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On the journey to Keramzin, neither of them speak. Alina leans her head out of the carriage window and numbly watches Ravka go by, too exhausted to do anything else. She feels tired down to her bones, empty of anything at all. A hollow shell of the once-great Sun Summoner.
Alina doesn’t feel very much like the great Sun Summoner: she doesn’t feel much like anything at all.
“Oh, Saints,” Zoya curses as the carriage travels over a gap in the road. Alina glances towards her, though she still does not speak. Silence is an easy place for her to retreat to.
The disruption only lasts for a moment before the road is smooth again and the carriage continues on its way to Keramzin unbothered.
*
“This place is a mess,” Zoya says, staring out at the ruins of the duke’s orphanage. “Out of all the places you could have picked to rebuild, Starkov, why did you have to pick this one?”
Zoya’s words might have drawn a smile out of Alina, before, but now she only frowns and replies, in a voice that is still half a whisper, “I grew up here, Zoya. It holds a special place in my heart, and so I am rebuilding it, and making it a better place. I do not care how much of a ruin it is.” If I can rebuild this place, and make it kinder, I can rebuild myself, as well.
She shrugs and leans down to pick up a broken stone, idly tossing it into the air with one hand. “If you say so, Sun Summoner.”
Alina shoots her an irritated glance, but Zoya’s back is turned to her. Sighing, she looks over the empty grounds of the orphanage. It looks as hollow and ruined as she feels inside.
Suddenly, there is an arm on her shoulder, and Alina staggers away without thought, clutching a hand to her shoulder. When she looks again, Zoya is there with widened eyes and a silent apology on her lips.
“I was only going to ask…” Zoya’s voice fades away, and Alina has to wave a hand for her to continue. “Where are we to sleep?”
Frowning, Alina looks out over the empty grounds, and finds nothing remaining except for the bare stones on the ground. “I do not know.” She has not slept since she had faked her death, but it seems that Zoya has not done the same.
“Oh, Alina,” says Zoya, but there is no anger in it, only tiredness. “What have you brought on yourself? Come with me: there must be an inn of some kind in the village.”
And Alina follows her. What else is there for her to do?
*
“So, how do you plan upon actually rebuilding the orphanage?” Zoya asks her the next morning, the two of them standing before the ruins of the orphanage once more.
Alina’s tongue sticks to her mouth as she tries to respond. “Uh, I don’t know...” she trails off.
When she had won the war and killed Mal in two fatal stabs, she had found herself thinking of the orphanage. She ought to have been thinking of something else, most likely, but she had not known any appropriate thoughts for a hero or saviour to think. All she knew was that Mal’s blood was on the dagger in her hand, and the Darkling wounded and dying — no, dead — in front of her, and that this would never have happened if she had stayed in the orphanage.
She still does not know whether the turn of events when she left the orphanage turned out to be a good thing or not.
“Hey.” Zoya is quiet, but she is insistent. “It’s fine if you didn’t have a plan. Very few of us did, after the war. Had a plan, I mean.”
Alina asks the question that has been in the back of her mind ever since she had glimpsed Zoya hurrying towards the carriage and felt the thump as the door was opened and Zoya got in, her face flushed. “Why did you come here with me, then?”
Zoya just shrugs. “I didn’t have a plan, myself. And I couldn’t let you go alone.”
“The great Zoya Nazyalensky, admitting that she did not have a plan? Will wonders never cease.” Alina tries to summon up the humour that she had previously possessed so easily, but it does not come. Zoya laughs at the joke anyways, though it feels forced.
“As I said, few of us even knew what to do. We lived with the Shadow Fold and the war for so long that it is strange for them to be gone. Do you know that I cannot remember a time without the Shadow Fold?” Zoya confesses.
Alina tries to smile — for what, she does not know — and answers, “I cannot remember a time without it, either.”
“Perhaps the Darkling was the only one left who remembered what the world was like without the Fold.”
“Perhaps,” Alina agrees, “and now he is dead.”
Zoya’s voice strengthens as she answers, “And now he is dead.” She comes to stand closer to Alina, although she does not try to slide her arm onto Alina’s shoulder as she had last time. “Leaving us to pick up the pieces. Or stones, in this case.”
She forces out a dry laugh. “We should get builders in.”
“It could take years, you know,” Zoya tells her. “And what are you to do if the builders recognise you? Very few people in Ravka have that pale hair of yours.”
“I would take each and every broken stone and build up this orphanage again if I had to,” Alina says to her, and her tone recalls the darkest moments of the Darkling. “And I could simply pretend to be an old woman. I have the hair for it, do I not?”
