Archive of Our Own

Her first Ravkan ball Alina dances with seven suitors. Her gown is white silk net and silver thread, her black hair is adorned with a pearl and moonstone comb, and even the sour mouthed matrons fluttering fans in the corner admit that the Shu heiress dances exquisitely — a poetically inclined scribbler at the society pages calls her movements “fluid as a ribbon of starlight.” 

Her aunt snorts when she reads that one over breakfast, the entry hall piling up with cards and flowers. Alina hides her smile with a cough, dutifully stirring cream into her teacup.

“You’ve made a splash for yourself, niece.” Ana Kuya says, mildly. It’s the work of several months of lessons and planning, strategized and launched as meticulously as a military campaign, and Alina bows her head, knowing the sound of approval from her aunt’s reserved tongue.

“Do you already have a gentleman in mind?” No beating around the bush. Generations of wealth, connection, and benign disinterest in power have given Alina the luxury of choosing a husband for herself. Ana Kuya sits back as her niece sets down her tea and nods.

“A few,” she says cautiously. “Nikolai Lantsov. Tolya Yul-Bataar. Aleksander Morozov.”

An eyebrow raise at the last one. “Morozov? The former Ravkan ambassador to Shu-Han? You hardly spoke to him at all.”

“Maybe not. But he sent beautiful flowers. I have an interest in knowing him further.”

“Ah.” Ana Kuya frowns. “The black orchids. A bit dark for a courting gift, I thought, but— well. It is your choice, I suppose. We’ll consider further steps after our morning walk.”

“Thank you.” Alina dips her head. When her aunt leaves the room, she darts into the hall.

Black orchids. She strokes the velvet petals, presses her thumb to the lurid purple heart. Remembers the murmur of Morozov’s mouth, his teeth grazing her stiff bud of a clit, his tongue licking slowly the nectar of her cunt. 

Your Ravkan ladies , she remembers sighing, hand in his hair, pressing herself harder into his mouth. They have pussies like roses, don’t they? All pink and pretty and soft. 

Fishing for a compliment, Starkova? he’d laughed, his finger sinking into her, his hand pinning her silk skirt up her sun gold thigh. I love all flowers, solnyshka. Though I must say, I’ve developed a particular taste for your garden. 

You flatterer, she’d ridden his handsome face, right there, in her own moonlit yard, her maid keeping watch by the far wall. You diplomats with your silver tongues. I have a much better use for you than talk — I don’t believe a word out of your pretty mouth. 

Afterwards, tying closed the sashes of her robe, licking her lips clean of his musky come, she’d asked: So, what does it mean? Solnyshka?

I love the way you say it , he’d said, kissing her hair. Your accent — never change it. It makes music out of the language I love.

I was never going to. You’re avoiding my question.

His laugh rustles the quiet of Shu night. I’m leaving for Os Alta at the end of this month. Come to me there, Alina. I promise you’ll find out. 

Why would I? She’d asked, stubborn. Here I have everything I want.

Do you? His hand sliding under her jaw, mouth punishing hers in a kiss. You don’t have me , moya dusha. And I know your father allows you many freedoms, but you have not seen the world yet. How could you know what you want?

She’d bitten him for that — then, quick regret washing over her, had tried to soothe it with her tongue. He’d brushed her off.

Leave it, Alina. Blood on his teeth in the night gleams dark. It’s a good farewell gift — a scar.

She had known then, right then, that he was right. This man who had lived her life near thrice over — this was the man who owned her heart. Will I see you again, before you leave?

Perhaps. I make no promises. Their foreheads touching, his face bent tenderly to hers. 

Think about what I said, he told her before leaving. It is half of your story. You are part Ravkan yourself. 

A handful of quiet suggestions to her father, a carefully worded letter to her aunt. Alina was an anomaly amongst the Shu court, anyway: the freckles across her nose, her feet country large and unbound. Not for the first time, she is grateful for brothers — sons for her father to focus on. 

She’s packed off to Ravka within the season, engages the services of etiquette tutors, music teachers, dance masters.

“I want the best money can buy,” she’d told her aunt, boldly. “After all, we can afford it, can we not?”

“You have more courage than I thought, little niece,” Ana Kuya smiled. “I was afraid after your mother died — well, girls of breeding everywhere are delicate flowers. But courtship is not a game for weaklings.”

If Ana Kuya was surprised by the force of Morozov’s ardor, she did not let on.

A thundering avalanche of gifts and house calls. Baskets of fruits, sheaths of colored silks, strange sweets that melt like cream on her tongue. Maps, beautifully rendered and colored; illustrated books from all places and about all things — some in languages she can read, a few in languages she cannot. 

Outings by the river. Strolls through the promenade. Museums, concerts, plays at the theatre. If Ravkan high society is shocked by the length and intensity of the courtship, they do not say a thing. Alina steels herself for it, reads the papers each day before Ana Kuya does, and yet she never sees an unkind word.

It is a rare courtesy, she realizes, not for her — but afforded to the girl courted by Morozov. 

