Chapter Text
She hikes the long, lonely miles from Novokribirsk to where What-Was-The-Fold meets The Golden Wastes. On her pilgrimage, and isn't it funny to think of her journey like that, she chants the list she's been drafting in her head for half a century. The list of things she'll change if this works. Finally she reaches her destination.
Three acts of merzost meet here. Three tears in The Making at the Heart of the World. She kneels down at the border and calls upon the remnants of the merzost and prays. It’s a desperate act, but what's left of Morozova’s journals say it should work. She promises she'll fix it all, if only given the chance. She'll make different choices, be a different person than she was. Ravka – no, her Grisha need more Heretics and less Saints. She understands that now.
And then, the Making, aware in a way she didn't know it could be, just as desperate as she is, wraps itself around her, leaving just a little bit of itself behind. Do you promise, it asks.
I promise, she answers.
There’s a flash, not unlike the ones she used to tear down the Fold and create the Golden Wastes. And then, she opens her eyes, back in the body of a child, staring up at Ana Kuya, who is demanding she explain what happened to the potatoes.
After looking Ana Kuya dead in the eye and saying that she has no idea what happened to the potatoes – she really doesn't, it's been so long since she's been here – Alina runs out to the forest and climbs the highest tree. She doesn't wait for Mal. Once hidden in the safety of the branches, she laughs. Not the innocent giggle of a child but the deranged cackle of an old woman. It worked! It actually worked! Years, decades of research into how to use merzost properly, not just instinctively, how to ask the Making for things directly and she's finally here!
Then she looks down at her hands and sobers instantly. The scars from where she dug her nails into her palms and pushed down her power are already there. She's already been tested. She feels a sharp tug in the corner of her mind. You cannot be his equal when you are yet a child, something that sounds like the Making says, And you must be when you meet.
Well, even seven-hundred-year-old women know better than to argue with Eldritch godlike entities. Alina satisfies herself with the knowledge she'll meet the Darkling again, that she'll be at his side eventually. In the meantime, she'll train.
Summoning is essential. She's not going to let herself suffer from wasting sickness again. There are caves not even half a day's walk from here, she knows from Mal’s hunting trips. If she can convince Ana Kuya that she's capable of behaving, which will be much easier once she distances herself from Mal, then she might be able to go there to practice on the excuse of foraging for the orphanage. After so many intermittent periods of being on the run, she's very good at foraging.
Hand-to-hand will be more difficult without a sparring partner. A sack strung up in the cave stuffed with leaves will have to do for now, she supposes.
Marksmanship will have to wait until the army. Sticks will do for swords and quarterstaffs. She misses her luiyedao already. It had been a gift from the Socialist State of Shu Han after The Great Liberation. Learning from Inferni Ambassador Altun Yul-Dagun how to use outdated weapons like swords as an extension of herself to summon had been enlightening.
Eventually she climbs down out of the tree and finds Ana Kuya muttering to herself in the kitchen. “Ms Kuya, I can help you find the potatoes if you are still looking for them.”
Ana Kuya gives her a stern look. “Miss Starkov, I thought you didn't know what happened to the potatoes.”
Alina fights the urge to shrug. Manners were so much simpler back in the future. She doesn't flinch under Ana Kuya’s stare. “I don't. I will help you look for them though.”
“Make yourself useful then, child,” the woman snaps.
Alina makes a show of looking in the cabinets and the pantry before searching in her and Mal’s hiding spots. She finds the sack in a crevice between the cabinet and the pantry door only a child can fit in. “I found them!”
It was only under the housekeeper’s almost approving gaze as she takes the sack that Alina really looks at her. The last time she had seen the woman had been through the tether with the Darkling, hanging in the tree he strung her from. It hurts to look at the bitter woman, who is simultaneously the only mother she really knows and an insult to what a mother should be.
Ana Kuya breaks her reverie, sniffing, “You're still not much to look at but at least you're learning to be useful.”
Alina feels the tug from the Making again and shoves down the spite rising in her chest. She needs to be useful to get access to the cave. “Does the cook need someone to prepare them?”
Ana Kuya gives her a nod and starts to walk away. When Alina doesn't follow, she turns on her heel, snapping, “Come along, lazy child, dinner is going to be late as it is.”
Her plan works flawlessly. After a few false starts with both Ana Kuya and the cook, they start teaching her what wild plants and mushrooms are edible and how to find them. It takes half a year of supervised foraging for them to trust her to go out on her own and bring back food and not poison. During those six months, Alina picks the lock to the music room and practices her summoning in there – after an incident where she nearly melted the ice house.
When she finally is able to go to the cave, she strings up the leaf-stuffed sack as planned and sets up a target range for her sunbeams. Eventually, she'll use the targets to practice the Cut.
Training proves to be a source of endless frustration. Her child's body throws her balance off. Her light is used to being suppressed instead of used. She can't even throw a punch without toppling over. It's like her first few months at the Little Palace all over again. She'd almost forgotten until now what it's like to be truly weak and helpless, to not be the most capable person in the room.
It's a humbling experience. The Making hums under her skin, strangely pleased with itself.
