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T
he first time they hang her, she laughs at them. Right up until the noose chokes the last cackle from her throat. Until her rotted feet twitch death’s final dance and stillness descends.
“Do not grieve for her,” Father Gavriil says to us, as we stamp and shiver in the winter chill. His face, smooth and flawless as a babe’s, gleams in the dusk. “She was an abomination. She does not deserve your pity.”
He is careful not to say her name. We all are. Lest she rise again.
“She killed Lady Milena, I can’t believe it,” Sasha, the innkeeper, whispers. “Lord Voronin must be devastated.”
“Believe it,” Matev mutters. “I had to help cart away Milena’s corpse. There was...” He shivers in his guardsman uniform. “...not much left to bury.”
“Hush, all of you,” Mistress Devka hisses, her gaudy beads clacking at her neck as she rounds on us. She glances at the priests. “Not here.” Her painted eyes turn on me, and I pull my cloak tighter as she searches my face. We’ve shared no more than a dozen words in all my visits to Sasha’s inn, but her forehead creases, concerned nonetheless. “Olya, are you alright?”
I lie. “I’m fine. It’s just—” I look up at the corpse, taking in the grave dirt still under her fingernails. “It’s my first time seeing...”
It is not my first time seeing a corpse.
Devka pats my elbow. “I know you were close. But she’s in a better place now.” She turns back to Lapachka’s village gallows and the monastery beyond it, muscles working behind her made up face. “Though I still can’t believe it.”
“May the Twelve rest her soul,” Father Gavriil says at the head of the procession, and the crowd bows their heads with him.
“May the Twelve rest her soul,” they chime.
I want to laugh. The Gods aren’t listening. Not now.
* * *
They learn the second time. They burn her at the stake. And as the priests’ spellfire roars across her flesh, she screams. Not in pain, but with the anger of a soul thwarted.
The wind off Yaromir Peak catches the sound, mixing it into flurries of snow and ash, and scattering it through Lapachka’s cobblestone streets. The crowd watches in chilled silence but for the breath rattling in their chests. Even Father Gavriil is quiet. His face is pale, the neck of his white and gold robe stained dark with sweat. His gaze never leaves the flames as they roar high above the rooftops.
“First Lady Milena, and now she’s taken Lord Voronin, too,” Sasha whispers. Her voice trembles, fear and outrage rolling into one. “Why?”
Matev stands beside her, listless, like an empty coat draped over a hook. His face is grey, uniform shabby and unwashed.
“You saw the corpse?” Devka asks him.
He nods, then shudders. “Work of a monster,” he says. “Twelve, pray this is the end of it.”
Devka looks him up and down. “I didn’t take you for a convert, Matev.”
He shrugs one shoulder, a sluggish half-jerk, as if too tired to do anything more. “Man’s got to have hope, especially these days, what with folk going missing all over the place n’ all. You know six others vanished last month before she—” He glances at the pyre, and his voice drops, “—came back. All stabbed through the heart, like she was. Captain’s at his wits end—and working us half to death.” He scowls. “So sue me for finding some comfort in the Twelve.”
“Well,” I say, staring at the flames. “At least we’re one monster less.” Though I know it’s not true.
“I heard they found Lord Voronin in the woods, near Nemir Brook,” Sasha says, gaze fixed on the pyre and the corpse writhing within it. “That’s where they found her. The first time I mean, when she was proper dead.” She shuffles closer. “Strange things are afoot up there. Unnatural things.”
“Sasha,” Devka’s voice rises in warning. “Save it for your tavern.”
The fire strips the corpse’s flesh away, leaving nothing but bones and a thick, pungent stench of charred meat. A tug at my sleeve makes me turn. Sasha. “Doesn’t Nemir Brook run through your mill?”
I nod.
She bites her lip and her brow furrows, worried. “Be careful out there.”
Too late for that.
At Devka’s glare, she pulls away, saving me from having to answer.
