Chapter Text
It took fifteen days for Ravkan astronomers to notice. The delay was a true testament to how the country's academic funding had long been monopolised by the Black General's pursuit of the Small Science. The Spinning Wheel observatory was already ceded to Fjerda, and it was over a century since the building closed its doors to learned scholars and leading minds.
And besides - it wasn’t the Bursar who lost a star. Nor the Hunter, nor the Scholar, or the Shorn Maiden.
The Three Foolish Sons remained three strong.
It was a small constellation, existing at the edges of everyone’s periphery. Often overlooked-
Easily missed.
It was Koja - the Too-Clever Fox. Named such by an amateur astronomer from Kerch, who had a nostalgic love for Ravkan folklore. Although it took a week for the halo around the star to fade from view and truly confirm it had disappeared from its place in the sky, it was this astronomer who wrote to the Merchants' Astronomical Society in Ketterdam to inform them of the development. He informed them that the tip of Koja’s right ear was now missing.
People were a little too busy with other, more pressing current events to care.
For this astonomer had noted the star's disappearance, the day the Sun Summoner was found.
The news caught Aleksander unaware - a rarity, in and of itself.
He was in the middle of a meeting, executing the seventh step in a nine step plan to earn the Second Army an increased budget from Lantsov. It was not the most exciting of meetings, nor the most exciting of plans. And still, it was a novel affront to find himself interrupted mid-sentence, as Fedyor abandoned his guard post outside the door and burst in with a missive in his shaking hand.
“What is it?” Aleksander said tersely. Although Fedyor had demonstrated insubordination in the interruption, the tone of his voice quickly restored order. He relished the way that several at the table tensed up, as the quality of the shadows shifted.
“I - General, I-” Fedyor did not seem to have the words. But nor did he have an excuse for breathlessness, given that he’d walked all of fifty paces.
Aleksander waited, unruffled, eyebrow raised.
“They… They found a Sun Summoner, moi soverenyi .” Fedyor said, then swallowed down another mouthful of air while several people at the table gasped. “She - she walked on foot into Keramzin.”
“Impossible,” and Aleksander meant it. If there was a Sun Summoner to be found, he had put measures in place that would guarantee he would be first to know. His testers would find them in Ravka when they were young, or his spies would find them elsewhere, and bring them to him in secret.
He snatched the missive out of Fedyor’s hand before his man could spill anymore of the details to others in the room and ruin his advantage.
Of course, it didn’t matter, did it? Looking down, he realised the letter had the seal of the First Army.
Aleksander was not the first to know. He had not found the Sun Summoner, as he had dreamed and planned for all these years. …He had no advantage to protect.
He was, in fact, scrambling, as he read the brief lines of text, describing a Shu girl who could summon light. She was residing in Keramzin - many, many miles away from him.
“Lies,” he said, half to room, half to himself, before glancing to Fedyor. “It must be some deranged fool with delusions of grandeur. Or a peasant with some half-decent understanding of alchemical reactions, creating some kind of lightshow, capable of feigning-”
“Forgive me, moi soverenyi... but I… don’t think so,” said Fedyor, looking sheepish. It was very rare that anyone outright contradicted the Darkling, but he persisted. “It’s just… they’re saying that…”
“They’re saying… what?”
“Only… that she burnt a hole through the Fold, moi soverenyi.”
He rode two days and two nights, and he didn’t sleep.
How could this have happened? How? He didn’t understand it. It was impossible. There was no way any of this could have taken place.
How could the Fold have sustained any damage without him sensing, without him knowing? It felt genuinely terrifying to have something so momentous happen, and it be so far outside his own control.
Keramzin was a place of little consequence. Its scrublands and dust-covered buildings passed Aleksander by in a meaningless blur, as he and the Second Army carriages followed the townspeople’s directions to the Town Hall. This was the building where they said the Sun Summoner was residing, waiting for them under First Army guard.
She walked into town, naked as a babe, said one old woman, hands trembling with rheumatism and reverence. Her skin was glowing. To see a Saint in my lifetime… truly, now I can die knowing happiness.
A handful of tents were set up in the central square, a makeshift barracks dedicated to protecting a single soul. Outside the building, a statue of Duke Keramzov astride a rearing horse - standard fare, for these small places that clung to whatever history they could to pretend they meant anything, in the long and dull passage of time. Aleksander actually remembered Keramzov: an inconsequential man. The features weren’t even accurate.
