Enchantment (45 page)

Only then did Katerina get to ask him what it was that made him get off the plane. He tried to describe what happened at the lavatories, and to his relief, she agreed with him immediately. “You were right. It might not have been her, but if it was, that’s just how you would feel. Confused.”

“The frightening thing is how close I came to not even noticing it.”

“You’re not supposed to notice it. That’s what the Widow’s spells are all about.”

“So was it Mother’s Aware charm that did it?”

Katerina smiled. “Remember telling me about vaccinations? Well, when you don’t get the disease, do you know whether it was the vaccination that saved you, or just that you never happened to catch it?”

Ivan grinned. “And to think you never even went to college.”

When the tickets were changed to a flight two days later—the next day’s flight was full—Ivan was faced with the problem of what to do in New York for two days. Not that he would mind holing up in a hotel with Katerina—in fact, that was his preferred solution—but he didn’t have the money for it. So he did what every self-respecting young husband would have done in such a situation. He phoned his parents.

They told him to call back in fifteen minutes to find out where to pick up the money they were wiring. He and Katerina browsed around the shops. That’s where they were when they began to notice airline personnel scurrying around quite urgently, and a buzz of conversation, knots of people jabbering about something. It was probably just Aware still working on him, Ivan thought. Until the clerk from the gate pointed out Ivan and Katerina to a couple of security guards, who approached quickly with their hands on their guns, ready to draw. “Ivan Smetski and Katerina Taina?” asked the one.

“Is there a problem here?” asked Ivan.

“We need to talk to the two of you,” said the security guard. “Separately.”

“Good luck,” said Ivan. “My wife doesn’t speak English.”

“We’ll get an interpreter.”

“No you won’t,” said Ivan. “Because she speaks an obscure dialect of Russian, and I guarantee you that the only person in New York City who speaks it, besides her, is me.”

It took an hour for them to believe him, and another half hour of intense questioning about why they left the plane. Katerina tried to ask him what was going on, but they were quick to stop any crosstalk between them. “You will
only
interpret what we ask and what she answers,” the interrogator insisted.

Finally they explained why they were so intensely interested in Ivan and Katerina. The airplane that they had left just before takeoff lost radio contact over the ocean. It also disappeared from radar. A massive search was under way, and no debris had yet been found, but they were acting under the assumption that the plane had gone down. And the two people who got off in a rush at the last second were obviously the ones they were most anxious to talk to.

It solved the question of what they would do with their time in New York, at least for the first day. Once Ivan realized what was happening, he called his father, who contacted friends who arranged for a very high-powered attorney to be in attendance for the rest of the questioning. Ivan scarcely had a chance to learn the man’s name, because once he was there, the questioning was pretty much over. Ivan and Katerina had both made their statements, Ivan faithfully translating all of Katerina’s recollections, even when they differed from his in some detail or other. He figured that it was more plausible if they weren’t completely in unison than if they were suspiciously identical. And since their checked bags had been removed from the plane, it was hard to see how they could have caused whatever the problem was.

And that was the clincher, as far as their attorney was concerned. “You don’t even know what happened to the airplane, and here you are questioning these two honeymooners as if you had some evidence linking them to a bomb. You not only don’t have a link, you don’t even have a bomb.”

As they were leaving the interview room for the last time, one of the men who had been fairly quiet until now stopped Ivan at the door. “Please,” he said. “I know you didn’t cause it. But you’ve got to admit, you’re the luckiest person on that airplane. Why did you get off? What triggered it? It could help us to know what happened to the plane.”

“Honestly,” said Ivan, “it was just a feeling I had. Muddled. Confused. A sense that something was there that shouldn’t be. If I had actually seen something, don’t you think I would have warned the crew?”

All of which was true. And anything more he might have told the man, he wouldn’t have believed anyway, so what was the point of that? There was a ninth-century witch in one of the bathrooms with a spell of unnoticeability on her, but I trumped it with my mother’s charm of awareness.

Yeah, right.

Ivan was just glad that they couldn’t make him take a lie-detector test, because he was sure he would have failed that miserably.

