Kate Quinn - The Huntress

He wasn’t always wild. In mellow moods he sang old songs of Father Frost and Baba Yaga, stropping the straight razor that always swung at his belt. In those moods he’d show Nina how to tan a pelt from the seals he shot with the ancient rifle over the door; took her hunting with him and taught her how to move over the snow in perfect silence. Then he didn’t call her a rusalka ; he tugged her ear and called her a little huntress. “If I teach you anything,” he whispered, “let it be how to move through the world without making a sound, Nina Borisovna. If they can’t hear you coming, they’ll never lay hands on you. They haven’t caught me yet.”

“Who, Papa?”

“Stalin’s men,” he spat. “The ones who stand you against a wall and shoot you for saying the truth—that Comrade Stalin is a lying, murdering pig who shits on the common man. They kill you for saying things like that, but only if they can find you. So keep silent feet and they’ll never hunt you down. You’ll hunt them down instead.”

He’d go on like that for hours, until Nina dozed off. Comrade Stalin is a Georgian swine, Comrade Stalin is a murdering sack of shit. “Stop him saying those things,” the old women who bartered clothes whispered to Nina when she came to trade. “We’re not so far out on the edge of the world that the wrong ears can’t hear us. That father of yours will get himself shot, and his neighbors.”

“He says the tsar was a murdering sack of shit too,” Nina pointed out. “And Jews, and the natives, and any seal hunters who leave carcasses on our section of shore. He thinks everything and everyone is shit.”

“It’s different to say it about Comrade Stalin!”

Nina shrugged. She wasn’t afraid of anything. It was another curse in the Markov family; none of them feared blood or darkness or even the legend of Baba Yaga hiding in the trees. “Baba Yaga is afraid of me ,” Nina said to another village child when they were scrapping ferociously over a broken doll. “You’d better be afraid of me too.” She got the doll, thrust at her by the child’s mother who crossed herself in the old way, the way the people did before they learned that religion was the opiate of the masses.

“Fearlessness, heh,” Nina’s father said when he heard. “It’s why my children will all die before me. You fear nothing, you get stupid. It’s better to fear one thing, Nina Borisovna. Put all the terror into that, and it leaves you just careful enough.”

Nina looked at her father wonderingly. He was so enormous, wild as a wolf; she could not imagine him afraid of anything. “What’s your fear, Papa?”

He put his lips to her ear. “Comrade Stalin. Why else live on a lake the size of the sea, as far east in the world as you can go before falling off?”

“What’s as far west as you can go before falling off?” The sun went west to die, and most of the world was west of here, but beyond that Nina hardly knew. There was only one schoolmaster in the village, and he was almost as ignorant as the children he taught. “What’s all the way west?”

“America?” Nina’s father shrugged. “Godless devils. Worse than Stalin. Stay clear of Americans.”

“They’ll never catch me.” Tapping her toes. “Silent feet.”

He toasted that with a swallow of vodka and one of his rare knife-edged smiles. A good day. His good days always came back to bad ones, but that never bothered her because she was fast and silent and feared nothing, and she could always keep out of reach.

Until the day she turned sixteen, when her father tried to drown her in the lake.

Nina was standing on the shore in a pure, cold twilight. The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind. A few years ago, those frozen waves had crawled so far ashore that Tankhoy Station had been entirely swallowed in wind-flung blue ice. Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies. All the same, Markov’s daughters , came the whisper in the village. They all go bad.

“I don’t care if I go bad,” Nina said aloud. “I just don’t want a big belly.” But there didn’t seem to be anything else her father’s daughters did, except grow up, start breeding, and run away. Nina kicked restlessly at the shore, and her father came lurching out of the hut, naked to the waist, oblivious to the cold. Clumsy inked dragons and serpents writhed over his arms, and his body steamed. He’d been on one of his binges, guzzling vodka and muttering mad things for days, but now he seemed lucid again. He gazed at her, seeing her for the first time all day, and his eyes had an odd gleam. “The Old Man wants you back,” he said conversationally.

And he was after her like a wolf, though Nina got three sprinting strides toward the trees before the huge hand snatched at her hair and yanked her off her feet. She hit the ground so hard the world slipped sideways, and when it came to rights she was on her back, boots scrabbling on the ground as her father dragged her onto the glass-smooth lake.

The ice this time of year was thicker than a man was tall, but there were gaps where the ice thinned. The village schoolmaster, less ignorant about the lake than about most of the things he taught, said something about warmer water channels winding upward from the deeper rift, enough to make holes in the surface—and now, her father dragged her across the ice to one of the spring holes, dropped to his knees, broke the thin crust, and thrust her head under the freezing water.

Fear slapped Nina then, alien and spiky as new-forming frost. Even being dragged across the lake by the hair she had not been afraid; it had all happened too fast. But as the dark water swallowed her, terror descended like an avalanche. The water’s cold gripped her; she could see the depths of the lake stretching away below, blue green and fathomless, and she opened her mouth to scream but the lake’s iron fist punched into her mouth with another paralyzing burst of cold.

On the surface, her body thrashed against her father’s grip in her hair. His stone-hard hand thrust her head down deeper, deeper, but she flailed a leg free and slammed one boot into his ribs. He brought her up with a curse, and Nina got one sobbing gasp of air that stabbed her lungs like hot knives. Her father cursed blurrily; he released Nina’s sodden hair and flipped her onto her back, seizing her by the throat instead. “Go back to the lake,” he whispered, “go home.” Again her head went down under the water. This time she could see up through the ripples, up past her father to the twilight sky. Get there , she thought incoherently through another wash of fear, just get up there —and her hand stretched blindly … But it wasn’t the sky her fingers brushed. It was the unfolded razor swinging at her father’s belt.

She couldn’t feel her fingers wrapping around the handle. The cold had her in its jaws, clamping down. But she watched herself move through the ripples of the lake that was drowning her, watched her hand jerk the razor free and bring it around in a savage swipe across her father’s hand. Then he was gone, and Nina came roaring up out of the water, a shard of broken ice on the edge slicing along her throat, but she had the razor in her fist and she was free.