Chapter 20: What Makes a Villain

Summary: In which Baghra the reluctant relationship coach finally leaves her cottage and she and Aleksander talk

Baghra watches thoughtfully as Alina leaves. She'd known something had happened – or rather, that something had gone wrong. As a general rule, Grisha don't get ill and with how powerful the Sun Summoner is, the story being put about of her having been unwell seemed odd at best and deliberately disingenuous at worst.

At first, she'd wondered if it was to do with that weak chinned snake up at the Little Palace. She had heard the rumours about the gifts, and knowing the Lantsov line as she did, it would be no surprise if the Tsarevitch had done something to upset Alina. Such a theory, though, didn't sit comfortably with her. She knew Alina. She'd known the girl since she was a child. She knew the strength that ran through her core and Alina would never allow some jumped up princeling to frighten her into hiding in her room like she clearly was.

The more likely explanation was something had happened in the Little Palace… something which probably involved her son.

Either way, her suspicions had been roused. Suspicions which had unfortunately been proven correct that afternoon.

What a saints-forsaken mess.

She'd known almost as soon as Alina started her sorry tale what had happened and why her son had done it.

Her stupid, noble son.

The warning signs had been there since the day he returned to the Little Palace with the newly discovered Sun Summoner in tow. Baghra shook her head. No. Truthfully there had been signs a long time before that day. Signs she had first seen in this very cottage just before her son had fled to Kribirsk and to war three years before.

Like a fool she had ignored them, dismissed it. She'd assumed that when faced with the chance to have everything he's ever wanted, that Aleksander would snatch it up with both hands - that he was the same power greedy man she had watched him become over the last three centuries. She'd assumed her role would be to counsel Alina, to warn her as to the danger she could face in such an unequal relationship, that it would be her job to open the girl's eyes as to her lover's true identity and nature.

How wrong she's been on every account.

Well, they say there's no fool like an old fool, and how right they are. This is her fault. She had seen and looked away. The story of her life. But no more.

She owes it to Aleksander and Alina to help fix the mess she has helped create. This is her penance, and she will not cower or cavil from it. It's time to talk to her son.

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Getting to the little Palace, despite what she likes to claim to her students, isn't actually an issue for her – the stick is more for show and as a corrective device, after all, than it is an actual requirement for her mobility. What is a slight problem though is getting to speak to Aleksander. Usually, in these situations, her son turns up at her door and she can sort things out with minimal inconvenience to herself. After waiting for him to appear for the best part of a week, however, Baghra is finally forced to admit that on this occasion she might actually have to stir herself and go to him rather than waiting for her recalcitrant child to come to her. It's not a thought that pleases her. She dislikes the Little Palace, she dislikes her son's guards and she really dislikes being made to wait – which is precisely what will happen if she tries to see him through the official channels. Ivan – the punctilious toerag - will see to that.

So no, visiting Aleksander the proper way is out of the question. At her time of life she has neither the patience nor the temperament for waiting. Thankfully, there is another option.

The secret passage.

She's never been completely sure whether her son knows that she knows about his secret tunnel. She'd come across it one day while out in the woods spying on Aleksander, when before her eyes he seemed to disappear into the vegetation. A little bit of searching had solved that mystery. There was a tunnel. A tunnel filled with the mementos of his various lives: portraits gifted to him by thankful Tsars, boxes of diaries and old books, the ratty old bear she had made for him all those centuries before and, of course, Luda's locket.

At first, she'd thought it was just a storage tunnel, a squirrel's nest full of the things Aleksander couldn't have near him but equally couldn't bare to destroy or throw away, but then one day as she was rummaging amongst her son's treasured possessions she spotted the passageway that was cunningly concealed behind a large standing mirror. She wasn't foolish enough to explore such a discovery while her son was still close by, but this was also not a mystery she could leave alone. So, the next time Aleksander was considerate enough to leave for several days, Baghra had rushed over to the tunnel to explore the mysterious path. At first, she had wondered if it was simply a continuation of the storage area as it was filled with crates of wine, but then she had come to the end of the tunnel and had spotted the unmistakable outline of a doorway hewn out of rock and brick. The door itself was wooden, and when she pushed on it, it opened for her on silent hinges. It had been a surprise to see Aleksander's study, but then it all clicked into place. Her clever boy – of course he would have a secret escape should the worst happen. They'd both been ambushed too many times over the years not to have escape plans in place.

