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Firelight danced off the mirror, a low, pathetic, hushed glow in contrast to the show I could put on, if I chose. But that was fine with me. I knew what my own radiance would show me; the same thing the sun's pitiless rays showed me every day of my life now, lived here in the Little Palace after all the fighting had ended. Just me, bleached white and pale, only the haunted dark of my eyes marking the difference between me and a piece of stone, cold and inert. At least firelight cast a little warmth back into my skin. Burnished the white of my hair to gold. Maybe even red, if I looked just right, tilted my head at just the right angle to look alive again, to let the shadows play over my face in a parody of life, my face changing even as I stared at it. First the girl I knew, pale as a mushroom cap growing from black soil and near as unformed; then with a shift, becoming someone new, someone I didn't recognize. A woman with sharp features carved from marble, crowned in gold. The kind of woman who looked like she might be in love with a monster.
"You look more lovely in the light," the Darkling murmured, looming over me, arms sliding over my shoulders, enveloping me like shadow. Behind him, for a moment I still saw the dark cavern of his bedroom reflected behind us, the white of the stars picked out on the ceiling, the glowing spots of color, flowers and discarded clothing marking my presence here. Our room, now. Rising, his shadows blocked out the room, the distant light of the fireplace, the rumpled sheets waiting for us to spill back into them. Until there was only his face and mine, reflected together in the glass; just the perfection of his bones, the contrast of his thick black hair, the slash of his dark brows, even the finely drawn scars cutting across his cheekbone no detriment to his beauty.
And me, beside him? A gaunt, pale ghost, white hair, white skin, white robe. Nothing but a bare glimmer in the night, a pallid, wilted flower in a forest of darkness. I ducked my head before he could catch sight of the tears shining in my eyes, tears I couldn't even explain to myself. I'd looked this way for years now. Why should it bother me now, just because he was so close at hand? Maybe it was just the tight braid woven like a crown around my head, the tugging weight of all my hair giving me a headache. Maybe I was just tired, tired enough to see something that wasn't there in the way he looked at me, quiet and still.
“Still hiding from me, Alina?” he asked, in that dark velvet voice, one finger tracing along the line of my jaw, set and stubborn.
"No," I said, and looked up on an indrawn breath, blinking, to meet the reflection of his eyes. "What could I hide from you? You've seen all I have to offer. And still you're kind enough to lie to me."
His eyebrows raised, and I thought a corner of his mouth moved, the barest flicker. "Kind isn't the word you typically have for me. Nor do I know what you think it is I'm lying about this time."
To his credit, I couldn't remember him ever flinching from me, ever seeming to mind the way I look. But how could it not bother him, sharing his bed with an apparition, a woman grown old before her time, drained of color? It certainly bothered me; more than once, I'd eyed his straight razor, wondering if it might grow back its old, familiar warm brown if I shaved off all the white strands, if I scraped my skull clean and watched them fall to the cold slate floor like snow. More than once, I'd thought about crawling to Genya, begging her to turn it any other shade than this. And yet, no gleam of malice showed in his eyes, no lie in the set of his mouth or the tilt of his head as he waited for me to speak. "You can't possibly think I'm lovely like this," I said, my voice flat. If I let it be anything else, I might cry. Reaching for my hairbrush, I tried to pull away from him, to avoid his hands and his eyes in the mirror, watching me with furrows in his brow, but he held me fast.
"I admit I've seen you better dressed," he said. "That golden gown you wore to Nikolai's last party, for example. You're aware I nearly tore it from you right there in the ballroom?"
That almost made me smile. I was very much aware, and the heat of his gaze on me had been blatant enough that even Nikolai had commented on it, the next day. At least that had brought some color to my cheeks, my rising blush even more of a stain than I wanted. For a few moments, I'd looked like a living thing. Nothing like the present, with the firelight wavering, making a hideous specter of my face. "I wasn't talking about what I'm wearing."
"Then what?" Slowly, gently, he grasped my chin in his fingers, forcing it up until I faced myself full on in the glass, his cheek a hairsbreadth from mine. "Surely it isn't your face you find fault in, Alina."
"Only next to yours," I managed, my voice light. Appealing to his arrogance rarely failed.
Of course, tonight it would. "Not even next to mine." His voice sounded firmer than my own, crisp as shadows overlaid on the edges of light, a sharp delineation. "I might begin to suspect you're merely fishing for compliments."
