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Chapter Text

The rumors come to Alina the way they always do, trickling through her network of clients and business associates as gleefully horrified whispers at the end of otherwise mundane business. Always, the words are offered to Alina in a rush, like they’re all back in the days of having their phones tapped by Ilya Morozova’s little insects in the Second Army Reserve: I’ve heard that they’ve found a Shadow Summoner .

It’s absurd. Alina’s been hearing the same rumor for nearly two hundred years at this point. The only difference has been the nebulous they in question--the tsar first, then the party, and now the modern democratic government, which Alina often finds herself thinking of the same way she might a quaint experiment run by a passel of over-excited middle-schoolers--and the rumors always come to the same end. Which is to say: nothing. Zilch.

These types of rumors have their ebbs and flows, so Alina thinks nothing of the marked increase in them until the topic steps out of whispers directly into Alina’s life, in the form of a tall, thin man with an aura of faint menace who appears on the front steps of her shop one night in late September when she’s doing her best to lock up.

“Mrs. Oretsev?” he says. 

“Sorry, we’re closed,” Alina says, squinting at him through the gloom. “If you have any inquiries, you’ll have to come back tomorrow. Or you can give us a call or email, we’re available by both.”

“I’m not interested in a book,” the man says, in a somehow threatening way. He sounds like he belongs in some old film, like he ought to be wearing a trenchcoat with the collar turned up to his chin and a hat tucked low over his brow. He sounds like the kind of person who might be able to authorize a phone tap.

“Then I’m afraid you’re at the wrong shop,” Alina tells him. 

“If I know a young Etherealki, if I have concerns, I’ve heard you’re the woman to go through,” the man says, lowering his voice. This is a conversation Alina’s had dozens of times over the last five years, but no one has ever sounded quite this menacing. Usually, there are tears.

Alina can feel her bright smile calcify on her face. “The Grisha Center is actually on the other side of the park. I know, I know, the signs when you come off of the train--they’re so misleading!”

“I’m interested in a solution more effective than anything offered by the Grisha Center,” the man continues. Alina takes a second to boggle at the fact that she’s being harrassed by someone wearing a pair of red plaid joggers and a jacket for a football team whose logo she doesn’t recognize. He should at least have the self-respect to put on something a little more intimidating. Or get knuckle tattoos.

“We’re very proud of our Grisha in Zapovednik,” Alina scolds him gently. “Their prospects are plenty bright, and it’s all down to the hard work that the Center puts in! We might not have the same resources as those rich neighborhoods, but we take care of our own.”

The man is starting to look annoyed. Good! It’s freezing out here and Alina has a shop to close.

“Just go back through the park and take a left at the subway entrance. A left! Don’t listen to the sign!” Alina says, and then, as she shuts the door, she makes sure to add brightly, “Have a good evening! Stay warm!” She pointedly slides the deadbolt closed. When the man raps his knuckles against the glass front of the door, she flips her little sign to CLOSED and makes an apologetic expression. Sorry , she mouths, and then she points to the side window, where she has taped the shop hours. 

~

The man is back the next day, of course. He’s wearing blue joggers this time, with a nice little grey pinstripe: the joggers of a man with prospects. “Mrs. Oretsev,” he says as he lurks in the open door, “perhaps now we can speak.”

“Don’t just stand there, you’re letting the heat out,” Alina tells him. “Did you manage to find the Grisha Center?”

The man scowls at her. His hair is cut very short against his skull and through this fuzz Alina can see the lumpy planes of his scalp rolling like little mountain ridges. For a very, very brief moment she is reminded of her husband, dead for so very many years, and his dear, lumpy skull. Alina had loved to lay awake at night and run her fingers over those familiar divots. You can retire the girl out of the army, but you can’t take the cartographer out of the girl.

“Masha said I should come and speak with you. It’s my nephew–he’s seventeen, a Tidemaker,” the man explains as he steps into the shop. The door swings shut behind him, its little brass bell jangling away. 

“Grisha books are on the second floor,” Alina tells him. “Take a right at the top of the stairs.”

The man looks both angry and deeply miserable for a long few seconds. This is the expression of a minion who regrets having to report something disappointing to their employer. Too bad for him; Alina loves disappointing the sort of people who employ minions.

“Is that so?” the man says. He’s having a hard time maintaining his aura of menace under the bright lights of the Oretsev & Sons foyer.

“Can I help you find something in particular?” Alina asks politely. “We have a very nice children’s edition of The Book of Saints .”

The man stares at her for a few seconds, going a little squinty-eyed, and then he lifts a hand and taps an index finger against his chest, just over the embroidered logo of a football in flames. “You’re very good,” he says. Alina has been alive long enough to understand him almost immediately. She doesn’t have a sense for other Grisha, not the way that others claim to, but he certainly does seem flushed with good health. That had been a much more reliable indicator even thirty years ago, back when the party was in charge and you had to wait in line for hours to get your ration card punched. Everyone, even the otkazat’sya, looks youthful and healthy and glowing these days to Alina’s jaded eyes, like the spirit of democracy has bolstered their immune system.

Alina says, “Thank you,” because the orphanage in which she’d been raised had always insisted on good manners. 

“You understand that I’m not the secret police?” he says, which seems like a pretty bald-faced lie for someone whose recent behavior might as well have been lifted out of a Second Army Reserve textbook on covert interrogation techniques. “It’s a personal interest.”

“It’s wonderful to see young people interested in these musty old books,” Alina says, smiling at him cheerfully. “You should take a look around upstairs! You never know what you might stumble across.”

The undoubtedly highly-ranked SAR Heartrender blesses her with another long three or four seconds’ worth of squinty-eyed contemplation and then stomps up the stairs to the second floor. Alina waits until she hears the floorboards creaking under him above her head and then she whips out her phone and texts Nina, Had a shop visitor asking about Etherealki . After a second, she appends, *have .

Currently??? Nina sends back almost immediately.

He’s upstairs in the children’s section , Alina replies. Are you expecting someone to make contact?

Do NOT do anything, I’m coming over , Nina returns. 

Alina can’t help smiling a little fondly down at her phone. She will never cease to be delighted by the phenomenon of friendship, which had eluded her for the many long, quiet decades of her mortal life. If asked, Alina couldn’t possibly pinpoint what has changed, but at some point in the last five years she’s managed to stumble her way into real, genuine human connection. These days, even when she feels at her most wretched, she can comfort herself that she has friends.

Occasionally overbearing friends, but well-meaning ones nonetheless.

Nina bursts through the front door of the shop what feels like a minute later, her hair exploding into a cyclone above her head. Matthias is right behind her, scowling from his great height. “Did you sprint across the park?” Alina asks.

“Upstairs?” Nina demands. The floorboards immediately cease their creaking. “Never mind,” Nina says, lifting her left hand. “I hear him. Alina, stay down here with Matthias.”

“No?” Alina says, as Matthias barks, “ No! ”

“Don’t be difficult,” Nina says, not looking at either of them as she makes for the stairs. “If there is trouble, I can handle one man, but there might be more. I need you to guard my back.” This last bit is presumably meant for Matthias, who says nothing while his jaw works furiously, as though he’s chewing on all the things he wants to say to Nina but can’t quite spit out. 

Nina disappears up the stairs to the second floor, taking most of the warmth with her. At a loss for what else to do, Alina says, “Can I get you some tea, Matthias? It’s chilly out today.”

Matthias turns his icy stare down on her. Although he never says much, Alina has gotten the impression that he does not like Grisha or their business but he’ll tolerate it if he has to, for his wife’s sake. That might’ve once offended Alina, but she’s lived too long to get herself tied up in knots about other people’s opinions. Besides, Fjerda might be less of a mess these days but you still couldn’t pay Alina to live there. Living amongst those cold, bitter people would surely only be marginally improved by the addition of distractions like televisions and cell phones.

“Thank you,” he finally bites out in his lyrically accented Ravkan. “That would be nice.”

By the time Nina drags the Heartrender down the stairs behind her like a scolded child, Matthias is stirring his third spoonful of jam into his tea. Alina had rustled up some cloudberry preserves in an undoubtedly transparent gesture of goodwill and had been rewarded with approximately four or five degrees’ worth of thaw in Matthias’ expression. She’s savoring this small victory as she hears Nina say, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

“Zenik--” the man tries.

“Going around, harassing shopkeepers dressed like some kind of--what even is this? I can’t believe Fedyor let you out of the house!” Nina plucks at his hip, pulling at his pinstriped joggers. “You look like somebody who steals purses from little old ladies.”

The man gets enough of his spine together to glower at Nina. “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

“You should have,” Nina says blithely. “I could’ve stopped this tragedy before it had a chance to get this far.” She waves a hand at Matthias before he can do more than rise to his feet. “It’s fine, it’s fine, I know Ivan Kaminsky and he’s harmless.” 

Ivan looks deeply offended at this. “I hardly need a half-rate national service dropout to vouch for me,” he says.

Although Nina doesn’t look upset at this accusation, Matthias glowers and folds his arms across his chest. Because he’s twice the size of a normal person, he doesn’t need to actually say anything to be immediately threatening.

Ivan ignores him, although his eyebrow does twitch a little bit.

Alina asks, “Would you like some tea, Ivan?”

“No,” Ivan bites out.

“He’s army, in case that wasn’t incredibly obvious,” Nina says. “But I’ve known him and his husband for years. Frankly, he should know better than to go around chasing rumors and making threats like a mobster from a bad movie! What if Alina had actually had a bunch of Inferni hidden away in her basement? You could’ve been in real trouble.”

Ivan gives Alina a somewhat insulting once-over and says, “I doubt it.”

“Don’t underestimate people just because they’re cute,” Nina says. “You underestimated me when we first met and look what happened--I wiped the floor with you so hard you nearly got a concussion.”

“You did not ,” Ivan snaps as Alina says, “You think I’m cute? Nina, that’s so sweet!”

“Of course you’re cute,” Nina says. “You’re little and polite and unlike basically everyone else I know you aren’t bristling with knives at all times.” 

Matthias looks a little put out by this. 

“Well, thank you,” Alina says. Her heart feels quite literally warmed. It’s so wonderful to have friends. “You’re cute, too!”

“She’s not,” Ivan bites out.

Matthias straightens up and somehow gains yet another frankly unnecessary centimeter in height. “Do not talk about my wife like that.”

“You got married ?” Ivan hisses. “To this ?”

“Oh, absolutely, marrying this extremely tall and handsome man with giant muscles, it was really a step down,” Nina says, rolling her eyes. “This isn’t the eighteenth century, Ivan, we can marry otkazat’sya these days without the world ending. Some of my best friends are otkazat’sya. Alina, you’re not planning on burning me at the stake, are you?”

“No,” Alina says. “Although, you borrowed that scarf from me last February and haven’t returned it yet…”

“She lost it,” Matthias says.

“I did,” Nina admits easily. “I kept thinking I’d buy you a replacement and then forgetting. Obviously I should be burned at the stake immediately.”

Ivan doesn’t look totally convinced by this little song-and-dance, but Alina thinks he might be the kind of person who always appears a little bit suspicious. Nina, perhaps thinking in similar lines, says, “Apologize to the nice lady, Ivan, and then stop haunting her place of business.”

Ivan turns his glower full-force on Alina, now that he’s been reminded of her existence. “Mrs. Oretsev, if you’re hiding something it would be in your best interests to come clean about it.”

Alina’s immediate instinct is to burst into laughter, but she tamps that one down swiftly. These prickly army types can never handle being laughed at. Instead, she tries to look serious as she says, “Would you like some tea to take with you? This cold snap is vicious! A person could lose a finger if they aren’t careful.”

Mouth thinning, Ivan says, “Very well,” and turns on his heel. “Zenik, Zenik’s spouse--goodbye. I hope to never meet again.”

“Charming as ever,” Nina sighs. “Give my best to Fedyor! We’ll have dinner or something soon.”

Ivan does not answer, but he slams the door to the shop closed behind him as he leaves.

Alina busies herself pouring a cup of tea for Nina and ushering her and Matthias behind the counter. “Come on, sit for a little bit, you went through all that trouble of crossing the park,” she says, evicting Myshka from one of the mismatched armchairs and installing Matthias in his place. 

“His heartbeat’s completely faded,” Nina finally announces. “What the hell did you do to get yourself on the SAR’s radar, Alina?”

“I thought you said he wasn’t secret police,” Alina says drily.

“Pfft, he doesn’t know that I know, but of course I know. It’s so obvious!”

“Well, maybe he was looking for a book,” Alina suggests.

“He looks for Grisha,” Matthias says darkly. “Everyone in Zapovednik knows, if you are a young Etherealki who wishes to escape national service, you go to a little bookshop by the park.”

“I wouldn’t say everyone ,” Alina tries.

“Of course everyone knows. Two people in Os Alta can’t keep a secret even if one of them is dead,” Nina says. “The real question is, why is the SAR twisting the screws now? They’ve tried on and off over the years, but never a true effort.” She gazes down into her tea, eyes unfocused.

Despite herself, Alina thinks, I’ve heard that they’ve found a Shadow Summoner . 

Growing up in the orphanage at Keramzin, Alina hadn’t had a word for herself or the way that she occasionally, inconveniently glowed in the dark. Was she Grisha? Was she just a little strange? Her first life had been so very mundane, growing old on her little farm with her husband, scrimping and scrounging the rare spare penny to indulge her love of painting, quietly mourning all of the children her womb had never been able to sustain. When her husband had died, she had been in so much agony that she thought she would go right after him, the same way she’d followed him into the army and then out to retirement on their little farm. 

But she hadn’t died. She’d started glowing and hadn’t stopped for about ten years. She’d lost most of her wrinkles and gotten the bend back in her knees and the flexibility back in her spine, although her hair had stayed white. It had eventually become obvious that staying at the farm was not going to be a sustainable solution, so she’d sold it to a pair of enthusiastically stupid newlyweds and gone traveling. As the years passed, she had found it easier and easier to ferret out information on Grisha. There were books that people had been hiding in locked trunks for generations and Alina, with her small, unassuming face and long white braid, had found herself able to talk them into exchanging those moldy old books for favors like new maps or a pair of hands for a harvest. 

The books had told her what she was. A living Saint. A legend. A creature of myth. Grisha lived a long time because the Small Science fed their souls, but even the longest-lived of the Etherealki died eventually, their inner fires sputtering out, their inner seas ebbing out to low tide. But the sun lived forever, and so, apparently, would Alina. 

So, too, would her mythical counterpart, provided they ever got around to being born.

“I’m going to be watched,” Alina tells Nina quietly. “The Grisha who come to me for help--”

“I know,” Nina says. “I’ll speak with Kaz, we’ll figure something out.” She grins a little fiercely at Alina. “I mean, don’t we always?”

Alina smiles wryly and clinks their mugs together. “No mourners,” she says.

“No funerals,” Nina replies cheerfully, downing her tea like it’s a shot of brännvin.

~

Not even a full week later, Jesper is already sitting behind the counter when Alina stumbles down from her little attic flat at half past nine to open the shop. Myshka is in his lap, growling contentedly in his sleep. “Do you have a key to my shop?” Alina asks, shocked to full wakefulness by the sight.