The townspeople froze and quivered in place when the feared Black General dismounted... as per usual. Aleksander supposed his control of the shadows was a little errant, with his tiredness and fury at this latest turn in the universe. The sky darkened overhead when he contemplated current events once more.
“Where is she?” he demanded of the first person he saw in uniform. They quailed at his expression, and hastily led him inside.
He didn’t know what he should expect. Someone below the age of testing, he supposed - the only logical explanation of how they’d so far alluded his grasp.
So it came as another infuriating surprise when the uniformed guard found him a First Army Lieutenant, who led him through the building, up to the Mayor’s study and library. Inside, Aleksander was greeted with the sight of a reed-thin young woman in her early twenties. She was laid sprawled out on one of the sofas for receiving guests, reading a book. Her dark hair was fanned over one sofa arm. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles and resting on the other.
“Oh,” was all she said at the intrusion, casting a cursory glance at Aleksander and his entourage of Fedyor, Ivan, and Zoya Nazyalensky. She stretched out once horizontally, pointing her toes with a groan. Then, she placed her book face down on the Mayor’s coffee table, uncrossed her ankles, and sat up, smiling.
“Hello!” she grinned, “You took your time. Or at least, I think you did? It was pretty quick for me, I confess, but several days have already passed and I believe that kind of delay is definitely frowned upon, by most people. I had to sleep, and relieve myself several times, which, you know, terribly boring business. I’d rather be having conversations and doing fun new things, but I haven’t been allowed to leave this room.”
This monologue was met with confused silence.
“Although, I do find that I quite like reading, so far,” the woman continued, unbothered by the lack of response. She bought herself to standing with a dancer’s grace and brushed down her clothing, picking some lint off her shoulder and examining it.
She was slight and small, made the more so by her chosen outfit: an oversized roughspun shirt, and trousers that swamped her. The four rolls to bring them above her ankles signalled they were clearly borrowed. Her hair was long and dark, snarled with knots left unbrushed and loose in waves across her shoulders. Her dark eyes were bright and curious in her face, jumping from place to place and person to person with avid interest, drinking in everything with the innocence of a baby bird.
“The Mayor’s books were boring…" she continued, "but his wife’s! My goodness. Those were very interesting. I have learned a lot about Ravka, these past few days! Did you know that not only did Sankta Anastasia do all that terrible martyrdom stuff, with the blood and the wolves and the dying, but she was also in love? With a noble from Tsemna, whose father accidentally bought the plague she was destined to cure - it’s so very tragic! Hard to get through a martyrdom at the best of times, but to have to turn your back on love first? I don’t know how she could do it! She must be very brave, or very heartless. But she also cried a lot, and did cut off her own arm. So I think it must be the former. She definitely seems to have a heart. She clearly cares, a lot.”
It was at this point that Zoya covered a snigger, with a hand and a very fake cough. Several of the Second Army’s eyes flitted briefly to the book left interleaved on the coffee table: it was, as expected, a romance. Aleksander was amazed that the Apparat hadn’t had it burned on the grounds of blasphemy. But he perhaps he had, and being a Mayor’s wife gave one unfettered access to items deemed to be contraband.
And this woman was either a moron, or an extremely gullible fool.
“You are Alina Starkov?” he asked, tersely, eager to get this farce over with, disprove her claim, and go back to something resembling normality.
“That’s me!” the woman said cheerfully, beaming at the sound of her name. She tugged an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you like it? My name? My sisters and I picked it for me. Some said it was a little on the nose to have ‘light’ and ‘star’ in there for everyone to see, but I liked how it felt, in my head! Apparently we misunderstood the conventions of your language a little, and it should be ‘Starkova’? But now that I have a mouth and a voice, the sounds are just so pleasing - I know I chose well.”
The Second Army contingent watched her silently, still uncertain how to react. She cocked her head to the side, blinking expectantly.
Ah, Aleksander thought, with a sudden and undeniable rush of relief. She’s not a Sun Summoner, then. She’s just a lunatic.
“It is… a nice name,” said Fedyor, the only one of them with a conscience or sense of social pleasantry. Even then, it took him a beat to muster a response.
“It is?” Alina smiled. “Thank you so much!”
“Your arm, please,” Aleksander said.
