Chapter Text
Artwork: Yin & Yang by lucife56
According to Shu legend, there were once ten suns. Their duty was to walk one after the other across the sky each day, east to west. But one dawn, they grew bored and decided to all walk at once across the sky. Their combined radiance turned the air into a furnace and burned the earth, blistering crops and parching rivers. Fearing that the suns would destroy the world in their carelessness, the Queen of Shu Han sent her legendary archer to confront them. When diplomacy failed, he shot down the suns, one by one, until only one remained in the sky to gently warm the land.
The other nine fell to the earth, but not all at once. Some clung to the heavens longer than the others. But each time one fell, a Sun Summoner was born. History is unclear exactly how many Sun Summoners have existed. If you believe the Shu, it can never be more than nine.
So goes the story that Alina hears from her mother every night when she is tucked into bed. “You can never let anyone know,” Mama tells her as she extinguishes the lamp beside Alina’s bed with a mere flick of her hand. “Not that you are Grisha, and especially not what you can do, Xiaoyang. My little sun.”
But Mama never tells Alina to deny who she is. Every day after breakfast, if it is sunny, Mama helps Papa set up in his smithy before she and Alina venture far beyond the village, to their secret place in the woods. There, Mama will practice with her fire, and Alina will watch and try to do the same with her sunlight. Mama admits she is untrained and has only the most basic control of her powers, but she still tries to impart what she can to her daughter.
“There is a school for Grisha in Os Alta,” Mama says as they prepare dinner. “You would have the best teachers there.”
“But they would take me from you and Papa,” Alina finishes. She knows this story too. “And they would view me as some kind of savior.”
Mama smiles sadly. “Perhaps you could be that savior. But I am too selfish. I want you to live your own life, not the one others tell you to.”
“Mama, why didn’t you go to the Grisha school?”
“Because I came to Ravka when I was already full grown,” Mama states, mixing the dumpling filling. “They would still have taken me in. But I wanted to live a quiet life with your father, and they would never have allowed that.”
Sometimes Alina wonders what if she went to that school. She would live in the palace, wearing the fine keftas of the Second Army, and perhaps someone could teach her to master her powers. But Mama and Papa wouldn’t be there. And they wouldn’t have dumplings, or dandan noodles, or steamed buns. No one would be there to help her practice her Shu calligraphy, or tell her Shu stories and history. And while in her village, people are more accepting of their mixed family--they aren’t the only one, being on the border--she suspects she will be the odd one out in Os Alta.
She does not regret staying home.
Occasionally, Papa leaves the village on business. Most customers come to him. His farming equipment outlasts generations, and his weapons hold an edge longer than anyone else’s, except perhaps the Fabrikators’ at Os Alta. But sometimes, a particular client teases the promise of enough money for Papa to come to them.
Such is the case when he makes the trip to Keramzin, when Alina is sixteen. This time, he takes Alina and Mama with him. It’s not every day a duke requires his services, and although the journey is not terribly long, Papa may need to stay a while. Papa’s ingenuity is the reason most of their village has indoor plumbing, and Duke Keramzov is willing to pay a handsome sum for Papa to install a similar system in his grand home. However, this means Papa will need to survey the premises, take measurements, and spend some time in the duke’s forge to craft whatever equipment he couldn’t prepare in advance. He has brought his apprentice Pavel (a local village boy who makes eyes at Alina, which she ignores because she’s just not interested) to make the work go faster, but it will still take time.
Mama, surprisingly, keeps her head bowed and swathed in a headscarf when they are introduced to the duke. It unnerves Alina to see her proud, beautiful mother hunching over herself like a common serf. When Alina starts to adopt the same humbled mien, Mama squeezes her hand and gives a slight shake of her head. So Alina stands straight and tall, and when the duke compares her beauty to that of the sun, she accepts the compliment graciously. Beneath the headscarf, Mama’s eyes shine with pride.
