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The Tale of a Failed Attempt to Thwart Fate
Once the land of Ravka was ruled by the Lantsovs, a family which grew greedier and more selfish with every generation, ignoring the needs of their people and becoming embroiled in countless wars with the hope of enriching themselves and their friends.
Then, came the Shadow Summoner who offered his services to Tsar Anastas I Lantsov, hoping to make Ravka safer by securing the borders with Shu Han and Fjerda. In return, he asked only for land to carve out a peaceful home for himself and his people, the Grisha, who possessed the ability to use Small Science.
Anastas agreed and the Shadow Summoner did as he had promised, defeating the Shu and Fjerdan armies and making Ravka safe.
However, the tsar grew jealous and fearful of the Shadow Summoner’s power, and sought to renege on their deal by slaughtering all the Grisha in Ravka.
The Shadow Summoner, though, was too powerful and he defeated Anastas and his army. Then he accepted the throne of Ravka, from which he ruled wisely and well as Tsar Aleksander.
All Grisha were long-lived, but Tsar Aleksander was eternal.
His first tsarita was Luda the Healer, kind and compassionate, who he loved dearly. They were never blessed by the Making with children, but they cared for many orphan Grisha over their lifetime. When she died, he mourned her deeply for two centuries.
Then there was Irina the Squaller, cool and collected, an exceptional military strategist. Theirs was more a marriage of convenience, for the Ravkan people liked their tsar to have a tsarita, even if Tsar Aleksander would never need an heir.
After was Petronella the Alkemi, the daughter of a member of the Kerch Merchant Council, clever but absent-minded, although extremely affectionate when she surfaced from her workshop. The tsar, they say, loved her almost as much as he had Luda, although, as with Luda, they were never blessed with children. He was without a wife for nearly a century following her death.
And then there was Keyen, a princess of Shu Han and the first of Tsar Aleksander’s tsaritas not to be Grisha. This was certainly a marriage of alliance and not romance, and while he appreciated her intellectual and diplomatic strengths, the tsar never entirely trusted that his wife was not reporting to her grandmother the Empress of Shu Han.
Considering that none of the tsaritas that had come before her had ever been pregnant, it was something of a shock when Tsarita Keyen announced that she was with child only two months after the marriage was solemnised in the Os Alta Cathedral, a baby that appeared to have been conceived on their wedding night.
For all the concerns he may have had about the troubles that a child of his could cause when they were grown, the tsar was delighted at the prospect of finally becoming a father. He was extremely solicitous towards his pregnant wife and did all he could to make her comfortable.
It was with great joy that the tsar and tsarita celebrated the birth of their daughter Tsarevna Alina and the tsar ordered all manner of celebrations to mark the occasion. He doted on the baby and would often bring her with him into meetings or when he heard petitions in the throne room. Although it was too early to tell what Small Science she would wield, the tsar could sense that she would be powerful indeed.
Just before her daughter’s first birthday, the tsarita visited Baghra, the tsar’s mother.
Baghra did not share her son’s youthfulness. She might have, if she wished it, but she chose to summon only rarely and so she aged, although slower than other Grisha. What she did have, which the tsar did not, was a seer’s gift.
“Please,” Tsarita Keyen said to her, “read my daughter’s future. I want to know that she will be safe and well.”
“Knowledge known cannot be unknown,” Baghra warned her son’s wife, “a prophecy heard cannot be unheard.”
The tsarita insisted, sure that she would rather have knowledge than ignorance.
“Well,” Baghra cackled, “do not say I failed to warn you.”
And then she made her prophecy.
This girl will be beautiful and a Grisha of exceptional renown.
But beware, Keyen, beware.
For one day your daughter will kill her mother.
And one day your daughter will marry her father.
Tsarita Keyen was horrified at the terrible and ominous words uttered by Baghra.
She tried to ask for more information, for anything they could do to stop such dreadful events coming to pass, but Baghra had stepped into the shadows and gone, never to be seen in Ravka again.
In despair, the tsarita wept in her rooms, for she had no idea what to do.
She could not kill her innocent daughter, even knowing what the prophecy had foretold.
Instead, she confided in one of her maids, a young woman who had been with her since her days as a princess in Shu Han. The maid suggested that she take the infant tsarevna into Shu Han to be raised by a peasant farmer. Alina shared her mother’s features and would not be out of place in Shu Han.
“But she is surely Grisha,” said Keyen, “and will be in danger there.”
“I will choose a family carefully,” the maid promised, “one who will raise her to know the dangers of using Small Science in Shu Han.”
