Chapter Text
For a place that cared so much about making them ladies, it smelled awfully of sweat.
Blood and sweat in the sparring arena. Rubber and sweat in the gymnasium. Carbolic soap and sweat in the infirmary. Sweat and a strange musky smell outside the room where the grown-up girls, those who had reached the venerable age of fifteen, learned how to make marks happy and stupid in ways that younger students like Viktoria couldn’t know about yet.
In here, it was sweat and chalk- that strange sticky chalk called rosin in English that helped their feet keep purchase on the polished floor. She wondered often if the dust motes sparkling in the sunbeams from the wide windows opposite the barre might be made of rosin. Perhaps, she thought, they would fly up her nose and into her brain, and help her lessons stick better.
Not that remembering was particularly hard, in this class. Monsieur D’Arcy was patient and soft-spoken and only struck them sometimes. And anyway, his long, thin switch hurt a lot less than the riding crop Mademoiselle Volkova used if you were slow reassembling your gun.
(Viktoria had wondered aloud, after one French class, why all the lady teachers were Mademoiselle. “Why, because,” Yulia had said importantly, “there is only one Madame.”)
All of that sweating made one very thirsty, of course. As quietly as she could, Viktoria lifted one of the battered metal canteens hanging from the end of the barre and raised it to her lips. Water trickled down her throat, soothing the dull ache, as she watched Irina drop down from her toes after the final crashing chord sounded from the victrola. Not the very tops of her toes, like the pictures in the months-old issues of Le Figaro and The Sketch they all pored over- that was bad for your feet, Monsieur D’Arcy said, and quite spoiled your knees.
“And we need your knees, girls,” he’d said with an impish twinkle in his eye. “We need every part of you to be in perfect order. Just like a clock- isn’t that right, Thomas?”
Across the room, a tall young man with the brightest blue eyes Viktoria had ever seen swept back his dark curls from his face and scrubbed a towel across his brow. The real Widows, the ones who had graduated and went to all sorts of exciting places, called him Masik sometimes, or bratik. Viktoria couldn’t imagine being bold enough to call the only gentleman Widow “little brother,” much less what sounded like a name for a pet cat. But he never seemed to mind- only returned nickname for nickname, with that easy humor they all knew well.
“Exactly right, Monsieur,” he said now, passing the towel to Oksana who accepted it gratefully. He smiled absently at her, and she glanced away, but didn’t look unhappy.
(Viktoria hadn’t understood this until Yulia, who pretended to know everything, said “He initiated her, you baby. She was hoping it would be him for months.” But Viktoria didn’t know what that meant, and from the way she cuffed Viktoria’s arm when asked, Yulia didn’t either.)
“See? There you have it. It’s only demi-pointe for you, my girls. Now, if you could take your places at the barre-”
The memory vanished from her mind as Monsieur began to speak, in the present. One lesson was learned quickly at the Red Room: never let your attention wander.
“Now,” he said, pacing the floor as he often did, “four of you have been excelling in your exercises these past few weeks, and I have noticed. So! I have a challenge for you, one worthy of your skills.”
He paused in front of a quiet dark-skinned girl, the only one in the room. Viktoria vaguely remembered her being praised by him several times in the past. “Sidonie, follow me.”
With Sidonie trailing mutely behind, he selected two more girls in the same fashion: pallid, white-blonde Alina, who had been one of the worst for crying in the dormitory at night until the big girls started drugging her dinners, and Giulia, tall with large features, large hands, large everything, who came from somewhere in Italy and never stopped complaining about the snow.
And then, with a start, she realized he was stopping in front of her.
“Viktoria, my dear,” he said kindly. “You are the last of our little quartet.”
Leading the four girls to stand in front of the windows, he turned to the rest of the class. “Five years ago, a brilliant new piece of choreography was added to Swan Lake. It is a perfect lesson in synchronicity- that is, how to move in concert and work together. When you have graduated, there may sometimes be two or four or ten of you working on an assignment together, and you must move with precision!” On the last word, he struck the top of the ancient upright piano with his switch, making a loud crack echo through the room.
Nobody flinched. They were nine years old, after all, not babies of five on their first day in training.
“Girls,” he said to four students now eyeing each other with curiosity, “in a month you will perform the Dance of the Little Swans for the class. This performance will be perfect. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Monsieur,” Viktoria said in automatic unison with the others. Of course, she knew, it would be. It was like the real Widows always told them, after letting them up off the rubber mats to nurse sprains and bruises and sometimes broken bones.
In the field, there was perfect, and there was dead.
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“My mama was a ballerina, you know. For a little while.”
Viktoria dropped Alina’s hand on her left and Sidonie’s on her right. She sighed and rolled her shoulders.
Giulia talked a great deal.
“You’ve said. You’ve said ten times. With the grand opera in Milano, but your papa deserted her when you were born, and she gave you up so you could have a better life.” She resisted the urge to stamp her foot. “Why do you keep saying it?”