They got the money from Western Union, which made Ivan feel guilty, because his parents weren’t exactly wealthy. Ivan didn’t take Katerina into Manhattan. Instead they found a place farther out on Long Island. Not easy to do, since it was the height of the beach season. But if you stay far enough inland, the motels empty out a little.

They didn’t stay in their room the whole time, though. Katerina needed the outdoors, and so did Ivan—he’d spent these past weeks cooped up in house or yard, unable to run every day for the first time in years. They felt safe from Baba Yaga, and so they went out, Ivan to run, Katerina to walk and enjoy the good weather. She tried to run alongside him at first, but she didn’t see the pleasure in it. For her, fitness came naturally, from work, not from play.

In the park there were more kites, and Ivan remembered that he had wanted to learn how to make a hang glider. He found a couple of books on hang gliding in a store and figured he could read them during the rest of the trip.

At night, Ivan and Katerina speculated on what Baba Yaga had done to the plane. Ivan explained about how terrorists blew up planes sometimes, which made Katerina sick at heart to hear about it. “Like Attila the Hun,” she said—for Attila was still the bugbear of tales to frighten children, in those centuries before the Mongols came. “Slaughtering everyone. Laying waste to everything.”

“The Widow wouldn’t do that?”

“Why would she? What would it accomplish? We weren’t on the plane.”

“Did she
know
we weren’t on the plane?” asked Ivan.

“
She
was on the plane. She didn’t blow it up.”

“Then what happened to it?”

Katerina shrugged. “Maybe she took it home with her.”

“Took it home? Passengers and all? What did she do, put it in a sack and sling it over her shoulder?”

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t even take our clothes with us from one world to the other. She can take a 747?”

Katerina smiled thinly. “What the Widow wants, the Widow takes.”

The next morning, the seventh of July, Ivan looked for the small carry-on bag that he had filled with reading material for the trip, along with a couple of gifts for Marek and Sophia. He wanted to add the hang-gliding books to the bag. But he couldn’t find it anywhere.

Only then did he realize that Katerina had only gathered up their belongings from under the seats in front of theirs. She probably hadn’t even seen him put that bag in the overhead compartment. And he had forgotten completely that it existed until this very moment.

For one horrible instant he wondered if Baba Yaga had somehow put a bomb in that bag, so that Ivan really had carried it onto the plane. But no, Katerina was right, it couldn’t have been an explosion. The bag was just an oversight.

An oversight? “Katerina,” he said, “shouldn’t Aware have told me that I was leaving that bag on the plane?”

“Yes,” she said, looking as worried as he felt. “But I
didn’t
notice you put it in the overhead, or if I did I forgot—that shouldn’t have happened, either.”

“And I didn’t remember it for two days. Just as well—if I’d thought of it while they were questioning us and blurted something out about leaving one little bag on the plane, they would never have let us go.”

Katerina slipped Aware off and looked at it. “This has to be the charm that let you notice the Pretender was there, or at least notice that you were being kept from noticing. So why didn’t it make us aware that we were leaving the bag?”

“It makes no sense for the Widow to let us go, but keep our bag,” said Ivan.

“Maybe it does,” said Katerina. “Tell me everything that was in the bag.”

He sat down and methodically wrote down everything. Nothing offered the slightest clue as to what Baba Yaga might have wanted with the bag, until Ivan remembered one last item. “I put that message from Baba Tila in there, too,” he said. “Along with the gifts for Marek and Sophia. Because I wanted to ask them about it.”

Katerina thought about that for a few minutes. “So, whatever that message meant, the Pretender just took it to Taina.”

“How did she even know I had it?” asked Ivan.

“Who says she did know?” said Katerina. “We still don’t know who the message is for, or who it’s from. It might have nothing to do with her. But if it’s supposed to be delivered to somebody in Taina, putting it on a plane that the Widow took back with her is the only way it could ever be delivered. Since you and I certainly couldn’t have taken it with us.”

“So we’re back to your theory that some fate is helping us.”

“It makes me wonder if maybe we should have
stayed
on the plane.”

