Author's Note: I was trying to imagine a scenario where the Darkling crossed paths with Alina before she was revealed to be the Sun Summoner. What might some of their early exchanges have been like, had he not known who she was, or how useful she might become? Would the possibility of an attraction still exist between the two? I'm a romantic, of course, so exploring the affirmative while trying to keep everyone in-character became the basis for this challenge. Only those who read on will know if I succeeded!

Glossary:

banya - bathhouse

kefta - garment worn by Grisha

kvas - a traditional fermented Slavic beverage

oprichnik/i - The Darkling's personal guards, elite soldiers

otkazat'sya - orphaned, abandoned; used by Grisha to refer to non-Grisha

sankt - saint

1

The banya in the port city of Kribirsk had been set aside especially for his use that evening; and for its use, he had shed his oprichniki as surely as he shed his kefta. Though the building's entrance was roped off and posted closed, there were no tell-tale soldiers stationed outside it, and no suggestion of the identity of the man who bathed within.

He disrobed save for the towel snug around his hips. He took his time preparing to enter the pool, letting the room's steam overwhelm him first. It was all a part of the ritual. Any crossing of the Shadow Fold required his full and complete attention, especially when others were fatally given to lapse.

The banya in Kribirsk boasted only two plunge pools — far fewer than the bathhouses of the palaces of Os Alta — and he favored the heated bath over the chilled, pushing his physical endurance to its melting point as he dropped his towel and lowered himself slowly into its scalding waters. His nostrils flared, but he emitted no sound as he felt his muscles finally start to untense from his time on the road. He relaxed back as his blood heated, his circulation coming alive within him. His gray eyes closed to cat-like crescents.

"I said no, Mikhael!" a voice shrilled outside the door. The Darkling's eyes opened.

"What's the matter, Sticks?" A man's voice, thick with drink, laughed at the refusal. "Why not rub two together and start a fire?"

The door to the banya was thrown open, and a soldier of the First Army — a young woman — swiftly folded herself inside and slammed it shut, shooting the wood latch the Darkling hadn't bothered with and bracing her too-thin arms against her barricade. "I wish I had an Inferni friend to set you on fire!" she shouted through the door. "You're soaked in enough kvas to go up like a torch wick!"

The brute on the other side made some reply to the effect that she had no friends, but it was drowned out amid a chorus of shouts — oprichniki coming to collect the drunken lout on the Darkling's doorstep. He wondered, idly, if they had even noticed the girl slip through the door. By this point they knew better than to pursue her. Either way, the Darkling felt the faint stirrings of displeasure. After the crossing of the Fold, he would dole out punishments to those who survived the journey.

The girl listened to the struggle on the other side; then, once they had gone, she vented an animalistic growl of frustration, heartbreakingly impotent, and hit the door with her fist.

"I might have accused you of not knowing how to knock," the Darkling mentioned. "But I see now that would be an incorrect assessment."

The girl whirled, the blood draining from her face faster than a Heartrender could draw it south. He met her stricken stare evenly from where he lounged in the pool. "I… my apologies," she stammered. "I didn't mean — "

"Of course you did," he interrupted pleasantly. "Surely one of the first things you learned when you enlisted was how to utilize your surroundings to outmaneuver a superior opponent."

"Stronger," the girl was swift to correct him. "Not superior."

There was something in the air between them, something curious he couldn't immediately place. It was a deficit of something, he thought. But that wasn't unusual. He sensed the deficiencies of others as keenly as he felt his own supremacy, and these states of existence were not always mutually exclusive.

When it struck him, it was like a bolt coming unexpectedly from the hands of one of his own Squallers: the girl wasn't afraid of him. Any power she had given to him in these first few moments was due to... what? His having taken her unawares, even when she had done the same by him? His appearance? It was clear she found him attractive at a glance — and by her downcast, annoyed expression, she was highly resistant to the idea.

To a nobody, without his kefta, he might be anybody.

"You don't know who I am." The revelation came before he could help it, almost soon enough to give the game away.

"I know who you are," she responded stubbornly. "You're Grisha."

The Darkling's smile broadened like a knife unsheathing, and the girl shifted uncomfortably. If that was truly as far as her understanding extended, then it wasn't just a matter of him being dealt the upper hand — she had no idea what game she was even playing. It was too irresistible to not invite her to take a seat at the table.

"Join me." The waif cut a quick glance toward the door. "Or perhaps you have someone else waiting for you?"

He observed, with bland curiosity, the way she stiffened at this. So there was someone. But he wasn't waiting.

"You don't want me." Her face, turned away from him, was hidden behind a curtain of hair so filthy he couldn't say what color it was meant to be to begin with.

"Not particularly. But I've never known a member of the First Army to pass up an opportunity to bathe."

The girl laughed sourly. "Then you don't know many members of the First Army."

"What is there to lose that you don't already risk losing tomorrow?"

"What good is a bath going to do the corpse you're so quick to assume I'll become?" she demanded.

The Darkling made no response to this, just reclined against the stone and pinned her with his steady gaze. She could have no conception that, to him, she was already a corpse; they all were. Their finite bodies and brief little lives just hadn't caught up to the reality yet.

She darted one last longing look toward the exit, but they both knew what she really wanted in that moment wasn't out there. Luxury was not so foreign a concept to her that she would refuse it outright on what might be her last night on earth. "I won't get into trouble?" He couldn't tell which answer she seemed to plead for.

