Chapter Text
Iustina keeps her head down. For all the world as if bowed by the weight of fear and piety. Only daring, at random moments, to glance up and about, through her unruly mane of russet curls. She has learned, through long practice, how to mirror the expressions of those about her. The terror-wide, darting eyes; the narrowing of suspicion, at every strange or secretive act or word of a neighbor; the desperation for refuge in faith.
She tightly clutches the small silver crucifix on the chain around her neck as she scurries, in a tight little flock with her parents and brothers, to church. Sits primly upright on the hard, narrow bench; raises her voice in the ancient hymns, with a realistically plaintive keen; shouts passionate “Amen!”s as Father Dumitru, with all the familiar, flakingly gilded icons glowering down behind him, shakes his fists impotently and bellows.
“By His power alone! shall we prevail! And through His blood! shall our souls find salvation! This foul mockery—this contagion creeping in our midst—we must destroy, root! and! branch! We must neither quail nor show mercy, for the Prince of the Power of the Air is also verily the Prince of Lies, and…”
Gabble, gabble, gabble…like the fattest and loudest of a coop full of fat, frightened hens. Iustina, as usual, finds sanctuary in the palace in her mind, constructed over the years of fanciful elaborations on pictures and descriptions in her father’s books, and tales told by rare travelers at the village inn. —Almost forgetting, for the duration of the service, that for once there is something just as fascinating afoot in real world.
Another body was found, just yesterday morning. Mihail, the miller’s apprentice. (Mihail, who at the last harvest dance pinched Iustina on her left nipple, and nearly cried when she stamped, as if by accident, on his foot.) That makes seven, all laid out in the church crypt, beneath their very feet, awaiting the spring thaw for burial in the softening earth. Their necks, or breasts, or both pierced and torn, as if by the fangs of an enormous rat; their bodies pallid, drained wholly of blood; their faces frozen in gurns of terror, or some other hysterical transport of emotion.
(Iustina has not been fortunate enough to see any of them, but her father has; a learned man of science, he has steadfastly refused to venture any theory.)
She shifts imperceptibly on the bench, between her two little brothers, whom she has the duty of kicking or hissing at when they fidget. Her heart thuds beneath the dour, pleated bodice of her dark blue woolen dress; she pictures it as a wild horse, kicking at the stall of her stays. Her veins sparkle and race like spring freshets. A real vampire!—just like in the grandams’ wild, enthralling hearthside stories. Like in her dreams…