The cold from the ground seeped into her skin, and she thought she could move her arms. She sent the message to her hands, move, lift, grab, but they didn’t obey her. She tried just her fingers, wiggling them and clawing them. She thought maybe they dug into the dirt, but the sensation was dulled, as if she was wearing thick gloves.
The bear watched her patiently, giving her the time to investigate what she could do before he sat down, propped her head against his paw, and spilled the water onto her face. It took him a few tries to get the water in her mouth, but most of it ended up there eventually, even if it started in her eye or up her nose.
When he set the cask down, she swore she could see an apology on his face. She took a breath, trying to speak again. “Thanks.” The words came easier now.
She turned her head and ended up with a face full of fur, so she turned her head the other way. “Are we on the mountain?”
The bear bobbed his head.
Her hands clenched with nervousness, but some of her anxiety fell away, as this time, she could feel her fingers and the nails digging into her palm. She rotated her wrist, and found she could, floppily, move her hand. She tried her feet, her ankles.
Her insides started to cool. Though she still shivered with tension, she no longer found herself convulsing.
Polya cleared her throat, moving her tongue around her mouth, and tried a longer sentence. “How do you understand me?”
It was a question that had nothing to do with their present situation. It would not help them plan, but it was the question which weighed on her mind.
Polya pushed at the ground, trying to prop herself to a seated position. The bear helped her, keeping his paw under her back until she could stay upright against a tree. He sat down, in that way bears do, looking like he could be at a table, back straight and head high.
He seemed to be studying her, watching her, measuring her. He fell forward and extended his claw, and then, to Polya’s amazement, he etched into the ground, “Not a bear.”
Her face flooded with heat. “A witch?” she asked, her mind listing and then discarding specific fairy tales. “A curse?”
The bear snorted, his head shaking from side to side.
“But how?”
The bear looked at her.
“So what are you?”
His gaze seemed to say, isn’t it obvious?
“A man,” Polya corrected, and then lifted a more controllable hand to her mouth. “Or a woman. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re furry. You could be a woman…”
The bear rocked back, shaking his head and wrote, “A man.”
Polya felt strangely relieved. She had been thinking of the bear as he since she had met him. “What is your name? How old are you? Do you have family? How did you come to be in the Hunt? How do you know the king?” The questions tumbled out of her mouth, tripping over each other.
The bear, ever deliberate, thought about her questions. “No family. Soldier, King’s Army.”
Polya waited, thinking he was formulating a response to her other questions, but he didn’t answer. He extended his paw, then retracted it, and then extended it again.
Polya thought about what she knew of the bear. He was loyal. He’d taken care of her when she was sick, not leaving her behind.
He was brave and fierce. He’d run in the direction of the machine guns, and when she’d been fighting the soldiers, he’d leapt into the fray without thought.
“The king was wrong to use you for this. A soldier like you should be protecting other soldiers or fighting an enemy, not entertaining bored nobles.”
The bear stared at her, started to write something, and then swept the ground angrily with his paw. Polya moved without thinking, stopping his paw. “What did you erase?”
She held onto his paw with both hands, squeezing it gently. It was heavy, and the pad rough. Polya found that it was ridged, and if she rubbed in one direction then it was smooth, and in the other, rough. His eyes closed, and he made a sound of contentment.
He opened his eyes and slowly withdrew his paw.
“If it feels good, give it back.” Polya winced at the entitled tone in her voice. “I mean,” she corrected, “it’s not bothering me.”
She held her hands out, and the bear slowly placed his paw in hers again. Feeling a little stronger, she adjusted her posture, sliding away from the tree so she could rest against the bear. He started and pulled away, leaving Polya inordinately disappointed, but then he moved closer. Rather than letting her remain against his flank, he sat with her between his paws, his head above her head, her back against his chest.
Polya sighed and relaxed into him, smiling to herself when he placed one of his paws on her lap. She picked it up and traced the claws, forcing them to extend. She stretched out the digits and rubbed against the pad. He made a deep noise in his chest, his warm breath huffing over her shoulder. His nose dipped and rested against her shoulder. Lifting a hand, she gently petted his face in the direction the fur grew.
“What is your name?”
The bear took deep breath, before he pulled away from her and wrote in the dirt, “Anatoliy.”
Polya smiled. “And how old are you? You don’t know?”
“Time got away from me.”
Polya giggled, turning her face into his chest. She rubbed her cheek against his fur.
Anatoliy swept the dirt, erasing their conversation, and then wrote, “Why do you have a tail?”
Polya leaned against his chest and stared at the question. It was a question she had asked. It was one her mother had never asked, but one for which countless doctors had no answer. She shrugged her shoulders. Anatoliy pushed at her with his nose, clearly not satisfied with her answer.
“My father said…” A pain began in her chest as the barbed wire tightened around her heart. “He said I was a tiger because he passed his wildness on to me. That I was a tiger because he was meant for great things. And that, since he couldn’t do great things, being the youngest brother of the king, God gave me to him. To show the world how powerful he could be. Because he could be the father to a tiger.”
