Spells of Blood and Kin (5 page)

Vasilissa's sole memento of her departed mother was a doll, which she brought with her everywhere, even into the forest to visit the witch. At the full moon, Vasilissa could ask this doll three questions, because as usual in stories, everything came in threes. Vasilissa asked the doll to help her through the three tests Baba Yaga set for her, and the doll gave her such good advice that Vasilissa was able to do everything the witch had asked. Baba Yaga was so impressed that she agreed to give Vasilissa a light to take back to her stepmother: not just any light, but one of the fiery-eyed skulls.

When Vasilissa returned from the forest, bearing the skull aloft on its spear, her stepmother was at first grateful, for there had been no light in the home since Vasilissa left. But the skull's flaming eyes began to scorch the stepmother, and when she tried to hide, the skull followed her and burned her to a cinder.

Vasilissa then took up the skull again, went back into the forest, and asked Baba Yaga to teach her all her magic. With the help of her doll, Vasilissa was able to perform all the tasks Baba Yaga demanded in exchange. Eventually, Vasilissa became a powerful witch in her own right, so powerful that she drew the attention of the czar, who made her his wife; and the story said she carried her mother's doll in her pocket for all her days.

There were other stories about Vasilissa, or maybe there was more than one Vasilissa, but this one was important for the kernel of truth in it, or so Baba said: a witch could make such a doll and hand it down to her daughter or to her granddaughter. Once a month, around the full moon, such a doll could be of help.

Baba's letter ended with instructions and a charm, which Lissa read through a few times before sneaking down to the kitchen to pick up the supplies she would need.

Back upstairs, she set the doll on the bedside table, crumbled a slice of bread before it, and sprinkled salt from the shaker.

She felt almost embarrassed, even though she was alone: this was a new thing, this ritual, and she had only a folktale to suggest it would work. It wasn't like Baba could have tested it in advance. Maybe Lissa was getting her hopes up over nothing … and maybe, even if it didn't work, it would only be because Lissa herself didn't know how to do it correctly.

Before she could talk herself into a spiral of doubt, Lissa took a sharp breath and whispered the charm:
By the white rider of dawn, by the red rider of day, by the black rider of night, I call to you: Iadviga Rozhnata, your scion desires your counsel.

“How long has it been?” said Baba from somewhere in the bottom of Lissa's brain. Her voice was a cold wind.

“This is the fourth day,” said Lissa. “There was the funeral, and then Stella came, and the lawyer—”

“And on what business do you desire my counsel?”

“I don't know,” said Lissa. She found she was crying again. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and wiped that upon her skirt. “I don't know.”

“
Vnuchka,
I am not to be called idly. Ask counsel.”

Baba sounded a bit lecturing, Lissa thought, like always. And very far away.

“Where are you? What's it like?” Lissa said. “Can you counsel me about that?”

“I may not speak of it.”

“I always thought that story was just a story. I didn't know you'd be waiting.…”

Baba was silent.

“I'm going to make up some spells for a few of the ladies,” Lissa said. “Will they all still come to me … will they trust me to do it right?”

“You have learned some of my trade,” Baba said. “They will have no cause to complain, so long as you remember your lessons.”

Not quite the wholehearted endorsement she'd been hoping for.

Three questions. Lissa bit down on the tip of her tongue to stop herself from saying anything careless.

Finally, she settled on, “Was there anything you left unfinished?”

Baba did not answer quickly. Her silence felt alive and dark and chilly. Lissa began to wonder if this was another forbidden question or if she had somehow made Baba angry.

“Maksim Volkov,” Baba said. “In life, I was sworn to help him. In death, I may do so no longer. If he comes to you, know that he is
kin
.”

“Kin? You mean we're related to him somehow?”

But silence was her only answer. Baba was gone. When Lissa said the charm again, nothing happened. She shook the doll. The eyelids fluttered open and shut; one of them stuck higher than the other, giving the thing an expression of drunkenness.

Lissa carefully jiggled it back into place and set the doll in her lap. She folded the letter up small and zipped it into a pocket of her purse.