Being otkazat’sya, neither the tsarita nor her maid knew of the dangers of Wasting Sickness, virtually unknown now in Ravka, but which affected many Grisha in Shu Han who felt they needed to hide their Small Science – although there was a treaty between Shu Han and Ravka to send all Grisha found in Shu Han to Ravka, it was not always honoured and the Shu labs continued to operate on a smaller scale in some secrecy.
And so the plan was made.
The maid smuggled the tsarevna out and the tsarita sorrowfully set the scene in the nursery, leaving bloodied blankets along with matted wolf fur to give the impression that Tsarevna Alina had been tragically killed in an animal attack.
The tsar’s grief was immense and prolonged. For months his shadows writhed around him and it was feared that he might lose control in his sorrow and rend the whole city in two.
Keyen was sorrowful too, but she had the advantage of knowing their daughter still lived. She hoped that time would heal the tsar’s wound, and that they might have more children to comfort her husband.
It had to be done, she reminded herself, so that Baghra’s terrible words would never come to pass.
Seventeen years passed.
Tsar Aleksander’s grief did not get better. In fact, it only worsened over time.
There had been no other children, for the tsar almost never visited Keyen’s bedchambers and took precautions by drinking an Alkemi tonic on the rare occasions he did engage in marital duties, apparently unwilling to have another child when the beloved first was gone.
He never accepted that Tsarevna Alina was dead, despite the evidence that Keyen had set out. There had been no body and so that gave him hope.
Tsarita Keyen despaired over his melancholy mood, and she was filled with guilt to know that she was the cause.
Eventually, she started to believe she had made the wrong decision.
After all, if she had kept Alina and they had raised her with love, then why would she have had reason to kill Keyen? And if Aleksander and Alina knew they were father and daughter, why would they ever seek to marry?
The tsarita decided she would have to make things right. She and her loyal maid would go to Shu Han and search for Alina there. When they found her, they would bring her home and pretend it was a miraculous stroke of luck, and the tsar would no longer live in a fog of grief.
Tsarita Keyen told her husband that she wished to visit a particular shrine in Shu Han – one set up in honour of the Shu patron saint of lost children – to pray for Alina, and she left with only her maid, too paranoid to bring guards that might figure out the truth.
The journey went smoothly and they arrived soon at the village in Shu Han where the maid had taken Alina so many years before. The family the tsarevna had been left with were still there and the tsarita was relieved to see that they appeared to be good and hardworking people.
It was strange and disturbing, then, for Tsarita Keyen to catch a glimpse of her daughter and see how emaciated and ill she appeared. She could not understand it, for even after so many years of marriage, she had never bothered to learn much of Grisha ways and remained ignorant of how dangerous it was for a Grisha to suppress their Small Science.
She was not an entirely unintelligent woman, though, and she quickly concluded that Alina’s condition must somehow be related to her status as Grisha. It became even more urgent for her to get the tsarevna back to Ravka, where Tsar Aleksander would surely know what to do.
In her panic, the tsarita did not explain herself well when she and her maid approached Alina.
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Ai-ling was wary of the strangers, and confused by their interest in her and the Ravkan name they called her, for her family had only ever called her Ai-ling. There had been rumours recently of Shu soldiers rounding up anyone who seemed sickly, allegedly to experiment on them in the laboratories, and Ai-ling feared that this odd, well-dressed woman who was so insistent that she go with her might somehow be connected to the laboratories.
It was fear that finally drew out her Small Science but, as with many cases of Wasting Sickness, the eventual emergence of the gift was uncontrollable and traumatic.
The light exploded out of Ai-ling, charring the field around her and killing both Tsarita Keyen and her maid instantly.
Horrified, and also fearful of the repercussions in the likely event that her light had been seen, Ai-ling fled.
She had barely any time to process the fact that she was Grisha, for she knew there was no time to waste. She had to get to the nearby border with Ravka before she ended up on a Shu dissection table.
Tsar Aleksander might be a bogeyman to most of Shu Han, but he was known to always help Grisha, and Ai-ling needed help now more than ever.
Tsar Aleksander met every Grisha refugee who came to Os Alta personally, to assure them that they were welcome and under his protection now.
He was struck dumb to see the young woman who gave her name as Ai-ling and came from Shu Han.
So many times he had imagined how his lost daughter would look as she grew, and the girl in front of him was the spitting image of his imagined Alina. Almost Keyen in miniature, but with Aleksander’s own dark eyes and his nose.
