She slipped out of the throne room and hurried down the hall. Had she gone too far or just far enough? Would the seeds she’d planted yield a move toward peace? Or had she only endangered herself and maybe Hanne too?

She couldn’t contemplate that now. She’d made her choices and there was more work to be done tonight. Earlier, she’d been too bleary to make sense of what she’d heard Brum say outside her room, but now the word rang through her head—Drokestering. The drüskelle would be in the woods tonight, far from the Ice Court, celebrating the sneak attack on Ravka.

This was her chance to break Magnus Opjer out of the drüskelle sector. Ravka was bleeding, and she was powerless to undo the damage their enemies had wrought. But Nikolai Lantsov still lives. That meant there was still hope. She could deal Fjerda a blow and maybe give her king a small advantage in this fight.

It was time to make some trouble.

23

NIKOLAI

NIKOLAI HAD MEANT TO SLEEP, and when he had tossed and turned sufficiently to determine that he could not, he rose from his unfamiliar bed in the Iris Suite with every intention of working. But he had no success with that either. He had penned a message to Ketterdam and there was nothing to do but wait for a reply. Though he tried to focus on the rocket schematics he’d had brought to him from Lazlayon, it was impossible to look at the plans David had drawn, the notations in his cramped handwriting filling the margins, and not lose his thoughts to sadness, to the endless what-ifs that might have saved his friend’s life. He couldn’t stop seeing David’s broken body being pulled from the rubble, the blood and dust on his crushed chest.

Nikolai walked to the window. The palace grounds were covered in snow. From this vantage point, none of the damage from the bombing was visible. The world seemed quiet, ordinary, and at peace. He had sent word to Tamar to see if she could find out if the Shu queen had known about the bombing, if the Shu and the Fjerdans had come together to forge an alliance against Ravka—the bone they’d been fighting over for centuries. But he didn’t think that was the case. Makhi had her own agenda. She’d seen Ravka as weak and she’d moved to claim it through subterfuge before Fjerda could claim it by force. If not for Isaak’s courage and fate’s love of a good plot twist, the Shu queen might have done just that. But while Makhi had failed with a scalpel, Fjerda might well succeed with a hammer. They would celebrate the buildings they’d crushed, the ships and flyers they’d destroyed, never knowing the true death blow they’d dealt Ravka: David Kostyk was gone.