#margaretebio

MARGARETE STARIKOV

EIGHTEEN ❈ HEALER ORDER OF THE LIVING & THE DEAD (CORPORALKI)

She was an accident, as children like her often are—beloved, but never truly belonging, a porcelain doll among an army of toy soldiers—and the world has never let her forget it. Born the youngest and littlest daughter in a family of killers, she was treated like glass, like silk—like anything but the steel from which she was built. It hardly mattered that she, too, could steal the breath from her sibling’s lungs, or that her heart beat so strongly that even her Corporalki mother hadn’t been able to slow it; she was their Molly, their baby, their lamb born in a lion’s den, and such a sentiment followed her wherever she went, a shadow nipping playfully at her heels. The Starikov children were a ruthless sort, bred for the sole purpose of being harbingers of death itself, but she was born different: dainty, soft-spoken, fragile enough to break. Margarete Starikov was an anomaly of the loveliest sort in the eyes of her parents, war-torn and weary as they were; it came as quite a surprise to all who knew of their cruelty to see their youngest not only tolerated, but treasured, but the truth of it all wasn’t that two of the Second Army’s fiercest soldiers had gone soft; it was that they’d buried one too many children and sent still more to die for a cause not entirely their own, and for their sacrifices—or perhaps as their penance, they deserved to hold in their hands something good and gentle without fear of seeing it harden and shatter.

But Margarete, for all that she was eager to make her parents happy, had seen the way they looked at her deadly brothers and sisters—like they were the future, the legacy they’d leave in their wake, and not a fleeting moment of softness, an exception—and decided that making them proud would be a far greater honor. So she did—or so she tried. She spent her days roaming the halls of the Little Palace, resilient and restless and desperate to prove she could be more than a doll in a red kefta; she ran and sparred and studied until she was more machine than girl, but in the years that followed, it made little difference. When the time came for the Corporalki to be divided up as spoils—some to Death and some to Life—she was ceremoniously gifted to the latter, to safety, to mediocrity. It was a death sentence, being saddled with the burden of undoing the same damage her siblings could inflict—a death sentence she didn’t have the grace to accept quietly, honorably. She raged against it, against the recognition she’d always wanted slipping through her fingers like sand, but they disregarded her as they always had, insisting that it was better this way, that a girl her size and stature would only get herself killed. They couldn’t fathom the thought that sweet little Molly, all chestnut curls and doe eyes and a laugh like tinkling bells, might be as bloodthirsty as the rest and twice as cruel. They couldn’t fathom the thought that the girl who picked at her dinner like a bird wanted to swallow chaos whole.

They should’ve known better than to try to make a dove out of a hawk, for the unbecoming of an innocent is perhaps even more terrifying than the rise of a sinner; a fall from grace that high would kill a lesser girl and harden a greater one, and harden her it did. The first man to die was a soldier, a First Army lieutenant with wounds pathetically easy to mend; the second was a noble, a young lady who’d caught a chill while returning home from an excursion in the North. After the third, she stopped counting. It was her own quiet rebellion, ruthless and indiscriminate, but far from bloodless, and though it took much longer than it should’ve for suspicions to arise, she slowly became something dangerous, something to be feared. She’d always been bigger than the body she was given, a roaring, wicked thing with a smile that hid sharp teeth, but it wasn’t until she stopped asking for their attention and began demanding it that the seedlings of doubt took root. Perhaps they’d been wrong about the Starikov girl; perhaps Molly had only ever been a figment of their imaginations, their hothouse flower blooming in the shadows of her superiors. The whispers were satisfying; the rumors, even more so. Murderess, they called her. A girl that collects dead hearts like trinkets. And they were right; she was the product of generations of men and women who killed as easily as they breathed, and she’d steal the breath from their very lungs to prove it.

But the path to greatness is ill-paved, and they’ve yet to give her killing a title—black instead of silver, poison instead of the cure. She’s become the type of Grisha otkazat’sya warn their children about, a girl with a gaping hole where her heart should be, but infamy isn’t true unless it’s total, and she won’t stop until the world knows her name—and perhaps not even then. But it seems she won’t have long to wait, for the war raging at their back door has drawn closer still, and it’s only a matter of time before her peers realize that they’d fare far better letting her fell the enemy than forcing her to prey on the kingdom’s weakened own. But until then, she waits, a flower wilting into something deadly, a soldier stationed in the wings. By the end of this war, Margarete Starikov will be a name whispered behind shaking palms, hearts quaking in anticipation, in reverence. Let her be as brutal as she is gentle, as hard as she is soft; let her show the world that her hands are every bit as adept at taking lives as they are saving them. Death may wait for no one, but it bows to her.

CONNECTIONS

ALTAN YUL-SUHE: He holds what she’s always wanted—recognition, respect, power—with an iron fist, and she loathes him for it; yet everything she’s done—everything she is, she owes, in a way, to him. The lesser of the two men with the authority to make her the weapon she’s always known herself to be, Altan Yul-Suhe is, perhaps more than any other mortal, the one man she seeks recognition from the most, second only to the god of a man he serves. She envies him as much as she seeks his adoration—hates him as much as she longs for his praise, but above all, she sees the older man as a challenge, something to be conquered. He tried to keep the girl from the war, but the girl will bring the war to him.

KONSTANTIN MIRONOV: She’s playing with fire, and she knows it. To rob a man of his wife and son is to test fate, but to look him in the eye and dare him not to call her what she truly is—a murderer, a traitor, a harbinger even Death hadn’t thought to send—is blasphemy of the highest degree. But her family never groveled at the feet of otkazat’sya, and she’s nothing if not devoted to tradition. Let him mourn his losses while she mourns the legend she could’ve been, the legend she still could be; let him learn that there’s a price that comes with being remembered, and the only recompense is blood.

RITA JAKOV:  There’s something within the older girl that she can’t quite place—pulsing, wishing, longing, as strange and yet familiar as a bruise, and she’d like to manipulate it, to spread the damage like a cancer no healer can erase. The tailor has devoted herself to making everything—and everyone—beautiful, as if a prettier smile and more vibrantly-colored eyes might hide the decay lingering just beneath it all, and for that, Margarete considers her a fool of the worst sort. But even fools have their uses, and there is beauty to be found in darkness, in death. Red is such a lovely color; wouldn’t you like to be a kingkiller?