“When will you leave for your next post?” She asks him, walking through his estate gardens. Far in the distance, by the wall, her aunt fans herself lazily in the sun. The most reasonable kind of chaperone, one eye open and the other shut. Alina aches beneath her skirts, feels the heat rising to her skin as it flushes. Wants to whisk the man behind a tree and kiss him senseless — that has always been enjoyable: the wet, animal communication of their mouths.

“Not until I’m married.” He says, easily. He grins, unrepentant, at her sardonic brow. “What?”

“So you will travel again.” Something fast and painful happening to her heart. “If you ever marry —”

“ — when we are married —” 

“ — what do you expect of your wife? You’ll just leave her here to raise your children? While you travel the world yourself?” Her strides have grown long and quick, her breath short. She makes a sharp turn down the garden path, the crunch of pebbles loud against her shoes. 

“I would not,” he insists, following her. “I would never leave my family here alone. My wife would be cared for, with plenty of servants to help. The journeys I make are dangerous, Alina, but if she wanted to, she could come.”

“You don’t mean that.” Her voice is ugly and tart. She hates the words as she says them, and if there is any music to be given his language from her mouth, it is a cacophonous, crowded, horrible song. “You don’t want your wife there — you want to be free to grace the beds of princesses, and return smiling with her lavish gifts piled up in your arms.”

It is a rare, perfect season for walking. Crisp air and warm sunlight, bright spots of flowers dotting the grass. 

But she is too cold. Too, too, cold. She suddenly hates it here, this cultivated beauty of a Ravkan house. She has been here near a year and she suddenly misses Shu Han, it is too flat here, she misses the embrace of blue mountains, the thick humid air that sits heavy on her skin like fog.

“Is that what you think of me?” He asks, and for once, the shape of his jaw is hard. “That I am going through all this — for what? You think that I am some monster led around by my cock, tasting of exotic delights and discarding them as they come?”

“Well, you love all flowers.” It is not funny. It is not. It is not. It is not . But she cannot help it, this ugly, horrid creature within her, spitting his love words back at him with humorless laughter. “Flowers wilt as they age, you know. And it’s easy to love a girl who’s new and exotic and smiles prettily — maybe you are the one who doesn’t know what he wants.”

“Is this who you are, then?” A cold slant to his smile. “You think I don’t know you? Are you telling me I should reconsider, because you’ll grow into a jealous hag who will make my life difficult, because after all this time we’ve spent I still have not earned your trust?”

“Perhaps.” Already her throat is closing, the heat under her skin fever pitched. A rush of feeling — and for what? But something in her egging her on, on, on. “Perhaps you have wasted your time and coin on a girl you dreamed up. I am not some exotic prize to be won and kept under glass, Aleksander. I will not spend my whole life unchanging, waiting for you to come home to make you a brood of dark haired children with delicate cherry blossom mouths. And I will not mold myself into your perfect Ravkan lady any longer, either. I can’t do it. I’m not good at it. I would never belong.”

He reached for her then, a softness she cannot bear. “Oh, Alina. Love —”

She shakes her head furiously, stepping away. Raises her hand to signal her aunt. “I can’t — I wouldn’t be a good ambassador’s wife, Aleksander. I can’t stay here, waiting for you. But I also can’t travel with you, always moving, always exploring, long years away from home. I don’t— we must end this here, Sasha. I have to go.”

His mouth opening, an answering fury darkening his scowl. But Ana Kuya is there in a flash, elbowing her way into the crook of her niece’s arm, eyes flashing in warning. 

“If you’ll excuse us, your excellency,” she says, frostily. “Alina and I have dinner plans with the Lantsovs.”

It is a ferocious loyalty , Alina thinks as her aunt marches her away, supporting the both of them with not a glimpse of strain on her face. The bond of familial love. Deep and inviolable, uncaring of right and wrong. 

Her aunt says nothing when Alina weeps in the carriage, doesn’t ask a thing when Alina skips dinner, retreats to the sanctuary of her room. 

Oh, Alina’s a fool. A brainless, bitter, shrewish fool. 

Silly girl, horrid with homesickness, spine shaking with the weight of what even her beauty, her manners, her wealth, the power of her Ravkan aunt, not even the influence of Morozov, can shield her from.

She didn’t know it would be this hard. She had thought she was brave enough. She had thought that the months of dance lessons, her feet bruised sore to the unrelenting pace of the foxtrot; the slaps of her etiquette teacher on her wrists as she identified each fork and glass; the sheer beauty of the dresses, so wonderful, so unlike the clothes she wore back home — she had thought that was all. 

Here I am, playing your courtship game as well as you did mine, she’d thought, each night, victory coursing in her veins as she pulled on her lacy Ravkan nightgown. I can win on your battlefield, as well. I’ll make them love me, these people who mean so much to you, I’ll make sure they all know there was nobody better, nobody else.

A farce. She was so stupid. Twenty one years of age and still crying for home like a child, just because the ladies didn’t welcome her into their parlors with open arms.

Did she think she would belong here? She was as much a freak here as she was back in Ahmrat Jen — here her skin too dark, nose too flat and shapeless, eyes too small. People speak to her slowly, as though her accent means a lack of understanding. Alina needs more than just a husband to be: she needs friends, she needs arms to fall in, a life, a sense of safety, a world that feels hers to claim.