It may have been designed as a secret exit, but doorways work both ways, and just as it allowed Aleksander to sneak out to Os Alta for all those years, so too can it be used to sneak into the Little Palace. With that thought, Baghra sets off for the tunnel with a speed and agility that would take most of her students by surprise.

The passage is more or less as she remembered it from her last jaunt 70 odd years ago. The only real difference is the presence of a few more boxes and a more ordered system for Aleksander's store of alcohol. The doorway though is still unblocked, and the picture swings open easily at her gentle push. The sight before her though is very different.

Her son is indeed in his study, as she had hoped, but the man before her is a pale ghost of her normally vital and charismatic boy. Even the shadows around him are more grey than black, betraying their master's emotional turmoil.

Aleksander looks up briefly, his eyes red rimmed with dark shadows underneath. "Oh, its you," he mutters, voice unusually disinterested and lack-lustre.

Taking one look at the shell of her son, Baghra trots across the room to the well-stocked alcohol cabinet that's concealed behind a bookcase. She looks at the full shelves consideringly, her eyes flicking over malt beer, nettle wine, kvas, five types of red wine and eight types of white before she finds the prize she's searching for. There at the back of the shelf is a large bottle marked Gin.

If she's got to sort this saints-forsaken mess out, then she's not suffering through it without alcohol. If gin got her through childbirth with an incompetent ninny of a midwife, through the loss of her husband, and the years following the creation of the Fold, it can bloody well get her through this as well.

With a harrumph of displeasure, Baghra grabs the bottle of gin before pausing, her head tilted to one side in thought, before adding the kvas to her collection. Her eyes flit to the neatly stacked glasses, but quickly dismiss them as unnecessary middleman to the main goal of consuming alcohol. Walking back with her booty and stick is slightly more tricky, but she makes it back to Aleksander's desk without issue and slides the bottle of kvas to the still figure on the other side. The gin she keeps with her and safely out of Aleksander's reach. She might be his mother, and this might be partly – mostly – her fault, but that doesn't mean she has to share her gin. There are limits to maternal devotion, and this is hers.

Silence settles itself, and for a while the only sound to be heard is that of liquid sloshing as mother and son sip their respective drinks

"You know I'm almost proud of you, boy" the old woman says consideringly, once she judges enough time has passed for the alcohol to start working its magic.

Her son frowns in clear disapproval as Baghra takes another swig directly from the bottle, fingers tapping pointedly on the glass he has poured the kvas into. "Thank you, mother, for that sterling praise. Be still my beating heart."

The kvas has clearly done its job, the Aleksander before her now certainly has more fire and spirit than the one she had encountered upon her entrance twenty minutes before, and while he still has a melancholy air, he has lost the morose desperation of before.

Baghra shoots a quelling glare at her son. "I didn't think it was possible for you to make more of a hash of your romantic affairs than you'd already done, but once again you've proved me wrong." It's the wrong thing to say.

"Do not speak of what you do not know," Aleksander hisses, fury flashing in his eyes. "This does not concern you!"

"Then stop being an idiot," his mother volleys back, her temper easily matching his. "And you're wrong. It does concern me. It concerns me very much. I'm your mother, boy, and I've just had that girl in my cottage spilling her sorry heart out to me. The girl you're in love with."

"How are you and I related?" Aleksander demands, shooting to his feet in his anger to tower over the diminutive form of his mother.

"Saints alone know how many times I've asked that question myself, boy. You certainly didn't get your idiocy and this unhelpful misplaced nobility from me." His mother retorts, her stick striking the floor with the force of a lightning bolt, unconcerned by the threat in his action and the shadows roiling around him like storm clouds.