Zoya laughs, and Alina finds herself laughing alongside her. She realises once she has finished and is looking Zoya in the eye, breathless with a stupid, wide grin on her lips, that the laugh was the first genuine one she had let out since Mal had died. (Since she killed Mal.)
*
True to Zoya’s word, the builders do move into the grounds. The first things they set up are several tents around the grounds that had once held the orphanage, and Alina and Zoya share one between them, moving out of the inn where they had been staying under the suspicious innkeeper’s eye and settling onto dirtied blankets for their beds.
The first night, Zoya makes a face as she lies down on the blankets, while Alina is perfectly content to rest her head on a bundle of soil-ridden blankets and attempt to get to sleep. (She never manages to sleep, but it is reassuring that she can still try.)
Alina wears a hooded cloak about the camp, and Zoya starts a rumour that her face is grossly disfigured in order to stop suspicion. There is one, of course — there is always one — who tries to sneak into their tent at night, but Alina does not sleep. It is easy for her to reach over, still blinking in the darkness, and grab Zoya’s shoulder to wake her.
Zoya’s angered eyes and the faint rolling movement of thunder in the distance approaching the grounds is enough for him to run out of the tent, screaming apologies.
“Why did you wake me?” Zoya asks afterwards. “The Alina I knew would have fought him herself.”
“I am not the same Alina who entered the Shadow Fold,” she answers, and lies back down, pretending to sleep. After a moment, Zoya does the same.
Out of the flickering curtain of her eyelashes, Alina sees Zoya’s breath turning into steam in the air. Her eyes gleam blue against the dim light of the tent, the rest of her shadowy underneath the blankets.
“I know you’re still awake, Alina,” mutters Zoya. “You haven’t slept since we came here. I assume you’ve not been able to get any since Mal and the Darkling died.”
“That’s true,” Alina replies, and sees her breath rise into the air. “Saints, I’m so tired, Zoya.”
“What would it take for you to go to sleep?” Zoya asks her, reaching out a hand across the dark valleys and hills of the blankets. “What do you want back?”
Alina closes her eyes. “Everything,” she whispers. “I want to see Mal again, alive still. I wish I was still back at the orphanage, even though it was not the best of places. I wish the Shadow Fold still existed, if only because then I would have never met the Darkling. I wish I never killed anyone.”
She puts her hand in Zoya’s, and feels her squeeze it back.
“We’ve all done some things we wish we hadn’t done.” Zoya’s eyes are raised upwards, to the skies above the tent. “But you should not regret destroying the Shadow Fold. You saved Ravka, Alina.”
“It doesn’t feel that I have saved Ravka,” she whispers, choking back sobs. “It just feels like I killed Mal.”
“Oh, Alina.” Her voice breaks as she runs a thumb over Alina’s knuckles. “I’m sorry.”
And Zoya sounds like she really means it.
Alina turns over and her gaze meets Zoya’s. “Thank you,” she replies, before she feels her eyes close in on themselves and sleep finally, finally coming to sweep her away.
*
“How did you sleep?” Zoya asks her the next morning.
She feels a smile coming over her face. “Very well.” The fear that she had once held, that when she went to sleep all she would be able to see was Mal’s face as she drove the knife into his chest, had not been realised. Her sleep had been blackness behind her eyes, but a peaceful kind, nothing like the fetid shadows of the Fold.
“Good.” With that, Zoya stands up and leaves the tent to fetch breakfast for them. Alina looks down at her hands, half-expecting to see them covered with someone’s blood — anyone’s blood, for she has so much on her hands, so much in the burden still weighing on her shoulders — but they are clean.
Zoya comes back with a tray holding two plates, which she sets on the ground in between them. The breakfasts never come close to the ones Alina had eaten at the Little Palace, but she prefers the simple bread and water to any elaborate feast.
The hands that carried the battered tray to Alina were kind and pure hands, while the hands that had bought Alina the lavish food in the Little Palace were forever stained with darkness. She would never have eaten there, if she knew what great atrocities the Darkling had done. (She would never have kissed him, if she knew the whole truth.)
Alina takes the bread in her mud-stained hands and sinks her teeth into it gladly. Zoya does the same, and soon the breakfast tray is empty of everything except the plates and glasses for the water.
“When I get back, should we take a walk around the grounds together? See how the rebuilding efforts are faring?”
She reaches to pull out her cloak from the mass of blankets spread across the ground. “Of course we should.” Zoya did not need to have even asked, for Alina would have said yes to anything if it came from Zoya’s lips.
Zoya grins and picks up the tray.
*
Alina hates the hood and cloak, for it obscures much of her vision and forces her to rely on Zoya for direction. She grips tightly onto Zoya’s wrist and forearm, holding on with everything she has.
