Baddie Alina and slightly better Darkling?
What if Alina and stayed the night of the winter fete instead of running away? What if she had chosen the Darkling over Mal? What if the Malina ship sank fast and the Darklina ship sailed?
All these charact...
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We rode for a few more hours across the plains, never able to see the road. I had no idea where we were going, but the Darkling did because he always seemed sure of where we were going.
Eventually, we stopped, far from the line of trees, and swung off Nycta. "Why do you think there haven't been more assassins yet?" I asked. "Are they so scared of you that they would go against their orders?"
"I think they're more scared of you, actually," he replied jokingly and sat down with his back to a tree, watching me pet Nycta. "After the whole thing with the Fjerdans, they're probably pretty terrified of you."
"Wait." I turned around. "You saw that?"
He laughed. "Yep. I watched when you punched that guy and broke his nose." In a bad imitation of my voice, he said, "Surprise! I'm a witch!" I giggled like a thirteen-year-old with a crush. "You were terrifying. You looked like you were about to destroy them with fire straight out of hell."
"Well, at least I can act scary. According to the Fjerdans, I was weak and unimpressive. At least, I was until I punched one of those guys. Then I was a witch."
"At the Little Palace, you'll train with Botkin. He's one of the best there is when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Or any other type of combat."
We talked some more about what life would be like at the Little Palace. He seemed to hate all the nobles - he called them stuffy and stuck-up. I don't know why it was so easy talking to him. I didn't even talk to Mal like this, and I had known him almost my entire life. It was so messed up. Here I was, in the middle of nowhere, talking to one of the biggest, baddest men in all of Ravka as if I had known him my entire life. I wasn't the least bit scared of him, yet I knew I should be. I had seen him perform the Cut on two people, had to wash their blood off my hands and face, and still fell asleep in his arms. For some reason (what it was I had no idea), I completely trusted him.
"Ask me."
His voice snatched me out of my thoughts. "What? Ask you what?"
"Anything. I'll try and answer the best I can."
I thought for a moment. "How old are you? Because you look like you're not much older than me, but I've heard stories about you since I was old enough to understand them."
He was silent for a few minutes as we watched the sunset. Finally, he said quietly, "I don't know exactly."
"How can you not know?"
"Do you know exactly how old you are?"
This was a sore subject for me. In Keramzin, we were all given the Duke's birthday out of respect for him. I didn't know when my actual birthday was. My annoyance must have shown on my face because he said, "Exactly." We sat there for a while, and then he said softly, almost as if he didn't want to share this with me, "A hundred and twenty. Give or take a few years."
