Ultimately, Nikolai is found at the long table on the ground floor, a heavy mug of coffee at his elbow. There is a plate in front of him, thick slices of toast stacked alongside a wedge of cheese. No meat this morning.
The laces of his tunic have been loosely cinched. A stripe of pink is visible to the well-trained eye, not quite hidden by the fabric.
“Thank you,” is the greeting offered to her, Nikolai’s eyes lifting to her immediately as she enters the room. “I was tired of speaking to you from a distance.”
Not that they had been so physically far last night. It was only the frustration of telegraphing his thoughts to her when he wanted to speak, of being forcibly silent when he was desperate to form words. This is a small thing, a minor favor, but it eases some quiet, lingering discomfort to simply be able to talk directly to her.
She sees it instantly. To be fair, she knows what to look for, and she had indeed eagerly been looking, some part of her hoping that the mark she had left would persist.
Good. It satisfies her seeing the blush of it there, like she's laid claim to something, even if no one else knows of it.
"You are entirely too used to being around people who jump when you tell them," she says, settling into a seat beside him and carving a piece off the cheese that sits there. Despite this rejoinder, she'd jumped too. But he's earned that, she thinks. At least this once.
"You're feeling well, I take it?" Well enough, after all, to get an exhausted little saint home from the castle despite taking her public humiliation for her.
"I would have come to you, had it not involved balancing so many plates."
And perhaps because Nikolai thinks it is all made easier to speak in a common area, not in either of their respective rooms. Would it have created some implication, some sort of pressure, were he to have simply knocked on her door?
Maybe.
There had been enough of a chance that he had sought to avoid it altogether.
He turns the plate of toast towards her, a silent offering, as he considers her question. Pares down to the necessary information to answer her, landing upon:
"Yes, I'm well. The banya took care of the wax, and I'll get some sleep soon enough," is a true accounting. "Are you well?"
"Better," she acknowledges, though there's a creeping confusion about her expression.
A few things that don't settle quite into place. But then she notices that, yes, his hair is still a little damp. She pushes a crust of bread and the slice of cheese into her mouth and chews it over as she tries to slot the pieces together.
"I'm surprised," she says around a mouthful, "that you didn't do that last night when we got back."
It's only that he had the benefit of being fully conscious, had been obliged to watch the Darkling lift her into his arms without any means to dictate where he took Alina, what would be told to her when she woke. It had been right for her to be returned to the boarding house, Nikolai knows this. The Duchess wouldn't have tolerated an overnight guest off a pedestal, and Nikolai hadn't wanted Alina to join him even without much of an audience left to observe her.
But still, watching the Darkling take her—
It's set aside. Nikolai turns his spoon, drawing a trench through his bowl of porridge. What he can't tell is what the decision to apparently return her to her room without explanation is motivated by. It can't be as incidental as not wishing her woken.
"I wasn't permitted to leave with you, Alina," he tells her. "The Darkling carried you out, after he and I spoke."
Alina's eyes slide slowly out of focus. She can feel her skin. Or something crawling all over it. But it's just the thin hairs, prickling with awareness, and not the ghost of Aleksander's hands on her.
The Darkling, Nikolai says. It is a name that the Fjerdans gave him. The name of a monster. She wonders what they call her, up their. What they will call her when all this is over, if it ever ends.
But these are disconnected thoughts, the scattered fragments that surface as she thinks mostly of the way her boots had been removed and tidily tucked under the foot of her bed. How only the belt and outer layer of her kefta was removed, the one that was stained with Nikolai's cum, and folded neatly on top of the only dresser in the room for her to find later.
She had thought these were little gestures of mutual respect extended back and forth across the bridge that she and Nikolai were building together, the one that was supported on their mutual desire to protect one another. They look different now, like long shadows cast by the light coming in the window.
A violation. An invasion. A reminder that he can and will enter every corner of her as he pleases.
She stops chewing. The bread in her mouth is mealy, the cheese rubbery. She gets up from the table, but her knee catches on one of its posts and she can't gracefully extricate herself from the bench, and the plates and silverware rattle, and the room is spinning.
And there's light. Crackling from inside her chest. Blue at the edges of her vision. Her skin feels hot, but when she looks down at her palm, they don't look brighter, they look normal. Sweaty, maybe. She opens her mouth, but words don't come out. She doesn't have anything to say. No excuse to get herself out of there, nor any calm or reasonable way to brush off this news.
As she rises, so does he. Moving in tandem with her, watching the way her expression crumples, the way she hits the table but doesn't flinch, alarm and concern wash over his face.
"Alina," is low, a plea, as he reaches for her.
What a luxury, to be able to reach for her.
"Alina, look at me."
