♥
THESE BLOODLESS HEARTS.
vi. forgive and do not forget
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At last, the night to escape had come.

Darya had left mid-morning in a caravan pulled by glossy horses and decorated with virgin-white floral garlands. Mavra had squeezed Yara's hand and restrained the girl when she tried to race through the mud after it, crying all the while that Darya was abandoning them without taking Mavra's jewel to include in her dowry chest.

The blood-red stone had fascinated Yara for days. By the way she caressed it, Mavra thought perhaps the girl-child meant steal it, and thus it was among the first objects she stuffed into her skin bag after the evening prayer. It now lay nested between three day's linen, a wooden sewing kit, and a sealed envelope of Rozian coins.

What Mavra had yet to make a choice about bringing waited in a chaotic spiral on the bed chamber floors: socks and stolen trousers, wheels of bread and smoked fish, incense and blue altar candles for bartering.

"But why can't I come?" Yara asked from her bed. She lay on her stomach, stacked hands shoved beneath her chin. "I do not want to be left here all alone."

"The road is long and hard and you are much too small, little bird." Mavra said with a weak smile. "Besides, you will not be alone. There will still be many girls left to take care of you."

"None of them like me as much as you or Darya."

"Sure they do. They adore you, for you are our littlest sister," said Mavra. She tucked a plain dagger stolen from one of Darya's lesser guards into the sheath she had constructed to wrap around the waist of any garment—skirt or trouser.

"Why do you need that?"

"For thieves."

The girl-child's eyes widened. "Thieves?"

"Thieves and bandits. Another reason you cannot come with me; they would snatch you up and carry you off as ransom."

Mavra smirked at the ghostly pale she sent coursing through Yara's scared face. The world beyond Tergrad would devour the girl whole before an upyr ever could.

"If there are thieves," Yara said after a nervous gulp. "Then may Rayi watch over you like a hawk."

"Like a hawk," Mavra agreed.

She finished with her supply selections, cinched the skin bag closed, and pushed to her feet.

In reply, Yara raced off her bed and threw her arms around Mavra's waist before she could take another step towards the door. Wet cheeks burrowed into the drapes of Mavra's embroidered blouse and Yara swayed like a cloth doll when Mavra tried to shake her.

"Not now! You cannot leave!" The girl's feet stamped the floorboards in protest. "You just cannot!"

"I must," Mavra said. An impatient hand stroked the top of Yara's head. "I am not meant for a place like this."

"Yes, you are. Anyone is. Because Rayi does not care who lives in her house as long as they follow her rules."

"There are too many rules for me here—even if they are hers. I cannot follow them all and I do not wish to upset her."

"It doesn't matter!" Yara cried. "You can ask for forgiveness again and again like you already do."

"Little bird, listen to me."

"It is not fair." Her grip tightened. "You must stay. Please."

"It hurts me to stay," Mavra confessed. She sighed with her head tipped back towards the ceiling as if it could help her escape Yara's desperation. "I am the kind whose heart wants to wander," she added. "The kind who longs to taste the salt of the sea and to see what adventures can be had with sledges on snowy roads."

Yara pulled back with a whimper to peer up into Mavra's face. A pool of tears stretched over her pleading eyes. "You have had adventures here."

"I have."

"You cannot forget them," she said, her breath sputtered. "Even when you go on your new ones."

Mavra nodded. The girl's grip had begun to loosen. She was letting go.

"I will not."

"Promise?"

"Yes, little bird. I promise. I love you."

Mavra kissed Yara's soft cheeks and peeled away from her hot arms. When she felt a pang of doubt at the door, she glanced back only to see Yara twist her hand in front of her lips like a key to a lock.

♥ ♥ ♥

Mavra had not gone. Not yet.

She wandered the corridors of the convent, between its wooden walls that had held her in their strangled embrace for four years. Back and forth, she paced before the sanctuary's doors before she slipped inside and then beneath a carved bench in wait.

The Mothers came in at moonrise. One after the next, they filtered towards the altar where candles would be lit in their name to help banish the darkness.

