“The uglier the woman, the better the wife.”
– Strigany saying The crows had been busy. Their beaks were dark with gore, and when they flapped away from the rotten excess of their feast, their movements were heavy and slow.
Chera, of the caravan of Malfi, didn’t blame the birds for their gluttony. On the contrary, she welcomed the sight of it. Ever since she had been old enough to toddle along behind her father’s wagon she had regarded them as birds of good omen. Wherever she had seen crows gathered and fattened, there had been rich pickings for her family and their caravan.
Today was no exception. The dead streets of the hamlet they had discovered were alive with the birds, with rats, too, and dogs, and a flabby pig, whose owner’s death had provided him with both freedom and food.
Most of the scavengers fled as the Strigany, all two dozen of them, dismounted from their wagons and entered the hamlet’s main street. Only the pig remained, its tusks pink as it lifted its head from the rancid body upon which it had been feasting.
Chera watched her father unsling his blunderbuss. He had found it in a town a few weeks ago, and ever since, despite the cost of black powder, he had been like a child with a new toy. As she watched, he eagerly drew back the hammer, poured a measure of fine black powder into the firing pan, and carefully lit the fuse with his pipe. Then he took aim at the pig.
The animal looked back at him. In this part of the Empire, not even the peasants knew much about black powder, and their animals knew nothing. There was little in the pig’s eyes but curiosity, and the spiral of its tail twitched in welcome.
“Don’t shoot him, domnu,” Chera said, putting her hand on her father’s arm. “Look how friendly he is.”
“Friendly!” her father scoffed, pulling back the hammer. “Try telling that to the man he’s been eating.”
“Can’t tell him anything,” Chera shrugged, “he’s dead.”
“You’re too soft-hearted,” Malfi told her, and aimed at the point between the pig’s eyes. Then a voice spoke in his ear, and he jumped.
“We happily feast upon those who devour us,” it said, and the domnu looked down to find the wizened figure of Petru Maria, who was standing beside him. She hadn’t been standing there a second before, of that he was sure.
“What’s that you said?” he asked, trying to hide his surprise.
“It’s what’s written above the lintel of every wagon on our caravan,” she told him. “We happily feast upon those who would devour us.”
“Has that always been our motto, Maria?” Chera asked, and the crone nodded.
“Yes, my sweetness, and we have always honoured it.”
“For Freia’s sake,” the domnu said, realising that, as usual, he had been outmanoeuvred by his daughter and Petru Maria. He lifted the blunderbuss, took aim at the corpse the pig had been feeding on, and fired.
There was a roar, a gout of red flame, and a cloud of dense black smoke. The domnu had been pushed back by the blast, and his pipe had been sent spinning out of his mouth. Chera picked it up for him, as the smoke cleared and he examined his handiwork. The corpse had been hit dead centre, its ribs and flesh splattered in a wide arc across the street. The pig was a dot racing into the distance.
“Oh, good shot daddy, I mean, domnu,” she said, handing Malfi back his pipe.
“Yes, well,” he said, patting the stock of his gun with the absent-minded fondness of a man for a favourite child. “We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s get on with it. It’s a fine day, so let’s start with putting everything on the street, bodies and loot both.”
Chera gave his arm a quick squeeze of affection, and then joined the rest of the Strigany as they went to work. Like all of them, she wore an oiled apron, and thick leather gloves, the tops of which flared out almost to her elbows. A few of the other Strigany wore bandanas around their mouths, but not many, and not Chera. The smell of rotting corpses was something that she had long been accustomed to, and even the plague held no terrors for her. In Main’s caravan, you either died of the plague young or not at all. Beneath the ragged thatch of her hair, Chera’s pinched features bore testament to her victory over the plague. They were still marked with a cicatrice of pale scars, the white marks and pock marks the ghosts of the disease she had overcome.
