Blood and Water - The Darkling

Chapter 17: Hungry

*Unedited

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𝕯𝖛𝖆 Stolba takes me by surprise. I somehow expected that the little valley would be like a graveyard, a grim wasteland of phantoms and abandoned places. Instead, the settlements are bustling. The landscape is dotted with burned-out hulks and empty fields of ash, but new homes and businesses have sprung up right beside them.

There are taverns and hostelries, a storefront advertising watch repair, and what looks like a shop that lends books by the week. Everything feels oddly impermanent. Broken windows have simply been boarded over. Many of the houses have canvas roofs or holes in the walls that have been covered with wool blankets or woven mats. Who knows how long we'll be here? they seem to say. Let's make do with what we have.

Has it always been this way? The settlements are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, governed by the Shu Han or Ravka, depending on how the borders are drawn at the end of a particular war. Is this how my parents had lived? It's strange to picture them this way, but I don't mind the idea. They might have been soldiers or merchants. They might have been happy here. And maybe one of them had been harboring a power, the latent legacy of Morozova's youngest daughter - or hopefully some other unknown Grisha family. There are legends of Sun Summoners before Alina. Most people think they are hoaxes or empty stories, wishful thinking born of the misery wrought by the Fold. But there might be more to it than that. Or maybe I'm clinging to some dream of a heritage I have no real claim to.

We pass through a market square crowded with people, their wares displayed on makeshift tables: tin pans, hunting knives, furs for the trek over the mountains. We see jars of goose fat, dried figs sold in bunches, fine saddles, and flimsy-looking guns. Strings of freshly plucked ducks, their skin pink and dimpled, hang above one stall. Mal keeps his bow and repeating rifle bundled in his pack. The weapons are too finely made not to draw attention. Even I have my hair star dagger tucked into my jacket.

Children play in the dirt. A squat man in a sleeveless vest is smoking some kind of meat in a big metal drum. I watch him toss a juniper branch inside it, sending up a fragrant, bluish cloud. Zoya scrunches up her nose, but Tolya and Harshaw can't dig out their coins fast enough.

This is where Mal's family and mine had met death. Somehow the wild, cheerful atmosphere seems almost unfair. It certainly doesn't match Alina's mood. Though in my opinion death is a part of life and to mourn over a life I never knew isn't living at all. But a small part of me feels a twinge of sadness.

Though we are well provisioned from the stocks at the Spinning Wheel, Mal wants to buy a map made by a local. We need to know which trails might be blocked by landslides or where the bridges have been washed out.

A woman with white braids peeking from beneath her orange wool hat sits on a low, painted stool, humming to herself and beating a cowbell to catch the attention of passersby. She hasn't bothered with a table, but has laid a rug displaying her stock—canteens, saddlebags, maps, and stacks of metal prayer rings—directly on the ground. A mule stands behind her, its long ears twitching off flies, and occasionally, she reaches back and offers it a pat on the nose.

"Snow's coming soon," she says, squinting up at the sky as we poke through the maps. "Need blankets for the journey?"

"We're set," Alina replies. "Thank you."

"Lot of people headed over the border."

"But not you?"

"Too old to go now. Shu, Fjerdans, Fold..." She shrugs. "You sit still, trouble passes you by."