She lived and, for whatever ghastly purpose yet unknown, Anasztaizia did not. This child would grow up, marry, and have children. Whatever dismal existence awaited a peasant girl, she was alive and not imprisoned in the grotesque flesh of a corpse.
It was not fair.
Something awakened inside Anasztaizia, gnawing its way out of the deep and cavernous place where it had lain dormant until now. It was envy and yet it was not; it was rage and yet she felt no violence toward the child.
It was, simply and quite shockingly, hunger: the desire to taste the force animating Evike’s little body. To taste again what it meant to be alive.
Anasztaizia clamped her mouth over the girl’s lips. Evike’s muted screams sent a thrilling vibration down Anasztaizia’s throat as her little chest heaved and huffed. Her arms flailed with weak, useless blows against Anasztaizia’s shoulders, but only for a moment. There was no stopping it, the flow of life from one body and into another. The child’s struggle served only to sweeten the flavor, for her life force reached the zenith of its intensity in its confrontation with death.
The little girl’s body relinquished its fight and instead quivered with an ecstasy it was too young to comprehend. Even as Evike went slack in Anasztaizia’s arms, her energy surged through Anasztaizia like the mightiest of rivers, fueling her muscles and veins with a child’s boundless vigor. No mere girl now, she had ingested the uncorrupted essence of life itself. This was her gift for returning from the dead, her path out of the darkness in which all lesser things dwelled and toward the Light. Sophia had not forsaken her after all. After accepting Anasztaizia’s baptismal prayer, she tested her with this new body, analyzed her worthiness as a light-bearer.
Anasztaizia closed the girl’s eyes before dumping the carcass unceremoniously onto the ground. Not this one. She must seal the way back.
By the time anyone else wandered so far into the wood, wolves would have carried off her bones. Another peasant child lost to the wilderness. It was an old story, and not the last.
~
She did not precisely know what made her remember, which spark of stolen life resuscitated her memory after several weeks in the forest. She fed upon the peasant women who collected mushrooms and berries just inside its borders, or the children who wandered too deeply within and found themselves lost, unable to distinguish landmarks amongst the sameness of the trees. If they stared too long into her eyes, they lost any sense of themselves. What terrible things did they see within, that a near-catatonic terror should befall them?
Awareness of what had brought her to her current state crept up on her gradually at first. Then, without warning, a bombardment of images over the temporary wall of reprieve death had built for her. The day of reckoning had arrived, now that she had come to terms with her new existence, but she did not want its knowledge. Let her endure in the shadows of ignorance with the peasants if it meant she never remembered. She could live that way, in the forest, a wild thing feeding upon the inferior creatures of the world. She could pretend she belonged there.
She was granted no such mercy.
A man. Silk and wool smothering her. Hands squeezing, bruising. A fleam of pain puncturing her core. Dresses shimmering with unholy magic.
Father.
The sun, the moon, and the stars…
She had watched the clearing as her father’s men dug four holes in the forest floor. Her companions lay where they fell; two slumped against a tree, shot through with arrows, and the old man a headless, withered stem cut down by her father’s sword. Her spirit writhed in impotent torment, trapped by its dreadful desire to harm him as he had her. She must let go. To attach oneself to earthly things was to be enslaved by the false creator. Flung back into the physical world and reborn into misery.
Something heavy and black embraced her. A disembodied yet familiar voice whispered, Let the moon’s essence call you back from the dead. Avenge them, and yourself. Relieve your soul of its burden. Do you not feel its weight upon you?
Kill him, daughter of my beloved.
She saw her own eyes, like open windows back into her body, and plummeted into them.
She was no monster. By the will of the Light, she lived again, a creature so holy that silly things like air became superfluous. Her purpose was as crystal.
She must cleanse of his sins the man who called himself her father.
