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jomiddlemarch · 2 years

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what it is to be a thin crescent moon

Chapter 29

It came to Alina, suddenly, the way a cup overfilled overflowed, that everything she knew about merzost was wrong. It followed, with the subtlety of sugar stirred into tea, that everything Aleksander believed about merzost was wrong. Between the two of them, her studies and his experience, they encompassed virtually the entirety of the body of knowledge on merzost. The realization was so daunting, so dazzling, that she couldn’t help speaking aloud.

“Everything we know about merzost is wrong.”

Her voice was pitched quietly for the Library, but it seemed to ring in the space. She was sure to disturb anyone who might be reading or walking through the stacks. As it was, there was only Togtuun at their desk who looked quite the farthest thing from disturbed. They rose, their chestnut brown kefta unbuttoned at the throat, revealing a necklet of enameled links in a style Alina had never seen at court, among the Grisha or even on the otkazat’sya in Os Alta.

“I shouldn’t say it took you long enough, when you have gotten further faster than anyone before you,” Togtuun remarked. They sat down across from Alina, resting a slender hand on the table top; Alina was convinced that beneath their kefta, Togtuun had crossed their legs with the sly grace of a courtier. There was nothing avid in their gaze, but some warmth was there that did not call its power from light or pressure.

“But you’d like to,” Alina replied.

“I haven’t been impatient as much as hopeful,” Togtuun said.

“You’ve been a little impatient I think,” Alina said. It was a relief that Togtuun could be so, when Alina would have said their chief attribute was a certain unbreachable remoteness.

“Perhaps a little,” Togtuun said. “Perhaps far too much, but there have been too many interruptions, too many difficulties that you have had to deal with, and the bond between you and the Shadow Summoner has been…unanticipated.”

“You didn’t think we’d fall in love,” Alina said, when it was clear that Togtuun would not offer an explanation without prompting. It startled her to hear the words she’d chosen instead of either other constructions she might have said, that she’d fallen in love with Aleksander or he with her, though she wouldn’t speak of it to him over their blessedly herring-less dinner; it would unsettle him now as it wouldn’t in a decade, when he would smile, curious, or in a century, when he would grin over it.

“Not so easily. So completely,” Togtuun said. “I suppose that time you spent alone in the woods was an idyll, a recalibration.”

“Both of us nearly died, several times,” Alina said. “It wasn’t a romantic tryst with moonlight and loads of silk cushions and wine flagons with platters of grapes heaped about everywhere. It was freezing and there were so many lentils, it beggared belief.”

“How disappointed General Kirigan will be,” Togtuun said.

“To hear me speak the truth? He’d never be disappointed by that,” Alina replied.

“To have missed your description of a perfect tryst,” Togtuun said. “He would never have guessed you felt so strongly about grapes.”

“I thought the grapes were part of the standard Grisha seduction,” Alina said, seeing Mal’s face as he tossed her a few after his evening with Zoya. Decadence hadn’t suited him and she’d had no appetite then, but she remembered the scene so vividly, she had to pity her former self.

“You were wrong about that as well,” Togtuun said. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“And merzost does,” Alina said, as she was supposed to. It could be this way with Togtuun, a lesson that became a dance, a debate that became a puzzle, an embroidery, Togtuun’s gifts those of a Durast and an Alkemi, with a quality all their own, a quicksilver manipulation of thought instead of particulate energy or matter. Alina couldn’t guess when a conversation would proceed in this fashion with the Librarian, but she’d learned to be watchful and ready; she’d learned that Togtuun would not scold her if she made a misstep or birch her if she fumbled, but their praise was nothing like Aleksander’s nor Master Botkin’s.

“It does,” Togtuun agreed. “Tell me what you know.”

“So you can tell me if I am right?” Alina said.

“So we can make the next leap,” Togtuun said. Their face was so serious, so open and unreadable, the wisdom that of the ancient fern and its freshest, furled fiddlehead. “It wasn’t only General Kirigan who has needed you for a time beyond time, Starkova Kirigana.”

“I hardly think you need me to solve the mysteries of merzost,” Alina said.

“You’re the only one who has questioned Morozova’s texts since the Little Palace was founded,” Togtuun said. “Most of the Grisha quail at the least mention of merzost.”

“That seems, well, foolish,” Alina replied.

“The otkazat’sya do not have a monopoly on folly. And the Shadow Summoner has impressed upon the younglings that they risk the gravest harm to themselves and their fellows should they peer into the abyss,” Togtuun said.

“‘Peer into the abyss?’ That has got to be a direct quote from Aleksander,” Alina said, shaking her head in fond exasperation. “He can be so dramatic, I think sometimes he’s really missed his calling and he should be writing three-act plays for the Imperial Theater and shouting at the lead actress that she has put more feeling into her monologue. Simply exploring whether the theorems about merzost are valid isn’t dangerous. It’s more dangerous not to, to just accept that whatever Ilya Morozova wrote was sufficient and correct. And it wasn’t as if there aren’t other people who considered the possibilities.”

