Enchantment (30 page)

Apparently some communication passed between them without words, for now Katerina saw the same half-hidden smile lurking on Marek’s face. Sophia laid a plate before him, and piled it with bread and lard, cheese and fruit. He ate with such gusto that the food seemed to melt from the plate like fog. Marek saw the wonder on her face and misunderstood her thoughts. “Of course I eat. I’m immortal, but my body still wants food. I wouldn’t die if I never ate—but I’d get very, very hungry.”

“What did you find on your search?” asked Sophia.

“She’s here,” said Marek simply.

Katerina felt her heart begin to race. “She followed us!”

“She didn’t come through in the same place,” he said. “If she had, I wouldn’t have seen her spoor. But there was a trace of stink in the rocky hills south of the road, overlooking that Armenian fellow’s farm.”

“The Arkanians,” said Sophia. “And his father bought the farm before he was born. You act as if he were a recent immigrant.”

“I just don’t bother learning the family name till they’ve been here for a few centuries.” Marek grinned.

“You seem cheerful enough, with
her
here.”

“She didn’t bring Bear with her,” said Marek, “or much of his power, if any. There was no scent of him at all.”

“Without him, she could never have made such a crossing,” said Sophia. “So she
does
have his power.”

“Not ready to hand,” Marek insisted. “I know what I’m talking about. She left footprints, that’s what I mean.”

Everyone knew that Baba Yaga did not leave footprints on the ground or reflections in water. Katerina was astonished. “Is she weak, then? Is this our chance to kill her?”

“Don’t even think of that,” said Marek. “Even at a quarter of her normal strength, she’s more than a match for any weapon in this world or yours. No, you must avoid her.”

“I meant
you
could stop her . . . permanently.”

Marek shook his head. “Don’t you understand? That’s not how my powers run. Sailors call on me because I have an affinity for wind and rain. Snow in the north. Sometimes a little lightning. Drought, if I’m angry enough, though it takes constant vigilance to maintain a good long one, and I rarely have the temper for it. I’m not much for war. And assassination is out of my league entirely. That’s a matter for Petun, and those who put their trust in
him
are usually sorry, I can promise that. He’s not good at clean killings. There are always some unintended targets that fall whenever he tries to bring down an enemy.”

Katerina sank back in her chair. “So Ivan doesn’t get his wish,” she said.

“What wish?” asked Marek, looking from Katerina to Sophia and back again.

Sophia finally answered. “Vanya offered to annul the marriage as soon as you finish off the old bat.”

“Why would he do something as stupid as that?” asked Marek.

Katerina felt a moment’s triumph.

Then Marek rolled his eyes knowingly. “Being noble, wasn’t he. You know he cares for the girl.”

“Everyone knows it but him,” said Sophia. “And the girl, of course.”

Marek thought that Ivan cared for her? He seemed to say it as if it mattered, too. But why would it? Did even an immortal change to fit the world he lived in? She had always thought that one of the attributes of the immortals was their changelessness. Didn’t Father Lukas say that God was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? Was there anything that she had believed in before that was still true now?

“What should we do?” asked Katerina. “Go back to Taina?”

“Oh, what a clever idea, you lure the most dangerous woman I’ve ever heard of into this world, and then you want to go right back and leave her here for other people to deal with. People who are singularly ill-equipped, I might add.
You
have your bits of spells, I assume, even if your mother didn’t live long enough to teach you. But there are precious few here like Vanya’s mother, seeking out the old lore and putting it into practice. What every woman used to know, hardly any even imagine in these benighted times. No, she’d create havoc here.”

“How am I to prevent that?”

“I don’t know if you can. She knows this land too well. Your best hope is for her to lose you here, and then give up and go home without finding you.”

“Can we hide here?” asked Katerina.

“If I stayed in the house with you, yes. If I left all my lands unwatched-over, yes, you could stay. But I think it’s better if you go somewhere else entirely. To a land where she doesn’t speak the language, where she’ll constantly be getting into trouble with the authorities.” Marek grinned. “I’d love to see her come up against an American assault force. I wonder if they’d beat her as easily as they beat the vast military of Grenada.”