As the years pass, she starts to grow into herself. Her sallow complexion gives way to a healthy golden beige. Dull, brittle hair turns gleaming, silky onyx. She gains fat and muscle and the cook’s food stops tasting like mud. The older orphans stop calling her Sticks.
The first time one of the older boys starts paying her too much attention, she kicks him between the legs and throws him onto the floor, her knee digging into his kidney as she pulls his arm back at a painful angle. No one has to be told twice to leave her alone after that.
Mal – the less said about Mal, the better. He doesn't take the distance Alina now enforces well. He misses the girl she used to be, she knows, just like the Mal she married. He tries to get her to steal from the kitchens with him but she refuses. She can't jeopardize Ana Kuya’s trust in her. He tries to pull her away from the other children to play with him, only him, and resists when she tries to bring him into her games with the other children. He talks about the dairy farm. A LOT. He doesn't believe Alina, either, when she says she doesn't want the dairy farm anymore. She doesn't want to be the woman carrying his salt block. She's grown past that. The resulting shouting match is loud enough that the servants have to separate them. Alina doesn't get to go foraging for a week. She blames Mal and his stupid, insecure need to own her.
She's thirteen and getting ready to leave the cave after successfully performing the Cut for the first time that she feels the sharp tug again. Stumbling back into the cave, she watches as a group of ten men wearing the distinctive red deel of the Shu Han army. They must be a scouting party to be this far north of the Sikurzoi Mountains. And why are they marching West toward the Fold? Alina watches them carefully from the shadows, bending the light away from her. When they're far enough away, she takes her basket of food and breaks into a run. As soon as she sees the outline of Keramzin, she starts yelling. “Ana Kuya! Ana Kuya! Duke Keramsov!”
Ana Kuya rushes out, shushing her. “Stop shouting, girl. The Duke is not to be bothered.”
Alina is not deterred. “Duke Keramsov!” she yells again.
Ana Kuya looks like she's getting ready to switch her when Alina sees the Duke walk out to meet them. Duke Keramsov’s face is unusually stern. He prefers the children to see him as jolly and paternal. The appearance of a good benefactor. “What is it, child?” he barks.
She does her best not to sound hysterical but like a soldier relaying a report. “Your Grace, eight kilometers due South of here, I spotted a party of about ten Shu soldiers hiking through the fields. They were heading northwest by west, toward the Fold.”
The Duke's face pinches but he bends down and lays a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Relax, girl, you're not in the army yet. Are you sure of what you saw?”
Alina takes a deep breath and answers. “Yes, Your Grace, I was foraging for food when I saw their red uniforms. I hid in a cave so I saw them but they didn't see me. As soon as they passed, I ran back here.”
“And they were heading in what direction, again?”
“Northwest by west.”
“Ten of them, you said?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The Duke straightens up and tells Ana Kuya to have his groom ready his horse.
Two days later, a Shu scouting party just like Alina described is intercepted hiking through the south of Ravka. When Alina gets her draft card, the Duke will remember this incident and tell the enlistment officer.
For her help, however small, in finding the Shu Han soldiers, the Duke gifts her an instrument he bought from a Zemeni trader in Os Kervo years ago. Alina recognizes it right away. A guitar. From that moment on, in what little spare time she has that she's not practicing her sketching, she's strumming at the guitar that's still a little too big for her, humming songs that no one else knows because they haven't been written yet.
At seventeen, Alina gets her draft card. It hits her now how completely fucked the Lantsov dynasty is. Not even two hundred years from now, seventeen won't be old enough to drink, let alone go to war. She might be a ruthless, grouchy old warlord at heart, but the rest of them? They're just children. Young, stupid, brash children and most of them won't even get the chance to grow up and realize just how dumb they are.
Yet another reason to join The Darkling and overthrow the monarchy.
It somehow surprises her when after basic training, her superiors don't discard her to the Royal Corps of Surveyors but instead assign her to a scouting unit. How is she supposed to meet The Darkling now? Don't worry, the Making hums, all is as it should be.
That's such a vague bullshit answer, especially from a potentially all-knowing entity. But it's exactly the vague kind of bullshit she's learned to expect from the Making. Honestly, if she had known how annoying her unexpected passenger on the trip back would be, she might have rethought this whole time travel thing. She gets a sharp tug for that thought.
One year into her service, Alina has more combat experience in the First Army than she did the first time around. More than once, she's had to covertly use her Small Science to hide her and her unit from Fjerdans who they supposedly have a cease-fire with. Serving amongst ot’kazat'sya is a challenge. She endures the jokes about Grisha ‘witches’ and Shu spies. Alina does her best not to react to it all but she makes note of the names and faces of those that do it the most. Her commanding officer, Major Borek Polyakov, is, by far, the worst offender. He tells stories about Grisha girls with horns and terrible creatures that steal children in the night. Crude fairytale bullshit.
It makes Alina sick. She has to fight down the urge to Cut him when he leers and snarls and spits at the Grisha they share encampments with. She settles for blinding him with sunlight each morning she has to drag him from his bedroll and subtly burning all of his meals.
Then one day, when her unit gets the order to relocate to Chernast, the Making’s subtle hum turns into a harsh buzz under her skin. “Calm down,” she hisses through her teeth, not caring how mad she must seem as she packs.
