Enchantment (29 page)

“Nobody was shouting at me, I figure, so I didn’t care,” said Ivan. “Still don’t.”

“Well, you will,” said Sophia.

“No he won’t,” said Katerina. “He never cared about anything. Long ago he wished he had never fought the bear and kissed me awake.”

Well, that was true enough. Though there had also been moments where he was glad of it, too. No need to mention that right now, however.

“That business with the bear,” said Sophia. “We always wondered how that happened, and we weren’t about to ask.”

“What happened?”

“How Bear lost his eye, of course. Never would have imagined it was our little Vanya.”

“That bear is still around?”

“He’s not laying for you, if that’s what you’re wondering. He stays well to the north and east of here these last few centuries. It’s Moscow where he has his den, where the winter still is his. But he mostly lies low. Came out to give a hard blow to Napoleon, and again to stop Hitler. Armies wake him up, but otherwise, he doesn’t much care about the doings of human beings.”

“So her bear is still alive,” said Ivan. “Does that mean she is, too?”

“Thank you for not saying her name in this house,” said Sophia. “And I have no idea where the old bat might be. Not a trace of her in many a year. But my husband has some idea that she might have followed you here. That’s why he’s out looking over the land.”

“Did he do that when I disappeared?” asked Ivan.

“He knew where you were going—into the enchanted place where he couldn’t see.”

Ivan snorted. “Are all the immortals around here half-blind?”

Sophia looked at him sharply. Katerina seemed not to breathe.

“Oh, I see, now that I know who he really is, I can’t tease.”

Sophia laughed. “Marek sees as well as ever. But into a strange place like that, no one sees.”

“Except me.”

“You
walked
in there.”

“So what stops
him
?”

“He can’t, that’s all. He walks straight toward it, then finds he’s walked past it, and his path was straight, but still it bent.”

Ivan shook his head. “And yet I walked in as easy as could be.”

“You walked in because wherever you ran, it was always nearby,” said Sophia. “It was calling to you.”

“It,”
echoed Ivan. “What is the
it
that was calling me?”

“The place.”

“Someone made the place. Or made it what it is. Didn’t they?”

Katerina spoke up. “Maybe no one made the place, Ivan. It follows no plan. The enemy cursed me to die; my aunts cast spells to leave me somewhere short of death, and set rules by which I could be saved again, but where the place was, they couldn’t choose and didn’t know.”

“And the Widow, she didn’t choose, either?”

“Maybe she did,” said Sophia. “But she didn’t make the place. She only used it.”

“So who made the chasm? Who built the bridges?”

“The chasm is how the Widow’s curse expressed itself,” said Sophia. “Bear ended up trapped in it, because it was by his power that her original curse of killing was made. By her plan, Bear was supposed to appear and tear Katerina cruelly apart. But instead he went round and round under the leaves. Katerina and Marek and I talked this out this morning, before you were awake.”

“I see I wasn’t important enough to include,” said Ivan, unable to keep a nasty edge out of his voice.

“What did
you
know about it?” asked Katerina. Perhaps she meant no insult by it, but all he heard was scorn.

“We’re including you
now
,” said Sophia, soothingly.

“Look, I’ve never had any power,” said Ivan, “so I don’t even want to know. Cousin Marek can fix things now, have it out with the old witch. Then Katerina can have the marriage annulled and go back and marry somebody appropriate. And I can go home and marry Ruthie.”

It was Katerina’s turn to recoil as if slapped. “You repudiate me?”

“We aren’t really married,” said Ivan. “You never wanted me, and I’m engaged to someone else, so it’ll all work out nicely for everyone.”

Katerina looked to Sophia, but the older woman simply looked away. She was not going to be part of this.

So Katerina looked at Ivan. For a long time she looked, till he squirmed like a first-grader caught in a lie. “There is no divorce in Christ,” she finally said.

“There’s no marriage until I’ve bedded you,” he answered, using a harsh proto-Slavonic term for it.

“Aren’t we the polite one,” said Sophia.

“Did I use too crude a word?” asked Ivan. “It’s the one used by the men out in the practice field.”