Night falls outside and still Alina weeps, drunk on self pity and shame.

Aleksander deserved a wife who could adapt to difficult situations, she decides, heart broken and mind made. Who was she, to stray with him to the capitals of the world, to flounce on his arm and sail side by side on his ship’s bow — when she cannot, even in a country that is half hers by blood, make a home for herself with the man she loves?

A soft patter on her window. Alina lifts her eyes to the sky for rain. Blinks at the unclouded moon, luminous with reproach. Another plink. A pebble drops.

Out on the balcony, leaning over the railing, she sees him: silhouetted against the trees in the dark. 

A finger held to her lips, her heart seizing. Oh, courage, do not fail me now .

Even in Ravkan gardens the moonlight is the same.

Alina cannot look at him when she tells him, makes him turn away. They sit back to back on the carved stone bench, her soft slippers damp from the grass, his hand clenched white-knuckled in the broad clasp of his lap.

Alina knows the embrace of that lap. Has ridden him rough and aching, her head tossed back, his mouth sealing bruises ardent as scarlet flame, licking up her throat, flowers climbing vines in late summer.

It’s strange that it is here, where women are out and about like people instead of tender buds grown in a glass hothouse, that she touches him less. She used to cover her mouth behind the paper screen as he regaled her father over tea, used to kneel until red circles formed on her knees, entranced by his stories of conquest, imagining the face to his warm worldly voice, fighting a fondness she couldn’t name.

She used to slip him letters between pages of books, poetry and pressed flowers. She used to bind her chest like a man’s and slip out in servant’s robes, hat pressed low over her hair. 

The streets of Ahmrat Jen’s were theirs — there nobody knew what the half-Ravkan girl really looked like, she was in no danger, her ravenous kisses on his shoulders in wine shops and pleasure houses were accompanied by no fear or shame.

Here everyone knows her. Here everyone watches her, and Morozov, damn Morozov, he treated her like a proper lady, intent on doing everything right, and she withered and wilted in public. At night, alone in her bed — she burned.

She does not tell him this part. It is a hard enough job, to lay out her terms of surrender: she cannot play out this game.

“You’re wrong.” He tells her, the moment she finishes. “You’re wrong, Alina. Saints .”

“I’m not. Don’t infantilize me. I can’t be an ambassador’s wife, clearly. And I can’t live here, either. I can’t do this alone, I can’t always be somewhere, waiting—”

“You foolish girl.” He stands up, fists clenched, rounding the bench in rage. “You don’t have to wait, you idiot. You’re the stupidest girl I know.”

He is good at speeches, this she knows, and when he lays out the bones of his love for her she almost caves. They are exactly what she wants to hear from a man like him, exactly , and Alina is but a girl, and she wants to believe so badly that his love will save them both.

But though she accepts his kiss on her mouth and lets herself open softly as a flower, though she smiles up at him in moonlight and lets her hand take the shape of his jaw, Alina knows that this is goodbye.

She will not believe his words of reassurance about who she is and what he can do for her until she knows more about where she belongs herself.

Alina watches him slip out of the garden before she pulls closed the curtains, his gait languid and easy, a man satisfied, a lover rewon.

Standing alone in the dark of her bedroom: Alina knows what she must do.

The bags are easy enough to pack. The note is more difficult.

Thank you for all that you’ve given me, dear aunt. Alina writes. But I must leave for Amrhat Jen immediately. By the time you read this, I will be on the next train. 

To her father she writes: 

Baba, I have found a vocation here, though it is not, as I hoped, one of matrimonial love. I am leaving for the convent in the steppes of east Ravka. I hope to live out my days there, in devotion to the saints. 

To Aleksander, a note to send out with the morning post:

Sasha,

Thank you for your kindnesses. You’re right. I must see the world for myself. 

Alina.

And, because she cannot help it, she adds —

Thank you for the flowers. I pressed a thousand ones between the pages of your books, but they never turned out right. 

There is no need for sheets outside windows and subterfuge. She awakens the stable boy with a gold coin pressed into his palm. She takes her favorite horse — a stout, greyish white mare whose mane makes her think of ash-stained starlight — and just like that, the Shu heiress vanishes into the night.

With every mile Alina puts in between herself and Os Alta, the more painful her heart throbs. 

Train to Os Kervo — she has yet to see much of Ravka proper, but to escape out of this life, she can’t dally too long on the way to the port.

She boards a merchant vessel to Novyi Zem, because that’s the farthest place she can think of, and because it’s a refuge, and she’s always wanted to see where people go when they have nowhere else.

Somewhere between the Reb Harbor and Shriftport she loses her purse and has to stoop and scrounge like all the other travelers.

She works on farms and she works in shops and she works in markets and only narrowly escapes the mines. 

And there is good work and there is hard work and there is work that makes her soul fill with light.

But there are good people too, and kindness runs deeper in some than others but Alina learns to tell.

Alina is smart and she is thrifty, and her hands are no longer soft. But sometimes even she makes a bad bargain, one that leaves her without transport in a cave in the desert, her waterskin empty and her pockets cut.

It’s not quite so romantic, then, this sense of adventure, this idea she had of seeing the world.

