Chapter Two:
The Best Bread There Ever Was
*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*
Crouched in the grove, secreted away in the copses and thickets, Helin peered bottomlessly through the branches and twigs. Two black moons drifting in a pale and barren face. No one would notice her, not from this distance and not unless she wanted to be seen. She was good at disappearing. Really good. She always had been and she likely always would be.
When your survival counted on being overlooked by your slappy-happy guardians and your pitchfork bearing villagers, you learned the nuanced art of vanishing fairly fast.
You also learned to weigh risk and reward rather well, as Helin began to right then.
The cart was a good few feet ahead, yet it may as well have been all the way down in Shu Han for all the good it was. Five men loitered around it, dressed in heavy blue coats that made Helin's frame shiver just at the sight of the warm wool and fur, a stark reminder of the holes hastily patched in her own tattered shawl. The rider was off his horse, back to them, and taking a piss over in a bush to the far right. If there was any time to go, it was to go now.
Raghnall, however, probably couldn't see the men, nor the wagon, not in the dark of the night pressing in from the thundering sky above. Helin could. Helin always saw better in the dark. Better than everyone else. Better than a stray cat.
It was the day, spring, summer, when she had problems with her sight. When everything was so, so bright that it burned and made a thrumming pain in her temple strike up a heavy tempo. Maybe she was lucky after all, living so close to Fjerda with its long, slow winters and its bittersweet short days.
It hadn't always been that way.
Apparently Ozryn used to be a sunny place before Helin showed up that fateful full moon. It had vine-yards and blue skies, dry soil and green trees, and it used to be warm enough, even in the night, that you could have slept in nothing but a sheet and still feel cosy. All of that was gone now, slowly but surely eroded in the eight years of Helin's presence.
Another strike against her in the mind of suspicious souls, surely.
How they thought she affected the weather was anyone's guess. She could hardly break out her cupboard to go sneaking for food most nights.
"Just do… you know… your thing."
Helin hissed at Raghnall's glib mood, voice swallowed up by the shrieking wind scraping against tree trunks and spattering rain washing up mud. Clothes drenched and sticking to her clammy skin, stomach cramping low, tangled and knotted in want. Want that burned as bright as any sun, and gave her a headache all the same.
It was so close, the cart, twenty steps ahead, such a short way away, an easy enough undertaking. If she was fast, swift, sure of hand, she could make it, stretch out what she shouldn't stretch out and take, eat.
And nothing was ever that simple.
"You know I'm not supposed to do that. It's bad. It's disgusting. The last time I-… Petunja beat me so hard I couldn't walk for a month."
Raghnall doesn't instantly contend against her, doesn't argue the memory of two seasons passed where he had found her curved and carved up underneath an apple tree, blue and black and trembling in the harsh wind blown over east from Arkesk. She had stayed with the Laska family for five glorious, warm days that time. Before she was sent packed back to Petunja who had grown weary of not having the hearth in her home attended to, or the vegetable patch outback managed, or the floors swept and the pots cleaned or the wool spun.
It had been perhaps the best five days of Helin's short life. There had been food, and light, and Raghnall's mother had even let her sleep in a room with a real blanket. Of course it was a room farthest away from everyone else's, on the bottom floor of their home and squirrelled away in a corner not easily stumbled across, but it had been a room and not a closet.
But Raghnall doesn't disagree with her, and that does nothing to stop the vicious bubble of bile rising in her throat. Only hastens its ascent until she tastes the acid on her tongue and pressure in her chest, makes her want to bite down. Hard.
Vile. Disgusting. Misbegotten creature.
Even to Raghnall, who came from a family of nine strong, four of seven siblings who had become Inferni like their father and mother, off to wherever people like them went, what Helin was was wrong. Something pitiful and awful enough to befriend, to take in for short, sporadic days when needs must and there was no other option, when they thought the Saints were watching on holy fetes, but ever dreadful enough never to keep.
Sometimes she caught whispers of a name in the dead of night, when no one thought she was listening, when no one thought she was there, always spoken with that cold sort of frenetic fear and always, always, hushed up hastily when addressed.
Black Heretic.
Helin doesn't know what that is, she's too afraid to ask because she does know that like herself, like this terrible thing inside, it must be wrong.
Why else would they curse that name when they saw her?
Instead Raghnall clicks his tongue on the back of his teeth with a clack that prickles against Helin's eyes, likely imagining the cakes and sweets in one of the crates in the back of the wagon with his forlorn sigh.
Honey forever out of reach. Helin knows that feeling well.
"'Spose you're right."
And even the temptation of sugar and syrup wasn't enough to entice him into saying Helin was anything but what she was. It was okay. She knew the truth too.