“Kaz has one,” Jesper says blithely, scratching behind the ragged remains of Myshka’s left ear. “I’m your new left hand, by the way. Semi-permanent loan. I won’t actually have to read anything, will I?”

His Ravkan has a lilting Zemeni twang to it that is surprisingly charming to the ear. The first time Alina had met him, Jesper had claimed to be enrolled at Os Alta State University, studying durast engineering--”Practical enough to make my mother roll over in her grave and just zowa enough to make my father blow his top. Wait, it’s not zowa here, is it? Fuck, I bet Matthias a thousand rubles I’d be fluent in Ravkan before him. What is it? Grisha . Just Grisha enough to piss off my father”--but it’s been five years and as far as Alina can tell he’s never studied a single book a day in his life.

“Neither of my hands do much reading, no,” Alina allows. 

“Perfect!” Jesper says, leaning back in the armchair. “I’ll just sit here and look alternately charming and threatening, shall I?”

“I’m sure that will be fine,” Alina says. “Perhaps you might also trouble yourself to facilitate the exchange of currency for goods, if the situation calls for it.”

“Darling, I always rise to the occasion,” Jesper tells her with an unsubtle wink. 

Alina does not manage to choke back a laugh. It’ll only encourage Jesper’s horrible flirting, unfortunately, but she can’t help it. Jesper is a bit of a no-good layabout, but he’s gorgeous and funny and Alina’s not above using his magnetic presence to make a few extra rubles. She owns her shop outright, but utilities aren’t cheap in Zapovednik.

“Can I get you some tea, Jesper?” Alina asks on her way to the electric kettle. 

“Ah, no, thank you,” Jesper says. “You don’t have coffee by chance, do you?”

“I do not,” Alina admits. “But you’re welcome to run across to The Cup and Crow if you’d like. I won’t open for another half hour.”

Jesper looks down at Myshka, sprawled across his lap, and then up to Alina again. “On second thought, tea sounds lovely.”

“Don’t let yourself be bullied by the dog,” Alina says. “He won’t die without a lap to sleep on.”

“Won’t he?” Jesper returns a little plaintively. “I couldn’t possibly disturb him. He sleeps like an angel.”

Myshka lets out a series of soft, honking snores. Alina rolls her eyes and goes to make herself and her new employee their morning tea.

~

An extremely beautiful woman comes to Oretsev & Sons the first week of October, wrapped in a pristine white wool coat belted across her narrow waist. Jesper is actually struck dumb by the sight of her, which as far as Alina is aware has never happened before. As the customer brushes a lock of long red hair back over her shoulder, Jesper stutters his way through his little welcome-to-the-shop-can-I-help-you patter at half-speed. 

“Good morning,” she says to him with gorgeous vowels that Alina hasn’t heard in half a century. She sounds like one of the minor aristocrats from the time of the tsars, most of whom had fled Ravka when their beloved king had been deposed and the socialist government replaced him. Alina spends a prurient few moments imagining this woman’s childhood as a princess in exile, raised on caviar and ancient Grand Palace gossip at a beautiful manor somewhere tropical and warm--the Southern Colonies, maybe--and then she snaps her attention back into the here and now as the woman says, “I’m actually interested in a map. I’ve heard that you have the best collection in Os Alta.”

Jesper’s chest swells at the suggestion of his proximity to the best of anything. Before he has the chance to say anything too inappropriate, Alina abandons her reshelving efforts in the travel section and scurries out to interject.

“Hello!” she says cheerfully, extending her hand towards the woman. “I’m Alina Oretsev and this is my shop. What sort of map are you interested in?”

“How lovely to make your acquaintance,” the woman says, shaking her hand. She’s wearing a gold filigree bracelet around her wrist, too delicate to be anything but Fabrikated. “I’m Genya Lantsov. Ekaterina Zhabin said you were able to find a map for her of her husband’s family’s old lands. She was sure all of them had been lost, but she said you were a miracle-worker.”

Genya Lantsov’s smile is an almost unbelievable thing, bestowed upon Alina with such cheerful grace that Alina momentarily feels the same way she had when she’d first seen the stained glass windows in the cathedral at Os Kervo. 

“Of course,” Alina says, after blinking a bit. “Mrs. Zhabin. Ulensk, wasn’t it? A manor and some forest.”

“Yes,” Genya Lantsov says, “yes, that is it exactly. I was hoping you might be able to do the same for me. Not my husband’s family, but my own--the Safins. My great-grandparents were from Tsibeya.”

This isn’t an unusual request, for all that it’s being made by the most beautiful person Alina has ever seen in her life. The democratic government has been stable long enough to make these rich old Ravkan families feel comfortable remembering their aristocratic pasts and it’s become fashionable for them to find ways of documenting the power they’d used to wield. Alina’s colleagues who deal in art and antiques are making fortunes combing through small museums and bank vaults in Kerch and Novyi Zem, chasing portraits of patriarchs and watercolors of manor houses and Grandmother So-and-So’s favorite icon of Sankt Mattheus. After Ekaterina Zhabin had commissioned Alina to find a map of the ancestral Zhabin lands, a steady trickle of society matrons had followed.

Alina’s eyes drift back to Genya Lantsov’s delicate bracelet. Cedar trees, little songbirds, the suggestion of dappled light. What an unusual, surprisingly tasteful piece for a society wife. Not even one single diamond.

“Tsibeya? I’m very happy to look for you, but of course I can’t make any promises,” Alina says. “I had a lot of luck with the Zhabins--they were so close to the border, I was able to find a military map for them. The closer you get to the Permafrost, the more difficult it becomes. Do you have a specific time period in mind?” Before Genya Lantsov has the chance to do more than open her mouth, Alina reaches out and places a hand on her forearm to cut her off. “Wait,” she says. “We ought to be a little more comfortable while speaking, don’t you think? We can sit in my office. Jesper, will you watch the front of the shop for me?”

Jesper very, very reluctantly tears his eyes off of Genya Lantsov’s perfect face. “Uh,” he says, and then his brain seems to come back online and he recovers, “Yes, of course, Mrs. Oretsev. We’ll watch the books, won’t we, Myshka?”

The little dog does not look up from drooling on Jesper’s knees.

“My valiant little guard dog,” Alina says indulgently. As she guides Genya Lantsov past the counter towards her office, she leans over and brushes her fingers over Myshka’s ragged little ear. “Oh yes,” she continues, dropping her voice into playful gruffness. “What a valiant little mutt!” And then, as she straightens, she drops Genya Lantsov’s bracelet into Jesper’s lap, hidden by Myshka’s bald little potbelly. “Will you call ahead and order lunch for us today, Jesper? I feel like waffles.”

~

Alina and Jesper leave the shop in the hands of Alina’s part-time assistant and spend their lunch hour trekking across the park to The Cup and Crow, the coffeeshop-cum-whiskey bar that lends the Dregs a faint sheen of respectability as well as a physical location under which to hide their more unsavory operations (which is to say, the illegal casino in The Cup and Crow’s basement). While Jesper does his best to distract Wylan from doing any actual barista work, Alina cuts her waffle into increasingly small pieces she has no intention of eating and Inej and a twitchy little Fabrikator friend of Kaz bend their heads over Genya Lantsov’s bracelet.

“It’s a fucken masterpiece,” the little Fabrikator is muttering to Inej, “I’ve never even seen this kind of work in real life. It’s, like, something by one of those old masters, you know? Who the fuck did you lift this off of? Saints, I don’t even want to know. It’s gonna be hot, good fucken luck moving it–” and that’s when Alina’s mobile buzzes with a redirected call from the shop phone.

“Oretsev & Sons, how can I help you?” Alina answers, cupping her palm around her mouth as she gets up and wanders away from the bar. Through the fingerprint-smudged front windows, she spies Ivan Kaminsky pretending to buy apples from the grocer across the street. When he glances up and happens to catch her eye, Alina waggles her fingers at him in a friendly wave.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Oretsev, this is Genya Lantsov.” Something in the tinny phone connection chews through Genya Lantsov’s fine pronunciation, leaving clipped syllables in its wake. Alina frowns and turns away from the window. Frankly, Ivan’s insistence on haunting Zapovednik is not the most pressing issue at this current moment.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you this quickly,” Alina says, forcing herself to give a brief laugh. After a pause, Genya Lantsov laughs as well; it sounds like the bells of the old cathedral, ringing at a distance. 

“No, no, of course not,” Genya agrees, so bright that it makes Alina’s molars hurt. “I’ve happened to misplace something–a bracelet–and I was wondering if I might have left it in your shop. The clasp can be, ah, temperamental.”

Alina does not swear, but it takes real effort. She waves a hand at Inej and then points at the phone and raises both of her eyebrows. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs. Lantsov,” she says, enunciating very clearly so Inej will be able to hear her over the hiss of the milk steamer.  “I’ll check around the shop floor and my office and see if I can find it. When was the last time you remember having it?”

“I can’t–quite recall,” Genya says, with a self-conscious little titter. “When I put it on this morning, of course, but after that? At any rate, I don’t want to put you out.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Alina assures her as Inej gently but very swiftly snatches the bracelet out from under Kaz’s dodgy little Fabrikator friend and wraps it up in a dark blue velvet bag. “I’ll let you know if I find it. What does it look like? I’m sorry, I don’t quite–”

“Oh, just a little gold piece. My husband always reminds me it’s not terribly valuable.” It takes a few seconds for Genya to remember to laugh. “Hardly worth anything, really, I’ve just–had it for ages.” Her voice cracks, very briefly, and becomes almost inaudibly soft. “It was a gift from a friend.” 

“Have you checked your car?” Alina asks, a little too loudly, as Inej tucks the velvet bag into the breast pocket of her peacoat and sprints for the back door. Inej lifts a hand in a quick wave, two fingers spread in acknowledgement, and disappears into the back alley. “I lost my wedding ring a few years ago, and it turned up underneath the carpet in the passenger seat footwell of my friend’s car.” 

“I–did, but not thoroughly,” Genya admits. “I could ring my driver and ask him to check.”

“Of course, I’ll still look around the shop,” Alina assures her.

“Thank you,” Genya says, and that luxurious warmth suddenly flows back into her voice, as if she’s remembered that she ought to be charming and friendly. “You’re too kind, Mrs. Oretsev.”

“It’s no trouble!” Alina says brightly.

~

By midnight, the living room of Alina’s little attic flat is crowded with bodies. Myshka is in heaven, skittering around on claws that Alina needs to trim as he snuffles people’s shoes. Kaz looks annoyed, the way he always does around small dogs, but he knows better than to say anything. Anyway, Myshka is harmless. He’s too old to do anything more athletic than stagger around self-importantly and he only ever barks at leaves.

“Genya Safin,” Nina muses as Alina wanders through the living room, topping up everybody’s glasses of malynivka. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. She’s top SAR--and I mean, top . When I was in the army people used to joke that she was born on the front steps of the Little Palace and then toddled inside to start working.”

“Is the name a fake one?” Alina asks. “Lantsov, I mean. If so, I don’t know why she’d bother if she gave me her maiden name immediately.”

“Of course it’s not fake,” Nina says, laughing. When no one else seems to find Alina’s comment funny, she casts a frown around the room. “Seriously? She’s Pyotr Lantsov’s second wife. He left the mother of his children for her! Their wedding was on the cover of Modnyiy Svet !”

“Who’s Pyotr Lantsov?” Jesper asks Wylan in a stage whisper.

“One of the interchangeable scores of oligarchs who own most of this country,” Inej replies before Wylan has a chance. “He claims to be a descendant of the old tsars, but not, you know, too loudly.”

“Ah,” Jesper says. “Rich. Old. Wrinkled, I’d imagine?” This to Wylan, who nods. “Well, I suppose I’m disappointed but not surprised.”

“I strongly suspect the bracelet’s origin is that SAR Fabrikator, Kostyk,” Kaz announces abruptly. Everyone stills and turns to him, even little Myshka. Kaz’s voice often has that effect in small spaces. “He works primarily in metal. Those subdermal tracking implants that gave us a spot of trouble? His design.”

Jesper whistles through his front teeth. “Nasty work,” he says.

Kaz doesn’t stoop so low as to say we’re nastier , but everyone in the room must hear it regardless. “She called it a gift from a friend,” he says instead. “That means they know each other, and perhaps work together, which draws a line between the SAR’s previous hamfisted attempts to infiltrate our export business and our new friend. It also suggests a change in strategy–first the stick, then the carrot.”

“What comes after the carrot?” Matthias wonders darkly. “A bag over Alina’s head in the middle of the night and a trip to the top floor of the Little Palace?”

“This isn’t the union,” Nina protests. “We have rights under the democratic government.”

Kaz says, “The same ones presumably enjoyed by the Etherealki who never return from their national service? Don’t choose now to turn up naive, Nina.”

Nina makes a rude noise. “I’m not saying we’re supposed to trust the SAR brass’ better angels. I just mean, we have options if Alina disappears in the middle of the night. Which she won’t, because Jesper is keeping an eye on her.”

Jesper puts a hand to his heart. “Alina, darling, you’re safe in my hands,” he tells Alina solemnly.

“I’m very grateful for all of this fuss,” Alina assures them. “I’m not convinced it’s completely necessary, but I do appreciate it.”

“You know too much of our operations to be risked,” Kaz says flatly.

“Also, you’re our friend,” Inej adds, sapping away some of the sting from Kaz’s quick words. Alina isn’t offended, of course--she’s the one who had gotten herself mixed up in Dregs business--but she appreciates Inej’s little gesture all the same.

“So what’s our move?” Jesper asks Kaz. “Business as usual? Or are we shuttering for a few months. Hardly would be disruptive, would it? We haven't had clients in a dog's age.”

“They’re not shutting us down, so they want to use us,” Kaz says. “Maybe they think they can trace our routes, find the Grisha, and drag them back here to be tried and sentenced for dodging their national service obligation. Since Kostyk’s clever little subdermal tracking implants didn’t work, they’re trying the next best thing--a person on the inside. Did she give you a sob story, Alina?”

“Nothing overt,” Alina admits. “But there were hints. Bruises on her forearms, strange pauses.” And then, unable to stop herself, even though she knows it’s a bad idea: “It’s not possible that she genuinely does want out, I suppose?”

“ Top brass ,” Nina enunciates. “And even if she hadn’t been Morozova’s right hand, she’s Corporalki. Whatever’s happening in the army, whatever the SAR has been doing--it’s happening to Etherealki.”

Alina sips her malynivka to stifle the urge to disagree with Nina’s point. The Dregs is a group of clever young people--ruthless, motivated, talented--and yet sometimes Alina looks at them with her old, weary eyes and can’t help seeing children. There’s a lot they still have to learn about the world. Alina doesn’t trust Genya Lantsov, but she knows better than to think the SAR leadership is entirely composed of rabid adherents to Ilya Morozova’s mysterious grand vision. Being a cog in a brutal machine can sap the spirit. Alina’s time in the army taught her that very well.

~

The shop phone rings a few weeks later; Genya Lantsov, of course, checking in on Alina’s progress and offering her thanks, again, for Alina’s suggestion to check the footwell of her car–her bracelet had been recovered so quickly it was like it had never been lost, thank the Saints. She’s even more pleased to hear that Alina has some candidate maps to share. “I’m afraid I’m completely run off my feet planning a charity dinner,” she admits, her beautiful voice gone wry. “I don’t suppose you would be amenable to making a home visit?”