The people she found within the darkness of the first house had not been so lucky. Even though the stinking confines of the house were lit only by the meagre strip of daylight that came through the door, Chera could see that there were at least three generations of a family, rotting together, as closely as they had once lived.
The adults lay on the floor, their bodies twisted like driftwood amongst the meagre furniture. Chera assumed that they had been the last to go, because the beds were sodden with the decaying remains of their children.
She examined them, and saw that their bodies bore testament to the sickness that had been their ruin. Their throats were swollen into thick, choking collars, their eyes were red marbles of burst blood vessels, and their bodies were cratered with suppurating sores.
It was the plague, all right.
Chera reflexively quashed the feeling of sympathy she had. These were bodies, that was all. They weren’t people: not the little boy who clung to his grandmother’s bloated neck, not the husband who lay cradling his wife, and not the girl who had died strangely alone, huddled in a corner.
No, they weren’t people. They were bodies that had to be destroyed so that people could live.
Chera carried on telling herself that as she wielded the long pole of her billhook, snagging the steel hook into the first body and dragging it out onto the street. Then, she went in to fetch the next, and the next, and, as she carried on with this grisly work, it became easier and easier for her to forget about the nausea that twisted within her chest.
Some others were losing that struggle with their instincts. Chera heard the sounds of their vomiting or of sobbing weaving through the bump and the slither of their grisly work.
That was all right, she thought, that was good. They were Strigany, which meant that they were tough enough to work through their suffering. Anyway, as Petru Maria said, it was only when you lost that feeling of horror altogether that you had to worry. Although she never said what exactly you had to worry about, Chera believed her.
She dragged the last body out of the house she had chosen, took a deep breath of relatively fresh air, and went back indoors to complete the more agreeable part of her task.
After so many years, she had an instinctive knack for where to look. Her fingers rustled through the stinking bedding as eagerly as if it had been sweet corn, and when her fingers closed around the purse of copper coins she smiled. She counted them, and then dropped them into the pouch in her apron.
Next, she turned to the tools that hung from one wall. The man had been a cobbler, by the look of it, and Chera wasted no time in bundling the tools of his trade into a blanket. After that, she looked through the cooking area. There was nothing worth having, but for the copper pot that rested on a huge clay brick stove. She dropped the cobbler’s tools into it, and prepared to drag it out into the street.
That was when she heard the noise from within the stove.
It was a wordless sound of pure animal panic. A bird that had flown down the cold chimney and become trapped, perhaps, or a cat locked away by its owners during their delirium.
Then the sound came again, and Chera, deciding that the thick leather of her gloves would be proof against either beaks or claws, went to open the stove door. There was a flurry of movement from inside, and the small creature shrieked as it was exposed. The thing extended two hands to ward her off, and Chera realised that it was not a thing at all. It was a child.
As always, when she met somebody who was not from her caravan, Chera instinctively raised her hands to cover her pockmarked face. Then, seeing how terrified the child was, she dropped her hands and smiled.
“Hello,” she said, and dropped to her knees. “What are you doing in there?”
The child made no reply. In the gloom of the stove, and beneath the soot that covered it, there was no way of telling if it was a boy or a girl. The flat shine of its terrified eyes could have belonged to either sex, and the tangled nest of its hair gave no clue.
“I’m Chera. My people have come here to help you. What’s your name?”
The only reply was a lowering of the hands, and a drawing up of the skinny legs. The child peered over the scraped knees, as if hiding behind them.
“Are you hungry?” Chera asked. “We can go and eat some porridge if you want, with honey in it. It’s my favourite. What’s yours?”
For the first time, the youngster dragged its gaze away from Chera for long enough to scan the room beyond. She was thankful that she’d cleared the room of the child’s family before finding it.
No, not the family, she automatically corrected herself, the remains of the family.
“I think that you should come with me,” she said, edging a little closer to the stove. “I’ll look after you.”
“Where’s Franzi?”
The voice was no more than a whisper, but it was enough to tighten Chera’s throat with sympathy.