He thought somewhat sadly of his wife. Theirs had not been a happy marriage, with the terrible sorrow of their daughter’s loss, but he had been grieved to hear news from some of his agents in Shu Han that the bodies of Keyen and her maid had been discovered near the border, charred beyond recognition but identifiable by the ornate gold and diamond sun pendant he’d had made for her on Alina’s birth and the falcon ring that had been hers as a member of the House of Taban.
Keyen had told him she was going on pilgrimage to a shrine in Shu Han to pray for closure regarding their daughter, and had insisted on taking only her maid and no guards. She must have been caught up in some sort of explosion, for the Shu did like to experiment with terrible new weaponry.
He had already notified the Shu Ambassador in Ravka, and he was thankful that Keyen had died within Shu Han, so that the Empress would have less cause to consider starting what would be a tedious and time-consuming war.
It was almost uncanny, he thought, how much Ai-ling looked as Alina would have, almost as if …
He winced, refusing to get his hopes up only to have them disappointed. There had been no news of his daughter since her disappearance seventeen years ago.
Still, he could not help but be drawn to her, entranced by her resemblance to the daughter who had been taken from him.
Alina was lost, but Ai-ling was here and in need of him, and he thought it might heal a small part of his heart if he could protect her the way he was unable to protect his daughter.
Ai-ling told him that she had never known she was Grisha, and that her Small Science had manifested abruptly. Reading between the lines, he thought it had been a difficult occasion and that the poor girl had probably had to flee from all she had known because of it.
He offered to amplify her if she would struggle to display her gift on her own, but she said that she had practiced on her way to Os Alta, although she had no real idea of how the Small Science worked, and thought she could demonstrate enough without aid.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw next.
He stared in awe at the orb of light in Ai-ling’s hand.
It was shaky and she could only hold it for a few seconds at a time, but it was wondrous to behold.
The Sun Summoner, finally here, the one he had waited so long for.
Here was someone who could share forever with him as no one else could have. Surrounded by people, he had always felt apart from them in a way, alone in his power and his immortality, but no more would that be, for now he had his Sun Summoner.
Theirs was an instant connection, as if a tether had formed the moment she summoned the sun in his presence.
Ai-ling was confused by how comfortable she felt in the presence of the imposing tsar, and by how instantly the palace and Os Alta felt like home.
Something about Tsar Aleksander felt familiar, although he was a stranger. His face invoked old, fuzzy memories of being cradled in strong, broad arms and of whispered words of affection.
It was like a strange fairytale, one of the fanciful tales that had been told to the children of their village when she grew up.
Love grew so quickly that it seemed only natural that they would marry, shadow and sun united, the only tsarita that Tsar Aleksander would now need.
It was rather quick, of course, considering the recent death of Tsarita Keyen, but few in Ravka thought it wrong, for the Sun Summoner was a special case, an exception to any normal rules of mourning.
On her marriage, and her coronation as tsarita of Ravka, Ai-ling took the Ravkan name Alina.
She did not mention to her new husband that it was the name the strange women had called her when she was still in Shu Han. And he, to the court’s surprise, seemed unconcerned that his new wife now shared a name with his much-lamented lost daughter.
Theirs was a warm and loving marriage, for the tsar knew that he would never have to lose this wife as he had lost others, since she was the Sun Summoner and thus as eternal as he was.
And if he often doted on and cared for her like she was his daughter, then no one was foolish enough to point it out. After all, Tsar Aleksander was the happiest he had been since before the tsarevna’s tragic disappearance, and the new tsarita was still recovering from a long period of Wasting Sickness, and surely deserved to be indulged and treated tenderly.
Alina’s family in Shu Han had been wonderful, but she was one of eight children on their farm and neither of her hard-working parents had been able to spend much quality one-on-one time with any of their children. It was a heady thing for her, to be the sole focus of the tsar’s intense affection, and she found that she equally enjoyed both their carnal marital duties and the times when he watched over her like a concerned father, always encouraging her to eat more or go out in the sunshine to get colour in her cheeks.
Two months after their wedding, Tsarita Alina shyly confessed that she was with child.
The tsar had not taken any precautions to avoid his wife falling pregnant, and given the frequency of their couplings it was unsurprising that a child would result, probably conceived on or soon after their wedding night.
It was a somewhat bittersweet moment for him, as he remembered how excited he had been at his daughter’s birth, and how devastating it had been to lose her. His sweet tsarita, who knew of his past tragedy, was nervous that the news might upset him, but he could not be sad about the idea of such a product of their love, of a child that might be as eternal as its parents.