“Come to your house?” Alina echoes, turning to Jesper and lifting an eyebrow.

Absolutely fucking not , Jesper mouths back.

“I would compensate you for the time and inconvenience, of course,” Genya adds smoothly.

“Well, I suppose I could come by around lunch time,” Alina says, to Jesper’s open-mouthed incredulity. “Would one work for you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Genya Lantsov assures her warmly. “Thank you so much.”

Jesper is already furiously texting when Alina hangs up the shop phone. “I’m telling Kaz,” he announces, not looking up from his mobile.

“He’ll agree with me,” Alina tells him gently. “We’re still in the carrot phase.”

Jesper’s phone vibrates and his expression turns even more sour when he reads Kaz’s response. “Just to be clear, if you get horribly murdered, it’s not my fault. Technically I did everything I could to keep you safe.”

“I’ve always admired your tender heart, Jesper,” Alina says.

Alina has to leave the shop at half past eleven to ensure that she makes it downtown for her meeting at one, transferring trains twice before catching a westbound trolleybus to Lubyanka Square. The square is packed with tourists, eating overpriced blinis on rickety cafe chairs, taking photos of the pigeons, flipping through brochures for the Historical Demonstration Hall. Alina can’t help feeling cold all over at the sight of the Little Palace, which for so long stood in the center of Os Alta as a symbol of the might of the socialist government. People had called Ilya Morozova the fist of the union then, back when half of the Little Palace had been a prison and the joke in the tea shops was that the Little Palace was the tallest building in Os Alta because you could see Tsibeya from the roof.

Alina had lost just as many neighbors to the work camps in Tsibeya as the army recruiters but the latter had always felt just a little bit worse, like a flourishing twist of the knife. Until Ilya Morozova had come along, Grisha were just as reviled in Ravka as they were anywhere else--distrusted, occasionally murdered, often to be found working shitty jobs for little pay--but he’d made being a Grisha something respectable, elevated them to fellow comrades working to preserve the glorious vision of the union. It had made the Grisha serving in the army ravenously loyal to him. Someone lost to the work camps was dead, of course, but someone lost to the army–or, even worse, the secret police–was completely obliterated and replaced by an entirely new creature. 

The Lantsovs live a few blocks away from the square, one white townhouse amongst dozens tucked up behind ornate wrought iron fences. Every door and window of the Lantsov townhouse has been opened to the cool autumn air and there are bodies moving inside, like industrious little ants. As she approaches, Alina can see that two women dressed entirely in black are up on ladders on the second floor, cleaning an enormous, hideously gaudy crystal chandelier. 

Alina makes it halfway up the walk before a spindly man of indeterminate age bundles down the marble front steps, calling, “And you are?” with the kind of imperious confidence Alina used to associate with Ana Kuya.

“Good afternoon,” Alina replies with a warm smile. She’s generally found that the more polite she acts, the older people assume she must be. Shu women don’t age, according to common witticism, and so Alina can pass for anywhere from twenty-five to sixty, depending on the gullibility of persons involved and Alina’s own manners. “Alina Oretsev for Genya Lantsov.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” the man says, abruptly turning on his heel and scuttling back up the steps. “Right this way, Mrs. Oretsev.” He pauses at the top of the stairs and turns to watch beadily as Alina climbs them, as if he’s waiting for her to slip and break a hip. He definitely thinks she’s ancient. To take advantage of this, Alina purposefully mounts each stair with slow deliberation.

The inside of the Lantsov townhouse is an exercise in ridiculous opulence. Alina feels embarrassed just to be crossing the foyer, the floor of which is tiled in green marble and inlaid with something that looks horrifyingly like gold wire. Luxurious hothouse blooms in a thousand shades of white spill out of enormous antique Shu vases. Although Alina had seen all of those bodies moving past the open windows, the inside of the house is cool and quiet.

At the far end of the foyer, nestled underneath the symmetrical curves of the split main staircase–is that white velvet carpet? --are a pair of tall wooden doors. The panels are carved with a gruesome little hunting scene, all barking dogs and terrified elk. The man knocks briskly on the left door and announces, “Mrs. Oretsev for you, ma’am,” and then steps back, snapping to obsequious attention as the door opens and Genya Lantsov’s beautiful face appears. The corners of her eyes are drawn tight, so her smile has an unfamiliar, pinched aspect to it.

“Ah, of course, right on time,” she says in a rush. “Thank you, that will be all, Josef. I’m afraid I’m a little less punctual--” and then, over her shoulder, she says to someone in the room, “Kirigin, I’m afraid I have another meeting. Can we continue this at the office?”

A smooth, quiet voice replies, “Of course. Another time.”

Genya Lantsov opens the door completely, gesturing Alina inside. At the end of her long arm, the filigreed bracelet winks in the light. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” she says. “I hope your trip downtown wasn’t too long.”

“No,” Alina says, and she’s only just taken a step inside when she sees the man. The Man might be a more appropriate way of putting it; he has a sort of gravity to him that is deeply magnetic. Alina notices in a glance a handful of useless tidbits--he’s tall and dark-haired--and other, more relevant details, like the exquisite cut of his suit and the neatly trimmed line of the beard over his jaw. A precise person with excellent taste.

Then she meets his eyes.

Alina does not always recognize other Grisha, but she knows in half a heartbeat that he is one. Kaz would tell her that this is theater and not to fall for it, and he’d probably even be right under most circumstances, but there is something very strange about this man’s dark eyes. Alina is no Corporalki but she almost fancies that she can hear his heartbeat through his pupils.

The man’s head very slowly tilts to the left, like a bird of prey. “Genya,” he says, not taking his eyes off of Alina, “who is this?”

Genya Lantsov looks very briefly alarmed but it smooths out of her expression almost immediately. “Ah,” she says, still sounding beautifully calm and pleasant. “Mrs. Oretsev helped Adrik and Nadia’s mother find that map--perhaps you’ve seen the copy of it hanging in Adrik’s office.” She turns to Alina and says, almost playfully, her eyes so brilliant that they look like hard little stones, “You didn’t make the copy yourself, did you? It’s exquisite.”

“I did,” Alina says. 

“Where were you trained?” the man asks.

“The national service education is very expansive,” Alina tells him, which is both true and irrelevant. “I always loved to draw, though.”

She immediately feels a little foolish for this childish admission, although she does her best to beat it back. The man’s stare is doing very strange things to her central nervous system, which feels both inflamed and soothed, like it is being rubbed along and then against the grain. When she looks at his face for too long between blinks, it almost seems as though the planes of his cheekbones are shifting, like flickering tongues of candlelight.

“I should leave you to your appointment,” the man says. “Mrs. Oretsev, was it? A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Alina smiles at him and shuffles out of his way. She’s not a large woman, and although he’s tall and has an exquisitely tailored suit that suggests otherwise, he’s not a particularly large man–there’s no reason for them to touch as he passes her. But he manages it, somehow, the back of his hand grazing the exposed skin of her forearm. The dozen or so milliseconds that they are in contact have the same weight to them that Alina remembers from when they’d first electrified the grid in Zapovednik. 

It takes profound effort to keep the placid, friendly smile affixed to her face, when all she wants to do is lock her fist around the knot of his tie and bodily prevent him from leaving the room.

His eyes flick to her face. Something cracks open in those dark pupils, like the jagged spikes of an accelerating EKG. His aftershave is expensive enough that Alina gets the faint notes of it in waves: jasmine, then almond, then, as between slow blinks he disappears into the foyer, a suggestion of something mineral and green, like the ocean but made of trees.

“All right, what do you have for me?” Genya Lantsov asks, feverishly bright, and the strange spell is broken.

~

As far as the Dregs and nearly every other living soul on the face of the planet are concerned, Alina is a breed of otkazat’sya that can be found thick on the ground in good old Zapovednik, whose insular people tend to view outside meddlers (including law enforcement professionals) with profound skepticism. Alina has been on the organizing board for the Grisha Center for a decade, keeping minutes and coordinating the annual fundraisers (the butter week carnival in the spring, the Mutual Aid Association 5K in the autumn), and for the last five years she’s also been working a little less openly with the Dregs, where she forges papers and coordinates job placements and university positions for young Etherealki fleeing their national service enrollments. Even if she hadn’t been one herself, Alina would have felt compelled to help these young people, whose order has MIA and KIA rates nearly triple that of their Corporalki and Materialki peers.

There have been others who have known about Alina, over the course of her unnaturally preserved life, but she has kept their numbers small out of paranoia and they’ve been steadily dying of old age for the last thirty years. A handful of living creatures might suspect Alina of being a Grisha; some might even be sure of it, lent that confidence by their own abilities, like good old Ivan Kaminsky. But no one knows .

No one except Baghra.

Chapter Text

Two days after her visit to the Lantsov townhouse, Alina calls a phone number that she has had memorized for thirty-seven years. When the line clicks over to indicate a voicemail recording, she says, brightly, “Good afternoon! I just wanted to notify you that your order has come in. Please come in and collect it at your soonest convenience. We’re open until seven on weeknights.”

A week later, Alina is alone in her flat with Myshka and a slender glass of vyshnivka. She’d asked Jesper to give her a hand mopping after they’d closed and he’d promptly done a runner fifteen minutes later, after a cursory swipe of the second floor and a lackluster stab at wiping down the stairs. He’d assured Alina he had urgent Dregs business and he was ever so sorry as he’d ducked out the door, and Alina had donned her most unimpressed look as she’d locked up after him. 

Poor Jesper; he was predictable in easily exploitable ways. 

When the knock hammers on the window overlooking the fire escape, Alina is licking the last of the vyshnivka out of the corner of her mouth. Myshka perks up at this noise and snuffles at Alina’s feet self-importantly as she goes into the kitchen to unlatch and open the window. Baghra does not climb so much as ooze through, like some kind of strange oil. She has the ageless skin of a practicing Grisha and the excruciatingly correct posture of someone born in a different age. Unlike Alina, she does not seem to even entertain the idea of pretending to be otkazat’sya.

“What?” she barks, as if it hasn’t been fifteen years since they last set eyes on one another.

“Good evening, Baghra,” Alina says. She waggles the mostly-empty bottle in Baghra’s direction. “I have a little vyshnivka left, if you’d like a glass?”

Baghra’s upper lip curls, the same way the lips of the noble women visiting Keramzin had curled when they’d set their eyes on pitiful little Alina, with her thin arms and dank hair and incriminatingly-shaped eyes. “ What ?” she repeats. She’s so tall, Alina has to stand several meters away so she isn’t craning her neck like a small child to make eye contact.

Alina puts down the bottle of vyshnivka. “I’d like you to tell me about Kirigan,” she says.

Baghra’s mouth curdles into an unpleasant expression. “Who?” she tries, but it’s a useless gambit to try on a cartographer. The sharp hills of those cheekbones! The lush valleys of those eye sockets! The generous cut between the upper and lower lip, as finely wrought as the work of any tsar’s most talented Fabrikator! If Kirigan’s father had tendered any genetic material at all, there was no evidence of it on his handsome face.

“A direct descendent?” Alina asks.

Baghra’s fine mouth thins into a hard line. “What of it?” she spits.

Alina has known Baghra for close to eighty years, but their acquaintance has been composed of a string of one-off encounters. Baghra is prickly, unpleasant, and temperamental; Alina had determined this almost immediately, when the two of them had had the misfortune to find themselves hiding from Fjerdan mercenaries in the same bolthole in the Halmhend hills. She was Grisha, but she refused to practice her Small Science with any living witnesses, and Alina had guessed from the dismembered bits of Fjerdan mercenaries she’d later found that it was some flavor of Etherealki–Squaller, most likely, since the talented ones could use the wind like knives. Alina had saved her life, mostly by accident, and Baghra had acknowledged this debt with a deep bitterness that had been directly proportional to how seriously she took the matter. 

“Nearly forty years ago, you called me,” Alina prompts. “You helped me shake off that major who was so convinced he wanted to marry me and spirit me out of the city to a life of luxury in Arkesk. In return, I helped you get your hands on papers from Kerch.”

Baghra says, “I recall the matter,” with icy precision.

“I never asked you about the second person,” Alina says. “His name was Hannes. You said a birth date that put him anywhere between three and five was acceptable, due to the child’s small size.”

Baghra’s dark eyes narrow. “Do you think you’ve done something clever?” she says. “Poking around in the dark like a bumbling little clown? You absolute fool –how dare you call me here to air these stupid little ideas, as if you know anything –”

“Fine!” Alina says, airily, as though her curiosity isn’t a clawing, itching thing. “If you won’t tell me about little Hannes, tell me about the Etherealki.”

Baghra draws back and up, all offended cat. The oppressive sense of her fury leaches out of the air around her, making it seem a little brighter. “I’ve heard,” she says coldly. “Your work, that neat little route across the sea to Novyi Zem? I’m sure it helped you sleep at night, to know you saved a handful of lives amongst hundreds.”

It seems like a waste of time to be offended, since Baghra is anyway trying to annoy Alina into giving up her questions. “Thank you,” Alina says. “It does, in fact. What’s happening to the unfortunate ones, who don’t know that they ought to run?”

“They’re dead,” Baghra says flatly.

“I had guessed as much,” Alina says. “Why are they dead?”

Baghra’s dark eyes narrow on Alina’s face. “How curious that it did not occur to you to ask, forty years ago, when he might have been stopped.”

That smarts, a little, in the place where Alina’s pride lives. But she’s lived long enough to know that heroes are made in propaganda films and fairytales; they don’t exist in real life. The closest thing Ravka has to heroes are the saints and martyrs, and they all died for the privilege. Alina probably can’t die, but the Grisha she’s met who’d been incarcerated in last century’s Shu laboratories had convinced her she could be made miserable enough to wish she could.

“You weren’t exactly in a sharing mood,” Alina reminds her. “Not that you’re ever generous with information. Are you sure I can’t pour you some vyshnivka?”

“It looks like one of your neighbors made that swill in a bathtub,” Baghra says.

“Probably,” Alina agrees. “But it’s hardly going to kill you. Sit down, won’t you? I’m not your enemy. You know that.”

“You’re a fool,” Baghra says. “You’re the enemy of anyone dim enough to call you a friend, because you’re too trusting by half. Of course I didn’t tell you anything, back then. Who knows what horrible mistake you would have made, going off half-cocked with half a story?” But she sits as she says it, the rickety little wooden chair creaking under her.

“Am I impulsive, or am I a coward? You’re about as reliable a judge of character as the weekly Izvestia horoscope,” Alina says as she opens the cabinet above the sink and pulls down a second slender little glass. She has to go up on her toes to reach it, because Matthias had been the one to put the dishes away after the last Dregs meeting. She fills the glass as she crosses the linoleum floor and sets it down on the table. “What is happening to them?”

Baghra tilts back the glass and swallows a mouthful. Her throat moves in a long bob, as though she’s having to choke down what Alina knows for a fact is a perfectly palatable beverage. When she finishes, her mouth relaxes back into that familiar grim line. “My father,” she says. “But it would be more apt to term him my creator. That was certainly how he saw himself.”

Alina silently refills her glass.