Something about this feels, not wrong, but wrong adjacent. Like there's something she's forgetting.
Chernast is currently a segregated outpost, after some idiot Colonel took offense to Grisha presence in the camp. Within a year, the camps will desegregate and merge back together, but she can't remember why.
For now, the Grisha camp is five kilometers northeast of Chernast. The Grisha stationed there are forced to live in tents while the First Army at least gets ramshackle buildings and lean-tos. When she comments on this, a soldier from a different unit, Vasek, knocks her shoulder with his. “Better them than us, right?” he laughs.
It's petty, but she enjoys melting the snow beneath his feet and watching him slip and fall.
Three weeks into her posting, Alina remembers why she had this sense of foreboding about Chernast when she's hiding in the barracks, practicing her Small Science, and she hears a rough voice yelling in Fjerdan outside the door. “You couldn't have warned me?” she hisses at the Making.
She feels a series of sharp, incessant tugs in response. Great, her sarcasm is rubbing off on the Making at the Heart of the goddamned World itself. That's something to deal with later.
She quickly bars the door, throws on her thin olive coat, wraps her mother's silk scarf around her face, and shoves her ushanka onto her head and her hands into her gloves. She runs out the back door. The air is thick with snow and the wind is howling, almost beating her back into the barracks. The door slams behind her when she finally manages to squeeze through.
Through the blizzard, she can see the bodies of her fellow soldiers everywhere and the snow is turning to dark red slush with their blood. She should've heard the sound of gunshots even through the wind. Then she trips over Major Polyakov’s body. His throat is slit to the bone. “Couldn't have happened to a nicer person,” she mutters, pushing herself up onto her elbows.
Alina looks up to see a Fjerdan-make revolver pointed straight at her head. With a snarl, she lunges for his knees. The gun goes off. The bullet goes wide as she tackles the soldier and her ears ring. She doesn't hear him shouting for his comrades. She gets him on his back, gasping for breath as her knees press against his chest, and wrestles the gun out of his hand. Warm blood splashes across her face when she shoots him in the head. She throws the revolver into the snowbank. Guns are a brutal way to kill people.
Her ears are still ringing.
Scrambling to get up, she sees a good half dozen Fjerdan soldiers coming at her from the north. She makes to run south, shoving down a stack of wooden pallets to block their path. “Why is it always Fjerda?” she growls.
The Making tugs at her. Once, twice, sharp and unrelenting. The tug feels northern somehow? She turns and looks to the northeast and sees the Major's horse running off just beyond some farmer's fenceposts. Right, the Grisha camp is to the north. Passed all the Fjerdan soldiers.
They're coming closer now. Not quite to the pile of pallets just yet. Taking a deep breath, she takes a few steps backward, hand out to her sides. She takes her gloves off and leans into a lunge. And runs straight at the soldiers.
She jumps onto the pallets, springboarding from them to grab the faces of the two men closest to her with burning hot hands. They don't even get the chance to scream as their faces melt. With a thunderous clap, she Cuts the next two soldiers in half. She flashes a blinding light at the remaining men, made all the brighter for the snow all around them.
She runs, glowing, into the blizzard toward the Major's horse. Vaulting over the fence that stand between them, she jumps onto the horse’s back and immediately spurs him into a gallop. The Major's horse is not meant for this and she knows it. This is not a steppe pony bred for ice and snow. The poor creature has trouble navigating the snowbanks and ice patches. But she pushes through. The snow melts around her in an unholy halo.
The five kilometers between her and the safety of the Grisha camp feel neverending.
The Making hums loud and insistent, her body practically vibrating with its excitement.
A shot rings through the air. The horse lurches and falls to its side, taking her with it. Her head hits something. A rock, maybe? The ringing returns along with the sluggish warm flow of blood leaving her body. The horse's back legs are tied up with a drüskelle bolas.
No, she doesn't die here. Not after all she went through to get back here. Not to Fjerdan soldiers, not to DRÜSKELLE, of all people. Grunting, she pushes the horse and pulls her trapped leg at the same time, melting the snow around them with her light. She glows brighter, a beacon burning in the white sky. Her leg really fucking hurts. Limping as she runs, she screams, “Drüskelle! Drüskelle!” when she finally sees the Grisha tents through the snow.
Her injured leg gives out right at the edge of the Grisha camp and she collapses at the feet of a man in a black kefta. “Aleksander.”
The name is a soft-spoken hymn on her lips. The Making hums soothingly under her skin.
His brow creases in confusion. A question forms in his mouth.
The strange moment of peace is shattered by a sharp cry of “Drüsje!”
Alina's hands act on their own, clapping together and sliding apart to form a blade of light. She barely notices the cool, oily shadows gathering around her. The drüskelle comes into sight. She releases the blade. Without her knowing it, The Darkling does the same. The witch hunter crumbles, head falling from his body as his torso separates from his legs.
The Darkling bends down to look at her. “Who are you?” he asks.
She smiles faintly. "That's not what y're s'posed ta ask," she slurs.
And her world, already fuzzy around the edges, goes black.