Their family stays in the servants’ wing of the duke’s house, while Pavel bunks with the stable boys. Papa sends Pavel with his younger legs to run around taking measurements. Meanwhile, Papa has been given control of the duke’s smithy. Mama spends more time there than even Papa, who has to leave sometimes to check on Pavel’s work.
“While we are here, I am a blacksmith’s wife and nothing more,” Mama tells Alina in a low voice as she monitors the bellows. “But you should stretch your legs, Xiaoyang. Start exploring this little corner of the world beyond our village.”
Alina tramps around the woods around Keramzin, basking in the sameness of these trees as the ones at home. During her ramblings, she will let light flicker and dance around her fingers, just enough to remind herself the power is still there, but she dares not do more in a strange place. Fortunately, she is not practicing when she meets Malyen Oretsev.
He is a handsome boy her age, and his smile affects her more than any of Pavel’s ever do. He grew up in the orphanage in Keramzin, he tells her, and he felt very alone among all the other children. Alina can’t sympathize with the loneliness, but her heart bleeds for him all the same. He’ll be joining the First Army soon, he says, as she allows him to steal a few kisses during their successive outings.
“I just hope those Second Army freaks keep to themselves, if they know what’s good for them.”
Alina frowns at that. “What do you mean?”
“The Grisha. They’re unnatural. But I guess if they stay away from me, I’ll stay away from them too.”
Alina feels her eye twitching. She doesn’t meet Mal anymore after that. One day she spots him entwined with some giggling girl in the stables, and the hurt she feels is only a pinprick before she draws her shoulders back and leaves, not giving them a second glance.
Several months later, the job is done. They depart Keramzin with a fat purse and the duke’s hearty gratitude. As they draw further away from the estate, Mama seems to stand taller again, and she casts off the scarf so her silky black hair shines in the morning sun.
“Why were you hiding from the duke?” Alina asks her the first night they are back home, while Papa checks inventory in his smithy.
Mama is quiet, as she runs a comb through Alina’s hair, not black but brown, not straight but with a slight wave. After several long moments, she sets down the comb and sighs. “I suppose you are old enough to know, and to keep it secret.”
Alina frowns. “I already keep us being Grisha secret. I’ve done it my whole life.”
“Yes. Being Grisha is part of your entire being. I could never have kept that from you. But this secret--I left it behind so that it would not define me or my children after me.”
Mama tells her the story of a Shu princess, raised in the lap of luxury, in a city of always summer. As a child, the princess almost set her room on fire, and she realized she was a ju , a tool, which she had always been told was good for nothing but the dissection table. She doused the burgeoning fire inside her and tried to pretend she was perfectly ordinary like the rest of her sisters.
The princess grew older but also sickly without the fire of her being. She knew in her bones that if she kept this up, she would die. A plan brewed in her sharp mind, and she asked her mother the queen to send her to the seaside where the clean air might restore her. Once there, she burned down the villa, and everyone believed the princess to have perished in the fire.
Meanwhile, a young woman who claimed no crown or title traveled north, to a land where people like her would not be cut apart for their spleens and livers. Her fire kept her warm on the dark nights, but it was a hard journey. Eventually she stumbled into a small village, weak and starving. It was the village blacksmith Anton, a young man who recently completed his apprenticeship, who found her and took her into the house he shared with his elderly mother.
When the young woman regained her health, she had already fallen in love with the blacksmith. So she stayed. They married, and soon they had a beautiful daughter who shone like the sun.
Mama brings out her little box of treasures and shows Alina a jade ring, emblazoned with a falcon. “My signet ring. I sold all my other jewels on the journey to Ravka, but this I kept.” She presses it into Alina’s hands. “It’s yours now.”
The ring fits perfectly on Alina’s finger, and she wears it constantly. She wears it the day Papa receives a letter, informing that Duke Keramzov’s praise of his work has reached far, and a wealthy merchant in West Ravka wishes to commission him for Papa’s especially ambitious innovations. She wears it the day they close up their house as they depart on this journey which will be much longer and harder than that to Keramzin; no Pavel this time, as he will be manning the smithy in their absence. She wears it the day they arrive in Kribirsk, and she beholds the Fold for the first time.