Alina Starkov looked at him and blinked again. “But you haven’t introduced yourself. Isn’t that what normally happens, before we shake hands? I definitely read that in more than one book, these past few days.”
Aleksander gritted his teeth, “General Kirigan. These are the contingents of the Second Army. Miss Starkov, your arm.”
“Ohhhh,” Alina said, nodding sagely. “You’re the Darkling! How silly of me, I probably should’ve been able to tell, shouldn’t I? From all the black! Is this a kefta, then? I like the patterns… the embroidery, is that the right word? I read about you in one of the Mayor’s histories. You run the Grisha, don’t you? An upcoming leader, the youngest in the bloodline of Shadow Summoners…”
She fell silent for a second - and what a second it was, a blissful respite - but turned thoughtful, examining his face. “Although… you don’t seem very young, to me. Something about you… Your eyes. You’re older than your face betrays, aren’t you? Tell me, do you know any stars?”
“Your arm," Aleksander said, without ceremony, and then reached out and grabbed her wrist, before any more ravings tumbled out of her permanently unrestrained mouth and caught on more uncomfortable truths. He wasn’t about to start believing in soothsayers, but a person who saw a slightly too accurate picture in a book from a century ago and then started running their mouth off could still be trouble. No matter how ludicrous they sounded.
“Ow, that hurts!” Alina complained, as he tugged her forward, and moved his ring on his left hand. “I think… I think you could bruise me!”
“This will only be a second, Miss Starkov.”
“Yes, well, I’m still learning how to measure those - OW!” she shrieked, overdramatic and shrill, as he broke the skin on her arm.
And wonderfully, blissfully, truly an answer to his prayers:
No light. No power.
All that happened was she bled.
Still, he must check. Aleksander dove his consciousness outwards, searching for something to amplify. Her heartbeat was thrumming like a hummingbird, and there was… something there. A blip on his awareness, but it was seemingly very small, almost a shadow in his mind. Nothing like he’d encountered in any other Grisha.
He reached out for it regardless. It was better to be thorough, if only to quell the small ‘what if?’ that would otherwise haunt him for decades to come. He tried to grasp onto that speck, and it… evaded him. Rather than rallying towards his influence, as usually happened when he latched onto a power to amplify.
In fact, it seemed so different from the signs he usually looked for, that he fought a triumphant grin. It probably meant there was nothing there, after all.
“Oh my goodness,” Alina Starkov was saying, looking down at her arm with wide, wondering eyes. “That’s my blood, isn’t it? Holy stars, it worked. My wish worked. I’m bleeding. I have flesh, I have blood. Oh my, it’s even red! I’m truly here to stay!”
“You are certainly destined for a life right here in Keramzin, Miss Starkov. Because you are not Grisha,” Aleksander replied, disgusted by her childish drivel and dropping her arm like it burned.
“And you,” he said, turning on the First Army representative, Tarasovich, “have colossally wasted my time, not to mention the Crown’s.”
“Y-you don’t understand, General,” the man stuttered. “Your test… it must be wrong. She’s the Sun Summoner. She called the light… I saw her do it.”
“We all did,” that was the otkazat'sya mayor, cowering in his corner. Somehow, his timidity was overcome in this brief moment, to defend the charlatan he thought a Saint.
“And yet, she did not pass my test,” Aleksander replied, with cruel satisfaction. “So whatever you thought you saw, you must be simply be a party to the same foolish delusions that this deranged woman-”
"Oh,” said Alina, who seemingly didn’t know how to be quiet. She was cradling her bleeding arm but not doing anything about the blood, simply watching as it ran in a rivulet to her elbow and then dripped onto the tarnished wooden floor.
“So that’s what that was" she said, frowning. "You just wanted me to shine? Why didn’t you just… ask me? Was the stabbing really necessary?”
Aleksander span on her, tiredness and panic and frustration all blending into an impatient anger that he did not bother to rein in. Particularly when confronted with one foolish woman who didn’t know when to admit her ruse was well and truly foiled.
"Go on then,” he goaded, in an icy and condescending voice, “summon the light for me. Do it right now, and I’ll give you the life in the Little Palace you must so desperately crave.”