Because yes, here she is, deep in the guts of it, this filthy fucking world, and she’s on her hands and knees in the gunk and swallowing tears because it’s a waste of moisture to cry, and she’s starving and her stomach is flat and she’s thinking If only I stayed I could have been taking a bath .

All the things she grew up with – the poetry and the salad forks, her refined manners and her gently useless ambitions – all of it is crunched under the weight of her own inadequacy out in this world that has no cause to adore her, that she has done nothing for.

Who is Alina Starkova with nobody’s money to prop her up, whose decisions are hers to suffer alone?

She dreams of his hands prying up her jaw and his voice cooing for her to drink. And she can almost smell it, the taste of salt from his hand, feel the warm shape of him cradling her back.

In her dreams it’s not a betrayal to want to be saved, it’s not weakness to tell him she wishes he could take her home.

She wants all of Aleksander’s kisses, wants the damp luminosity of that moonlit garden. Wants orchids rarer than jewels, wants soft silks and a full belly and Sasha’s gentle mouth. 

Except when she wakes it’s somebody else holding a water bowl to her cracked lips, and it pierces Alina deeper, the kindness of this stranger, this woman who owes nothing to her and yet still chose to help. And Alina is too weak to do much but press her forehead to the back of this woman’s hand, and in every language she knows she says thank you and thank you and thank you and the woman smiles and touches her cheek gently – as though she is a child.

Homesickness ebbs and flows, but Alina learns to live with it.

She rather likes getting to make a shape for herself in each new city, to collect acquaintances and hiding spots like jewels on a crown, to test her paper vocabulary against fluent, native tongues. And with each place she travels to, it is easier to find her footing.

It’s a joy to realize how small she is. How unwise sometimes. How little she knows. 

But oh, things that used to render her helpless and ashamed, sulky as a boy – these things are laughable now. 

Perfection cannot be achieved in a life of moving guidelines. And besides – nobody cares, nobody is watching, and she alone knows how far she’s come and how hard she’s trying. And in these fluid moment, Alina finds her dual background a strength, two worlds that she knows and whose knowledge she shifts and draws upon.

Prejudice exists everywhere, including inside her own heart. But day after day Alina looks for beauty and often finds it, and that she likes most of all.

There are men she sleeps with, and there are women, too. It’s a delight to learn that even without her silks and her dowry and her harp, Alina is beautiful, Alina is wanted , and that an open hand led to the breast is still an invitation to touch.

She misses him, though, the ache strongest when her lover turns to bury their sleeping face in the sheets.

Where are you, Aleksander? She wonders, the moonlight falling on her stomach, her fingers massaging another man’s spend into her cunt.

They could be in the same city, really. Except she was here in the apartment of an artist, while he was probably in the Ambassador’s residence across town. 

If he was here, would she want to seek him out?

No , Alina thinks, her grin sharp with her aloneness, even now. I still have much to see without him .

He is beautiful, this dark eyed, brawny poet she met last night at the bar. 

His eyes remind her of Aleksander’s. It’s a silly thing, but she likes that, and she asks him for more of his seed inside her, just to fill her up.

“You speak Ravkan?” The captain raises a brow. “Where’d you learn it?”

In her mind, as always, rings the voice of the Ambassador, and she longs to say: I am part Ravkan myself . 

But it is the same story to wade through, and the briney chill of the Ketterdam docks is no place to rehash this particular pantomime.

Instead Alina says “I knew a man” and opens the coat over her rounded belly and lets the sigh in her voice do the rest.

She never does get to reach the Wandering Isle, but she gets darned close, closer even than Morozov. 

Here in the mountains beyond the Permafrost, nobody expects to find a girl from Amrhat Jen. 

The tavern has no name, though some jokingly call it the inn at the end of the world. And only stragglers come through here: a few lone merchants, refugees from countless wars, monks and pilgrims and runaway saints.

Alina finds lodging here, somewhere in the crossing between her thirtieth and fortieth year. It is time to find a home, even for a moment, if not for her, then for the boy and girl who are the loves of her whole life. 

She cuts wood for the fire and slings liquor in the tavern. When the roads thaw in spring she does calculations for fur trappers and writes letters for travelers in every language she knows. She teaches the village children their sums and their geography when their lone traveling teacher gives up and leaves town, and there’s a few brilliant children she wishes to teach more to, but their parents need them to do the hard work of mountainous survival, and what is politics and economics and history of foreign lands to them? Everyone depends on each other around here, and a dream of further education or a life for themselves is a luxury, one that gently starves everyone else.

Some days Alina sits on her bed and counts her coins and thinks of making her way back to Shu Han or Ravka. Or perhaps Ketterdam, that dark, smoky jewel in the True Sea — perhaps her boy would like it, the canals and the boats and the people and fuss. And her girl is smart, smart enough to make it, to learn from merchants and engineers and make something of her small, ferocious self.

But oh, she has not quite enough money, and it will take her many months.

Besides, Alina thinks she wouldn’t mind dying here. It’s funny. When she was younger she felt that all the world boiled down to dresses and jewels and accents and the flickers of power that cross the length of an hour. 

— and it did, that’s the thing, back where she came from.

