Chapter Text
Aleksander looked at the shadow wall, the fold in the heart of the world, and sat on an uneasy thrill. It whispered to him. It was deep and dark and full of monsters, but it sang at the edge of his senses. Beckoning.
He couldn’t help it: he let shadows curl around his fingertips. Before him, the great wall of shadow responded, knowing him, knowing what he held in his hands.
“Alright there, Sasha?”
He shook the shadows off quickly, letting them dissolve into nothingness, scattering the evening sunlight.
“Great,” he said, turning. Jovial, he reminded himself. A friendly soldier. That was what he was, for now.
Malyen Oretsev was a handsome man, so handsome Aleksander often felt the rotten tongue of jealousy creep down his throat whenever he watched another beautiful girl catch his eye. Aleksander was not unattractive, he knew; he was good-looking, but good-looking like a flower was good-looking, fragile and pretty, not something you really wanted to tumble down in the grass with. Oretsev was all engorged muscle and big grins. If he wasn’t so nice to be around, Aleksander would have seriously considered making the shadows eat him. As it was, he was a good friend.
“Creepy, yeah?” Oretsev said, coming up to watch the Fold beside him. It was a peasant’s superstition to think looking at the Fold brought back luck, but Aleksander noticed most of the First Army avoided any direct eye contact with it. They were mostly peasants, after all. Oretsev was brave, he noted: another point against him. “Came to get you; they’re reading out assignments now.”
“I know where I’ll be,” Aleksander said dryly. He was considered weaker than the other soldiers, less good with a rifle. They didn’t know it was because he’d never needed one.
“You’re improved,” Oretsev said, then grinned. “Hard not to, from where you started. Come on, I’m dying to know where they put the rest of us.”
They went. As always, as they walked, Oretsev periodically acknowledged, companionably hit, or flirted with people on their path. As always, Aleksander stood beside him, watching with boredom and faint puzzlement. He couldn’t imagine liking even half the people Oretsev liked. He’d never been called to friendliness, and though he tried to wear the costume, to ape Oretsev’s friendly and charismatic mannerisms, it always fell a little flat. He’d overheard some of the other soldiers whispering their little name for him: Malen, they called him. Ghost. But that wasn’t right—he was real, alive, vital, the only person alive in the whole world, and it was everyone else who were the ghosts, weak and insubstantial. And why would someone like him care to go consorting with ghosts?
As they walked, as Oretsev flirted, a golden carriage rolled by. They, along with everyone else in the street, paused to watch it. Two white horses pulled the carriage; a single stage-coach sat at the front. In the body of the carriage, behind the soft golden curtains, unseen but unmistakeable, was the Sun Saint.
Aleksander felt the deep foreboding in his gut, and was glad when the Sankta’s carriage turned a corner and out of sight.
“Saints,” Oretsev swore. “Can that really have been her?”
Aleksander shrugged. “Likely.”
“They say she’s beautiful,” he said, staring at the carriage, wistful. Little orphans like Oretsev always longed for powerful, lonely beauties. “White hair like the moon. Golden skin like the sun.”
“There’s no skin on the sun,” Aleksander said. Oretsev gave him a droll look. Inside, he collected the darkness that lived in him and combed through it, needy for reassurance after close proximity with the Sun Saint. He had built a life—if you could call it that—around evading her notice, as he’d been taught. The Sankta was a force of bright destruction, of terrible wrath, and it was best not to bring to her notice that he was a summoner of darkness, like his ancestor Morozova, whom no one but Aleksander and the Sankta herself knew to be the Black Heretic that created the Fold. Only the Sankta could harness the darkness and leash it within the confines of the Fold, which she’d done after a thorough battle with Morozova, whom she’d beaten. But her leashing wasn’t perfect. The Fold leaked. Little pockets of darkness sprouted throughout the continent, swallowing up critters and insects, an ancient evil always growing. Sankta Alina periodically patrolled the outsides of the Fold, looking for its little sons and daughters.
She sensed darkness, which was her enemy. Aleksander sensed darkness, which was his birthright. He had heard the call of the Fold all his life, and standing in front of it, he could hardly believe anyone—even a Saint—could hold it at bay for hundreds of years.
It was best to stay away from her, his mother had taught him, as her father had taught her, who was of course Morozova himself, who had created the Fold out of greed and desire, out of a desperate hunger for power, and barely escaped the Sun Saint with his life, wretched as it was. To his descendants, he had instilled one simple lesson: stay secret.
