Note:Wow, I am so sorry for the long time between updates. I am hoping to keep this regularly updated from now on. :3 Thanks for being patient, guys. Also this is an interlude kind of chapter to speed up to the current story line.
i.
It was interesting to Alina, as time went on, how her pain dulled. It roiled like a storm at sea in her chest, and those images merely worked to make her feel more hurt and anger. But that eased as year after year crept past her. Her chest was not so tight. She did not wake up in the morning drenched in her own sweat. She did not scream at night after a decade.
Loneliness clung to her skin like a finer dress than any her seamstresses could make for her, and if she could not slough it off in the same way, she was resigned to accept it. Instead, what she had was her husband.
And instead, what they had continued to be tumultuous.
She learned to welcome it. The fierce arguments, the furniture they were constantly replacing. The pressure of his arms around her waist and the bite of his teeth on her skin. He would stay with her, after the nightmares were truly gone. He would sleep in her bed and she would watch his pale chest rise and fall and wonder at the beauty of a man she hated as much as she desired.
If she was being generous, if they had gone to sleep needy and satisfied, she would let her thoughts drift to other thoughts. Love. She loved him as much as she hated him. The feelings were one and the same, too entwined to be anything else. Just as they were, as more years fell at their feet. She was too much his to say she did not love him.
But mostly she welcomed the times when she pushed him away. She thought of running, of leaving him to his power and hiding in the safer parts of the world that had not been touched by their sovereignty yet. The taste would be on her tongue, like cool water from a spring, like the first flower in bloom. Alina never left, though. Not far, at least. Not for very long. A few years, at most, when she would take up campaign or when she would settle herself into the newly built capital of Fjerda.
She would take lovers then, men who were all too human and weak and smelled of oil, dirt, sweat.
Men that had brown hair and blue eyes.
Men that were blonde and smiles like devils.
Men that would disappear as suddenly as she had wrapped them around her finger.
Aleksander was, after all, a jealous man. And she was not quite so attached to any of them to make her suffer unduly for her discretions. He accepted her choice to have them, but the men? There was no escape from the wrath of the Ravkan King.
Alina had learned long ago that there were some things that her husband felt he had to continue to prove, and so she let him. There was a comfort in the familiarity of their routine.
ii.
A little girl with a mass of fiery curls ducked into an alleyway behind a bakery. Her stomach sounded more like a wild animal than hunger pangs, and she pressed her hand over it like she would a mouth. Hush, she wanted to whisper. Now was not the time to be thinking about bread and the welcoming smell of the ovens.
Home had smelled that way once, before her mama had gotten too sick to stand, let alone cook. She had begged and begged her mama to let her use her gift. Just one time, one time to earn the coin they would need for the medicine.
But there had been a wild fear in her mama's eyes that made them go almost entirely white, and though she was weak with fever, she still managed to leave bruises on the girl's arm.
"You heard your father," her mama had hissed. "Nobody must ever know what you are."
"But Grisha-"
"You are special, my heart." Shaky hands had smoothed down those errant curls. A gift from her father, which was a gift from his mother and her mother before her. Just like their ability.
The girl stared at her fingers now, dirty and too thin when they should have been pudgy with youth. A slight smile cracked her chapped lips open. For a ten year old, she sure felt wiser, older. At the same time, though, there was a hollowness in her chest that ached for her mama and someone to make it all better.
The sound of boots slapping against wet concrete jolted her out of her memory.
Her father had said to never ever use their ability. It had made him weak and sick, like her mama. But worse. He was denying something that she already knew was part of herself.
Anna's breath quickened. There was no time to debate the morals of this situation, over whether or not her parents had been right in making her hide what she could do. All she knew was that she was special, and that she had a right to protect herself.
"Here, little duckling," cooed her pursuer for the last time.
/
Anna's smile did not crack her face this time as she strolled out of that dark alleyway. Her straight black hair fell to her shoulders softly. Her pockets lay heavier with the stolen coin, but her mind was at ease knowing that she could take care of herself against predators.
iii.
Alina watched Nikolai with patience. He often did this, appeared from nowhere when she was far from home. Watching her. Waiting. After the first century, she had long since stopped praying for his death, for his release from this life. She would sometimes wonder if she had the power to restore him, but a vague restlessness would accompany the thoughts. She would remember the way that Zoya's skin had glowed, and she would remember David's death.
The nightmares would come back, her wrist would grow heavy.
Guilt was a trying creature for a woman meant to live as long as she would.
She was sure, in these moments, that she could do it. Reverse what the Darkling had done to him. She was sure that he would not be prepared for it. That what he was now would be what he was for an eternity, until his body finally did wither away.
That empty feeling bloomed in her chest as she shielded her eyes and watched him.
He was a dark presence, foreboding.
A few of her more religious soldiers, at the sight of his figure in the sky, would begin to pray. She would bite her tongue, for to scold them would only make them hate her more, fear her more. If she was in close enough distance, her hand would rest lightly on their shoulders.
"Do not see it as a bad omen," she would murmur in her softest voice, but it would still carry. "The saints merely wish to send us a messenger for their wills."
Alina hoped that when she spoke these words, with new soldiers each time, that they would keep silent about the monster that flew overhead. A cold dread walked fingers down her spine each time Nikolai would dare to appear in front of others, not all whose loyalty she had secured. As much as she fought for it, schemed, planned, Aleksander found a way to weave into her ranks. And if he knew about Nikolai…
Perhaps that was the prince's plan each time. Someone would tell the Darkling, let it slip without realizing what they were doing, and that would be the end of him.