Wrong. Appalling. Terrible. Thing.
Helin was lucky to have a friend at all. She dreads the day when Raghnall, although he seemed so excited for it, began to show signs of a Gift like his siblings although he had yet to do so and Fredek and Georgiy had started setting fires at six years old. She doesn't, like a lot of things, know where people like him, like his brothers, go after being tested, Petunja always kicks her out or ushers her along when it was mentioned, but they do go.
Go away somewhere Helin will never follow.
What would Helin do then?
The man facing the farthest bush does a strange shake that travels down his spine and sways at the hips, the sound of cloth rustling underneath the drumming of rain, and Helin's time to think and plan was over as he turned back around to his men in coloured keftas.
As quick as she was, as small as she was, Helin wasn't getting passed five Second Army officers.
"Head home then?"
Raghnall would head home, yes. Home to his mother and his father and his supper waiting on the stove. This wasn't about food for Raghnall. This was about the thrill and the adventure, about living up to his brothers, about being able to brag back when they teased him.
If a Laska brother had done something, Raghnall must do it too.
Helin, though, would be back pulling dead weeds in the vegetable patch ready for sowing next season, unsure when her next meal would be. She'd spilled Petunja's kermes dye for the wool, the expensive kind bought from a real merchant in Arkesk, their closest town, tipped it all over the floor in her hurry to take it back to the cellar lest she get the belt again, and Helin wouldn't pay that back on only four missed suppers.
Maybe she could forage for mushrooms by the pond again if the boys weren't there playing.
"Looks like it-"
A wolf howls in the expanse of bare branched trees, followed by another, and another, and another. Far enough away that the noise echoes and resonates on tree trunks and rocky inclines, but close enough to ring through the roar of the rain. The men around the cart rush like bees shaken from a nest, flying into a flurry of movement with gossamer keftas.
They obviously weren't from Ozryn if the sound of wolves in the wood was such a scare.
Weapons drawn, shoulders stiff, the five men dispersed into the woods.
Helin sees it, knows it, and scarpers.
"Now!"
"Oi! Hold on! Sankt, Helin! I can't bloody see!"
Helin was already scrambling up the back of the open backed wagon by the time Raghnall finally caught up with her puffing and huffing away, numb, cold fingers digging into the top of the closest crate, looking for a weak spot.
Everything had a weak spot, you just needed little fingers to find it. And she does find it, a grove in the grain of the wood, a vulnerable corner in the plank.
"Got a stick to pry this off with?"
Raghnall throws one over to her before he too hauls himself up the back of the wagon. The lip of the stick cracks into the sealed top, and as both children brace it side by side, hip to hip, grasp stick tight in hand and then jump, the lid pops off with a satisfying plunk.
Helin shoved it off, delving head first into the coop. She pulled out the top parcel wrapped in cheese cloth, heart hammering away between her aching ribs as she peeled the cotton from her prize as gently as one would unfurl a butterflies wing.
Raghnall groans, annoyed, when he spots the golden-brown glaze.
"Bread? Really? We came all this way for bread? It took us two hours to walk here and it'll take us two more to get back, and all we find is bloody bread?"
Helin doesn't listen, not really. She was too busy tearing into the loaf with her teeth, a bitefull of bread so large her cheeks hurt, her fingers hurt, her belly hurts.
It's her imagination, she knows, this bread had likely come all the way from Arkesk, but she thinks it feels warm. Fresh. Like clouds plucked from a summer sky. The best bread there ever was.
She takes another mouthful, can't seem to force herself to part with the loaf for a moment, afraid it would disappear if she let go, keeping it in hand as she shirked her shawl off, laid it on the back of the cart, and began piling wrapped loaves on top. Not too many, not enough to be noticed missing, she had to be smart, but enough.
She knots it all up by the time she finished her fourth bite, and slings her makeshift pack over her shoulder.
If she could figure a way out to keep the bread from going stale, she might just be able to weather Petunja's punishment without passing out.
Again.
"You're taking the bread? Truly?"
Helin doesn't blame Raghnall for his confusion, not with his rubakja as clean as it was, unamended and unripped though handed down. Not like her sarafjin, a patchwork of scraps stitched together hastily, and its hem caked in mud and moss, hewn from Petunja's sons old shirts.
Raghnall has shoes, leather boots with twine laces. All Helin has is her toes and her dirt.
You could always tell the ones who didn't know thirst or famine by the state of their dress in Ozryn. Her friend was one of them. Raghnall came from noble stock, low, very low, but noble all the same, and that was a heavy weight in their world.
Helin came from nothing, no one, nowhere.