Does it matter, that Nikolai couldn't move? (Maybe this is deliberate too, a lesson for him as much as it is for Alina.) Would he have been able to stop Kirigan from taking her if he weren't paralyzed?
These are questions he can turn over in his mind later. In this moment, all that matters is how Alina has gone pale, struck silent. His fingers settle around hers very loosely, easily dislodged, as he looks into her face. Says her name again, a murmur, maybe a grounding thing to remind her that she is here, and Kirigan is not, to whatever extent that dulls the slap of reaction dragging her out of her own skin.
Orphan code. You don't cry in front of other people. Nikolai's hand finds her arm and her gaze snaps back onto his just as she feels that burning in the corners of her eyes, too much to stand. Her hands are trembling. She closes them into fists, and it's like shuttering windows, the way her fear disappears back into herself.
In all but one presentation. Her voice is a hoarse whisper. Tremulous, wet.
"He knows."
It's not the kind of fearful that comes from paranoia. It's a confession, one she had planned to make later as part of some kind of strategic conversation, not as a way of explaining why she is reeling with the knowledge that he had been so close.
There is some recognition here. Nikolai is not an orphan, but Vasily and the Ravkan court had taught him very well the importance of concealing misery and tears. Alina claws back control by degrees and Nikolai knows immediately the trick of it, what it is to crush an emotion so vast into your fist and keep hold of it lest it get away.
At her sides, Nikolai's hands run up her arms slowly, draw back down to the bend of her elbow. (This too, a luxury.) Her voice is a wreck, betraying the depth of the feeling. Fear. Nikolai recognizes this too.
"He knows?" is a prompt, quiet. He has drawn closer, stepped in as a shield. He is taller, makes a good screen should someone walk in behind them. So little of her is visible at a glance with his body planted protectively in front of her.
There is such little guesswork in the answer, though it might be a help for Alina to say it.
Nikolai had been naked. The wax Alina had drawn across his body had been very obvious, as had his send been on her kefta. The Darkling is not a fool.
"Last night." The recounting comes in fragments. She is not ready, yet, for full thoughts in more coherent sentences. Her voice stays low, like she thinks that the stove might run to tell Aleksander how scared he had made her, what a good job he'd done at disorienting her. How victorious he was. "We were in the library. He told me."
She shakes her head. She feels so stupid. She'd avoided telling anyone immediately particularly because she felt so stupid. Baghra is there in her mind, again—always. Telling her what a stupid little girl she is for ever believing she was anything at all.
There are the tears, again. She can barely hold them back. She brings the back of her hand to her mouth, knuckles brushing her nose. She looks anywhere but at Nikolai.
"He knew from the start. He just let me ..." She shakes her head. "Like it was a game."
So before dinner, they had spoken. Something that troubled her now, knowing he had seen them, knowing that he had taken her.
The sweep of his palms lengthens. Up over her shoulders, down her back, encouraging her a step closer. In against him, where she won't have to avoid his eye, where she might steady herself against him.
"Breathe," comes as a murmur. A suggestion. Not to stop the tears, but temper them when they come.
It was a game, Nikolai knows. Doesn't say as much, because Alina will perhaps come to that on her own and it will be too much of a cruelty to point it out to her.
"What does he know?"
Though this too is coming to Nikolai, understanding by degrees. Managing him, Alina had said. All the way back when Nikolai had been newly arrived and disoriented and Alina had looked at him without a trace of recognition. Her project. What Nikolai had promised her.
He is careful not to stop moving. The consoling strokes of his hand, always roaming, keep this from being a reassuring embrace. It's steadying, the movement. Unpatronizing. And yet some part of Alina wishes that he would just hold her, the way he hadn't been able to the night before, the way they'd both wanted him to. Even if she knows she wouldn't be able to accept it, she aches for it more in its nearness.
But she shuts her eyes. Breathes. Tries to use it to steady herself—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Like they'd taught her while running drills in the First Army.
She'd been sixteen, then. Just a child. She'd heard that they'd talked about lowering the draft age even below that. So many people fought against it, scorned the idea, but she thinks of herself and of Mal and of the other children who were tested in Keramzin when they were just children, children who would have been shipped off instead to the Second Army. Too young for the otkazat'sya, but not for the grisha. Not for Genya. Not for the King.
And then she realizes that Aleksander much have known then, too, when he'd told her about Genya. Pointing her at a different monster, waiting to see if it would redirect her anger, sowing discontent and mistrust between her and Nikolai (as if Aleksander's betrayal hadn't already made her untrusting, isolated).
She squeezes her eyes shut tighter. Pushes all this noise away so that she can answer.