“Calm down,” Zoya hisses. “There are hardly any people here, and besides, they’re barely looking at us.”
She tries to even out her breathing, staring down at the ground full of ash and the dust of stones, or corpses long since gone. Zoya’s presence by her side steadies her, much as she is loath to admit it: Zoya made the right choice when she did not let Alina return to Keramzin alone.
Summoning the courage to look out from the shadowed depths of the hood, she sees the builders — in uniforms so alike hers, so similar to the girl she used to be — and they do not even look towards her. Instead, their attention is solely focussed on their work.
Alina looks back to Zoya. “How much are you paying them?” She remembers the not-quite poverty of her time back in the orphanage, the nagging feeling that one day there would be too many mouths to feed and one of them would have to leave. (Alina always thought it would be her that would find herself being forced out of the orphanage. As it turned out, she was forced out of the orphanage, but for a far different reason than she had believed.)
“First, it’s Nikolai who is paying them, not me.” Nikolai? “Second, it’s not as much as I would wish, but five gold sovereigns apiece for every worker.”
Five gold sovereigns is enough for them to buy food and proper lodgings. Alina nods, satisfied, and feels Zoya squeeze her hand where their fingers are interlinking.
She doubts that Zoya had ever given a passing thought to the payment of workers, before, when she still tossed her hair with an air of superiority and sneered down on Alina with thick, bitter jealousy. But the war has changed both of them, and Zoya is all the better for it.
While Zoya had become better, though, Alina had only become a murderer. She killed Mal and the Darkling — to save Ravka, but to damn her soul. Sometimes she wishes that the Second Army had thought of saving Alina, rather than saving Ravka, but it is selfish of her to value herself over the country. Ravka made her, and she must save it in return: that is what she has always been meant to do.
Alina watches the builders slowly reconstruct the foundations of the place she grew up in, brick by unbroken brick, and wishes she could rebuild herself that easily.
Who is Alina Starkov, if she is not the Sun Summoner? She wishes that she knew.
“A sovereign for your thoughts?” Zoya asks, nudging her gently. She touches Alina like she is glass, about to shatter, and Alina wonders if she truly is what Zoya thinks she is. Not quite broken, not yet, but not fully repaired, either.
“It’s nothing,” she replies, glancing back at Zoya. “Shall we walk a little more, through the lands around the orphanage?”
“Not like we have anything else to do.” Zoya replies, and slips an arm around Alina’s cloaked shoulders. Alina lets her do so, no longer as repelled by the touch of a friend as she had been when they first came to Keramzin (when she still thought she had blood staining her fingers every time she touched something), and they walk for a long while, quiet.
The trees and the clouded skies seem to be watching over them, and Zoya’s arm is steady and protective around Alina, and for once she feels safe.
*
Alina does not know the exact amount of days it took for the builders to build the small extension that Zoya had requested, only that she had come to Keramzin as the summer began again and now it is autumn, turning to winter. The once-green trees are now painted in browns and reds, and the chill has started to seep into the ground and into bone, to curl up inside her.
There is one bed for the both of them, and Zoya gives a happy sigh on the first evening they spend in the extension as she flops into the bed. “Urgh, after all that time sleeping on the soil and in those stinking blankets, this feels like heaven.”
Compared to the luxurious beds of the Little Palace, this worn and rickety bed is horrible and cheap, but Zoya does not complain once — not even when she learns the undersheet is full of moth holes. She simply lies down and falls asleep immediately, a beautiful picture with the sheets gold-tinged around her.
Alina glances out of the windows, seeing the grounds with their empty tents: the workers had all left in favour of the warm inns of the Keramzin village proper, leaving only her and Zoya on the grounds. She sighs in a moment of blissful loneliness before lying down and pulling the sheets close, feeling the comforting warmth of Zoya’s body beside her.
It is when she closes her eyes without anyone there that the nightmares she has been dreading finally come for her.
Mal’s face is in the forefront of her mind, the certainty in his eyes and Alina’s breath coming too short, too sharp. It is exactly like the day it happened, down to the Fold roiling around her and the knife slipping in her grasp.
Alina doesn’t want to do it, but the knife embeds itself in Mal’s chest anyways. Tears roll down her face as she gasps, “I’m sorry,” over and over. Then everything turns black, then blinding light.
She wakes up in a cold sweat, gasping, and reaches for Zoya’s hand. It is cold when she takes it, but she grasps onto it anyways. Alina is drowning, and Zoya’s unfeeling hand is the only thing keeping her head above water.
In the darkness, she cannot tell if there is blood on her hands or not.