The glory of newfound enlightenment engulfed her. Through pain, purification. This was the secret, the gift, to which the trader had alluded. Anasztaizia threw out her arms to embrace the starless and moonless night, and let out a blissful shriek. Neither animal nor bird dared attract her attention, for perhaps they too sensed the unquenchable hunger driving her toward the castle.
After the sickening journey back through the moat, Anasztaizia stood at the foot of the wall enclosing the bailey. The watchman’s snores filtered into her ears from his post above. She hooked her fingers into the spaces between the timbers and skittered like a spider up onto the wall walk. He sat with his back to her, feet dangling over the opposite edge and chin against his chest. His shoulders rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Anasztaizia glided up to him and pressed her hands against the sides of his head. She gave it one hard twist, and when the bones in his neck shattered, he slumped over onto his side.
Anasztaizia plucked a torch from a sconce below her on the wall. She walked along the perimeter, igniting each of the crude towers standing at intervals. The screams of the soldiers stationed within made her giggle, for they were not such brave men after all. Some leapt from the wall walk into the moat, where they drowned in the dark, or into the bailey, where fractured bones and cracked skulls halted their escapes.
Anasztaizia crawled down the wall in the same manner she ascended; the power of even the basest creatures belonged to her. Above her, the towers burned like bonfires. The empty bailey stretched before her, its buildings shadowed and silent but for the dreamers within who mumbled, cursed, and sometimes cried in their sleep. As she passed the buildings—the kitchens, barracks, store and stable, forge, and workshop—she touched the flame to each. With a great whoosh, the eager fire engulfed every wooden structure in the courtyard, helped by a breeze carrying bits of hot ash from one building to another. The grand conflagration illuminated the castle in a demonic orange glow. Black smoke curled into the air and with it the futile and dying shrieks of families, of horses, of scent hounds. She imagined the doors sealed shut. Fists, feet, and shoulders assailed the unyielding wood but did not break through.
Horses, their manes and tales aflame like the Devil’s own steeds, bounded from the collapsing stables before dropping in charred black heaps on the ground, their long limbs bundles of burning logs. A pungent stench draped the air like a tapestry woven of scorched flesh. Anasztaizia crossed the flying bridge, blinking away the smoke that stung her eyes, and entered the castle. She rushed up the stone staircase, very much like a spirit after all, invisible to the chamberlain and the guards who rushed out of the fortress toward the fiery bailey, their impotent rationale undetermined. The cistern would be useless in such a conflagration, as ineffectual as their attempts to return to the castle alive.
She will clothe herself with mindless wrath. She will cast them down into the abyss. They will be obliterated because of their wickedness.
And their heavens will fall one upon the next and their forces will be consumed by fire.
He was just where she expected him to be, his back to her as he watched the bailey burn from her bedroom window. She stood in the doorway, inert, so that he did not notice her just yet. The quilt on her bed was rumpled and darkened with a deep brown stain, the wardrobe flung open and dresses tossed into the back of it like discarded rags. An impression of violation, of things battered and broken, hung thickly in the air. A part of her frantically wished not to be here.
Tears so dark and viscous they obscured the room from her view gathered in Anasztaizia’s eyes. She swiped them with the back of her hand, and when she pulled it aw
ay, it was not water dampening her skin but red smears of blood.
Anasztaizia crept up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. The blood coursing through his veins pulsated against her palm, singing ever so sweetly of her hunger’s imminent gratification. She wished for nothing less than to rip out his throat. The muscles beneath her fingertips tensed, and he flinched.
He had perhaps expected to see the chamberlain or treasurer standing there. But when he turned, he found his dead daughter instead.
It was a situation over which he, for once, exercised no control and could not manipulate the outcome. He stumbled away from her and circled the edge of the room, seeking the door. He hadn’t trimmed his beard in many days, and threads of silver shined within the unkempt brown fuzz. “Then it is true, what the peasants say. You are a Rém. You are the Terror. Lord, protect your faithful servant.” He crossed himself.
“What did you tell the household, I wonder? Did they find it strange the lady disappeared along with the tirewoman, the court fool, the priest? What an odd assortment.”