“Well,” Alina shrugged one shoulder, indifferent at his threatening presence and simply sending more blood dripping to the floor. “Ok, then. But only because Lieutenant Tarasovich told me that that’s what I need to do to save Ravka. Otherwise, I’m not sure this ‘Little Palace’ is really worth my time - why do you advertise it as being ‘Little’, exactly? That's not exactly something you want to lead with, is it?”
Aleksander, despite his better judgement, was incandescent with fury. And then, Saints help him, she pouted: “I would also like it to be noted, that when I did my last demonstration, Tarasovich did at least deign to say please, first.”
The Darkling didn’t say please. He didn’t say anything.
And she was lucky he didn’t use the Cut, either.
Alina blinked at him for a second, then scowled, childishly. “Just one second,” she said, which Aleksander presumed meant she was stalling. She picked a letter knife from the Mayor’s table and stabbed through the sleeve of her shirt in one tug. It ripped like it was paper, and she pulled it off, beginning to bind her arm.
“I’m not used to bleeding,” she explained to the room, still shamelessly buying herself time. “It’s quite distracting, to cause such a stain.”
“There’s no point continuing with this pointless farce, Miss Starkov,” Aleksander said, eager to get home, back to the war room and the many plates he’d left spinning there for… this. “You’ve had your two days of sainthood, I’m sure you’ve been treated like a queen. Now just go quietly back, to whatever pathetic life led you to this urge to indulge in this fallacy-”
Aleksander Morozova choked on his next sentence, as Alina Starkov summoned a glowing orb of light into her hand.
It was the size of a dinner plate, and gave off heat like a furnace.
Impossible. He thought, for a second time. The test had not summoned her power, nor had his own properties as an amplifier. There was no way-
Alina summoned a second, into her other hand.
And then split the two of them by two again, so that she had four.
She glanced at him and his companions, now awe-struck. Her expression was bored and a little resigned. She dissolved the four spheres of light into particles that exploded outwards, out so that they danced like motes of golden dust on the wind. She arranged those motes into a storm, or a galaxy, then span them in a circle. She made a constellation out of them, and grinned to herself like she was making her own secret joke.
“Do you need me to glow, as well?” she asked, conversationally, maintaining the vortex of power in a corona around herself, still bare foot and bleeding through the linen on her forearm. “I did that when Tarasovich asked, but I think I went a bit bright, and then the room set on fire. The curtains caught. I’d rather not do that in the library - I’ve still got several books to read. I could do it outside?”
Aleksander’s mouth was dry. He had to swallow twice.
Amazement, and… panic.
Not just a Sun Summoner, but a powerful one. Already trained. She had to be.
“You look worried,” Alina said, with a genuinely sorrowful expression. “I’m confused. Isn’t this what you wanted me to do? Apparently I’m prophesied, or something?”
A rebel trap? A Shu-Han ploy? A plant, by his mother?
Alina blinked at him, and let her light die. “Everyone was saying that this is important. That what I did in the Inkblot was important, as well. But if you’d rather I didn’t, I’m quite happy just going for another walk. I was thinking about maybe seeing the sea-”
“The ‘Inkblot’?” he asked, through numb lips.
“Oh, sorry! The Fold,” she qualified. “That’s your name for it, isn’t it? It’s just that, from above, it looks like an inkblot. A smallish one. Or at least, my sisters - the ones who’d taken their pilgrimage already - said it looked like an inkblot, and I never understood what they meant. But now I’ve seen ink, and I find the analogy quite accurate. The Darkness was tangible, when I was inside it. It ran like water. Easy to frighten away.”
Saints, what the fuck was she? The worst fucking spy ever, if that was Shu-Han’s plan. He should kill her where she stood.
But he couldn’t kill her. Not with witnesses, and not when he needed her for his own plans. Still, Aleksander had to do something, before this entirely spiralled out of his grasp. Damage control was his first instinct. It was all he could achieve when faced with such a complex, frightening anomaly.
“Pack your things,” he said, trying to give his voice authority he once, for the first time, wasn’t certain he had. “My colleagues and I need to visit whatever you did at the Fold. Then we will come back for you, and take you to Os Alta.”
“Is that the rule, then? That Grisha have to go to Os Alta?”
You are not Grisha, he thought, mind fraying a little at the edges. A Grisha would’ve passed the test. He could’ve amplified a Grisha.
