You Must Know The Darkness To Appreciate The Light

🔆🌙 Chapter 9 🔆🌙

TW: gore, gunshots wounds, cringey writing and lots of regrets on my part

Through the rest of the day and the next, Tima and I rode side-by-side, usually at the very back of the procession where we could talk freely.

It amazed me how quickly and easily I opened up to him, albeit with a fake backstory, my words flowing freely. Before long, I was laughing so hard a few of the oprickniki ahead of us turned around to see what was going on. He told me about his family, his life growing up on a farm outside Balakirev and his sister being discovered as Grisha.

"I always wondered how she never seemed to get hurt very badly. She could roll down a hill, hitting rocks on her way down and not have a single bruise. But it was really discovered one day when I was on the roof of the barn with my Da, fixing the shingles thst had come loose that winter, terrible winter wasn't it that year? I mean the snow just piled up! And it never seemed to quit! It stayed so cold I went skating on the river, which never freezes, or at least very rarely, I actually have only heard one other time that river froze, but that was a few years before-"

"Tima!"

"Yes?"

"You're rambling. Back to how your sister was discovered."

"Oh. Right, yeah. So I was up on the barn roof, fixing the shingles, I was about nineteen then, and my Da needed more nails so I shimmied over to get them, and well, my boot caught on one of the loose shingles and I went over the edge."

He spread his hands apart in the air making a whistling sound, then clapped them together like something falling from the sky. "That hurt, like a lot. Scared my Ma, seeing me go hurdling over the edge of the barn roof. I landed in a hay stack in the pasture, but it still snapped my leg right in half. But luckily for me, Zinnie was there and fixed my leg. She was fifteen. I don't know she knew what to do, but she did."

I raised an eyebrow. "Zinnie?"

"Short for Zinaida, but she hates that name, so I've always just called her Zinnie. But so that's how we discovered she was a Healer." He went quiet for the first time that day.

I stole a glance at him, his face a mix of emotions. "Did something happen to her?"

He snapped back to himself and shook his head.

"No, no. Well, unless you call Grisha Examiners something. After she helped my leg we didn't annouce her..abilities...but we knew there was no way to hide her when the Examiners came that summer. They whisked her off to Os Alta. Our parents were worried about her and afraid of her going alone so I tagged along and looked for work in the city so I could be close to her, but then I found a job with the General's personal guard," He shrugged. "And I've been here ever since. I don't get to see her as much as I would like to, but that's okay. What about you, what's your story? You said you were from the west, Os Kervo, right?"

As much as I liked talking with Tima, I wasn't sure he ever stopped. Did he even need to breathe? I sighed and adjusted my hat. I was grateful for the conversation, and with someone who wasn't the Darkling. "Uh, yeah, Os Kervo."

Tima just waited for me to say more, but I didn't. "Were you born there? Why did you decide to come east? Do you have any family? Why did you join the oprichniki?"

"I was born there. My family...my older brothers...were traders." Certainly not my smoothest lie, but it would work. "We all moved to Novokribisk when the markets in Os Kervo dried up, and, and then-" I made my best attempt at crying on cue, a single tear rolling down my cheek. Tima instantly apologized for asking such intrusive questions and went quiet. I'm becoming as manipulative as the Darkling.