“Heretics. They kidnapped you and killed you before I met their ransom. That is what I told them.”
Her lips trembled. Behind them, her serrated teeth longed to tear into his flesh. “Rumors of your evil have spread far and wide, Father. You have no secrets.”
“The trader did this, didn’t he? How dare he come into my home, covet my wife! That filthy heathen bastard… I’ll have him killed, you mark my words! I will have that yellow dog’s head on a pike!”
“He loved her. A concept foreign to you, as I’ve had the misfortune to discover. But you can’t kill him.”
Her father wiped the spittle from his lips, his chest still heaving. And when he beheld her, it was as if he saw her for the first time, for a fear like her fear that night in the forest swallowed his expression as completely as quicksand.
“And you can’t kill me, either. Not again. Not ever.”
“Your eyes…” His expression grew vacant. He gawped at her, but it was not his normal leer. Not the one that slithered over her body and unstitched each piece of her clothing. “I can see Hell itself in them.”
“It is the Hell of your own making. The Hell that has come for you.”
Ispán Gergo shook his head. “This was his plan all along. His revenge for having what he wanted. Turning my own daughter against me.”
“Yongnian showed me what you are. And what I could be. It is an imperfect, impure world in which we live. I must cleanse it of people like you, of your weakness. I must clear my path to the Light.”
He returned his gaze to her, to her eyes. She almost felt his thoughts unraveling. “I might have known you’d return.” He spoke in a soft monotone and did not blink. “We should have buried you at a crossroads. I should have cut off your head. But I was not in my right mind.”
“When was the last time you were, Father?”
“It is a fair question. Some men, perhaps, are not born in their right minds.” He winced at the waves of heat rolling off the smoldering buildings, as sweat beaded on his brow and temples. “Shall I suffer?”
“Oh yes, Father.” She licked her lips, salivating at the taste of blood where her teeth had pricked flesh. “Your suffering shall be legendary.”
“Árpád warned me against the magic, all those years ago when I courted your mother. ‘She will love you on your own merits, or she will not,’ he said. I never understood why he did not seek to release himself from my service. Now I know he stayed to protect you.”
Anasztaizia bit down hard on her lip, until rivulets of blood dripped from her chin. “Your confession comes many days too late. You showed me no pity. You showed the others still less.”
“Love and hate have become so entwined in my heart, I scarcely recognize the difference anymore.”
“I will not allow madness to absolve you of your sins. God may find compassion that you have lost your way…” Anasztaizia advanced on him. He had no choice but to back up against the sill of the uncovered window. “But I am not God.”
She never quite remembered if she pushed him, or if he fell of his own accord. She thought she recalled reaching toward him, grasping nothing but air. Anasztaizia leaned out the window as time slowed to a crawl. He was below her, suspended in mid-air for an interminable amount of time, his arms stretched out as if to catch the window ledge he had long since passed. Yet his dark eyes disclosed only acceptance of his imminent fate and acute awareness of the tall, sharp wall post just beneath him.
The wooden pole plunged through his back, tearing through flesh with a glutinous sound not unlike the stirring of a thick stew. Blood flowed over the post and shone in the firelight like liquid rubies. The famine in Anasztaizia’s veins raged. Rather than take the protracted route down the stairs and through the gatehouse, Anasztaizia climbed out the window and wriggled down the stones as she had the wall upon which her father found himself impaled, then leapt from the castle wall onto the timber fortification. She wanted his suffering more than she’d ever wanted anything.
His body jerked and slipped down a few centimeters, until he met with the blunt edge of the wall and hung there like a hunter’s trophy. The blood gurgling from between his lips prevented him from speaking clearly.
“Now you know how it feels.” She leaned over the edge and licked away crimson dribbles from the sides of his mouth.
He grunted. When he blinked, tears cut a swath through the sweat-caked ash on his cheeks. Those too she collected on her tongue, for she savored his sorrow even more than his fading life.