“There is nobody here anymore,” she said. “Who was Franzi?”
“My brother,” the girl whispered from within the darkness of her hiding place. “He’s only little. We shouldn’t leave him on his own.”
Chera thought about the little body that she had found curled up in the chill embrace of its grandmother’s dead arms. She blinked.
“They’ve all gone to Morr’s garden,” she said. “Franzi will be all right there. Now, come along. Come and eat something. We’ll look after you now.”
She reached forward, and for a moment the girl drew back. Then, coming to a sudden decision, she leapt forward, wriggling out of the stove to throw herself against Chera’s stained leather apron, and wrap her arms around her neck.
“Good girl,” Chera said and, drawing a blanket over the child’s head, took her quickly away from the rotting remains of her old life, and to the beginnings of her new one. By early afternoon, Domnu Malfi’s caravan had picked the plague-blighted hamlet clean.
The festering remains of the inhabitants lay stacked in the street, like so much cordwood, and their valuables had been collected, cleaned, divided up and stowed in the wagons. They included the girl that Chera had found. Petru Maria had taken the child, bustling her into her wagon, as eager as a mother hen with a lost chick. She would care for the orphan until a family could be found who would take her.
As the Strigany finished dusting the heaped bodies with the corpse powder that would make them burn, the petru returned. She stood on a barrel so that she could see down the festering lines of the dead, and, although she held a black-bound book of Morr in one hand, she didn’t bother opening it. The blessing that she recited over the dead was the old one, the usual one, the one that she had recited a hundred times before.
Although the words were old, the crone’s impassioned recitation was as fresh as blood on snow.
“We are all made by the gods,” she began, when everybody had gathered around, “strong or weak, fair or foul, man or woman. Whatever we do in this life it is no more than the will of our creators, for we owe them everything.”
Even before she had finished the sentence, her whiskered lips drew back over her remaining fangs, in a snarl of derision.
“At least, that is what they would have us believe,” she scoffed, with such feeling that the words might have been her own, and not those written in the book that nobody else had ever read, “but even the gods have their time, and not even they can escape the Garden of Morr. Nor should they.”
Her clawed and blue-veined fingers scratched towards the sky as she continued, as though she was lecturing the gods.
“To each of us is allotted a time, and the will to make of it what we will. When that time is finished, and when that will is gone, then our work is finished. By then, we have made ourselves the house that we shall dwell in within the Eternal Gardens beyond.”
The crone paused to draw breath, her bony chest heaving with passion. Her people waited, heads bowed, and when she spoke again, her voice soared and rolled, and thundered in a way that should have been impossible for one with such a skinny frame.
“As we prepare to tidy away after the lives that these people have led, we can be sure that Morr is already guiding them to those dwelling places. Some will be wonderful, others won’t, but whatever these people find in that world will make the suffering of this one seem as fleeting as a nightmare, and the joys no more than a cool breeze on a hot day.”
The petru raised her hands in final benediction, and, as the Reikspiel she had spoken gave way to the incomprehensible hacking of the old tongue, she gesticulated over the ranked bodies as wildly as only a Strigany woman knows how.
It was only as she finished this final catechism that the Strigany realised that they were no longer alone.
The horsemen had come along the road that led out of hamlet and into the forest beyond. One look at them was enough to tell Domnu Malfi that, whatever they were, these horsemen were no merchants, far from it.
They had the lean and hungry look of professional soldiers: mercenaries, by the look of their ragged mismatch of uniforms, or maybe even bandits, Malfi thought, uneasily. Each of the men carried a lance, and each was harnessed with a unique collection of armour. The steel plates had the battered, ill-fitting look of loot.
Their leader, a grey and grim-faced man with an incongruously colourful feather stuck into his hat, saw Malfi, just as Malfi saw him. He reined in his horse and raised his hand to stop the column that followed him.
He and the domnu regarded each other for a moment. Then the mercenary looked down at the street full of corpses. His eyes rested on one of the smaller bodies, and, if anything, his face grew even stonier.