“They called him the fist of the union forty years ago,” Baghra says flatly. “But before that, in the time of the tsars, he was the Mad Bonesmith. You’re old enough to be familiar with the stories, I imagine. That wretched woman was so desperate to see her son cured of his bloody illness that she let my father run as many of his horrible experiments as he desired. Out of that he made me and my sister.”

Baghra’s mouth twists. “For someone who claimed no interest in or utility at politics, my father was incredibly adept at them. After the tsar’s family was killed, he wasted no time in convincing the socialist government that Grisha were foundational to the union’s ambitions. I tried to kill my sister and myself before he could use us, but it was for nothing–he brought her back, and upon seeing Sankt Ilya’s great miracle they gave him as many laboratories as he wanted and as many little Etherealki to tinker with as his heart desired.”

She smiles at Alina. It is a gruesome thing. “And when I proved unwilling to stay in my cage, he tried to take Aleksander. My son.”

Struck mute now by horror, Alina uncorks the bottle and pushes the entire thing across the table. Of course she knows of the Mad Bonesmith; the tea shops had been teeming with lascivious stories of the strange, occultish practices he asked the tsarina to participate in to help cure her son. Had that poor woman been Baghra’s mother? But it would be gruesome to ask, and anyway irrelevant; family lines are the sort of thing only aristocrats care about. Everyone knows these days that Small Science proclivity is barely heritable. 

“How long were you in Kerch?” Alina asks, because she can’t think of a nice way to ask anything else.

“Thirty years, if that,” Baghra says. “In the end, I couldn’t convince him to stay away. He thought of the SAR as his to inherit, and he wanted so badly to sink his little claws into his grandfather. They were more alike than I could stomach. That desperate need to own something by seeing all of its insides.”

There’s too much folded inside of that sentence, like the clamorous harmony of the Sunday call to church service. Alina leans across the table and snags the bottle of vyshnivka, tipping it back into her mouth and gulping down a syrupy mouthful. She wishes at this moment that she kept brännvin in the house.

“So the heart attack last year, and the touching little state funeral–” Alina rasps leadingly.

“I’m sure a very talented Corporalki stitched his corpse back together,” Bagha says distastefully. “I don’t know the details, so don’t bother trying to bat your eyelashes at me, you old crone.”

Alina widens her eyes. “Me?” she says, and then both women burst into laughter that borders on hysterical. “Takes one to know one!” Alina cackles. Her chest hurts. Baghra is temperamental and unpleasant, and she treats the debt she owes to Alina–one she herself had invented, nearly out of whole cloth–like cold iron manacles clamped around her ankles. But she has known Alina for eighty long years, and there is no one else who can say that.

When Baghra leaves half an hour later, performatively shoving Myshka away with her foot, she looks away as she says, “Don’t call me again,” her voice once more chilly with disdain. But her cheeks are flushed from the alcohol; her ooze back out the window is a little more unsteady than her entrance had been. 

“Sure, sure,” Alina calls after her. “Watch your step on that bottom rung, okay? It’s rusted through!”

~

After she has washed her face and brushed her teeth and combed and braided her hair, Alina tucks herself into bed in the corner of her small bedroom and lets Myshka squash all of her internal organs two or three times before he finally settles down as a little donut on her lower belly. Alina puts a hand on his head and slowly strokes his soft ears.

“What are the odds, do you think?” she whispers to Myshka. “Little Hannes!” She can remember the passport photograph, if she really concentrates on it. The sulky little mouth, the dark eyes, that floppy little curl of hair. No reason those features couldn’t belong to a powerful Squaller, like his mother, or a talented Fabrikator, like his grandfather. Perhaps it is just the covetous orphan at the heart of Alina that wants him to be something different. Ever since she lost Mal, she’s missed carrying someone in her heart in that particular way. What would it be like, to share centuries of intimacies with that chiseled, beautifully cold face? If he has a lumpy skull, it’s masterfully hidden under that thick head of hair.

Alina strokes Myshka’s ear, slowly, worrying the thin flesh between her thumb and forefinger. “I think Baghra is right,” she says quietly. “I think I am an idiot and a fool.”

Myshka snorts in his sleep and kicks his little back feet into her spleen. Alina oomphs in discomfort and wriggles under his body until she’s no longer in acute discomfort. 

“Fair enough,” she says, once she’s settled again. Alina’s letting her fantasies get the better of her, the same way she had as a teenager, when she’d been so desperate for Mal to love her back that she’d taken every one of his little paramours as a personal affront. Mal had needed years to realize that he wanted her; the strength of Alina’s affections alone hadn’t been enough to guarantee them being returned. “I’m just lonely,” she rationalizes to Myshka. “This is what happens when I’m lonely. Maybe I should let Nina set me up with that friend of hers–what’s her name, Talma? Tamar?”

Myshka lets out a sleepy little fart.

“You’re right,” Alina agrees firmly. “Tomorrow’s problem it is.”

~

Luckily for Alina's sore head, the next day is a Monday, the only day of the week that Oretsev & Sons is closed. Less fortunately, Alina's plans to nurse herself with a late, leisurely breakfast are rudely interrupted by her mobile ringing at quarter past nine, as she's stirring a spoonful of jam into her tea. The caller ID says G Lantsov, because of course it does. 

Alina licks the back of her spoon and then drops it into the sink as she swipes to answer the call. “Good morning, Mrs. Lantsov,” she says.

“Same to you,” Genya Lantsov replies brightly. “I had a chance to look over the maps you brought–they’re all gorgeous! I suppose I should have expected it, Ekaterina had only glowing things to say about you.”

“That’s very kind,” Alina demurs. “But it’s more important that you like them. Maps are just like any other piece of art; there should be something in them that speaks to you.” She cautiously braves a sip of tea and winces as it scalds her lower lip.

“Oh, I don’t have the head for art,” Genya declares. “My husband’s taste is exquisite, but mine is a little more pedestrian.” Although she tries to make this statement charmingly deprecating, there is something a little strained in her voice.

“Well,” Alina says politely, “I’ve never met your husband, of course. But as you are looking for a map of your family’s holdings, I imagine there is a connection there that’s important to you. It’s not a matter of taste, but of sense of self.” Her temple throbs; she digs a thumb into the tender spot.

“How charming!” Genya says. “I’m not quite sure what you mean, but it sounds delightful.” She laughs, a little self-consciously, in a way that is familiar to Alina from their previous phone calls but totally foreign to the self-possessed aristocratic beauty who had swept into Alina’s bookshop in her pristine ivory coat.

“A map is a reminder of where you came from,” Alina says. This is a familiar patter that she’s delivered a number of times to her various wealthy society matron clients; it’s always helpful to remind them that she’s providing an exclusive service, since she charges them an absolutely exorbitant number of rubles for it. Alina is always conscious, the whole time she’s delivering it, of how strange it feels to parrot back Ana Kuya’s lessons on the divine rights of landowners. But of course that’s what her clients want to hear, because it reminds them of a time when their ancestors had ruled Ravka like little gods. “It’s like a family portrait–a way to remember the generations of your family that devoted themselves to their land. It is as much a part of you as your surname, really.”

Genya does not say anything, for long enough that Alina would be worried. But there is steady breathing at the other end of the line, as a kind of susurration.

Finally, Genya says, “I barely knew my family.” Her voice has gone a little thin. “My great-grandparents burned their estate to the ground when my grandfather was thirteen rather than let it be confiscated by the socialist government. My father was orphaned as a small child, and then I was, too. Safin was just–a part of me, hardly more noticeable than my having red hair.”

Something small and wretched in Alina’s chest twists at this. Hadn’t she felt the same, growing up a Ravkan orphan in a Ravkan orphanage, her Shu heritage more of a burden than a mark of her mother’s love? And how her mother had loved her; Alina’s few memories of her early childhood are all shot through with love, like the veins of gold in the marble floor of the Lantsov townhouse. Every night after supper, her mother had forced Alina to sit at her feet and suffer her hair to be brushed and braided, even though Alina had been a restless child. This crowning glory of my beautiful Ling’er , her mother had crooned, patiently brushing each lock until they lay heavy over Alina’s shoulders like expensive embroidery silks. 

The first thing they’d done at Keramizin had been to cut it all off; there was always some concern about new children bringing in lice or other vermin.

“I hardly knew how to value a family’s legacy, until I met Pyotr,” Genya says, papering over that thin spot in her voice with tender devotion. “He’s been so very good to me.”

With any other society matron, Alina would immediately agree; even though modern Ravkan is theoretically egalitarian, it’s usually the husbands who pay Alina’s fees. But Genya Lantsov is not just any society matron, and Alina feels a little too brittle on this chilly Monday morning. “Hmm,” she says noncommittally as she pushes her cup of tea away from the edge of the counter and folds her arm across her chest.

“Of course, it’s quite a lot of work to be married to a Lantsov,” Genya elaborates, as though to reassure Alina, “and I’ve had to learn so much–but he’s so patient.”

“I’m sure,” Alina says, and she doesn’t bother disguising her dubiousness.

“That’s what marriage is, isn’t it?” Genya says, laughing. “Patience!”

What an absurd little aphorism. Alina observes, “How unusual of you to say so! Most young people these days seem to think marriage is a trap.”

At the other end of the line, Genya makes a kind of choked noise. “Ah!” she manages after a few seconds.

Taking pity on her--and, frankly, desirous to get off the phone and eat her breakfast before it gets too cold--Alina suggests, “If you don’t like any of the candidates I brought, why don’t I keep looking around?”

“Oh, yes,” Genya says. “Please, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not," Alina assures her. "You never know, sometimes you think there aren’t any other options and then–poof, there one is! The saints provide.”

~

The following Saturday--the feast day of Sankta Margaretha--Alina and Jesper open at ten. As is her annual tradition, Alina intends to keep the shop open an hour later than usual, to provide somewhere warm for spectators to wait as the lantern-lighters make their rounds through the streets of Zapovednik. At 10.02, as Alina is in the middle of a brief little primer on the sort of unhinged behavior that Jesper can expect from Oretsev & Sons customers on this particular feast day, which is the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season, the little bell above the door heralds the arrival of a tall man in a dark wool overcoat. Alina's warning stumbles to a halt and she says, “Kirigan,” without quite meaning to, as though his name is the shape of her exhale leaving her throat.

“Good morning,” Kirigan replies, with soft, deliberate syllables.

“Who’s this, then?” Jesper asks Alina in a stage whisper, propping an elbow on the front counter. “A new flame? I didn’t take you for a cradle-stealer.”

It takes Alina a second to parse this unfamiliar idiom, which is at the very least a convenient distraction from Kirigan, with his wind-tousled hair and turnt-up collar and faint, delicious aftershave, carried to Alina on the cold draft from the door. “A cradle–?” And then, of course, the waggling eyebrows clue her in. “It’s cradle-robber . No wonder you still owe Matthias a thousand rubles.” 

Jesper’s eyebrows sink comically low; his mouth droops in both corners, like he’s a street puppet with a wooden jaw. “Cradle-robber,” he whispers to himself, and then he mutters something in Zemeni before slapping the counter and straightening up. “Right, well, there’s that one down like a lead zeppelin, eh? You want me to finish opening up, boss?”

“Yes, please,” Alina says. “The shipment from De Vries Huis came early this morning but I only got as far as unloading the pallet.” And then, as Jesper disappears into the back to ostensibly do the job for which he is being paid, she tilts her head towards Kirigan and smiles as blandly at him as she’s able. “How can I help you?” Which hopefully will equally serve to save her some face and distract from the fact that Jesper barely lets the door swing shut behind him before whipping out his mobile.

Kirigan crosses the foyer towards her; the old oak floor barely creaks under his feet. He has a particular way of moving, as though he occupies a great deal of physical space but in an ephemeral way.

“I believe you know why I’m here,” he says. As Alina watches, her polite smile still pinned onto her cheeks, he begins to pull off his right glove. The parts of Alina that had once been a hungry orphan and an impoverished farmer cannot help marveling at this masterpiece of exquisite leatherworking, which fits him so neatly that it must be custom. So few people have their clothing made-to-order these days; all the old artisans are dying. It’s hard to blame the Fabrikators, really, since Alina had quite readily given up knitting her own sweaters once they became cheaper to buy from someone else.

Alina angles forward over the counter; a lock of white hair spills over her shoulder. “Are you looking for a book?” she asks him in a conspiratorial whisper.

The overhead light catches the glint of one long, silvery hair sprouting from his hairline. Little Hannes, old enough to be going grey! But it’s strange for a practicing Grisha–and he is one, she can feel it. It’s almost as if the air around him is saturated with fine little particulates, like he’s one of the towering old steel mills that used to cover the east country.

“My Heartrender says you’re a very fine liar,” Kirigan remarks casually, still strolling towards Alina, working now to remove his left glove. “But I don’t know if that could possibly be true. I can see your pulse leaping at your throat.”

“Ah, it’s these old veins,” Alina demurs, straightening. “When you’re my age, you’ll find them constantly knotting up on you.”

Kirigan sets his gloves down on the counter. The fine-grained leather is so chilly that it cools the air around it; Alina can feel this difference in temperature as a kind of brush along the back of her hand. A Squaller, like his mother? She wonders this with something close to desperation, like a superstitious old woman shooing away a bird on her windowsill.

“Is it age that gives you the gall?” Kirigan asks her, so calmly that Alina doesn’t understand at first that he’s furious. There it is again, that crack at the center of his pupils: and in the middle of it, a dark, jagged spike of electricity. 

“I am a generally shameless old woman,” Alina allows, “but in this particular instance I don’t know what you mean.”

Should she be afraid? Probably. Is she? She can’t quite tell. But he is right that her pulse is galloping away furiously, high enough that when she swallows she can feel the resistance in her throat. 

“Twenty-seven counts of kidnapping,” Kirigan recites coolly. “Fifty-three counts of human trafficking. Two counts of murder.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Alina repeats, but it fails to sound convincing even to her own ears; the breathy quality to her words renders them irresolute.

“Did you not know about the security officers?” Kirigan replies, at a low hiss. “Two Corporalki, barely old enough to be out of basic training.”

Alina knows little of the process by which the Etherealki come to her door, but she’s not particularly surprised to hear that it might involve violence. In her experience, the Second Army Reserve is not an outfit given to doing anything by halves, including recruiting subjects for human experimentation and torture. It does seem a little counterproductive to begin hurling invectives, though, so she errs on the side of cautious truth: “I do not know what you mean .”

His hand moves so quickly; as Alina is inhaling, it is resting in a loose curl on the countertop between them, and then as she lets out an exhale it is around her throat, the thumb crushing her thundering pulse. Alina finds herself wondering for half a second if he and Baghra have both come by their tempers honestly, inherited from that old fist of the wretched union, and then she’s distracted from that trivial thought by the sensation that rips through her. 

It feels as if Kirigan has plunged his hand into her chest and knotted his fingers in the disparate strings of her nervous system. A numbing heaviness settles on the back of Alina’s tongue that reminds her of nothing so much as a dish seasoned with slightly too much Nehlu peppercorn. There is a yank, so strong and unexpected that for a moment Alina doesn’t know how to respond, and something slippery peels out of her bones. The fine details of Kirigan’s face are suddenly much easier to make out: silvery hairs dot his beard like confectioner’s sugar across the top of an apple cake; his irises are not black but a kind of deep reddish-brown, like the fine Zemeni mahogany that had been used to trim the Lantsov townhouse; his pupils have curled into tight little pinpricks, like pillbugs. 

