya in his great black coach.”

“In the snow?”

“His great black sleigh,” I amended. “And when we arrived at Chernast, your unit would be led into our exalted presence—”

“Are we allowed to walk, or do we wriggle in on our bellies like the lowly worms we are?”

“You walk, but you do it with a lot of deference. I would be seated on a raised dais, and I would wear jewels in my hair and a golden kefta.”