Chapter Text
You know a story.
Perhaps you were told it badly—most people are. Stories often become crooked when they have passed through enough mouths.
Sometimes there is a castle. Sometimes a garden. Sometimes a room no wife may enter and sometimes it is the husband who has been barred. One teller may remember that the room is locked, but not why and so he invents a reason. Another might recall the hero’s many misfortunes and grow so fond of them that he allows the hero’s wife to look cruel by comparison.
A war becomes a quarrel. A prison becomes a room. A woman’s judgment becomes jealousy or pride or some equally unforgivable passion. A monster learns to look pitiful. A fool learns to look brave.
By the time the story reaches a child, it has usually been made small enough to be about disobedience—most stories are, once men get hold of them.
Do not eat the fruit. Do not turn around before you escape the underworld. Do not disobey the woman who knows better. Do not open the door. Do not look inside the room. Old stories are full of rooms that should remain shut.
But it would not be much of a story if they listened, would it?
And they would not be children if they did not disobey, would they?
Perhaps you know the story by another name—though that hardly matters. Stories with enough bodies behind them tend to acquire several.
It goes thus—
There is a man who cannot die.
As with all the old stories, he is a tsar—a terrible and ancient tsar, old as the oldest thing in the oldest tale. He has carried his life so long that it has ceased to resemble life at all and has become instead a hoard, his years stacked like coins in a locked room, an endless wealth collected while his people starve.
He lives in a castle on a hill above a black and restless sea. On moonless evenings, it seems less like water than a second country laid flat beneath the first, a drowned kingdom beating its fists against the rocks. In winter, the waves rise high enough to salt the lower windows. In summer, the gulls scream so loudly that the servants cannot bear to rest for more than a few minutes at a time.
Beneath the hill, his people grow thin.
They eat black bread and salt fish. They bury their sons in frozen earth. They send their daughters to the castle and receive empty pine boxes in return.
Beneath the hill, his people grow afraid.
They fear his soldiers and his taxes. They fear the rooms of his castle where no servant is sent twice. They fear his cleverness most of all.
They say that, through that cleverness, their tsar has learned to cheat Death.
That in his castle atop his hill atop his terrible sea, he has learned all the little trades by which a man may go on living after the world has finished with him. That he has hidden his death in a needle, an egg, a bird, a box, a tree, a place no honest hand would think to search.
The tale changes depending on who tells it. The truth, perhaps, changes with it.
All anyone knows for certain is that Death has come for him many times and gone away empty-handed.
Many girls have been sacrificed at his altar, each sent to his door to serve, each disappearing in turn. And still they keep feeding them to him, one and two and three at a time, and down they go—into his belly, perhaps, or into his dungeons, or into his dark and endless sea.
At last, they send Marya.
In some tellings, she is a soldier. In some, a simple bride. In some, a witch’s daughter with a knife sewn into the hem of her dress. Sometimes she has brothers. Sometimes she has no one at all. Always she comes from the country below the hill. Always she climbs toward the castle with the sea shouting behind her, and always she means to kill the man inside.
In every version of their song, the tsar beholds her and loves her at once.
It is a terrible thing, to be loved by a man who has mistaken his wanting for something that matters—as the only thing that matters. He gives Marya rooms full of the finest silk and cabinets of jewels. He gives her horses pale as bone. He gives her oranges in winter and honey that tastes of her favorite flowers. He gives her cities in miniature, carved from ivory and set beneath glass. He gives her feasts while the villages strip bark from trees and call it supper. He gives her music while the mothers below the hill teach their children how to be quiet when soldiers pass.
Marya accepts these gifts and says very little.
One evening, he calls her to his chamber.
There is rain at the windows when he calls her—the lamps burn low and the sea has gone nearly white with rage below them.
The tsar asks her whether she loves him.
Marya looks at him, and in his eyes she sees her sweetest desire.
She sees him as he might have been, if a man such as him could be peeled back to anything tender. She sees his mouth without its cruelty, his hands without their taking, his face turned toward her with no kingdom standing behind it. She sees him young, perhaps. Unmade. A boy before the crown found him, before hunger learned his name and answered in his voice.
She sees herself beside him.
