Saints Day (Grishaverse)

The Hiraeth

Hi, it's Kazzle Dazzle here, I wrote this chapter after no sleep and fuelled on caffeine so if it makes zero sense, that is why

Days blended into weeks, blurred to years that Aletta had stopped counting in the ice court.
She had courted death with the Parem and still Fjerda wanted more. They had seen a taste of power and were greedy for it, like children grasping something they couldn't quite reach.

She didn't have much more left to give.

All Aletta wanted was to return to Kerch. This place made her even miss the Barrel Bosses and their squabbles, the spices of East Stave, the bustling markets.

She could almost taste the feeling of Ketterdam.

Cinnamon and other spices swayed through the wind above, dusted from the market stalls that lined the streets, the hot and bustling villages just about bursting with people as the sun dipped lower in the sky, staining it a burnished gold, casting the taverns in an evening glow.

Vendors were always setting up for the night-time rush. The crush of people, tipsy on a euphoria only these streets provide, roam the living city.
The world seemed to float as you walked past the streets with the busy houses, the rowdy men and women who came to seek their pleasure inside, the streets where people wandered through, draped in a giddy bliss.

The streets she had grown up in.
Fortune tellers and little vendors called out to the passing, trying to gain a new customer, a new face. Masks cover their faces as the thrill of anonymity provoked dizzy freedom, all clothed in vibrant, rich silks. The heat and crowds give an exhilarating feeling, like being drunk on your own freedom, intoxicated with this colorful mess of people stumbling tipsily through the cobblestone lanes and alleys.

Laughter and shouts slipped through the crowd like ribbons, twirling over the streets like an invisible hand guides them through, ringing in the ears of everyone in this loud and frivolous space. Flirting with danger, but without a care, these party goers watch the boys and girls from the brothels traipsing and skipping through the covered faces, maybe old customers, but the masks provide nothing left to recognise. Just another face and satin clothed body.

Exotic dresses flit about the place, near card games and gambling clubs, past the pickpockets and thieves that reside in Ketterdam, past the slavers that roam the city, looking to snatch up a beautiful girl to work in the funhouses. There are sharp blades hidden up the sleeves of sharper minds as the music plays loud enough to make your head ring, if the alcohol didn't do that already.

It was messy, dangerous and scarily free.
But it was home.

And Aletta never thought tears would slip down her cheeks as she longed to return to Kerch. What would Aletta do if she returned? That question had haunted her waking hours, because she had nothing to do.

No purpose, no underlying task, nobody to return to, nobody to notice she was even gone.
But Aletta knew.

She would return to Pekka Collins's employ and gather enough kruge to leave him and his disgusting gang, find a nice enough place to stay, far away from everything. She could even go to Belendt, and the famous music school there. Aletta had always wanted to learn violin.
No. Aletta had wanted to learn magic tricks.

“So you take the pen.” Filipe had instructed, moving her hands to the right position. “And you twist it, spin it but tuck it under your fingers here. Magic!”
Ten year old Aletta gasped as it disappeared seemingly into thin air, clapping.
When others had visited, one teenage girl, Betje, who Aletta had charmed and Betje had braided Aletta’s hair with red ribbons, Aletta had swelled with joy.
She even had a terrible crush on one of the others who were brought in, a boy three years older than her with curly chocolate hair and honey brown eyes.
She had let herself too hung up on this. Let herself believe they were a family, even though they only had been for a week. Let herself believe it was real. The worst part is, she loved it. As if they could replace her own parents, just for the time she was there.

Jacob Hertzoon.

The very name made her eyes sting, her skin burn in shame.
Everything has consequences, Aletta thought bitterly. She reached her slim, shaking hand up to her face, the tiny, thin scar that sliced down her eye, from brow to lip, too jagged to be a knife, made with the tip of a cruelly pretty bird’s beak.

Then her fingers brushed her neck, lighter than a feather's touch, where the ghost of five ugly purple bruises that had never truly left scraped down, none from the same point, slender finger-like tendrils made from the burn of leather stealing the breath from her lungs.

She should have died that night, but fate had not given up on Aletta yet, and she would one day prove that Fate had made no mistake with sparing her.

She had to.

Every scar had the same story, but Aletta didn't have the same story as the scars.
Aletta ripped her hand away as if burned.

The past is the past.
“May the bridges I burn light my way.” She whispered, believing it, lighting them up one by one with candles in this freezing cell, the funny little saying Pekka had used, after a fair amount of Kvas instead of the harsher ‘forget your past’, the words Aletta had used to describe any hard situation, which was a horrible coping mechanism, really, but it worked.

The guard outside the cell rattled the keys after receiving a nod from a drüskelle outside the hall.

“Up.” He walked in, boots clumping on the floor, callused hand reaching down and wrapping easily around Aletta’s arm, roughly jerking her to her feet from the slumped pile she had been in, against the stone wall.
Aletta stumbled against the man’s arm clumsily as he yanked again, seemingly unaware that wrists aren't leashes, her small frame, frail from imprisonment, almost going limp at his side.

“Don't touch me, Drüsje.” He snarled and Aletta bit her tongue from the unfairness of it. He drops her arm like it's scalding. “You have a new target.”