Katerina had no idea what he was talking about, but Sophia chuckled. “Don’t have much use for America, do you?”

“Arrogant newcomers who think they’re smarter than everybody just because they can make a machine that washes dishes.”

“In other words, no one there remembers your name.”

Marek’s temper flashed across his face. But he calmed himself. Katerina wondered what would happen to Sophia if Marek ever grew uncontrollably angry at her. But then she dismissed the thought—Marek wasn’t the kind of man to lose control.

Man? How did she know what kind of man a god might be?

“This America you speak of—this is Ivan’s birthplace?”

“No, no, he first went there when he was a child. But his parents live there. It’s his home now.”

“And we’ll be safe there?”

“How should I know?” said Marek. “Safer than here, though, I imagine.”

At that moment Ivan spoke up from the doorway leading to the stairs. “Safer, but I can’t get her out of the country without a passport.”

Katerina had no idea what a passport was, nor was she wondering. What occupied her mind was a different question: When did Ivan come back down the stairs? For that matter, had she ever heard him go
up
the stairs? Had he stood outside the kitchen door, listening to her entire conversation with Sophia? Monstrous thought!

“Passport,” said Marek dismissively. “I’ll have one of those drawn up, of course.”

“You can’t fight the witch, but you can conjure a passport?” asked Ivan.

“I won’t conjure anything. I have a few friends left in this world. I can get her a legitimate legal passport. And an American entry visa—false ones are expensive on the black market, but we can probably get you a real one, since you’re Ivan’s wife. We’ll get a certificate drawn up for that, too.”

“You’re taking me with you?” she asked Ivan.

“I took an oath, didn’t I?” said Ivan. “That I’d protect you, right? I’m not a fighter, but I’m famous for running away.”

His tone was so bitter and ironic that she ordinarily would have thought he was furious at her, that he hated her. But thinking of what Sophia had said, Katerina heard something different now. His ironic nastiness was because he thought that
she
scorned
him
.

Well, he
wasn’t
a fighter. She couldn’t help that, could she?

And she didn’t scorn him. She needed him. Taina needed him. And if it took pretending to love him, as Sophia had suggested, then she’d try to act as if she did. Nobody could expect more of her than that.

“Whither thou goest, I will go,” she said, quoting a passage she had learned from the Book of Ruth—an unfortunate name indeed, she realized as she spoke. “Where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God . . .”

Her voice trailed off. He seemed not to recognize the words.

“Your family aren’t Christian, are they?” she asked.

“If you refer to the Christian habit of plotting to murder their in-laws, then no, they don’t qualify as Christian.”

“Vanya,” said Sophia sharply.

He did not apologize, though he did wither under her stare.

And why should he apologize, thought Katerina. His complaint was not unjustified.

“I’ll follow you to your parents’ home,” said Katerina. “As you followed me to mine.”

“Naked?” asked Ivan.

“Young man!” cried Sophia.

But Katerina only laughed. “I thought you told me I didn’t have that option.”

“I’ll take you,” said Ivan. “It’s up to you whether I introduce you as a friend of mine, or as my wife.”

“As you choose,” said Katerina.

“That’s not my decision,” said Ivan.

“Yes it is,” said Katerina.

“No it isn’t,” he said in a firmer voice. “If you are only calling yourself my wife out of duty to Taina, then I don’t want to make such a claim. My parents will see at once how you feel about me, or, more to the point, how you
don’t
feel about me. It will worry my mother. So you can only come as my wife if you promise to pretend to my parents that you think I’m a good catch.”

“A good what?” asked Katerina.

“A good husband,” he explained. “That you think you did well to choose to be my wife. If you can’t pretend to believe that, then it’s better to introduce you as nothing more than a friend of mine.”

“Coward,” said Sophia softly.

“Taina still needs us married, as much as ever,” said Katerina. Beyond that, she did not know what to say, or even what he wanted her to say.