Giulia looked hurt. “I forgot I said it already,” she replied, somewhat quieter than before.
“She’s only said it twice,” Alina pointed out. And that had been quite a surprise, the past two weeks- what they’d all taken for shyness, Viktoria was rapidly learning, had in fact been observation. Alina’s colorless gray eyes seemed to miss nothing, and her hearing was as keen as a bat’s. The skinny little girl seemed to know ten times as much as she said.
It was Sidonie- now taking advantage of the pause to adjust her gauzy rehearsal skirt -who turned out to be shy. For the entire first week, Viktoria had wondered how on earth she seemed to already know the dance before Monsieur taught them the steps. It had taken ever so much pestering from Giulia (while Viktoria and Alina feigned annoyance with her) to get an admission that she’d seen the ballet before, many times. How or why, she still wouldn’t say.
“If your mama was a ballerina, why can’t you get your pas de chats right?” Viktoria demanded. She strode over to the towel rack to wipe her clammy hands- towels, not skirts, were for sweat, Monsieur had told them over and over, and she was in no mood for a switching if Giulia decided to tattle as revenge. “I don’t even know why Monsieur picked you.”
“Don’t be unkind,” came a quiet interjection in Sidonie’s blurred-sounding French accent. “She’s trying her best.”
Viktoria shook her head. “You’re too nice sometimes. We’ll all be punished if she ruins the dance.”
“Someone has to be nice to us.”
Silence fell. From a nearby room, down the hall, the thuds and grunts of sparring drifted in. From another, a recitation in Latin. From a third, an adult speaking in hushed, quick tones, punctuated by the sound of something striking flesh. The Red Room, Viktoria thought, was almost never completely quiet.
It was silly. Monsieur D’Arcy was nice. Miss Angelus, who taught English, was nice. Madame was even nice, except to bad or stupid girls who didn’t do as they were told. Plenty of people were nice to them.
Someone sniffled behind her. Someone was being a tiresome cry-baby. If the grown-up girls were there, they’d pinch her black and blue until she stopped.
“Let’s try again,” Sidonie said calmly. Viktoria turned, ignoring Giulia’s red eyes, and took her place in the middle of their line. She clasped hands with the others- right arm over left arm, which was important -took a deep breath as Alina counted down, and began to move.
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A woman came to teach them, from somewhere else.
This happened from time to time, though all of the regular teachers lived in the complex. Someone- usually a woman, like the teachers, like the infirmary doctors and the surgeons who graduated the senior girls, but sometimes a man -would arrive by motorcar or in Madame’s personal carriage, be put up in the tastefully decorated guest suite, and shift the ordered routine of their days for a while. Sometimes only a few days. Sometimes months. Occasionally, a full year. Many of them seemed ill-at-ease, reluctant to speak to anyone and apparently eager to leave.
Playing pranks on them without getting caught always made a wonderful game. With most of the men, the ones who turned faintly green whenever they watched the Widows fight, it was as easy as dropping a heavy book on a hard surface.
This woman was not like that. At all.
On the night that she arrived, accompanied by an entourage of tall, scarred men (only men; the younger students whispered endlessly about how strange that was), Madame stood up from her chair at dinner and clapped twice. Silence fell immediately.
“Young ladies,” she said, perfectly resonant without shouting, “we have visitors. A detachment from our sister society, Department X, bringing you a temporary instructress. She will be working with your combat teachers for the next six months. You will, of course, afford her the respect and obedience you do your other superiors. Is this understood?”
“Yes, Madame,” the room chorused as one.
“Thank you.” She smiled tightly. “You may resume your meal.”
As chatter rose to fill the dining hall once more, Viktoria glanced up at the staff table where the woman sat surrounded by men. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, wasn’t shifting in her chair the way that even the Widows did, wasn’t looking at anything but the roast chicken on her plate. She was pretty, with dark hair scraped tightly back from her face and pinned up in a simpler style than those favored by most of the ladies Viktoria knew. Her skin was pale, and she would be tall, Viktoria could tell, when she stood up. When she looked up, chewing, the light caught two thin white scars on her face: one above her eyebrow and one cutting into her upper lip. Her left arm was a strange, semi-mechanical thing of dark bone, with blue lights darting along wires like the tendons the girls had seen during science class dissections.
And then, before Viktoria could look away, their eyes met.
Staring was impertinent, and the threat of extra toilet-cleaning duty should have made her look away immediately. But that pale green gaze held her transfixed, and made something in her stomach turn unpleasantly.
There was absolutely nothing behind it. The woman might as well have been looking through her.
In the weeks to come, that moment would make more sense. The woman was just- empty. Other instructors had good or bad tempers; some, like Monsieur D’Arcy, even cracked jokes at times. Their faces showed annoyance, happiness, confusion, pride, and all the usual emotions everybody had. They had habits. They had favorite breakfast foods and pieces of music they didn’t care for.
