Echoes of your name

Prologue II - I am Anya Soeng

I'm on a roll.

TW: Gore, murder, mentions of rape and sexual abuse, mentions of suicide, blood, underage drinking

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~ I know my heads not right ~
~ I think too much overnight ~
~ But in you I see a light ~
~ Let's be more than strangers ~

Messed Up - Once Monsters & Chloe Adams

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For Kaz Brekker's first birthday Anya gifted him the patch of land they had buried Jordie on.
The vacant house that stood on it had collapsed due to heavily unstable foundation and the owner was eager to sell it cheap.
He was pretty sure she had something to do with it.

When he asked her when her birthday was she just winked and told him she'd tell him later.

She didn't. (He gave her a pair of beautiful knives of rare quality on summer solstice. He was sure their previous owner wouldn't miss them too much, not that he cared.)

They were eleven then.

When he joined the Dregs with twelve she gifted him his own gloves in celebration.
He had tried to purchase some but they were missing the slits at the fingertips her's had and when he tried to cut them himself the glove frayed and started dissolving and sleight of hand without these slits was difficult.
He didn't actually know why she had them, since she didn't really do sleight of hand like him.
He didn't even know why she wore gloves all the time.
It was strange how little he knew about her.

Before joining, he had explained to her that 'he didn't need a gang that was great just one he could make great'. She had loved his plan.

They went on like this for about three years. Going about their day seperately, her at the University and whatever else she did and him at the barrel.
In the evening they met up and discussed their days.
They befriended a pair of crows that they affectionately called bastard and bitch and that they trained to carry letters between them.
They tried all the sweets they could think of and she taught him neat penmanship.
She taught him a style of writing that was all edgy and full of corners and sharp lines, so different to her own curved but tall and thin writing style. He loved it (he also loved her letters that stretched high and always swooped down like birds of prey but also fitted together on the page in dozens).
He taught her a bit of sleight of hand and together they learned how to pick a lock and raise an eyebrow.
She would bring books from the University and he would bring heists that he was working on and they would bounce ideas and thoughts off of each other and gossip over the people and happenings of the barrel.

He wished that it could go on like that forever.

But it didn't.

Instead, it all changed one night when they were thirteen.

He had been sleeping in his bed when she had appeared on his window sill and, bewildered, he had let her into his room. The first thing he had noticed was her hair, red in the exact shade of blood, like a stain around her.
Before he could say anything she had placed a gloved finger on her lips and peeked out of the window .
"I'm leaving" she had said.
"What? Where to?" He had asked, frowning.
"Sturmhond offered me a place in his crew."
He knew that name, Sturmhond. But he hadn't been in the city in weeks.
"When?" He asked, eyebrows furrowed.
"Months ago" she had said "I didn't take him up on his offer till now because I didn't want to leave you alone."
"What changed?"
"I think you'll be perfectly fine without me"
"No I won't!" He had wanted to say. Instead he said "Will you be back?". And it wasn't the budding Dirtyhands speaking. In that moment he was Just Kaz, a boy who was on the brink of losing his only left constant in life, his only friend.
She had smiled sadly. "Don't worry, I'll visit regularly. And I'll sent you letters with Bitch."
They had tried that before, whenever she had to visit her family on the mainland.
He had nodded.
Alright.
He wouldn't stop her, wouldn't dare keep her.
"How will you get to him?" She had smiled ruefully. "I'm taking the next ship over to Novyi Zem, I'll meet him there." "Alright. This is Good-bye then, I guess?"
She had taken his bare hand in her gloved hand, something he was only comfortable with with her and probably only because she had held his hand much the same way when she had saved him back then. Squeezing his hand she had smiled again and said "No, this is See-you-later."

He had heard of it then the next morning, heard of it for the first but certainly not the last time.

There were a lot of myths in the Barrel, Kaz Brekker just in the process of turning into one himself. Dirtyhands, ready to do anything for the right incentive, for the right price. However, the myth he heard of the next morning was a new one, a fresh one, having been born the night before and therefore still speckled with more fact than complete fiction.

In the later years, when the myth of Dirtyhands would go on to join the bundle of myths told to tourists and pigeons and newcomers, whispered to friends and in between gang members, shared over the counter of a bar or a hand of cards, when that happened the Myth of The Blood Angel would be right beside it.

As with every myth, especially those told in the barrel, the stories were muddled over time and every version would differ a bit from the others. Some called it the legend of the Blood Demon or The Red Lady.

But the version Kaz Brekker heard the morning after his friend's departure went like this:

It was a spring day, late in the evening (later, some would say it to be summer or autumn or winter but back then everyone had been quite sure that it had been spring) when four University professors stumbled out onto the street (or two, three or five or six or sometimes thirteen. Loony Lubyov even insisted on 427 (not that anybody believed him, considering that Ketterdam University never even employed that many professors at any given time)).
They were followed by a girl or a young woman maybe in a white satin slip covered in blood (or a nightgown or a dress or the outfit of a ravkan grisha or a shu fighter or a kaelish fae or even completely naked in the tales of some leering, drunken men).
She chased them through the streets like a wrathful demon and they scrambled away, fearful and stumbling.
And then she murdered them one after the other.
Some said she stabbed them or ripped their hearts out or castrated them or bit open their necks, but they all agreed that it was bloody and that she was shouting-crying-screaming while doing it.
They said she had said "This is for Fiona who you killed, and for Ana who you destroyed" and she listened half a dozen other girls. (Here the names varied again).
And they also all agreed that when she was kneeling beside the last body, screaming up into the sky in a wordless expression of anguish, the rain started, heavy and powerful and all-consuming and it washed clean the streets of the barrel and the roofs of the merch mansions and it cleared her skin and her clothes and everything of blood, except for her hair which, even when the water was running away from her in rivets of scarlet, stayed a deep blood red.

The Red Lady, Blood Angel or Demon.

Whoever told the story always associated her with the red blood of her victims. The blood of sinners.

The University covered the incident up (Kaz guessed that that was because of the things the professors had done that warranted her wrath) and when Anya returned to the city and revealed herself on her climb to being a big player in the barrel, she had a myth already following her, a myth that was only cemented in her actions.

Kaz then asked her why she had done it and she smiled and said "I'll tell you later" (and she did, when they were fifteen and she came back from her travels with Sturmhond to find him with a badly healed leg. Two days later she had gifted him a beautiful cane with a crow head and they sat on a roof with a bottle of whiskey and then she told him. She told him of beautiful, zemeni Fiona who had joined her dorm when she was 12 and Fiona 14.
She had told him how they were both called into their professor's office, one after the other.
She had told him how their professors had taken advantage of them, taken their pleasure with them, raped them, and half a dozen other girls.
She had told him how they had threatened to make sure they were expelled if they told anyone, not that anyone would believe them.
She had told him how Fiona had nowhere else to go.
She had told him how she had held sweet, fragile Fiona as she cried every night.
She had told him how they had fallen in love, tender, clingy love with each other and how, when they found out, their professors used that against them. Made them watch each other while they used them.
She had told him how Fiona had gotten pregnant and how they got a shady doctor from the barrel to abort the child.
How Fiona had bled and cried for days.
How Anya had found her, wrists slit, bled out in their dorm room.
She told him that not even in death had Fiona looked peaceful anymore.
And then she told him of Ana, the sweet, innocent girl that Anya once was but never would be again.).

But on that morning, the morning when he had first heard the myth, he had finally understood what she had meant, the night before when she had turned around on the windowsill and spoke last words of parting.

"Today, today is my birthday. Today Anya Soeng was born. And I am Anya Soeng."