“It’s not the word,” said Sophia, “it’s the heartlessness of what you said.”

“Heartless?” said Ivan. “My supposed wife has never felt anything but contempt for me. How tender am I supposed to feel in return? My supposed father-in-law plotted to kill me. Exactly how seriously should I take their religion?”

“He didn’t plot,” said Katerina.

“You said yourself that Dimitri would never have attempted my murder if he didn’t have your father’s consent.”

“If he didn’t
think
he had my father’s—”

“Don’t hurt each other any more, children,” said Sophia.

“How could I hurt her?” said Ivan. “She’d have to love me before I could do that. All I am to her or anybody in Taina is either a tool or an obstacle. I was the tool that woke her from her enchantment and got her home safely. Of course, I can’t claim credit for that, either, since you tell me I was forced into it.”

“Led up to it.” Then Sophia switched to modern Ukrainian. “Don’t you love her? This beauty, this bright and powerful woman?”

“She understands Ukrainian well enough,” said Ivan, “so this won’t let us have a private conversation in front of her.”

True enough, Katerina was blushing at Sophia’s praise—or perhaps at the bluntness of her question.

“What does it matter what language I speak, then?” said Sophia. “Everybody understands everything, and nobody understands anything.”

“I think it’s all very clear,” said Ivan.

“So do I,” said Katerina. She looked Ivan in the eye. “I release you now. We’ll get the annulment. You were already betrothed to another woman, so you could not enter into the vow.”

“He wasn’t engaged to anyone,” said Sophia. “He married you a thousand years before he ever met Ruthie.”

“It’s his own life that he’ll be judged by, and, in his life, before he said he’d marry me, he said he’d marry her.” Katerina looked at Ivan scornfully. “Not much of a king you’d make after all, to be so easily forsworn.”

“It was agree to marry you or get killed by a bear,” said Ivan.

“I’d rather die than break an oath.”

“That always seems to be my choice,” said Ivan, “but where would you be if I had chosen
your
way?”

“Still enchanted,” she said, “waiting for a man of honor.”

“Stop it!” shouted Sophia. “Enough, you two! These are terrible things that you’ll be a long time wishing you could unsay.”

She was right. Ivan already wished it. When he offered to annul the marriage, he realized now, he had been half-hoping that she’d refuse, that she’d insist that she wanted to be his wife. That she loved him, or might love him, or wanted to love him. Instead, he had provoked this outburst, in which she had exposed the full measure of her contempt for him. Because of his engagement to Ruthie, Katerina didn’t even regard herself as sworn to him now. So his last hope with her was gone—if there had ever been a hope.

“What a shame you didn’t let Dimitri kill me,” said Ivan. “Having me alive is inconvenient to everyone. Me not least.” He got up and left the table. No one said anything to call him back.

Katerina was so angry she could hardly eat, though the food was good and she didn’t wish to offend Sophia.

Sophia, for her part, ate with gusto, while smiling in amusement at Katerina’s lack of appetite. “He really makes you angry, doesn’t he.”

“I hate a man whose oath is worthless.”

“Men and women these days break off engagements whenever they want. No one thinks of it as oath breaking.”

“And you approve of this?”

“Approve or not, that’s the world in which Ivan and his Ruthie agreed to marry. Either one of them is free to break the engagement, without cause. So you can give up this nonsense about despising him for breaking his engagement with her.”

“So was his engagement to me just as worthless?”

“He married you, didn’t he?”

“And annulled it the first chance he had.”

“He offered to annul it,
if
that’s what you wanted.”

“When did he give
me
any choice? When a man says he wants to annul—”

“You have to understand, Katerina, customs have changed. A woman in this world is as free to make choices as a man is. So maybe when he offered to annul the marriage, he thought he was giving you what
you
wanted.”

“Why would I want to be shamed in such a way?”

Sophia sighed. “Katerina, are you
trying
to be slow of understanding?”

Katerina flushed with anger, but she contained it. Sophia was the wife of a god.

“Vanya—your Ivan—is a good man,” said Sophia. “And he was a good boy, when he first came here. I don’t know why he was drawn to you, when even my husband couldn’t enter your prison in the woods. Was it someone’s plan? I don’t think so. I think that the spell that bound you could only be opened by one who was . . . extraordinary in some way.”