"He knows that I've been lying. Pretending like I still trust him, like I don't know what he is. He knows his mother told me. He knows I ran." She stops for breath. "I don't know what else. I don't know how much he's ..."
If he knows what Alina knows, he could know much more than that. As much as Genya, Zoya, or Nikolai. And Alina was the only one left in the dust, stupid as ever.
By and by, Nikolai closes the slip of distance between them. The sweep of his hands is relegated to one palm, rubbing circles across her back. Maybe he'd be better suited to stillness had he not spent hours frozen, examining every impulse towards motion denied to him.
They haven't done this. He has never held her. He has wanted this, so badly that it makes him mistrust his intentions now. Does it come at the expense of her fear and pain?
When his opposite hand settles at her nape, it is a tentative thing. He had admired the dark gleam of her hair in its heavy updo, the glimpse of her nape above the collar of her kefta. There is a reverence in the way he sets his fingers there, edging just below her hairline.
This close, tucked in against his chest and the burns lingering beneath the fabric of his tunic, Alina can surely hear Nikolai thinking. The speed with which he is considering what she tells him, trying to calculate out the danger it poses to her. (To Genya. To Zoya. To the people in this boarding house, the grisha woman who shared his rooms.)
"We'll find out," becomes: "I'll find out. You won't have to face him alone."
He'd promised, only hours after he had arrived in this village. It's time for him to make good on it.
His palm feels warm, settled against the niez mark that she now knows is there, on the back of her neck. It's like he's covering it up, secreting her own monstrosity away from the two of them and everyone else. They're plotting against Aleksander Kirigan, not against grisha, not against her and what she might have to become in order to stop him.
She knows it's not true, what he says. That when the time comes, she's the only one who will be able to do anything about Aleksander. About the Fold. Because no one else can do what she can do, she is entirely alone in this.
Worse, she has seen what he'll do to others who try to help her, who get in his way, who betray him. It is written in Genya's skin.
"You're in more danger than anyone," she tells him. She straightens herself, steeling herself on that tactical acknowledgment and using it as an anchor to pull herself back from him. She's never led the Second Army, but Nikolai thinks she can, says she will. She'd better start thinking like someone who can, who recognizes that this is a battle, not mere subterfuge. "It's your throne he wants."
When she straightens, Nikolai can observe the damp tracks on her face. The way the toll this takes on her is written over her face still, even as she composes herself once more. His hand lingers at the nape of her neck, thumb soft at the hinge of her jaw. Stay he wants to tell her. As tired as he is, he would hold her for hours more.
It's a fine line to walk, reconciling a figurehead with a living, breathing person. Nikolai has had more practice at this too, at diminishing himself behind a mask. He sees the threads of it in Alina's face now, the beginnings of the woman he had come to know so well.
"I wouldn't deserve it if I cowered from him."
Alina has attempted to discourage him before.
"If he wanted to kill me, he could have," is only simple logic. "I wouldn't have been able to stop him last night. He's playing a game here, and we can beat him at it."
Would Nikolai have been able to stop him if he had movement? Maybe. The odds would be better. And Nikolai has always been able to trade on even the slightest chance of a victory.
"There'd be no advantage in it, for him. The Duchess would blame him for ruining the evening, and she'd resurrect you by the time the month is out." As painful as the resurrection process seemed, it would appear that merely inflicting pain was not part of Aleksander's interests.
Alina thinks on what he'd said to her that day in the library. Of his aims, the little admissions that slipped through. He thinks he's doing the hard thing, the necessary thing, to save Ravka from an inept ruler, and to save grisha from enslavement under him.
But Ravka as Nikolai and Genya have described it is already saved. No Fold, a Grisha queen, and the Lantsov crown on Nikolai's head. Aleksander might have rejoiced these things with the rest of them, had he not made a monster of himself to put them into motion, had he been able to accept that the one who should rule might not be him.
"Why kill you when he can get the same reaction just showing us that he can if he wants to?" She meets Nikolai's gaze finally. There's a raggedness about her. Something tired behind her eyes already. "And without sabotaging his chance to ally with her, besides."
For a long moment, Nikolai is quiet. His fingers trace a nonsense pattern at Alina's nape, his palm resting at the small of her back.
She's right. There is so little room in which to gain advantage in this place. All Kirigan has is the ability to flex his power, to hold it over their heads as a threat. It would only be as effective as they allowed it to be. Without the permanence of death, how much of a motivation could avoiding his power really be?
It occurs to him that it would be a very similar punishment as the Duchess meted out; if the Darkling killed him, it would be very likely an opportunity to teach Alina a lesson as much as to cow Nikolai.
"I owe her a favor," Nikolai admits. "He can't touch me without alienating her, I think."