Alina continued talking, which seemed to be what she did whenever she was faced with a silence. “Tarasovich said that might be the way things have to be. Are you sure there’s room for me, in this ‘Little’ Palace of yours? I suppose I won’t take up much space, given I don’t have anything to pack! Although-” she looked down at her exposed and bleeding arm, “I could probably do with a new shirt. And I’d like to finish my book.”
“You do that, Miss Starkov,” Aleksander said, voice feeling very far away to his own ears. “Fedyor, Ivan, you stay and watch her.”
They could incapacitate her, should she try to run.
He turned. “Nazyalensky: you’re with me.”
The Fold had peeled back by half a mile on the South Eastern shore. Ground that had not seen daylight in centuries now baked under a cloudless sky.
The edges of the Fold itself, where the tear had formed, were singed. The injury dealt had given the Fold a tangible physicality, and the ripped edge still smouldered, like a burned piece of paper flaking into ash, or the dying embers of a fire. They surveyed the newly uncovered area, and at its heart they found a small indentation in the earth. A sunburst of soot, in the shape of a girl.
Further in, beyond their eyes, was a crater: thirty meters wide and ten meters deep, the sand melted on impact into a shining, dented mirror of onyx glass. But Aleksander couldn't see that: he could only see the devastation before him.
A section of the Fold, destroyed. And he hadn’t felt it.
Aleksander and Zoya stood there, speechless. Alina Starkov had detonated a section of the Unsea.
He hadn’t felt it.
A part of his own creation erased from existence, by a… a madwoman. And he’d been told, via letter.
“Just what… what is she?” he whispered. Luckily, the breeze snatched the words away before they could reach Nazylensky. He couldn’t let anyone know that he was at such a loss.
He didn't see the spot where the star had fallen. And it didn't occur to him to look.
“We got her a shirt,” Fedyor told him hastily, seeing the stormy expression on Aleksander’s face when they dismounted once more in Keramzin, “and… some shoes. We’re ready to leave, moi soverenyi.”
Aleksander had ridden the horses too hard, and so they needed to take the carriage back from here. Alina Starkov was waiting on the steps of the town hall with Ivan. Her mouth was moving, and Ivan looked like he wanted to be anywhere but in listening range. At least, when he saw Kirigan move straight for the carriage and not the girl, he understood the message with perfect clarity, and began moving them both down the stairs as well, eager to depart. At her side was a small satchel, seemingly stuffed with more books, but otherwise she had nothing else on her person.
“Sankta!” came cries from townspeople congregated in the square, several of them crossing themselves as she walked past. A group of small children ran up to her, and handed her a posy of flowers with the roots still attached, soil clinging to them.
She took them with a gracious bow and then spoke with them for a few minutes, smiling and grinning as one of them tugged on her sleeve.
Aleksander wondered if she was enjoying herself - if all of her pointless, incessant prattle was an affected eccentricity to sell the claim to sainthood and accelerate her canonisation. Was she possibly that canny? All he knew was, she was delaying them, and didn’t even look up for permission with which to do so.
The Darkling, waiting by his carriage like a lemon, for an actual lunatic.
“Please, Sankta!” one of the girls shouted. “Please show us!”
Alina cocked her head, as if considering. With an impish grin, she opened her hand and summoned the light for them.
At the sight of it, entire square went silent, like they were holding a collective breath. All except the children, who started clapping while Alina shaped the light into a flower, and made it bloom.
Aleksander tensed, as dread washed over him. Another story confirming her identity, that would spread before he had the time to contain it. She was doing this deliberately, wasn’t she? She had to be.
“Alright, move along,” Ivan grunted, grabbing Alina by the arm and moving her towards Kirigan and the others.
“I’m sorry!” the girl shouted over her shoulder, “Goodbye! Thank you for the flowers!”
“Get. In,” Aleksander told her through gritted teeth, gesturing to the open door she’d left waiting for several minutes.
“Oh, goodness, are we on a schedule?” Alina said blithely. “I’m sorry, like I said, I’m still getting used to how you all perceive time. And they gave me flowers! How nice of them! My sisters warned me that showing off my light could cause problems, but they were clearly wrong. Everyone is just so lovely!”
Sisters, again. Did that mean there was more of them?
Saints. Aleksander decided to save himself a headache by simply not contemplating it. “Just get in, Miss Starkov.”
Alina acquiesced. But whether anyone was thankful was a question up for debate, because it soon meant they were all locked up in a carriage with her, and she still didn’t stop talking.