The tug slackens; whatever gummy strings have oozed out of Alina’s skeleton go lax enough that she can reel them back into her bone marrow, where they belong. That brief moment wherein Alina had found Kirigan’s features clear and easy to read has ended, as swiftly as it had begun.

After a protracted second, he lifts his thumb, and Alina is able to inhale. 

I’ve heard that they’ve found a–

“Shadow Summoner,” she rasps. 

His face twists with some combination of emotions too tangled for Alina to distinguish between. He closes his fist around her throat again and this time, when he pulls, she keeps the deep parts of herself quiet and hidden. Alina has always been prickly and contrary, resentful and then protective in turn of her loneliness. She has never fully grown out of the habit of longing for close friendships and yet being unable to cross that last bit of distance to true intimacy. Even if her divinely-crafted other half had been less of an utter prick about it, it is likely Alina would still have found herself unwilling or unable to crack open her insides for him.

Alina curls her fingers over the sliver of wrist exposed between the strap of his gold watch and the sleeve of his wool overcoat. “No,” she tells him in a dry whisper. 

His grip slackens, but only enough for his hand to slide around and clasp the back of her neck. His thumb drags along the bottom of her hairline, the nail scraping along her skin in a way that makes her shudder, helplessly, in a kind of reflexive shiver. Alina is still holding his wrist, she realizes, but she cannot quite bring herself to let go. Maybe he is struggling with the same impulse? She is finding herself quite attracted to him, but it is almost incidentally sexual. A part of Alina she hadn’t realized was atrophied is being pricked all over by pins and needles, coming awake again, and it hurts.

“How long have you known you were a Sun Summoner, Alina Oretsev?” Kirigan asks. His face is still cast in those harsh lines, but his voice–!

“Is this still an interrogation?” Alina croaks. “In which case I believe I have the right to obtain counsel from a member of the advocatura.” 

“You murdered two members of the Second Army Reserve and kidnapped and trafficked over fifty men and women called to serve their country. You don’t have the right to anything except thirty years of hard labor,” Kirigan replies, not quite as firmly as Alina fancies Ivan might have managed.

“Your grandfather murdered hundreds of enlisted members of the actual army and as far as I can tell never faced justice, so why must I be punished for protecting a few children from the same fate?” Alina quips. Her delivery is ruined by the catch in her voice, because she is a fool, deep down, just like the idiots populating countless propaganda films and fairytales. “The whole time, the state media was happy denouncing the Shu laboratories as if they hadn’t built one of their own in the middle of Os Alta.” Her hand clamps down on Kirigan’s wrist without her quite meaning to do so, her nails digging into his flesh. “Why are you here?” she demands, peering up into Kirigan’s face. When answers prove impossible to pry from his expression, she lets out just a little bit of light, enough to warm the air between them, and it chases away the shadows. “His work is finished, isn’t it?” When Kirigan fails to answer her, she says, forcefully, “ Isn’t it? ” and lets the air get just a little bit hotter. Even with the shroud burned away, she can’t tell what he’s thinking. 

“The work has ended,” Kirigan allows. Is he lying? She can’t tell.

“The labs?” she asks.

“Destroyed,” he says, almost venomously.

“He must have kept–notes,” Alina says. “If not–film, or, or–”

“Burned,” he says, and Alina thinks that she might see disgust there, in the curl of his upper lip. It makes him look so much like Baghra that Alina is shocked by how much she wants to laugh. After a few seconds, Kirigan’s face relaxes out of its disgusted moue into something–different. Is it softer? Can Little Hannes manage anything approaching softness, after the horrors of his life? And when did his thumb begin to stroke along her neck like that? “What did you do with my soldiers, solnyshka?”

Alina can’t help rolling her eyes at this transparent little stab at intimacy. “They’re safe,” she says drily. “The ones that knew to ask for help, anyway. Why did you send your Corporalki here?”

There is an infinitesimal pause before Kirigan speaks. “I couldn’t be sure they weren’t dead. The company you keep isn’t exactly known for being friendly to the SAR.”

Almost immediately, Alina knows this is a lie. The confidence of it is almost supranatural, as if the head of Sankt Lukin is perched on her shoulder, whispering wisdom into her ear. “No,” Alina tests, “I don’t think that’s true.”

His mouth tightens. “True enough for near strangers,” he says.

“No,” Alina says, with more confidence, “it’s not. And we–aren’t.” Here, she falters. “You don’t think so.”

He does not say anything to this, which feels fairly incriminating. Alina watches his mouth, first for incipient words and then because she has begun to think about what it might be like to kiss him, the likely pleasure to be found in the contrast between the bristles of his beard and the softness of the inside of his mouth. She wants to swallow him whole like the insatiable old woman from the children's rhyme who eats cows and goats and spiders and flies to cure herself.

The bell jingles as the front door swings open, bringing with it a rush of cold air. Alina snuffs out any trace of light that might be leaking from her person as Kirigan drops his grip on her neck and steps away from the counter. It takes Alina slightly longer to remember that she’s still holding his wrist; for a moment, they’re linked like that, Kirigan’s strange presence still laying heavy on Alina’s bones, and then she lets go and he evaporates out of her body.

“I’ve brought waffles!” Nina announces brightly and too loudly, brandishing a large brown paper takeaway bag. Her smile has about twice as many teeth as it ought. 

“I brought coffee,” Inej adds, stepping out from behind Nina. Her smile has few teeth and even less humor. “Where’s the shop boy?”

It takes her a second, but Alina manages, “Unloading a delivery,” in something approximating a normal tone of voice.

“JES,” Nina bellows. “WAFFLES.”

Kirigan inclines his head. Alina had thought him difficult to read, before, but it turns out she had been mistaken. His expression now, in front of witnesses, is as dim and cool and remote as stone. “Mrs. Oretsev, I’ll leave you to your lunch.”

Before she can answer, he turns on his heel and brushes by Nina and Inej to pull open the front door. “Ladies,” he murmurs politely. “Do give Kaz Brekker my regards, won’t you?” And before either of them can say something, he’s gone. 

The inside of Alina’s body feels strange without him, as if he’s dug out a warren of empty spaces and now the structural integrity of her skeleton is compromised.

“Alina, who was that?” Nina asks tightly.

Alina looks down for a moment to collect herself. The two leather gloves are still there, neatly piled on top of each other, and Alina briefly entertains the insane notion of putting one on, to see if she can feel the imprint of his fingerprints. As if she even needs to; he’s left some for her already, as tender spots ringing her neck.

Alina lifts her hand to her throat and pretends to adjust the neckline of her cardigan. “I think he works with Genya Lantsov,” she tells Nina.

“Those carrots just keep getting prettier and prettier don’t they?” Jesper remarks breezily as he shoulders through the door from the back. “What did he want? I wanted to put a glass against the door but I couldn’t find one.”

“Ah,” Alina says. She fiddles a little too hard with her neckline and accidentally presses against what feels like an incipient bruise. Almost as if it’s happening to someone else, she feels herself begin to flush. “Just–to chat.”

Jesper cackles wickedly. Nina frowns; as she puts the takeaway bag on the counter and begins to unpack its contents, she mutters to herself, “A proper SAR honeypot? By the Saints they’re truly plumbing the deep catalogue.”

As Jesper and Nina descend into a flurry of speculation, Alina nonchalantly sweeps the gloves off of the counter and tucks them away on a shelf underneath the register. When she chances a glance, Inej is looking directly at her. In the end, although Alina is the first to look away, Inej says nothing.

~

After the sun sets that evening, a handful of Inferni volunteers from the Grisha Center dressed up in traditional peasants’ garb circle the neighborhood and light all of the glass lanterns strung up along the streets, much to the appreciative oohs and aahs of the spectators packed into the windows of Oretsev & Sons. Alina goes out onto the stoop to watch and is just in time to see a little boy with bells tied at the ends of his braids nearly set her hanging sign ablaze; his mother wails, “I'm so sorry, Mrs. Oretsev!” as she slaps the little tongue of flame back into the glass dome like it’s a naughty goat.

“No worries,” Alina says, smiling first at her and then down at her little boy. “Are you staying warm, Andry?”

“Of course!” he replies, indignant. “I’m an Inferni! I’m always warm!”

“Ah, my mistake,” Alina says. “I thought you might have been a windchime.”

“A windchime ?!” Andry squawks.

“Or maybe an alarm clock,” Alina muses, tapping her chin.

“I’m scaring off the dark,” Andry informs Alina, at such a volume that he also shares this information with the entire block. “It’s like when Mama put a bell on Koshechka to scare off the mice.”

“Ah,” Alina says again, now thoroughly scolded. “Well, I think you make nearly as fine a cat as Koshechka, although maybe your ears are a little small?” She leans over and gently rubs Andry’s ear lobe between her thumb and forefinger. “Hmm, yes, and not nearly hairy enough.”

“Mrs. Oretsev!” Andry whines, and then he makes a startled little popping noise as Alina pretends to pull a paper-wrapped piece of milk fudge out from behind his ear. He snatches it out of her hand and stares at it, going steadily cross-eyed. He’s just young enough to find Alina’s fussy old woman tricks to be interesting; if she tried this on his cousin Katya, a mature young woman who’s seen seven Feasts of Sankta Margaretha, she’d be rolling her eyes. “Wow,” he mumbles to himself, and then he has the milk fudge unwrapped and stuffed between his teeth in about half a second.

“What do you say?” his mother prompts.

“Fanx,” Andry mumbles.

“Be polite to your elders!” his mother hiss-whispers.

“Thanks,” Andry manages, droplets of half-dissolved milk fudge flying every which way. His mother gives Alina a smile that’s more of an awkward grimace and then picks him up and rushes after the rest of the Inferni, who have proceeded down the street in a clamorous din of bells and cheers and the hissing pops of igniting wicks.

Last year, there had been no parade to light the lanterns for Sankta Margaretha; Ilya Morozova’s death had been announced the week before and what seemed to be every Grisha in Os Alta had been called to the Little Palace to participate in the overblown pomp and nauseating circumstance of his state funeral. Under the cover provided by this chaotic spectacle of public mourning, Nina and Jesper had boarded a train to Os Kervo with an eighteen-year-old Squaller who had just been accepted into the pre-law program at the University of Shriftport. 

Having spent the previous month feverishly hunched over her work table manufacturing the reams of paperwork that would be required to convince the university that the young Squaller in question had grown up in Kejerut, Alina had been looking forward to the lantern-lighting. Although she did not consider herself superstitious, it had seemed providential to have the young Squaller, in some ways a lost child, seen off on his journey by Sankta Margaretha’s holy light. In the end, Alina had taken her big ring of keys and gotten the large ladder from the basement of the Grisha Center and lit a handful of lanterns herself, just enough to be sure the Saint’s attention was turned to Os Alta.

Alina finds herself now thinking back to the winter months of last year, and how the trickle of terrified Etherealki coming to Oretsev & Sons had slowed after the Feast of Sankta Margaretha. Not immediately, but–within a few months, certainly.

As Alina stands on the stoop of her shop and watches her neighbors sing and clap, cheering on their Inferni neighbors as they ward off the encroaching darkness, she brushes two fingertips against the tender skin of her throat. Mine, Aleksander had called those Grisha, with a kind of implacable surety, the same way Alina thinks of the Etherealki of Zapovednik as hers. Something electric daggers through her.

~

Andry and all the other lantern-lighters have been tucked into bed for hours by the time the various members of the Dregs begin to climb up Alina’s fire escape in carefully staggered groups of twos and threes. Wylan and Jesper are the first to arrive, and Kaz is the last, of course, although Alina suspects he’d been the first on the premises and spent the intervening forty-five minutes haunting her rooftop. His mouth is pinched by irritation or physical discomfort or both when he swings in through the open window and slams the sash shut behind him.

“Who?” he asks Alina tersely.

“Genya Lantsov called him Kirigan,” Alina replies promptly.

“Nina,” Kaz barks, and then he frowns down at Myshka, who has come scuttling out of the kitchen at top speed at the sound of his voice in order to sit on Kaz’s foot.

“I don’t know much,” Nina admits. “His given name is Leonid, I think? I’ve been hearing more about him in the last year or so, but he was after my time. I’ll need a few days to circulate, ask the right sorts of questions. Grisha, but I couldn’t say more than that. His heart was going about four thousand beats per minute but that could be because he was interrupted in the middle of threatening Alina in broad daylight.”

“Hardly,” Alina demurs as Kaz’s head swings her way. “He asked me about the Etherealki outright.”

“It could be them angling to lend urgency to Genya’s situation,” Nina suggests. “A new force in the SAR, someone aggressive and willing to make bold moves–someone that could be threatening Genya in some way?”

“It’s a nice story,” Jesper observes. “Very gritty. Shall I go find some trench coats for us all to don so we can meet at dusk on some deserted street corner?”

“Yes, obviously, that’s the point!” Nina asks, exasperated.

Matthias leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. “It has been months since anyone has come. The Lantsov woman is the first one since February, and she is Corporalki. Is this sealing an escape route? Or is this cleaning up, after something that is already finished?”

Irritably, Kaz says, “If that was their goal, they could tidy this up far more neatly with a bullet between each of our eyes.”

“That’s debatable,” Inej mutters.

“Looking for evidence is what people do when they want to make an example of someone, publicly,” Kaz continues as if Inej has not offered this low interjection. “Right now, they have nothing. But Matthias is right about one thing. We’ve gotten no inquiries–no real inquiries–since February. The client pool has shrunk to nothing and the danger of keeping the path open is ballooning. As the risks outpace the benefits, it’s becoming financially imprudent to maintain the routes to Novyi Zem.”

“You mean stop ?” Nina says, aghast.

“We’re running a business, Zenik, not a charity,” Kaz says.

“A business that keeps people alive!” Nina counters hotly. “Anyway, isn’t half the fun running circles around those bloviated SAR bureaucrats?”

“The SAR is welcome to chase its own tail halfway to Tsibeya if it so wants,” Kaz says. “But right now I’m wasting money and resources peddling a product that no one wants and we only offered in the first place because you swore to me that it would be profitable. We’re not taking on the entire fucking national security apparatus because you want to feel morally superior to the members of an organization that found you wanting.”

Nina’s high cheeks bloom with pink and purple splotches. “You fucking –” is as far as she gets before Matthias clamps a giant arm around her waist and tugs her back into his lap. “Don’t!” she snaps at him, but Matthias puts a hand on each of her cheeks and says something quiet in Fjerdan that Alina can’t quite make out.

“Not to be too obsessed with my own skin,” Wylan says with a nervous laugh, “but we can’t exactly put out a notice on the community bulletin board that we’re going out of business, so how exactly does this, uh, get the SAR off of our backs?”

“All collapsing businesses look the same,” Kaz says flatly. “An expert will be able to read the signs.”