At least, until the Duchess calls in her favor.
"And he doesn't know what I know. That's another card for us to play on."
"We don't even know the rules or what game we're playing." The reply is desolate. Aleksander would be able to inflict pain after pain upon them to twist them into doing as he wanted precisely as he had back in Ravka and for exactly the same reason: none of them knew what his end goal was.
Beyond the obvious, of course. "If his goal is to get back to Ravka, he'd have better luck working with us than against us. The fact that he's willing to give that up means it's a matter of the circumstances under which he wants us to return in, and making sure that those are settled first."
She draws away from him now, pacing as she thinks. It makes her queasy, realizing how well she can settle into thinking as he does. He has made her paranoid and power hungry and all the things that drive him, as well. It takes no effort at all to imagine the situation from his perspective: it's how she has been thinking all along.
"If it was me, I'd be trying to find a way to regain the kind of powerful allies I'll need back home. And I'd be trying to find a way to ensure we don't bring our problems back with us." She looks at Nikolai very pointedly. "It must have occurred to you, as it has to me, that we might return to Ravka without Kirigan. That means we have to assume it's also occurred to him to return without you."
There's a snarl of possibility here. Alina puts a finger on it, implication weighing heavily on Nikolai as potential outcomes spin out from the question she poses.
What does it mean, to be contained here? What would it mean if he recalls the Darkling scattered into dust and his own coronation? Can any of what he knows to be true be destabilized by what occurs here?
Alina paces and Nikolai leans back against the table, struck briefly silent before his gaze lifts to her once more.
"Are we certain he wants to give up the possibility of working together?"
Alina stops pacing and looks back at him, frozen a moment, disgust apparent in her expression. She may be approaching the pragmatic mindset needed to lead an army, but she's still no politician by any means. Her feelings are written there all over her face, as long as they aren't her pain.
"He destroyed Novokribirsk. He disfigured Genya." Even as she says these things, they feel ... foreign. Distant. Genya's scars are real and present in front of her, and yet she can't fully reconcile that Aleksander put them there because she hadn't seen that kind of violence in him firsthand. But she knows them to be true, speaks of them like they are, because it is enough to know he is the Black Heretic, who made the Fold, which killed her own parents. "You can't be serious."
The expression she wears is a guide, of a sort. A reminder: she is months behind him. They are not yet at a point where she knows him, can track the path his thoughts take.
Braced there against the table, his hands come back together. Watches her for a moment. Maybe thinking again of the library, and how easily she turned a true, painful thing back against him. Maybe thinking of her hands on him, or the press of her back against his stomach as she slept.
His sweet wife, sharp as a blade when she wishes to be.
"I loved my brother, you know," he tells her, because maybe she had never known this of him. Because it is a raw, painful thing to bare to her even now, after spending an evening naked, on display. "When I was little I was just...desperate for his attention. Trailed him everywhere he went. Tried to do everything he did. I thought if I could just master all that my brother did, the two of them would spare a second glance. But even after all my best efforts, and my father was barely interested, and my brother..."
A spreading of hands into that space between them. Her pacing has made him still, or near to it. Holding his ground.
"They were monsters, both of them. But I still had to watch the Darkling's nichevo'ya tear them apart while my mother screamed for them."
These are minor sins, Nikolai knows. What are two lives compared to Novokribirsk? Against Genya's suffering? There is the cynical, terrible truth that the best his father and brother could have done for Ravka was to die as they did.
But the purpose is this: it is personal for Nikolai too, in the way it is personal for Alina, and for Genya.
(He does not name the scar, twinging at his shoulder.)
"Know that I want nothing more than to see him stripped of his power and thrown down into the grave where he belongs. If I ask after his hopes of allegiance, it is only to the extent that it serves that purpose."
It feels like being scolded. Maybe she deserves that, a little. Maybe she should apologize for deliberately eliding the loss of King Pyotr, but she would never mourn him. Can't bring herself to.
In fact, she can't help a flare of defensive anger in her chest because she cannot think that watching the man who'd presumed she would only speak Shu die painfully could compare to what she's had taken from her, to the feeling of Aleksander's shadows crawling across her thighs and the knowledge that he'd known even then, when she was giving herself to him, and had made her twice the fool for it.
It shouldn't matter. She believes him. She believes that he is as serious as she is, as hateful, and that should be enough. It is easier to distract herself from this sense of competition, this notion that only one of them can be the most injured, can have authority over Aleksander's crimes, when she stops to realize—
"What is a nichevo'ya?" She shakes her head. "His 'nothing'?"
How can he expect Alina to mourn Pyotr, or Vasily? Nikolai himself had not.
