You Must Know The Darkness To Appreciate The Light

🔆🌙 Chapter 35 🔆🌙

Darkling's POV

After my little brawl with the tracker I had return to the Captain's quarters, settling down at the desk and having a glass of kvas.

I had called a Corporalnik to attend to the knife wound in my arm, and while they worked I couldn't help but wonder —or worry— about what Alina would think about her precious tracker's butchered hand when she awoke.

But as hour after hour, day after day passed she didn't wake.

Soon, my lingering by her bedside lessened and my attention turned to the kvas bottle in my cabin, until my visits stopped all together.

What little hope I still had dwindling to nothing as time wore on.

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Alina's POV

I stretched lazily under the late summer sun, a warm breeze rustling the wheat around me and birds sang a cheerful song in the distance.

I didn't know how long I had been here, or even how I had gotten to this place, but I didn't care.

I was perfectly happy here, at Keramzin. Much happier than I had ever been in my childhood. It was peaceful and calm.

It's odd how things change.

At one time, I had hated this place and the memories of growing up here, treated as a burden and nothing more than another mouth to feed and dirty body to clothe and bathe.

And now, it was my sanctuary.

Footfalls thudding through the soft dirt drew my attention behind me, where a woman and a man were standing, looming over me.

I looked up at them. The woman —who was Shu, with beautiful ebony hair streaked with silver and sun tanned skin— crouched down next to me, reaching out to brush the fallen chaff from my loose white hair.

"Alina."

Her voice was accented, but not in the elegant tongue of the Taban princesses. No, this woman's voice held the accent of the country, further evidence of such showing in the fact her hands her scarred and rough from long days of work.

I didn't ask how she knew me as I looked between her and the man, who had salt-and-pepper and a kind smile that showed in his dark brown eyes.

He was clearly Ravkan, from both his appearance to the olive green uniform bearing the double golden eagle on the front.

I had been too young to remember my parents when I was sent to Keramzin, and no one there had cared. I had been told they had been killed in the crossfire of the borders wars, the reason that most children had been sent to the orphanage.

After all, it was better to pay attention to your studies and to not run through the halls than to waste time hoping that our parents would one day to claim us and take us to a proper home.

I smiled at her, taking her hand. "Mother."

Tears welled in the woman's golden eyes as she knelt next to me. "My little girl."

As I heard my mother's voice again, I was just a little girl again, traveling down a dusty road in Dva Stolba on my father's shoulders and eating beets that someone had sliced for me. I felt relief, like I was no longer the Sun Summoner and I no longer held the weight of all of Ravka on my back.

I could almost believe it, too, as my father wrapped both my mother and I in an embrace.

"I thought you were gone. I was told you were dead." I sighed. "I missed you."