She talked about everything: the carriage interior, the scenery breezing past the window, the food she’d eaten since arriving in Keramzin, and how she was excited to try chocolate.
Aleksander tried to tune her out, as did Zoya and Ivan. Fedyor tried his best to keep smiling and nodding along. But even his smile was looking a little brittle in the face of her incessant monologue.
“Oh, it’s so exciting to be travelling again, although you really do move slow,” she smiled, looking out of the window. “Oh, it’s just so thrilling! I’ve got so many things I want to do! I want to see a play, something where lots of people die needlessly and dramatically. And read something so moving it makes me cry. And swim outdoors, so I can feel the wind drying the water on my skin when its damp. I want a dress, the kind that shimmers, and whispers when you spin. I want to hug someone, and be hugged back, and laugh with someone else until I can feel these ribs of mine hurt. And I want to save Ravka, because everybody seems to think I could do that, and it would be nice if some of those stories that make people cry were about me, so that I can leave a mark here. And I want to fall in love, of course! My sisters tell me that that doesn’t always happen, but I’ll tell you a secret now that they can’t hear me - I think I have a nicer personality than some of my sisters. They are very stand-offish, and distrustful. And none of them shone here, which is clearly just the solution to making everyone immediately like you!”
If she is a spy, she is the worst spy I have ever encountered, Aleksander thought, fighting the urge to rub at a forming headache.
The double bluff present in that concept could have given him more reason to be suspicious. But no spy would act this way. Not when Alina’s entire persona made everyone within the confined space want to kill her without a single crime being committed.
“You’re so pretty,” she told Zoya, roughly forty-five minutes later.
The air in the carriage snapped taut in a second. Fedyor physically sucked in and held a breath, no doubt sensing the change in Zoya’s physicality. Her feelings were written plain on her face, as she glared at the new Sun Summoner with renewed fury.
Alina, obviously, didn’t notice, and continued, “blue looks so nice on you. I’m not sure how colours work with complexion yet, but we both have dark hair, so maybe blue would suit me as well? Is that what I get to wear, when I get one of these keftas? Do I get to choose?”
The carriage was dangerously silent. Zoya was practically crackling with static. Even Alina noticed this silence was different in quality from the impassive, apathetic acceptance her stream of consciousness had earned her so far. Unfortunately, she misunderstood it, glancing around the carriage, and saying hastily, “oh, I’m sorry, please don’t worry! You’re all very pretty, also!”
“You,” she gestured to Ivan, “are very tall, and your shoulders are very broad which means you have a strong silhouette.
“You,” she turned to Fedyor, “have a lovely smile, and very kind eyes. And you-”
She turned to Aleksander, frowned a little, while everyone else in the carriage seemed to physically cringe and wish for death.
“You have a lot of… presence. Also, your cheekbones are excellent. My sisters explained to me about cheekbones, and how they could make or break a face - clearly, you have been very lucky. But the fact remains that Zoya is also a woman, and with the same colouring. So I think she’s a much more useful model for me to follow initially, if I wish to look for ways to make myself pleasing, in preparation for falling in love. And while I like red as a colour, I am far too bored of black. It is blue, for me, I think.”
“...Are we really just going to let her keep talking?” Zoya asked, aloud. She looked at Fedyor and Ivan, “Can’t you send her to sleep, or something?”
Ivan actually glanced at Kirigan, silently asking for permission.
Aleksander shook his head imperceptibly, but even he could admit that his already thin patience was hanging on by a thread.
“Where do you hail from, Miss Starkov?” he asked. They were going to have to interrogate her at some point. Might as well be now, when they had her surrounded by heartrenders, and they couldn’t escape her even if they wanted to. It meant less time spent with her at the Little Palace, which was becoming more appealing by the second.
“I don’t know,” Alina said with a shrug. “Well, I know where my home is, but I don’t know where I landed when I fell here. Somewhere in the Fold. There were some buildings. I got quite turned around. I only made the hole when I got bored searching for the way out - turns out I was pretty close to the edge, but it's very hard to tell, when the darkness is that thick and you've got bat monsters haranguing you at every turn.”
The Darkling raised an eyebrow, “you know your home, but you don’t know where you’re from?”
“Pretty much,” Alina shrugged. “I have a vague understanding of your geography, but there were no maps in the library. So I haven’t got round to learning the names of cities and the like.”
