“The power that I possess, that Elizaveta and Grigori and Juris possessed, that now crackles through your veins, is not so easily wiped from the world. You can strike a bird from the sky. It’s far harder to vanquish the sky itself. Only our own power can destroy us, and even then it’s not a sure thing.”

“And your mother?”

The Darkling’s gaze slid back to the covered window. “Let us not speak of the past.”

She had been Zoya’s teacher, feared and beloved, powerful beyond measure. “I watched her throw herself from a mountaintop. She sacrificed herself to stop you. Was that her martyrdom?”

The Darkling said nothing. Zoya couldn’t stop herself.

“Grigori was eaten by a bear. Elizaveta was drawn and quartered. Still they returned. There are stories whispered in the Elbjen mountains of the Dark Mother. She crowds in when the nights grow long. She steals the heat from kitchen fires.”

“Liar.”

“Maybe. We all have stories to tell.”

Zoya pulled up the shade, then lowered her window, inhaling the cold winter air.

The woods were thick with snow, the branches of the birch trees glittering with frost.

She felt something in her stir, as if waking, as if whatever was inside her had also lifted its head to breathe deeply of the pines. These woods should have felt barren, maybe even sinister with their long shadows, but instead …

“Do you feel it?” the Darkling asked. “The world is more alive here.”

“Be silent.”

She didn’t want to share this with him. It was winter but she could still hear birdsong, the rustle of small creatures in the brush. She saw the tracks of a hare through the white drifts of snow.

She reached over and raised the shade on the Darkling’s side. From this vantage, they could see a low hill and the abandoned sanatorium.

“What is that place?” the Darkling asked.

“It was a duke’s dacha long ago. The hill was covered in his vineyards. Then it became a quarantine house during an outbreak of the wasting plague. They dug up the vines to bury the bodies. When the quarantine ended, the duke was dead and no one wanted the property. They said it was cursed. It seemed just the right spot for this wretched endeavor.”

The sanatorium was miles from any real village or town and had long been rumored to be haunted. They wouldn’t have to worry about unwanted visitors.

As they watched, a coach pulled up and three figures emerged—a man, a young boy accompanied by an orange cat that bolted for the trees, and a small, slender woman, her hair long and white as the first snowfall. She tilted her face up to the sky, as if letting the winter light pour through her. Alina Starkov, the Sun Saint.