There are moments when it feels like a failing. It feels like a failing now, speaking of it and realizing how little he had done to recognize their passing. How little he intends to do, knowing what he does now?
Alina's question brings Tamar to mind, her uneasy accounting of the creatures that had billowed into the ballroom. The things that had speared him through the chest, gave him his scar.
It brings to mind Genya, speaking of her fears for Alina behind a closed door.
"His shadows," Nikolai answers. True, on a technicality. "Made of nothing. Impossible to hit with a bullet or a knife, unless they've hold of something."
Or, she thinks she does. His shadows, his nothings, it's just his power. The same power that made the Fold. She'd hoped that her light would be able to fight it, but it's a stupid thought. Without an amplifier, of course they would be stronger.
If she could just get her hands on one... but there's no hope for that here. She rubs at her brow, sitting with that thought. Back to the question at hand.
"We can't be certain he's ruled out cooperation, no. But even if he hasn't, he doesn't want cooperation. He wants obedience." That had been clear to her in the library. "He doesn't want allies. He wants tools."
It isn't a surprise. Of course Kirigan wants tools. (Again he recalls his father, thinking no more of grisha than a man may think of a hammer in a toolbox, a holstered gun waiting to be fired.) He would make all of them subservient to him, if he could. Zoya back at his right hand, Alina at his left, Genya trailing after him, Nikolai—
Where? The picture doesn't immediately complete, though it does lend itself to the possibility of an early grave. It's hard to say what use Nikolai is here and now, and Alina is right: Nikolai occupies his throne. The saving grace is that no one has divulged that just yet.
"No alliance starts off that way," he muses. "We'll have time, to shape our approach as we please. And we outnumber him. That will make things easier, if it comes to that."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forgive me this backflip into prose (cw forced restraint ref)
The laces of his tunic have been loosely cinched. A stripe of pink is visible to the well-trained eye, not quite hidden by the fabric.
“Thank you,” is the greeting offered to her, Nikolai’s eyes lifting to her immediately as she enters the room. “I was tired of speaking to you from a distance.”
Not that they had been so physically far last night. It was only the frustration of telegraphing his thoughts to her when he wanted to speak, of being forcibly silent when he was desperate to form words. This is a small thing, a minor favor, but it eases some quiet, lingering discomfort to simply be able to talk directly to her.
sir this is a wendys (ie an iphone)
Good. It satisfies her seeing the blush of it there, like she's laid claim to something, even if no one else knows of it.
"You are entirely too used to being around people who jump when you tell them," she says, settling into a seat beside him and carving a piece off the cheese that sits there. Despite this rejoinder, she'd jumped too. But he's earned that, she thinks. At least this once.
"You're feeling well, I take it?" Well enough, after all, to get an exhausted little saint home from the castle despite taking her public humiliation for her.
no subject
And perhaps because Nikolai thinks it is all made easier to speak in a common area, not in either of their respective rooms. Would it have created some implication, some sort of pressure, were he to have simply knocked on her door?
Maybe.
There had been enough of a chance that he had sought to avoid it altogether.
He turns the plate of toast towards her, a silent offering, as he considers her question. Pares down to the necessary information to answer her, landing upon:
"Yes, I'm well. The banya took care of the wax, and I'll get some sleep soon enough," is a true accounting. "Are you well?"
no subject
A few things that don't settle quite into place. But then she notices that, yes, his hair is still a little damp. She pushes a crust of bread and the slice of cheese into her mouth and chews it over as she tries to slot the pieces together.
"I'm surprised," she says around a mouthful, "that you didn't do that last night when we got back."
"spoke"
It's only that he had the benefit of being fully conscious, had been obliged to watch the Darkling lift her into his arms without any means to dictate where he took Alina, what would be told to her when she woke. It had been right for her to be returned to the boarding house, Nikolai knows this. The Duchess wouldn't have tolerated an overnight guest off a pedestal, and Nikolai hadn't wanted Alina to join him even without much of an audience left to observe her.
But still, watching the Darkling take her—
It's set aside. Nikolai turns his spoon, drawing a trench through his bowl of porridge. What he can't tell is what the decision to apparently return her to her room without explanation is motivated by. It can't be as incidental as not wishing her woken.
"I wasn't permitted to leave with you, Alina," he tells her. "The Darkling carried you out, after he and I spoke."
"""spoke"""
The Darkling, Nikolai says. It is a name that the Fjerdans gave him. The name of a monster. She wonders what they call her, up their. What they will call her when all this is over, if it ever ends.
But these are disconnected thoughts, the scattered fragments that surface as she thinks mostly of the way her boots had been removed and tidily tucked under the foot of her bed. How only the belt and outer layer of her kefta was removed, the one that was stained with Nikolai's cum, and folded neatly on top of the only dresser in the room for her to find later.
