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It’s been two years since the Ice Court Heist—two years since they broke Matthias out of Hellgate, two years since jurda parem stole her heartrending from her, two years since she and Matthias stepped onto a boat that would take them to Novyi Zem—and sometimes Nina feels like she’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s a byproduct of being a soldier for most of her life. She thinks that Matthias understands it, too. They take turns coaxing each other back into sleep when they wake up in the middle of the night with a scream wedged in their throat and anxious mumblings of yet another nightmare on their tongues. It’s okay. I’m here. You’re here. We’re here. We’re okay. Over and over. Their own little prayer. And every morning, miraculously, they wake up together. Safe. Happy.
Still, sometimes she looks over at him as he works—cutting wood (one of her personal favorites) or tending to the flowers he planted so that she would have something beautiful to look at (‘I don’t need that,’ she had told him, ‘I already have you.’) or building her something (he’s become quite proficient with his hands in the last two years) — and she sees him stumbling toward her in the streets of Ketterdam, blood blooming across his white shirt, and she can’t breathe right. She’s paralyzed with fear, consumed by the thought of all the different ways it could have gone wrong that day.
And it all could have gone very wrong.
She could never forget the way her stomach lurched when she saw him, how she’d thrown herself off the boat and sprinted for him. She caught him just as his knees buckled and they both crumpled to the ground as she howled something that vaguely resembled Genya’s name. What if she and Zoya and Sturmhond had left only a few minutes earlier? What if her former instructor hadn’t been there to save Matthias’s life?
Mercifully, she’ll never have to find out.
It had been a rush job—just enough to get the bullet out of him, repair his internal organs enough to keep them working, stop him from bleeding out—but it had been enough. Once Kaz retrieved Wylan from the Church of Barter, they managed to take a very weak but still alive Matthias back to the Van Eck mansion, where he’d stay until he recovered.
Nina still suspects that the time they spent at Wylan’s house is what made them so docile, so soft. They had planned on setting out on a mission to change the world, to end a generations-long war between their people once and for all, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, they lingered. It was easy to linger when they spent their nights warm and full-bellied, listening to Wylan play the piano while Jesper crooned along with him and Inej laughed. They pushed their plan off. One day they would go back to changing the world, but almost losing Matthias the way she had changed her the same way that watching jurda parem try to kill Nina had changed him.
Days turned into weeks. They watched the seasons change in the garden outside of Wylan’s house—it was where Matthias first took an interest in plants. She asked him about it, eventually, as they laid nose-to-nose in bed, buried beneath covers one night. He told her it felt restorative, giving life instead of taking it away for once. When she fell asleep, she dreamt of them on a farm, somewhere quiet where Matthias could spend all his days elbows-deep in soil if he wished. Whatever made him happy.
One night, at dinner, Inej volunteered to sail Wylan and Jesper to Novyi Zem to visit Colm and Nina found herself seeking out Matthias’s gaze beside her. She raised an eyebrow at him and he heard the question in her mind without her having to speak it, nodding once. “We will go, too,” He said, reaching over to take her hand as he turned to face her. “Is that okay? I know we haven’t discussed it—”
“I want that,” She interrupted, surprised to find her voice thick with tears. She missed Ravka something fierce, just as she knew Matthias missed Fjerda, but in that moment the only thing she truly cared about was keeping Matthias safe. “It doesn’t have to be forever, but… for now.”
“For now,” He agreed.
They packed their bags that night and by morning, the five of them were Novyi Zem-bound. They intended to part ways at the docks—Inej to the sea, Jesper and Wylan to Colm’s farm, Nina and Matthias to find somewhere to stay—but instead they all ended up around the Faheys’ dinner table that evening and Nina realized for the first time in her life that home wasn’t a place, it was a feeling. It was this feeling.
In Novyi Zem, things only got better for them. As fate would have it, Colm had been looking to go into business with someone for quite some time now. He needed help on his farm from someone younger and stronger, with a steady hand and a good heart. They bought a cottage down the road from Colm’s farm—their first big purchase with the money they got from the Ice Court job—and the next day the boys traveled to Weddle in search of furniture while Nina and Inej stayed back to paint the walls.
They’ve been here for two years now—in Novyi Zem, in the cottage, in this fragile new life of theirs—and most days, she feels like she’s cradling a baby bird in the palm of her hands, a little fledging thing that she has to protect, but she’s happy. She’s so she’s happy, happy in a way that’s unfamiliar to her. She’s happy without expectation, without burden, without fear.
She doesn’t know what to do with this much freedom, this much time. It took her months to learn how to slow down, to unlearn the behaviors that she resorted to while operating on borrowed time. Matthias, for his part, has never had a problem with taking his time. He swore his devotion to her years ago and proves it frequently. She does her best to embody him when she spends hours committing each curve of his body to memory.
Nina knows Matthias like the back of her hand now. She knows the way he speaks, the way he breathes, the way he sleeps. She can tell how he’s feeling by the tilt of his head and the clench of his jaw. She can hear his heartbeat in her dreams.
