The Spark That Ignites the Dawn

Chapter Nine: Blood Upon the Stone

A/N: image is our anti-hero (?) Koschei the Immortal! I hope y'all love him as much as I do.

Blackness surrounded her, but Marya planned and calculated. She knew the layout of the dungeons, vaguely. It wasn't unlike her mother to have placed her in there, several days per month, as punishment. She knew there was a torch bracket hanging on the wall, so she stepped forward, fingers prickling over the mossy walls. Damp hung heavy in the air, coldness seeping through the stone.

Whoever was ambushing her here was taking their time. The prince's footsteps were quiet, slow, behind her. As she reached the torch, she debated using a little magic to light it; the downside was giving away her position of koldunya to Siegfried entirely. She waited in the darkness, hands paused on the metal, and let him do the talking. He'd led her down here, after all.

She held there, coiled like a tiger, until he spoke.

'I know you're a sorceress,' Prince Siegfried said. There was no uncertainty. No fear. Just fact. Cold, clinical, sensible.

'Koldunya,' Marya prompted. 'If you want to be correct about it.'

'My mistake,' she could almost sense Sig's wry humour, had this conversation existed in another world. 'You are a dangerous koldunya that has enslaved my future wife.'

Marya's eyebrows rose. For a moment, she was so taken aback that she couldn't speak. The prince took her silence as assent.

'I must save Vasilisa from your spell. I will be the one to free her.'

Marya found herself curious. 'How? How will you, with no magic, break the spell that binds her to a lake?'

She knew it was a foolish thing to say. Her first act should have been to deny his accusations and plead with him until he saw reason. Yes, she might be a koldunya, but that didn't make her his enemy. She should not have continued the conversation as though he were right, but she couldn't help but ask. Marya had, for years, searched for a way to break the chains that bound Vasilisa to a lake, and to stop the terrible transformation that she had no control over. But no spell was there to guide her, and she could not risk Vasya's life by trying to unmake and remake the spell.

So how was the prince so confident?

'I won't,' said the prince, his voice quiet. Wary. Marya's eyes narrowed, trying to squint through the darkness towards what else might be in the room. A sudden suspicion had gripped her.

She grabbed the torch from where it hung and set it ablaze; a flashy trick the koldun had loved. Fire roared from it, bursting into orange and red and gold, and dancing light across the walls. Prince Siegfried watched her, mouth open, face pale. He was a spot of red against a dark dungeon.

And in the centre of the room was a prisoner she wouldn't ever forget.

He was no prince; he wore no riches, nor had any decorated uniforms as Siegfried did. He was no beauty, either; there was something too long about his nose, too crooked about his face, too unearthly his cheekbones. His eyes were pools of hellish fire, a deep amber that glinted almost red in the light. His face was marred by streaks of dirt, and a thin scar that reached from his temple, across his cheek, and to his nose. It shifted the line of his face slightly enough that he looked more insolent with it, like an oddly likeable painting turned into an assassin. His hair had overgrown; shiny and black, it curled around his face and hung in strands to his ears, where it met with his full, also-overgrown beard. He had, after all, been a prisoner for a great many years, and from what Marya could see, he hadn't been set free in all that time, either. His skin, likewise, was almost as pale and grey as hers, from lack of sunlight.