“Gods of the Twelve, rest her soul,” Father Gavriil prays before us, clasping the prayer beads tight in his hands.
We bow our heads with his.
As soon as the pyre dies to glowing coals, Gavriil leaves, hauling up his ash-stained robe so he can lengthen his stride. He pushes through the crowd before they can part.
I clench my fist under my cloak, feeling the scar there. I do not move. I want him to see me. I want him to know.
That’s right, you bastard, I’m still here.
Our eyes meet and he stops; freezing like a man who has come face to face with the Dark Reaper herself.
In a way, he has.
“Gods have mercy,” the words rush out, no more than a murmur. Sweat pours down his silky skin. This close, he seems too youthful for his fifty years.
I smile and step aside. “May the Gods have mercy,” I echo. But I will not.
He hitches up his robe and runs.
* * *
I call her name again that night.
“This is your last chance,” I tell my friend as I raise her blackened bones from the graveyard.
There is only one more, she tells me.
“Then we make sure we finish it,” I say and hold up my fingers. “I cannot raise your soul again.” I’ve not known my power long, but of this I’m sure. With every summoning, her soul feels less tethered. I do not think I can bring her back a fourth time. “He’s well protected.” I nod to the monastery atop the distant rise. Its spires split the rising moon in two. If I listen carefully, the tramp of guard boots come on the breeze.
She cocks her skull at me, teeth trapped in a perpetual grin. Mere men won’t stop me.
“Magically protected,” I tell her. “He has the Gods’ blessing.”
Her bones shrug. And I have yours.
“It is not the same thing.”
It is close enough. There’s a tinkle of bones shifting, and the skeleton holds out a hand. You have my thanks, Olya.
“I am not her. Not anymore.” Under my cloak, I rub the puckered flesh over my heart. My fingers search for the slow, rhythmic beat that shouldn’t be there. Not since the night, nearly two moons ago, when the bag fell over my head and they dragged me, kicking and screaming, through the brush. Not since they dumped me on the earth, bound and gagged, like a huntsman’s trophy.
Not since I heard Lady Melina hiss from the shadows beyond my hessian blindfold: “You brought her? You were supposed to take someone young. Someone supple.”
Lord Voronin’s voice had boomed in response, “She still has plenty of life left.” After listening to his drunken rambling in Sasha’s tavern on and off for ten years, I’d have recognised it anywhere. “They’re not picky.”
I was just a widower then. Husband dead five years to the plague. Just one woman scrounging a living from her mill, alone and with no one to miss her.
Except for one dear friend who would not stop asking questions.
Lying in the dirt, listening to Voronin and Melina squabble, I’d felt the hand fall on my shoulder and squeeze, as if it wanted to be around my throat. “She will do fine.”
That was the last time my heart skipped. Hope and horror had cracked it against my ribs as Father Gavriil’s voice sounded beside me—strong, confident, divine. Right before his dagger crunched through my chest.
I might have forgiven them—passed on to whatever came next—had I not heard them laugh as my blood pooled to power their workings.
They’d sought to summon a God; my blood paving the way for an immortal to descend to grant them a boon. Youth, longevity, power. But they’d also summoned something darker—and it slipped into my shell like a naiad into a pond and set my heart beating again, slow and steady as a pendulum clock.
I am still Olya, yet I am also not Olya.
The hoot of an owl brings me back to the graveyard, back to my friend reduced to bones. I should have protected her. I thought if I kept my head down, stayed at my mill and carried on, no one needed to know what had happened.
My friend had thought different. When she eventually drew the story from me, she had sought justice. And they had killed her for it. Dumped her in the woods, like me, but without the pomp and ceremony.
I will keep my head down no more. I snap my fingers. The sound ricochets off the graveyard stones. “He’ll have priests waiting. We need—” A smile curves my lips. “Reinforcements.”
And I have just the souls for the job.
“Lord Voronin, Lady Melina, arise.”
