The hot scent of burning sugar lit the air and hung heavy in the rafters of the dressing room. Anya watched as Mikhail lit another sugar cube over another glass, the flames sparking up for a shivering moment before they eased back down and the melted sugar dripped into the liquid. He lifted the glass, offering it to her. She declined. 

“Are you sure? You’ll need it out there, volchitsa.” He swirled the glass and offered it to her again. Again, she declined. 

“I’ll be fine,” she said, drawing her legs down from where they had been resting up on the table. 

“You won’t.” 

“Give me a cigarette.” 

“Hell no. I only have one left,” Mikhail protested. 

“And I need it. I’ll need it out there,” Anya said sweetly. She drew her black hair over one shoulder, tilting her head to one side and smiling at him. 

After a long moment, Mikhail sighed. He dragged a hand through his dirty blond hair and fished his last cigarette out of his back pocket. She took it in two fingers and waited for him to light it for her. 

“Anya! Fifteen minutes!” The cry came from somewhere, but in the small backstage room, filled with cigarette smoke and the burning scent of molten sugar, it seemed to come from everywhere at once. A sharp-toned reminder that in fifteen minutes she could very well seal her own fate. 

“You just have to be perfect, yes?” Mikhail said. 

“Easier said than done.” 

“You’re always perfect, just be yourself and…” he trailed off, obviously struggling for the right word. “Amplify it.” 

She rolled her eyes and let the cigarette smoke trail out of her mouth like a thin, lazy snake. “You make no sense.”

He shrugged. His muddy blue eyes were glassy from the liquor and she knew that anything he had to say to her would be worth less than her dead grandmother’s paste rings that she wore on her hands. 

“Impress the Voivode, that is all you must do.” 

“Mikhail, shut up.” She was beginning to regret saying no to the liquor. She did need a drink. 

“The other girls would kill for this chance. To sing for the Voivode himself.” Mikhail stared into the middle distance. He was long gone. The swirl and flame of the absinthe overpowered any and all of his judgments. He was supposed to be backstage, making sure the electric lights were snapping when they were meant to and the girls weren’t tripping off stage. 

“Yes, well, if they made a misstep it wouldn’t mean execution,” Anya said tersely, though she was unsure why she was still discussing the matter with him. Probably because he was there behind the absinthe, he was listening through the fog, and in a handful of minutes she would be walking onstage. She would step in front of the glaring lights of the firing squad, a black lace ribbon tied over her eyes. She would bleed crimson when the bullets tore through her flesh and all of this would be over in a few notes of a song. 

Something in what she said stirred the sluggish synapses in Mikhail’s brain and he glanced over at her. Was he thinking the same thoughts as her? He had seen his share of the firing squads, they all had. It was a fact of life, it was a simple truth. One misstep and you are no longer worth the pounds of bread it takes to feed you. You are not worth the moth-eaten blankets needed to keep you alive in the winter. You are worth nothing at all. 

“That won’t be your fate,” he said. 

His words held no reassurance. It didn’t matter, though, because she was no longer in the stuffy backstage room, but she was in the snow. She was years in the past, and all was cold. The wasteland of grey and ice that enveloped the world and swallowed it whole. Her black boots crunched against the frozen ground and the cold was so bitter that her fingers stuck to the muzzle of her rifle even through her gloves. The fur of her coat was frozen into clumps of hard spikes, and she could no longer feel her feet. There was nothing for miles in every direction but the glaring white. She was completely alone. 

She had only one task and she was going to fail. Her regiment was nothing more than a scattered trail of frozen corpses marking the path where she once stepped. Prokopy, Nikolai, Marya, Vasili, Sveta, Sasha, all of them gone. One by one they fell. Some with bullets in their eyes, in their hearts, in their legs. Their blood dropping onto the snow and staining it in the patterns of marble. Some falling from the ice, dragging its bitter claws into their bellies and freezing their insides. Theirs were the quiet deaths of eyes closed and never reopening; frost melding eyelashes and sealing them shut forever. 

Now they were bitter ghosts that danced along the edges of her steps. They whispered in her ear through the howling wind, telling her of how much better it is where they were. If she were to just lie down and let the snow encase her in its arms how warm she would feel. It would be like being at home; the home before all of this. The home that still had a fire in its brick fireplace and a grandmother who would tell her stories as she crushed herbs in her mortar and pestle. A grandmother who would weave magic with her words and spells with her hands. Anya would sing, and her voice would be captured like a gentle bird and sold for a handful of coins that her grandmother would use to keep them alive. 

But that was a time Before. Before the tall, pale prince with the black hair came to her door to buy a spell and found a song. Before the spells lost his interest and the song consumed it. Before he took her hand with a smile and gently pulled her from the home with the spells and the songs and into a world where the spells held the black tinge of pain and treachery. Where the songs became the blast of gunpowder and the tearing of bullets through flesh. She had gone willingly and those black spells and snatches of screams still felt like her spells and songs because she had him, and his magic was of such that all the world could melt into hellfire and she would still be happy within it. 

