The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason …

She wasn’t precisely rude, Ian decided, just abrupt.

A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections.

“You go down your list of fears.” Her eyes had a distant compassion, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Stamp them out, one after other, till there’s only one. Is good to have one fear, luchik, but just one. I think the fear you want to keep is the fear you never find die Jägerin, yes? So get rid of this one.”

We don’t hunt the helpless, luchik. We hunt the killers. Is like villagers going after a wolf gone mad. Only when the wolf is dead, villagers go home and we find the next mad wolf. Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just—” She mimed an explosion. “Is too much for them; they come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop, not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. Is a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die.” It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever heard her say. Ian sat back, looking her over. “I had no idea my wife was a philosopher.” “Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”

Battered souls like ours, Ian thought, tramping out of the wreckage of wars, always have guilt. Ghosts. Lakes and parachutes. They could both bear that weight, going on.

Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin. Let this wheel stop. Let us not forget this time. Let us remember.