Malfi took a step forward.
“Good day, menheer,” he called out to the mercenary, his voice relentlessly cheerful.
The man looked at him, studying him as if he was something that had been left dead by the side of the road. For a moment, Malfi didn’t think that the warrior would reply, but, before he could think of anything else to say, the man did reply with a single, damning word.
“Murderers,” the mercenary pronounced.
Main felt his stomach drop, and he exchanged an anxious glance with the men beside him.
“No. No, that’s not what happened,” he called out, his hands spread in a placating gesture. “We are plague eaters. Look, you can see that we have been cleaning this town of the plague’s victims.”
“They even murdered the babes,” another of the riders said, ignoring him. “Strigany filth! Thank Sigmar we are finally to be rid of them.”
“We shouldn’t stand for this, captain,” another man added, his voice tight with hatred. “There’s no mistaking death by poison. I bet the Strigany poisoned their well and then robbed the bodies. We should do more than just move them on.”
The captain said nothing. Malfi looked past him, and tried to decide how many were in the column behind. More than a dozen, definitely, but how many?
Resisting the urge to level his blunderbuss at the men, he squared his shoulders, and decided to become outraged.
“I have explained to you,” Malfi said, taking a step forwards, “that we are plague eaters. We provide a service for the Empire that none other will. And who might you be, who are so at home amongst the vapours of the plague?”
It was too late for words, however. Even as Malfi was speaking, the captain lifted his hat to reveal the steel skull cap beneath. His men reacted to the gesture immediately, their lances lowering as the feather in their leader’s hat described a blur of colour through the air.
Malfi cursed. For a moment, he wondered if these thugs genuinely disbelieved him, or if they were just seeking an excuse to plunder his caravan. Then he put such distractions from his mind.
“They’re going to charge,” somebody said behind him, and, as if those words had been the signal, the captain drew his hat down, and his men started to trot forwards.
“Ushoran preserve us,” somebody said, and Malfi could hear the fear in the man’s voice. He turned to find that some of his people had already started to retreat, scuttling down the street to the imagined safety of their wagons.
Every instinct in Malfi’s body urged him to follow them, but he knew better. There was no running from cavalry. They either stood their ground or they died.
“lerva, Mallik, Blythe, hold your ground!” he bellowed. “You know better than that.”
A command was shouted from the other end of the street, and the riders closed in, forming dressed ranks.
Malfi unslung the blunderbuss from his shoulder, and turned around to face his people. He was chilled with the sudden realisation of how old the grandparents were and how young the children.
Still, they were Strigany. They would fight.
“Right, here’s how it is,” he barked, his eyes glinting with the controlled terror of battle. “We either run and let them kill us all, and they will kill us when they catch us on the open road, or we take them here.”
“So, we hold our ground?” It was Chera who asked, and Malfi was simultaneously proud and dismayed to see how fearless his daughter looked.
“No,” Malfi said, and turned back up the cluttered street, “we hold that ground.”
The domnu pointed to the rows of neatly stacked corpses, the abandoned hay carts, the stacked barrels, and all the other obstructions that littered the street.
“We’ll take ’em at close quarters,” he said, grinning, “and they won’t know what hit them. Remember, go for the horses first.”
The horsemen quickened their pace, and, a moment later, the sound of their hooves was echoing off the walls of the hamlet. There were more than twenty of them, Malfi realised as they trotted forward. More than twenty armed, trained and mounted professional killers; no wonder they looked so confident.
They remained confident even when their formation disintegrated amongst the clutter of the street. This lapse certainly didn’t bother their captain. Incredibly, he was smiling as his horse jinked its way towards the Strigany. It wasn’t until he realised that the Strigany weren’t fleeing from this clumsy charge that his smile faltered.
Then, he saw what Malfi held cradled in his arms, and the smile left his face altogether, slipping away like a rat from a sinking ship.