She loves him—even knowing, even after all she has seen. She loves him with the ruined, human part of herself that still wants to be wanted in return. She loves him and cannot live with him. She loves him and cannot yet bear to part from him. It is a miserable curse, this need to be loved and to love in answer—it has undone better women than Marya and will undo worse ones before the world is finished with them.
Marya reaches forward. For a moment, the room holds still around them—and ever so gently her fingers touch his face. His skin is warm beneath her hand. She tucks a strand of hair behind his ear.
“I know who you are,” she murmurs.
The tsar smiles—
He takes a knife from the table and cuts from his chest half of his heart.
He does it almost tenderly—rib and skin and blood part beneath his hand. His face remains beautiful, attentive, softened by some private expectation, as though he is offering her a flower plucked from his own garden. He looks almost young in that moment.
He holds the half-heart between them.
“Eat,” he says. “Be full.”
Marya looks at the heart.
It is a country’s worth of years held in one red hand. It is every tax taken from an empty table. It is every girl sent through the castle gates. It is every soldier buried with his mouth open and his stomach hollow. It is warm. It is living. It is power made small enough to swallow.
Marya takes the halved heart in her hand and thinks of the country below the hill, growing thinner year by year while he grew older and older. She thinks of the boys sent to war for the honor of a man who will never die in one.
“Eat,” says the tsar. “Eat and live. Eat and be mine as I am yours. Eat and never leave me.”
She bites.
His heart tastes of iron—it tastes of salt and winter stores and stone and countless ages spent in his castle atop his hill atop his sea. It tastes of a thousand stolen years.
The tsar watches her swallow.
For a moment, there is only rain, and the sea, and the wet sound of his breathing, then the wound in his chest begins to close. Marya feels the change inside herself at the same time—a heat beneath the breastbone, a second rhythm settling beside her own.
Her tsar smiles.
…
After that, Marya cannot die.
The years enter her. Wounds close. Sickness passes her by like a beggar refused at the gate. Her face remains her face while other women’s daughters grow into grandmothers.
The tsar is pleased and Marya is patient.
There are ways of killing a deathless thing—and she must learn them if she is to do them.
The tsar helps her, in the end.
He grows careless in the way men do when they are happy. He cannot resist being known. He shows her everything and tells her all of his secrets—he laughs and kisses her and tells her that no one has ever cared enough to ask before.
When the chains are finally ready, she waits until he sleeps.
By dawn, the tsar is beneath the earth.
He wakes in the dark with iron at his wrists and Marya standing beyond his reach.
“You ate my heart,” he says.
“Yes,” says Marya.
“You said you loved me.”
“Yes,” says Marya.
“Then why have you done this?”
Marya looks at him for a long while and then she closes the door.
For years, the door remains shut.
…
The country heals in its uneven way.
Bread returns first. Then songs, though the old ones are sung quietly for a while. Then children bold enough to run past the castle road and throw stones at the gate. Their mothers scold them when they come home flushed and laughing, but not too harshly. It is a strange thing, after so many years, to have children who can afford to be foolish.
The castle upon the hill becomes a place people point to when telling their daughters what was survived. The sea grows calmer, though never gentle. Some nights, when the moon is gone and the lower windows shine yellow against the dark, it still throws itself at the rocks as though it remembers.
Marya rules.
She is good at it, which few people forgive. In daylight, they call her queen. After dusk, witch. Marya lets both names live.
Centuries pass.
The castle grows ivy. The girls in the songs become grandmothers, then names, then nothing. Marya becomes a legend and then she becomes horribly, achingly lonely.
Then Ivan comes.
He is a poet. He is gentle with wounded animals and careless with candles. He writes too long into the night. Ink stains his fingers. He is beautiful in an unfinished way, all gentle bones and earnest eyes. He looks at Marya as if she is a door opening onto summer.
He has none of the tsar’s grandeur and none of his hunger, which makes Marya love him with a relief so fierce it is nearly pain.
They wed in spring.
Marya wears red. Ivan wears white and trembles through the vows. Outside the chapel, the orchards are flowering, branches frothing pale against the sky. The people cheer because they love a wedding, and because they love their queen.
Spring passes. Then summer. The orchards fruit and empty. Winter comes and then it is spring again. And round and round and round and round—
Then a rider comes to the gate.
Half-dead. Blood on the saddle. Blood in his hair. Blood smeared across his hands. Marya reads the letter clutched in his hand once and does not need to read it again. By sunset, the courtyard is full of horses. By moonrise, armor. By morning, the road will have her.