"Saints forbid that I inherited anything soft or honourable from you!" he mocks. "But then you never were one for self-sacrifice were you, mother."

Baghra's eyes blacken, shadows swirling around her like snakes. "Oh, you think that's what this is, do you? I'll tell you what I see – I see a coward hiding behind a pretence of sacrifice and nobility."

Aleksander's expression darkens dangerously. "Get out!" he hisses, pointing at the still open portrait.

"No," Baghra's voice is cool and immutable. "Not until I've talked to you, and we've sorted this mess out."

"That wasn't a request," Aleksander thunders. "Leave. Now!"

His mother's cold gaze meets his unflinchingly, and she makes a point of settling herself more comfortably in the chair. "No." She takes another sip of gin.

"Leave on your own or I will make you," he threatens, tone as black as the shadows wrapping around him.

"You can try," his mother counters blithely. "Normally, I wouldn't stand a chance, we both know that, but looking at you now I think a stiff breeze could knock you over. So, I'm happy to take that chance. Are you?" She gives her son a distinctly shark like grin.

Like a sail suddenly bereft of wind, Aleksander deflates, slumping in his chair with the air of man who has been pushed past the point of all endurance. "Please, mother," he says tiredly, "just leave."

"And what good will that do?" Baghra challenges, eyebrow raised. "I didn't raise you to be a fool, Aleksander, but that's exactly what you're being. Sticking your head in the sand isn't going to fix the mess you're in, and it's about time you stopped sulking and realised that. The sharks are circling and there's far more going on than you realise."

"Like what?" Aleksander asks, in the tone of one clearly resigned to having this conversation.

His mother frowns, eyes cold, "well there's that Lantsov spawn, for one. He's slippery, that turd, needs watching… and probably neutering."

Baghra grins again as her son crosses his legs under the table and shifts the angle of his chair in the vain attempt to put more distance between them. Typical man. It's not often she can scandalise or shock her son these days, so she relishes the opportunity when it does arise. It does the trick though, Aleksander is listening now. Listening and talking.

It takes a while, but eventually Baghra succeeds in pulling Aleksander's perspective of that night from him. It confirms her thoughts and suspicions, and she sighs heavily as her son refills his glass for the fifth time. What a mess.

"So instead of staying to talk about your feelings you decided to do the mature thing and run away?" she questions as her son falls silent. The look she receives from Aleksander for that summary could curdle milk at 60 paces, but it has little effect on the old woman.

"The military term is a 'strategic retreat'," Aleksander offers with a put-out sniff.

Baghra nods sagely, "running away." Her son sighs and stares dejectedly into his kvas as if it has all the answers he seeks.

Of everything she has seen and heard in the last hour, it's this that worries her most. Her boy has always been a calm, centred and emotionally stable individual – with one glaring exception. Control is vital for one as powerful as they are and Baghra had ensured it was both a skill and a lesson her son perfected from a young age. The man before her now is not that man. This Aleksander's emotions are veering more than a seesaw or rocking horse – swinging between dejection, despair and glib humour with worrying speed. The last time her son lost control of his emotions he created the Fold, what horror might he accidentally unleash this time. It's a worrying thought and one that preoccupies Baghra as she makes a point of taking an overly loud mouthful of gin, a smile stretching her thin lips at Aleksander's grimace.

Swallowing, Baghra fixes a gimlet stare on her son. "So, let me see if I've got this straight. Alina offered you everything you've spent the last four centuries obsessing over, but you don't think you're worthy of her, so you turned her down."

"We both know I'm not the man she thinks I am," Aleksander says softly, suddenly finding the ceiling fascinating.

"What?" His mother splutters, gin dripping down her chin. "What nonsense. What's the last 15 years been then, boy, an act? If so, I have to say, you missed your calling - you should have been on the stage."