Now it was just the ice and the failure and the knowledge of reality now untainted by magic and song. All she had were her trudging steps through the cold while ghosts nipped at her heels. She moved her rifle over her shoulders; she only had a single bullet left. Either the cold would take her, or her single bullet would. Her pale prince was a tyrant, her tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless. Would that he could see her now he would laugh, run his cool fingers through her hair, call her Annushka, and tell her it’s her own misfortune she should have held the magic while she had it. She should have let the chaos of war in its freezing rage consume the world and kept the magic for herself. He had warned her what would happen if reality were to creep into her bones. He had told her if she were to fail, then it would be failure in full. And her time had been spent, the day she was to return had passed her by weeks ago. This was failure of a less conventional nature. This was failure in the eyes of her pale prince. 

Was that what was keeping her moving? Was that the only thing that kept her from putting the last bullet in her eye? The hope that she could see this through, that she could make it back and he would welcome her return. She had the papers; she held all the knowledge of the enemy plans for the coming melt season. 

She shuffled the papers out of her pockets, forcing her unwilling fingers to move against the cold. It had been too long, she realised. It had been far too long since her regiment had been sent out. They had been marked as a failure in the books already. If she managed to return, would it even make a difference or was her disgrace too much written on her frostbitten face? She knew the truth in her bones. If she did make it back, it would still not matter. She knew him well enough to know that her hold over him would not be enough to save herself. 

Anya crumpled the papers in her hands. Failure was failure and she would see a firing squad because of it.  So, she stuffed the papers back in her pockets and stared out into the wasteland. She knew the direction of home, so she turned and went the other way.

“Five minutes, Anya!” That voice from everywhere jolted her into the present, but only for a moment. 

Anya toyed with the lace ribbon tied around her wrist before pulling it off and tying it around her eyes. This magic was her magic. Her spells and songs. He had come for a spell and fallen for her song. Now she would give him both even with his magic and his rifles pointed at her chest. His gunpowder and black magic could only take him so far, he could only kill her once and she still held his songs. 

She had escaped the firing squad once, initially. She didn’t expect to escape it again. She had staggered into an outpost praying that it was not one of his. It was. They had taken the papers but because their standing officer was only a sotnik, only a captain, he did not know. He did not know that Anya’s delay meant Anya’s failure. He did not know that he was supposed to take her to the back of the compound and have her shot. He let her go, charmed by her voice and her name. Anya Volkov, the witch with the songs who held the pale prince’s heart. Let them believe that was still true. Let them believe that she could still charm him with her songs and her magic. 

Her flight had been hard. She left behind her world of silence and screams, of witchcraft and gunpowder. She pretended as though she was nothing more than a penniless singer. She was no pale prince’s lover. She was no desyatnik in his army. She had a voice and a pretty face and waves of black hair. 

She stopped at her old home for a day, an hour, just a moment. She knew the inevitable, she knew that death had taken her life and her warmth and her grandmother with her mortar and pestle. She had swept the bottles and the herbs off the dust coated shelves and into a bag. She had taken the paste rings and the real rings from the false floorboard and everything that the scavengers had missed. Then she shut the door, not bothering with the lock. Perhaps some misfortunate soul could seek shelter from the cold in this house that was once warm. 

Now she was here, in this theatre that barely passed as being such. In this hall of darkness and promiscuity. If one walked the back alleyways after dark and talked to the right opium addicts, they could find this place. She sang for the creatures of the night who were too stoned to know that there was magic in her voice. They would stumble into the hall and they would applaud accordingly when her final notes ceased, but they did not know what they heard. They did not know that she could kill them with her songs, she could burn the whole building to the ground and she could harness a hell of ice and sweep the world in shadows. They didn’t know what her magic could do, what she could accomplish with her voice. They just heard a few pretty notes strung together on a line, and that was all they needed. That was all she needed them to hear. 

Her world now was a world of simple song and simple magic. It was a world of misery, of poverty, of broken dreams and dead weight. She was hopeless and restless, yet knew that this was all she had anymore. This life was an uncomfortable fit over what she knew best. A choking haze of cigarette smoke and opium when all she wanted was gunpowder and leather. The witch with the songs was weeping over the dull and dry music she sang to appease the drunkards now. She had sung for a prince while he’d kissed her throat and given her a gun. Now she sang for the dead. 

“Anya!” 

“Knock ‘em dead, volchitsa,” Mikhail slurred, barely even conscious anymore. 

She ruffled his hair affectionately before standing up to leave. If death came to this theatre tonight, it would be for her. Her fate decided, her mind at peace, she had done all she could and she had run for long enough. What was to come would come swiftly.

The stage manager, Vitaliya, took her hands as she left the room, admonishing her for smoking before a performance. She was going to be late, she said, and on this night of all nights. The Voivode himself was in the audience, she could not afford anything to go wrong. 