As she gazes at the writhing darkness, it hits her, really hits her, that they are venturing in there. We might all die , she thinks wildly, as all the stories she’s heard of the terrible volcra come flooding into mind. She wants to grab her parents and beg them to return to their little village, where they can live quietly making plows and pipes.
But she remembers how Papa’s face, normally placid and complacent, lit up with almost childlike delight at the prospect of enough funding and helping hands to make his craziest inventions a reality. He has toiled his whole life to make just enough to feed, house, and clothe Alina and Mama comfortably. Now he has a chance to achieve his dreams.
Alina feels the light humming beneath her skin and vows that she will do what she can to give Papa that chance at his dreams.
She learns that her family will be the only civilians onboard the skiff departing tomorrow. Originally the skiff was only supposed to bring back supplies, but the West Ravkan merchant paid a hefty fee for their passage. They stay at an inn in the town proper, which Alina is thankful for as she’s uncomfortably aware of the leers she’s garnered from some of the soldiers when they walked through the camp.
Morning comes too soon for Alina’s liking. Mama and Papa are both pale as they board the skiff, and Alina doesn’t doubt that her face is similarly colorless. She thinks she spots Mal among the soldiers on the skiff, but frankly, he isn’t on her list of concerns. Instead, she retreats with her parents beneath the roof of the skiff, which provides an illusion of protection from the horrors they are about to face.
When the volcra attack, Alina is not too proud to admit that she cowers behind some crates, all too willing to let the actual soldiers do the fighting with their guns and powers. Then one of the monsters grabs Papa.
Mama reacts first, surging forward with a fierce cry as she launches fire at the volcra, which releases Papa, letting him sink onto the deck with a pained hiss. But another volcra seizes Mama, and she’s being carried up, up, up.
Alina screams for her mother, hand outstretched, and it’s like the sun itself has fallen from the heavens onto the once-doomed skiff.
She ignores the stares of the soldiers as she rushes to her mother’s body. Alina nearly weeps when she finds that Mama is still breathing, though bloodied and bruised. Papa crawls over, his leg bent unnaturally. Alina grabs both her parents’ hands.
The skiff returns to the bright daylight of Kribirsk. Someone wearing a Grisha blue kefta tries to pull Alina off the skiff, but she stands her ground. “I am not going anywhere before one of your Healers sees my parents,” she declares.
A red-garbed Corporalnik kneels beside Mama, and Alina allows herself to be shuffled away. She is the object of many stares again when she crosses through camp, but this time they are filled with awe, shock, fear.
The Black General--Kirigan, she recalls his name--is waiting. He watches her enter, and Alina trembles at the intensity of his dark stare. But she thinks of her mother, and she holds her head up, looking him in the eye.
The corners of his mouth twitch upward, fleetingly.
“Is it true? Can you summon light?” he inquires, as calmly as if he’s asking how she takes her tea.
There is no point in playing dumb. “Yes,” she answers.
“Show me.” It is a demand, not a request.
The jade ring weighs on her hand, and Alina frowns at him. “Sir, I am not one of your soldiers to order as you please.”
His gaze falls to the ring, and his eyes flicker with something she can’t read. “So you say. My apologies,” he says smoothly and with perfect politeness. “Who are you, if I may ask?”
She wonders if her parents have been healed yet. “Alina Starkov. My father, Anton, is a blacksmith from Dva Stolba.”
“And your mother?”
The ring feels tight around her finger. Alina purses her lips. Instead of answering, she returns to his earlier command. Show me . So she does.
Everyone in the tent gasps and stares at the burst of sunlight resting in her hands. Everyone but the General. He slowly steps forward toward her, his eyes never leaving hers.
“Alina,” he says lowly, in a voice meant for her ears alone, “you and I are going to change the world.” He takes one of her hands, the light briefly haloing his fingers, and kisses the signet ring.