She doesn't blame him… But, again, it doesn't stop it from hurting, a slither of something like glass imbedding in her chest, the rush of a flush at her cheeks when she sees the embarrassment on his freckled face from her actions, her haste, as if she had told him she wanted to lick the filth from the wagon wheel.
"We came all this way for it, didn't we? When you see Fedek and Georgiy again, do you really want to tell them you came away empty handed?"
Perhaps that was bad of her too, one sin in a long line of many, prodding her friend like that so he didn't linger on her own humiliation, her flushed shame.
She'll beg an extra prayer for a Saint this night. It hadn't worked so far, she didn't think they'd heard her yet, but one day they would.
They would.
"Fine. Let's just go. It's dark and cold and-"
Raghnall went to jump off the cart, but the hem of his trousers caught a bent nail hidden by one of the boards, snagged, pulled. His leg twisted as he fell, Helin heard a pop, and suddenly he was gasping, dangling upside down by his awkwardly bent leg off the back of the wagon.
She dropped the bread and ersatz sack, and dashed for her friend, scrambling to pull him back up.
Crunch.
"That pelt will look good once I get the thing skinned. Hang it up on my bed. What do you think?"
"Whose going to skin it? You? Pull another. You squirm at the sight of the Heartrender's tent."
"I'll have you know-"
No. No. No.
The men were back. The officers were back. They would be coming through the treeline any moment if Helin could hear their voices. Raghnall's blue eyes met her own, blown wide in panic. They had no time to run. The men would see them dash for the closest cover. That meant-
By the time Helin tore Raghnall's hem free, struggled to pour out the bread from her sack back in the crate and slip the lid back on, she heard their footsteps squelching in the wet mud out front.
The two children did the only thing they could. Climb over the crates, Helin dragging Raghnall over, find a crack to dig down deep in, fling the shawl over their heads, and hide.
"Have you been dipping into the rations again Ergoy?"
Helin glanced down to her hand.
Her empty hand.
Her empty hand that had held the half-eaten loaf before she had dived for a dangling Raghnall.
She must have dropped it in her panic, must have left it behind on cart or road-
"No."
Please. Please, please, pleasepleaseplease-
"Sure."
"I told you I didn't fucking eat any rations-"
"Just get on the horse and stop bickering. We still have an hour before we reach camp, and I don't want to be out here in this rain for any longer than I have to be."
The sound of jostling, curses under breath. The heavy thud of boots on the back of the cart as men hopped up, safe from view from the children's spot in the far back of the wagon, hidden by the crates. The soft nicker of a horse with a rider's weight on its back and…
And a sudden lurch of movement.
Oh no.
*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*
Woo or Boo?
Translations and Notes:
Rubakja: Play on the Russian rubakha: a traditional Russian men's shirt in a tunic style from old Slavic times.
Sarafjin: Play on the Russian Sarafan: A long, trapezoidal Russian jumper dress.
Ozryn: A made-up village I've placed around the North-East of Arkesk, bordering Fjerda. Once a part of the northern country rather than Ravka, hence why most of its population, sans Helin, show the typical light hair and light eyes of their Fjerdan ancestors, its swapped hands throughout the Ravkan-Fjerdan wars as the two countries struggle for victory and expansion over the other. It's a pretty impoverished village due to this, and is often one of the first places that sees battle when Fjerda advances or Ravka does. Under Ravkan dominion for the last century, its often used by the First and Second Army sporadically as a sort of surveillance point to see if Fjerda is on the march or planning invasion again. Still heavily influenced by Fjerdan culture, Grisha born/emigrated there are still wearily treated, but overall tolerated.
Laska: Play on the word ла́сица (lásica) – dialectal. Noun. ла́ска • (láska) Meaning weasel.
A.N: The Uk is currently being battered blue by a storm, and as someone living in a town with a Red weather warning I've been stuck in for much of the day. To stop myself from going barmy, I've cracked this chapter out.
This fic does go into some very dark topics such as childhood abuse and neglect, religiously incentivised aggression, religious trauma and other topics such as violence, bigotry, racism and war in general. None of this is in relation to the Fem!Harry/Darkling relationship, but they are themes heavily present in this fic. So if those are triggers for you please be mindful. I will also say that the Darkling and Helin meet when she's young, nine, but no, let me repeat that, NO romantic occurrences happen until Helin is well above age. None. Nope. Nada.
Thank you to everyone who followed, favourited and, of course, reviewed. I hope you all enjoyed this, at least a little bit. Next chapter sees a certain tall, dark and deadly make their first appearance. if you have a spare moment don't forget to drop a review! I love hearing from you all! And I will hopefully see you guys again soon with a fresh new update.