Five feet away, the fresh-turned earth shifts, and the scent of copper fills my nose, metallic and bloody. They clamber from their graves. Lady Melina balances her severed head between her nails, features lax, eyes lost. Lord Voronin is expressionless, but that is hardly surprising: my friend has ripped off his face. Their souls push against mine, straining against the power that pulls their strings. I flex my fingers, tightening the hold on my puppets, and bring them to heel.
“A fitting end don’t you think?” I say to my friend, eyeing her shattered ribs. I imagine how they would have cracked under Voronin’s boot, snapping like twigs under the pressure of his Gods’ blessed strength.
The skeleton’s hollow eyes move between the marionettes and me. You’re right: you are not Olya.
I am more than Olya. I am vengeance: the Dark Reaper’s right hand. The Twelve may select their chosen, but so has the Reaper. Her boon will balance the scales. At the thought, the scar on my chest twinges: an echo of the woman I once was. I shove the feeling aside, dusting my hands and gathering my skirts. I am not her. The old me was meek and let the world do to her as it pleased. No more.
“We end this tonight.”
My friend nods, her ivory skull glinting in the moonlight. Our killers flank us into the night. In life they were beautiful, bastions of wealth and influence, but now they scuttle after us, my power yanking them across the fields like dogs on a chain. Death was my friend’s vengeance upon them. Enslavement is mine. Eye for an eye.
The monastery is a grandiose thing. Stone walls hem the opulence in, but beyond them, the arched roof of the dormitory looms, its shingles a deep, starless shadow against the sky. Further away, the steeple of Gavriil’s private church rises into the night. There, the dark within me whispers. That is where he will be.
We follow the wall, ducking away twice as patrols march past, boots crunching on the gravel path. They never see us. Not even Lord Voronin or Lady Melina who drag their feet. Perhaps they choose not to see. We are the picture of death after all.
At the iron side-gate, my friend slides a fingertip into the lock, popping it open with a grinding twist of metal on bone. We steal across the lawn, past the dorm, to Gavriil’s personal Godshome, reserved for his most devout.
I wonder if Matev knows. The thought catches me off guard as we climb the low steps to the double oak doors. What about his Captain and the rest of Lapachka’s guard? How many has Gavriil enthralled with the promise of youth and life everlasting?
With a twitch of my hand, Voronin and Melina push the doors open.
The church is quiet inside. But I feel him in there. His heart races, along with six others, their staccato beats plucking at my senses.
“Gavriil!” I call.
Silence.
We wade into the hall, my friend’s feet clacking on the wooden floor, Voronin and Melina shambling after. Images of the Twelve look down on us from stained glass windows. I stride past Uroda of the land and Morskoi the Sea Tsar, through the pews, putting the murals behind me. One God is not present. She never is. She remains undepicted, her name scrubbed from memory. Dark Reaper we call her. The thirteenth God.
I stop before the altar, before Svarog the Supreme, God of the Sun. A candelabra burns there, its twelve arms scattering light across the raised dais. Behind, a templon wall of filigree gold rises from floor to rafter; a locked door in its center bars entry to the sanctuary beyond—the room where my quarry hides.
Movement snaps my gaze to the wings. Hands twist, spellfire roars out: six blinding arcs of green aim straight for my heart. My power flexes, driving Voronin around me. Bolts thud into the chest of my corpse-shield and a sizzling aroma of cooking flesh fills my nose.
My friend reacts, her skeleton hands curling about the priest’s podium, knocking the Book of Twelve to the floor as she wrenches it with a strength she’d never had alive. Wood cracks, splinters, and she hurls it into one of the wings. Two priests go down with it, a third skitters away, but she’s upon him like a cat. Her charred-bone fingers strike at his skin, gouging welts through his cheeks. He screams, gurgles, and then falls silent.
Three more arcs of green spit from the opposite wing. I twist, dodging one, and pull Voronin-the-meat-shield before the others. Two more thuds, and a fresh waft of burnt skin. Voronin makes not a noise.
