Aleeza-the Star Summoner

On Thin Ice

That week was probably the best week Aleeza ever had. But, she didn't want to let herself fully indulge and get used to her happiness. She knew that she was on thin ice-very thin. She needed to know her family wasn't also Grisha before allowing herself to get too comfortable.

She often thought she was cursed. Whenever she finally accepted a good thing, something else just had to come along to ruin it.

However, by her calculations, she still had another few days before Ivan would discover whether or not her family was Grisha.

Every day she would train with The Darkling, some days longer than others, and she was impressed with her progress. She hoped The Darkling was too. If her interpretation was correct, he seemed absolutely amazed at the things she could do.

It was good they were training together, The Darkling thought. They needed each other to train. Without his shadows, you'd never see the stars. However, both their attentions had been steadily drifting away from training. The room was full of stars, but he was staring at her, and her at him.

Another good thing that happened is Genya's and David's relationship, or according to Genya, their "friendship." Whatever it was, it was getting along splendidly, all thanks to Aleeza's advice, obviously. David knew about Aleeza's friendship with Genya, which may have prompted him to make peace with Aleeza.

However, more likely in Aleeza's mind was that he was simply interested. She found herself seated next to him at dinner one night-Aleeza had been rotating where she sat and decided to sit wherever the heck she wanted to, even sitting at the heartrenders table once with Feydor. No one dared to say anything about her disregarding the seating hierarchy rules.

David was insanely interested in her new powers, specifically, the small science behind them. He offered to help her in an experiment with mirrors or something, and Aleeza gladly accepted.

They only met once, but they got a lot of work done. Aleeza discovered that with a lot of effort she could make objects permanently invisible, leading David to consider the possibility of an invisibility cloak.

Truly Aleeza was having a great time going to the Banya and even going for a late-night swim on the lake. Aleeza was jealous of how much control the tide makers had with their domain, but it was the middle of the night, and Aleeza had immense authority over the moonlight. Meaning she could temporarily blind any tidemakers that wanted to splash her.

Along with David's help, Aleeza finally made a conclusion. Since the moon is technically a reflection, it falls into her dominion, meaning she had more control of how to bend its rays when compared to the sun. That all finally explained why Baghra woke her up early every month.

The time she'd been with Matthias on the shipwreck was the first time she'd been awake during a full moon. Baghra had made it her duty to wake Aleeza up at the crack of dawn every morning on the eve of a full moon, Aleeza's tiredness that resulted prevented her from doing anything outside in the moonlight.

Aleeza still wanted to know why the heck Baghra had hidden her and wanted to ask The Darkling, but she needed to impress him. When she wasn't doing anything fun, she read books about astrology, wanting to know more about her power. She even worked on making constellations, but it took a lot of effort.

The first time she summoned a small number of stars was in front of The Darkling. He wanted to see if she could move the stars into her hand. Perhaps only summon a single one in the palm of her hand as if she were a sun summoner. Unfortunately, it seemed that her stars didn't want to touch her.

However, with her small number of stars, she could move them around in a pattern-making constellation. The Darkling didn't see any tangible use for this, but just like everything else she did, they were pretty, and The Darkling found himself in awe. For some reason, summoning fewer stars made her more tired than if she summoned a whole bunch.