Except the world, as they say, is big. And Alina finds that in certain corners one can find pockets that empires forgot.

She wants her children to grow up in this place, she decides, putting her few valuables back in her pouch. 

She wants her children to grow up with the harshness of seasons, with the skies as a mother bringing both sunshine and rain, with the mishmash of people from all different pasts who smile not too often but mean it when they do, with the freedom to see the world at their feet and a thousand roads to choose on the way down.

Nobody comments on their skin tone here, on their eyes or their accents.

It’s like her mother used to say: everyone comes from somewhere.

She used to imagine it a thousand different ways.

He’d come onto the ship as a passenger — the best cabin, of course, fit for an emissary of the Ravkan crown — he’d come up to the decks to pace and see the stars, and he’d see her, hoisting the sail, and he’d stop.

Or maybe she’s on a horse riding through the market stalls — this was back when she still had the horse, before she’d weeping given her up — her bag full of fresh produce to hawk from nearby farms, and he’d come out of a building talking important business, eyes squinted against the sun.

Over the years Alina has learned how to hoard and savor these daydreams. And once they had the power to make her cry, bitter from childish loss. Now that they’ve lost their power over her — she likes to pretend that part of her life belonged to someone else — she finds herself preparing for them less often.

Sometimes even fantasies outgrow themselves.

But she is in the tavern serving in the afternoon. It is early spring and though the snow has not yet melted completely, quite a few brave travelers have trickled into town. There are your usual groups of strangers, big coats and tired faces, ears stung red from cold and the furs around their collars flipped up.

Alina attends them, drifting from table to table in the quiet bar. She pours ale for everyone because it’s what’s cheapest, and also because at this moment ale is all they have to sell.

But she sees the ring on his finger before she hears the fine timbre of his voice, and her hand slips on the ale pitcher for the first time in years. 

A dull clatter on the packed earth floor and the liquor soaked into the soil, his head lifts up and he stares at her, a pedestrian kind of look — and for a moment Alina has the horrific relief-realization-fear-despair that he might not recognize her — except it seems she gave too little credit to the ardor of His Excellency the Ambassador Aleksander Morozov, because he is toppling back out of his chair with his face white and lost as a ghost, and Alina’s throat is choking on nothing because oh god , he is beautiful , and oh fuck , when did her darling Sasha grow old ?

Now would not be the time to lament her not combing through her hair this morning, the shorn silken strands wild round her face like a dark angel’s halo. And Alina is happy with her clothes, the lived-in, loved-in purpose of them, these homespun threads made by her hands and those who care enough to clothe her, these shoes that have carried her across these mountains she has learned to call home. But to meet a man who she loved as a younger woman brings her to mind of herself as a girl, and she is afraid of what she might find in his eyes, afraid to discover just how he has changed, terrified to find that he has not.

The ground froths at her feet with the spilled ale, and Alina meets Aleksander’s gaze across the dim air full of memories and dust.

“Inej,” she calls to the barkeep, and the woman who she owes half her life to appears, wraith-like, behind the bar. “I’ll be taking my break now.”

He is here on a cartography mission, he tells her.

Small fish for the former ambassador, but this Aleksander has silver in his hair, and Alina doesn’t tease him for it. She supposes anything that gets him out of Shu Han and Ravka is probably good enough.

She had thought when they met it would be all passion and remonstrance, fights she’s stored up in her spine since she was a quarrelsome child. She thought they would kiss each other and fall into each other’s arms and weep and curse for the time that has come between them.

But it turns out that she greatly overestimated both their capacities for dramatics. It turns out that what Morozov wants is not explanations. He is content to sit with her and know that she is well.

She helps him map the waterways. He tells her news of the world that he came from. And it is different knowledge than the stuff the shepherds and tradesmen pass on, this is intrigue and sedition and traitor lies from the mouth of a tsar, but it recalls her to when they two were courting in the Shu Han dark, and he would feed her bits of treachery like honeycomb in his mouth, and Alina would pretend she didn’t care, pretend she’d rather have his cock in her cunt and ask him to shut up — but all along she’d relished knowing how total his trust was in her, how he gave her secrets to ruin his life like he knew how much she needed them to risk love.

Most nights when the candles burned low in his room, she would gather up the maps and see herself out. Her children are waiting for her, at the bend of the wood before the well, and she earns coins for her labor with Morozov, yes, but she loves her kind Dima and her clever little Amita, and even if others are willing to watch them, she likes the way their childish chatter lifts her conflicted, heavy heart.

He does not ask anything of her, when she goes.

When spring bleeds into summer, the maps are complete.

He tallies up her coins in exchange for secretarial services, and asks her for the list of things she’d wanted for the town. 

School supplies. Tools. Medicine. Books. 

He has grown fond of the village children, the way they truly belong to everyone — it’s hard to tell, with the way they all help each other out, whose children are whose — and for both these facts Alina is secretly grateful. She’s asked for some outrageous things on the school supplies list, but he can afford it. 

The creeping cowardice that has her throat clogging up each time she should introduce her children to Aleksander, that she does not understand herself. 

She is not ashamed of him or of them, but. 

