Kingdom of Scourge and Shadow (The Sightstone Series #1)

Chapter Nineteen: Alina

Trigger Warning: Mentions of sex, sexual assault. Skip the first couple of paragraphs if you don't want to read it.

"King Mikhail is a man of great choler. Quick to anger and quick to violence, he is a warmonger through and through, and his thirst for victory and imperial dominance has led his kingdom towards poverty and self-destruction. It is my opinion that it is only a matter of time before he violates the rules of engagement."

-Lord Bennington, former Caedish ambassador to Saroviya, in a dispatch sent to Queen Sara

***

 If Alina had hoped that things would get easier if she let the king into her bed, she was hopelessly wrong. He took every excuse to corner her, to kiss her, to paw her, and every night he knocked on her door. The queen was as vitriolic as ever, and still the other mages shunned her.

Then, about a week after she first relented, the king presented her with an expensive silver choker and a pair of diamond earrings. Alina wore both reluctantly. The earrings were far gaudier than the simple jewelry she'd always favored, and the choker reminded her a bit too much of a collar. Still, the king liked seeing her wear them, so she did. Her position was too precarious to refuse.

In the lab, every day, tension reigned. Nikolai, her only ally now that Elektra was away at the front, seemed oblivious to the sneers and snide comments of the other Healers, of the way they talked about her behind her back. At least the rumors were no better or worse than they'd ever been. They still called her the king's whore, still muttered about how she thought she was better than them, still cast snide, superior glares her way. It was no better, no worse than before.

Every day, she threw herself completely into the work being done in the lab. It was a much-needed distraction from the knowledge that, when she returned to the royal quarters, the king would be waiting for her. Lately, he always seemed to be.

She'd never studied a disease like this before, never had to build a profile from nothing. The work was challenging–hours spent peering into microscopes and scouring the reports sent from the front for a list of symptoms, trying to develop a way to identify the Scourge's presence in a victim's blood so they could tell if someone was infected.

Most days, they kept coming up against dead ends, and soon Alina began to hear whispers among the Healers that they'd never seen a disease like this before. Not long after, the speculation began. The disease wasn't natural, some of them theorized. It wasn't even developed from an existing virus, unlike any biological weapon they'd seen before. It was divine retribution, a few of the more devout Healers would mutter, or it was mage-made. It wasn't a disease at all, but a curse. No, no, it was definitely a disease, completely unlike anything in existence–a disease that they couldn't figure out how it infected people.

Around and around in circles they went, as they found, on one day, evidence to prove one theory, then the next day found evidence that proved a completely different hypothesis, and then, the day after that, something that completely disproved both their theories.

The work was hard and headache-inducing, but Alina reveled in it. She'd never done anything like this before, never built a disease's profile from the ground up, never spent much time on virology at all. But, soon enough, it started to become clear that she had a knack for this type of work.

Side-by-side with Nikolai, working as a team, she identified more of the Scourge's unique characteristics than anyone else. After a week of fruitless labor, by using donated samples of blood, she was the first to be able to identify traces of the Scourge in human blood. The next week, she discovered the first traces of another virus in the Scourge's molecular structure.