He’d thought she might be repelled, even fearful, but Zoya just said, “I wish you’d been there.”

“You do?”

Now she looked nothing but annoyed. “Of course I do. Who else would I rather have my back in a fight?”

Nikolai struggled not to break out in song. “That may be the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. And I was once told I waltz like an angel by the lead dancer of the royal ballet.”

“Maybe if you’d been there…” Her voice trailed off. But they both knew Nikolai wouldn’t have made a difference in that particular fight. If Zoya and the Sun Soldiers couldn’t stop the Darkling, it was possible he couldn’t be stopped. One more enemy we don’t know how to fight.

She bobbed her chin toward the walls. “Do you see what grows around this place?”

Nikolai peered at the twisting gray branches that ran along the perimeter of the garden. “A thorn wood.” An ordinary one, he assumed, not the ancient trees they needed for the obisbaya.

“I took the cuttings from the tunnel that leads to the Little Palace. It’s all prickles and spines and anger, covered in pretty, useless blossoms and fruit too bitter to eat. There is nothing in it worth loving.”

“How wrong you are.”

Zoya’s gaze snapped to his, her eyes flashing silver—dragon’s eyes. “Am I?”

“Look at the way it grows, protecting everything within these walls, stronger than anything else in the garden, weathering every season. No matter the winter it endures, it blooms again and again.”

“What if the winter is just too long and hard? What if it can’t bloom again?”

He was afraid to reach for her, but he did it anyway. He took her gloved hand in his. She didn’t pull away but folded into him like a flower closing its petals at nightfall. He wrapped his arm around her. Zoya seemed to hesitate, and then with a soft breath, she let herself lean against him. Zoya the deadly. Zoya the ferocious. The weight of her against him felt like a benediction. He had been strong for his country, his soldiers, his friends. It meant something different to be strong for her.

“Then you’ll be branches without blossoms,” he whispered against her hair. “And you let the rest of us be strong until the summer comes.”

“It wasn’t a metaphor.”

“Of course it wasn’t.”

He wished they could stand there forever in the silence of the snow, that the peace of this place could protect them.

She wiped her eyes and he realized she was crying.

“If you had told me three years ago that I would shed tears over David Kostyk, I would have laughed at you.”

Nikolai smiled. “You would have hit me with your shoe.”