She was following a wall on the far side of the water gardens, where he’d played as a child and where the secret tunnel to Lazlayon was located. He opened his mouth to call out to her—then stopped as Zoya pushed aside a heavy mass of vines to reveal a door in the wall.

He couldn’t help but take offense. That Zoya had kept secrets from him was no surprise, but that the palace should?

“I thought we were past that,” he muttered.

Zoya slipped a key from her pocket and opened the door, vanishing inside. He hesitated. She hadn’t closed it behind her. Turn back, he told himself. No good can come of this.

There were two stars carved into the wood—just like the stars in the mural in her rooms, two small sparks painted onto the flag of a storm-tossed boat. He’d never asked what they meant.

He needed to know what was on the other side of that door. Really, it could be a matter of national security.

Nikolai passed through the tangle of vines and into what he realized was the old vegetable garden. He’d thought it had been left to rot, abandoned to the woods after the raised beds were moved closer to the kitchens. It didn’t exist on any of the new palace plans.

Whatever this place had been, it was something very different now. There were no tidy rows of cabbages, no orderly patterns of hedges favored by the palace gardeners. Willows bordered the paths, like women bent in mourning, their branches shod in ice and brushing the soft white ground like strands of hair. Flowers and shrubs of every variety overflowed their beds, all of them white with frost, a world made of snow and glass, a garden of ghosts. Zoya had lit lanterns along the old stone walls and now she stood, her back to him, her figure still as an ornamental statue, as if she’d been part of this garden all along, a stone maiden waiting to be discovered at the center of a maze.

“I’m running out of room,” she said without turning to face him.

She’d known he was there all along. Had she wanted him to follow her?

“You tend this place?” He tried to imagine Zoya sweating in the sun, dirt beneath her nails.

“When my aunt was killed and I came back to the Little Palace to fight the Darkling … I needed someplace to be alone. I used to walk in the woods for hours. No one bothered me there. I don’t remember when I found the door, but I felt as if my aunt had left it here for me to discover, a puzzle for me to solve.”