❝ 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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IF SPRING IS HIDDEN IN THE woods and her goblin children are monsters sniping at humans for magic, then it is dwindling into disappearance. But there is a girl at the edge of the world with feverish skin and four fingers who hopes that winter ends.
Anitchka lounges by the fireplace, seated before a table that hosts some salted fish and broth. She picks them at them, sipping, biting. "Why is it always winter?"
The demon's fingers dance across the air, raising the flames of the fire so that it almost licks the stones above. "Because Spring dwells in the land of death now." His voice is emotionless, the end of his knife cutting through the flesh of the fish, and there is something peculiar about the act. "I hid her there when the Tsar promised me more men for my kingdom in exchange for the Northern Waste's crown."
Anitchka knows little of the Tsar. Hamlets and the poor care nothing for who sits on the throne. They're all the same: different heads, same hands streaked with blood. She can't remember who it was before this Tsar, but it irks her that the man who rules them was in an agreement with the Collector.
And that he traded cold, cruel winter for a cold, cruel crown.
She grapples at what she knows, the rift between the land of living and the dead, the banishment of spring for a punishing winter. The Collector reaps the humans from the land of living to his kingdom, while the Tsar bargains for gold. The greed of men is boundless. "So, all this time, the reason you pass over the line between the living and the dead is because the Tsar lets you? The hamlets were never under his protection."
He nods, requesting for some wine to wash the meal down his throat. "How else would men and women seek me out so easily to make deals? Death and the cold should have stopped them."
"But there is no line," she says slowly, wondering if it is unusual for a girl cut from the most fragile pieces of the universe to dine with the demon who whisked her into his kingdom. Anitchka watches the heat in the hearth flicker gently. Perhaps she should stifle her fears, head into the woods to release Spring and ease the starved bones of the living.
Then she thinks of the Collector and his lands, the Wastes of Death, and whether she should steal his kingdom.
Dinner wraps itself in silence, the quiet murmurs of the Count, and questions lining her lips. Anitchka does not ask much, and his deceptive smile tells her that he prefers it this way. He even offers some of his meal to the fire, feeding it with a hum of unfamiliar words.
When the winds bring the darkness of night with the chill, Olga helps her into a thick shawl, the kind that the Wastelands had never given her. Meanwhile, the man of shifting faces slips long gloves through her hands to conceal the agony of a missing finger. "You asked for apprenticeship," he says slowly, a Count now, although he had been a Miner the night before, "Tonight is your first deal, Anna."
He holds a lantern high in his clutches, the flame sharp against his brow as he leads her through the gnarled limbs of ancient roots once again. They are still, caught in the embrace of a spiraling tunnel.