Anatoliy tensed behind her.
“Princess?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “The king is my uncle. And my father wants him dead.”
Anatoliy the Bear
Anatoliy was still for so long that Polya almost feared facing him. She worried he would hate her because of her relationship to the king.
His body shifted, and then he wrote again, “How could he do this to you?”
“My father?”
Anatoliy bobbed his head against her shoulder, and she leaned into him again. “I don’t know. I mean. I do know. He wants to be king. He wants people to see me and think he would be a better king.”
Anatoliy started to write, then swept away the thought before beginning again. “Revolution?”
Polya nodded, Anatoliy’s fur tickling her ears. “I think so. I think he’ll lead the revolution. Be the new head. If not a king, then something like a king.”
Polya found herself whispering to Anatoliy, her chin tucked into her neck, worried someone besides him would overhear what she was saying.
Even so, she recognized the ridiculousness of her fear. Her father had dropped her into this game. She’d fought four armed soldiers, was recovering from poison on a mountain, and she was worried that she would implicate her father in treason if someone overheard her.
She snorted.
Anatoliy huffed. She was starting to understand the sounds he made. He wanted to know why she was laughing.
“I’m worried about my father,” she answered quietly. Her chin lifted so she could look at his face.
Her body was feeling normal again, except for a sort of loose-limbed floppiness.
Silently, he stared at her then leaned forward so they were nose-to-nose.
And licked her.
Polya pulled her head back and lost her balance, falling over. His tongue was rough and dry. It wasn’t like bein
g licked by a dog. It wasn’t sloppy. It was just a swipe. Still, she lay on her back, staring in shock at the sky before wiping her nose with her sleeve. The remembered sensation of his tongue made her nose tickle. He stood over her then, staring down at her, wearing an open-mouthed grin on his face. Polya narrowed her eyes at him and snapped at his nose.
He pulled back quickly and growled low.
She growled back. He lowered his head and growled deeply and much louder than Polya. She tried to stop the smile that teased the corners of her mouth, but she kept growling.
He lowered his body over hers, almost like he meant to lie on her.
“Stop!” She laughed, but he covered her, legs boxing her in, paws tucked in tight. He put his nose on hers and licked her forehead.
“Stop!” she cried out, giggling and thrashing her head from side to side.
He licked her cheek, her chin, her nose, her neck. She could barely breathe from laughing. No matter how she turned, he just kept licking her.
Finally, he huffed and rolled to the side, dropping his head across her belly. She reached down with a hand, and gently tugged his ear. “You’re wicked.”
His head bobbed a little in agreement, and she smiled as she wiped at her face.
“I’m going to get you back.” His body rumbled. Then he shook his head. She gave his ear another tug and propped herself on her elbows so she could whisper in it, “You’ll never see me coming.”
His eye rolled to her, and she could see the challenge there. She smiled at him superiorly, sure of her ability. He moved quickly and licked her across the mouth. She sputtered and fell back onto the ground. “Challenge accepted.”
St. Svetleva Reads the News
In Misurka Square, children gathered around the illustrations pinned up on the recently erected bulletin boards. After eagerly devouring the pictures of the first challenge, they pointed and screamed in mock-terror, then ran off and re-enacted the events seared into their mind.
Of course, they made some changes.
They broke free of the chains. They ate the man with the whip, and they tamed the wild dogs. When they grew up and looked back at the Hunt, those were the things they’d remember— the actions they’d assigned to the Beast, not what he’d actually done.
He would take on mythical proportions and become god-like.
All the little boys wanted to be the Beast. They wanted to rescue the princess. No one wanted to be the king, because he was the villain.
And that was not what Aleksandr had intended.
He would have done better to stay in the capital to approve the newspaper articles, penny dreadfuls, banners, and propaganda before they were released to the masses. Instead, he had left the job to his trusted advisors, who then delegated those tasks to other men, and so on, until the editors and newspaper owners who had spent their evenings arguing in Pytor’s study and eating at his table were handed the story.
They had their directives, and those were in direct opposition to the king’s. Rather than write the story of a heartless Beast and a demon girl, they wrote about a brave bear and fantastical princess. Their artists drew pictures of Polya holding the whip, keeping the deranged dogs from tearing apart the sad-eyed Anatoliy. They drew pictures of Polya leaping toward a dog, her entire body illuminated like God was directing the sunlight on her.
The writers wrote short stories describing Pytor’s face as he watched his daughter rescue the bear: ravaged, proud, tormented, adoring.
There were photographs of the king leveling his gun at Polya’s unconscious body, and of Anatoliy, fur-bristling, teeth-bared, challenging him. In every photograph, Aleksandr looked insane, unreasonable. He did not look powerful or regal.
He did not look like a man chosen by God to lead a country.
He looked exactly the way Pytor had always seen him: spoiled, cruel, changeable, and weak.
In the cafes around the university, students read the stories that had been written specifically for them (though they didn’t know this). They read about loyalty and honor. They read about the unit of soldiers sent to push Polya toward the mountain.