Since Katerina had already thought of this, she was a little resentful at the reminder. “You think I haven’t tried to think of something praiseworthy about him?”

“Oh, and you’re going to tell me now that you haven’t ever seen anything to honor in this man?”

Katerina shook her head. “I won’t tell you that. He seemed to be trying, back in Taina, to be a decent man. My father said that Ivan seemed to have a king’s heart. But the moment he crossed the bridge into this place, he began acting foully. Making me wear his shirt!”

“He was correct and you were wrong.”

Katerina was stunned. “You! Does the wife of Mikola—”

“No names, no names,” said Sophia. “Call him Marek, now, please, as all do in this place.”

“Does the wife of such a man as Marek think that it’s right for a woman to wear a man’s clothing?”

“No one would have mistaken you for a man. Men generally wear pants with their shirts.”

“It’s not about being mistaken, it’s about—”

“About being decent,” said Sophia. “And I tell you that decency changes from year to year, from land to land, and you have to learn the customs of the place you’re in. Vanya did things for your sake that felt shameful to him—and you, for his sake, did things that were shameful to you. I think that’s a good beginning to your marriage.”

“Shame?”

“Bending.”

“It’s hardly a beginning to our marriage, is it, when he’s about to annul it?”

“Do you want him to? Is there a man back in Taina that you love?”

Katerina wasn’t sure what she meant. “Whom would I have loved? It was not for me to choose.” She thought of Dimitri. She certainly didn’t love him, nor he her.

“There you have it,” said Sophia. “In Vanya’s world, young people marry for their own reasons—usually for love, or desire that they think is love. The parents barely get a chance to give advice. Vanya’s mother thought his engagement to Ruth was deeply wrong, but he hardly listened to her.”

“So everyone marries like peasants? A wink and a nod and a hop over the broom?”

“Vanya keeps looking for a sign that you love him.”

Katerina was completely flustered by this. “How would I love him? I barely know him.”

“Nonsense,” said Sophia. “You’ve had ample opportunity to see the kind of man he is. But all you ever show him is your disapproval.”

“Because I disapprove of what he does!”

“Yes, you’re honest enough, child. But he has, quite logically, come to the conclusion that you find him loathsome and, being a decent man, he has offered you your freedom from your marriage vow, so you don’t have to be married to someone you find so distasteful.”

“What does any of that matter? I married him to save my kingdom. My kingdom still needs saving.”

“He thinks my husband can save it. So with that reason gone . . .”

It was a strange way of looking at the situation. Katerina tried to understand. “So he would give up the right to be my father’s heir, because he thinks it would make me . . .”

“Happy? Yes.”

Katerina tried to digest this thought. In all her life, she had never been aware of a man doing something solely because it would make a woman happy. Well, not true; she knew several henpecked peasants who watched every word they said, so as to avoid getting a tongue-lashing or worse from a shrewish wife. But such men were despised, and . . . and Ivan was nothing like them. “Why does he care whether I’m happy?”

“That’s a very good question,” said Sophia. “And it’s one you need to answer, because he’s been trying to make you happy for quite a while. From what you told me this morning, he walked naked through the woods, getting whipped by branches, because he wanted to make you happy.”

Her memory of this event now looked different to her. She thought of the shrewish peasant wives and realized that this might well be the reason Ivan had complied with her. Having betrothed himself to her, he found himself subject to a woman who spoke scornfully and he meekly bowed to her will.

She was not such a woman. He was not such a man. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “I thought he had simply come to see what was right and wrong, and chose the right.”

“Maybe that was it,” said Sophia, but amusement still played around the corners of her lips. Katerina would have probed more, for the conversation was teaching her to see events in a new way, and she felt herself to be on the verge of acquiring a bit of wisdom, but at that moment the door opened and Mikola Mozhaiski—no,
Marek
—strode into the room, the floor booming like a drum under his bold steps.

“I’m hungry,” he announced as he came into the kitchen. “What, is Vanya still asleep?”

“He isn’t hungry,” said Sophia dryly.