*
They settle into a routine in the extension, each day passing by as the workers toil to build the orphanage again. Zoya wakes up and fetches them breakfast, which Alina eats in bed, before they take a walk around the Keramzin area. Instead of returning for lunch, Zoya will go find the nearest shop and buy them food to eat for lunch.
Sometimes Zoya goes out into the wilderness to practice summoning storms, and Alina comes with her. She feels no jealousy that Zoya still has her powers, for it was her powers that led to the deaths and the struggle of so many. Though she was most likely meant to mourn their loss, she has grown used to not being Grisha any more. She is not the girl she was, believing herself utterly unremarkable, and she is not the Sun Summoner: she is purely herself, Alina Starkov.
Although Zoya often tells her to get back so she will not be rained upon when the storms come, Alina never does, and lets the rain drench her with the hood of her cloak lowered. When she closes her eyes, all that is left is the rain.
“I will never understand you, Alina,” Zoya tells her once the storms have faded from the sky, shaking her head. “Are you not afraid of catching a chill?”
Alina simply shakes her head and says, “Now that the Darkling is dead, and Sankta Alina the Sun Summoner along with him, I think you are the most powerful Grisha in the world.”
Zoya sighs and pushes rain-sodden curls back from her face. “I used to want to be the most powerful Grisha in the world. So much that it might have killed me. But after I saw what happened to the powerful Grisha, I changed my mind. I’m happy being just Zoya Nazyalensky, who only uses her powers on occasion. To drench her friend, who won’t get out of the way.” She elbows Alina pointedly, though her smile is good-natured.
Alina smiles back, and it is real as the smell of the earth beneath her, the soil drenched in rain yet still thriving. There is nothing false in it, for the elaborate lies and deceptions of the past are all gone, washed away by the rain and Zoya’s storm.
*
“I think,” Alina says one evening, chewing on her lower lip, “that once the orphanage is rebuilt, I want to find some children to bring in and raise.”
Sliding the sleeve of her nightdress upwards on her shoulder, Zoya turns to her and asks, “Is that so?”
“Yes.” It comes out in a quiet, yet determined, rush. “I want to give them a happier childhood here. Once the builders are gone, I can’t… it can’t be just me and you, as much as I like what we have here. I want to see them smiling.”
“You want children.” As ever, Zoya cuts straight to the bone.
Alina nods, and bites her lip as a joke manifests itself in her head. “And I rather think you would make a fine parent, Zoya.”
Zoya laughs mockingly. “That’s all your job, Starkov. I will be — fuck, what will I be doing?”
“Helping me.” Alina half-considers walking up to Zoya and kissing her upturned lips for a single honey-warm moment, her mind in that pleasantly hazy, weary state. She makes a motion to get up, but Zoya’s gaze catches her sharply, and Alina ends up reprimanding herself for her foolishness. After all, why would one of the most powerful Grisha in the world want to kiss a powerless once-saint?
“So long as I’m not actually parenting the children, I suppose it’s fine,” huffs Zoya. She gathers up her hair and tosses it backwards so it is all streaming down her back, a river of dark brown.
“If you say so.” Alina gathers the covers around her shoulders and burrows into the bed. A strand of white hair falls in front of her eyes, and she reaches a hand to brush it away.
Zoya had offered to dye her hair back to the dark brown it had once been, but Alina had refused. Dark brown hair would mean that she had returned to the scared girl who did not understand: the pale hair carries all her world-weary experiences in its white lengths, all the things she has said and done, and yet it still remains pure.
She will never tell Zoya why she wants to keep her hair as it is, though, for she knows Zoya would not understand. But Alina understands why, and that is enough.
*
Alina doesn’t know when the extension starts to feel like a home — no, not any home, her home. When Zoya becomes less irritating and more a fixture of life, all her raised brows and mocking laughter now things that Alina captures and never wants to let go of.
She doesn’t know when she and Zoya start to grow closer than friends, when they start to hold each other in their sleep, when she starts to kiss Zoya’s hand when she serves Alina breakfast — first as a joke, then a ritual to the only saint she has.
Although she doesn’t know, she likes it. Alina could have only this for the rest of her life, and she would be happy.
*
“Come on, up,” Zoya tells her one bright, early morning, and Alina’s fingers close around the blanket atop her protectively. Zoya sighs and pulls the blanket away. “I said, get up.”
Yawning, Alina stretches and kicks aside the blanket with her eyes still half-closed. “Please don’t tell me that there’s another war on suddenly.”
“No, of course not.” She hears Zoya sputter out a laugh, and feels silent gratitude that even the idea of a war seems so preposterous now. Perhaps they are truly getting used to peacetime. “We’re going out to train.”
