Page 15 of The Maiden and Her Monster

The hut was much smaller than her house in Eskravé.

The wooden walls were braided with twine, greenery peeking through the cracks like the stubborn weeds Malka used to pull from Imma’s medicinal garden.

Aside from the open hearth, there was a more proper clay oven for baking, the wide tree-stump table, chairs woven from roots, and a couple wheat sacks pressed together.

But what stole Malka’s breath was the trunk of a giant oak tree, which split the room like the great stone pillars of Eskravé’s synagogue.

Like the rest of the hut, there was something magical about the tree—the wood groaned when Nimrah walked by, the bark shimmering with sap.

Malka slid into a wobbly chair at the table, where a cauldron sat, steam wafting from the stew. It was mouth-wateringly rich, the salty smell of some kind of meat filling her nose.

Amnon ladled some into a bowl for her.

Malka muttered the prayer for sustenance under her breath, then filled her mouth despite the heat.

When she finished, she drew her hand to her belly, relishing in the discomfort that came with fullness. It was a sensation she had long forgotten.

Amnon refilled her empty mug with tea from the kettle.

“Did you kill the Rayga?” Malka asked Nimrah.

The question felt like a juncture of fate.

The monster was not what she expected. What use was her snare in capturing the creature, when it crawled out of a yawning tree and wielded the branches as weapons?

How would she prove to Father Bro ? ek she had found the Rayga when she was unsure how to trudge back with the spoils of her hunt?

Though, if Nimrah hadn’t killed it, she would have no spoils of which to speak. She had already come face to face with the Rayga and almost died. Would have died if Nimrah had not saved them. Their next encounter would surely kill her.

“The Rayga?” Nimrah raised her brow. “Oh, that’s right. Your friend here told me that’s what you call the creature who attacked you. No, I did not kill it. Cursed creatures are hard to catch when they are made—or remade—by Kefesh.”

Malka paled. “The Rayga is a creature of Kefesh?”

Nimrah shrugged, as if the question bored her. “In a sense.”

“Are you sure?” Amnon asked, but Malka was no longer present.

She closed her eyes. She thought of every girl the woods had taken. Their bodies disemboweled by a monster created with Kefesh. Chaia, lost to her forever due to that blasphemous magic.

Baba had been right to instill in her a fear of Yahadi mysticism. Any good it could do was rendered obsolete with its capacity for violence.

If Father Bro ? ek discovered the Paja members were killed by a monster of Yahadi magic, it would surely strengthen his ire instead of soothing it.

Though, was it truly much different if he already deemed Imma a Yahadi witch who killed Rzepka for her blood?

At least with the Rayga caught, the priest’s fury would fall upon a guilty target.

When Malka opened her eyes again, she found Nimrah regarding her, her fingers curled against her mouth while her other hand—this one flesh—drew lazy circles on the table.

Such a human act, yet Nimrah did not seem human.

Not with the stone eating half her body, green veins discoloring the skin she did have.

Her height, unnatural for a woman and many men.

Despite her unusual appearance, there was a mystical air about her, too.

The way the earth bent with her as she moved, how her voice shimmered like rustling trees.

When Nimrah noticed her stare, she stilled her fingers and curled her hand into a fist.

“You’re different than us,” Malka remarked.

Nimrah barked a laugh, and a gust of wind howled through the room, disrupting the steam in the fresh cup of tea Amnon had poured for her. “Because I actually have survival instincts?”

“Because the earth reacts to you,” Malka said, running her hand through the steam to imitate what Nimrah had done.

“I am different than you both, but not because of that. Any Yahad can provoke a reaction from the earth. That is the purpose of Kefesh, is it not?”

“Is that how you subdued the Rayga?” Malka’s throat began to tighten. “You used Kefesh, too?”

“In the way I was made to use it.” Nimrah studied them. “You don’t know who I am?”

Malka stared again at the letters of the ancient Yahadi holy language on Nimrah’s forehead. Truth. “You bear the mark of our holy language.”

Nimrah traced the finger over the etching on her stone forehead. “Yes.”

In the way I was made to use it.

“Made…” Amnon trailed off.

Malka paused. “You’re a golem?”

“I was made from the clay and stone of this forest a decade ago, twisted into life by the prayer of the Maharal of Valón.”

Heat pricked up her neck. “The Maharal ’s golem?”