The rest of the meeting is devoted to hashing out the mundane details of this work and consists almost entirely of Kaz dispensing tasks to the members of the Dregs and them agreeing with varying levels of surliness to accomplish them. Kaz is such a deft manager that Alina almost doesn’t realize that he hasn’t given her anything to do until everyone else has clambered out of her window and it’s just the four of them–her and Kaz and Inej, with little Myshka idly chewing at the base of his own tail, curled up as a knot at Kaz’s feet–and the silence begins to bite at the corners of the room.

“It was a pleasure doing business with you,” Alina says warmly, crossing over to the pair and offering a hand to Inej. “A terrible business, but you run a very tight ship. I’ll finish up with Mrs. Lantsov’s order, of course, and let her know, discreetly, that I won’t be able to help her, but I can’t imagine we’ll need to meet again to discuss it.”

Inej squeezes Alina’s hand. Her small fingers are cool and firm, covered in invisible little scratches that catch on Alina’s fingerprints. “We’re just across the park,” she says quietly, “if you need anything.”

“Try not to need anything,” Kaz says.

“That’s very kind of you,” Alina says to them both. Until Kaz had come along and enacted a ruthlessly bloodless coup d’etat, the Dregs had been more of a neighborhood pest than a truly effective force for good or bad; a Zapovednik fixture like Masha, who sells syrniki from a stall in the lobby of the Grisha Center and prefers to bribe the city health inspectors instead of attempting to actually pass their annual examination. Neighbors were the price you paid to live in a civilization, and sometimes you had to rub along with people you didn’t like.

But Alina admires Kaz’s purity of purpose (which is to say, the pursuit of financial profit), not in the least because of the fascinating way that the waves of it break themselves open on the rocks of Inej’s steadfast piety. They suit one another, and the work that they do, and they’re much more interesting people than poor old Per Haskell.

Kaz says, “Let’s not oversell this.”

“It’s hardly goodbye, is it?” Alina points out. She bends down and scoops up Myshka, who always wants to follow Kaz whenever he leaves. As Inej and Kaz begin to clamber down Alina’s rusty old fire escape, Alina pokes her head out the window to call, in a loud whisper, for the benefit of any secret police Heartrenders who might be lurking in the vicinity whilst pretending to enjoy Masha’s soggy syrniki, “I’ll see you at Nina and Matthias’ next month, for their anniversary. And you’ll hear from me when we’re a little closer to butter week! The Grisha Center needs a new roof and the waffle stall just prints money.”

Chapter Text

As the weather gets colder and Alina’s attic flat becomes plagued by drafts and cold spots where the roof insulation is going off, Alina finds herself craving the kind of warm comfort that only hot food can provide. Sorting through bags of dried mushrooms and poppy seeds and rye flour at the grocery is unpleasantly evocative of her years as a malnourished young orphan, but it does lift her mood a little to browse all of the fresh produce that someone else has grown. Alina had not particularly enjoyed being a farmer and she’s pleased by the reminder that it is no longer her livelihood. She tucks potatoes into her hand cart and then spoils herself with a thorough evaluation of what else is on offer, picking up a bag of bright green peas and cupping their plump little bodies in the palm of her hand, marveling as always at how she is able to buy them already shucked. She adds the peas into her hand cart, and then a bundle of neatly formed carrots with enormous tufted heads, and then a large container of fresh sheep’s cheese. 

In those lean years when the farm didn’t quite have its feet under it yet, Alina had often made dumplings with pickled cabbage, because they were Mal’s favorite and there was always so damned much of the stuff–cabbages were the the only thing Alina could reliably grow, Mal had gently heckled whenever he found Alina irritably weeding the kitchen garden–but these days Alina is able to eat what she wishes, and what she wishes for are halušky. She turns up her nose at the cabbages and does not select one, even though they are beautifully formed and a pale, cheerful green.

As Alina is waiting to check out, wondering whether or not she ought to have splurged on a little bag of tangerines, someone very tall steps into line behind her and she reflexively turns to wrestle her hand cart out of their way. “Oh!” she says. “Good evening, Ivan.”

“Mrs. Oretsev,” Ivan replies. Exhaustion looks as though it is dragging down the corners of his usual expression of long-suffering irritation. 

“It’s Alina,” she reminds him, for easily the fifth or sixth time.

He makes a huffing noise in the back of his throat that could be acknowledgement. He has the strap of a bag of tangerines looped over a crooked index finger and a box of potato flour cupped in the palm of the same hand. Alina considers asking if Ivan is the cook in the family, or perhaps it’s this mysterious husband Fedyor, of whom Nina reminisces as fondly as she does of anyone from her army days, but there is something a little careworn about Ivan today and needling him seems as though it might be cruel, rather than fun. 

Instead, Alina turns back to face the front of the line and begins unpacking her cart so everything can be scanned.

Such is the nature of their disparate purchase sizes that Alina is still packing up her hand cart by the time Ivan has finished checking out, and he holds the door open for her as they both step out onto the street. He dooms himself with this surprisingly polite gesture, because, in the end, this is too much for Alina to resist. “Do you have any plans for the holidays?” she asks innocently.

Ivan silently watches Alina wrestle her hand cart down from the grocer’s front stoop to the sidewalk. Once she has finished and it’s become clear that Alina and her cart are on steady ground, he says, "No." He immediately turns on his heel and stalks away into the night. Alina can’t help noticing that he’s going in the opposite direction of the nearest train station.

“You should consider trying out The Cup and Crow some time, while you’re in the neighborhood,” Alina calls after him. “They make the best Belendtish waffles in Os Alta!”

Ivan does not acknowledge this. Nonetheless, Alina strongly suspects she’ll see him again quite soon–if not tomorrow, then the day after. There have been few days this autumn where Alina hasn’t stumbled across Ivan pretending to have business on various Zapovednik street corners. The whole stupid farce seems below someone of his particular skill set, which Nina has mentioned as being decidedly lethal, but since he’s conveniently serving as witness to the slow collapse of the Dregs’ export business it doesn’t seem worth the effort to scare him off.

And, frankly, it pleases Alina that she continues to see him, for reasons she would prefer not to examine closely.

~

It takes Alina a few weeks to finish the antique map of the Safin estate she has miraculously “found” for Genya Lantsov. She has a drafting table up in her little attic flat that is a shadow of the one Mal had built for her the winter that they’d ticked over into their late forties (they’d assumed; birth years were an imprecise art for those raised at Keramzin), when Mal had clearly felt that any chance of Alina successfully carrying one of those small infants to term had become negligible. Alina had continued to miscarry for years after that, but they’d stopped speaking of children as a real possibility. Instead, Mal had spent three long months’ worth of afternoons in the barn, and out of this labor of love had come a gorgeous drafting table, its legs carved with rabbits and cedar trees, with careful notches along the right side designed to hold her inks and pens. It had lived in the corner of their bedroom for the rest of Mal’s life, so they could share a gas lamp in the dim evenings as they worked on their little projects, side-by-side, in companionable silence.

Alina had left the table behind when she’d sold the farm. It had felt too difficult to carry with her, for both emotional and logistical reasons.

Instead, she’d spent over a hundred years with a series of shitty make-dos, all rickety legs and scratched tabletops. Drafting had felt to her like a compulsion, compared to painting, which was clearly an art, but it had taken Alina many long years to realize that drafting was the art of her lifetime, probably, and she ought to treat it as such. She’d splurged on a proper drafting table with a light box after she’d had the Os Alta shop for a while and it had seemed like a worthwhile investment. For the last thirty years, in between drawing maps for society matrons and historical societies and the occasional young adult fantasy author, Alina has used her drafting table and its built-in light box to forge documents for desperate people needing help. In the years before vital documents had become computerized, Alina had spent most of her sleepless nights churning out marriage and death certificates, ration cards, church registers, and the various other scraps of paper that made up a person’s history. 

Her particular speciality is birth certificates. She has an almost bottomless patience for the fine details of these constructions: the distinctively Fabrikated dark purple ink that requires a pen with a hand-trimmed nib; the hideous yellow-grey paper with its ugly, ornate watermark; the copperplate Ravkan script in which all names were transcribed by state-sponsored officials at the major hospitals; and, of course, the distinctive errors that would mark such a document as genuine–creases, water stains, sun bleaching, fingerprints, regional spelling variations, and notarized changes (usually the addition of a father, sometimes decades after the fact).

There hasn’t been much call for Alina’s particular area of expertise in the last eight months. As she bends over her drafting table, sketching the forests of Tsibeya for Genya Lantsov’s map, it is so deeply tempting for Alina to tell herself that this is because of Kirigan–that the time for Etherealki to fear their national service obligation is over, that no more young people will die to satiate the bloodthirsty curiosity of the union and its faithful fist. But it is just as easy for her to imagine a careful, watchful, precise person like Kirigan plugging a leak as it is to think of him making a fundamental repair to a broken system. Do people–individual people–even fix systems? Is that possible?

It takes Alina a few weeks to finish the map for Genya Lantsov, and by the time she is done she still has not made up her mind what she will do.

~

It is a unseasonably warm and rainy afternoon at the very end of the year when Alina leaves the shop in the hands of her part-time assistant and transfers trains once, and then twice, and then catches a westbound trolleybus to Lubyanka Square. She unfurls her bright orange umbrella as she jumps off of the trolleybus and trudges her way to the Lantsov townhouse. The building is closed up tight today; there is no sign of the reams of staff that had been working so industriously to prepare the mansion for Genya Lantsov’s charity dinner. Alina has to ring the bell three times before the door cracks open, and a pale-faced Josef does his best to scare her off: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Oretsev, but it’s just not possible.”

“I have a meeting with Mrs. Lantsov,” Alina lies, very politely, with one hand extended to brace herself against the door. These old women–so unstable after even one flight of stairs!

“She is unavailable,” Josef says. He has to repeat this, because the first time he says it the end of his sentence is drowned by the distinct sound of shattering ceramic, followed immediately afterwards by a raised voice, all thunderous with masculine ire.

“Is she?” Alina asks politely in the ringing silence that follows. “Perhaps you had better check. I spoke with her this morning.” This is also a lie, but one Alina feels confident Josef will not be able to catch her in.

“I am sure, yes,” Josef says, very firmly, and he tries to close the door. He frowns, confused, when he’s unable to do so; he’d missed the moment, during the ceramic breaking and all the shouting, that Alina had used a tiny sun cupped in the palm of her hand to malform the inner workings of the door latch.

“It was such a long journey–” Alina says, to herself, with a tremulous little warble. “All the way down here, and she’s no longer able to see me?”

A very loud thud travels from deeper in the house. “That’s too bad,” Josef says, eyes tight in the corners. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Then, there is a strangled yelp. Josef slams the door shut and must scuttle off immediately to some safe harbor deeper in the house, because he’s not there to catch the door as it fails to latch and swings open again. There’s no sign of him when Alina gently nudges the front door open and eases into the cold, pristine foyer of the townhouse. In the dim light of a rainy afternoon, the large white space has a kind of eerie ghostliness to it, as if the entire room is built of ectoplasm. At the opposite end of the room, under the stairs, those huge carved wooden doors stand ajar and through them Alina can hear voices, now, very clearly:

“--and what, you thought you could leave ?”

“Pyotr, please, it wasn’t–”

“--and I suppose it was Kostyk who arranged the whole thing, you’re far too stupid to have done it on your own–”

“--it wasn’t like that, please, you know I would never–”

“--Tatiana told me trusting you would be the last mistake I ever made! And you know how I hate that bloody shrew!”

“It wasn’t a mistake, I promise, please–”

Alina creeps across the foyer like a little mouse, clutching her map case and furled umbrella between her chilled fingers, her head tilted so her left ear is closer to the open doors. She has never heard well out of the right; even decades of practicing her Small Science have failed to restore what a bad blow to the head had accomplished at twenty-two. She can hear the sounds of labored breathing, with the kind of wet catch to it that could herald tears, or a severe chest wound. 

When she peeks around the edge of the door, a middle-aged man of truly middling appearance is doing his best to tower over Genya, with a fistful of her red hair caught between his fingers as he bellows down into her face. He has the close-trimmed hair and quarter-zip sweater of one of the hundreds of interchangeable salary men that swarm the financial quarter at the end of the work day, although his sweater is cashmere and there’s a gold and diamond signet on his pinky that winks at Alina, coyly beckoning: Aren’t I an extremely valuable antique? His face is so pale it is almost blue; his florid lips stand out in horrifying contrast.

Genya’s face is streaked with tears and looks as if it is literally glowing from within, like an icon of Sankta Maradi painted by Rublev. Her lips are bitten and swollen to appealingly raw little pillows, parted around each ragged inhale: “Please, Pyotr,” she says in a low whisper. “I swear, I’m not going to leave.”

It’s clear that he’s either disinterested in or incapable of listening. “You’re a Lantsov now, I thought you understood, you fucking idiot,” he is spitting hoarsely, before she’s even finished. “You’re not just some fucking little society wife, you’re Ravka . We’re the blood of this entire fucking country .”

“I know that, of course I know that, it’s such a special gift,” Genya says. Her tears glitter on her cheeks like ice crystals dotting a hill after a snowfall. When she blinks, her dark lashes clump together, and when she opens her eyes again, a few milliseconds later, her blue eyes–or are they green?--gleam with the luminous purity of fine gemstones. “I would never leave you, Pyotr, I know how important it is to be a Lantsov. It’s a gift.”

“ It is a fucking gift ,” Pyotr Lantsov thunders. His next inhale makes a whistling noise in the middle of his chest. “It’s one that I gave you,” he spits, flecks of saliva lit to a bloody mist by the stained glass lamps standing in the room’s far corners, “and it’s one that I can take away any time I want, you fucking –”

Alina can hear it, when his voice changes. She was in the army for nearly thirty years. She knows when someone makes the choice to act on a threat of violence. There’s a curl to Pytor Lantsov’s scarlet lower lip, as he looks down at his gorgeous, perfect, cowering wife, and Alina recognizes that, too. Some people are bullies, through and through, and nothing will soothe them except visiting their petty vengeance on someone they think vulnerable to it. 

Chest heaving with the force of his labored breathing, Pyotr Lantsov lifts his fist, with its manicured nails and reddened knuckles, and before he has done much more with it than that, Alina hits him across the back of the head with her map case. It makes a hollow noise when it connects.

He collapses so quickly that Genya actually falls after him for a second, tugged down by the hand in her hair, before she’s able to slip free of his grip. She makes a startled, strangled noise when she locks eyes with Alina. Her control over her features is not so good, in the face of this shock, and some of the absurd beauty drains away. She is still stunningly beautiful, of course, but it becomes obvious that she is not always a woman with zero pores capable of literally radiating good health. 

“Good afternoon,” Alina says. “I had thought I might drop in and surprise you, with your map of Tsibeya.”

Genya stares at her.

“I am sorry to have to tell you like this,” Alina continues, very gently, “but the route to Novyi Zem is closed.”

Genya looks at Alina, and then her map case. “Isn’t that canvas?” she croaks.

“You have a good eye,” Alina tells her, offering the cylindrical map case and stroking a fingertip along its front. “It’s waxed, otherwise I’d never trust it out in this weather. It does have a fiberglass skeleton, though.”

Both of them look down at Pytor Lantsov, crumpled at Genya’s feet. “I don’t believe fiberglass can do that,” Genya says, with a peculiar little lilt to her voice.

