The Nightingale

Chapter Nine

Natasha let herself get lost in her work for the moment, letting her focus on the drawing of group of men, the curves of their backs as they sat hunched around a small fire, which cast dancing shadows across their face, letting her fingers explain the expressions on their faces and the characteristics their body language displayed.

"That's quite the drawing." Natasha jumped at the voice, looking up to find Alexander standing behind her shoulder. Lost in her drawing she hadn't noticed, but he had walked up the other set of steps, crossed the deck, and come up behind her. She didn't know how long he had been standing there, either.

"Thank you," she replied, looking down at the drawing then back at the main deck. Only a few men remained compared to the amount in her sketch, even John had retired to his own room, making Natasha hesitant to return to bed.

"May I?" Natasha looked up at Alexander, who was motioning to the space beside her. She nodded, moving over slightly to allow him more room. When he settled next to her, she looked over at him and handed him the sketchbook when he asked to look more closely at the drawing. He studied it for a moment before handing it back to her, and Natasha closed the book and held it tightly against her chest, thankful that he hadn't been nosy enough to flip through the other pages as her siblings often had.

Despite having spent the better part of the afternoon with him, they had only talked about the steps and techniques he had been trying to teach her, and while his demeanor while they trained taught Natasha a lot about him, he was still a stranger to her. Even more, she still had so many questions for him, and as she looked at him, she sensed he had his own thoughts he had been waiting to express.

"So how long has it been?" he asked her, before Natasha had the chance to ask one of her many questions, and she tilted her head to the side inquisitively. "Since you left."

"Oh," Natasha replied quietly, "Five days now, but it feels like a lifetime already." She looked down at the sketchbook in her arms, thinking of all of the pictures tucked inside of her home, her friends and family. She missed them, and a large part of her always felt the urge to just abandon the ship and take her chances in the village, anything to see her family, to make sure they were safe and let them know that she was too.

"Tell me your side of the history," Alexander continued, still watching her carefully. "What stories were you told to keep you imprisoned in the town for so long?"

"You don't know?" Natasha asked him, surprised. With everything he had told her earlier, with everything he seemed to know, she assumed he would have known what these people said did to keep her and her townspeople imprisoned. Part of what he had said earlier in the bar was even true, the assassins who hunted her town for people who tried to leave, but there were parts of her story that differed from what he seemed to know.

"Well I've heard stories, of course, rumors, but I've never actually spoken with somebody who lived in the village. I want to know what you know, to hear the truth for once from somebody who lived it." Natasha studied him for a moment before retelling the story she had repeated to her so many times in her life, beginning to realize how absurd it sounded that her entire village had believed in these monsters, and how nobody had managed to escape, and live to talk about it.

"It sounds crazy, doesn't it?" She sighed after finishing her story, running her hands back through her hair. "A whole village believing in monsters that nobody had ever seen."

"I wouldn't say it was crazy," Alexander replied, looking off in the distance as he spoke. "Your village faced great tragedy for centuries, perhaps it just became easier for them to accept that these atrocities were the doings of supernatural beings instead of human beings. Nobody wants to believe that kind of evil actually exists within people." Natasha followed Alexander's gaze, looking out over the water as she let his words sink in, and she couldn't help but think about her father once again, and how that kind of evil seemed to exist within him.

"But why didn't anybody find out the truth? After all these years, why didn't anybody figure it out? If they had, if somebody had found out the truth, all of this could have been avoided," Natasha said quietly, letting her words trail off again. "My father never would have disappeared. He would be alive."

"I wouldn't be so quick to assume that nobody figured out the truth," Alexander responded, and as Natasha looked back at him she found his eyes already on her. "If I had to guess, I'd say that perhaps the reason many of your people disappeared was because they were bothering to find out the truth, and they found out something they weren't supposed to know. For that, they were either killed or forced to join those who guarded your town."

"Why do you think that is? What could they have found that would have cost them their lives?" Natasha watched him carefully, unable to deny how thankful and relieved she felt to have somebody who would answer her questions, somebody who knew something about her town.

"Don't you remember what I said yesterday, Natasha?" He asked, and she nodded, replaying bits of their conversation in her mind, searching for what Alexander would be referencing.

"Nobody's ever found written proof of what happened the day those two Lords abdicated, but the people who know about your village believe that you come from those families, and that's why the current Lords put so much effort into keeping you all contained, because descendants of those two Lords could disrupt the kingdom.

"The spies originally sent into your village killed those in charge, most of the people who were old enough to remember where you came from. Those who were left, I image were threatened into keeping quiet, until eventually all those who remembered your past were gone. But I don't believe that these men and women would have just let your heritage die. If I had to bet, there's information hidden somewhere in your village about your past, about who you all are-"

Natasha finished the sentence for him.

"Descendants of the two formal Lords."

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A/N: I'm not really a huge fan of this chapter, idk why. Let me know what you think!

Edited 9/8/18