Impossible. In the stories told, the Maharal’s golem was not at all shaped like what— who —sat before her now. The tales had deemed the golem a voiceless giant of assembled stone. Not… a woman, whose body fought back and forth between stone and life, whose mouth had bite.

The golem’s demeanor shifted as she straightened and clenched her jaw. “So, you do know me.”

“Are you lying?” Malka asked, clutching her knees. “You do not look like the golem of the stories.”

Nimrah bent forward, her shadow crawling across the table until it was consumed entirely. Her stare sent a strike of fear up Malka’s spine. “And how exactly does this golem of your stories look?”

She saw it now, the reason her feminine characteristics were omitted from the stories. It must’ve scared men so profoundly to fear a woman this much.

But she was not like any woman Malka had known.

“We know the Maharal created you to protect the Yahad and in response, you killed an innocent Yahadi boy.”

She had imagined it before—the stone giant, soulless and unflinching, murdering a child. It was worse imagining it with the golem before her in its place, more monstrous knowing this golem thought and felt, and killed that boy anyway. More vicious.

“Good to know how far stories travel,” Nimrah grumbled.

The groaning fire warmed the room, yet still Malka shivered. “You’re a lesson on Kefesh’s destructiveness. Even the legendary Maharal couldn’t control the Kefesh he possessed. It’s dangerous.”

Nimrah’s face hardened. “Your stories don’t get everything right. It is easy to change history when you wish to forget the truth.”

“You’re right,” Malka agreed. “The stories didn’t get everything right. They say the Maharal laid you to rest in the synagogue attic after what you had done, so you could not harm anyone else. Yet, you are here.”

Nimrah’s knuckles whitened as she clenched the table, wood crying under her grasp.

Malka imagined those same fists fighting back the Rayga—a creature she had thought impervious when it had squeezed her breathless. Fear crawled up her neck. Those fists could have effortlessly crushed bone.

“The people of Valón wanted me to die after what I had done,” Nimrah explained.

“I did not blame them. That’s the story they shared, after all.

The story you heard. But the Maharal was like a father to me, and I suppose I had become like a daughter to him.

He brought me here, instead, to the middle of the forest marked by this Great Oak.

He prayed and made it so I could only go as far as the roots of this tree spread. ”

Nimrah pointed to the Great Oak. At her attention, the tree groaned, shaking the wooden beams above them. A cry whistled through the air and the fire flickered. The tree had darkened—its bark a deep brownish-gray, the way wood turns when dampened.

“Lucky for you and your near drowning, that’s a decent portion of the forest, as the roots seem to grow at an unnatural pace. So, I’ve been trapped here ever since. Good as dead if you ask me.”

Nimrah hiked up her sleeve and rubbed absently at her arm. Glimpsing her skin, Malka noticed a Yahadi word carved into the stone, but she couldn’t make it out.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Malka said, eyes trailing Nimrah’s fingers, imagining them flexing around her own neck.

Nimrah snorted. “Then you better leave the forest before another creature like that finds you.”

“It’s imperative—” Malka began, then paled when she registered what Nimrah had said. “What do you mean another creature like that?”

The golem raised her brow. “You thought there only one?”

It had been her village’s assumption since the killings began. A monster who, overnight, began to hunt their girls. They had been killed the same inhumane way, left with wounds no normal creature could create.

Outside, it had begun to hail, sharp raps of ice hitting the wooden hut in waves. A small puddle began to pool near the slit in the door where the intruding ice had melted.

Malka listened to the storm as her head spun.

It had been one thing, to think that bringing back one creature would stop the killings and prove to Father Bro ? ek a beast was to blame for Rzepka’s death.

It was quite another if there were multiple beasts.

Even if they managed to capture one, the killings wouldn’t stop.

Father Bro ? ek would remain unconvinced.

Or even worse, he would see it as an attempt at subterfuge.

“You two make a strange choice for a hunting party,” Nimrah observed. “Stranger yet with the two dead Ozmins I found you with.”

“I made a bargain with an Ozmini priest. To bring him what we thought was a singular creature—the Rayga.”

“You thought it smart to bargain with an Ozmini priest?”

“I had no choice,” Malka said vehemently.

“The Church accused my mother of killing an Ozmini woman. They claim she’s a witch who planned to use the Ozmin’s blood to conjure curses.

But it was the creature who killed the woman.

Same as it—or they —have killed many girls from my village. We were going to prove it.”