“I had good leverage,” Alina assures her. Genya stuffs almost her entire fist into her mouth as she crumples over and begins to emit a kind of muffled, rasping noise. The adrenaline can do that, sometimes, as it courses through the body; Alina shuffles around Pyotr Lantsov’s outstretched legs and pats Genya gently on the shoulder once she’s in reach. “I really am sorry that I’m not going to be able to help you,” Alina says, and she does mean it. “Are you very set on getting out of Ravka? It’s getting more expensive with the new conservative majority in Kerch–they’re cracking down on all visas, part of that stupid plan to halve the number of licensed sex workers by the end of the decade–but I could ask around.”

Genya unpeels her fingers from where she’s had them clamped over her mouth. “Don’t,” she says. “If you don’t say it, I didn’t hear it, and it isn’t a lie.”

“You don’t happen to know Ivan Kaminsky, do you?” Alina wonders. “Because that seems like exactly the sort of policy someone might need, working with him.”

“He’s Kirigan’s right hand,” Genya says, dazed. “Everyone knows Ivan.”

Alina’s heart ticks up at that, just a hair, just enough to be incriminating to a very good Heartrender. It’s clear that whatever Genya Lantsov is, she’s not one of those, because she bends over and fits her fingertips into the crumpled fold of her husband’s throat. A very good Heartrender would have known that he’d been dead before he’d hit the floor.

“Fiberglass?” Genya murmurs.

That, or the ricin poisoning, but who could say, really.

Alina hooks the strap of her map case back over her shoulder. “Must be soused,” she observes blithely. “It’s a hard thing to be married to a man with a drinking problem. You have my sympathies.”

~

Half an hour after that, trailing gentle lies about how Pyotr Lantsov just needs a few hours to sleep off his inebriation, Alina trudges back out into the rain and leaves Genya Lantsov and her counterfeit map of Tsibeya to enjoy the nascent hours of her widowhood. Alina’s sturdy little orange umbrella jumps in her hands as she fights her way back to Lubyanka Square. The poor weather has scared most of the tourists indoors; there are few witnesses to Alina’s halting struggle against the wind as she makes her way up the steps of the administrative entrance to the Little Palace. The lobby is brightly-lit but still somehow dim, as though the fluorescent bulbs know that it ought to be cloudy.

“Alina Oretsev for Mr. Kirigan,” Alina says politely to the man at the front desk as she shakes off her umbrella and fastens the strap to winch it closed. “I don’t have an appointment, but I believe he’ll see me.”

The man looks extremely disbelieving as he picks up the phone, but a few seconds of hushed conversation seems to change his mind. “Ah, of course, Mrs. Oretsev,” he says, hanging up and immediately beginning to clack away at his keyboard. “Let me just–get a visitor’s pass for you.” As he forks it over, he asks perfunctorily, “Do you know how to find Mr. Kirigan’s office?” 

“I don’t,” Alina says apologetically, blinking the rainwater out of her eyes. “Are there signs?”

The man visibly softens. He lifts a hand towards the security desk manning the entrance to the elevators and makes a beckoning motion with his wrist. “I’ll have someone take you up,” he says. “The upper floors are a maze. Here, pin this to your blouse--it has to be visible at all times that you’re on the premises--and I’ll get--Vanya! Get over here! This lady needs someone to show her to Mr. Kirigan’s office.”

A man in a baggy grey army uniform with purple stripes on the sleeves bustles over from the security desk. “I’ll take her,” he says. “Come this way, ma’am.” They clearly don’t bother with metal detectors--even an untrained Fabrikator like Jesper can do the work of one in half a second--but someone from the security desk looks through her purse and map case while another pats down her arms and legs. 

Vanya the security guard brings Alina up to the seventh floor and then guides her through an endless warren of hallways, left after right after left. The hallways of this upper floor are almost deathly quiet and most of the office doors are closed, the names of the residents printed on the frosted glass windows: Z Nazyalensky , D Kostyk , L Hilli , B Yul-Erdene . Considering that this is a state agency, a surprising number of the surnames are not Ravkan.

Finally, they arrive at L Kirigin . Vanya knocks briskly on the door and announces, “Mrs. Oretsev for Mr. Kirigin.”

The door creaks open. Ivan, looking like he’d much prefer immediate martyrdom to whatever conversation he’s about to experience, says, “Right. Come in, then,” on a long sigh.

“Good afternoon,” Alina replies, smiling at him. “I’m sorry, I seem to be dripping–it’s absolutely pouring. Can I?” Under Ivan’s beady stare, she props her umbrella in the brass stand next to the door. Most of the room is occupied by an enormous desk, on which listing piles of paper and a desktop computer of decidedly antique vintage jockey for space. Ivan only has to take one step to the left to reach another door, on which he raps his knuckles. “Sir,” he calls.

“Yes, send her in,” comes, muffled, through the door.

“Leave your coat,” Ivan orders waspishly as Alina makes to shuffle by him, still clutching her map case to her damp chest. He takes the case from her and leans it against the wall next to her umbrella, and then he also relieves her of her coat, giving it a single brisk shake over the mat before neatly catching its hanging loop on a hook above the umbrella stand. It’s hard to believe anyone ever thought this man might be capable of pretending not to be in the army.

Kirigan’s office has windows, but they’re small rectangles nestled into thick slabs of concrete and very little light manages to fight through them. There is a dark green glass lamp on his desk illuminating most of his workspace; he doesn’t look up from the yellow legal pad he’s scribbling on when Alina meekly ducks through the door. All men of power like the same little games, Alina has learned over the years; perhaps it is an exploitation of some shared psychological flaw. For whatever reason, treating unexpected visitors like naughty little schoolchildren is a favored ploy.

One wall of his office is entirely bookshelves; a sea of red leather hardbacks, the spines varying in thickness but otherwise identical, down to the font in which the titles have been embossed with gold leaf. This smacks of a legal library, but when Alina wanders over to inspect the titles she’s surprised by the eclectic breadth of his collection. Her finger trails first over On the Origin of the Shu Preoccupation with Human Elektricity by Evgeny Vladmirovich Oborin–Alina can remember the absolute furor that went through the tea shops in Novokribirsk when it came out, nearly a hundred years ago–and then, next to it, a Zemeni translation of The Complete Czeslaw Milosz .

“知己知彼, 百战不殆,” Alina murmurs to herself.

“Presumably you haven’t stopped by to critique my personal library,” Kirigin says. When Alina peeks over her shoulder, he hasn’t bothered lifting his eyes off of his legal pad.

“This must have been hugely expensive,” Alina muses, stepping back and counting the shelves. By her estimation, it’s nearly two hundred books. “These days, you have to special order the binding to match a collection and most people just don’t bother, not even the old aristocratic families. Have you been collecting for long?” 

“No,” he says. 

She leans forward and, frowning, hooks a finger in Oborin’s famously stupid treatise on Shu scientific progress of the nineteenth century. The frontispiece is the original wretched little woodcut of a woman in a qizhuang hooking a flayed Grisha up to a series of wires and a primitive lightbulb; the recto title page acknowledges the book as a reprinting and has a hatefully familiar stamp at the bottom. “You can’t be serious,” she says, whirling around. “You’re ordering from Ebba Bergstrom? She’s a hack!”

Kirigin puts down his pen with an irritated sigh. “I’ll have to defer to your judgment on the matter; I inherited the collection.”

“From your grandfather?” Alina wonders. “All the red does suggest the glory of the old union, I suppose.” She shoves the Oborin book back onto the shelf. “When you say that you burned all of his writings–?”

“They’re not annotated, and they lend the office gravitas,” Kirigin replies evenly.

“You don’t strike me as a man who needs help in that quarter,” Alina says, turning now to face him directly and folding her arms across her chest. “I had wondered why you let yourself go grey, but clearly it’s all part and parcel. I suppose the otkazat’sya take you more seriously.”

“You would be in a position to know,” he points out.

“Oh, this wasn’t deliberate,” Alina assures him. “I’m just very old.” She untucks her right hand and picks up the tail of her white braid, inspecting its frizzy, split ends. “The rest of it comes and goes, but my hair is very stubborn. Will yours all grow in black again, if you practice your Small Science enough?”

He leans back in his chair; for a brief moment, the thin wool of his trousers stretches over his thighs, catching on ropes of muscle, and then he hooks his left ankle over his knee and Alina is able to pull her eyes back to her hair. “Yes,” he says.

Alina strokes the tail of her braid with her fingertips. “I don’t like to think of myself as a vain person, but I think I might be jealous. I have to use a purple rinse, otherwise it’s all yellow, like rotten old vellum.” She pauses and looks up, as though something has just occurred to her. “I suppose, if I had someone with Genya Lantsov’s skill set working for me, I’d never have to worry about my hair turning sallow.”

Kirigan slowly runs an index finger along the edge of his jaw. His eyes, trained on Alina’s face, reflect the lamp light as a kind of wet, animal gleam. “I don’t think I have the patience for this today,” he muses. “Why are you here?”

“I’d find some,” Alina recommends, “and quick, because some time in the next hour Genya Lantsov is going to call and tell you that her husband is dead.”

Nothing in the insouciant sprawl of his body changes, but Alina feels the sharpened gaze of a large, patient predator rake along her features. “All right,” he allows after a few long seconds, “but that doesn’t tell me why you’re here. Unless it’s to report her to the authorities, but you don’t strike me as the type.”

“I’m not particularly torn up about Pyotr Lantsov’s sudden demise, no,” Alina admits. “I only knew him for about three minutes but he seemed to be very unpleasant. That’s the blood of the tsars for you.”

“Solnyshka, get to the point,” he says. 

Alina can’t help making a face. “Really?” she says. “It just smacks of insincerity.”

“Tell me your real name, then,” he replies mildly.

“That’s a little rich coming from someone who claims his mother named him Leonid Kirigan ,” Alina points out. “I can’t believe Baghra let you get away with it–what a slight to her taste! You ought to have kept Aleksander, I think it suits you much better.”

His eyes narrow, ever so slightly. Alina doesn’t need to have his hand fitted around her throat to know that her blood is pounding furiously all through her body, sending endorphins and adrenaline coursing from behind her nose down to her fingertips. She feels like she’s climbed the highest peak in Ryevost and is waiting, breathless and tense, for the wind to knock her off. She has the overpowering urge to laugh with wild abandon, like the horrible old crone that she is, and she has to work to bite it back.

“Does anyone call you Sasha?” she wonders.

His brows pinch together in clear irritation. “You may use Aleksander,” he says, “if you tell me your name.”

“It’s Alina,” she says. For the benefit of his incredulous eyebrow, she elaborates, “I was Alina Starkov for twenty-four years. But I took my husband’s name when we married, as was the way of things back then, and I’ve been Alina Oretsev ever since.”

“Alina Starkov,” he muses. His unblinking stare, half-lidded, makes Alina unbearably conscious of her flesh as an animal structure: the thick viscosity of her blood, the dry rasp of her skin, the curling hair on the backs of her arms, the warm dampness of the backs of her knees. “How is it that until a year ago I’d never heard even a whisper of you?”

“I’m just an old woman who owns a bookshop,” Alina says modestly. “I sit on the board of the Zapovednik Grisha Center. I have a little dog–his name is Myshka, he’ll be twenty years old in March. I was trained as a cartographer, and I am still sometimes paid for this trade, if you can believe it.”

It turns out that Aleksander really doesn’t have much patience; Alina has only just finished the end of this little introductory patter when he stands, sending his desk chair skittering back, and the room is plunged into darkness so absolute that it seems to actually suppress sound. Alina cocks her head, tilting her left ear towards where Aleksander had been standing, and when she hears the scrape of boot heel she has a few milliseconds to slap her palms together and pull them apart before Aleksander’s hands are locking around her upper arms and he’s lifting her up, pressing her against the bookshelf so that her toes only just barely graze the ground.

In the time that takes him to do this, Alina has braided cobwebbed sunbeams around her fingers into a thin chain. It is the act of an instant to slip this chain over his neck. When she gives it a little tug with her fist his chin goes up, this time not in defiance, but in deference to the garotte she has made for him.

“I think it might be worth considering that there’s a reason why you’ve never heard of me,” she says gently. His face is rendered a wholly unfamiliar thing by the angle of the light; the reflections dance off of the tip of his pale nose and the wet surface of his eyes. “I would remember that, when you find yourself tempted to bully or manipulate me because I’m just an old woman with a little dog and a bookshop.”

He rasps, “You’re overestimating how often I think about you.”

Ignoring this, Alina continues, “If Ivan wants to trail me up and down Zapovednik for the next decade, he’s welcome to do so, although I think he’s only likely to end up with a stomach ulcer for his trouble. But don’t you think it’s a bit of a waste of resources? You’ve got Etherealki Grishenka running from their mandatory national service because they’re worried they’re going to be euthanized like lab rats and high-ranking Corporalki going out and poisoning their abusive husbands with ricin.” 

She presses her left thumb into the corner of his mouth. For a single millisecond, she marvels at how soft his beard feels, and then he pours into the cavernous spaces of Alina’s body and fills them, like a torrential downpour flooding an abandoned quarry. Hysterical elation presses her skin from the inside, like she’s been inflated by it.

Aleksander tilts his head. His pupils have blown open into gaping mouths. His mouth shapes a word, Alya , maybe.

Alina strokes her thumb down the line of his chin. “This house you seized from Ilya Morozova,” she tells him softly, “it’s got rotten foundations. It’s your responsibility now to fix them.”

“You’re much more self-righteous than I expected,” he murmurs. His exhale brushes her mouth like a physical touch.

“Well, we’d be having a different conversation if you had been content to stay in Ketterdam as little Hannes Jansen,” Alina allows. “But you didn’t, and you weren’t, so here we are. How long are you going to hold me up like this? I’m going to get shin splints.”

“Is that why you’re shaking?” he asks, quietly mocking.

Very faintly, as though it is happening at a great distance, Alina hears the tinny trill of a landline. “That will be Genya,” she says. “Pytor Lantsov was a close friend of the president, wasn’t he? I should let you go, I imagine covering up his murder is going to require all hands on deck.”

So slowly that the anticipation is a physical thing that makes her back teeth ache, Aleksander reels sheafs of shadows back inside himself until the details of his office progress from invisible to obscured to discernible, if poorly lit. A bolt of lightning cracks across the pair of windows, for half an instant painting the little squares of the Os Alta skyline neon purple. A few seconds later, Alina hears the thunder follow, nearly inaudibly, and when that has dissipated she is able to make out Ivan’s low murmur from the outer office.

Alina opens her fist and lets the sunlight garotte dissolve across the flat of her palm. As it slithers away, Aleksander finally lowers her down onto the ground and Alina releases a happy little sigh; her hamstrings really were beginning to ache. 

In the improved light, Alina can see that she’s left a bright red line around Aleksander’s neck, just barely visible in the notch of his unbuttoned collar. “That will take a few days to fade,” she tells him, not quite apologetically, gesturing with two fingers to the hollow of her own throat. 

He makes a dismissive noise as he strolls to the standing coat rack on the other side of the door piled high with various items made of expensive-looking black wool. He shrugs them on in layers, first a suit jacket and then a scarf and then, finally, that familiar overcoat. As he fixes the lay of the overcoat’s collar with one hand, he yanks open the door to his office with the other and gestures Alina through. 