“Pardon?” Does Zoya believe that Alina’s Sun Summoner powers will manifest themselves again through some miracle? She is not a Grisha any more.
Zoya notes the confusion on Alina’s face and quickly clarifies, “Not with Grisha powers. To fight properly, using your body and the weapons at your disposal. And there is no great conflict that you must train for, as far as I know.”
Alina nods, finally understanding. “Alright.”
A pair of men’s trousers and a loose shirt is then tossed to her, which Alina hurriedly slips into. Zoya turns her back to Alina, though truly there is no reason for her to: Alina would not mind it if Zoya saw her unclothed.
She notices that Zoya is already dressed, in similar clothes to her, and finds herself drawn to the strong line of Zoya’s shoulders inadvertently. The lean muscles beneath her skin, the way the trousers are tight around her thighs and waist —
“What’s taking so long, Starkov?” Zoya asks, and suddenly she is back in Os Alta with Zoya looking at her with bitterness and jealous anger in her eyes. Alina looks down and hurriedly tugs on the trousers.
“I’m ready, now.”
Zoya turns around with bright eyes and gives Alina a smile. “Good. I hope you haven’t forgotten too much. I won’t be easy on you.”
Alina bites her lip, thinking about how much she doesn’t want Zoya to go easy on her, but she doesn’t get a chance to say it, for Zoya is already leading her out of the house and into the fields and forests that surround the grounds.
They come to a clearing that slopes gently downwards, and Zoya settles into a fighting stance. Alina tries her best to copy her, feeling awkward as she raises her hands.
“Good start,” Zoya says, encouraging. Alina forces herself to keep her eyes on Zoya’s fists as she waits, her body thrumming with tension. She has gone so far without fighting that even the feeling before a fight is unfamiliar to her, the tension like a tremor over her whole body.
For one short moment, she blinks, and when she opens her eyes again Zoya is advancing on her with fists raised. Frantically, she tries to get her arms into a block, but Zoya is too quick for her and lands a jab on her ribs, her fist coming in from beneath her arm.
Alina gasps, and Zoya glances at her, concerned. “Are you okay?”
Nodding, Alina replies, “It’s just been a while since I did anything like this. Again, Zoya. You promised not to be easy on me.”
“I did, didn’t I,” Zoya says, and her eyes flash mischievously as she comes in for what appears to be a hook. Alina stumbles backwards to evade it, but too late she realises that Zoya has got a leg wrapped around hers and that she is falling backwards, the mud and grass giving out below her boots.
She gasps, and grabs Zoya’s wrist to pull her down with her. Their legs are still entangled as Zoya falls atop her.
Zoya’s weight is heavier than expected, but surprisingly pleasant despite that. Underneath her, Alina feels secure, as if Zoya is covering her with her body to protect her from the world and anyone who would hurt her.
“You minx,” Zoya says, but she’s laughing, and Alina giggles too. She leans her head back, already breathless and pleasingly boneless, and feels her eyes beginning to close when Zoya leans downwards and presses their mouths together with surety and certainty.
“Oh,” she feels Zoya murmur against her mouth, and Alina feels herself agreeing for one perfect moment before she realises exactly what she is doing and pulls herself away.
Immediately, Zoya is concerned, seeking out Alina’s gaze. “I’m sorry — was it too soon, after Mal? I should have asked, oh Saints, I’m so sorry — ”
“No,” Alina says with a sudden rush of gold-happiness to her chest, her cheeks warm, “you were perfect. It’s just, oh, I wasn’t expecting it. You were too much for me, but now I know.” She knows that Zoya Nazyalensky tastes of honey-sweetness and the joy that comes with heavy rains, with standing out in a field and letting the storms wash over you.
The Darkling had tasted like bitter lies and slick, sour blood against Alina’s lips. Mal had tasted like the gruel they were served at the orphanage and the girl he had kissed before her, familiar and tainted by a series of small betrayals.
She likes kissing Zoya better than she had liked kissing either of them.
“So, you liked it?” Zoya asks, hopeful, and Alina laughs in genuine joy. Zoya brings that out in her, digs deeply enough into Alina’s soul that she can pull happiness out again.
“I did, Zoya,” she replies breathily, and tangles her hands in Zoya’s hair to pull her back down for another kiss. And another, and another, until the sky became dark with storms and the rain began to pour over them. Until thunder rolls through the sky with great, booming claps and lightning flashes proudly across the sky.
Zoya’s rain-soaked hair is plastered to Alina’s face, and their clothes are sodden enough that there is nothing between either of their bodies. The ground beneath her is cold, but Zoya’s lips are warm, and Alina loves it with all her wild heart, finally freed.