The denial is out of Aleksander before Baghra has even finished speaking. "Of course not," he avowals crossly, a flash of something dark crossing his features.

"Then what's the problem?" His mother asks, "seems to me that the little miss knows exactly what she'd be taking on."

Aleksander chuckles darkly. "It's not the same thing, and you know it."

"And have you actually asked her?" Baghra's asks shrewdly, "or have you merely made your mind up that that's how she will feel"

She observes her son carefully for a moment. He's slumped in his chair, the picture of defeat, with his head in his hands.

"What would be the point?" Comes his muffled response after a long pause. Surely it's better to end it now, to set her free so she can find a man who deserves her, than to bind her to me and watch as the loves fades from her, poisoned by my sins."

He looks up, his blood shot gaze meeting hers. "I'm doing this for her, mother. For Alina. Do you think I don't wish it were different, that I could… that we could… that there could be a future for us together. The only future I can offer her is death and destruction."

The expression on his face is raw and wrecked and so full of anguished devastation that it makes her old heart hurt to see it. "I know I've hurt her, mother. It nearly killed me. I would rather suffer through jurda parem again than watch that beautiful light fade from her eyes and the worst thing was it was me who was causing it. Me!" he thumps his chest. "For one precious second I had all I've ever wished for in the palm of my hand. All I had to do was take it and it would have been mine."

"Then why didn't you," Baghra asks sharply.

There's a sardonic, defeated look to her son as he says: "Because we both know she could never love me, not knowing who I truly am.

"Knows what exactly? Seems to me she already knows quite a lot and loves you anyway."

The look Aleksander directs at his mother is withering. "Yes, but that's because she doesn't know the truth. If she knew who I really am, she could never… no one's love could survive that; and that's not the worst of it."

His mother hums, a smug, knowing smile on her thin lips. "And how do you know that, boy, if you don't ask her?"

But Aleksander just shakes his head. "I'd have thought it self-evident. You've made it clear over the years that what I've done is unforgivable. Creating the Fold saved our people, but it cost me whatever was left of your affection." He looks towards the flames, eyes fathomless. "Do you really think Alina will be any different?"

"Boy-" Baghra starts, only to be cut off by her son's desperate, "and that's not the worst of it. All those years I spent planning – scheming - what I'd do once the Sun Summoner was found. I'd have done anything to make her my creature - I was even planning on finding grandfather's stag and collaring her, binding her to me for eternity. I'd have destroyed her, completely and totally to have control of her power, and I would have thought myself right." The bottle of kvas hits the floor with crash tinkle and liquid seeps around him as his head falls into his hands.

"Tell me now that she can love me. Better I'm the villain who broke her heart, than I make her a monster...like me."

Had Aleksander looked up then he would have seen the almost unique sight of his mother crying. Only twice before in his entire five hundred odd years of living has he seen his mother shed a tear: once when his father died, and the other when she saw the Fold for the first time.

Baghra stares in horrified silence as thoughts whirl like shattered glass around her mind, each one slicing deeper than the last. Her throat is choked with emotion, words desperate to be said strangled into silence by her revulsion. What has she done? Her boy, her precious boy. What would her beloved Mikael say if he could see the mess she has unwittingly wrought. He would be devastated and ashamed. So ashamed of her.

Her Mikael had been a beautiful man with a smile that could light up cities and banish the shadows in Baghra's soul. He had been a loving man. A man who once he loved did so whole heartedly and without thought to himself. He had been Baghra's opposite and balance in every way. And he would be ashamed of what she's done to his legacy - to their precious Sasha.

She had always seen Aleksander's similarities to her as his greatest strength, but now she curses them and wishes that he were more like his father, for then so much pain could have been avoided.

Hindsight is a cruel and inexorable mistress and having started down this road Baghra is powerless to stop the long-denied thoughts from coming. The truth is her boy had been more like that once. That had been the child desperate for friends, who in his loyalty had not seen the danger they represented and nearly died as a result. She had made it her mission to stamp out such foolishness after that day, no longer willing to risk that Aleksander might meet the same end as his beloved father - betrayed and killed by those he thought trusted friends and allies.