The woman came into the gymnasium or the shooting range. The woman taught them. The woman went back to her quarters. And that was the beginning and end of her presence.
She wasn’t a bad teacher, exactly, Viktoria thought after those cool, long-fingered hands had corrected her form and their ghost-like guest had moved on to the next student. She explained things more clearly than Mademoiselle Petrova, the regular combat teacher, sometimes- and ended a bet struck in the nighttime stillness of the dormitory on whether or not she could speak, netting Viktoria Sidonie’s share of dessert for a week. She fought much better than even most of the real Widows, and that had impressed Viktoria to no end.
It was just that terrible blankness, like looking into a room so dark you couldn’t see the opposite wall.
After three weeks of her presence, Viktoria realized they’d never even been told her name.
It was Yulia, insufferable Yulia, who pointed this out. They were meant to be practicing their English conversation, sitting in the elegant formal parlor with its wall-to-wall floral carpets and stylish white-painted Rococo-revival chairs upholstered in lavender silk. This room always made Viktoria feel faintly grubby, even if she had on her best white dress and her hair half-up in a silk ribbon rather than fighting gear and a practical braid. Like the sweat smell lingered on her no matter how many times she washed, and hands that had broken bone could not be trusted with bone china. It was pretty, and soft, and she did not belong here.
But belonging in parlors was just as important as belonging on rooftops or dark alleyways. So she gritted her teeth and smiled and tried to act like a princess.
“The new instructress,” Yulia said. She was annoyingly good at masking her accent, better than most of their class. “We don’t even know her name.”
“She would have told us if we were supposed to,” Viktoria replied primly.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“It would be impertinent to ask.”
“I bet you’re just chicken,” said Yulia smugly.
Viktoria’s mind struggled to catch up. “Chicken? Why am I a chicken?”
“It’s an expression,” Yulia replied. “You ought to talk to Mademoiselle Angelus more. You shouldn’t only learn the words in books. It means you’re a coward.”
“I’m not!”
“Ask her then,” Yulia shot back. “I dare you.”
The trap had been completely undetectable until she’d walked into it, but backing down now would cementer her forever in Yulia’s mind as, in this strange new English phrase, chicken. Viktoria thought she might sooner die. And so, here she was, walking up to the woman and her entourage after class like a girl approaching the gallows. When she’d rather turn and run back to the dormitory.
The woman was occupied putting away a staff she’d been using to demonstrate a new technique, but straightened up immediately when Viktoria tentatively said, “Ah…Mademoiselle?”
“Yes?” As usual, no discernable emotion marked her tone.
“Forgive me, it’s just that- well, it’s terribly rude of me, but I seem to have forgotten your name. Could you please be kind enough to remind me?”
The woman blinked at her, once. “I don’t have one.”
“Um.” Viktoria struggled for a response. “Forgive me,” she ventured, wincing inwardly at the echo, “but what do I call you?”
“You just called me Mademoiselle,” came the even reply. “That will do.”
“What if I have to talk about you to another teacher?” Where this boldness was coming from in her, she had no idea. I t was as if her mouth had detached itself from her brain and began operating of its own accord.
“You won’t,” the woman said, shouldering a large rucksack of equipment. “I’m leaving in a week.”
With that, she turned and walked away, leaving Viktoria to shiver in her wake.
Rumors spread through the halls that the woman was some sort of punishment- that any disobedience too great for a lashing or extra chores to expunge, would result in an abduction by Department X, to become a blank and empty shell like her. The adults for their part, said nothing the few times any student got up the temerity to ask- just smiled inscrutably and continued with their lessons.
It was worse than a “yes.”
----------------------------------
The day of the performance came.
It was perfect.
From the first jaunty notes of the tune- which still sounded faintly menacing to Viktoria, even though she knew the whole dance was about baby birds really -the four girls moved in exact unison. Despite the sweat dripping down her back and the constant reminders she knew they must be running over in their minds just as she was (not too fast…shoulders back…don’t tug Alina’s arm…pull up through your leg to stay balanced), the whole unit managed to stay together until the last few beats. The rush of cool air against her hands, drying their dampness, as she moved quickly to her final mark chalked on the floor, felt alien somehow. Like an absence of something critical, something vaguely comforting.
An arabesque and a quick but controlled drop to one knee, and she was finished. They had made it through.
The class clapped politely, having been told time and again that excessive emotion did not become young ladies nor well-trained assassins. Monsieur D’Arcy, with his usual exuberance, was the exception, letting out a whoop of delight and pressing a kiss to each of Giulia’s cheeks before clapping the other three girls on the shoulders firmly.
Viktoria wasn’t looking at him, though. She was looking at the inner window, the one that looked out into the hall so Madame could observe their lessons if she felt the need.
The woman was standing there, watching, still as a statue.
Her eyes met Viktoria’s in an echo of that first evening, and once again, it was like staring into an endless hole made of green ice.
She walked away and was gone by the end of the day, slipping out of their lives like a nightmare fading in the sunlight.