It’s how she knows that things are different now. They have been for weeks.
When Matthias first started working with Colm on his farm, his hours were always the same. He left early enough in the morning that he had to rouse her from sleep with a kiss to say goodbye but he was always home before dinner, and every day during his lunch break he would walk back home to eat with her. Every day was the same—a kind of domestic comfort that she was never afforded in the second army, one that she quickly grew accustomed to.
Recently, though, Matthias has been sneaking out for work earlier and getting back later and later at night. Nina tries not to let it bother her. They don’t need to spend all their time together. She doesn’t want him to grow sick of her.
Then he stops coming home for lunch. The first day, she brushes it off. Perhaps it’s a busy day at the farm. She’s sure there are several crops in-season, even if she can’t name what they are.
The next day it’s a little harder to ignore. When he gets home that night, she very casually approaches the subject while they wash their dishes after dinner.
“Is everything okay?” She asks, eyes carefully focused on his face to try and catch a glimpse of anything that might clue her in to what’s going on inside of his head.
To her great frustration, he looks the same as always. His smile is genuine, his face relaxed. “Of course,” He says, and she wishes she didn’t know how convincing of a liar he actually can be. She wishes she could believe him. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason.”
The next day comes and, once again, Matthias doesn’t come home for lunch. The third day in a row. Refusing to wallow in it any longer, Nina packs up a lunch for the both of them and walks it down to Colm’s farm herself, only to find that Matthias is nowhere to be found.
“I assumed he went home for lunch like always,” Colm offers, kind but entirely unhelpful. “Sorry, Nina.”
She paces around the cottage for hours when she gets back home, uneaten lunches in hand. She retraces her steps, goes back through everything she’s done in the last few weeks to try and figure out if she did something to push him away. Then she goes through everything he’s done, trying to find clues to what secrets he’s keeping. Both times, she comes up empty-handed.
She’s spiraling and she knows it, but she can’t stop thinking about it, fixating on it. They were supposed to have forever here, now all of that feels uncertain. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s losing him.
She rehearses exactly what she wants to say to Matthias as soon as he gets home, her speeches going from angry to confused to hurt and back again the longer that she’s alone with her thoughts. She’s going to tell him that he needs to start being honest with her. She’s going to tell him to be a man and stop running away from her. She’s going to tell him that if he wants to leave her, he’ll have to say it to her face. It’s easier to dwell on the anger, to let it boil up inside of her until it drowns out everything else.
When she hears the sound of the front door opening and then closing again, as gentle as always, she starts to waver. She can hear his footsteps coming down the hallway from where she’s sitting on their couch and even though she tries to tell herself to be strong, all of her anger seeps out of her the minute that she sees his face.
He looks as happy to see her as he always does at the end of a long day, like he’s been waiting all day for this—just getting to see her face. She wishes that it were true. She wants to believe it more than anything, but if it were true then why would he be trying so hard to get away from her?
He hesitates when he reaches the doorway, leaning up against the wood frame as he studies her closely, his eyebrows knitting in concern. “What’s wrong?”
Of course he can see right through her. Of course he can read her this well. Of course she folds like a house of cards the minute that she winds up on the receiving end of one of his worried looks. “I should be asking you that.”
“What?” Matthias looks more confused than distressed now, which isn’t fair at all. He doesn’t get to look confused when this is all his doing. She’s the one who gets to be confused right now, not him. She can feel herself being worked into a tizzy, teetering dangerously close to unhinged territory. “Nina, what’s going on?”
“Do you want to go back to Fjerda?” The words come out of her lips before she can think twice about them. If she’d been able to, she probably would have stopped herself from saying them. She feels so silly and stupid still being hung up on Fjerda after all of the times that Matthias has explicitly promised her that isn’t what he wants right now, but for the life of her, she can’t figure out anything else that would pull him away from her like this. “I’ve been trying to figure out for days where you’re going when you leave early in the morning and come back late and skip lunch with me and… Fjerda is the only thing I can think of. Are you trying to find a way back? You can tell me if you are.”
As he processes the words, Matthias’s expression shifts from one of bewilderment to one of horror, like he can’t believe that he’s been feeding into these delusions of hers. He moves quickly towards her, closing the distance between them in a few quick strides and lowering himself to kneel between her knees. It’s a shame, because usually she loves the sight of Matthias on his knees for her, but she can’t even begin to think about that right now.
“No, Nina,” He insists, taking her hands within his own and squeezing them. For a moment, it transports her back to the streets of Ketterdam, when Matthias was bleeding out in front of her and squeezing his hands was the only way she could get him to hold onto consciousness. Right now, she feels like it’s the only thing that’s keeping her from spinning out completely. “Of course not. I don’t want to go anywhere without you. I love our life here. I love you.”
“Then what?” Nina asks, sounding about as helpless as she feels.