"Even if I could promise you that, you seem the type to break that promise yourself."

The girl expressed herself with such an unusual facial tic then that the Darkling, besides earning the easy satisfaction of being right, couldn't help but feel the first stirrings of real amusement. This entire situation was a distraction, something that could serve no purpose other than to prolong his own preparation for tomorrow — yet he could not claim he tired of it. Not yet.

She disrobed clumsily in front of him. Her decision to leave some garments on was an interesting one. She would be no stranger to mixed bathing if she was a member of the First Army. He watched as she cautiously lowered herself down into the sunken pool, her smallclothes darkening as she came. She gasped at the shocking temperature, a noise that made something dormant within him sit up and take notice. She seemed to realize how the sound might be misconstrued by male company and quickly bit her lips, before sinking down fully onto the submerged stone seat across from him.

The steam rose between them, softening the drawn and hungry planes of her face. No, hungry wasn't the right word for it — she seemed to have evolved beyond the time when the sensation was an unavoidable and immediate imperative. She wore starvation like it was a kefta she was born to. He had seen plenty of faces like hers among the Ravkan peasantry, though admittedly none up close. Not in a very, very long time. If there was one thing the people of the present shared with the people of the past, it was suffering. It was a legacy specific to neither otkazat'sya nor Grisha.

"Is this your first time to the Fold?" she asked awkwardly.

"No." He needn't return the question — the answer was already in everything she did.

"So you've made it through before?" She was overeager now, and the Darkling studied her.

"Not as often as you might expect."

"Oh." She returned to gazing down at the ends of her hair trailing in the pool. Even with the water leeching away the grime of the Vy, she lacked any unique color. It was like she had grown up as some insistent weed in the dark, without the benefit of nourishment or sunlight. There was something almost unnatural about her appearance.

"Are you afraid?" He knew that she was, of course, but was curious anyway what her answer would be.

He was beginning to think he wouldn't have her answer, after all, until at last she spoke. "Have you ever been afraid for so long that you can't tell the difference anymore?" she asked quietly. "It's just what it means to still be living. And being alive is the best you can hope for. So you stop resenting it after a while." For a moment, her eyes penetrated his, and he knew that she was not seeing him at all; then her cheeks burned with a blush that seemed to drain down her face like a bad watercolor. "I don't know why I said that. Of course you don't understand. You're Grisha."

"You keep saying that." He didn't know why he was suddenly irritated. This whole encounter should have been irritating to him from the start, like a grain of sand that would never produce a pearl. Maybe this was the return to normalcy he should have been anticipating all along.

"Because it's true," she insisted.

"And does that diminish my kind, in your eyes?" It was an incredible thought — that this otkazat'sya should think less of him because of what he was, even knowing as little as she did about his identity.

She looked genuinely baffled by his question, too perplexed even to wince at his tone, which anyone else would have shrank from. "Of course not. It means I'm the one who's diminished. That's what it always means."

The Darkling stared at her, and a long moment of silent consideration passed between them. Of course she was right. What was this strip of a girl when compared to Corporalki; Etherealki; Materialki? To him? She had nothing to offer but a mayfly's diversion, an encounter that would be lost on him in a year's time, if not a week's.

Yet he persisted. "Have you ever considered that this line of thinking is what makes you suffer as much as you do?"

She bristled. "I don't... I don't suffer. Did I say that?"

"Not in so many words."

"Not in any words!" Her arms shot out of the water to hug her narrow chest, as if that would somehow make her more substantial to him. If she took his questions for criticism, that was her prerogative.

"Then tell me, with words, and in any tongue you choose: why do you look as if some unexceptional sankt raised you as a revenant?"

She said something unexpected in Fjerdan that made the Darkling burst out laughing. Even she, who did not know him, seemed to appreciate what a rare sound it was — she looked absolutely terrified.

"You unbelievable otkazat'sya, where did you learn that phrase?"

"I might surprise you," she retorted, and half-rose to climb out of the bath, until his naked figure gliding over to her startled her back into a seated position. He was mere inches away, the purity of the water between them doing little to protect his modesty.

"You have surprised me." He let his expression betray appreciation, and savored her flush when it came; something told him they were hard to draw to the surface, like precious currency, and that was two he had coaxed from her now. "And that is a good deal harder to do than you might expect," he added. "Lesser tongues are silver. Yours is forged of Grisha steel."

His pale hand caught her drifting hair and wound it into rings around his fingers. She shivered as she watched, the tremor translating into ripples expanding out to meet his own. "I was considering making you pay for the bath." He lied as easily as he breathed. He lied to experience any new expression on that unremarkable face. "But I am still debating how to exact my payment."

"You don't want me." She echoed her own earlier words, although she sounded less certain now. Perhaps that was progress of a kind. A little self-regard could be becoming when it was hard-won.

"I'll settle for your name," he ceded.

She watched his hand as if it were a water viper, as if she didn't have the faintest idea of how to become disentangled from it without being bitten. "Alina," she whispered.

"Run away now, Alina," he said, and released her so she could turn and pull herself out of the pool. Her wet footprints charted a direct path to her clothes, eager to reclaim her armor of filth, as the Darkling resumed lounging in the spot he had previously occupied. He watched her get dressed, conscious that she was conscious of his gaze on her. She didn't so much as steal a last look over her shoulder as she escaped out the door.

He closed his eyes, and drifted with the certainty that he would forget her by morning.