There’s a part of her that savors each moment he does not see her as a mother, as if she is still the young Shu heiress with starlight in her hair.

Aleksander gets to the end of her list of demands and he folds it away without complaint.

“What about you?” He asks, and there is a hunger in his eyes she cannot quite bear. A longing for what cannot be returned again. “What can I do for you for your services, Alina?”

“What I want cannot be bought.”

He always had a way of smiling, a small half tilt of his mouth, as though joy were a secret he’d stolen as a boy from a hoarding god. As though each quiet smile recalled him to that youthful rebellion, as though the sharing of it is both gift and transgression, a slip in time where the thief forgets himself.

The sight of it on his lined face robs breath from Alina’s mouth.

“You might be surprised,” he says, gently. “I will always do what I can for you, Alina.”

She cannot handle this tonight. There’s a softness to his gaze that she thinks ought to be spent on someone else. 

“Aleksander,” Alina sets her hand upon his and pretends she doesn’t feel him shake beneath it. “I’m grateful for that. For everything. Believe me.”

“But I’m a changed woman, and I’ve built a life out here that I love.”

She wonders if he hears her. Or if the sight of her with her hair unbound will always bring him back to the nights of their love when the moonlight was still young. 

“It was foolish to run away so naively,” she confesses, quiet. “But I don’t regret it. With every year I am more and more myself.”

She had wondered how long it would take him. When he shows up at the tavern one windswept afternoon, she knows from the look on the face that he knows.

“The child.” He says without preamble. “He’s yours?”

She puts down the washcloth. “Yes.”

He nods like a man who already knew it deep down. “And—” He chokes. “ — how — how old is he?”

Alina can feel his desire shiver through the air, with the delicate invisible violence of a riptide. She wants so badly to tell him what he wants to hear — that the child is twelve years old and not ten, that he was conceived in a beautiful Ravkan garden on a tear-streaked, love-sunk night. 

“He is not yours.” She tells him. “And neither is the girl.”

“The—” His breath catches. “You— the girl.”

“Yes.”  This is the test, she thinks with a horrid certainty. The test for him and for herself. “I have two children, Aleksander. You can’t have expected me to be chaste as a nun.”

His eyes close briefly, but when they open they are bright with anger. “I did not expect that of you, Alina.” He tells her, his voice cutting and strong. “And I do not — there is no part of me that condemns you for it. I’m only sorry that I have not made you feel comfortable enough to tell me yourself.”

She holds the words in her mind like smooth river stones, turning them over and over until she understands their earthy warmth. “But you understand—” Her voice breaks a little then, but she is only human, and Alina holds her chin strong. “You understand why I cannot go back with you. Their life is here, with the land and people that they love. And I won’t return to Ravka with you and cause a scandal for you. I know with Ambassadors the lines are sharp and the judgment is very harsh.”

Something happens with his face that she does not understand. Alina grips the side of the table for strength to hear him.

Look at his face , she tells herself, look, because soon he’ll leave and you’ll be left with only this memory.

“Alina,” he says, slowly. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

Kaz, for all his reserve, loves little Amita, and taking in the children for an afternoon — “or a night,” winks an intruding Nina — is no problem at all.

In her room with the narrow bed, out by the little patch of garden by the well, Alina serves Aleksander the last dregs of Shu Tea she keeps in a dented tin, and watches him swallow the burning liquid in one gulp.

“I am not an ambassador of Ravka.” He says immediately, the moment his cup touches the table. “I am here in half-official capacity only, to determine if the maps drawn centuries ago by an empire more sprawling than we are now is still accurate, to see if the people of this land are still loyal in any way to Ravka. The waterways and mapping are my own business, for a friend who makes and sells maps in Kerch.”

“I see,” Alina says, though she is not sure she does. He can do anything he wants, she thinks, but some part of her aches for that brilliant young diplomat she met in the courts of Shu Han, that dark haired wonder whose future shone so bright he drew people to him like a shooting star. 

“It would create no scandal to bring you back, Alina. Not you, not Dima, not Amita.” There is no bitterness in his gaze, but a quiet ruefulness tints his words. “At least — not more scandal than I’ve already caused.”

“What do you mean?” Alina gropes for a chair and sits down. In her little room, her children’s drawings still tacked up against the wall, she finds the sight of him sitting on her bed a sight she cannot stand. A convergence, she thinks, timelines blurring, a heartache for a life unchosen, though she knows with hindsight she’d still choose to give up. “I— you’re not the scandalous sort.”

He tells her, then, the story of a man who has come to sit before her, his knees anchoring his spread palms. Of his falling out with the Ravkan tsar, his refusal to wed — for a bachelor diplomat is alright while he is young, but a wife to entertain and share the burden and learn the secrets of other wives is a must — his loss of station, his mother’s growing disgust. He speaks lightly, quietly, and she can tell that the man who describes these events no longer has sorrow in his heart. 

He speaks of a need to wander, a disagreement of politics, the desire to do something other than push papers across different desks in different rooms for the same stiff, unyielding tsar. His work on the peace treaty with Fjerda, the unwelcome success of it ( But why? Isn’t peace the point? — Oh, Alina, there are always other interests involved ), his early withdrawal from official business, no longer an associate to the crown.

