Grief lanced through Ranka’s warm, drunken haze with sobering clarity. They loved him so dearly, and he’d loved them in return. They spoke of him with all the reverence with which she spoke of Ongrum, but with a warmth Ranka had never known. In another life, had she not been a threat—had she not represented everything Foldrey stood to lose—she wondered if he might have loved her, too.

Aramis closed her eyes for a moment. Pain and love shared the lines of her face in equal measure. “He’d be so pissed to know we’re on the roof again.”

“Oh, furious,” Galen agreed. He leaned his head on Percy’s shoulder and played with the cuff of his sleeve. “I miss him. I miss so many of them.”

They lapsed into quiet, eating their sweets, the silence broken only by the occasional sniffle. There seemed to be a precious understanding floating between them—that this brief window of peace was only that, and there was more pain coming. More struggle. But somehow, inexplicably, they’d found one another, they’d survived together, and that was something. For a single night, instead of the heads of an empire, they were just kids who had weathered far too much, far too soon, perched on a roof after midnight, eating cake in the dark.

An hour after the bells tolled, Galen brought them back inside. But instead of going their separate ways, Galen cleared the books from his bed and pulled an extra cot from his closet. The four of them huddled together on the mattresses, and Ranka listened as Galen and Aramis took turns sharing stories of past birthdays, of when they’d awoken as children and the entire world had paused to celebrate them.

After a while Galen and Percy dozed off, slumped against each other, and only Aramis and Ranka remained awake. She knew she ought to leave; none of this was proper, and she needed every ounce of sleep she could get. But she was reluctant to end this fragile peace.

“Are you nervous about seeing them again?” Aramis asked. “Your coven?”

Ranka tensed. “Yes.”

It was hard to picture the Skra here, in the palace—like her memories of them belonged to a different girl, in a different life.

“I’m sorry.” Her fingers found Ranka’s in the dark. “About your blood-magic…”

Ranka swallowed. She didn’t want to talk about this, didn’t want to invite everything they’d momentarily forgotten back into this brief bubble of precious calm. “We’ll figure it out, Princess. I’ll be fine. And—it’s like you said. We have guards and defenses. Galen doesn’t need a blood-witch to make it through this.”

Ranka closed her eyes. She had made the decision to seal Belren away long ago, and after what she’d seen in the garden, she would not go back to it now. Not now, and never again.