Aleksander was happy in the dark, safe from the glare of her sun.
Although, he had also heard she was very beautiful.
When he sailed into the Fold for the first time, he cried. The cold crisp air, the metallic scent of darkness, the comforting blanket of blackness. It felt like home, like safety, like nothing. He’d always found the world too bright and glaring and tacky, and here it was, what he’d been waiting for always: nothing, finally.
For the first time, Aleksander let a shadow out in front of someone. Thankfully, everyone around him was blind. Not him. He could see as well as he ever could, though of course not as though it was illuminated. He simply knew all that the darkness touched, and in this place, the darkness touched all. There were creatures above him, swooping and ugly, though they were far from him now and not getting closer. His shadows crawled up the skiff, hardly needing any of his energy at all, so luscious was the blackness in the Fold.
“Creepy,” said Oretsev, at a low whisper.
Aleksander didn’t respond. It was dangerous to speak in the Fold. Besides, he disagreed.
They sailed on in that way, silent and unseeing, aiming hopefully for West Ravka.
Of course, it went wrong. Aleksander first understood this when he sensed the horrible creatures swooping down to them. The force of their wings beat the shadows across his skin. He was looking up, his eyes closed in rapture, still leaking, and so he didn’t see at first the brief flare of the lantern, the hissing of the commanders, but he certainly heard the crash when the lantern fell. He opened his eyes and saw fire lashing at the deck of the ship. Flaming oil bleeding heat into his skin.
“Fuck!” said someone.
The volcra were diving. People—those poor cattle—they were all panicking. Aleksander put out a hand and snuffed out the fire. In the safety of darkness, he waved away the volcra, carried them away on gentle shadows.
“What?” said someone, who got hissed at to stay quiet. After a minute or two, it became clear the volcra were not coming, and the skiff sailed on.
“I don’t see the problem,” complained Dubrov. He was sick of standing around; they all were. “The fire got put out. We lived. We should be celebrating!”
The soldiers around him agreed. Aleksander was silent. So was Oretsev, he noted. It was horrible that Oretsev was so handsome and so congenial and so intelligent. It was hard to dismiss the otkazat’sya as dumb beasts when Oretsev was there, but thankfully Aleksander had never failed to rise to the task. (When he needed reminding about the inferiority of the common man, thankfully Dubrov was there to help.)
They had been corralled into a tent immediately after the skiff landed in Novokrisbirsk. Aleksander had been curious to see the city, how a culture might have evolved in West Ravka—and of course he was dying to see the True Sea, but he’d been shoved immediately into a meeting tent along with the rest of the soldiers. There were not enough seats for all of them, which was an annoyance.
It was just as well. He needed the time to dissect his own reactions, understand why on earth he had reacted so, what he’d been thinking. He ought to have jumped off the skiff and fled through the Fold on his own feet, emerged in West Ravka and pretended to have simply gotten very lucky. It happened, once in a while, some lucky fool appearing from nowhere—but there was always an article in the paper about it. He ought to have run away and taken a different name, started over. He knew how. Why hadn’t he?
It was a mistake. The soldiers around him should be dead, torn apart in the jaws of the volcra. Oretsev shifted next to him, and Aleksander started, a little.
Then the doors of the tent blew open, and the Sun Saint strode in.
Aleksander’s mouth went dry as he looked at her. Her face was composed, and fierce, and hardly as beautiful as he’d imagined—but that didn’t matter, because from her every pore sang power. She had a luminosity to her, as if she were lit from within. She wore a golden kefta; it shone beneath her white hair. She looked Shu, which he knew she was, as everyone knew—but it surprised him still; most of the sculptures and paintings had apparently de-emphasized the slant of her eyes, the curve of her nose.
“Sankta Alina,” breathed a soldier behind Aleksander. She looked immediately to the speaker, and her eyes roved over the rest of them. Aleksander hastily dropped his eyes. He tried to look as stunned and rhapsodic as all the other soldiers did. His stomach was knotted fiercely. This was the woman who had torn apart his grandfather, the great Morozova, sent him and his descendants fleeing into the shadows. For generations, she had defended all of Ravka with her own two hands. Her own two hands, and the force of a thousand screaming suns.
