Beautiful and Broken

18.

Genya was moved from the infirmary, back to one of the cells in the basement. I've visited her daily, without any more objections from the guards. She asked me to read to her, so I've picked out the most syrupy romances I could find in the public library – these volumes had no place in a military base's collection, but it turned out that some of the Grisha smuggled them in and hid them in the covers of the most boring treaties about battle theory. 

And when I run out of romances, I've told her the fairy tales of Atlantis, of the magical creatures that inhabited the land before the first mage was born: dragons that hoarded gold in their lairs, unicorns that only showed themselves to the maidens pure of heart, dwarfs who yielded iron into unbreakable weapons and elves who made the flowers bloom in the heart of the winter. It took many, many stories to lure the faintest smile out of her. But as the weeks passed, it was clear that her spirit was slowly healing. I couldn't help but look at her in ave.

I've mainly avoided Aleksander, which wasn't hard, because he was spending an unusual amount of time outside the base. I've heard rumours of Alina staying in Os Alta, under the protection of the youngest crown prince, Nikolai, and of his older brother, Vasily, negotiating with the Fjerdans about opening the borders with Ravka for trade relations. The soldiers at the base whispered that the General was planning an attack on Ravka as soon as the negotiations succeeded and military forces on both sides of the border were removed. 

I've profited of his absence to ask Ivan and Fedyor to try the same exercises in magic that I was unsuccessfully showing to their General. It turned out, it wasn't only Aleksander: Grisha magic simply didn't work as our magic in Atlantis. It baffled me, because we've always been taught that there is only one kind of magic everywhere in the world.

I've learned that Morozova's human daughter died and he resurrected her, but then both of them were supposedly drowned by the angry village folk. Her shadow summoner daughter soon remained an orphan, as her mother couldn't bear loosing his husband, and nobody knew or cared what happened to her afterwards. As much as I looked, there never existed mentions of more than two shadow summoners in Ravka at any given time, a woman and a young man. What if it was the same two people all along, a mother and his son? 

Also, there was no knowledge of a shadow summoner before the daughter of Morozova, and no sun summoner before Alina Starkov, they just seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. I knew had the pieces in my head, I just couldn't arrange them into the right order to find the solution that my assignment from the Council required.

I was sitting near Genya, watching her slowly fall asleep in the middle of one of my stories, when Aleksander entered.

"Wake up, Genya, it's time to go."

I stood up, moving between her and Aleksander. "Where are you taking her?"

"We're going to Ravka, to finally take what's mine." His eyes were hard as stone, his chin slightly raised.

"Aleksander, don't," I pleaded. "This will only end in more destruction."

"There is no other way," he stated, stepping closer to me.

"What if there is? I'm so close now. I only need a little more time."

He showed me out of the way, dragging Genya out of the bed. "I've run out of time, Altair." He pushed Genya out of the door, then turned back to me. "I'm sorry that I need to do this, but I can't risk you trying to stop me." And with those words, he stepped out of the cell and turned the key in the lock.