❝ Anitchka, Anitchka, will you not invite me in? ❞
In which a girl is indebted to a wintry demon for saving her life, and the gold from her fingertips is a magic whose price she must repay tenfold. Unless she guesses his name first.
| loosely based...
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THERE ARE NIGHTS WHEN SHE CALLS TO DEATH, and there are nights when she wishes she can disappear into the folds of winter. As Dmitri, his eyes beadier and crueler, flutters over the coarse fabric of her dress, Anitchka counts the moments till the dusk falls. If she was a girl made of steel, she would have rushed from this eerie hamlet into another, but Anitchka is a girl of straw, of little resolve.
"If I were to go," she says, more to herself than to Dmitri, yet the creatures of her home lean in closer, crawling to her feet and arms, "Would anyone mourn me?"
Cackles and chuckles echo across the little room, and she falls on her bed, eyes running a sad story. Even before the winters turned endless, Anitchka was alone, so alone, so alone. She had been found by an old woman wandering the forest for wood, and the kindness in her had taken the child into her home. She had left Anitchka's mother, though, parted her with a soft prayer to the Old Gods that they devour her cold, lifeless body.
It was something the farmers and the poor did, for they could not bury their dead.
The Tsar stole half of what little the labour of the peasantry earned in taxes, and it dawns on Anitchka that his actions resemble the demon's. Power is, after all, cut from the same threads of subjugation.
She sits up then, hands reaching for the shimmering ribbon in her hair. There is nothing the Tsar desires more than gold, and her fingertips swirl in a magic that is dark and punishing. It was a ruler once who had banished the demon into the lands beyond the north, and it is a ruler now who wields power equal to his. And, Anitchka, she has the touch of gold.
"Bones," the bat-like Dmitri lets out a high pitched screech, "Bones, where are you going?"
There is a pause when she considers the abrupt recklessness coursing through her, and she eyes him quietly. Anitchka knows that she does not owe the creature any answers, any explanation, for he serves the very master she intends to outwit. But she has been so alone that she has never learnt the warmth of confiding in someone other than herself. "To the Tsar."
Dmitri proceeds to settle on her shoulder, shaking his misshapen head. "Dealing with the Tsar is the same as being indebted to my Master."
When she does not answer, he continues quickly, "And how will you get to the palace? It is beyond this hamlet."
"I will take a carriage," Anitchka says, drawing her shawl closer. "I will make a deal with your - the demon - to give me a day. And I will make money to go to the palace and seek the Tsar's aid in exchange for gold."
Her hands reach the glass of the window, shaking as they clear the mist off the surface, and she eyes the hauntingly picturesque mass of stilled trees, and death sinking into the ridges of the snow. A knot of distress chokes her throat as she pulls the warmest of her fabrics over herself. It is a journey long and cruel towards the Tsar's palace. Despite Anitchka's claims of asking the demon for a day, she is aware that he will not extend her time in the land of the living. So, she collects the few coins she has earned by clearing snow from the doorsteps of the villagers, and cuts a thick slice of rye bread to sate her hollow hunger.