“Come forward,” she commanded, and the soldier who’d spoken stumbled clumsily towards her. “What is your name, friend?” she asked.
“Dominik, my—my lady,” he stammered.
“You will address me as General,” she instructed. “Grisha address me as moya soverenya, as I am their commander. I am here to see which of you may be Grisha.”
Cold sluiced down Aleksander’s spine. He suppressed the urge to shift uncomfortably, although perhaps he shouldn’t have—all the rest of the soldiers were reacting, and he had held suspiciously still. It was the first of many mistakes.
“I understand there was trouble on the skiff,” she said. Her voice was a simple girl’s voice, clear and high, but spoken without a trace of doubt. She sounded like a general, but a very young one. “Tell me of it.”
Haltingly, Dominik told the story. “There—there was a light,” he said. “A lantern. I didn’t see who lit it.”
“It was Boris,” said Mikhail. Boris let out a pathetic squeak. “That idiot.”
“Well, it’s dark in there,” she said. Was that supposed to be a joke? “You lit a lantern.”
“Boris did,” said Dominik, defensively. Boris audibly cringed again.
“Yes, then what?”
“The lantern broke,” he said. “There—there was fire.” He swallowed. “Then it was—it was… put out.” Put out. Saints, Aleksander was in so much trouble.
“How?” she demanded.
He shrugged helplessly.
“Hold out your hands,” she said. When he did, they were shaking. She folded her hands around his own and peered closely into his eyes.
In just a moment, she dropped his hands and told him to step aside. Then she repeated the process again, and again. She made each soldier recite their interpretation of what happened on the skiff. Aleksander was amused when Boris cried, but she was kind to him, and only said that he would know better next time. Each soldier adopted Dominik’s phrasing—the fire was put out. Though they were helpless, dumb otkazats’ya, they weren’t fooled—they knew the fire had been deliberately doused, though none of them could explain how.
When Oretsev went up, he was unusually somber. Aleksander had half-expected him to try flirting with the Sun Saint, but he was strictly business, almost distracted. As it was, there was a charged moment when she touched his hands, their eyes meeting in a strange intensity. Then her eyes narrowed, and she told him to step aside.
Aleksander was desperately trying to think of a way to get out of this. He still was when she told him to step forward.
“Your name, soldier,” she said.
“Aleksander,” he said, softly.
“Tell me what happened, Aleksander.”
He did his best to put no particular spin on it. His only hope was to pass unnoticed, again, to suppress the greatest parts of him, again, and to walk out of here below the notice of the greatest general, the living saint, again. Not for the first time, he cursed his grandfather, greedy and cowardly, who had fought the sun and lost.
“Boris dropped the lantern,” he said. “The oil spilled and caught fire. It died somehow.”
“Your hands,” she said.
He held them out. He was pleased they remained steady. She touched his hands—hers were cold, which surprised him; he’d expected the living sun to run hot—and he was unable to avoid her gaze any longer. Her dark eyes looked deeply into him, and her hands chilled his skin, and this time she summoned a little bit of the light, although she hadn’t for any of the others, and he knew that somehow he’d been found out. He’d made a mistake; he couldn’t tell where—or, more accurately, he realized he’d made innumerable mistakes, all along, and the only trouble was figuring which mistake was the worst one, the one that had exposed Morozova’s heir to Morozova’s enemy. Her light rose and rose around her, and beamed golden white heat onto him, searing him, and he couldn’t help it, not even after all this time, all this caution, all this fear—his shadows rose to meet it.
Half the tent was plunged into darkness. The coolness was a relief from the heat. Then the Sun Saint whipped her hands from his and ordered him caught and bound.
“Have mercy, General,” he said, palms still forward and beseeching. Why was he such an idiot? “I have done you no wrong.”
“I know your talents,” she spit at him. “I have sensed you in this camp, all along, haunting me. I have seen your shadows creeping over my tent. The Shadow Summoner. You are coming to Os Alta, as my prisoner, to finally pay for the crimes of your forefather.”
Her oprichnik came and bound his hands with rope, which might have hampered any normal Grisha. He didn’t fight; there was no point, and at least this way she was looking at him and not at Mal.
He caught a glimpse of Oretsev as they led him away. All the soldiers were staring after him, mouths hanging open, already the light of gossip rising in their faces, like evil little suns, but Oretsev was looking at him with a clean and fierce intelligence, not surprised at all.