She had thought these were little gestures of mutual respect extended back and forth across the bridge that she and Nikolai were building together, the one that was supported on their mutual desire to protect one another. They look different now, like long shadows cast by the light coming in the window.
A violation. An invasion. A reminder that he can and will enter every corner of her as he pleases.
She stops chewing. The bread in her mouth is mealy, the cheese rubbery. She gets up from the table, but her knee catches on one of its posts and she can't gracefully extricate herself from the bench, and the plates and silverware rattle, and the room is spinning.
And there's light. Crackling from inside her chest. Blue at the edges of her vision. Her skin feels hot, but when she looks down at her palm, they don't look brighter, they look normal. Sweaty, maybe. She opens her mouth, but words don't come out. She doesn't have anything to say. No excuse to get herself out of there, nor any calm or reasonable way to brush off this news.
no subject
"Alina," is low, a plea, as he reaches for her.
What a luxury, to be able to reach for her.
"Alina, look at me."
Does it matter, that Nikolai couldn't move? (Maybe this is deliberate too, a lesson for him as much as it is for Alina.) Would he have been able to stop Kirigan from taking her if he weren't paralyzed?
These are questions he can turn over in his mind later. In this moment, all that matters is how Alina has gone pale, struck silent. His fingers settle around hers very loosely, easily dislodged, as he looks into her face. Says her name again, a murmur, maybe a grounding thing to remind her that she is here, and Kirigan is not, to whatever extent that dulls the slap of reaction dragging her out of her own skin.
no subject
In all but one presentation. Her voice is a hoarse whisper. Tremulous, wet.
"He knows."
It's not the kind of fearful that comes from paranoia. It's a confession, one she had planned to make later as part of some kind of strategic conversation, not as a way of explaining why she is reeling with the knowledge that he had been so close.
cw ref to waxplay.
At her sides, Nikolai's hands run up her arms slowly, draw back down to the bend of her elbow. (This too, a luxury.) Her voice is a wreck, betraying the depth of the feeling. Fear. Nikolai recognizes this too.
"He knows?" is a prompt, quiet. He has drawn closer, stepped in as a shield. He is taller, makes a good screen should someone walk in behind them. So little of her is visible at a glance with his body planted protectively in front of her.
There is such little guesswork in the answer, though it might be a help for Alina to say it.
Nikolai had been naked. The wax Alina had drawn across his body had been very obvious, as had his send been on her kefta. The Darkling is not a fool.
And Alina's reaction to that—
no subject
She shakes her head. She feels so stupid. She'd avoided telling anyone immediately particularly because she felt so stupid. Baghra is there in her mind, again—always. Telling her what a stupid little girl she is for ever believing she was anything at all.
There are the tears, again. She can barely hold them back. She brings the back of her hand to her mouth, knuckles brushing her nose. She looks anywhere but at Nikolai.
"He knew from the start. He just let me ..." She shakes her head. "Like it was a game."
no subject
The sweep of his palms lengthens. Up over her shoulders, down her back, encouraging her a step closer. In against him, where she won't have to avoid his eye, where she might steady herself against him.
"Breathe," comes as a murmur. A suggestion. Not to stop the tears, but temper them when they come.
It was a game, Nikolai knows. Doesn't say as much, because Alina will perhaps come to that on her own and it will be too much of a cruelty to point it out to her.
"What does he know?"
Though this too is coming to Nikolai, understanding by degrees. Managing him, Alina had said. All the way back when Nikolai had been newly arrived and disoriented and Alina had looked at him without a trace of recognition. Her project. What Nikolai had promised her.
He knows, Alina had said. Is this what he knows?
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But she shuts her eyes. Breathes. Tries to use it to steady herself—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Like they'd taught her while running drills in the First Army.
She'd been sixteen, then. Just a child. She'd heard that they'd talked about lowering the draft age even below that. So many people fought against it, scorned the idea, but she thinks of herself and of Mal and of the other children who were tested in Keramzin when they were just children, children who would have been shipped off instead to the Second Army. Too young for the otkazat'sya, but not for the grisha. Not for Genya. Not for the King.
And then she realizes that Aleksander much have known then, too, when he'd told her about Genya. Pointing her at a different monster, waiting to see if it would redirect her anger, sowing discontent and mistrust between her and Nikolai (as if Aleksander's betrayal hadn't already made her untrusting, isolated).
She squeezes her eyes shut tighter. Pushes all this noise away so that she can answer.
"He knows that I've been lying. Pretending like I still trust him, like I don't know what he is. He knows his mother told me. He knows I ran." She stops for breath. "I don't know what else. I don't know how much he's ..."