Ivan searched her face—for what, she didn’t know. Nor did he find what he was looking for. She knew this because of the way he sagged a little, then nodded. “All right then. I’ll tell them you’re my wife. Let them believe what they believe.”

I hurt him again, thought Katerina. I meant to pretend to love him, but in the moment I simply told the truth, which is my habit. And I don’t know that I want to change that habit. You can tell a lie now and then, but what happens to you when you try to live your whole life inside a lie?

Still, he had chosen to keep her, even though he clearly wasn’t all that happy about it. Could Sophia be right? Did he truly care for her? Or was he agreeing to stay married solely out of duty?

More to the point, Katerina wondered, am I?

Baba Yaga

Long ago she had found this still pool in the darkness of the cave, deep in a subterranean chamber. By torchlight she had come here from time to time, to draw upon the majesty of the place. But she had never used the water to travel, for until now there was nowhere she wanted to go that she could not reach more easily another way.

The surface of the water was absolutely still. That was important; unfortunately, it meant that she could not douse the torch in the water, for then she could not see when the surface became still again. She tried stubbing it out in the dirt, but that did nothing; she beat it on the ground, but it only burned more hotly. Finally, she smothered it with her own skirts, singeing them badly but what did she care? People would see her as she chose to be seen.

In the darkness, she was momentarily disoriented. She had to find the water by the smell of it, and by feeling forward with one dainty foot until she was near the brink. Then, in a loud voice, she proclaimed the words of the spell that would turn this vast empty mirror into a gateway. She could not see, but she could feel the surface trembling with her voice—that was the only disturbance that could be permitted here.

Last of all she proclaimed the name of the princess, which had been stated so openly at her baptism, so that all comers knew the name by which the gods knew her. Fool. She could never hide from Baba Yaga once her name was known.

The name still echoed in the chamber as Baba Yaga leaned forward, toppling off the brink like a cup off a table. The spell worked: She never touched water. Instead, the surface carried her like strong hands into the place she asked for.

She found herself lying on something hard and rough.

A loud, roaring, rattling sound was getting louder and louder. What could it be?

She raised her head from the ground, opening her eyes into the twilight.

A new noise at once was added, something screeching, metal on metal. She rose to her feet, looking for the source of the noise.

A big, awkward-looking house made all of tin sat on four black feet, like a crippled animal, in the middle of the hard surface where she had been lying. The surface itself was of miraculous smoothness, as if someone had scythed the earth itself. Then she realized—this was a road, like the ones the Romans built, only wider and less finished on the top. And this house must be capable of movement.

A man leaned out the window of the house, shouting at her in some barbarous dialect. She only caught a few words of what he said, and didn’t care. She waved him to silence.

It didn’t work. He didn’t even pause.

Terror thrilled through her. Had she taken herself to a place where her powers didn’t work?

She tried a much stronger spell of silence, murmuring the words and making the signs behind her back—no need to anger him, if she turned out to be utterly powerless.

This spell should have silenced him for weeks; instead, it merely calmed him down. He mumbled a little more—unthinkable that he should have a voice at all!—and then, without so much as making a single pass through the air or dusting his house with powder, he caused it to move forward, moving around her and passing her, leaving her behind in a cloud of dust.

She couldn’t be sure it was her spell that calmed him down or simply that he had run out of wrath. This was an urgent question that had to be settled right away.

She sniffed the air, turning in all directions. Her sense of power was weakened, but it was not gone. She caught faint traces of the princess—she had walked near this very road, and not long ago—but her smell was all but lost in another one that left her stunned. Mikola Mozhaiski! After all her pains to cast spells to make him neglect his beloved land of Taina and his friends there, she had ended up coming to the very place that was now the center of his power. No wonder her powers were so sharply suppressed here! And no wonder that awful boy had caused her so many problems—he came from Mikola Mozhaiski, and when he led the princess out of this world, of course he brought her back to his master.

Well, there are more gods in this world. She had the power of Bear, didn’t she? And Bear was more than a match for Mozhaiski.