Chapter Text
Five hours of restless sleep later, Alina woke, feeling as though she had taken a frying pan to the head at some point during the night. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept so poorly.
In the light of day, the window of the suite gave her an unobstructed view of the gardens behind the East wing, and she could just make out the Little Palace where it stood enveloped by trees. Remnants of smoke were curling their way up from the ruins. Her heart twinged with loss.
The Little Palace had perhaps been the closest she had ever come to having a home. She had grown used to her chambers and seeing the mix of blue, red and purple in the Dining hall at meals, training by the lake, meeting with Nikolai in the war room…
The new scent of the bedding here had unsettled her.
She felt displaced, and the prospect of the aftermath she would see today only served to exacerbate her anxiety.
She was suddenly hyper-aware of the layer of soot and grime that covered her skin. She couldn’t see it, but she could have sworn she felt the prickle of dried blood on her arms, too. The guilt that twisted in her stomach was too real for the early hour and she quickly located the adjoining bathroom so she might scour away the feeling. Her mind was racing as she scrubbed her skin raw until it burned.
Today was just the first hurdle, she had no idea what would be expected of her as the Darkling’s… soverennya? Koroleva? She didn’t even know what to call herself. She had a daunting thought that hadn’t plagued her since she first discovered her powers: what if she wasn’t who they thought she was? What if they would see her standing at the Darkling’s side and discover she was a fraud? A worthless orphan in a saint’s skin.
She desperately wanted it to be real. She needed to matter to someone.
She realised as she was bathing, that the texture of her hair had changed with the colour. It had grown somehow thicker and downy, and the weight of it down her back when she stood left her feeling slightly off-balance.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, gilded in gold on the wall of the bathroom. There was something about her face that looked different, almost older. Her cheekbones stood out more prominently and the pallor of her skin was darker when contrasted with her hair. She couldn’t say she minded the change, her hair had been thin and dull before, and the added memory of the Darkling saying it suited her endeared her to the look somewhat.
She chastised herself for caring what he thought. She didn’t need his compliments to feel comfortable with herself. She liked her hair. It did suit her.
She had no idea what was in store for her today. The uncertainty was as unnerving as it was liberating.
Drying herself quickly, she was just about to pull her clothes back on when a timid knock came to the door.
She panicked momentarily, thinking she would have to answer the door to the Darkling dressed only in a towel, but when she reached out with her instincts that always seemed to know when he was near, she found him elsewhere.
Still not wanting to open the door in her current state, she looked around hastily and pulled on the black cloak she had found last night, before hesitantly turning the handle and peering around the door.
“Genya?”
Alina stood and stared uncomprehendingly at Genya standing in her red kafta in the hallway, looking uncomfortable. Her face was beautiful, as it always was, but there was now a very prominent red scar that ran down the length of the left side of her face.
She clutched the pile of folded black fabric she was holding like a shield as she asked, “Can I come in?”
Alina wordlessly held the door wider for her to enter. Before she had even fully turned around, Alina heard her start, “I know I -”
She cut herself off and fidgeted, then appeared to think better of whatever she was going to say.
She stepped forward and tentatively passed the heap of fabric that, upon closer inspection, Alina realised was a kafta with gold embroidery.
A black kafta.
“He thought you might want a change of clothes,” Genya said.
Alina nodded.
She bit back the spike of irritation she felt at knowing exactly what the Darkling had intended by giving her this. There would be no denying their alliance once she dressed herself in his colours. It was a mark of possession.
Genya was setting down a pair of black and gold leather boots and she looked on the verge of slipping as fast as she was able out the door when Alina gently caught her arm.
Alina conveyed as much understanding with her eyes as she could, “Thank you,” she said earnestly, “For these, and for letting us go.”
Genya looked down at the hand on her arm, “I didn’t want you to be trapped here. I should have done more.”
Alina shook her head.
“You did more than enough,” she said, finding Genya’s palm and giving her hand a firm squeeze, “Did he -” she hesitated, “Did he hurt you for it?”
Genya gave a small, rueful smile and touched the scar on her face. It puckered and pulled at her skin as though it hadn’t quite been allowed to heal properly.
“Not directly, but I was punished,” she gave a small laugh, “They call me Razrusha’ya now, among the Grisha ranks, when they think I can’t hear them.”
Razrusha’ya. Ruined
Her voice was deceptively light, but Alina could hear the strain in it. She had been branded a traitor for her, for the others, and Alina had ended up here anyway.
It occurred to her that this was likely another sort of test from the Darkling - to see if she would try and use Genya to aid any plans she had to contact the rebels. She sighed internally, they would need to learn to trust each other if this alliance was ever going to work, but it was beginning to look like more and more of an unattainable ambition.
Nevertheless, Alina was determined. All that suffering, all that loss, it would not be for nothing. For she would make something of the world yet.