“No,” said Ivan. “Absolutely not. The Widow doesn’t control the bridge. That’s why we have to get to Taina that way. On the airplane, even if she took us there, we’d arrive as her prisoners.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Katerina.

“That bag I left on the plane, that message—I just hope it
was
some kindly fate helping us. Because if it wasn’t, then the likeliest outcome is that my boneheaded blunder might cost us dearly somewhere along the line.”

“
Your
blunder? Give me my share of the credit.”

They went to the airport early. Some of the same clerks were on duty, watching Ivan and Katerina very carefully, but treating them with more politeness than usual, which, at Kennedy, isn’t a hard standard to surpass. Ivan and Katerina were, for their part, just as careful as before, but this time there was no sign of danger, before and after they boarded the plane.

It began to look as though Katerina might be right, that Baba Yaga had disappeared right along with that first plane, back to the ninth century. Which meant that maybe they wouldn’t have to worry again until they crossed the bridge.

They were so relaxed, they even slept on the flight. And when they finally got to Cousin Marek’s house, exhausted from travel and from too much alertness, he confirmed it for them. “She’s no longer in this world. But when she left, she didn’t leave alone.”

“So she took the passengers with her?” asked Ivan.

“They’re all back there, where she is,” said Marek. “Poor things.”

“What can we do? How can we bring them back?”

“Two ways,” said Marek. “First, you persuade old Yaga to send them back.”

“All right, we’ll do that,” said Ivan.

Katerina looked at him as if he were insane.

“I was joking.”

“What’s the other way?” Katerina asked Cousin Marek.

“Break her power,” said Marek.

“Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West,” said Ivan.

“What?”

“A movie.
The Wizard of Oz.
The only way to break her power is to kill her, isn’t it?”

Marek shrugged. “That would certainly work. But I can’t tell you that it’s the only way.”

“Do you know of another?”

“I’m only a god, Vanya, not an expert.”

With Baba Yaga no longer gunning for them, they didn’t have quite the same urgency to get back. Whatever mischief she was doing in Taina, time flowed differently there from here, and so hurrying made no sense, if something could be gained by lingering.

And something could, Ivan hoped. Together Cousin Marek and Ivan and a couple of other farmers from the area worked on making a hang glider out of available wood—some seasoned lumber for the most rigid heart of the frame, but the rest springier, newer wood, thin wands of it. And tightly woven fabric—cotton for now, but rough linen would have to do, when they got to Taina. Unless they could find silk. Katerina remembered that she had once seen a length of imported silk. If it was still there, not cut up into too many smaller pieces, they might be able to use it.

They had sense enough not to make the test flights by jumping off cliffs, and after several tries, they were able to make a glider that worked. Katerina insisted on learning to fly it, too, and while neither of them became brilliant at it, they also didn’t die, which was how you graduated from a do-it-yourself hang-gliding school, Ivan figured.

They knew all that they could think of that might be useful. They had done all they could think of to prepare and practice and plan. There was nothing but fear to hold them any longer, and so they decided, as one, that it was time to cross the bridge, this time as rulers of Taina, first to drive the usurpers out of power, and then to strike the blow that would set them free of Baba Yaga once and for all.

Or they’d die trying.

Baba Yaga

It was not until the house-that-flies was in the air that Baba Yaga ventured out of the bathroom to walk the aisles. She had had a shaky moment when the boy stood right outside the door of the restroom where she was hiding. The spells that his mother had prepared for him were powerful, and she could feel how the Aware spell struggled against her Oblivious. When he went away, though, she was sure he hadn’t seen her. She only wished she could understand what they were saying.

Seats 2-A and 2-B. Empty.

Were they simply out of their seats? In the bathroom? Visiting the cockpit?

No and no. They had left the plane. They were nowhere on it.

Baba Yaga was filled with helpless rage. All of last night’s work had been for nothing. She was sure Ivan had said they had their reservation, and yet their names were nowhere in the computers. Only when she redoubled the spell of helpfulness on the stupid weary ticket agent did he come up with the bright idea that maybe they had flown from a different airport.