Work Text:
Cause every house looks the same in my dreams
Every house feels like home for a couple weeks
Alina Starkov crossed the Fold when she was ten years old, her parents smuggling her across and starting their lives over in Os Kervo. Her mother had many friends there, and a brother who worked as a cobbler and who was willing to train Alina’s father in the trade as well.
Her mother kept a dockside tea stand and Alina grew up hearing the stories of sailors and merchants and traveling circuses and she learned turns of phrase in every language that crossed under the little awning above the tea stand. That her mother would swirl the tea with a flick of her fingers rather than a stirring spoon was either never noticed or at least never remarked on by anyone who visited them.
It meant her mother was Grisha, but both Mama and Papa were deft hands at silencing Alina’s questions about it. As she grew older she understood it better, though her questions remained unanswered over the years. Her mother was from the Shu border, her father had been something called an oprichnik, and they’d left the old country so fast that sometimes Alina recalled that they’d washed up their supper, slept, and then been on their way to the Fold the next morning. Whatever their neighbors made of the house and its absent occupants was and would remain a mystery, the Starkovs having left before even the lamplighters had had time to douse the street lights at dawn.
When Alina turned twenty she took over her mother’s tea stand. Her easy command of a bit of every tongue let her smooth over the various snits and pouts their customers had that her tea was not as good as her mother’s. Soon her regulars were drawn in because on the coldest and most miserable days in Os Kervo, stepping under the Starkov’s Tea awning was like stepping into a spot of sunshine. So what if the tea wasn’t as good as Madam Starkov’s when you felt the tension roll away from your shoulders as Miss Starkov smiled at you?
News reached them about the death of the Shadow Summoner the year afterwards—the papers all said he’d been assassinated by Kaelish fanatics, and the Tsar had retaliated by banning Kaelts from trading in Ravka. The sailors who frequented the tea stall said that it was all a bit of smoke and mirrors, as the trading agreements with the Wandering Isle had been canceled for months. A few of the men also speculated that that was why the General of the Second Army had been assassinated. It was just part of the feud, and ultimately both sides knew that no one cared about one more dead Grisha.
That winter was hard, the winds driving sleet sideways so that no where outside was safe from the wrath of the weather. Alina developed a lingering cough that she tried to conceal as much as she could, the cold never quite leaving her fingers and seeming to sink right into her bones. Her customers dropped off, only because it was too miserable to do more than bend their heads against the wind and head home. In the midst of this, one of her cousins died of the flu and was shortly followed by her uncle and his wife. Her mother formally sold the tea stand to Alina while her father sold her their little cottage. The two of them moved out and into the cobbler shop to look after Alina’s cousins and keep the business afloat.
Alone for the first time in her life left Alina at odd ends. She had no one to come home to at the end of the night, no one to share breakfast with. Her mother had thrown herself into raising Alina’s five remaining cousins, while her father worked long hours to catch up on orders and new stock for the shop. Despite the secrecy of her childhood, she had never felt lonely until that winter.
Spring came late. The sea, normally keeping the weather moderate, seemed unable to let the winter go. The oldest sailors and fishwives muttered about the sea witch giving Ravka and the Wandering Isle grief for their squabbles. Alina listened to them, sitting on a tall stool that she’d been forced to get as her lungs refused to let go of the cough from the winter, and wished that she had a way to leave Os Kervo. Somewhere warmer, to feel less empty at the end of the day even if she still went home alone every night.
As March turned to April the weather finally started to clear a little, and with it came a handsome carpenter freshly returned from a few years as a journeyman over in Novyi Zem. He had the wavy black hair and a beard he was growing out. He looked like he came right off a gold vlachka, the kind that only ship’s captains and silk merchants ever tried to pay with.
He’d never had Madam Starkov’s tea and he didn’t have a single sideways comment to make about the tea that Alina brewed—only asking if she’d changed the name of the stand when she’d married, after he’d glanced at the sign she’d written herself stating when the shop had been established. Alina had blushed fiercely and hastened to tell him she was not married, her mother was Madam Starkov and had sold her the shop.
