The Spark That Ignites the Dawn

Chapter One: the tiger with blunted claws

  "I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy." Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar   

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'What have you got there, Mar?'

Marya von Rothbart, adopted daughter and protégé of the famous Aloysius von Rothbart, had been caught. Aloysius's voice rang clear across the room, commanding and cold.

Nine years old, and her fourth master plan to sneak her friend into their cabin had failed. Miserably.

The little girl was sat on the floor, legs crossed and her long, snow-grey hair wild and frizzy. She was not small for her age, but rather skinny, with legs like a baby chicken. Vivid, icy eyes like a wolf peered out from her safe vantage point in the corner. Her skin had the typical shading of one of the most northern of the north clans— a warm shade of grey, tinged with blue. She looked like a wildcat, and acted like one too; most of the time, she hated wearing shoes because she couldn't feel the earth beneath her feet, and tonight was no exception. Two muddy feet and ten soil-filled toes had trotted dirt tracks across the old wooden floor.

The child was a curious creature, though; a mix of contradictions, of child and adult combined. Like her mother, but in all ways opposite. Marya might seem like a savage, but her heart was focused and pure. She would never sit on the soft and comfortable fur rug over by the embers of the fire. The pelts Aloysius tried to make her wear she would shun, even in the coldest of winters. Neither would she allow her father to bring back any of the animals he'd hunted to enjoy later. She was too young to understand that he still hunted them, regardless— but her priorities were still clear, for a young girl. No killing animals.

Tatiana had been the opposite. Aloysius's older sister had reminded him, over and over, of her prowess, her fame, her rise to power. The leader of the strongest magic clan, and the most respected woman in the north. Aloysius watched from the shadows as his sister took the glory first prize, again and again. And when one day someone had suggested that his sister have a child...

Tatiana wasn't the motherly type, but something had swayed her. She'd chosen the male— although never divulged who— and after Marya was born, immediately handed her over to a nursemaid.

'Raise her strong,' was all she instructed.

When Marya was fed chicken as her first meat, she'd spat it on the floor and howled in her highchair, a lamenting and sorrowful sound. She'd been vegetarian, albeit one that couldn't even pronounce the word, ever since. Tatiana had scowled.

'I told you to raise her strong,' she admonished the staff, 'Not nice.'

Aloysius, now her guardian after her mother's death and her clan's ruin, was rather bemused at his protégé's instinctual dislike of cruelty, the one thing he understood.

And the strange girl was cradling her one true friend in the whole world.

Aloysius sighed. His daughter's best friend wasn't human. In fact, none of her "friends" were human; not the wolf she'd strolled through the woods with last week, nor the bear she had climbed onto the back of a few months back. The white tiger of the north— as the legend told— had not made a reappearance, and, by all accounts, Marya had forgotten the event entirely. If she didn't apply herself, Aloysius worried that the potential she had within her would never surface. A child content to be ignorant would become an adult without skill.

Usually, Aloysius paid no heed to her intense connection to the nature that surrounded their life here in the forest. Other von Rothbarts had been known to have Marya's wild heart. Her great aunt had lived in the wilderness for most of her life, returning only to remind everybody who was the most powerful koldunya, before disappearing again. But Aloysius had a problem with this particular friend of hers. The damn thing was broken. A swan with a wing that would probably never fly.