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“Thinking, General?” a familiar voice asked.
Zoya blinked, looking up from her cup of cooling tea. The blonde-haired king was leaning against the doorframe of one of the many not-so-common rooms in the Little Palace, a mug of coffee in his hands. His hair was streaked with something dark, and there was a smudge of dirt on his cheek; he must’ve been in the labs, then, with David Kostyk.
She shrugged, crossing her left leg over her right and leaning back against the cushions of the couch she’d settled on a while ago. “You could say that,” she replied, gently setting the porcelain teacup onto the coffee table in front of her. “I’m, for lack of a better word, reminiscing .”
“Reminiscing,” Nikolai repeated, walking in and sitting down on a couch opposite Zoya.
If he had been anyone else, she would’ve told him to scram and he would’ve left, scurrying out and spilling his coffee in his haste to escape. But then again, she countered, nobody but Nikolai Lantsov was brave enough to intrude on Zoya Nazyalensky’s private time.
She nodded, eyebrows raised as if daring for Nikolai to make a snarky comment. There was a beat of silence before the fox-king said, “That’s dangerous, Zoya."
Zoya scoffed, face contorting into a scowl. “I know,” she shot back. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
"Are the memories particularly happy?"
She shook her head.
“Well,” Nikolai said, “would you mind if I joined you?”
“Yes,” Zoya replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “Very much.”
“Oh, come now, Zoya,” Nikolai whined, shooting her a pleading look. “Indulge me, just this once?”
“If you weren’t king,” Zoya proclaimed, “I’d have struck you dead ages ago.”
Taking this as an invitation to stay, Nikolai took a sip from his coffee. The two of them settled into a comfortable silence, neither of them daring to say the first word. Before Nikolai had barged in, Zoya had been, well, thinking.
She’d been thinking of Alina Starkov (as much as she loathed to admit it), thinking of the Darkling’s body burning on a pyre, ferociously licked by the flames, of the soldiers- no, friends - that they’d loved and lost, of the damage one shadow summoner had done to the people around her.
(Zoya realised that she had never wanted to become the villain’s right-hand-woman, to side with the Darkling; she’d been a young girl manipulated and molded into a young soldier, just like the rest of the Grisha. Just like Alina.)
She took a tiny sip of her tea. It’d been piping hot, but it was lukewarm now; mellowed. “Hypothetically,” Zoya suddenly asked, “what would’ve happened if we never defeated the Darkling? If Alina never found the final amplifier?”
“Neither of us would be here to ponder that question,” Nikolai quipped, witty as always. There was a hint of a smile on his face. “We’d both be nothing but ashy remains.”
“Right,” Zoya deadpanned. “Dead.”
“I’m very glad that we’re alive,” Nikolai said, “regardless of what he’s done to us.” He looked pointedly down at his gloves, which were twinkling faintly in the candlelight, the fabric rippling with his every move like the sea at night. “I’m glad that we’ve become survivors.”
Survivors, Zoya thought. “It does have a nice ring to it,” she admitted. “We’ll tell their stories. All of them.”
She downed the rest of her drink in one gulp.