“You look Shu,” Zoya observed, glaring.
“Oh, do I?” Alina smiled, “well, that’s nice! That explains why your features are different from mine, I suppose. You’re Suli, aren’t you?”
Ivan and Fedyor shared a surprised glance, and at Zoya’s startled look, Alina continued grinning broadly. “See, who needs maps? I can just tell! It’s a kind of kinship we hold, you and I. You’re like me - you know that home is not simply a place, but a group of people. That home and family are, in fact, one and the same thing. Not that I’m Suli, obviously - you’ve just told me I’m Shu! I just like the Suli, because some of your beliefs are similar to my own.”
“...So, you are from Shu Han?” Fedyor asked, while Zoya went paler and paler with every word from Alina's mouth.
“...Is it easier if I say yes?” Alina asked, after a thoughtful pause.
“It depends on what cover story you are trying to sell to us, Miss Starkov,”Aleksander informed her.
He did so, in seamless Shu. A slightly pointless test at this point, given that he thought she was far too deranged to be a spy. But one he couldn’t stop himself making, out of sheer curiosity.
A saint would have no Shu. A spy, on the other hand…
Alina frowned for a second, gaze going far off, and then replied, also in perfect Shu: "I don’t have one, really. At least, not for my sake. But you won’t believe me, if I tell you the truth. So I’m trying to work out what story will make you all feel the most comfortable. Is it believable for you, then, if I come from Shu Han?”
The rest of the carriage jolted into action.
Fedyor and Ivan’s hands each formed a complicated pattern in unison, and then Alina was gasping, choking on pain as her body locked up.
Instead of opting for lightning in this confined space, Zoya pulled a dagger from the bodice of her kefta.
“Spy,” she hissed.
“Who sent you?” Fedyor demanded.
Aleksander was impressed that they had reacted according to protocol, but still ultimately bemused. Very few Shu assassins would blunder through an interrogation with such a blasé attitude. Miss Starkov was too incompetent to be a good spy.
Of course… she could just be a bad one.
“No one sent me!” Alina said, strained and speaking once again in Ravkan. “Why are you suddenly so frightened?”
“We are a little concerned that you are fluent in our enemy’s tongue, Miss Starkov,” Aleksander explained calmly, even as his shadows began to kiss his own fingertips in preparation for the cull.
“But… but you spoke in it first!” Alina said, confused, affronted, and starting to fight against the heartrenders’ hold, “I was just copying you… I didn’t want to be rude! Why aren’t they attacking you?"
“Because I don’t speak Shu like a native.”
“But… but we sounded the same! Is this because you don’t look Shu?” Alina relaxed in the cage of her own body, and then started pouting again, as if she’d made a social mishap and was puzzling herself through it, “well. I suppose that does make it different for me. I think that’s awfully distrustful of you, but I can see how that would cause confusion, if you’re angry at the Shu for some reason. Does it help if I tell you I can speak all languages, then, not just that one?”
She turned to Zoya, got that slightly vacant look again, and then said something in Suli, that caused the woman to tighten her grip on her dagger. Suli had become less useful to Aleksander in recent decades, since the geopolitical landscape had last shifted, but he could make out the question in her tone: "this is the language of your people, yes?"
“What. the. fuck?” Zoya ground out. A perfect accent in a third tongue didn’t exactly provide evidence in Alina’s favour.
“Oh! And this one!” Alina said, in Fjerdan, “I spoke this one to some very mean and disgruntled men, and they seemed to understand me perfectly-”
She squeaked, as the heartrenders tightened their grip on her body.
“Who sent you, Miss Starkov?” Aleksander demanded.
“No one!” Alina replied, looking panicked and frustrated, “I sent myself!”
“So, you were in training for some kind of infiltration, and decided you could do it independently, without supervision,” he theorised, then sighed, “let me tell you, whoever your handler is, they were right. You really shouldn’t be out in the field.”
“Infiltration?” She said, flabbergasted, “I didn’t ‘infiltrate’ anything! You… you all came to find me and take me somewhere, because you said it was important! You think I wanted to be stuck in a carriage with four grumpy, violent people? I just wanted to see the sea!”
“What were you hoping to gain, Miss Starkov? Who sent you? Where are you from?”