Before she leaves, Marya takes Ivan below the castle.
They pass through the kitchens, where ash sleeps in the ovens. They pass through the cellars, where the wine darkens in its casks. They pass the crypt and keep going downward, deeper and deeper into the wet root of the hill, where the air grows close and the torches lean away from the walls.
At the end of the passage waits a door.
Marya takes his hand and presses it flat against the grain.
“There is something behind it,” she says.
Ivan says nothing.
“You are to leave it shut.”
He looks at her then—the torchlight cuts her face into gold and shadow. He thinks that she seems older here. Less queen than wound. Less wife than something very old and very unknowable.
“What is it?” Ivan asks.
Marya’s mouth tightens.
“You are to leave it shut,” Marya repeats instead. “If it speaks, do not answer. If it weeps, do not pity it. If it promises you my safe return, do not believe it. If it offers you the thing you most desire, know that it lies.”
Ivan tries to make a brave face for her.
Marya touches his cheek.
“Oh, beloved,” she says, and the sorrow in her voice is terrible and ancient. “You have such a tender heart.”
Then she goes to war.
Ivan waits.
At first, waiting has a particular shape. It is made of letters and councils, of meals taken alone, of candles burned while he reads Marya’s old campaign journals and tries to sleep on her side of the bed. He writes poems and hates them. He walks the orchard until the servants begin to watch him from windows. He presses fallen blossoms between pages and finds them weeks later, brown and flattened, little corpses of spring.
Marya does not return.
Rooms seem larger in her absence. Corridors lengthen by a few steps when Ivan is tired. The sea grows louder at night, hurling itself against the cliff with the wet, repetitive insistence of a body thrown against a door. Sometimes, in the hour before dawn, Ivan wakes convinced that someone has spoken his name.
He does not go below—for years, he does not venture below the kitchens—
But on his loneliest night, he hears a voice.
Please, it croons, I am so thirsty. Please. If you have a heart—please.
The voice is thin through the floors, worn down by stone and distance until it hardly seems a voice at all. It might be water in the walls. It might be wind beneath the hill. It might be grief, which has always been skilled at borrowing other sounds.
Ivan does not move.
He lies beside Marya’s empty place and thinks of mercy. He thinks of cruelty. He thinks of chains under the earth and the kind of person who leaves another living creature alone there. He thinks that Marya, for all her greatness, is a soldier first. He thinks that soldiers learn to close doors others might open.
Please, says the voice.
And the pity in Ivan rises so quickly that his body obeys before his mind can stop him.
He takes a lantern. He takes a pail. He goes below the kitchens, below the cellars, below the crypt, into the wet root of the hill where the torches burn low and blue.
The door opens beneath his hand.
Behind it, Koschei the Deathless Tsar hangs in chains.
“Water,” Koschei says again.
Ivan gives it to him.
One pail.
Then another.
And another.
The water spills down Koschei’s chin. His throat works. His hands flex in their chains. Each time Koschei drinks, the chamber seems to remember him. The stones darken. The chains tremble against the wall. Somewhere deep inside the hill, something old begins to wake.
On the seventh pail, he smiles.
On the eighth, the chains begin to tremble.
On the ninth, Koschei lifts his head and looks at Ivan.
In his eyes, Ivan sees his sweetest desire.
He sees Marya as she was on their wedding day, red-clad beneath the flowering trees. He sees her standing in the orchard with sunlight in her hair and ink on her fingers from stealing his pen. He sees her returned from war before dusk, her armor gone, her hands clean, her face turning toward him with all the weariness taken out of it. He sees the bed no longer empty. He sees every letter answered. He sees the long table set for two.
He sees the life he has been waiting for.
“She ate half my heart,” Koschei says. “Did she tell you that?”
Ivan says nothing.
“No,” says Koschei. “I thought not.”
The chains groan again.
A seam of darkness opens along Koschei’s breastbone, neat as a cut in cloth. There is no wound there, and yet Ivan sees red. A heart or half of one or simply the memory of it.
“Eat,” Koschei says. “Be satisfied.”
Ivan thinks of Marya’s hand over his on the door. He thinks of her warning. He thinks of her face in Koschei’s eyes and hates her, briefly, for being right.
