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“We should wait for them here, they seem to be out,”
The Darkling nodded absent-mindedly at Ivan’s comment, yet couldn’t stop himself from scrutinising their surroundings, the shabby room Alina and Mal were occupying in Novyi Zem while in hiding.
Something was wrong.
He ran a hand over a hastily opened drawer, its meagre content —practical things, thread and needles, a hastily scribbled receipt for the room— in disarray as though someone rummaged through it in a hurry. Had they left already? Some of their belongings were still around, though, things one might need on the road, like a sturdy backpack, and—
His eyes caught something gleaming in the light, stuck in between two badly joined planks of the floor.
White fur.
“Drüskelle,” he whispered.
“Well, you seem to be lacking one sun summoner, General,” the insufferable privateer greeted him as soon as the Darkling’s boots hit the ship.
“Get your crew, we are leaving,” he ordered. “We are going after a Fjerdan ship, it left this port about five hours ago,”
That seemed to sober the other man up and he pushed off the railguard immediately to bark orders at his crew, getting it together and ready to leave port at an impressive speed, if the Darkling had it in him to care.
“Is she with them? Are you sure?” Sturmhond asked once satisfied with his men, gesturing at the Darkling to follow him into the captain’s quarters.
He could feel the strain of these last few weeks weighing him down. Escaping the Fold, realising the way its shadows kept clinging to him, his first experiments with the nichevo’ya while tracking down Alina— He had barely slept, eaten even less.
“The owner of the hotel admitted to it. And we found the corpse of her tracker. My grishas questioned sailors around the docks to find out about the ship,”
“I know the usual routes they take,” the privateer hastily closed the door behind them. “But we’ll need good wind in our sails, if your etherealki can—”
“Yes. Can your crew handle summoned wind?”
The man smirked insolently.
“They certainly can,”
If he had been able to care about anything else but Alina in the hands of the Drüskelle, the Darkling would have noticed the ease with which the privateer commanded squallers, and how his crew worked with them seamlessly, and come to the logical conclusion that some of them were not as otkazat’sya as they pretended.
But nothing mattered as long as his sun summoner was in the cold hold of the grisha hunters’ ship. The nichevo’ya crawled under his skin, in the edges of his vision, pooling formlessly in his shadows and begging to be set upon the repugnant Fjerdans.
Oh, how he had imagined reuniting with Alina, showing her his new power and subjugating her easily by threatening her sorry tracker with them. Bringing her back to Os Alta and coaxing her back to reason once she would see, see how worth it it would all be.
Now she would, without a doubt. See the need for a grisha ruler somewhere, anywhere in the world. A truly safe haven for them. A weapon to make their enemies tremble in fear.
Alina shuddered violently as she slowly came back to herself, sluggishly blinking away the black dots in her vision. Cold. So cold. Her legs were numb, and when she looked down, she could see she was on her knees, rough wood underneath her. The right leg of her pants was torn to shreds and bloodied, but bandages now stood around the mauling wound she knew to be there, where an Isenulf had bitten her. Echoing the throbbing pain of it, her shoulders burned fiercely, her arms forced above her head by shackles locked around her thin wrists.
The attack…
They had been on the lookout for the Darkling, for Second Army soldiers. They never saw the Drüskelle until they fell upon them.
An anguished sob slipped past her parched lips. Mal. Her last memory before fading into unconsciousness, of the blade ripping his throat open after he tried to get in between the grisha hunters and her.
Her cry was echoed by another in the hold and she turned around, swallowing down the despair that threatened to spill out at the sight. Another girl. Younger, held in the same position as her. The tattered remnants of a blue kefta with stained silver embroidery made her heart clench. A squaller.
“They said you were the sun summoner,” the girl whispered, and Alina winced.
What a sun summoner she made. She had tried fighting back the Drüskelle, seeking the powers she had used against the Darkling on the skiff. But after days of not using them, the exhaustion, the hunger— it had been a pathetic display, barely better than what she first produced in Baghra’s hut.
Still. She nodded. She was the sun summoner, no matter how incompetent.
The Drüskelle had known. How long had they been following after her? Since the Fold? Since the Little Palace? Since Kribirsk? Since that first attack where they had almost gotten her if not for—
“They’ll burn us alive,” the squaller whimpered. “I tried to desert. It was my first time on the front… I didn’t want to be a soldier my whole life…” her words dissolved into cries, the shackles shaking with her.
They’ll burn us alive.
“We— We can still get out of here, I… I’ll find something,” Alina promised, straining in her own chains, pulling and tugging.
Her wrists had always been so thin and frail, there had to be a way to slip them out, even if she had to break them for that. Her hands couldn’t touch, preventing her from summoning, but if she freed just one of them— The girl next to her had to barely be 16 if she had been on her first assignment, she couldn’t let these cold-blooded monsters kill her in such a horrific way. She grunted under the effort, using all her bodyweight to pull herself down. The shackles were rusty and the metal coarse, scratching into her skin over and over, but soon she could feel one of her thumbs start to slip through— a short lived victory as heavy footsteps sounded down the stairs to the hold.
She put a stop to her attempt immediately and waited quietly, hearing her companion stifle her sobs to pretend to be asleep. Her heart thumped in her chest, but she tipped her chin up.