Suddenly realising what a mistake it had been to fall into this battleground, the mercenary dug his heels in and began to raise his hand. Before he could complete the gesture, Malfi levelled his gun and fired.
The gout of flame threw shadows skittering across the walls, even as the spray of steel chopped into the mercenary and his horse. The range was close enough for the impact to hurl both animal and man tumbling backwards, and they crashed into the rest of their squadron.
Malfi, his head ringing, half hoped that such a well-placed shot might have knocked the heart out of his enemies, but it was not to be. If anything, it merely seemed to encourage them and, howling with rage, they urged their reluctant horses forward.
“Charge!” one of them cried, digging his heels into his mount as it leapt over a cart. Behind him, his comrades urged their nervous horses into an awkward gallop, even as one of them tripped and fell with a scream and the snap of breaking fetlocks.
Malfi roared his defiance and drew his sword. Then he charged forwards, leading his people to battle amongst the piled corpses of this blighted town. Chera wanted to run, wanted to hide. The horsemen looked huge as they bore down on her, and she felt a moment of sheer panic as she saw the steel tips of their lances. Every single one of them seemed to be pointing directly at her.
However, the sight of her father rushing forward to meet the murderous onslaught cured her of that fear. By some strange alchemy of the soul, her terror became hatred, and a moment later, her hatred became strength.
She realised that she was screaming a challenge, as she rushed forwards, her billhook held over her shoulder like a woodsman’s axe. Although the weight of the tool usually made even lifting it an effort, now she wielded it with an adrenaline-fuelled strength that made it feel as light as a fencing sword. She swung the polearm down in a lethal arc, and before she even knew what was happening, she was killing.
The first man she took was about thirty. He had a hooked nose and a blond beard that needed a trim. His eyes were blue, and he was riding a bay horse. The armour plate he wore on his chest was dimpled where rust had been scrubbed off.
Chera saw these details in a single flash that burned them into her memory, even as she twisted away from the thrust of his lance. She used the momentum of her spinning body to chop the billhook into his neck, and she pulled at his dead weight just as she would have pulled at the dead weight of a three week-old corpse.
The steel tip bit deep into the muscles of the mercenary’s neck, and he screamed as he was dragged from the saddle. Chera screamed back and instinctively tried to free her hook from his neck. When it came loose, it was through a rip of flesh and a spray of blood that splashed against her leather apron.
She stood and watched the man, who lay ruined and dying at her feet. He watched her back, eyes pleading. Then he was gone.
The rage that had driven Chera to the act ebbed, and she was left trembling with nausea over the corpse of her first kill. As the battle surged around her, she stood, staring blindly at him, and the haft of her bloodied billhook started to slip through her hands.
Before it could fall, she felt cool, bony fingers close around hers. She started, and then looked down into the still, dark eyes of her petru. It was like looking over a precipice into some dark, terrible void.
“Well done, my darling,” the old woman said, and Chera felt her nausea pass, her shaking hands becoming firm. Her victim forgotten, she could hear the cries, screams, and howls of battle, the endless clatter of steel and stone, and wood.
“Kill them,” Petru Maria told her, her wrinkled face twisted with a burning intensity, “before they can kill us.”
Then Chera saw the horseman who had appeared behind the old woman. He kicked his heels into his horse’s flanks as he aimed his bloodied spear tip at her back.
“Maria,” Chera yelled, “watch out.”
The old woman turned. She gestured as lazily as if she were shooing away a fly, and spoke a single word to the horse.
The animal screamed and reared back, as though from a branding iron. It spun around, its hooves slipping on the cobbles, and bolted down the street. Its rider dropped his lance as he tried to hang on, deaf to the curses of his comrades as he fled past them.
“Come with me, my sweetheart,” Petru Maria said, beckoning to Chera with one gnarled finger as she stalked forwards to find more victims. Around her, the street was a confusion of debris and struggling forms.