Matthias opens his mouth but no words come out, he just kind of gapes at her for a moment before he snaps his mouth shut again. It doesn’t feel promising. Neither does the way that his gaze flashes desperately toward the window. Nina can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to plan an escape, if she’ll wake up tomorrow and he’ll be gone.
But when he stands, he doesn’t let go of Nina’s hands. In fact, he gives them a tug, pulling her with him. She’s not in the mood to be carted around right now while he dodges her questions. “Are you going to answer me?”
“It will be easier to show you than it will be to tell you,” Matthias says, and even though it’s technically not an answer, at least it’s a promise of one.
She allows him to drag her toward the door, still guarding her heart carefully as she slides her shoes on. It feels wrong, shielding herself from Matthias when he’s the person who she’s always trusted more than anyone to protect her. He saw her through her darkest moments, in the cramped surgeon’s cabin on the way back from the Ice Court. He held her through the night, and even after she said the most terrible things to him, he still loved her when the morning came.
The sun is just starting to set and when they walk out the door; the sky is painted in swirls of fuschia and lilac, the whole world bathed in a warm, amber glow. Looking at it makes her feel the same way that loving and being loved by Matthias Helvar does—beautiful and vast.
“Where are we going?” She finally asks as they reach the edge of their property and start venturing down into the forest it backs up to. She can hear the way that all of the hardness has vanished from her voice and if the way that Matthias looks at her as he laces their fingers together is anything to go by, he hears it, too.
“To show you where I’ve been this week,” He says. “Then hopefully you won’t be mad at me, anymore.”
“I’m not mad at you.” She’s almost surprised to find the words ring true. Her anger had been nothing but a shield, a wall she threw up desperately to try and protect herself. “I’m scared that I’m losing you.”
He stops suddenly and turns to face her, his expression serious. “You are not losing me. I promise you that.”
Nina releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding in, relief seeping into her bones. “Okay. Show me what you’ve been doing, then.”
“It’s just a little farther.”
Sure enough, in the distance, Nina begins to see a garden take shape. It’s much smaller and much more humble than what Matthias has created for her outside their little cottage in the past two years—these flowers all look like they’ve sprung up from the earth on their own, with no human intervention—but it’s beautiful. Of course, the most beautiful part of the garden is easily the carefully-constructed wooden arch that stands in the center of it, ivy and wildflowers woven throughout it.
“Do you remember what I told you in the cistern room under the embassy garden back in Ketterdam?” Matthias asks, turning to face her. He still holds both of her hands in his, still walking the two of them backwards towards the arch.
Nina raises an eyebrow at him. “You told me a lot of things in that room, Matthias.”
Predictably, Matthias’s cheeks go pink. She loves that she still has this power over him, that she can make him blush like this after years together. “When I told you about how I would court you if we were back in my home country.”
“Gifts, and flowers, and sweets, and kisses in only the most romantic backdrops that Fjerda has to offer,” Nina says with a nod. “I remember.”
“Well, this is another Fjerdan tradition,” Matthias says, and Nina knows him well enough to easily pick out the nervous sort of tremor in his voice, even if it’s faint. He must have practiced this. “Back home, when a man decides he wants to propose to a woman he does so by constructing her the arch that they’ll be married under.”
And… oh.
Oh.
“Matthias?” Now her voice is the one wobbling, tears welling up in her eyes before she can stop them.
“I don’t have a ring yet,” Matthias warns, his hand coming to rest on her cheek, brushing her tears away. “I’m making it. That’s tradition too—forging a golden ring for your lover’s finger by-hand. I would have if someone wasn’t so impatient and forcing me to rush this whole thing ahead of schedule.”
Nina gives a wet sounding laugh and Matthias catches another tear on his thumb. “Ask me anyway.”
There’s a smile on Matthias’s face as he stops them right beneath the arch and dutifully lowers himself down onto one knee. “Nina Zenik, three years ago, Djel changed my life forever when he bound me to you and every day that has followed has only carried me deeper into love with you. You are my purpose. You are my reason for being. You are my destiny. I swore an oath to you—”
“Jer molle pe oonet,” Nina says before she can stop herself, and she’s glad she said it when a beautiful grin splits Matthias’s face in two, his blue eyes sparkling at her. “Enel mörd je nej afva trohem verretn.”
“I wish, more than anything, that you’ll let me keep that oath to you for the rest of our lives,” Matthias murmurs, taking Nina’s left hand in his own. Like he said, there’s no ring, but Nina doesn’t need that. She just needs him. “Will you do me the honor of accepting my hand in marriage?”
“Yes, you glorious babink,” She nods, tears falling down her cheeks once again. She’s never cried so much in her life as she has since they came to Novyi Zem, she’s certain of it, and a part of her knows that it’s because she’s never felt safe enough to until now. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
And, because she’s Nina, once she’s given him her answer she promptly tackles him down onto the soft ground of the forest beneath them to kiss him absolutely senseless. She’s certain that it isn’t the Proper Fjerdan Way, but it’s their way and that’s the way that really counts.