If he knows what Alina knows, he could know much more than that. As much as Genya, Zoya, or Nikolai. And Alina was the only one left in the dust, stupid as ever.
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They haven't done this. He has never held her. He has wanted this, so badly that it makes him mistrust his intentions now. Does it come at the expense of her fear and pain?
When his opposite hand settles at her nape, it is a tentative thing. He had admired the dark gleam of her hair in its heavy updo, the glimpse of her nape above the collar of her kefta. There is a reverence in the way he sets his fingers there, edging just below her hairline.
This close, tucked in against his chest and the burns lingering beneath the fabric of his tunic, Alina can surely hear Nikolai thinking. The speed with which he is considering what she tells him, trying to calculate out the danger it poses to her. (To Genya. To Zoya. To the people in this boarding house, the grisha woman who shared his rooms.)
"We'll find out," becomes: "I'll find out. You won't have to face him alone."
He'd promised, only hours after he had arrived in this village. It's time for him to make good on it.
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She knows it's not true, what he says. That when the time comes, she's the only one who will be able to do anything about Aleksander. About the Fold. Because no one else can do what she can do, she is entirely alone in this.
Worse, she has seen what he'll do to others who try to help her, who get in his way, who betray him. It is written in Genya's skin.
"You're in more danger than anyone," she tells him. She straightens herself, steeling herself on that tactical acknowledgment and using it as an anchor to pull herself back from him. She's never led the Second Army, but Nikolai thinks she can, says she will. She'd better start thinking like someone who can, who recognizes that this is a battle, not mere subterfuge. "It's your throne he wants."
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It's a fine line to walk, reconciling a figurehead with a living, breathing person. Nikolai has had more practice at this too, at diminishing himself behind a mask. He sees the threads of it in Alina's face now, the beginnings of the woman he had come to know so well.
"I wouldn't deserve it if I cowered from him."
Alina has attempted to discourage him before.
"If he wanted to kill me, he could have," is only simple logic. "I wouldn't have been able to stop him last night. He's playing a game here, and we can beat him at it."
Would Nikolai have been able to stop him if he had movement? Maybe. The odds would be better. And Nikolai has always been able to trade on even the slightest chance of a victory.
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"There'd be no advantage in it, for him. The Duchess would blame him for ruining the evening, and she'd resurrect you by the time the month is out." As painful as the resurrection process seemed, it would appear that merely inflicting pain was not part of Aleksander's interests.
Alina thinks on what he'd said to her that day in the library. Of his aims, the little admissions that slipped through. He thinks he's doing the hard thing, the necessary thing, to save Ravka from an inept ruler, and to save grisha from enslavement under him.
But Ravka as Nikolai and Genya have described it is already saved. No Fold, a Grisha queen, and the Lantsov crown on Nikolai's head. Aleksander might have rejoiced these things with the rest of them, had he not made a monster of himself to put them into motion, had he been able to accept that the one who should rule might not be him.
"Why kill you when he can get the same reaction just showing us that he can if he wants to?" She meets Nikolai's gaze finally. There's a raggedness about her. Something tired behind her eyes already. "And without sabotaging his chance to ally with her, besides."
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She's right. There is so little room in which to gain advantage in this place. All Kirigan has is the ability to flex his power, to hold it over their heads as a threat. It would only be as effective as they allowed it to be. Without the permanence of death, how much of a motivation could avoiding his power really be?
It occurs to him that it would be a very similar punishment as the Duchess meted out; if the Darkling killed him, it would be very likely an opportunity to teach Alina a lesson as much as to cow Nikolai.
"I owe her a favor," Nikolai admits. "He can't touch me without alienating her, I think."
At least, until the Duchess calls in her favor.
"And he doesn't know what I know. That's another card for us to play on."
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Beyond the obvious, of course. "If his goal is to get back to Ravka, he'd have better luck working with us than against us. The fact that he's willing to give that up means it's a matter of the circumstances under which he wants us to return in, and making sure that those are settled first."
She draws away from him now, pacing as she thinks. It makes her queasy, realizing how well she can settle into thinking as he does. He has made her paranoid and power hungry and all the things that drive him, as well. It takes no effort at all to imagine the situation from his perspective: it's how she has been thinking all along.
"If it was me, I'd be trying to find a way to regain the kind of powerful allies I'll need back home. And I'd be trying to find a way to ensure we don't bring our problems back with us." She looks at Nikolai very pointedly. "It must have occurred to you, as it has to me, that we might return to Ravka without Kirigan. That means we have to assume it's also occurred to him to return without you."
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There's a snarl of possibility here. Alina puts a finger on it, implication weighing heavily on Nikolai as potential outcomes spin out from the question she poses.