In the open, the lancers would have slaughtered their ragged opponents as easily as they had hoped, spearing them where they stood, or running them down as they fled.
Here, though, things were different. In the confines of the village, the Strigany fought with the brutal, direct expertise of born street fighters. They jinked amongst the piled corpses and scattered debris on the street, dodging the jabbing lances and arcing swords of their foes to cut their horses out from beneath them. Tendons were sliced. Bellies were opened. Soon, the screams of the horses were loud enough to drown out both the confused orders that the mercenaries were shouting at each other, and their screams for assistance as, one by one, they found themselves isolated, and surrounded by the Strigany.
Chera followed Petru Maria through the bloodied chaos of the street, and even through the horror she felt at the grisly task she had to perform, she was amazed by the petru’s enthusiasm. The old woman grinned and hummed merrily as she slipped unseen through the battle, the blades she held in her withered, liver-spotted hands in constant motion as she stabbed, sliced and severed.
Her smile didn’t fade until the mercenaries began to retreat, their courage suddenly snapping. Some of them fled on foot, leaving their crippled mounts amongst the carnage of battle. Others galloped in a confused line back up the road they had come by.
A ragged jeer went up from amongst the Strigany. Maria simply spat, shrugged and turned to Chera.
“Well, my poppet,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Your first kill. Good girl.”
“No,” Chera said, looking from the bodies of their victims to the carnage beyond. “This isn’t right. It can’t be right, to kill each other like this. Things shouldn’t be this way.”
The petru looked at her, a terrible pity in her eyes.
“But they are,” she said, her honesty as blunt as a cudgel. “They are this way.”
“Petru Maria!” a voice called, and the old woman turned to see Malfi walking towards her, holding a roll of parchment in his hand. “I found this proclamation on the body of the captain. Look, it’s got a seal, and it says something about us, about all Strigany. Can you come and read it for me?”
So it was that, surrounded by the cold corpses of their clients and the warmer ones of their foes, Malfi’s caravan learned of the terror that lay ahead of them. As the pyres had burned to a greasy ash, Malfi’s caravan had withdrawn back down the road that had led them here. When the smell of the burning corpses no longer followed them, there they stopped, circled their wagons, and waited while the wagon masters went to Malfi’s caravan to discuss what to do next.
Chera, having no place at the council, made her way through the dusk to Maria’s wagon. Once there, she lit a lantern, and watched the sleeping child she had saved from the plague-blighted village. The girl had been cleaned, and her hair braided, and now she slept the sleep of the truly innocent. Not wanting to wake the child, Chera resisted the temptation to stroke the smooth skin of her flawless cheeks.
They were a stark reminder of her own ravaged features. The strain of contagion she had caught had been a virulent one, virulent enough to have killed her mother. Only the art of Petru Maria had kept Chera alive, stemming the fevers and the buboes that had wracked her frame, and since then the two had been devoted to each other.
Although Chera had seen enough of death to be thankful for every breath of life she drew, she wondered what the future would bring. No husband, that was for sure; at seventeen she was of marriageable age, but the only glances she drew from men were of pity or curiosity.
At least, so she believed.
She sighed and looked at the peachy complexion of the sleeping child.
“You’re a lucky little thing,” she said.
“What’s so lucky about her?”
Chera jumped, and looked around guiltily. Maria emerged from the shadows by the wagon’s entrance.
“Maria! I thought you were at council?”
“I was,” the old woman said. “It didn’t last long. We are going to keep off the road until we can find out what the others are doing. These aristocrats are as demented as mad dogs at the best of times, but this Averland…” She trailed off, letting the venom in her tone do the talking.
“So it’s true, then?” Chera asked. “We are banished?”
Maria shrugged her bony shoulders.
“Perhaps. We will see. But tell me, liebling, what is so lucky about this little girl?”
Chera blushed.
“Nothing. It was a silly thing to say especially after all she has lost.”
Maria nodded, and tugged at the whiskers on her chin.
