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It's strange and complex to hold the sun. The radiance is something Alina feels in her whole body now, true and hers . Now that she is not holding back anymore, it swims in her bloodstream, shines from her eyes, sharpens her appetites. All her appetites.
The healers were wary at first. They checked her skin for signs of damage, the kind of redness that could happen after a long day outside in the summer. They peered into her eyes, muttering about cloudiness that could happen after a lifetime of exposure to the natural sun's rays.
There was nothing, no damage to be found. Her sun heals her. Her sun transforms her bit by bit into someone who will not die.
It's not something she thinks about too often. It's a timescale that's hard to hold in her head. It would be the most terrifying thing if she was alone in it.
But she's not alone, and she never will be again.
*
Aleksander never looks away, even when her light is too bright for others. Others who have turned them both into symbols - living saint and enduring reminder. He sees all of her, takes in her light hungrily, as a comfort. Sometimes he'll touch her skin to feel the warmth underneath, swirling power that answers to his touch. He closes his eyes and truly relaxes then, basking in her.
And she knows his shadows intimately . She shouldn't feel so safe, curled up against him in his bed. If she is no amplifier, she is still tuned into him enough to feel the way her power calls his . To know what it means to be seen, and met, and matched. To know exactly what she would do to never give that up.
*
The moment Baghra called her a "naive little girl" Alina knew she was done with her teacher. And to describe her own son as a "lost lonely boy" with no compassion in her voice, no awareness of how she might have contributed to that loneliness... No. Baghra had not earned her trust after all. Alina was not going to be uprooted again, not going to lose the place she'd almost found belonging.
So, she turned left when she was supposed to turn right, and found her way back into the palace. Back into the war room, then Aleksander's bedroom, where she hid from whatever had pulled him away.
When he came in, his eyes were wild, and he pulled the shadows with him. They dissipated on an exhale when he saw her. "They tried to kill you," he growled, with no further explanation before he was kissing her with relief and desperation.
She wanted nothing more than to pick up where they had left off earlier, but she couldn't yet. She didn't believe Baghra unquestioningly, but she needed to know what was going on. It would be smart to wait, and plan...but that was something he excelled at. What she had going for her was the element of surprise, and the affection that was plain in his unguarded, uncalculating moments.
"Aleksander," she murmured against his lips. He pulled back enough to look her in the eyes. "Your mother found me." She saw anger flare across his face, then vanish into calm control again. "I didn't do what she wanted. I came back. But I need to know what is actually happening ."
She couldn't read the expression in his incredibly dark eyes. Maybe she should have seen it before, the weariness from long, long experience in him. More than just a single human lifetime. He'd almost said as much when she'd found him the night she couldn't sleep.
"I can be your ally. You are not alone, " she said.
He hesitated a little longer, and then he told her. All of it.
*
The skiff comes to a stop at the last marker before the western edge of the Fold. She knows what sort of welcome will await them in Novokribirsk. Aleksander has told her about the tactics that Zlatan has been developing, to overwhelm Grisha with guns and cannons. News of the skiff's arrival and its passengers will have gone ahead of them.
They travel in a bubble of her sunlight. She touches her collarbone in a reflex, where she absorbed the antler amplifier. It is hers, and hers alone. Aleksander had told her about his true plans, finally, and whatever anger and desire for revenge he had seen in her had convinced him she could be trusted.
She wears silk interwoven with gold and jewels in her hair, the radiant and terrible Sol Koroleva , the vengeful Sankta who is about to add to her legend.
Far away in the Grand Palace, the Tsar is dying. Nothing will be the same after this.
Aleksander looks at her then, her shadow, her equal. For a moment, there's heat in both their eyes, like they would embrace here and now in front of the delegates and the Grisha on the skiff and the volcra flying somewhere beyond her light.
But that is for later. They stay where they are, standing side by side. She nods, and he grasps the substance of the Fold, and slowly, slowly pushes it forward.