He missed his stolen daughter fiercely, but his new wife was healing much of the hurt and he celebrated the wonderful news while vowing that he would never forget his first daughter and would keep sending out search parties and enquiries to see if she still lived.
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Seven months later, Tsarita Alina gave birth to a son who was named Lukyan. He was an adorable and robust child who brought joy to all who saw him, and he was surrounded by the very best protection the tsar could find.
The tsar and tsarita loved their son fiercely, and spent many hours each day with him, even while they kept up their busy schedule of state duties.
However, in the midst of all her joy, Tsarita Alina began to suffer from a recurring nightmare.
In it, she was back in Shu Han, confronted by the strangers who had shocked her Small Science free, their screams of pain echoing in her ears as her light burned them. But in the nightmare, unlike in reality, the women somehow survived, their bodies covered in burns, and they sought revenge against her for what she had done to them. They managed to enter the palace and stole away her baby son, taking him far, far away so that she would never see him again.
The tsarita woke screaming every time she had the nightmare, and in the daylight she became frantic and paranoid, rarely leaving Lukyan’s nursery and insisting on bringing him with her when she had to go elsewhere.
The tsar worried over her, and consulted all of his Healers, who told him that the tsarita did not suffer from any physical ailment, but was clearly seriously worried about something and that was the root cause of the nightmares.
Tsar Aleksander begged his wife to confide in him, for he hated to feel helpless in the face of her distress and he wished to help her however he could.
“I must tell you something,” she confessed to him eventually with tears in her eyes, “which happened in Shu Han, before we met.”
She explained the full circumstances of her discovery of her Small Science, and the two women who had been killed by her light.
Then, she told him of her nightmare and how worried she was that it might somehow come true.
Any fear that her husband might recoil from her was immediately put to rest as the tsar wrapped his arms around the tsarita and comforted her. After so many centuries, he knew that tragic accidents could happen with the emergence of a Grisha’s Small Science. He tried as best as he could to minimise such occurrences by fostering a safe environment in Ravka where Grisha would feel comfortable enough not to hide, for it was suppression that usually led to an eventual explosion of power. In countries like Shu Han and Fjerda, though, his reach was limited, and it pained him to know his poor wife had suffered that way.
It was only later, when Tsarita Alina was sleeping peacefully next to him, that the tsar thought of the implications of her words.
She had come from the area of Shu Han where the bodies of Tsarita Keyen and her maid were found, and it seemed too much of a coincidence to ignore. He did not blame his wife, but he did wonder why his old tsarita had been harassing her and trying to get her to come with them – what reason could Tsarita Keyen have for accosting someone who appeared to be a simple Shu peasant girl?
The only conclusion he could come to was that his old tsarita had known something about Alina. She had never been interested in the Small Science and would not have recognised Wasting Sickness. But why else would she have been so keen to …
Oh.
His wife Alina’s resemblance to the young woman his daughter Alina would have become. Tsarita Keyen’s vague secrecy regarding her visit to Shu Han, and the reason why she might specifically focus on one young woman when she arrived there.
He thought back much further, to his daughter’s disappearance, and how strangely guilty Tsarita Keyen had seemed. And then, she had mentioned, not long before that, asking his mother Baghra to come and tell her their daughter’s future. His mother had disappeared right before his daughter did, and her prophecies were rarely things people wanted to hear.
Separately, all these things might be dismissed. Taken together, though, they suggested something shocking.
His wife Alina and his daughter Alina were one and the same.
What future Tsarita Keyen had been trying to prevent by staging their daughter’s disappearance and sending her to Shu Han, he did not know. She and her maid were both dead and he would never be able to ask them. And his mother would not be found if she did not wish it, so there was no chance to question her.
He thought of Alina, slumbering undisturbed for the first time in weeks. He thought of Lukyan, smiling in his sleep in his cradle.
What good would it do to tell anyone the truth? It would just cause chaos in Ravka, and it would break his heart and Alina’s too.
Besides, they were the Shadow and Sun Summoners, destined partners, soulmates written in the Making at the heart of the world. Surely, that meant more than blood ties that only he knew about?
The tsar could not bear to lose Alina. He refused to ruin their happiness over what was really a minor thing in the grand scheme of the eternity they would spend together.
Tsar Aleksander could not publicly celebrate the good news of his daughter’s survival, but he would know it in his heart and be thankful.
He would ensure that Alina never wanted for anything, that she was always surrounded with love and comfort, as she deserved.
They would be happy until the end of time.
From the book Ravkan Myths, Legends, Fairytales and Folktales