“I've already said, if I told you, you won’t believe me! I’ve been explaining to people for days and they don’t like it, it’s just exhausting! I’ve decided It's just easier if you all decide on what is the most plausible. I can be from Shu if you want, or Ravka, if that makes you less horrible to be around-”
Aleksander gave the nod, and Ivan tightened his grip until she squeaked again.
“I’m on a pilgrimage!” she said, her face looking absurdly betrayed and hurt. She was stupid, but her acting was exemplary. “It’s just… it’s what we do! All the eldest and most staid of my sisters have done it. We get restless, and we know it’s time to fall, so we come down here and we find the thing that completes us, whatever we lack that has left us feeling so out of sorts. A purpose. And I came down here, and everyone immediately seemed so certain of my purpose, of what I could do, and who I came here for. You all handed me the instructions on your doorstep. So I thought it would be easy! Please stop hurting me!”
“The answer is truthful, moi soverenyi” Fedyor said, his face becoming overcast with confusion and weakness at the sign of her distress. She wasn’t holding up to questioning the way an agent would - unless that was all part of the act.
Aleksander cast his glance over at Fedyor’s less soft-hearted partner, who also nodded his confirmation. Either she’d trained her body to fool his two best heartrenders, or… she was actually in distress.
“Where are you from, Miss Starkov? I don’t want to hurt you, but I will not ask a third time.”
“The closest thing I am is Ravkan. Koja is named after a Ravkan story, I arrived in Ravka!” she sputtered. “But…” she bit her lip, then said, “and you can’t be angry at me, if I tell you.”
“I will be the judge of that, Miss Starkov.”
"You won't like it, but you also don't seem to like not knowing it. Please don't do this once you have my answer. It's not my fault you’re all impossible to please."
"And yet, I must have that answer, if you are to live."
“I’m… I'm from the sky!” she told him. “I was a star, and I fell. I landed in Ravka, so that makes me Ravkan. But I’ve only been in Ravka less than a week, so I don’t feel very Ravkan, which is why I didn’t know to say it like that. That’s all. I’m not a spy. And I’m not sure I’m even the Sun Summoner, like you all say I am, but the Sun is also a star, so maybe I’m a close enough fit that it will all work out! I just want to help people, and find my purpose. Please, you have to believe me.”
Everyone was silent again, save for Alina's laboured breathing as she heaved against invisible heartrender bonds.
...What, exactly, did a person say to that?
“She’s… um. Well, she certainly thinks she’s telling the truth,” Fedyor said, into the quiet.
“She’s actually unhinged,” Zoya observed. She glanced at the General, “Some kind of conditioning, gone wrong?”
“The Fjerdans are the only ones who radicalise their extremists using religious doctrine,” Aleksander told her calmly, “and while there is some overlap with lunar tradition, the symbology does not align with the Shu. I think she may just be mad.”
“Still a Sun Summoner,” Ivan noted.
Yes. That was true. Aleksander couldn’t kill her - not when he needed her to complete his plans.
“I am not a spy, and I have no interest in infiltrating or harming anyone,” Alina said. “I just want to help. I’m here to find my reason to be. Maybe my purpose is to make it so that you no longer hate the Shu and these Fjerdans and don’t assault people in carriages without just cause, which seems to me to be a very unfounded social practice, but…”
She looked at the four people, aggression entering into her expression for the first time, glaring at them like a child having a tantrum. “I will admit, I don’t know that for certain. All I do know, is that the people in Keramzin were nice. And they wanted me to destroy the Fold. I can do that. I will do that. That is a suitable purpose.”
A quick glance exchanged between Ivan, Fedyor, and Aleksander: all true to her. Albeit stupid.
“Please let me go,” Alina said, after a second. Her voice quavered a little, but she stuck her chin out defiantly, all the same. “Please stop hurting me. I don’t want to hurt you - but I will not ask a third time.”
Aleksander raised an eyebrow at his own threat being parroted back at him, with what he supposed she thought was imperial contempt. He made a gesture, and the heartrenders ceased their influence. Alina fell back into the comfort of a body that belonged to her, rubbing uncomfortably at her arms.
“Why are you all so angry?” she demanded, “isn’t this what you wanted?”
Aleksander was tired. This girl wasn’t a threat, but she was far from harmless.
“Send her to sleep,” he told Fedyor with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We could all do with a break.”