What does it mean, to be contained here? What would it mean if he recalls the Darkling scattered into dust and his own coronation? Can any of what he knows to be true be destabilized by what occurs here?
Alina paces and Nikolai leans back against the table, struck briefly silent before his gaze lifts to her once more.
"Are we certain he wants to give up the possibility of working together?"
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"He destroyed Novokribirsk. He disfigured Genya." Even as she says these things, they feel ... foreign. Distant. Genya's scars are real and present in front of her, and yet she can't fully reconcile that Aleksander put them there because she hadn't seen that kind of violence in him firsthand. But she knows them to be true, speaks of them like they are, because it is enough to know he is the Black Heretic, who made the Fold, which killed her own parents. "You can't be serious."
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Braced there against the table, his hands come back together. Watches her for a moment. Maybe thinking again of the library, and how easily she turned a true, painful thing back against him. Maybe thinking of her hands on him, or the press of her back against his stomach as she slept.
His sweet wife, sharp as a blade when she wishes to be.
"I loved my brother, you know," he tells her, because maybe she had never known this of him. Because it is a raw, painful thing to bare to her even now, after spending an evening naked, on display. "When I was little I was just...desperate for his attention. Trailed him everywhere he went. Tried to do everything he did. I thought if I could just master all that my brother did, the two of them would spare a second glance. But even after all my best efforts, and my father was barely interested, and my brother..."
A spreading of hands into that space between them. Her pacing has made him still, or near to it. Holding his ground.
"They were monsters, both of them. But I still had to watch the Darkling's nichevo'ya tear them apart while my mother screamed for them."
These are minor sins, Nikolai knows. What are two lives compared to Novokribirsk? Against Genya's suffering? There is the cynical, terrible truth that the best his father and brother could have done for Ravka was to die as they did.
But the purpose is this: it is personal for Nikolai too, in the way it is personal for Alina, and for Genya.
(He does not name the scar, twinging at his shoulder.)
"Know that I want nothing more than to see him stripped of his power and thrown down into the grave where he belongs. If I ask after his hopes of allegiance, it is only to the extent that it serves that purpose."
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In fact, she can't help a flare of defensive anger in her chest because she cannot think that watching the man who'd presumed she would only speak Shu die painfully could compare to what she's had taken from her, to the feeling of Aleksander's shadows crawling across her thighs and the knowledge that he'd known even then, when she was giving herself to him, and had made her twice the fool for it.
It shouldn't matter. She believes him. She believes that he is as serious as she is, as hateful, and that should be enough. It is easier to distract herself from this sense of competition, this notion that only one of them can be the most injured, can have authority over Aleksander's crimes, when she stops to realize—
"What is a nichevo'ya?" She shakes her head. "His 'nothing'?"
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There are moments when it feels like a failing. It feels like a failing now, speaking of it and realizing how little he had done to recognize their passing. How little he intends to do, knowing what he does now?
Alina's question brings Tamar to mind, her uneasy accounting of the creatures that had billowed into the ballroom. The things that had speared him through the chest, gave him his scar.
It brings to mind Genya, speaking of her fears for Alina behind a closed door.
"His shadows," Nikolai answers. True, on a technicality. "Made of nothing. Impossible to hit with a bullet or a knife, unless they've hold of something."
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Or, she thinks she does. His shadows, his nothings, it's just his power. The same power that made the Fold. She'd hoped that her light would be able to fight it, but it's a stupid thought. Without an amplifier, of course they would be stronger.
If she could just get her hands on one... but there's no hope for that here. She rubs at her brow, sitting with that thought. Back to the question at hand.
"We can't be certain he's ruled out cooperation, no. But even if he hasn't, he doesn't want cooperation. He wants obedience." That had been clear to her in the library. "He doesn't want allies. He wants tools."
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It isn't a surprise. Of course Kirigan wants tools. (Again he recalls his father, thinking no more of grisha than a man may think of a hammer in a toolbox, a holstered gun waiting to be fired.) He would make all of them subservient to him, if he could. Zoya back at his right hand, Alina at his left, Genya trailing after him, Nikolai—
Where? The picture doesn't immediately complete, though it does lend itself to the possibility of an early grave. It's hard to say what use Nikolai is here and now, and Alina is right: Nikolai occupies his throne. The saving grace is that no one has divulged that just yet.
"No alliance starts off that way," he muses. "We'll have time, to shape our approach as we please. And we outnumber him. That will make things easier, if it comes to that."
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(cw: dubcon, risk of pregnancy, magic plan b)
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cw forced restraint, humiliation
cw: body shaming
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cw unplanned pregnancy contemplations
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