This, now, is the consequence of her success… and of her failure. She couldn't suppress Aleksander's loving heart, not completely, as she had discovered first with Luda, and then a second time with Alina, but apparently her words had had sufficient sway over the years to make her son afraid. Terrified of losing the one he loves, of being the cause of their destruction. She thinks of Luda's death, and the intemperate words of the brother who had blamed Aleksander for it, shouting at him that it was his fault, that Luda would have lived had she not been involved with a Shadow Summoner, that his love was a curse."

She had heard them all, and in her grief, she had let it go unanswered. She should have stopped Luka and comforted her son, that's what Mei-Xing would have done, but that's never been Baghra's way and she had hoped that this would be the end of her boy's quest to have a normal life. That this would be the lesson he needed to become the man she knew their people needed him to be.

She should have known better. She got half her wish, but it cost her Aleksander. He changed and she became afraid, convinced he had been corrupted by Merzost and lost to her forever.

"Oh my boy, my poor boy. My Sasha." She murmurs in a horrified whisper. "How I've wronged you."

"Mother?" Aleksander queries as he lifts his head.

Baghra meets his gaze, her eyes shining with tears. "I raised you to be strong, to need no one, to bow to no one, to trust only yourself. To see that you were superior." She bows her head, her hands twisting the cloth of her skirt. "I was wrong. I thought to spare you the pain I felt in losing family, friends… your father, and yet my folly has caused you so much more."

Her boy is frowning in confusion, and it makes Baghra's ancient heart ache. Confession is not an act she is familiar with and the words don't come easily. "But my greatest mistake," she admits slowly, "is in making you think you had lost my love. Know that I loved you then as I do now. I have always loved you, my Sasha, though I have not shown it well."

"After the Fold, I feared I had lost you – you were walking such a dark path – and I could only watch as you became more and more lost. I've seen it before, what Merzost does to those who dare to call on it. There is always a price. For some, it takes their minds, other's it takes their lives, but with you I feared it had taken your heart. You became so cold, so resolute and removed – nothing could touch you, and you listened to no one. I could do nothing but watch." A tear slides down her wrinkled cheek. "I mourned you, even as I feared what you were becoming, and yet I stood aside and did nothing." A second tear joins the first. "And then, one day, a miracle happened and I saw my boy returning. She did that, your Alina, she called you back from the path you were on and you found your way back. You're not a monster, boy, and the man you are now is more than deserving of her love."

Silence falls, heavy and impenetrable as the two occupants sit and sip their drinks. This isn't how the conversation was meant to have gone, Baghra laments to herself. For the first time in years she feels lost and uncertain. It's not a feeling she's either familiar or comfortable with. Even at its worse, when she truly believed she would one day have to kill her son to stop the monster he was becoming, had she felt so uncertain as to what she should do. Reluctant? Yes. Mournful? Yes. Regretful? Yes. But uncertain? No. She hadn't been that.

As day turns into night and shadows envelop the room, Baghra knows that they are at a turning point. Silence is a familiar companion for her and her son, it's a corner stone of their relationship; they seldom talk, and when they do it's always about events, and only rarely about feelings. This is her mistake. Her cross to bear. When Mikael has lived, their lives had been very different, full of smiles and laughter and talking, despite the danger. After his death though was when silence crept in like a thief in the night and made itself at home. It had been easier for her not to talk - especially about emotions - and her boy had followed her lead. Hindsight is a cruel mistress, and Baghra now sees so clearly her culpability in this mess. Hers and Aleksander, this is on them.

She can only pray to gods she has long since stopped believing in that her choices haven't cost Aleksander his chance at love, that she hasn't ruined his life.

It's a sobering thought, and one which stays with her long after the gin bottle is empty, and she has tucked her inebriated son onto the nearest sofa. This is her fault. Her mistake. Now she must find a way to put it right.