“Free me,” says Koschei, and his voice is dry as old paper, gentle as a knife laid flat against the palm. “Free me and be merry. Free me and have what you wish for. Free me and have her home again.”
Above them, somewhere past stone and root and the old sleeping bones of the hill, the sea strikes the cliff.
Ivan reaches for the chains.
...
In another version of the story, there is no castle on the hill. No war-bride with blood on her hem. No poet trembling before a forbidden door.
There is only a man lost in an endless black.
The black has no proper beginning. It opens in every direction, slick and depthless, an ink-sea without shore. It stretches past sight, past speech, past the little mercies a mind invents when the body has no use left for time. The boy is somewhere inside it. Perhaps he is standing. Perhaps he is drowning. Perhaps he has been there long enough that the difference has worn away.
And in the dark, he sees his sweetest desire.
A land without chains. A land without pyres. A land where children with fire or air or black at their fingertips do not learn to hide in fear. A land where mothers do not smother miracles in the cradle for fear of who might come knocking. A land where his people may walk beneath the sun without flinching from every passing shadow—
And in the dark, he also sees his greatest fear.
That he will fail them. That he has already failed them. That every road he chooses will end in the same field, the same torn earth, the same long trenches packed with bodies whose names no one had time to write down. He sees mass graves opening like mouths across the ground. He sees the snow gone red around them. He sees hands reaching up through dirt, through ash, through history and black and ink—
In the howl of it, he hears them.
Please, they scream.
Please.
Please.
.
.
.
You wake with Mal’s foot digging into your shin.
He does it in his sleep, with all the careless violence of a boy who doesn’t mean to. His heel catches the soft place beneath your knee and you jolt upright, breath caught in your teeth, one hand already raised to shove him off the cot.
“Saints,” you hiss.
You did not pick the word.
It comes out of you anyway, sharp and natural, in a language that fits your mouth too well and sounds strange to whatever part of you has just woken inside it. The word is yours. The language is yours. The voice is yours.
And still—
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You are strange. The room is strange. Your own tongue is strange behind your teeth.
Even Mal, grumbling as he turns onto his stomach and drags half the blanket with him, seems strange for one breath too long. His hair sticks up in dark, stubborn tufts. One foot hangs over the edge of the mattress. He is all elbows and knees, built mostly of spite and hunger, one year older than you and somehow determined to take up the space of three boys.
Mal, you think.
The name comes easily—and you think that you should not recognize it so keenly.
That frightens you too.
It is there anyway, sitting in you with the certainty of a thing learned before anything else. You do not know it, and yet you feel you have known it your entire life.
He’s Mal, you think.
Mal running barefoot through the yard with Ana Kuya shouting after him. Mal with blood on his lip and a grin wide enough to make you furious. Mal who can mimic Ana Kuya so well the little ones squeal into their blankets. Mal who once bit a boy for calling you rice-eater and spent the rest of the afternoon spitting blood onto the ground.
Mal at five, at six, at seven, always beside you, always a little ahead, always looking back to see whether you have followed.
You have never lived without him.
Only that isn’t true, is it?
You have lived an entire life without him.
Or maybe you didn’t.
There is a room somewhere with yellow light. There is a street wet with rain. There is a cup in your hand. There is a woman laughing in the distance. A book left open facedown. Someone saying your name from another room.
Your—
You lose it.
No, perhaps you never had it. Perhaps you are feverish. Perhaps dreams are crueler in winter. Perhaps there has only ever been Keramzin, only ever this narrow bed, this cold room, this boy’s elbow digging into your ribs as if he has a legal claim to the space.
You cannot remember.
You cannot forget.
Mal snores into the blanket.
You stare at the back of his head with a sick, crowded feeling in your chest, as if two hearts have tried to beat in the same narrow place and neither has made room for the other. Your hand curls in the blanket. Chapped knuckles, bitten nails, a healing scratch across the thumb from where you slipped climbing the orchard wall three days ago.
Three days ago.
You remember that too.
Mal dared you. You told him you were better at climbing than he was. He laughed so hard he nearly fell out of the tree, and when you cut your thumb on the bark, he tore a strip from his own shirt to bind it. Ana Kuya made you both scrub floors for ruining perfectly good linen. Mal complained the whole time. You complained louder.
You remember the sting of soap in the cut.
You remember the shape of his grin.