“So you see —” Aleksander wets his mouth with the tip of his tongue. “— I can weather any scandal, Alina. There is nothing to worry about.”

As a child in her father’s house, Alina was well versed in the language of hidden meanings. The Shu are renowned for it, their poems that hide secrets within words like nectar in the heart of a flower, their language of grace and layered etiquette a ritual that papers over the real workings of the world — for Shu fight and need to eat and they bleed red like anyone else.

But she is long in the language of the mountains, of outcasts cobbling together meaning from messy grammar and bare vocabulary born of survival tongues, and Alina has no patience for this brand of beautiful, deceptive fuss.

“Why are you telling me this?” She asks, gripping the table edge. “You had better tell me direct.”

His eyes close and he breathes out a laugh. “Are you— Alright, Alina. Whatever you want.”

“Say it.” She repeats, and it is a coward’s call. She wants him to say it before she does. To come into her home and strip himself bare for her alone to judge.

“Alina, I would have Dima and Amita as my own, if you’ll let me.” He says, and there is none of the aged weariness in him — this Aleksander is all true steadiness and open warmth. “I want you to know that I have no other connections I need to honor. If you want me to stay, or if you want me to go — nothing stands between anything you could ask me for.”

“What would I ask you for?” Alina says, because yes , maybe she’s every word they ever made for women like her, maybe she is sour to the heart and dark to the core, but she wants what she wants and if he’s saying what she thinks he’s saying, she’ll have every part of him open to her and naked to the bone. “What could you have to offer me, now that I’ve seen and held the world?”

“I’m saying,” he is smiling at her ferocity, and maybe this is why she loved him, she thinks, she understands now, because oh oh oh — “I’m saying, my little tyrant, that I’m in love with you and I’m not sorry for it, and if you let me, I’ll continue loving you and not feeling sorry for it until the day we both leave this godforsaken earth.”

She must look a little affected because his eyes light and he presses on.

“I still have money, Alina, more than I can do with, and a title. I know it’s nothing compared to the wealth you come from, but it’s enough for you and me and both our children to live with comfort in any city or any farm. And if you ask me to throw that away into the valley I would do so in a second, except that Dima has the most atrocious Shu I’ve ever heard, and Amita asked me if my coat ever felt too hot without its holes, and something tells me that you would like them both to have a little more from life to make easier their days, and my coin could provide for that, you could have free reign.”

And just like that she remembers the way he made her feel, even when she was young — like she was a queen, already, to him, and that he would kneel at her feet in front of all the kings of the world and smile all the while — like she held his heart in her very palm and he was proud of it, no, more than that — he was thankful .

“But if I must think of things to offer you, Alina, what I most want to give you is this: I want to wake up beside you in the mornings and go to bed with the shape of your belly against my arm. I want to haul you the water that fills your bath and fetch you the berries that sweeten your tea. I want to watch how you are with the children and I want to tell them stories about how you and I were and I want that to be where they first learned about true, everlasting love.”

“Because you’re it for me, darling, and I know that a long time ago that made you want to run, but I knew the world even before I knew you in it, and since I’ve known you I’ve never wanted anything else. So take me, leave me, keep me, discard me. But I’m yours, Alina.”

She crosses the room and reaches for him, and he stands up. And oh, he’s tall, so tall up close, in this way that she remembers him, and she has to lean up to kiss the breath out of his mouth.

“You —“ she gasps against his lips, hands ripping at his collar, shoving his coat down his arms. “You fucker. You — I hate you and your words and your stupid, stupid silver tongue.”

He laughs at that, a hard, bright joy — “Is that so, darling? Well, it’s yours as well.”

She cannot bear to tell him out loud. Him and his speeches, saints. But she whispers it against his neck when she bites him where it’s soft, she murmurs it into his shoulder when she pushes him back onto her cot. 

Alina’s forgotten how good his Shu is — maybe it’s because here only a handful of people speak it, so much that it’s become a hidden language between her and her children, one of curses and secrets and sticky sweet love — but Aleksander’s breath catches and he stares at her, his pupils blown absolutely dark, and says, in his Ravkan, “Alina, do you mean it, love?”

Yes, yes, fuck yes, she does. This she whispers against his cheek, and then his stomach, her hands singing with the joy of touching him, her love. 

He reaches for her clothes — her trousers and blouse — and she rears back, eyes uncertain, and for a moment everything stops.

It’s a silly notion, after that ridiculous speech, but this is irrational, this part — “Are you — I haven’t shaved, I’ve had two children, I’m not… the same as I was.”

His mouth fighting with laughter, his dark eyes fierce and soft. “Alina, I’m not the man I was either. Please. Let me see you. I want to kiss your pretty cunt.”

Hot desire threads through her, arrow sharp. And he’s got his hand inside her trousers and then her underthings, he’s groaning at the feel of her dripping cunt. And she’s tearing off her own clothes, needing to touch him skin to skin, and she’s riding his hand like a teenager, and they’re kissing up a storm.

“Will you— fuck — yes, please, more of that — will you still take a trampled garden, Ambaassador Morozov?”