She brought Genya’s hand to her lips and kissed the back fiercely. There was so much that needed to be said to each other, and even then their friendship may never be as it once was, but Alina could but try. Genya had been her first friend, her confidante, and she hoped that she could count on the fact that at least some aspects of it had been real.
Because she would need allies of her own if she was to survive this place.
“Could you help me with my hair?” she asked, “I can never quite manage it as you did.”
The smile that lit the Corporalki’s face was warm and genuine.
***
Alina sat at the dresser as her hair was brushed and dried and let Genya talk. She seemed as relieved to unburden herself of the story as much as Alina was distraught to hear it. Even so, it felt good to have Genya there; left her feeling a little more grounded. The woman’s words flowed with her fingers as she worked her tiny miracles.
As Nikolai’s ship had fled with Alina aboard, the Fabrikators on hand had been desperately trying to fix the wound to the boat’s hull that Alina had Cut. Seething with rage, the Darkling had demanded to know how the prisoners escaped and, knowing her fate would be far worse if she were caught in a lie, Genya told him how Tolya and Tamar had freed Mal and Alina and how she had watched them kill Ivan before letting them go.
He had told her that if she wished to remain in his service, she would have to prove her loyalty, and promptly threw her overboard.
She would have surely died of hypothermia within hours had she not discovered one of the smaller scouting boats was still intact after the attack of the sea whip. She had crawled aboard and lain there, freezing, as she watched the Darkling’s vessel return in the direction of the mainland until it was out of sight. She had sat there until dusk, fully expecting to suffer a slow, agonising death. Her healing abilities helped her somewhat in fighting off delirium and frostbite, but she had no sails, only had a knife in her sleeve and she wasn’t Etherealki - she couldn’t direct the tide or the wind. And, although the sea whip was dead, she wasn’t naive enough to believe it was the only creature inhabiting those waters.
“The hopelessness was the worst part,” she said, focusing on the braid she was weaving, “I was… so sure, that I would die there, cold and alone, with no one for hundreds of miles to even know where I was, or care that I was missing or dead.”
She sighed, “No one to mourn me.”
“I would have mourned you,” was all the response that Alina could offer.
Genya just smiled indulgently and continued speaking.
“It was well into the night when something knocked against the hull of the boat, and I was so terrified that there was some creature in the water, that I didn’t dare move for almost an hour. Whatever it was kept tapping and knocking every now and again, always on one side, always in rhythm with the waves. It was probably due to my exhaustion that it took me as long as it did to realise it was an object floating in the water, rather than an animal.
“When I reached over the side, it was long and stiff, almost frozen solid, but as desperate as I was, I started paddling with it. I didn’t know where I was going, or whether it was even going to work, but I clung to the idea of doing something other than just laying down to die. I knew if I was lucky, the tide would carry me inland where I might be spotted by another boat - I just had to stay awake, keep breathing and keep paddling.
“I stayed awake all night, desperate to find a current that would take me ashore, but in the light of the dawn, I realised two things: I was in the middle of the ocean, with not a scrap of land or another boat in sight, and the thing I had been so urgently paddling with, was a severed leg.”
Alina gasped in horror.
Genya had stopped all pretense of fixing her hair and sat down on the end of the bed. Smoothing her hand over the covers with a kind of reverence.
“I suppose it would be disgusting,” she conceded, “Horrifying even, to anyone else. To anyone less desperate to survive. But I had already been at it for hours, and really, I thought, what difference did it make? So I kept going.”
Alina stood quietly from her chair and sat next to the girl on the bed, taking her hand in a show of wordless solidarity.
“I must have gotten somewhat further inland, because after another two days and a half, keeping my metabolism low and sleeping as little as I possibly could, I spotted a hunting boat on the horizon. I must have been moving further south, because the leg was thawing and starting to bleed again. I had thought myself inconceivably fortunate that the boat turned my way - that it had spotted me somehow - and the hope was so vivid after so long, I felt sure I would have cried had my body been in any fit shape to afford such a thing.
“But,” she laughed bitterly, “I am not exactly a lucky woman. The boat had been hunting a knife-tailed akula and it had scented the blood in the water.”
Akula in general were incredibly dangerous; large fleshy bodies the size of horses, with fins as strong as steel and a venomous bite. But Alina remembered something Nikolai had told her of a skirmish he had had with the knife-tailed variety. They were perhaps twice as big and had a long blade-like tail that it used to slice open the hulls of ships. Or disembowel small whales.
“What did you do?” she had asked Nikolai, “How do you kill something like that?”
“You don’t,” he’d said grimly. “Believe me, Alina, I don’t ever wish to encounter one of those things again. There’s a reason I started designing ships that could fly.”
Alina felt the blood drain from her face.
Genya had been so focused on the incoming boat that the akula had managed to get within almost a hundred metres of her before she saw it, its great tail parting the waves like a guillotine. In the heartbeat between realising what it was and noticing the small stain of blood she was leaving in the water, the akula had halved the distance between them. She knew that if she were to throw the leg, the cloud of blood her boat was sitting in would likely still draw it in, so her only other option was to swim for the boat that could surely see her now, if it hadn’t before, and hope she got there in time before the akula smelled her and her much fresher meat.
