Say That You Are Mine - A Darklina Fanfic

Chapter 6

Darkling's POV

We waited there for another hour, talking. We had to wait because Alina had ended up jumping into the stream because she could still smell the Fjerdan's blood on her. I found out about how she was an orphan, one of the ones who had grown up in Keramzin because of the war. I found out how she had always wanted to travel the world. She wanted to visit the library at the Univerity of Ketterdam. She had hopes and dreams and fears. Her best friend was a tracker in the First Army who had grown up with her. She told me all about him. His name was Malyen Oretsev, but she called him Mal. Mal was only a couple of months older than she was, and he had gotten to the orphanage only about a week before she did. At first, I was a little jealous of the relationship between them because I could tell by the way she was talking about him that she liked him, but then I noticed something. She told me about all the times she had been there for him but never about any times he had been there for her. There was a shadow in her eyes, so faint that I could tell she didn't even know about it. She told me how she got put in jail overnight once because she got into a fight and left the other person unconscious because he had said something bad about Malyen. But she didn't see him until a week later when she got out. He hadn't visited her. I knew for a fact that soldiers were allowed to visit someone in the jails if they asked and gave a good enough reason. He had given some excuse about why he couldn't visit her. For a whole week.

I told her as much as I could about the Little Palace. She listened in silence until I mentioned that we ate herring and rye for breakfast. Her nose had scrunched up. "What? You don't like herring and rye?" I laughed.

"Not really. Besides, I didn't expect you to say that you ate peasant fare. Do you eat with everyone?"

"Rarely. I'm almost always in my room working during meals. Were you looking forward to eating with me?"

She smiled slightly, still not altogether comfortable around me. "You wish. I'll bet you were just hoping I'd say yes so that you could eat with me."

Take out one specific word in that sentence and that was exactly what I had hoped would happen. That word being 'with.'

It was remarkable how easy it was to talk to her. She wasn't terrified of me like so many others. Her personality was like a beam of sunshine. We talked and talked and talked. She lay in the grass with her eyes closed, waiting for her clothes to dry, the sun on her face. I sat next to her, leaning back on my hands with my legs crossed. Every time I looked over at her (which was more than I'd like to admit), her skin was glowing in the sun. Her hair gleamed from where it was splayed across the grass behind her head, light still woven through it from the outburst of her Summoning.

When there was a lapse of silence, I said, "Sorry for overstepping boundaries, by the way. I shouldn't have. I know I apologized earlier, but it didn't feel like enough."

"No, it's fine. I think it's probably better if I move on. Mal's never liked me, anyway. He's handsome, popular, and a talented tracker. He can make rocks into rabbits." She laughed softly. "He even has Grisha girls chasing after him. And then there's me. I'm... not any of that. First, I look like this." She motioned toward herself, although I couldn't see anything even slightly wrong with her. "Second, I'm not the most talented mapmaker ever. And third, I am not popular whatsoever. Whenever I have a friend who's a girl, they just use me so that they can get closer to Mal. I've known for a while that if we kept going down the roads we were on, we'd end up being far away from each other. And now that I'm supposedly Grisha, that distance just got a lot farther. So, I don't have a chance."

I looked at her, surprised. "You could get any guy you wanted. Trust me," I laughed darkly and she smiled, but it quickly faded. "I told myself that I wouldn't like you at all, and now look what's happened." She rolled her eyes. "But if you're dry, then we should probably get going. We have to get there before the carriage does."

She looked at me as we got up and walked to my horse. "The carriage? I thought they went back to camp."

"Nope. They're a decoy for any more assassins. We met them on the road while you were asleep. That's why we're going through the middle of nowhere."

As I helped her swing into the saddle, she looked down at me curiously. "Does your horse have a name?"

I swung up behind her, straddling her. "Her name is Nycta. It's a derivative of nyctophilia, which is like... I don't know how to explain it. It's when you love nighttime or feel really comfortable in the dark. I like it because it fits both her and me." She laughed, turning around to face me. "You're kind of a nerd, aren't you?" I gasped, wounded. She suddenly stopped laughing and bit her lip nervously. "That reminds me... How did you do that thing with the Fjerdan? What was it?"

Um. "It's called the Cut. It's... something only talented and powerful summoners can do if they have the right focus. It forms your element - shadow, sun, air, water, or fire - into a blade that can cut through anything. It can be done from any distance, but the further the distance the more difficult it is."

"Huh," she said. "Can I see the shadow thing you can do? I don't think I've ever actually seen it."

This, for whatever reason, made me slightly nervous. What if it scared her or made her think I was creepy? Then I shook myself. She'll be fine. She's a big girl. I felt around for the shadows around us and pulled them in, feeling the familiar softness of the snake-like shadows. At her wide-eyed face, they dissipated.

But she just turned around and faced forward again. I would give anything to know what she was thinking. But I never would because she just leaned into my chest and closed her eyes, completely at ease. At least that meant she didn't completely hate me. She wasn't running away scared yet. But, as much as it killed me to say it, she would. She would run and not look back.

Word count - 1148