“It didn’t feel right to change the name, not when the sailors tell their fellows to seek out Madam Starkov’s Teas,” she said softly, trying to keep her voice from catching and starting a coughing fit. His dark eyes seemed to see her struggle and he didn’t keep asking—turning to his tea as she moved to the next person at the stall. When Alina returned to where he’d leaned against the counter she found two silver pieces cleverly hidden under the dirty tea cup.
The man’s name was Aleksander Grijs, the only inheritance he’d gotten for having a Kerchman for a father he’d said with a rueful smile when she asked. At the look Alina had given him he chuckled and said that it was better than his mother’s little joke—that she had the misfortune of being saddled with a disappointment for a son after following her heart.
Alina couldn’t imagine not having her parents be proud of her. Even as they were distant and busy taking care of her cousins and the work left by her aunt and uncle they never once looked askance at her.
Even as the weather improved, and she had something like a sweetheart in Aleksander as he visited the tea stand once or twice a day, Alina’s health worsened. She missed a day here and there, barely making it out to the stand to leave a sign saying she was too sick to work and would be back the following day. A kind of grief flickered across her mother’s face when she found time to look in on Alina, her expression growing somber as she steeped tea with a strong mix of honey, salt, and pepper.
By June Alina was missing a few days in a row most weeks, and she had to shorten a lot of the days she did work just because it was too taxing to make the walk to the tea stand and back. Aleksander sometimes walked her back to the little cottage, his concern pouring off him in waves, keeping silent despite it seeming to claw at his insides. When he offered to pay for a doctor to look over her she almost didn’t refuse—but she was too afraid to think of what any doctor here might say, might ask, might notice about her family.
It was illegal to conceal Grisha in Ravka, and her mother was a tidemaker.
Her cousins all caught the measles in early July and her parents both stayed away in hopes of keeping Alina from catching it too. Aleksander somehow pounced on renting a shop just down the block from her tea stand, doing a brisk business with the traders and shipwrights that frequented the docks, and seemed to carve out every moment he could to visit her. She gave him a sign to hang up on the tea stand in case she was ever too ill to make the walk there and back, and he’d been weirdly emotional as he took it from her.
August brought on an illness that kept her in her bed for days, a raging fever leaving her too weak to do much more than shuffle to the kitchen for water or to the privy. Alina didn’t know how bad it was until one morning—afternoon? Evening?—she woke up to see Aleksander sitting vigil at her side. Every bone in her body screamed at the effort it took to sit up a little, and easing herself up the headboard took more willpower than she’d ever needed in her life.
Aleksander woke with a start when Alina coughed, his eyes frantic until he was able to focus on her.
“Breaking and entering is illegal,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
“Ah, you will have to take it up with Madam Starkov. I offered to look in on you and your mother accepted. How are you, my dear?”
“Like I got run over by a cart and dumped in the harbor,” she managed to say, blushing as he took her hand and kissed her fingertips.
“I assure you that you did not, but you’ll start to feel better soon,” he said, moving from the chair to sit next to her on the bed.
Alina gave him a questioning look and he gave her a smile, shaking his head and taking up her other hand and kissing her knuckles too. She closed her eyes, exhausted from the fever and the effort of getting herself even nominally vertical, and relaxed in the coolness of the room. It’s never this cool in August, she thought, brows knitting together as she puzzled through the temperature. It was like wading through the surf where the waves broke, tricky and slow and tiring.
Aleksander didn’t fight her when she knitted their fingers together, not moving or saying anything in the silence of her room. His hands were warm, like a patch of sunlight had fallen on them, like they were out having a picnic on the bluff overlooking the sea. The idea was a pleasant one and she made herself open her eyes so she could see his face when she told him—
The room was full dark, with swirling shadows that were black as night, except for a little bubble of sunlight around them that sparkled with motes of starlight where it seemed to bounce off the shadows.
The fever seemed to burn away as the light grew brighter and brighter, and she caught Aleksander’s eyes through the glow. His face was slack with disbelief, unable to look anywhere but her even as they were surrounded by what had to be some kind of miracle. Staring back at him she felt the world slough away and she knew immediately that they were destined to be together this way in every lifetime.
There would always be an embrace of hands, arms, a meeting of eyes, and bright light all around them with shadows keeping the world at bay.