Like a stove to a kitchen, the altar was the heart of the sanctuary. It reached the tiered ceiling, all of its shelves of permanent offerings free of dust and wear. The mural painted with a priestess's hand behind its velvet table depicted the Great Oak. The gold-flecked paint that ran through its trunk represented the stem of life that once flowed between Rayi's glowing house in its highest branches, the fields and peasants dancing around its trunk, and the mangled black between its serpentine roots.

Mother Agafya, the highest of the convent's priestesses, came before it last. She stirred the swirls of fresh smoke with her draped sleeves towards the heavens. Then she fell to her knees with grace and placed both hands over her heart in prayer.

Mavra seized the moment of pause to slither out from beneath the bench. It took a mere two steps for the tapping of her boot soles to draw Mother Agafya's attention.

In all her age, Mother Agafya still had the sight and hearing of a cat. Little more than brittle bones and translucent skin dappled with age, it wasn't until she drew near enough that one could notice her mismatched eyes, one dark, the other an icy blue. They had earned her many accusations of witchcraft, all of which were uprooted and dispelled when she spoke with a tone as righteous and peaceful as Rayi herself.

Yet Mother Agafya had an underlying edge that could burn. She made a point to scorch Mavra with it when she retreated down the aisle to seize the girl's wrists and strung her towards the double doors.

"Child, we have had this conversation before," she hissed during their collective retreat. "I do not care if you have seen an upyr or the firebird or the light of Rayi herself—you do not interrupt rituals as sacred as thus. Wait in the corridor and I will come for you when all is finished."

"If I go now, I will not come back," said Mavra. Her heels dragged against the marble floors. "I am leaving for Serkadom."

Mother Agafya threw Mavra back when she noticed the skin pouch slung over the girl's shoulder. "Fool, you are not the one set to be married."

"Nonetheless, I am going," she said. "Darya needs me."

"Darya has a knyaz at her side. Whereas you? You would be very much alone on your travels. Go back to your bed instead of the capital and leave me to pray," she said, her tired voice verging into a plead.

"Mother Agafya, I must. I cannot stay here. My heart, it tells me to follow her to Serkadom."

"Your heart? That twisted thing? Have you forgotten where it led you last time you wandered?"

"I—"

"It took you to a graveyard where you sat beside a fresh mound and watered it with your tears for that wretch. Baba, you called her. Baba, even though she was not your grandmother, but rather a mad woman who stumbled half-blind through the night and never once stepped foot in Rayi's house. I rescued you from that tragedy of your heart. Repay me in kind by returning to be so I do not have to save you a second time."

Mavra did not move. Instead, she shriveled like a cornflower in a frost, for she remembered, though pained, the woman Mother Agafya spoke of.

Baba had freed Mavra from a bone cage, valiant and perhaps a little mad, singing to the dead to help her as she did so. In her cottage of wood and stone, Mavra learned to speak Drekavi and how to pull blood from the dead before they were laid to rest in the graves Baba dug. She witnessed the darkness twist away from the witch woman as if afraid of her fate. Its warnings prepared Mavra to mourn long before the peasants ever bound Baba's limbs and condemned the very earth she worked to swallow her alive.

"You do not have to save me," Mavra replied, voice soft on behalf of the recollection. "I only came to thank you. You showed me mercy then and throughout my stay in your convent. I will not forget it, or you."

"A lot of good mercy has done in raising you and that ambitious heart of you," muttered Mother Agafya. "Nevertheless, do not let it get the best of you, child. May you go in peace and discover many simple joys on your path—wherever it may take you—instead."

Mavra stepped forward, hand outstretched to embrace the blessing, but Mother Agafya had already wheeled toward the altar to conclude her prayers. Rayi was waiting for her words, and an adventure on the road was calling to Mavra.

And so she raced from the convent, satchel flopping against her back, the late summer wind tugging on her braid, finally free to answer it.

let the second act commence!

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happy reading & writing! ♡♡