“If you can hear me,” she said, “I'll talk to you again as soon as I'm allowed, next month. I love you. If you're there.”

When she came downstairs, Stella looked at her face and went to hug her again.

“I'm fine,” Lissa said, backing into the banister and rubbing at her eyes.

“Another delivery came,” Stella said. “I didn't want to wake you.”

“What was it?”

Stella didn't answer but led her into the dining room, where a box sat on the table.

“It's the urn,” she said. “A gentleman from the mortuary brought it over.”

“I never asked her what she wanted done with her ashes,” Lissa said.

“You didn't know she'd go suddenly,” Stella said. “She was in good health, wasn't she? Dad said she was strong as a horse. You can't blame yourself.”

“I should have asked,” Lissa said. Three questions, and she had not managed to make this one of them.

She took the urn upstairs to put it on Baba's dresser, for now.

Stella followed her into the big, dim room. “How many rooms does this place have?” she said. “I'll bet this house hasn't been sorted in a dog's age.”

“She had better things to do,” Lissa flared, thinking of the third bedroom, a warren of boxes dating from when her mother was still alive. “I should've. It was my job to keep things clean.”

“Even her knickers?” Stella said, wincing at the overflowing laundry basket.

“Don't,” Lissa said. “Don't.” She couldn't get anything else out of her mouth. She crowded Stella backward out the door and into the hallway. “Don't. Don't.”

Stella stumbled, caught herself on the banister. “I want to help,” she said. “That's all.”

“I don't need your help,” Lissa said. “Where were you before?” Which didn't even make sense, and damn it, when had she started crying again?

Stella had her hands tight together, and she was looking at Lissa with that face, and Lissa pushed past her into the bathroom and locked the door.

“Lissa? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” A breath. Feet shuffling.

Lissa shoved her fists against her temples and wiped messy tears all over. She unrolled a crumple of toilet paper and blew her nose.

“Lissa … I don't quite know what to do,” Stella said through the door. “I'm getting it all wrong. I think I should go out for a bit, okay? So you can have some space.”

“Yes. Please,” Lissa managed to say, thick and wet.

Silence. Lissa blew her nose again.

Eventually, she heard Stella's footsteps moving away, pausing at the top of the stairs, and then descending.

A minute later, the front door opened and closed.

Stupid, this was all stupid and wrong, and she needed to do something different. Well, there was something she'd been avoiding, and today was the last day she'd be able to do it until next month.

She went to the house mains and shut off the breaker. The subterranean hum of the house cut off, leaving blank silence. Lissa wondered how the
kolduny
had discovered that electricity was unfriendly to magic: had they gathered somewhere in the old country to discuss it? Had they written each other letters? Baba had rarely spoken of such things, but when she did, Lissa could not always tell whether she was learning rules or merely Baba's habits. The most important
Law
she knew because of the way Baba looked whenever she mentioned it: flinty and staring, holding Lissa's eyes until she was sure Lissa understood.

Magic was to be done only on the full moon and the next two days after. Never on or near the new moon. That was
Law
.

“Like, the kind of law where if you break it other witches will arrest you?” Lissa had asked when she was a young girl. Baba had not laughed but had answered, “No,
vnuchka. Law
like the law of gravity. Nature imposes it, and if we break it the consequence is inevitable and severe.”

So the kitchen corkboard always had a calendar with the phases of the moon highlighted, right underneath the cookbooks where Lissa could easily see it.

The grimoire of the
koldun
Anatoliy Ievlev stood on a shelf up higher, inside a cupboard, above the cookbooks and the calendar. It was a heavy tome with ragged-edged pages and a gold-stamped spine, printed in Moscow toward the end of the nineteenth century, probably as a curiosity more than a text; Baba had learned from a different grimoire, she said, but that one had been lost when she fled Russia, and so this one had been ordered at great expense from an antiquarian in Yekaterinburg on the occasion of Lissa's twelfth birthday. For Lissa's benefit, Baba had interleaved her own penciled translations, written on envelopes or notebook sheets, tucked in between the musty-smelling pages of Cyrillic. Lissa still had to stand on a step stool to reach that cupboard; she'd done it so many times now that her fingertips found the right book unerringly.

