A memory

"Kira, Kira," Ippolit sighed, kneeling on the grass and using the edge of his shirt to wipe away the worst of the blood, "You're too old to be still doing this."

"Don' care," she muttered. She scowled, and held still as he dabbed at her face.

Ippolit turned her face gently, inspecting for injury. There was a small split on her lower lip, and a bump near her left temple of fairly impressive dimensions. Besides that, the main damage seemed confined to her raw, bleeding knuckles.

Ippolit sighed. Just when the scabs had been healing, too.

"What was it this time?"

"Mitka," she said, naming a boy a year or so her senior. Her lips pursed sullenly.

People sometimes called Kira cherubic, when they saw her in pictures. In person, they rarely made the same mistake.

"What about Mitka?"

"He said I was ugly."

Ah. Things were beginning to fall into place. "So you bit him."

"No." She shook her head fiercely, a maelstrom of gold hair. Unlike in her brother, with his odd brown eyes, the bulk of Kira's heritage had utterly overpowered the dash of strange blood in her veins. When it came to appearance, at least. "I asked why I should care what a cunt louse like him thought." (Someday, Ippolit was going to find out where she was learning these words.) "Then he called me a stupid bitch. Then I bit him."

The rest was easy enough to construct. Blows, blood, tears. It was always this way. Tooth and nail were Kira's solution, including where nobody else could see a problem. At least this time there'd been some kind of provocation. It made it easier to explain. There were always angry parents. Sometimes they were able to forgive, or at least forget. Write it off as high spirits, and the exuberance of childhood. Not always.

One mother, a woman with hair like a nest of mice tied together at the tails who might have been young once, had stood half behind her door as Ippolit apologised and explained. Then she'd given him a blank, fish-eyed stare and said, with gelid, mechanical calm, that if they had any wisdom they would lead the little beast into the dark parts of the woods and leave her to the mercy of the other wolves.

"You've got to stop doing this," Ippolit had said with brotherly indulgence, as he always said. She hissed as he washed her scrapes, small hands clenching into absurd claws. "You can't go around hurting people."

The pout of her lips twisted into the shadow of a snarl. "What if they deserve it?"

His eye may have tightened, at the corner. Maybe not.

"Especially not then."