Your hand creeps from beneath the blanket.
Small and shaking with dirt under the nails. A child’s hand, though of course it is a child’s hand, you are a child, you are—
No.
The word comes so quickly you nearly make a sound with it.
No.
Your fingers curl.
This hand has drawn crooked maps in stolen margins. This hand has clung to Mal’s. This hand has wiped blood from his chin. This hand has stolen bread, dropped bread, been slapped for dropping bread. This hand belongs to Alina Starkov, who is twelve years old and cold and hungry and very good at being overlooked.
This hand is yours.
No.
No.
No.
It is yours.
It has always been yours.
But you had another hand once.
Didn’t you?
Longer fingers. Ink near the thumb. A little half-moon scar on the palm. Or no scar. A ring, maybe. No, no ring. A sleeve too large at the wrist. A pen bitten nearly flat between your teeth. That was yours. That must have been yours. Unless it belonged to a woman in a dream, unless you only saw it once and mistook seeing for having.
What was your name?
Alina, you think.
No.
No.
No.
You had another name too, didn’t you?
No, you think, you didn’t.
Yes, you think, you did.
Mal rolls over in his sleep and burrows closer, greedy for your warmth. His forehead presses briefly to your shoulder. The contact is nothing. A child half-asleep. A boy who has shared too many winter mornings with you to know where his body ends and yours begins.
It makes your throat close.
Suddenly you think: I love him.
The thought comes up bright and stupid and breathless, the way children run downhill too fast and cannot stop themselves before they fall. It fills your mouth. It fills your hands. It makes a hot, aching place beneath your ribs where a moment ago there had only been panic.
The feeling is already there, waiting for you—it tumbles through you, greedy and certain.
You love him. Of course you love him. You have always loved him. You must have been born loving him, tiny and furious and half-starved, with Mal already written somewhere behind your ribs.
You cannot remember a time before him.
Except you can.
Or something in you can.
There is a life with no Mal in it. A whole life, maybe. A long stretch of rooms and streets and hands and names where his face never appears at all. You reach for it and it slides away, slick as soap in bathwater, leaving only the awful shape of its absence. It feels strange, that life. Distant. Wrongly angled. Like a story told about someone who had your voice and someone else's.
Mal shifts in his sleep, muttering nonsense into the blanket.
You stare at him.
He opens one eye.
“You’re breathing funny,” he mutters.
You say nothing.
“Alina?”
The name pulls at you.
It is a meathook under the ribs, sunk deep in the wet of you. It catches on everything tender and drags. You feel it snag behind your heart, loop through your lungs, twist itself higher until it is no longer hook but rope, no longer rope but leash—a red, glistening choke chain made from the softest parts of yourself.
He squints up at you, pillow creased into his cheek. “Why are you awake?”
Your throat aches.
Your mouth opens and Ravkan comes out.
“I don’t know,” you say.
Mal frowns. “You look weird.”
You almost say, I am weird.
You almost say, I think I died.
You almost say, what was my name before this?
“I love you,” you blurt.
Mal blinks.
For one awful second, he only stares at you, sleep-soft and confused, his hair crushed flat on one side and sticking up on the other. Then his mouth tilts into a crooked little smile, pleased and embarrassed and already half gone back to dreaming.
“I know,” he mumbles.
Your face crumples.
You make a horrible little sound and fold forward before you can stop yourself, pressing your face into his chest so hard your nose hurts. His heart is beating under your cheek. Yours is worse, yours is louder and annoying and terrible and stupid. Yours is running around inside you like it has lost something.
You want it out.
You want to claw it out.
Mal goes stiff, then pats your shoulder with one bony hand.
“Alina,” he says, more awake now. “Was it a bad dream?”
“Yes,” you say wetly.
“Was I in it?”
You do not answer quickly enough.
“Was I dead?”
“No,” you say. “Yes. Maybe.” Your fingers twist in his shirt. “I don’t know.”
Mal is quiet for a moment.
Then his other arm comes around you, awkward and warm, trapping part of the blanket between your bodies. He is too thin, you think, and his elbow digs awkwardly, almost painfully, into your side. His chin bumps the top of your head. He does not know where to put all of himself, but he keeps you there anyway.
“Go back to sleep,” he mumbles.
You don’t.
Neither does he, you think, though he pretends to.