The Starry Sky - A Darkling/General Kirigan Prequel

Epilogue

She walked for weeks without being followed. For the first time ever she was not being watched over or looked for. She walked like her life depended on it, going as south as she could reach before food and water ran out. She ended her journey in the foothills of the Sikurzoi, with her babe wrapped tightly in her arms and a new name. Eabha was dead weight on her lips, and Anna was too well known. Over the days she'd become a new person, Vasilka, she'd call herself. Patron saint of unwed women. It was blatant, she acknowledged, and a tad on the nose, but she'd been without faith for so long, and it seemed like a way of grounding herself.

The child was called Margaretha, for similar reasons as Anna became Vasilka. She became Vasilka's daughter along their travels, as it was the only excuse Anna could create that wouldn't entirely be questioned. When they reached the small village where they'd live it was the beginning of winter and the cold was hitting the hardest near the mountains, so when the townsfolk saw a travel-worn woman cradling a child to her chest they fussed over her like worried mothers.

No one questioned where the girl with a Ravkan name, Fjerdan looks, and Kaelish accent had come from. No one asked why her child had the faintest traces of Shu features, when her mother had come from the north. No one questioned where her husband was, or where the baby's father was. No one wanted to look at the woman and ask what had happened, because she looked so fragile. So close to breaking. Her bones had started jabbing through her skin, she'd lost any softness she gained in the Little Palace, and her Kefta was worn thin with travel.

Anna never let Margaretha out of her sight, even when the village women tried to bathe the pair of them. She didn't want that child disappearing. She couldn't handle it. So, when they stripped Anna down, taking her Kefta (it was unknown to them why she put up such a fight to keep the thing) to be washed, and placed her in the bath, Anna kept her eyes trained on the child, who was being coddled by a pair of girls. Of course, to the villagers she just seemed like a protective mother. They couldn't tell the horrors that had befallen her over the past five years, and she didn't want them to. The charade that her being a protective mother worked for her, so long as nobody questioned it.

For the winter months she stayed in a cottage with one of the elders in the village, as they thought she was sick. They didn't know what could cause her to wake screaming in the night, or jostle every time she heard a sudden noise, no matter how small. The easiest thing to do was blame it on the stress she'd endured on her way south as a new mother, with no help. Her and the baby were burrowed up in that house, with Vasilka only sometimes being allowed passage to the chapel on tuesdays. Not that she cared, as far as she saw it she was out of the public eye, which meant that whoever came looking for her wouldn't find them.

It took time for her to adjust to life in the Sikurzoi, and even more time to adjust to being a mother. Children wailing and year-long freezes were new to her, previously they'd only been brief occurrences in her life. It was so much harder to forget about the struggles you'd endured when more and more kept popping up. Thankfully, most of the people in the village took pity on her, even if they still had no clue what she'd been through. The mothers would sit with Margaretha whilst Anna slept, the farmers would make sure she was always in supply of milk and bread, the priest would visit her every week to pray.

But eventually, she prevailed. Weathering out the food shortages, and nearby war. Learning how to soothe a teething child, and calm herself down after a nightmare. When the woman whose house they were living in died, Anna inherited it, and had a place to call her home. She still faced problems, of course, like how sometimes she'd see Aleksander where he wasn't. There were instances when she'd see him in the garden, watching Margaretha play, or he'd be stood in an alleyway opposite Anna as she washed her clothes in the fountain. But, with one blink he'd been gone, and Anna didn't know whether she was more sad or happy that he'd never been there at all.