As she passes him, Alina watches out of the corner of his eye as he reaches into the pocket of his overcoat. After a confused few seconds he seems to come to some realization; his mouth twists into an annoyed little curl. It stays afixed there as Ivan passes him the phone and helps Alina with her coat and umbrella and map case with the clear intention of ushering her out of the way as swiftly as possible. Resisting the physical shove towards the door, Alina leans across Ivan’s desk and tugs on the sleeve of Aleksander’s overcoat. When he flicks an annoyed glance at her, telling Genya, “Mm, yes, I understand,” with a lifted eyebrow, Alina pulls his gloves out of the pocket of her coat and slaps them down on the desk. The curl disappears like Alina has wiped it away with the side of her thumb.

“It’s okay, I can find my own way out,” she tells Ivan, straightening up and adjusting the strap of her map case. And then, as she lets the door close behind her, she adds, “I'll see you around, Sasha.”

~

By the time Alina makes it back to Zapovednik, her confident swagger has melted and she feels like a sopping wet washcloth that someone has forgotten to wring out. A hot shower does not fix this; neither does scrubbing all of the dirty pans in the sink or taking Myshka out to perform his evening ablutions. Eventually, unable to sleep or paint or even make much of a dent in the backlog of emails she has waiting for her the Oretsev & Sons inbox, she pulls on her boots and crosses the park to get a drink at The Cup and Crow. It’s early enough in the evening for the Dregs’ ilk that they’re still in the process of transitioning from coffee shop to bar; Wylan is wiping down the gigantic metal cone of the industrial burr grinder when Alina comes in the door. Poor Wylan seems to always be on shift whenever Alina comes by for a cup of coffee, probably because he’s the only member of the Dregs willing to admit to knowing how the espresso machine works.

“Alina!” he says, freezing at the sight of her. After a few seconds, he seems to remember how to be a normal person and goes back to jerkily collecting stray coffee grounds with a damp dish cloth.

“Good evening, Wylan,” Alina says. There are a handful of familiar faces dotted at tables here and there across the shop, with an array of half-empty ceramic mugs and glasses of amber liquid scattered around them. “Can I get a glass of whiskey, please? Whatever that one is that Nina always orders, on the rocks.”

“Sure!” Wylan says with brightness that does not seem entirely genuine, abandoning the coffee grinder to scare up a glass and a bottle with a familiar label and a name in the language of the Wandering Isle that Alina’s never quite managed to fit her tongue around. “Is everything–ah, all right?” he asks Alina at a pitch that wildly swerves between audible and inaudible with every syllable. Using a pair of tiny tongs, he drops a clear, spherical ice cube into her glass.

“Just wanted to wind down a bit,” Alina tells him with a small smile.

“Right,” Wylan says, wide-eyed, nodding, and then he furtively surveys the room behind Alina and leans forward to add, “Are you sure ?” as he sloshes whiskey into her glass.

“Positive,” Alina whispers back.

To give Wylan an excuse not to talk to her, Alina takes her glass to the far end of the bar, away from the half-empty pastry case. The first mouthful of whiskey sits on her tongue, scalding her taste buds, before scraping its way down her throat in a hot line. Alina does not always enjoy these types of foreign spirits, but they’ve become popular in the years since the collapse of the union, brought back by the expats who’d packed their suitcases with all sorts of interesting foreign delicacies: denim jeans, avocados, democracy. 

Alina had been born only a few years after the serfs had ostensibly been liberated; in most small farming villages, like the one where she had lived with her parents as a child, as far as the local landowner was concerned he still owned all of his laborers. Freedom for most peasants was more a strange hypothetical than a legal certainty, and it was worse if you were Grisha, of course, the way everything was in those days. Even if she lives a full thousand years, Alina suspects she will die with a clear, perfect memory of the beautiful spring morning that the villagers had stoned Dominik in his parents’ barley field. Had he actually used the Small Science to drown his neighbor’s bull? Alina certainly has no idea. But in those days the stud fees were sometimes the only thing keeping a family from starving and the perceived depravity of the crime had whipped the whole village into a rage like a spark landing on dry underbrush. 

It’s so easy to be angry at the otkazat’sya, who can always be relied upon to react to things they don’t understand with fear and violence. But of course the otkazat’sya don’t have a monopoly on the more unpleasant human emotions. Or murder.

Alina inspects her glass, using her wrist to gently swirl its contents. The thought of Genya Lantsov is bothering Alina, rubbing at the back of her mind like a little pebble caught under her heel. Is it possible that Genya hadn’t been sent by the SAR at all, but had instead come to the Dregs because she’d genuinely needed their help? Alina thinks of the cold white foyer of the Lantsov townhouse and the endless security procedures of the Little Palace and imagines Genya somehow stuck inside them, pinned in place like a butterfly.

Wylan sidles down the bar, pretending to buff a martini glass. “Can I get you anything?” he asks. “Do you need a top-up?”

“No, one was enough, thanks,” Alina assures him, tipping back the last of her glass and then dropping it back onto the bar. She fishes her wallet out of the pocket of her coat and unpeels a handful of rubles. “Have a nice evening, Wylan.”

“Ah, you too?” he says, carefully using his thumb and forefinger to pluck the paper notes from Alina’s outstretched hand.

As Alina ducks out of The Cup and Crow, the chill of the rain smacks her across the face. Grimacing reflexively, she hunches her shoulders under her coat, unfurls her umbrella, and begins her wet trek back across the park. 

It’s so easy to be angry at the otkazat’sya. For someone who has lived as many centuries as Alina, it’s even easier to feel drowned by the inexorable march of human existence, the endless-seeming waves of cruelty and desperation compounding war and famine and suffering. In the face of such misery, what is there to do? The act of deflecting it is too large a task for a single person; generations of saints have died attempting to do just that, only to be crushed under its weight. The only recourse, really, is to shore up one's self and one's neighbors: the commitment of one's self to the petty indignities of living the present and the wretched work of building the future. Make connections, in other words, like an enormous mycelium knotting itself deep underground, so that the organism might survive when individuals falter.

The alternative would be to give in to the helplessness and become some sort of lonely, wizened crone hiding in a hut in the forest, and Alina has no patience for that.

~

Two days into the new year, the morning of Nina and Matthias’ wedding anniversary dawns sunny and brutally cold and it only gets worse as the day goes on. The shop is bustling all day, both floors teeming with frantic Os Altans trying to finish off their holiday shopping, which at least gives Alina an excuse to run around and stay warm. After Alina shoos out the last lingering customers and closes the shop, she and Myshka wrap themselves up in sweaters and warm boots and then Alina tucks Myshka into his little basket, where he’ll be protected from the salt coating the sidewalk. As she locks the front door behind them, a sudden gust of wind rattles the street's glass lanterns and hanging signs.

The green lawn of the park is covered in a brilliant shell of glittering ice, somehow still majestic even in the darkness of the evening. Alina is minding the heels of her boots more than her surroundings, which means she’s violently startled by the voice when it comes from behind her: “Evening, Alina.”

“Inej!” Alina gasps, her hand gone up involuntarily to her throat. She fists her hand closed to wink out whatever sunlight she might have inadvertently called. “By the Saints–!”

Myshka’s basket only has a few seconds in which to wobble before Inej is there, stabilizing it between her two palms. She’s dressed for the weather in a quilted parka and fleece hiking gloves, her braided hair coiled up around her head. Alina had worn her hair like that for the festival days of her youth, but she hadn’t ever looked half as fetching as Inej does now.

Inej peeks into Myshka’s basket and tucks a corner of his blanket a little more firmly around his neck. “Good evening,” she says to him, quietly. Myshka licks her fingers and then grumbles to himself when he only gets a tongueful of fleece for his trouble. “I’m sorry for startling you,” she says to Alina.

“It’s not your fault I can’t hear very well,” Alina says dismissively. “Are you on your way to Nina and Matthias’?” And then, at Inej’s nod, she adds, “What has brought you to this side of the park?”

Inej turns a little so Alina can see the dark bottle nestled into her armpit. “Nina used all of her burgundy to make the chicken, so she asked me to pick up another bottle. When I texted her a few minutes ago she said they’re still setting up, so there’s no need to rush.”

She and Alina stroll together along the path in companionable silence for a few minutes, Alina carefully picking her way between frozen-over puddles while Inej confidently braves them in her thick-soled boots. Blessedly, the wind seems to have settled and not a single breath of it disturbs them; all Alina can hear is the crunch of fresh ice under her boots and Myshka’s snuffling snores.

They’re just passed the shadowy mass of the picnic pavilion when Inej says, “That SAR Heartrender, the one who knows Nina.”

“Ivan?” Alina says. “Yes, he has been persistent, hasn’t he?”

Inej hums. “Strangely so,” she agrees. “Everything has been shut down for weeks now. Has anyone come by the shop?”

“Holiday shoppers, but nothing unusual,” Alina says. “I think perhaps Kaz was right, when he thought Genya Lantsov would be the last.” 

Inej does not reply to this. When Alina glances at Inej’s face, just a little peek out of the corner of her eye, it’s to Inej’s brows set low over her eyes, as though she’s mulling something over. Inej does not often allow herself to be very expressive.

“It’s odd,” Inej finally says, in her steady, usual way. “Because it’s you he’s following, not Kaz.”

A flash of heat unrelated to the weather creeps up the backs of Alina’s knees, prickling her skin under her sturdy woolen tights. It is unbearable to know that someone else has made note of this. Alina prefers small pleasures such as these to be enjoyed privately.

“I’m easier to follow,” Alina replies.

“An SAR Heartrender might be able to manage it,” Inej points out, quite rationally. “Follow Kaz, that is. Nina said that this Corporalki was the best in her enlistment year.”

“Maybe,” Alina allows. Then, truthfully, she adds, “I’m sure Kaz has a number of tricks up his sleeve.”

Inej does not bother agreeing with this. “Are you still freelancing?” she asks instead.

“Yes,” Alina says, thrown for a moment by this sudden change of subject. “But I thought Kaz has a dodgy little friend who does your in-house work?” In the five years that Alina has worked with the Dregs, she has found that Kaz has a dodgy little friend or two who can do anything. Of the many things that could be the secret to his success, Alina suspects that this–his network, the careful way he keeps track of favors kept and owed–is the primary foundation.

Inej stops quite suddenly in the middle of the path. They’re between lamp posts; the nearest one is behind Inej as she turns to face Alina, lighting up the wisps of dark hair that have escaped from her braid. Her face is set into an expression that is almost over-serious. “It’s not for the Dregs,” she says quietly. “It’s a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now.” She bites the edge of her lip, for only a few milliseconds, and then her mouth tightens back down. “It’s not profitable, if I do it right, so I’ve been building capital.”

Their conversation has twisted into one that has a familiar shape to Alina. Anticipation froths in the pit of her stomach. “All right,” she says, coaxingly.

Inej is staring at Alina very hard, as though she can climb into Alina’s brain through her eyes and read her thoughts like words on a page. “Nina thought that you were being threatened. She’s been looking for months now, but she can’t find anything on Leonid Kirigan. He didn’t even exist fifteen years ago, and now everyone’s talking as if he’s going to be the next chairman.” Her mouth flattens; she does not blink. “But I don’t think he was threatening you, not really. So if you’re–working for him, or sleeping with him, or beholden to him in some way, you would be a risk.”

Alina has to work hard to fight the grin that wants to bloom in the corners of her mouth. Perhaps it’s strange for Alina to be so moved by the transparent trust that Inej is offering to her, but Alina can’t help it. She was friendless for so long. 

“You don’t think he was threatening me?” Alina asks.

Inej gives her a deadpan look.

“Well, maybe it wasn’t all dour descriptions of how many years I was going to serve in a labor camp,” Alina admits. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say Kirigan’s bark is worse than his bite–he seems dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Ivan Kaminsky, and I think it’s unlikely he’s going to stop having me followed any time soon. But I’m not planning on letting that influence what I do or whom I decide to help.”

Inej’s eyebrows pull together. “How do you know we’d be helping anyone?” she prods.

Alina purses her mouth, to better hide a smile that she knows Inej would find condescending. “A private project?” she says. “An unprofitable one? And you, looking just as ready as Nina to chuck Kaz out the window when he decided to close the routes?”

“It was the right decision,” Inej says, a little too quickly.

“I’m sure,” Alina soothes. “Just as I’m sure you’ll make the right decision when it’s your turn to be in charge. Brr! Let’s get going, shall we? Before we’re so late that they decide to start eating without us.”

They walk a little faster after this interlude; Alina can’t quite feel her pinky toes and she’s hoping the increased circulation from a brisk walk will warm them back up. She puts a hand inside Myshka’s basket to touch his nose and reassure herself that he’s not too cold. 

They’ve left the park and are waiting for the light to change at the intersection when Inej says, very abruptly, “You didn’t say anything to Kaz, when he decided that we were closing down. But it was originally your idea. Years ago, right after.”

Right after Per Haskell’s abrupt departure, and Kaz’s meteoric rise, and the wretchedly hot summer when the Grisha Center’s air conditioning had died and little Daryna Vovka had practiced her Small Science by sending periodic whirlwinds around the gymnasium where the Zapovednik Grishenka were making their plodding way through the annual summer workshop series. When she’d turned eighteen in August and gotten her national service summons, Daryna had come by Oretsev & Sons to thank Alina for convincing her mother to enroll her in the workshop counselor’s program–“I’d be a worse Squaller,” she’d said, her face scrubbed clean and shining, her hands knotted around the straps of her duffel bag, “and I’m way more patient now, especially with the little ones, which my dad says you need in the army because everything is super slow and nothing ever happens and you have to clean all the time–anyway, thanks, Mrs. Oretsev!”--and then she’d caught a train to boot camp in Udova and no one had heard from her ever again.

Alina hums thoughtfully. “Maybe Kaz and I did have a conversation about it, before anything was formally established,” she muses. “But the routes were always a Dregs project and it was Kaz’s connections that made the whole thing work. He has a genius for logistics.”

There are many skills that Alina has acquired over the long centuries she has been alive. She can lie beautifully, balance books, turn invisible, knit sweaters, produce competent counterfeits of nearly any vital document, and kill someone either painlessly and very painfully should the situation require it. She has her own little network of artisans, forgers, bookbinders, and antique dealers that she has cultivated for decades, through a tremendous amount of effort, because being charming and friendly does not come naturally to her. 

The foremost skill Alina has learned, though, is how to survive. It is a tricky thing to master, involving trust and distrust in equal measure. In some ways it is an instinct that she has cultivated rather than a true craft. One of the truest pleasures of her long life is being asked to share this skill with someone else.

“So, you’re interested in helping?” Inej asks.

Across the street and down a block, Ivan Kaminsky, wearing a practical but comically enormous fur hat pulled low over his ears, is frowning down at his mobile as he pretends to wait in line at the bakery. Two stories above him, the windows of Nina and Matthias’ apartment glow, warm and golden, almost rosy in the evening gloom. As is his annual tradition, Matthias has cut and folded stars out of tissue-paper and taped them to the glass. Somebody moves past one of the windows in a quick scuttle, perhaps Wylan or Jesper dispatched on some last-minute errand. 

“Always,” Alina says.

The traffic light changes. Together, Alina and Inej cross the street.