She remembered the imposing man from the attack, with grey strands woven through his long blond hair and a neat beard of the same shade. A silver wolf, the Drüskelle symbol, much like the terrifying Isenulf that had torn her flesh away, emblazoned on his black sleeve.
The other Drüskelle had all deferred to him. He had been the one giving the order to kill Mal, she knew that even if she didn’t speak his language. She knew he could only be one man, a name she had heard mentioned with hatred and terror back in the Little Palace. Jarl Brum.
He spoke up and shivers ran down Alina’s spine although she did not understand a word of what he was saying.
Aside from drüsje . The Darkling had told her its meaning during their ride after the attack.
Curse him to the end of the world, how she wished he was here now, deadly Cut in his hands, mercy absent from his heart.
“So frail, yet reports say you cut a hole in the Fold,” Brum finally said in Ravkan, making her snap to attention.
She glared, fingers gripping at her shackles to force herself to keep a semblance of composure.
“I can cut a similar one in you, if you require demonstration,” she seethed.
“I don’t think you’ll be doing anything with your hands immobilised. I don’t recall you doing much with them both free before, anyway,”
If only she had had more time to learn how to use them. If only she hadn’t resisted them so much at first. If only she had never suppressed them in the first place. If only…
“Shame for you, perhaps you’ll wish I did when the Fold expands enough to start swallowing your wretched country,” she retorted, and a cackle bubbled out of her lips, spurred on by the terror churning in our guts. “You can burn us all, you’ll never be able to get rid of it!”
“I won’t burn all of you. You will, drüsje,”
Shouts and hurried footsteps sounded above their heads before Alina could make sense of that statement. Jarl Brum straightened up, keeping an ear out for his men’s voices, before shouting questions into the stairs leading back on deck.
Whatever the answer should have been was lost in a blood-curdling scream followed by an eerily silence. Chaos broke out again and Jarl Brum hurried back on deck, leaving Alina and the girl alone once more.
She did not lose a single second before trying to break free again. Whatever was attacking them, she did not want to face it with both hands tied above her head. The other grisha had curled up as much as she could, shoulders drawn up to try and cover her ears. Alina attempted to block out the screaming and the Fjerdan shouting, but she couldn’t help but wonder why they could only hear the voices of their captors. Who was attacking, why couldn’t they hear Ravkan, Shu or Saints-knew-What-Else?
Triumph at last when she tore her hand out of the shackle with a grunt of pain and relief.
A body tumbled down the stairs, crashing in front of her in a horrific noise of broken bones and battered flesh. She only had time to meet the terrorised gaze of the Drüskelle commander before an outworldly clicking sound followed and a creature climbed down the stairs.
Volcra , was her first horrified instinct.
Volcra , was her second relieved thought.
The girl next to her screamed when the monster tore into Jarl Brum’s body like a starved beast. It did not have eyes, yet it seemed to whip them toward her, pausing its feasting as its body edged closer to her.
“Don’t!” Alina warned, clapping her free hand to the other, summoning light at her fingertips. Not enough to cause any damage, just enough to attract the creature’s attention.
Volcras feared light.
Whatever this was, it didn’t.
“There you are, my little Saint,”
Alina’s heart skipped a beat, head snapping back toward the trapdoor. The Darkling stepped down the stairs, heedless of the blood sticking to the soles of his boots. His frame blocked out most of the light, turning him into a black silhouette devoid of features. He murmured something and his creature slithered back to him, formless as it seemed to curl around his legs like smoke. A flippant flick of his wrists, and Alina and the girl’s shackles crumbled into nothingness, allowing them to slump back down.
“I’ve been worried,” he murmured, stepping over Jarl Brum’s body. He reached a hand out and laid his fingers under her chin, tipping it up. “Are you ready to come home, now?”
The faint light hadn’t left her own fingers, and with it she could finally distinguish the deadly silver gleam of his eyes.
And, taking her breath away, the gloss of maimed flesh all across his face, the scars from the volcras’ claws, his handsome face marred forever.
She called the sunlight back so she could grip his arm instead, relieved to feel flesh and bones under her fingers. The light from behind outlined his dark hair, haloing him as her saviour, her the supplicant on her knees.
“I am,” she whispered, her hold slipping down his forearm until their hands met. The familiar rush of power and surety rushed down her mind, and he laced their fingers together to help her up.
A smile touched his lips, graciously taking more of her weight when she leaned on him, unable to stand on her mauled leg. She barely processed it when he bent over and swiped her clean off her feet, an arm under her knees and the other at her back. She held her breath in, his face so close his nose was almost brushing hers.
More and more of his creatures rushed down the hold. She thought she heard them help the other girl out, but soon there were so many joining with their master again that they were plunged in the dark, the opening of the trapdoor blocked out completely.
She closed her eyes, allowed herself to only feel the Darkling, hold onto him in the shadows.
“Let us turn against our true enemies, Alina,”
“Don’t use my power,” she breathed out, her lungs about to explode. “ Teach me. Show me how to wield it against them,”
He held her tighter against him. His lips caressing hers, a featherlight touch that had both of them sigh.
A promise.