They read excerpts of the soldier’s letters home when they were published, all of them saying goodbye to loved ones. The soldiers wrote about having to obey their leaders despite knowing their orders were wrong, and about staying with their unit to protect the men they had come to view as brothers. They wrote about hopelessness, but they also wrote about being proud they would die with the best of comrades.
The students read about Anatoliy protecting Polya. How he seemed to be asking for help for her and how that help was denied. There were photographs of Polya accompanying these stories—her face pale and beautiful, her tail curled around her body like flowers draped on a coffin.
It inspired the students. As they looked around the cafe at the friends they’d known since boyhood, they realized they felt the same way about each other that these soldiers had. They were moved to take oaths like the ones they’d made long ago at tree forts to support each other unto death. They swore to be brave, like Anatoliy, and to protect the innocent, like Polya, and above all, to be unswerving in their beliefs as they went forward to create a new Konstantin.
Then there were the final photos and stories. Pytor gazing longingly up the mountain, his hands behind his back and his shoulders straight. He was broad-chested and handsome. He looked like a leader: a trustworthy, caring leader. He looked like the father of a country. Journalists wrote rambling opinion articles about the symbolism of a man who had a tiger as a daughter. They wrote articles they knew could result in their deaths, but ones they said they were morally obligated to write.
Everyone was taking risks now, not just the anarchists and revolutionaries. A tiger girl had tamed the beast feared by all righteous men.
It was a sign of the king’s waning power, of change coming to Konstantin.
The people all agreed: the prince could lead them. He would give them freedom and self-determination. If he was strong enough to have a tiger for a daughter, he was strong enough to lead a nation.
Anatoliy Doesn’t Like It
Anatoliy watched Polya very closely, and it made her uncomfortable. She could stand, but her head spun and she was breathless.
“Blood loss,” Anatoliy wrote.
Polya sat back down, leaned against him and rolled up her sleeves. She stared at the multitude of tiny slices along her arms. She could feel more over her shoulders, across her sides, and stomach. She looked down and gaped at the holes in her blouse. She dug through the satchel where she had packed underclothes, a shirt and stockings. She would have to keep on the bloody and torn dress.
“Wash.”
Polya felt her cheeks flame as she read Anatoliy’s message, and she sniffed at herself. There was a strange smell sticking to her clothes.
Anatoliy dropped his head on her shoulder, and she turned to stare at his eye. Once he was sure he had her attention he wrote again. “Wash cuts. Infection possible.”
Oh.
Polya nodded, looking around. “Should I use the alcohol?”
Anatoliy squinted his eyes as though wincing, probably remembering what it felt like when she’d cleaned his scrapes and whiplashes, but he nodded.
She crawled over to the cask before gazing over at him. He seemed to get her meaning and turned around, his head facing the other direction. She unbuttoned her jacket and slowly, painfully, removed it. She sniffed at it once it was off and wished she could wash it, but then dismissed the idea. There was nothing she could do about it now, and besides, Anatoliy didn’t seem to be bothered by her smell.
She blushed again, wondering how she came to care about what Anatoliy thought of her and whether or not he cared if she smelled.
Her undershirt was completely ruined, and she peeled it off carefully. It stuck to her scrapes in some places and tore off the scabs that had formed. At the fleshy part of her waist, above her hipbone and just barely visible over her skirt, was a small hole. She felt around her b
ack with her fingers, afraid of coming too close to it, and sucked in a breath when she touched too near what must be an exit wound in her back.
She’d been shot.
Someone had shot her. A bullet had gone through her body. A few inches up and it would have gone through her heart. She bit down on her wobbling lip.
It hit her then. People were really trying to kill her. She wasn’t just entertainment, set up for a series of near-death experiences.
No. People were actually trying to end her life.
She dashed away tears which landed on her chest. She wasn’t going to cry over stupid people. She refused.
A snarl made her glance over.
Anatoliy stared at her. He’d managed to sneak up and now watched her with concern. His gaze traced along the slices from the bayonet, the tiny puncture holes from the darts, and then came to land on the bullet hole in her side.
He snarled, lip curling until his canines showed white against his dark fur.
After seeming to catalogue and memorize every injury, he met her gaze again, and she was struck by the sadness she saw.
“Don’t be sad,” she whispered.
Anatoliy growled. I’m not sad, he seemed to say.
He pushed the cask closer to her, prompting her to uncork it and pour it over a bandage to clean her arms. She sucked in another breath at the sting but kept wiping, moving on to the next arm before refolding the bandage to clean her chest.
She took out a new bandage and doused it in alcohol, then leaned back a little and wrung the liquid directly into the bullet hole. The sting went all the way through her body, burning and clarifying. A cry escaped her mouth before she bit down again.
The rough tongue along her neck startled her. Anatoliy licked from her shoulder, up the cord of her neck, to her jaw. She tipped her head, allowing herself to rest against his face for a moment, before pouring more alcohol on the bandage, holding her breath, and repeating the process.
Wrath and Ruin Page 17