“No one reads those books and treatises,” Togtuun said. “A very few have begun and none have finished. I had hopes of Kostyk, but his small Science has compelled him elsewhere.”

“I think David has some idea. About merzost and that we’re wrong about it,” Alina said.

“Perhaps. He knows Kirigan would not listen to him though, not in the way he would need to be heard,” Togtuun said. “And he doesn’t trust me.”

“He doesn’t trust many people. Probably because Dame Baghra tortured him,” Alina said. She thought the Librarian might argue the choice of words, but evidently the one constant in the world was that everyone knew Dame Baghra to behave monstrously. Togtuun sighed, just a little, and Alina decided not to try and interpret the meaning behind that soft breath, softly released.

“You do, though. And now, you will trust me enough to tell me what you have discovered,” Togtuun said, making the words tremble between question and command. There was a trick to it that Alina wasn’t sure she would ever master herself.

“Morozova conceptualizes merzost in material terms, the power and the sacrifice needing to be balanced on a scale, as if he were bartering for a sack of flour with the miller,” Alina said. “There is only duality, good and evil, dark and light, whatever is taken must be paid for and the transaction, the act of payment itself, is inherently wrong. To desire is wrong, to fulfil desire is wrong, to be satisfied and whole an impossible state. I’d almost pity him if he hadn’t cocked everything up so terribly and caused such torment.”

“You mean in the Shadow Summoner,” Togtuun said.

“Aleksander, yes, of course, but he’s not the only one who’s suffered because of Morozova’s errors,” Alina said. “So many lost, so many incomplete. Such a waste—”

She broke off, aware that whatever she meant by the word would pale in comparison to the comrades and friends Togtuun had seen maimed or killed, exiled or enslaved, feeling impossibly young and far too authoritative. Togtuun saw it and as was their wont, exercised the most pragmatic mercy.

“What is right?” Togtuun asked. “If we agree Ilya Morozova was wrong, how should we understand merzost?”

“I think…I think understanding merzost is comprehending the incomprehensible. I know, that sounds specious and silly and anyone else would tell me it’s a load of Volcra shit, in varying degrees of politeness, but I think there is no direct way to understand merzost. It’s unconfrontable…it requires you to occupy a liminal space, present and ephemeral, approaching and waiting. It’s about potential and how it can tip into being. And also, there is a tremendous amount of mathematics built into it,” Alina said. “I can’t emphasize that part enough, because I nearly went mad trying to get some of the equations to work out.”

“A pity Ninochka was not here sooner. She has a particular facility in that area, though few realize it,” Togtuun remarked, a bit of astonishing information shared casually, as though Alina would not remember that Togtuun was nearly always imperturbable but never casual, never speaking without some greater purpose. She would not care to face Togtuun across the shatranj board.

“You said, once I told you what I’d learned, there could be a next leap.” Alina wouldn’t have referenced an abyss, but her sense of what lay ahead was indistinct, misty instead of dark, though dangers could easily hide within both obscurities. She’d only ever been a mediocre map-maker, but she still trusted a map, a bottle of ink, the squinting in the distance required for leagues and mountains, the key etched into the bottom left corner.

“Merzost may be used to serve our purposes,” Togtuun said.

“There’s a lot to unpack there,” Alina replied. “May and not can or will. Who is included in our—you and I alone, General Kirigan? The Grisha as a people or only those in the Little Palace? And what are our purposes? Do you mean to use merzost defeat Prince Nikolai and his coup?”

Togtuun laughed. There was delight in the sound and pride. Relief and trenchancy. And power, a power that came neither from light nor darkness, not from release or restraint, but owed something to the vastness of the ocean Alina had never seen herself and the space between notes in a chord.

“Nothing so little as an overthrown coup. We might change the world, Starkova Kirigana. But only if you will allow it. And that demands we work in secret, within silence. That liminal space you have discovered you create,” Togtuun said.

“In secret? You mean I have to lie to Aleksander,” Alina said.

“Shall we philosophize over omission and falsehood? I’m sure it would prove an interesting discussion, but there will be other costs,” Togtuun replied.

“He’d try to stop us. Me,” Alina said.

“Naturally,” Togtuun said. “Would you keep him from hurting himself, if you could?”

“I would. I have done, since he rescued me,” Alina said. “He makes it very hard though.”

“It would not be forever, I think. There would be a time when you could tell him. When we would need him,” Togtuun said.

“He will be very angry. Even if it’s not a long time,” Alina said, seeing his face, the bleak expression that would twist his lips. The way his shoulders would rise and his kefta billow, a second shadow meant to demonstrate his wrath, his need to be concealed.