Compliments from the Darkling still made my heart race, fluttering like a butterfly's wings, but he didn't need to know that. "You know me too well," I said brightly, trying once more to shift away, to put an end to this ridiculous conversation my self-pity had entangled me in.
But again, he refused to let go. He'd always been just as stubborn as me. "I do," he said, his hands on my shoulders pinning me to my seat. "Which is how I know you would never do that." For a moment, he studied me, eyes narrowing. I brought my hands together in my lap, nails digging into my palms, wishing - what? That he'd give up, let me go, laugh it off as a silly girl's insecurities and whims? Or that he'd somehow see deeper, beyond the walls I'd purposely set up to keep us apart, see the little wounded shell at my core - the very thing I'd kept hidden from him for good reason.
His inhalation startled me out of thought, sharp in the silence. "Is it your hair that bothers you, Alina?" If I hadn't known better, I'd have called the thing lurking inside his voice incredulity, only I was certain that word played no role in the Darkling's emotional repertoire. Surprising a man centuries old was difficult to do, after all.
"No," I said, lying out of pure habit; it's how we dealt with each other for far too long to have stopped now, just because our war had concluded. Just because we slept in the same bed. "Of course not. Never mind, just - forget it, please?"
In the mirror, he straightened, eyes studying me, the black of his kefta bleeding into shadow, a backdrop for my startling bone-whiteness to emerge, a phantom in the dark. For a moment, I knew he wouldn't let it go, the glint of his eyes telling me he'd not given up. He'd always enjoyed that, enjoyed ferreting out any secrets I might try to keep from him, enjoyed not letting me hide. I watched him open his mouth, before his eyes met mine; before he thought better of it for once, and dropped a kiss on top of my head instead.
"Let me help you," he said, softly. Deftly, his fingers sought out the hairpins holding the end of my braid in place, freeing them, unwinding the long plait, moving with deliberate care, taking his time. My world narrowed down, the root of each strand of hair tingling and alive as everything turned to the lightest of touches; his smooth hands brushing over the tips of my ears, the nape of my neck. The long, capable strokes through the brilliant mass of my hair, teasing the braid apart, splitting it open strand by strand. The mirror reflected his movements, the vivid flashes of his fingers almost obscene against the stark white, buried up to the knuckle; the intensity of his focus, as if he'd never performed a task more delicate or complex. The intimacy of it made me shudder, only intensified as he reached the braid's base, his hands invading the tightly woven mass against my scalp, urging the lot of it to spill loose over his skin. Scents of lavender and juniper perfumed the air around us, thick and enveloping as a living thing, rising from the freed cloud of my hair.
"Beautiful," he murmured, so low I hardly heard him, hardly saw his lips move in the mirror. I was too focused on his hands, still sunk deep in the soft waves left behind by the tight braid. Too distracted by his fingers combing through the strands, passing lightly across my head, down the back of my neck, drawing out shivers in their wake so delicious they left tears behind my closed eyelids, my shallow breath caught in my throat.
I didn't want to break the magic of the moment, and yet, I couldn't help myself. "Do you remember what it used to look like?"
"I have never forgotten a single thing about you, Alina." When I failed to laugh or even smile in response, he sighed, his fingers stilling, a single white lock wrapped around them, gleaming in the low light. "Brown, as I recall. A bit like bronze in the right light."
"Yes," I said, and swallowed hard. Once, I had thought it my best feature, the prettiest thing about my sad, hollow, soured self. Chestnut, someone had called it once, someone I couldn't think of anymore, not here and now. "It used to be warm. Bright, even, once I started using the light."
"It was charming, in its way," he said, and shrugged, letting my hair slip from his fingers, falling back into the mass around me. "If you miss it so, there are measures you might take. Older women at court don't all keep the shades of their youth in their hair through Grisha intervention, you must be aware."
It wasn't as though I hadn't thought of dyes before. But the vanity of the whole enterprise pricked at me, the obvious weakness it would reveal, the declaration to one and all that Sankta Alina was unhappy with herself. Maybe it would be worth it, though, to not have to look at myself and see a lost, blanched creature staring back.
"If I may offer a counterpoint?" the Darkling said, making me jump as I looked up. "Leave it as it is."
I laughed, the sound swallowed by his shadows before it could echo. "Why?" My voice came out a whisper, a bare thread, for all I'd meant to challenge him.