“Could you not have killed it?” Alina asked, “Stopped its heart?”
“After three days on the verge of hypothermia with no food or water?” Genya asked, “No, probably not. Or that’s what I tell myself at least. At the time… I had only been training as a Heartrender for a few months - it didn’t even cross my mind.”
She looked so ashamed by such an admission that Alina felt compelled to grip her hand tighter, “I understand.”
Genya squeezed her hand gratefully, “In any case, I split my chances, threw the leg a short distance to the left, waited for the monster to switch course and dove out of the other side of the boat. The water was so cold, like knives in my skin, and my limbs were so weak from starvation that I sank immediately. I did what I could to keep moving, to stay afloat, but the current was pulling me under.
“And then I felt the akula change course, and I knew it was coming for me.
“I just followed my instincts, I went towards it, hoping that if I could get behind it, I remembered hearing somewhere that akula -”
“Can’t swim backwards,” Alina finished as the answer dawned.
Genya nodded, “So I managed to dodge it at the last second and grabbed onto its tail.”
“That’s insane,” Alina exclaimed in half-horror, half-admiration.
A genuine chuckle this time.
“Yes, that’s what they told me. Before it could turn around, I straddled it, and let it drag me towards the ship as it tried to shake me off, then pulled the knife from my sleeve and tried to cut off its tail.”
She reached her free hand up to finger the slice running down her face, “It thrashed, and got me right in the face with the tip of the blade. But I held on and kept sawing, even when I couldn’t see for the blood. Once it couldn’t swim, the hunting boat sent down a harpoon and killed it where it lay in the water. They pulled me out, drenched and covered in blood of all kinds.
“I nearly died several times on the trip to Weddle in Novyi Zem, it was only my own powers that stopped me bleeding out, or losing my eye to infection. It could have been worse, I suppose, the hunters that picked me up could have been Fjerdans and executed me for witchcraft, but as it was, they kept me alive and gave me a portion of the money they sold the akula tail for which was enough to buy me passage to Os Kervo and then some.”
Genya met Alina’s inquiring eyes briefly, “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “Why didn’t I run then? I could have stayed away for good - hidden away, letting everyone assume I was dead and lived comfortably. At peace.”
She smiled wistfully, and appraised Alina who was still sitting in her cloak with her hair half-done. She reached up and tilted the other girl’s face up by the chin, examining her.
“Peace. It’s a lovely dream. But I suppose you will understand as well as anyone that that’s not what I wanted. I knew the cost of coming back, and I realised I would gladly pay it; I would do it all again, for a chance to live in the world we mean to build. No more hiding.”
She touched her scar again, and Alina thought she detected a hint of pride in the girl she had missed before. “I find I don’t mind the scar anymore. It reminds me. Of why I’m here, of why I kept fighting.” She shrugged, “It reminds me that I fought a knife-tailed akula and won.”
A weight seemed to have lifted from the girl’s shoulders and the two shared tentative smiles.
“Plus,” she added with no small amount of satisfaction, “When I got back, the Darkling made me his second-in-command and Commander of the Heartrenders in his army.” She gestured to the blue ribbon pinned on the left side of her chest, the Ravkan Silver Star of Gallantry obvious now she pointed it out. Alina found she understood. Becoming aware of your own potential was a thrilling feeling. One that the Darkling seemed to universally inspire.
“Now,” Genya said, squeezing Alina’s hand once more before getting up, setting her shoulders, “What do you want me to do with your hair?”
A simple question, but Alina knew Genya hadn’t just told her that story for sympathy.
She thought of the Darkling. Of how he had thrown Genya overboard expecting her to die, of how he had blinded his own mother and created a dark army with merzost, chained her and collared her and seduced her so that he might control her power. So that he might keep her.
But she was also thinking of his expression after he had first kissed her, as if it had been just as much a surprise to him as it had been to her. Of the gleam in his eyes last night when he had touched her orb of light and said it felt like her, when she’d echoed his words back to him and he’d looked so caught off guard, he hadn’t managed to conceal the flicker of disbelief before she noticed it.
What did the Darkling want more than anything?
He had power, he had control over most of Ravka. He wanted freedom for the Grisha, yes, that much was clear. She believed he loved Ravka - as surely as Nikolai did. The Darkling was simply unafraid of wading through the blood and ruins of his enemies and sacrificing everything else to forge his new world. He had lost so much, and it was clear the centuries had taught him to believe that power was all he could trust.
But they were ambitions. What did he want?
The problem with wanting, is that it makes us weak.
The answer came to her, clear as day, and a plan was slowly forming in her head.
Genya seemed to notice the change in Alina’s eyes because slowly, her face slid into a knowing smirk.
He thought he knew what he wanted. He thought he knew what she was capable of.
Alina smiled.
He was wrong.
“You're going to make me the soverennya.”