Better The Devil You Know (Zoya Nazyalensky)

Twenty One

Anastajia Børn was only five when she discovered she could wrend bone as easily as the snow balls she formed with mitten clad hands. Fortunately for her, this discovery was made unassisted and away from the prying eyes of zealous neighbours, neighbours who would have no qualms about sentencing a child to almost certain execution. Instead the forest bade witness to its child; nature hears and sees what humans cannot, even Grisha. In a clearing - several miles from the cabin she shared with the man who didn't answer to 'fadder' - she had communed with the veins of the earth, its roots and shoots. All had been well - this was a common scene for the little girl, an escape from the severity of her sire -  until a rogue hunter entered the midst. Though hunting was commonplace in their nation, particularly in the fertile grounds surrounding Halmhend and its neighbour Ravka, all girls are taught to be wary of men. Anastajia knew this better than most. For, she was afraid of her own flesh and blood; it is easy to see how rage, anger and want could corrupt someone. Her paternal figure was once described as 'gentle, caring' in her mother's journal, yet now he could be painted as no less than a beast without direction.

"You're a long way from home little one." The hunter - elk slung over shoulder with beady, blank eyes that bore into her - bore an easy smile. He had worn no pin, clearly not following the Drüskelle code (not that the code was any source of moral honour), and she didn't recognise him from the village.

"No, my pa is just setting a trap" the child had cocked her head towards the thicket behind them. The stranger didn't need to know the truth of the matter, the truth being she didn't know if her father would mourn her loss.

"Really?" Tone mocking, stepping closer now. Close enough to see yellowing teeth, smell breath lined with liquor.

The young Børn had refused to shudder; this was her territory. "Yes." Teeth grinding molars into ash, hands fisted at her side as if she could even land a punch on a body so tall.

"I think you're lying."

Little Anastajia hadn't cared if he thought her dishonest. No. She did, however, care for the seal-skin covered fingers that extended to meet her face.

Even as a young girl, Ana wasn't immune to the realities of life; the violence that encompassed their world, their country. Artillery fire and waspish moans floating through fir trees were the staple orchestra of a Fjerdan upbringing. But, girls were not allowed to fight, Djel decreed it was against nature - that is what the men patented at least. A curious fact, given fault always seemed to fall at the feet of feminine wiles when maidens are forcibly defiled into whores.

Cloth scratching cheek, his body encroaching into her safety; scared.

"I will scream if you step any closer" the child had threatened, ice stolen from the nearby permafrost clear within her voice.

But he had only laughed because, of course, there is pleasure to be exulted from terrorising a youth decades younger than you. Of course.
"Go ahead, there is no one to hear us."

Later, Anastajia and Ileska would both agree that they had seen the corpses - piled upon each other like a plague pit - within the hunter's murky eyes. He was a hunter of the flesh, nothing more than walking greed living for his next thrill, thrill that came at the cost of a life not his to take.

The thrumming had begun in her arms; blood electrifying within her veins and propelling forwards an alien energy. Energy that alternated both hot and cold, searing one moment and arctic the next. How peculiar it must have looked to the heavenly hosts above them - this tiny child, barely out of swaddling, raising arms against a veteran of pain. Perhaps they had laughed; mortals are so very quaint.

Chuckling, the stranger's amusement was brief and bittersweet. One minute the stalker, now the stalked. You see, the relic of that stag he had so callously treated decided to listen to the silent entreaties of the young supplicant; it listened and it responded.

There are many bones within a cervid and Anastajia controlled all of them that day. Ribs sufficed to plunge through the dense cloak and muscled back of her prey; organs punctured, his heathen blood soon spilled onto the altar of the forest in all its fetid glory. Osseus material - jagged and unforgiving, repaying the stolen debt - burst through the coat of the stag, offal falling onto the ground without its skeleton for packaging. Reformed anew, the slaughtered animal was a gleaming, white spectre.

There had been time for surprise, but the Grisha had not stopped, she wanted to hurt him - to excruciate. The animated spectacle had turned to her, awaiting an order from its mistress. Mistress. How good, how honey sweet, that deference had tasted; this - this was power. Djel save her, but if that made her a heretic - a drusje - so be it, the little summoner had never felt safer, nor so alive.

The bone-stag just watched patiently; eyeless and tongueless it still somehow moved, it breathed. A spectacle of - necromancy? Magic? The Fjerdan had little clue; Grisha was a rare word within the homeland, the ways of their crafts even rarer. For the monarchy and the Drüskelle, let alone their hoards of pitiful acolytes, they were simply demons. Devil worshippers who were chased for sport and burnt for hate. But she had known all that mattered; this.... spectacle... she had somehow orchestrated, would be proof enough of her monstrous nature. There would be no trial, no excuses, no mercy. The water hears and understands, but the ice does not forgive.

First, though, the job had needed finishing. The worm of a human had not yet suffered enough, despite the deathly pallour stroking his face. Some time in the future - though several years before the Ileska Vieder we know and love - Anastajia would learn how to command non-verbally, alongside the true extent of the divinity that cursed her veins. Even so, the memory would remain a blessed one for her older self (despite the fear that saturates its edges.) Not many five year olds can claim to have conversed with a reimbursed cadaver. At the time, however, novelty had been far beyond the girl's concerns, instead preoccupied with the ordainment of her spindly companion.

"Finish him". Little more than a hiss, the demand had been fulfilled nonetheless. Bowing its ghastly skull, the stag had used its calcified antlers to gore the man, easier than a butcher threaded skewer through meat. The last Anastajia had seen of the two dead bodies - one trotting with creaking, crunching steps, the other hung in a noose of bone - was a bleached outline moving stark against the infinite verdant trees. 

The hunter, what was left of him, would become food for the forest before he was ever found. The dregs of spirit that had remained within the bones of the stag thought it fitting to give his murderer to the mouths of the woods it had once befouled. When his mistress could no longer fuel his return, the stag met his demise, crumpling to the ground without ceremony. Only then, when Anastajia felt the ignomious loss in her heart of a muscle that was supposed to be exercised, had she realised the full extent of what she had done.

But, reader, the mould that would produce our dearest Panther did not meet the truth with despair, nor guilt. This was a fact Ileska openly admitted. And now, perhaps, you will understand why Ileska finds herself at odds with returning home to Ketterdam empty-handed. She has waited long enough to confront Kirigan, to deal him the hand that he deserves.

The words conveyed through the kindred squaller - that education in ferocity of a woman - ring through her head once again.

I'm coming for you Aleksander. And if she so happens to cross paths once more with a certain Nazyalensky, then the possibility no longer appalls her. Because there, in that storm of lightning and wind, was a person who demands to be loved in ravenous fury. And, whilst Vieder could not claim to have ever known love, she could guarantee that you will never meet someone more hungry.