"Brown is…common," he said, arcing one dark brow, his head dipping as he contemplated my hair, lifting a hand to stroke through it once more; the firelight caught in the black of his own, picking out the soft brown streaked through it, and I fought back a smile. "Whereas this - this silver-white is striking. Arresting. Fit for a queen."
I held my breath as he caught up the length of my hair, twisting it into a loose coil and bringing it over my shoulder, letting it spill down the front of my body like a soft snowfall. "I'm not a queen."
"A saint, then," he said, as though the two were one and the same. Maybe they were. "You think of light as the sun," he said, bending near once more, his face so close beside mine I could feel his warmth, and titled into him, a flower to the sun. "As fire, as heat. But that is not the only light in existence."
His shadows crept across the fire, blotting it out, snuffing the lamps nearby. At the same time, they pulled back the curtains, letting a new light wash over us, thin in all its gleaming, watery brightness. "Moonlight," he said, combing through my hair once more, brushing it out to let it fall like silk from his fingertips, blending so well with the silver light it seemed invisible as I watched, transfixed. "Starlight. Those lights that shine out even in the midst of the blackest dark. Your hair is the corona of an eclipse, Alina. The veiled haze that lies between stars, the moon reflected in a field of snow, a thing both gentle and cutting."
"It's the light you can't put out," I breathed, turning to face him, no longer content to stare at a reflection.
His mouth twisted. "If you must."
This time, I did smile, letting my fingers trace along the silver scars I'd long ago left on his skin, fine as strands of my hair. "What would you call it, then?"
"The light that belongs to me." At the base of my throat, his fingers brushed against my skin, tracing the fall of my hair, dipping into the hollows of my clavicle, sliding along the tines of the antlers locked around my neck. "The light that saves the darkness from being an utterly cold, pitiless thing." Tracing lower, his hand nudged aside the edge of my robe, sliding it from my shoulder, leaving me clad only in the bright white of my hair, the rosy tip of my breast peeking out in the silver light.
I felt my mouth go dry, and needed to lick my lips before I could speak. "Is that what you think I did for you, Aleksander?"
Occupied with divesting me entirely of my robe, he failed to respond until it lay in a draped puddle over my seat. "Your hair lost its color when you used your life to pull merzost from me." Frowning a bit, he drew me to my feet, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, as though he saw another version of me, long ago. "You were not the only one affected. Where did that life drawn from you go but back into me, in the end?"
Taking my hand in his, he led me deeper into the room, the curtain of shadow and starlight trailing us like another lover to our bed. "You made me human again, Alina." Wrapping his fist in the waves of my hair, he tugged, just a bit, just enough to pull my head back for him. The roots of my hair tingled with the pressure, with the whispered potential of pain, and my breath came faster. "Every time I see you lying beneath me, that hair spread out like a blanket of light, I'm reminded of it." He pressed his mouth to my throat, kissing across the column of it, until he reached my hair, still wrapped around his hand, and buried his face against it, inhaling. "Each time it falls like a curtain around us when you're on top of me and tickles at my face, the scent of it driving me mad, I think of it."
Pulling back, he took my face between his hands, thumbs stroking over my cheekbones, and I stared up at him, like a thing entranced. Like something bewitched. Maybe I was. "If you request it, I'd cut it from your head myself. I would help you stain it whatever color you pleased. But I would hate it. Please, Alina," he said, resting his forehead against mine, his breath against my mouth. "Don't take that reminder from me."
Glancing over my shoulder, I could still see the mirror behind us, dim and faint through a veil of flitting shadows. And reflected in it? A man made of darkness, of the seething, sucking night, always seeking to tug him beneath it for good. And standing before him, tethering him to life, my glowing figure, shining like a blazing pillar of pure white light.
Enough holding onto the past. I wasn't the scared little ghost anymore, the mushroom girl of the underground. I could be something more, if only I was willing to let myself reach for it. To accept it, one final time.
Reaching up, I drew him down to me, my mouth hot and urgent against his, a demand I knew he wouldn't refuse. "Maybe we saved each other," I whispered to him, a breath between us. Taking his hand in mine, I wrapped a lock of my hair around his wrist, like a leash; like a tether, and fell back into our bed, tugging him down with me. "Remind me I'm alive," I asked, and saw the gleam in his eyes, my light reflected in him, and knew he would oblige.