“Well, if you won’t tell me, you won’t,” she said, “but perhaps you’d brew some camomile for me. The weather’s changing tonight. It always makes my water ache.”
“Of course, Maria,” Chera said, and started bustling about with the tea things.
“She is a beautiful child,” Maria said to herself as Chera put the kettle on the brazier. “Perfectly formed. Look at her cheeks, like peaches.”
Chera said nothing as she spooned dried herbs into the kettle.
“I remember,” Maria said, sitting back and watching Chera from beneath hooded eyes, “when you were a little girl. You were exactly the same, skin as white and as smooth as fresh cream.”
Chera bit her lip as she stirred the camomile into the warming water. She swallowed. Suddenly, for no reason whatever, she could feel tears welling up inside her.
It must have been the bloodshed today, she told herself as she turned, and busied herself looking for the tea strainer. Of course I’m upset, all that violence.
Maria’s eyes glittered like a hawk’s.
“You were such a beautiful little girl, and now you’re a beautiful woman.”
Chera snorted, and a tear rolled down one of her cheeks. She felt the warmth of it zigzag across the ridges of her scars, and suddenly her vision blurred. She blinked hard, took a deep breath, and stirred the tea.
When she spoke her voice was level.
“I know that you are trying to be kind, Maria, but we both know that that isn’t true. I am scarred, ugly, hideous. And don’t say anything about true beauty being on the inside, or souls meeting, or that stupid old saying.”
“Of course I won’t,” Maria said, and watched Chera pouring the tea. “It’s a load of old rubbish anyway. Beauty isn’t on the inside. It isn’t anywhere. Only poets know the truth about beauty, although they never tell it.
“The truth about beauty,” Maria said, wrapping her arthritis-knotted fingers around the cup that Chera gave her, “is that it’s a lie.”
Chera wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and poured her own cup.
“No, it isn’t a lie,” she said, miserably. “Men look at you. They see if you’re beautiful or not.”
Maria, who had just taken a mouthful of tea, choked, coughed, and then spat it out.
“Men!” she repeated, horrified at Chera’s naivetй. “What do they know about anything? Nothing. They’re worse than children. What difference does it make what shape your nose is as long as you can smell? None. What difference does it make if you’ve got breasts like melons or saddlebags, as long as your hips are wide enough? None. Men are idiots, and beauty is a lie.”
Chera sniffed, and looked away as Maria, content to have set the record straight, slurped at her tea.
“I’m sorry, Maria,” she said. “It’s just that I want a husband, and, let’s be honest, with this face, I won’t get one. I’ll never be in love, or have babies. I’ll grow old, all alone. It isn’t the worst thing, I know it isn’t. It’s just that sometimes… Oh, let’s not talk about it.”
Maria sipped her tea. She had been wondering how long it would take for them to have this conversation, and was glad it had finally come. If Chera had been another type of girl, it would have come years sooner, but then, if Chera had been another type of girl, Maria wouldn’t be so keen to help.
“If you want a husband,” Maria said at length, “all you have to do is to ask, my darling. It’s simple enough. No more difficult than charming an animal. Easier, usually.”
Chera shook her head emphatically.
“No. No, not that way. What’s the point? I want a man to want me for who I am, not because he’s been forced.”
“By Ushoran, girl, I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. Don’t blush, you know it’s true. Men don’t want any girl for who she is. They want her because of who they want her to be.”
Chera looked into the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. There was no solace to be found in them. Even so, her jaw hardened.
“I won’t ensnare a man with your arts, Maria. I wouldn’t want one that was taken that way, and maybe I will find somebody without them, one day.”
Maria grunted.
“You’ve changed your tune, my girl. If you won’t let me make things easy, that’s fine. I suppose you wouldn’t refuse some cosmetic help. The gods know, there’s not a woman alive who would.”
Chera looked at the petru suspiciously.
“Can you fix my skin?” she asked. “I mean, properly? Permanently? I didn’t think you could do that sort of thing. Last time I asked you said you couldn’t.”