“I’m not much for cultivating gardens,” he says against her mouth. “I prefer my flowers wild. As free as they come.”

"You're still a liar, I see." She can't get enough of his taste on her tongue. And where was all this passion , she wonders, where was this hunger hiding in my little thief of a body, when bigger, younger, more beautiful men poured honey all over my heart and offered to spend their lives licking it up? “You sent me those black orchids, remember? Temperamental, difficult flowers. I tried to buy some in a market once and I got laughed out of the shop. I know you have a taste for refinement, Sasha, it’s alright. I know you, and I love it, and you need not pretend you’re something you’re not.”

His laugh shakes through his body as wild as tree branches in a thunderstorm. And he is lost to her, Alina realizes with a vicious satisfaction, he is as helpless as she is in the grips of whatever madness this is.

“Ah, Alina.” His hands tremble on the buttons of her blouse, his mouth taking a break to kiss every inch of her life-roughened skin. “I called you a fool once, didn’t I? I’m afraid you still are.”

She has to bite him for that, hard on his earlobe, and he swears bloody vengeance, his fingers leaving her to spread empty and aching, dripping lust as she bucks whining against his palm.

“I’ll always love whatever flower you are now,” he tells her, teasing the head of his cock at her entrance, coating himself in her nectar and rubbing her soft, puffy folds before fitting himself where he belongs. “I loved you when you were delicate and high strung, and I’ll love you when we’re nothing but mulch in the cold spring ground.”

“Oh my saints,” Alina groans, closing her eyes against his neck. “Fucking stop with the poetry, Morozov, just fuck — oh yes, like that, oh fuck .”

It’s laughable that she once thought lovemaking was something meant only for pretty young things flushed with hormones and lust. Alina takes the retired former Ambassador to the hilt and kisses him all over – this body that has spent so long in the world without her, and yet carried their love so well.

“Did you ever write back to your father?” Aleksander asks her, when they lie sated in bed in the dark. His spend still cooling between her thighs, and there’s faint rivulets on her skin where the sweat has run, but Alina hugs him to her tight, and doesn’t get up.

“No,” Alina laughs. “I wrote to my aunt a few years ago. She’s tried to send money a few times, but it always gets robbed.”

“Ah.” He traces the shape of a stretch mark. “Does he still think you’re in a nunnery in eastern Ravka?”

Alina snorts. “Oh, not at all. I didn’t write him, but I did visit him in Shu Han, before I had Dima.”

His finger stills. “How did that go?”

“Well.” She hums. “Not well. I think my father can forgive many things in the name of love. But a girl who wears her hair short and shows up covered in dirt with her stomach full of a commoner’s child — I think he would have preferred I keep him in the dark.”

“His loss,” Aleksander kisses her shoulder, once. “Dima’s a beautiful child. He’d be a delight to his grandpa.”

“Perhaps.” Alina grins. “Did you know my father told me he wishes I were born a son? He said he could use a boy with guts like me in the family.”

“There is nobody like you, Alina.”

Beneath the window they hear quiet giggles, and Aleksander throws a blanket over them both. 

“Did you — ah,” his face burns. Alina is charmed to realize that he can blush, too. “I’m so sorry, I should go.”

“No, no,” Alina says. She grabs a seashell off her bedside table and tosses it at the window. With a plink, a burst of giggling shrieks are unleashed, and they hear the sound of running feet, fleeing into the yard. “They’re supposed to stay with Inej and Kaz tonight. If they snuck back and catch a glimpse, it’s their fault for being little creeps.”

“It’s not how I want to be introduced to them, exactly.”

“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Alina rolls her eyes. “You’ve met them already, they adore you. And they’re farm children, Sasha. They’ve seen cows couple, horses too—”

His indignant splutter makes her heart grow light and warm. “Alina, we’re not horses, it’s not—”

“Oh, believe me, Sasha, I know you’re not a horse,” she says, because she can, and because it delights her, to remember how far they’ve both come —  both raised in the houses of nobles where bodies are not just bodies and love is not just love. “Besides, I think it’s good for them. Like you said — it’s nothing to be ashamed of, two people who love each other.”

He’s quiet, a soft hum in his chest. And Alina rubs his stomach, leans over to kiss his collarbone. 

“I’ll think of the best way to introduce you into their lives,” she says. “I’m still friendly with both their fathers — well, we write. But it will be good for them both to have someone close.”

“I hope they’ll like me,” he says, and Alina hears the note of anxiety in his voice, that tender vulnerability for which she first fell.

“I don’t doubt it,” she reaches for his hand, blindly, under the covers. “Dima’s already half in love with you, did you know? He thinks you spend your life digging up rivers and drawing up maps, and Amita’s asked me more times than I know if you’ll let her borrow your horse sometime. She seems convinced the horse and her are soulmates, and that if you only let her perch on him, they’ll run away from here and be pirate friends for life.”

“And maybe it’s arrogant to say, but I’m pretty sure they take after me. I’ve never gotten over you, Aleksander, so why would they?”

He is trembling against her, his kiss wet against her cheek. And Alina is shocked to discover that he is crying.

In the dark embrace of night, entwined in her thin bed, they rest.

Love blooms.

A garden grows its roots.