“I will take only what I need. I want you to feel your body dying around you as I did.” Anasztaizia crouched atop him and pressed her mouth to his. As she drew out his breath, he grew hard against her backside. He moaned against her lips and shuddered, battling the desire for what he had taken by force such a short time ago, and dampness spread across the front of his trousers.
He died sometime during the second day. When Anasztaizia came to him in the early evening, just before sunset, he was stiff and gray, and flies buzzed over the dead flesh, crawling over his gelatinous eyes and into his nostrils, laying eggs in the wound the post had ripped into his stomach. Chunks of rotted flesh dropped from his bones and collected in maggot-ridden piles at the base of the wall. And when nothing remained of him but a sunbaked skeleton, she left him there as a reminder that his power belonged to her, now and forever. She had conquered him.
Chapter Eighteen
Mira lived in a second-floor walk-up a block off Walnut Street. The thrift store furniture and bare, colorless walls suggested none of the girls spent enough time there to invest in or care about the decor. White Christmas tree lights framed the front window. Candles in mason jars burned on the windowsill and the coffee table, casting an inviting orange light over the living room. Still, an aura of sadness lingered in the air, along with the sickly-sweet odor of recent illness.
Mira wore her hair down. Just brushing her collarbone, it was like an autumn wheat field—most of it brown, resigned to the inevitable cold, and some of it blonde, still clinging to the memory of summer. No makeup, not even eyeliner, tinted her face.
“Not much, but it’s home,” Mira said. “At least until I become principal, right?” She pointed at the brown plaid couch. Tristan hadn’t seen anything in that pattern outside of Value Village. “Have a seat. Make yourself comfy. Want something to drink? We have coffee, tea, milk, diet soda…”
Diet soda. So she meant “pop,” then. It was like trying to learn a second language, even after three years in the States. Probably a lot easier if she actually talked to people.
“And, depending on whether your day has been exceptionally bad or exceptionally good, we have wine.” Mira grinned. “We go through a lot of wine in this apartment. Nothing fancy, but booze is booze. So, what’ll it be?”
Tristan smiled back. It was impossible not to, despite her mood. “Um…yeah, water’s fine.”
“Be right back.” Mira walked through an arc
hed doorway. Tristan sat down on the lumpy couch and set her messenger bag on the floor. The edges of an oven and a refrigerator protruded from one side of the arch. She remembered twirling and clomping across the linoleum floor of her family’s basement, and Mami Treszka stomping in time above her in her bedroom. Tears stung her eyes.
Mira returned with two tumblers of water. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to cry.”
“Yeah, I just…think too much sometimes.”
“Left something bad behind in Toronto?”
“I wish I could leave it behind.”
“So what was it? Bad family situation? Drugs? If it’s drugs, that’s your business. Just don’t do that shit in front of me.”
Tristan cocked an eyebrow at her.
What kind of people does she usually date?
“I’m not on drugs. I swear.”
Mira lit up a cigarette and pulled a red glass ashtray across the table. “Who am I to judge, I’ll probably die from fuckin’ lung cancer. Anyway, we’ve hung out a few times now. You can trust me with your deepest, darkest secrets.” She giggled, and though Tristan tried to laugh along with her, she felt sick inside. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“Well…I have this sort of…situation with my roommate.”
“Where there are roommates, there are situations.” Mira took a long drag. “What’s her story? It’s a her, right?”
“Yeah. And it’s funny you mention drugs, because I think she might be into something. We’ve only been here a few months, but—”
Mira’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. So she came with you from Canada?”
“Not exactly.” Tristan scrambled to dig out of the hole into which she’d fallen. Mira thought she was leading her on. Great. “We’re not together. Never have been nor will be. I got her out of a bad environment, but now I think she might have done something stupid. The problem is that she has something important coming up, and I can’t just…leave her. I guess I should just talk to her, eh? Maybe we’re both misunderstanding.”
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