Maria said nothing, but just looked at the sleeping child, the peasant child whom she had known for less than an hour. Then she looked at Chera, who had been so much more than a daughter to her. Then she came to a decision. It wasn’t difficult, not as difficult as it should have been.
“Of course I can fix your skin,” she said. “It’s just a tricky potion to make, that’s all, but it can be done, Ushoran willing.”
From what I know of that black-hearted devil, Maria thought grimly as she looked again at the sleeping child, he’d be willing enough. As always, it would only be a matter of choosing the right currency.
She sighed, and cracked all ten of her knuckles. Then she leaned back against the wooden walls of her home and lowered her eyelids. Although Mannslieb was already riding high, it was still too early. Such a dark deed needed an even darker night, if only so that she could hide from her reflection in the puddles in the road on the way back.
Love, the petru thought, as Chera kissed her goodnight and left the wagon. Only the gods could have inflicted such a perfect curse on the world of mortals.
Although the smoke from the bodies that the Strigany had burnt had long since cleared, the smell of the burning still clung to the blood-greased streets and hollowed-out dwellings of the village. It clung to the shadows that stalked among the ruins, too. Hungry shadows, whose appetites had outgrown their cowardice, as Morrslieb set between the jagged spires of the forest to the south.
Although their cowardice might have been eclipsed, it still throbbed in their movements. They skittered about among the remains of the dead, with the cringing gait of beaten dogs, their teeth glistening in the night, as brightly as the stars that glittered overhead. Their cowardice showed in their stealth, too, and in their silence. Apart from the snuffling of their noses and the occasional slobbering as they found another morsel amongst the ash, they moved as soundlessly as nightmares.
They heard the woman approaching when she was still almost half a mile away. They froze, eyes wide and ears twitching as she approached. Then the wind turned, and their noses wrinkled at the familiar smell.
Their disappointment was short-lived. By the time the small, bundled figure of the old woman had stepped out of the night, which was as dark as the pits of their eyes, the creatures were busy about the remains of the dead. They knew her of old, this one, and not even the most desperate of them dared to do so much as to look into the horrible, flaying brightness of her eyes.
Then the swaddled bundle, which she was carrying with such surprising ease, stirred, and muttered something in its drugged sleep. It was a soft sound, barely audible above the wind that whined through the straw roofs of the dead houses. No matter how soft it was, though, it had the same electrifying effect as a spot of blood dropped into a pool of sharks. Cowards though they were, the things that had gathered looked up from the cold comforts of their feast. Some hesitated, but most started to close in, the hooks of their ancient appetites drawing them towards the bundle that the old woman carried, as irresistibly as moths to a flame.
They circled around her, silent as ever, apart from the clip of their claws on the cobbles, and the hiss of their excited breathing.
The old woman didn’t slacken in her pace as she walked though them. Nor did she speed up. She merely glanced at the twisted form of the thing that had made the mistake of stepping in front of her, pointed an arthritic finger towards it, and muttered a single, terrible word.
It was still screaming as she walked over to its twitching body, stamping down with her hobnailed boots to feel the satisfying snap of bone.
She smiled, pleased to have been distracted from thoughts of the awful bargain she was about to make.
The smile died on her face as, to a chorus of sudden whimpers from the carrion eaters, a form emerged from the doorway of one of the houses. Even with eyes as sharp as needles in the dark, the old woman couldn’t make out more than the outline of its shape, for which she was thankful. Anyway, she didn’t need eyes to see it with. It radiated such a sense of raw, murderous power that its presence throbbed in her mind with the same dull insistence as a rotten tooth.
She curtsied, her mouth suddenly dry.
“My Lord Ushoran,” she hissed, her voice little more than a death rattle, “I bring you tribute, and I ask for a favour.”
With that, she laid down the form of the bundle she carried, returning the child that Chera had taken to the fate that had found it.