I send in Melina. Or rather, Melina’s head. The priests scream as a flick of my wrist sends it bowling into them. You’d think they’d be used to seeing death in this corrupt house, but they scatter like crows, cawing for their master: “Father Gavriil, do something. Stop them!”
Still their master does not show. They are alone. Melina collects her head, and my twitching fingers command her and Voronin to advance. They close in, nostrils flaring, scenting the fear that lays thick and heavy in the air.
One priest yells, fires a bolt of spellfire at Melina, then charges between her and Voronin, fleeing down the hall and out into the night. The other two follow, a second strike reeling Voronin back as he reaches for the man. The last priest’s spell chokes short as a smoking Melina grabs his arm and tosses him into the pews, as if he were no more than a rag. He slams into chairs with a meaty thud and is still.
A tap-tap-tap signals my friend returning to my side, skirmish completed, bones dripping blood. Three crumpled priests lie behind her.
“Can you deal with them?” I motion to the open door and the men fleeing across the grass.
My friend’s skull swivels, sightless eyes fixing on the priests’ fluttering robes. Consider it done.
“Go with her,” I instruct Melina. And after the briefest of pauses, in which I tighten my strings, she lopes off, swinging her head by its hair like a cudgel.
I turn to the templon wall and its door. A surge of power crumbles the lock in my fingers, and I push it open. It is dark beyond, a pitch that even my gifted eyes can’t penetrate. I gather the candelabra from the altar and step over the threshold, Voronin poised at my shoulder.
My feet swish over rush matting, the reeds woven into a façade of humility. A musty scent cloys in my nose, reminding me of my farm’s old cobwebbed cellar. My chest tightens. I’ve not ventured into my cellar once since my rebirth. I no longer feel hunger. Or pain. At least, not like I once did.
Thump-thump-thump-thump. His heart is racing. Breathing short and shallow to my ears.
I hold the candelabra high and the shadows pull away as I peer into the gloom. A flash of gold lacing draws my eye. A robe—and it’s occupied. My light illuminates Gavriil’s face, white and sweaty, his forehead creased with lines of fear.
White light flares, blinding my vision.
“Back, mancer, by the light of Svarog!”
I twist Voronin’s strings. He lunges, barrelling straight for the father. The spell takes the corpse in the chest with a heavy whump, and I clench my teeth as the Gods’ blessing buffets the cords that bind him. Then the light is gone, and my shield slumps to the ground, obliterated beyond recognition.
“Svarog will smite you, foolish woman.” Gavriil scrambles to his feet, lips pulling back into a sneer. “The light will prevail.”
Not yet. I will not lay down and die, not this time.
I grit my teeth and pull on Voronin’s soul, wishing him back up. The corpse rises to one knee. One arm remains, although his head and most of his chest are gone. But my power snags. I draw harder. Voronin’s body sways. With a strangled gurgle, my strings break, snapping like spider threads swept up in a broom. Voronin’s soul flees. His corpse flops to the floor, still.
Garviil laughs. “Is that it? Is that the best you have against the true lord’s power?”
I stare at Voronin, horror crawling into my chest. I am nothing without my puppets. One single spell, one strike, and he’s destroyed my only weapon. The Gods’ blessing rises within Gavriil again. A blessing bought with my blood.
His fingers weave the spell and fling it towards me. “Die!”
I dive to the floor. My candelabra spills onto the rush matting and fire wicks across it as if it were oil. The spell singes my back and I come to my feet, slapping out a flame caught on my sleeve.
But Gavriil’s ready. A second spell rips into my side. Its heat sears my bones and I scream. So this is the power of the Twelve.
When I open my eyes again, I’m slumped on the floor. Charred matting burns my skin, smoke clogs my lungs and fire licks the tapestried walls. Garviil’s still laughing. He prances about the dais, grinning to the molars, eyes rolling in his head.
“That is what I’m talking about!” he cries, throwing his arms wide to the Heavens. “I am blessed; you cannot harm me. Nothing in this world can!”
