One moment, Tatiana had been attempting to defend her father’s bakery with nothing more than a heavy-bottomed frying pan and every last ounce of courage she could muster, and the next…another man was encroaching upon her. He was tall, dark-eyed, and dangerous, if the two sickles he held in his large hands were anything to go by, and she felt her eyes widen as she struggled to determine whether or not she was going to have to fight him off as well. She didn’t understand how it was that he had gotten hold of such frightening weapons in the first place…as far as she knew, those were not the sort of instruments that the men of King Christian’s army boasted. However, before she could so much as cry out or scream for help, the strange man was moving towards the half-circle of looters that had formed around her bakery with all the grace and agility of a seasoned fighter, and he made the group of dirty-faced men appear clumsy and disorganized in comparison. Then, without any sort of warning whatsoever, he was reaching for the looter that was the closest to him, the one with the broken bottle and the stained teeth, and Tatiana felt her last breath escape her parted lips in a shuddering rush as…in a handful of mere seconds, he was dragging one of his sickles across the swell of the looter’s throat until it tore open and gaped into a deadly, bleeding gash.
He…oh God, he had killed him. Without so much as a single thought, this man had killed him.
Tatiana wasn’t even aware of the rest of the raiders leaving in a hurried rush in response to the murder of one of their own. Her pulse was pounding in her ears, and she felt shaky, dizzy, and nauseous, as well. Only once before had she seen someone die in front of her, and that had been her poor mother, gaunt and pale as she allowed her sickness to consume her entirely as she said her goodbyes to the family she loved more than anything else in the entire world. Tatiana knew that the man standing before her now had only been attempting to help her, to shield her and her bakery from the gang of looters that would have done unthinkable things if left alone, but she still couldn’t tear her wide-eyed gaze away from the sight of the lanky man on the ground with his throat torn open and the last vestiges of life quickly leaving him. “He is–he is dead; oh–oh God, he is not…on ne ostanovitsya krovotecheniye; on umirayet, Bozhe...” Shakily, and without answering the stranger’s query, Tatiana was falling to her knees before the dying man, and her fretful little hands sought out the jagged gash that had been dragged across his throat, only to come away bloody and useless as she realized that there was no longer anything that she could do. She had wanted him to leave her bakery, of course, and she had been willing to beat him over the head to do it, but…oh God, she hadn’t wanted anyone to die today.
“We must be giving him proper burial,” Tatiana managed to say in a quivering rush, and with hands that trembled just as badly, she reached out to close the fallen man’s eyes, feeling her own well with tears all the while. She looked back up at the stranger that had single-handedly defended her and her bakery, and she wasn’t angry or accusing at all, but rather…sad. Sad, and determined as well. She didn’t know who this man was, or why he was carrying around a pair of sickles, but…he couldn’t be too bad, could he, if he had taken time away from whatever he was doing to rescue a girl he didn’t even know? “Please, I–I am wanting to take his body into the woods…no one should have to lay dead in street for everyone to see. You are already doing much for me, big man, but I am asking for just this one more thing and then I will be pretending as if I am not seeing you at all. Please…help me bring into woods.”