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Yes, a single year at the whims of a wood demon is worth a lifetime of belonging.
That was when Liska knew that there was something wrong with her that could not be prayed away. The thing inside her, it made people afraid. She learned to stifle it, hide it, but there were times where it won.
He grimaces. “I preferred you when you were quiet.” “And I preferred you when you were a deer.”
Marriage is an inevitable thing for village girls, but Liska always ignored it—she assumed it would come like death, arriving when least expected and stopping her life in its tracks.
It strikes her that she is asking a spirit-cat about a ghost-dog.
Of course this would be her doing. Of course. It seems she is fated to never do good, no matter how she tries.
They are not similar at all, Liska and the Leszy, but they share two things: magic and grief.
The way he looks at her, it is like she has spoken absolution to a man condemned.
“Onegdaj.” A word meaning “the past,” meaning “a time before.” A time she would like to return to, yet a time she wishes she could have changed. The thing that haunts her and that has shaped her. The place she belongs. The past: a weapon, her protector.
Of course she likes him; she has always been eager to trust, eager to love, seeking warmth no matter how many times she is burned.
“But nothing is ever equal with humans, really—we give and we take, the scales ever tipping. That’s just the way of it. I am what he has, and he is what I have—there’s no point keeping score.”
She set out to sow death, and death is what she grew. Now she reaps the consequences.
His next words are stitches—not enough to heal a wound, but enough to begin the process. “You are not a monster, Liska Radost. You are sunlight, and you breathe life into everything you touch.”
Around them, white flowers dazzle and shine, swaying in the breeze. The air warms as magic crackles, motes of light—periwinkle blue and fern green—rising from their skin and drifting overhead.
and though she grieves what she has given up, she does not regret it. She wonders if a sculptor feels this way when he chisels stone into statue, knowing it can never return to its previous form.
This is how it may be, monsters and monstrosities, but who among them hasn’t done monstrous things?
Each more unlikely than the last, yet they have been strung together like a necklace of rowanberries, threaded by fate or God’s will or something even wilder.
“I do not know how many nights I have left, Liska Radost, and I would very much like to spend this one with you.”
He is a demon, and he has done monstrous things, but he makes her feel whole. Perhaps that, more than anything, is what got them here—a boy who loves too little and a girl who loves too much, two threads tangled on the loom of history.
(Of women, he’s heard it said: “She will be the end of me,” or “She will be my undoing.” None of that is true for Liska Radost. She is not the end of anything, but the beginning of everything. He has been dead a long time, and she is his resurrection.)
You are my soul, Liska Radost. I lived seven hundred years to find you.”
“It’s yours now. It has always been yours, every part of me.”
He raises her hand to his lips, kisses her knuckles in a final act of worship. His smile is that of a man complete. “I am already saved.”
Grief is a bit like a chronic ache, I think—it’s always there, but sometimes you notice it more and sometimes less, and sometimes it’s unbearable and sometimes you think it might be gone for good.”
It feels good to speak everything out loud—it makes her pain more tangible somehow, turns it into something she can grasp. And if she can grasp it, she can tame it. If she can tame it, then she can turn it into something good.
This is the strangest part of it all: every time Liska meets the stag, she tries to touch him. Every time, her hand passes through. Until one night, one rainy spring night, it does not.