Anya let the woman lead her to stage left. The glare of the electric lights made the audience nothing more than shadowy figures in the old, threadbare, alcohol soaked seats. But she saw him, if only because Vitaliya was pointing him out, chattering in her ear. Her pale prince, come to fire his final bullet into her heart. 

And she knew that he saw her, leaning too far towards the stage. Her black hair now artfully placed over one shoulder, her lips as red as the blood spilled on the snow, her eyes the colour of coal but as sharp as steel. A black ribbon of lace tied over her eyes marking the end she knew was coming, or the end that she was to cause. 

Her Voivode, her pale prince, with his black hair and eyes the colour of woodsmoke. The golden braid that marked his military success lined his coat. The badge with his own insignia, that of a wolf, pinned to his chest. His eyes met hers and she saw his lips mouth a single phrase. Moya Annushka. 

In the pit, the musicians were beginning to play. Her time was up, her time had come. She stepped out onto the stage and into the blaze of the electric lights. This ultimate firing squad of audience and judgement. She would sing and her magic would lace her notes and he would shoot her in the heart or he would stand and walk away. These were the only outcomes.

She sang. She sang and her magic was threaded in each and every note and when the shot rang out it was so expected that it took her a few moments to realise that she was still alive. That the audience was in chaos; that the room was a roiling pit of madness and that there was a bullet hole in the back of the stage just behind her head. That he had shot her and he had purposefully missed. 

The lights blinded her until someone shut them off in a hurry; the torrent of panic still had its hold over the theatre. With the lights off, she saw him lean forward in his seat, a silver pistol in his hand. He tilted his head to one side, deliberately, towards the exit, then stood and left. His black coat swept behind his steps as he gracefully picked his way through the panicked crowd. 

Anya stood on the darkened stage as the screams died down and people fled the theatre. She reached up and untied the black lace ribbon and let it fall to the ground at her feet. She let her life of simple magic and simple song slide off of her like an old skin as she stepped back into the skin she knew best. 

She stepped down off of the stage and followed her Voivode, her warlord, back to his world of gunfire and black magic. 

Moving listlessly, she stepped out onto the snow and into the night. The Voivode stood in the alleyway, looking out of place amongst the rancid muck. He was tall and regal and the poverty of the alley seemed to be creeping towards his toes but turning away before it could touch him. 

Her tentative fear of death had slipped away from her when she had dropped the lace ribbon. His gunshot missed her, he had shown her his forgiveness as the twisted animal that it was. He held out his hand for hers. 

“Moya Annushka,” he murmured. “I have not heard music in far too long.” 

She took his hand, lacing their fingers together, binding them with the intent to not let that bond be broken again. He was dangerous and cruel and she would return in kind. She could be vicious. She could be cruel. He would see that she was not a common soldier to be put to the firing squad so easily. She would not be so easily cowed by him again. 

He drew her closer and she leaned towards the heat of his body. She could kill him with her songs; he could kill her with his gunpowder. Old magic and black magic entwined; swallowing each other whole in an endless cycle. 

When he kissed her, she tasted the world she had lost and snatched it back up, determined to not lose it again. Gunpowder and blood fused with the screams of the enemy soldiers and the music of her deadly songs. She realised that he could not kill her — he could not touch her — he needed her more than she needed him. Her essence, her songs, were infused in his world and to kill her would be to strike a chord so discordant that the entire army would spiral to chaos. That was what she learned as she kissed him and tasted his desperation, his longing. The ache in his soul that spelled his need for her.

She was the one who held the power to break the world, and he had just given it to her. 

Anya stepped out onto the snow and into the night. The Voivode stood in the alleyway, looking out of place amongst the rancid muck. He was tall and regal and the poverty of the alley seemed to be creeping towards his toes but turning away before it could touch him. 

Her tentative fear of death had slipped away from her when she had dropped the lace ribbon. His gunshot missed her, he had shown her his forgiveness as the twisted animal that it was. He held out his hand for hers. 

“Moye Annushka,” he murmured. “I have not heard music in far too long.” 

She took his hand, lacing their fingers together, binding them with the intent to not let that bond be broken again. He was dangerous and cruel and she would return in kind. She could be vicious. She could be cruel. He would see that she was not a common soldier to be put to the firing squad so easily. She would not be so easily cowed by him again. 

He drew her closer and she leaned towards the heat of his body. She could kill him with her songs; he could kill her with his gunpowder. Old magic and black magic entwined; swallowing each other whole in an endless cycle. 

When he kissed her, she tasted the world she had lost and snatched it back up, determined to not lose it again. Gunpowder and blood fused with the screams of the enemy soldiers and the music of her deadly songs. She realised that he could not kill her — he could not touch her — he needed her more than she needed him. Her essence, her songs, were infused in his world and to kill her would be to strike a chord so discordant that the entire army would spiral to chaos. That was what she learned as she kissed him and tasted his desperation, his longing. The ache in his soul that spelled his need for her.

She was the one who held the power to break the world and he had just given it to her.