Zoya could signal a Tidemaker, but the dragon was near and she wanted to be the one who held Genya in this moment. She lifted her arms, moving her palms slowly together. Are we not all things? If the science is small enough. There’d been no time to hone her gifts or shape the power Juris had granted Zoya with his life. But her Squaller talents were not so far from the abilities of a Tidemaker. I need to give her this. The dragon demanded it. Zoya’s grieving heart required it.

Ice formed on the surface of the lake, a shimmering white path that spread with each step Genya took, leading her from the shore to David’s pyre. She stood before the flames, her red hair gleaming like the feathers of a firebird. She pressed a kiss to the cover of the notebook.

“So you’ll remember when I meet you in the next world,” she said softly. She tossed the notebook onto the fire.

Zoya shouldn’t have been able to hear the words, not at this distance. She didn’t want to know this private thing, this painful thing. But she saw with the dragon’s eyes, heard with its ears. For every life Zoya had grieved, the dragon had grieved a thousand.

How? How do you survive a world that keeps taking?

There was no answer from the dragon, only the crackle of flames and the cold silence of the stars, lovely, bright, and uncaring.

After the ceremony ended, Zoya intended to escort Genya back to her rooms, but Genya refused.

“I can’t be alone. Are you meeting with the king?”

“I am, but—”

“I can’t be alone,” Genya repeated.

“Leoni and Nadia will be there.”

“I know. The Fjerdans won’t wait for us to mourn our dead. We’ll need to select someone to represent the Materialki on the Triumvirate.”

“We have time.”

Genya’s eyes were haunted. “Do we? I keep seeing the way he looked when they pulled him from the rubble. He was still dressed in his wedding clothes and … he had a pen in his hand. His fingertips…” Genya held up her own hand, touched her fingers to her lips. Fresh tears filled her eyes. “They were stained with ink.”

Zoya hadn’t been there. She had returned to Os Alta too late to help, too late to fight. “If you don’t feel ready to—”

Genya wiped away her tears. “I’m a member of the Triumvirate, not just a grieving widow. I need to be there. And I can’t sit alone with my thoughts.”

That much Zoya understood.

Everyone gathered in her sitting room, at the table where the Darkling’s oprichniki and then Alina’s guards had once sat. The king’s chambers were still intact, but the halls around them weren’t yet cleared of rubble.