❝ ── come windless invader, haunted beat of blood. a hush descends over EAST STAVE before the arrival of henrick von de leyen. ❞
This anger — she recognizes it. Childlike, flailing; without grace or tenacity. The quiver of arrow poised; the breaking of dawn, the breaking of skin — into a wound that’s somewhere between rage and complete surrender.
An informant lies unconscious on the floor. His papers — Severin’s assignment, to be urgently retrieved — in her pocket.
She hadn’t actively searched for him. Yet somehow, in the days following her return to Ketterdam, Severin had been everywhere — his memory in decay of the abandoned buildings, the cobblestone streets where she’d scraped her knees one too many times, the salt of the sea’s air that clung to her lashes and stung her vision blurred. Like a ghost trying to break out of its mirrored reflection, Severin had etched himself into her memories of Ketterdam.
Once, she had been able to silence him. To silence them — the memories. Once bright and soft, now decayed by disappointment; rusted and tarnished with time, shadows clinging upon her like scar tissue. The memories, which had once been the present — which had once been twined in the song of fairytales, of hopes for a future framed by walls that weren’t gray and peeling; of blood that could be held as sacred instead of spilled for survival. ‘Come away with me,’ she had whispered ten years ago, in a room much like this one, small hands clasped around his like the beginning of a prayer to a saint she’d long forgotten the name of.
Back then, she should have known — that even wallpaper with painted flowers was bound to become sullied by time; that blood, like all things, could be washed away by sea.
Vasilisa didn’t have a name for it — that hollowness. That loss; that grief for hopes fractured by reality (and too, perhaps grief for the children with eyes that seen too much, too young; children had never truly been children). She didn’t have a name for it — that moment when he hadn’t shown up and the ring of blood in her ears sounded too little like heart and too much like ache.
She didn’t have a name for it, so she gave it his.
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