Lissa moved about the room in the dimness, setting out a row of tea lights. She couldn't see the floor in this light, the stain where Baba had lain, which wasn't even there anymore. She groped in a drawer for matches, felt a knife blade slide silken over the ball of her thumb.

The first match crumbled. The second fizzled. The third caught. She touched it to the wicks of the tea lights, and the unsteady light made the dark look darker. She licked at the cut on her thumb.

Next came the loosing of bonds. All the
kolduny
agreed that magic could not be done if the
koldun
wore anything knotted or clasped. Lissa unfastened her bra and wriggled it out through the armholes of her tank top and opened the clip that held her hair, letting the mass of it down over her shoulders.

She laid out her gear on the kitchen table: Baba's wooden spoon, the last thing her hand had touched in life; a Pyrex mixing bowl and a tiny spice-toasting pan; mortar and pestle; an assortment of flasks and test tubes, mostly purchased when Brunswick Collegiate closed its doors and sold off the contents of its classrooms.

From the cupboard over the refrigerator, the shoe box full of old baby food jars, some labeled in Lissa's hand, some in Baba's. From the fridge itself, a fresh dozen eggs.

The most recent orders from the church ladies were written on a magnetic shopping notepad.
For children,
Baba had written, in deference to Lissa's poor Russian.
For bones. For sleep.

Lissa tugged strands of hair from her mouth and bent over the grimoire. Fertility was hard; she hadn't done it before. She would have to learn.

For the base, Anatoliy Ievlev suggested wine, but Stella seemed to have finished off the bottle of pinot grigio from the refrigerator; Baba had often substituted plain white vinegar, and Lissa did so again, splashing a cup into the Pyrex bowl.

Rabbit fur. Anatoliy Ievlev explained, “For they of all the animal kingdom are the best known for their increase.” In one of the baby food jars was a rabbit's-foot key chain, some of the fur already scraped away for an earlier ritual. Lissa razored off another tuft and placed it in her tiny cast-iron spice-toasting pan upon the stove.

Baba's old gas stove was of the avocado-colored variety and had no automatic lighter; Lissa had to slide a lit match up to the burner to catch the gas.

Soon the rabbit fur twisted and charred. Another moment and it sprang into flame, and Lissa wrinkled her nose against the stink.

The ashes went into her mortar to be ground fine, and from there into the Pyrex, where they floated atop the vinegar. Lissa had asked once why so many ingredients had to be burned and put into the mortar before going into the recipe: was it something to do with the mortar the witch in the story used to ride around in? Baba had chuckled at that and said it was only that otherwise the texture would end up uneven.

Next, Anatoliy Ievlev directed her to add the more pedestrian clover and raspberry leaves, without explaining in what way they related to fertility. Both herbs toasted crisp and ground to powder, she passed on to the final item on the list: mother's milk.

From the refrigerator, she withdrew the baby's bottle she'd stolen during the funeral. You didn't pass up a chance like that. Anatoliy Ievlev had the right sense of it. The fluids of the body were always, always potent in spells.

She trickled the milk into the vinegar mixture and used Baba's spoon to stir it all together. She tilted in a few drops of red food coloring until the mixture achieved a dull pink color.

Lastly, the hokey part. When she was younger, she would blush at the sheer weirdness of it, especially the way Baba did it, intoning the words in a voice of drama and mystery.

She knew by now that the manner didn't matter so much. You didn't have to shout, either. The spirits would hear you, even if you spoke English, even if you stammered, even if you spoke in a whisper because your father slept upstairs. So long as the moon was full, or near full; so long as the speaker asked politely; so long as the speaker was a witch.

She took up the first egg in her left hand and dipped her right in the vinegar mixture.

“As the seed grows to flower; as the egg grows to chick; as the moon grows to full; so, I ask you, grant healthy increase. Riders of dawn and day and dusk, I ask you. I, Vasilissa, granddaughter of Iadviga, ask you this.”