She should put him out of his misery herself. It should be her.
"Why do you do this?" she asked him one night, but there was no response. There never was. He watched her with hard hazel eyes instead. She began to notice that, over time, the humanity slowly ebbed from them.
How long would it be until he was nothing more than an animal, and she could finally rid herself of his reminder?
"Go away, Nikolai."
Her words always went unheeded. As with Aleksander, only Alina seemed to exist for Nikolai. She was a beacon that drew monsters in.
Her hand slid over his face, cupping a furred cheek. There were so many words on the tip of her tongue, and none of them were adequate enough. Whatever this Alina was now, it was not the Alina she had been once.
iv.
Centuries pass, but few traditions ever completely leave the minds of the Ravkans. And though generations have been raised to realize that their King and Queen are all powerful, conquerors, immortal the people whisper, traditions rarely fall apart completely.
They speak of it at dinner parties, among the nobility, in the colonies of Fjerda where Ravkan ancestors first went to help rebuild.
An heir, they whisper. Where is the heir?
There was no son to inherit the throne. The fanatics, those who worshipped the Grisha as holy, would claim there was no need for a son. There was no need for an heir when Sankta Alina and the Darkling did not age, did not die.
But tradition was the heart of Ravka, and it was the one thing that the Darkling could not rip out of their hearts.
His lip would curl in disgust whenever he heard such prattle, and Alina would hide her smile from behind her hand. It was not the best attempt at hiding.
"Do you find me amusing?"
"It's just talk," Alina laughed. Her hand dropped to her side, no longer bothering to hide the smirk that curled her lips.
The look her husband gave her was all too flat, all too human. Something about it softened her in ways that she hated. When had their marriage stopped being about Ravka and become something more intimate? When would she stop letting herself be separate from him?
She reached out a hand, slipping it into his and tugging him closer to her. "Let the people talk, Aleksander. That is what people do, and we cannot police every single peasant, every single noble. Even the Grisha talk about it. Our servants. Our armies. It's natural."
Even as Alina said them, though, she knew that what her and Aleksander were wasn't natural. And she didn't need to be a mind reader to understand that whatever he would tolerate from her, it would not be children.
"We do not need an heir," he muttered, rubbing a hand over the top of his head. Strands of dark hair came loose from his ponytail, and with her free hand, she smoothed them back down, trailing after his own hand.
"We do not."
Why would she bring a child into his world?
v.
Centuries pass, and small rebellions always pop up. They always take care of it. Small groups are no match for them, and they never let anything take root for as long as Zoya's Rebellion. It was what the people began to call it, a title that history could never seem to eradicate. Each time Alina heard it, something dark would swirl in her heart, and she had been known to set flame to those that said it in her presence.
That was the rumor, at least, one that parents told their children at night to keep them well behaved. To not speak of rebellion or the Wind Queen who had once thought to fight the Sun Queen.
Careful now, or Sankta Alina might get you in your sleep.
It bothered Alina at first, but that also ebbed away, the same as her loneliness.
She was a tyrant. She was beloved. It all mattered on the year it was.
But there were always pockets of rebellions that rose up, as if they stood a chance against the united might of the Ravkan monarchy.
vi.
Darkness had been her only friend. There was no time, there was just darkness. Except for the glow of her skin, which she had learned once was her saving grace from the creatures that had thought to make a meal of her. They did not become friends. In fact, she could hardly tolerate them, their constant screeching for attention and hunger.
But they were useful to her, there was no doubt about it. It was not often, but parties of others would travel through her darkness. She could not say why it was important, but she knew it was best to hide. Their warning cries came in use then.
Once, a small group had found her. A fear had settled in her body, hard as rock. She could taste theirs, too, however, and when it came down to her life versus theirs, she whipped them across the darkness and laughed when the annoying animals from above swooped out of the sky to take them away to their nests.
That had happened only once, of course, at some undetermined point of time, but it had won loyalty of the local annoyances. Food, they had chirped.
They were hungry brutes, that was for certain.
She could not remember much of her life before the darkness and the soft glow of her skin, before the annoyances and the fear of others finding her here. She only knew survival and the bitter need to escape from the safety of her friend.
She could not say when she decided to start walking or which direction she was going in, where it would lead her. But she walked. And her annoyances followed her. She attempted to scare them off, waving her arms and hissing at them in their language. But they still followed, for the light was now their friend in the same way the darkness was hers.
It was a begrudging acceptance that allowed them to accompany her.
vii.
Alina sat heavily in the chair in Baghra's hut. It was, of course, a new chair. And a renovated hut. Three hundred years had proved to be too much for most of the items in the place, and although Aleksander had not approved of her side project, Alina was used to not listening to him to begin with. Still, despite the changes and the ravages of time, it still felt like the old woman's place, and there was comfort in that.
The fire was already going, a trick that Nikolai had picked up over the years. She could only hope that Aleksander did not see the smoke before she arrived, but he was so adamant on not having anything to do with his mother, she doubted it. She stared into the flames, felt their warmth on her cheeks, and realized for the first time since she had lost everything that had been hers, she was at a loss.
Nikolai perched in the corner, still as a statue. Waiting, as always. For her to kill him. For her to free him.
When she glanced at him, she found that she could find no words. As always.
But it must have been the look on her face, the paleness of her skin, the haunted roundness of her eyes. Because he crept forward, like a wounded dog coming back to its master.
Her lips parted, and she sighed.
"I'm pregnant."