“Less than you imagine,” Togtuun said. “And between you, there is a communion that cannot be compromised. He will know without knowing and once he realizes that, it will not be a matter of forgiveness, but only wonder.”

“Only wonder? Aleksander is not capable of unalloyed marveling,” Alina said.

“You haven’t seen him watch you when you Summon,” Togtuun said. “Or when you laugh.”

It came to Alina that perhaps Togtuun was, among many other things, a Heartrender, but one who worked not directly upon flesh, their aim unerring, unsparing.

“You said nothing as little as an overthrown coup. But that would be included, right?” Alina asked. “We would remove Prince Nikolai as a current and future threat.” She didn’t specify what remove meant and Togtuun wouldn’t ask for clarification.

“You won’t care about something so small if we succeed,” Togtuun said.

“I’ll always care about something small. I’ve been little all my life and I know not to underestimate small things,” Alina replied.

“Like lentils,” Togtuun said, fluttering the fingers of their left hand in a way that recalled the spill of the beans, the ticking they made against each other like seconds passing.

“If I ever become a Sankta, I guess that’s what I’ll be the patron saint of. Lentils and other small things,” Alina said. “How Aleksander will crow over that!”

He was asleep when she returned to their rooms. She’d come back much later than she had intended when she’d left to go to the Library but it was earlier than he usually fell asleep. Alina could count on one hand the number of times she’d found him dozing in his armchair by the fire. In retrospect, it was an indication of how grievously wounded he’d been that he’d slept so long and deeply when they were in the woods; she suspected even the cabin’s utter remoteness wouldn’t have allowed him to relax enough to keep him from standing watch over her every night. To see him now, his head tucked against the wing of the chair, his bare feet propped up on the flocked velvet hassock he’d first called an abominable Imperial affectation before claiming it, almost made her second-guess her decision. She could wake him and guide him to their bed or go about her own nightly ritual and wait for him to rouse to the sound of the water poured into the bowl, the jeweled hairpins dropped into their silver casket. The fire danced in the hearth, drift-wood brought from the harbor at Os Kervo burning violet and aquamarine. The light flickered across his cheekbones, the line of his throat, his kefta unfastened, the linen shirt beneath unbuttoned far enough the faint scar above his heart was visible through the scattering of his chest hair. It was rare for him to permit himself such license, rarer still for her to observe it, and she wished it could only be a night she remembered for this moment, this tender, exquisite peace and the look of drowsy desire his dark eyes would hold when he opened them and saw her in front of him.

She wasn’t sure it would work. She couldn’t be sure. If it didn’t, she wouldn’t have to explain anything; she could wait a hundred years before she mentioned it to him, an anecdote shared over honey-cakes and tea, the time leaching any bitterness from the action. And if it did work, if it exceeded her wildest hopes (not her dreams, because she would never have dreamt of this for them), she would say, in all truthfulness, that she hadn’t been certain of what would happen, other than that the risk she took was for herself alone and he couldn’t take her to task for that. Plausible deniability, that was how Togtuun had framed it, head tilted to one side, evidently prepared for Alina’s response,

“Plausible deniability. Yes, that’ll be about as convincing to Aleksander as me wishing for a herring syllabub.”

There hadn’t been any rejoinder, though Togtuun had grimaced, properly, at the prospect of such a repulsive dessert. And so Alina crept onto Aleksander’s lap, nestling her face against his neck, feeling his arms come around her even as he slept. She took a long breath and thought and chose.

“Sashenka mrinyk, minii oyuun ukhaan tany khüch chadald tavtai moril,” she said, striving to match Togtuun’s inflections in the incantation. Her attempt would have had no chance of working at all, save that Aleksander was an amplifier, perhaps the most formidable amplifier living, and her husband, who had already pledged himself to her, in every regard and dimension.

When the Librarian had uttered the words, Alina had first laughed, remarking This is why the drüskelle call us witches. Togtuun had answered And this is why you do not know the name of my Small Science.

Aleksander stirred beneath her and she pressed her lips to the delicate skin of his throat. He murmured something incomprehensible, likely in Ravkan so old she couldn’t recognize the words. Alina closed her eyes and turned inward, where it was not dark, nor light, but only a place between and then she sent herself forth as she would Summon and waited to find out if Aleksander would answer and how.

Across the city, Prince Nikolai sat at his gilded desk, candles lighting the room to the brightness of a summer noon. He signed his name to the last page before him, cast a glance at the papers strewn about the floor. He shrugged and leaned back. Success was never assured, but he felt it, near as a stalking beast about to strike.

(@tortoisesshells, please consider this your prompt-fill for “liminal space” and everyone else!)

#crescent moon au #valentine's day update #darklina #alina x aleksander #merzost #the librarian #shadow and bone #nikolai lantsov #romance #liminal space #prompt fill #proof that this is still a WIP #not abandoned #alina starkov #aleksander morozova #a lot of time with my OC

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