koschei the deathless // d4 fin

K O S C H E I

“I’ve come for the girl in the window,” Koschei said, standing in the doorway of the house across the street, the house he’d watched for as long as he could remember through the tall windows of his own. Two identical twins lived there, but he could tell them apart. One of them had been watching him, too.

It was supposed to be formal like this, the way that he walked up to their door dressed his best, collared shirt and pants freshly pressed. The way he knocked, asking permission, and drew himself up tall, straightening his spine to reach his full four feet and five inches. These ways were tradition, and there were reasons for them, although at that age he wasn't firmly rooted in them. Ten year-old Koschei had been asked to choose, which of these girls would be his wife? They were both beautiful, but he had chosen, he had been wed to her, even before his footsteps had lighted on the doorstep. Her name, her parents told him, was Marya.

The arrangement was supposed to happen when he was sixteen, but when he was nine years old Koschei's father decided they needed to start early. The fate of his family line rested upon his thin shoulders, but Koschei was dying.

Everyone was dying, but most people were dying much more slowly than Koschei, whose own brain cells were plotting against him, metastasizing into armies through his head and neck. Blinding pain kept him up at night as a child, his cries echoing through the high ceiling of his bedroom. The doctors said there was no cure in the Districts, and even with his parents’ money, a fortune in District Four, they wouldn’t be able to pay for the treatments that the Capitol offered. Living to thirty years old was a generous guess, they’d said, on the medicine that the best doctors had prescribed him, pills like robin eggs that had made his stomach lurch and his hair fall out in clumps in the shower.

He didn’t want to die. The taste of death had trespassed bitter and unfair in his mouth, and he would not call it by its true name. As he grew up with the cancer inside his body he wore his expensive wig like a crown, real human hair, bright blonde like a shout, I deny you, death! Though his limbs were long and spindly, he worked his legs in the evenings on the tall staircase until his rocky knees wobbled and did pull-ups on the railings until his veins strained at the skin on his arms, just to feel the way the blood pumped through them still, steady and reliable. His body was thin, but he would not be frail. Although he was pale, with sunken cheeks under sharp cheekbones and eyes that protruded imploringly from under his brows, he wouldn't dare to say he wasn't beautiful. Koschei was alive, beautifully alive, and to acknowledge his death would be treason.

He seized onto life with eager hands, devoured it whole until there was no room inside him to hold any more. Most of the time the pills wouldn't let him keep his food down, but he stuffed himself full with the richest seasoned flavors of seafood and expensive meats, fruits imported from other Districts. He wore tailored clothes in the deepest violet, the color of royalty, because he was a prince. Anything he wanted would be his, and his parents couldn't refuse the wishes of a dying child.

Marya and Koschei grew up together, and he clung to her. She was the only thing just beyond his grasp, not set in stone, not until they were eighteen. Courtship was an art, and it could be mastered. If he gave her more than anyone else could, she would never change her mind. He wooed her with gifts: jewelry imported from One; perfect, unblemished fruits from Eleven. All that she could ever care to eat, he would feed her with his own hand, his own spoon. He showed her the magic of his world and promised that it would all be hers, if she would stay with him forever. At night starting when he was about fourteen he would smuggle her into his room and they would sleep side by side, skin to skin, arms and legs knotted together. He kissed her there, in the secret dark hidden in the silken bedsheets of a king, a crushing kiss to swallow her whole. She was his first everything, and she would be his last everything. Koschei wouldn't have it any other way.

But it was a limited magic. Koschei was imprisoned, captive within his own body as the sparrow and two finches in the cages by his bedroom window. But there were things that made him feel free, fresh like new cells dividing, and these were the unknowns in life. These were the things that were reckless, that someone with their life on the line shouldn’t be doing. His parents had seen him as a precious piece of glass, paper-thin, and always tried to shelter him from any harm, as if smoking a cigarette would double his chances of dying. Or going out alone at night, or running until his lungs hurt, or sleeping on the roof just to feel the goosebumps rise on his arms while he slept. They didn’t know that these were what kept his blood pumping to the ends of his fingers, thundering in his ears. That he was more alive than anyone.

Marya freed him, too; her blue eyes shining like a promise, lips like silk along his collarbone, slender fingers grasping at his hips under the blankets, practiced, desiring. But there were others, there had to be; though he was reluctant to admit it, Marya held his heart in her hands, his lips at her feet, and he would do everything in the world to make her stay. He felt as though he had to. Other women were easy. Koschei sought the little control he could grasp, and he could always grasp it with money. A diamond a dozen, maybe--all he had to do was buy them something pretty, or say something filled with some empty meaning he contrived from bits and pieces of dusty old poetry from his parents’ shelves, and they would grovel like worshippers, offering up their bodies for the taking. He took them, pulling and twisting the life out of them until he was a single beating heart, consuming all the space in those dimly lit hotel rooms. He loved being the center. These women were strings of grapes he could suck dry for pleasure, casting aside the emptied vine. Though he tried, Marya was not so easily undone.

They belonged to each other, although neither could be owned, their fates entangled but unbound. Death nipped at his heels, but Koschei would never look down. He wouldn’t say he was running away. Koshei was running towards warmth, a quickened pulse, deep breaths, sex and food and sunshine and birds in cages and a woman he could chase but never pin down. Although Death had been with him since the beginning, an old friend to crack jokes at, he would never open his doors to it. For now, he was a king of the living.