My fingers curl into the ruins of the matting. The fire’s spreading. With every ember that drifts down, flames spring up in its place. I am running out of time. Damn you, Gavriil.
As if perceiving my thoughts, he comes, leering through the smoke to wrap a hand around my throat. His touch is a blight on my skin. It sends pain stabbing into my head, behind my eyes. I twist and kick, claw at his fingers. He brushes me off and squeezes, giving himself over to that base desire I’d sensed in that clearing months ago.
Nothing has changed. I bite the inside of my cheek to stop the sobs. My vision narrows to a pinpoint. My heart thuds its slow and steady rhythm.
Thump.
My friend’s death will go unavenged. And mine. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I spit a curse, reach up and dig my nails into Gavriil’s cheek, sinking them deep. Something to remember me by, bastard.
Thump.
I tried. At least I can tell my friend that when we meet on the other side. When I go, the power tethering her to this world will go with me.
Th-thump.
My heart strikes my ribs like an anvil. Something pulls at my limbs, a tightening around my soul. I snap my eyes open. Of course. Why had I not realised?
I reach for the dark, for the other-Olya, within me. She surges, alive, lithe, and hungry at my beckoning.
I am with you, she says.
I’m not a soldier. I’m not one of Lapachka’s men of arms. I’m no warrior of legend, or priest of the light. Without my puppets, I have no power to match that of Svarog. I am just a miller’s daughter, a widow. One human soul.
But my soul is tethered, too. And my strings call to an unnamed God.
I close my eyes, unfurl my senses, and let not-Olya pull my cords.
We slam our head into Gavriil’s. There’s a crack of breaking cartilage and he falls away, screaming, blood streaming from his nose.
“Bitch!” he snarls. The light’s blessing rises within him again.
We move together, the Reaper and I, weaving around first one bolt then another, the burn of their light dulled through my eyelids. We pirouette and leap, crossing the flames on toe-point, alighting at Gavriil’s side.
“Stay back!” he screams, scurrying away. “Svarog will burn you to ashes!” A dagger flashes before us. We duck its swing and lean in.
“Svarog cannot help you now.” The name stings my tongue and I savor it; savor this moment.
Because I have a dance. And I also have a name.
And to know the name is to know death herself.
I whisper it in his ear. The power of it tingles on my lips.
My patron laughs and surges forward, scythe swinging. She severs his soul from his body, and it leaves him in a hush of collapsing lungs. With a brief, muffled scream, her power envelops it and devours it whole, never to see the world again.
Gavriil’s body sags, and the dark settles, sated within me. Around us, the Church of the Twelve burns.
* * *
My friend finds me in the graveyard at dawn. Melina skulks behind her, obedient as a hound.
It is done.
“Good,” I purr, watching the smoke cloud plume above the monastery.
I help her find her grave. The gaping hole of raw earth is still there, snow stained black from her passage the first time I resurrected her; the first time I heard a soul crying out from beneath the dirt. A soul wronged, like mine.
She clambers in, rests her head on a pillow of soil and crosses her blood-stained bones over her ribs.
May the dead dance for you again, dark one, she says.
I nod.
She goes quietly. Bones slumping, skull lolling, her jaw dropping half askew. The ache in my chest eases a little, like a piece of me has gone with her. I stand there, thinking of the woman she’d been, of the life she could have had. Wronged like me but now silent and peaceful.
I am not silent—or peaceful. But perhaps, as I put more to rest, I will be.
“Come.” My power coils about my servant, lurching her up. “This is just the beginning.”
Others in Lapachka have sought the Gods’ blessing. I know because there were six other sacrifices after mine. Six more souls wronged—maybe more. I know because not-Olya still curls inside my steady heart, sleeping, but not gone. Not yet. We have more work to do.
But how deep will this warren go?
My fists clench. I will hunt them down. And with each of the murdered avenged, perhaps I too may know peace. I turn to the next grave, read the name; listen to the cry of the wronged soul within. I reach out and gather its strings.
“Arise.”