Spells of Blood and Kin (7 page)

East was the way he'd entered the alley, and Maksim had not smelled the young man's scent on the way in. But he backtracked, anyway, slow and thickheaded, tracing and retracing, and sure enough, there was a hint of it, a trace of blood on a wall where he might have rested his hand.

So Maksim had managed to track the two young men a whole fifty feet. What next? He sat down on the hood of a parked car to think about it. Queen Street? Where there were streetcars and taxis and—wait, yes. He had already thought about this part. Surely Queen Street would be correct. He would just stroll down that way and keep scenting.

In a moment.

He started violently awake to a brush of warmth over his hand. He reached, snatched, caught nothing. Peered about, breathing hard.

On the roof of the car, behind him: a yearling cat, thin and hunched, peering back. When he stood up, it skittered away, paused, jumped down, and vanished into the alley.

Maksim braced against the drowsy slackening of his limbs. He did not sit back down on the car. He pushed off toward Queen Street.

A few steps down the sidewalk, he realized his hands were empty. That was wrong.

He turned around and saw his eggs, abandoned on the hood of the car. The little cat had come back and was sniffing at the carton.

He lunged at it, but he was just slow enough that his fingers only closed on a tuft of fine black fur. The cat darted under a nearby fence. Its wide-pupiled eyes gazed at him quite calmly as he took up the eggs again.

It should fear him more. His nature would have had him snap its neck before he could think. The eggs would wear off eventually, and he would be a danger to whatever, whoever, was near him.

He sighed. His eyes stung. He did not want to be a danger to small cats. He would sit down for a moment before resuming his search. Just a moment to rest his eyes before going on.

SHULGIN, RUSSIA: 1707

Smoke billowed up from the burning tents. The
ataman
was laughing, one side of his moustache singed to curling char.

The
ataman
's chest was bare, running with sweat, and his long
cherkesska
flapped open, buttons slashed off and one lapel scored with a ragged tear. He shook his saber in the air, and blood flew from the blade.

“A fine night!” he said. “A fine night, Maksim!”

Maksim heard the words as if through a waterfall, did not see the man's face at all, only the weapon and the blood scattering. He ran at the
ataman
and tried to slash his throat.

The
ataman
blocked him, still laughing. “You are very slow, and your saber is dull,” he said. “You have been fighting-mad for many hours. Our foes are dead or have fled, and it is time for you to put your saber down.”

Maksim tried to raise his saber again, but one of the nicks in the edge caught against the
ataman
's blade, and he could not seem to free it.

“Maksim,” the
ataman
was saying. “Be calm now. The fighting is over for this day.”

Maksim still had fight in his arms, but the
ataman
repeated himself until at last Maksim dropped his saber.

“It was a very good madness,” said the
ataman
. “Come back from it now.”

Maksim, at the touch of the
ataman
's hand on his shoulder, startled and began to tremble.

The
ataman
soothed him like a beast, petting his arm. “Your brothers are over at the fire. Have you any hurts that need tending?”

But Maksim did not have his voice yet. He recognized the
ataman
now—a man he'd been following since last summer, through a long and messy campaign—and he was able to follow him dumbly toward the cooking fires, but when Maksim drew near the others, some of whom were wounded, the smell of blood and gunpowder made his lips draw back from his teeth. He covered his eyes with his hands so the
ataman
would not see the madness returning in them.

The
ataman
looked at Maksim's face and shook his head. “I will have someone come to you. But perhaps I should make sure you cannot forget that the fighting is over for now.” The
ataman
took off his sash and used it to bind Maksim's hands together.

Maksim pulled mindlessly at his bonds until he hurt himself, and then he was still, mostly.

After some time, a woman came to help him strip off his scorched and slashed
cherkesska
and douse his injuries with vodka. He was still too much in his madness to answer questions, but he was able to make himself submit to her touch. After she stitched the worst of his injuries, he went to sleep there on the ground, still bound, wrapped in his battle-filthy coat.

When he awoke and freed himself, he found he was one of the heroes of last night's action. He drank with his brothers; he rutted with the woman who had cleaned him up. His injuries healed very quickly.

But the madness did not quite leave him. He fell into it again each time they fought, and each time took longer to return to himself. And when they were not fighting, he was quicker to anger, flush with energy that had to be wrestled out. He thought he had not always been this way.

He began to notice people flinching from him a little. He heard rumors about himself: that he was a shape-changer who became a beast at the full moon, that he was possessed by an evil spirit. None of the rumors he heard were true, but he began to understand there was something at the heart of them.

Finally, he sought out a
koldun
. The
koldun
was frail, stooped, blind in one eye; Maksim was a Cossack in the prime of his youth, and yet he feared the
koldun
so much that he trembled with it as he stood in the hut to ask his question.

The
koldun
demanded the price of a deer, which Maksim chased down on foot.

When Maksim returned with the animal slung over his shoulders, still steaming, the
koldun
said, “You have only to look to that hunt for the secrets of your nature.”

“What do you mean?” Maksim said, growling a little, for the heated blood of the deer still stained his hands.

“You follow blood. You shed blood. You are kin to the others who share your blood. Blood is the only end,” the
koldun
said as if that was all Maksim needed to know.

The
koldun
waited, smiling, his sighted eye bright in a web of wrinkles, while Maksim clenched his hands on the fine-boned limbs of the deer and fought down both the desire to run at him and the desire to run away.

“I can take it from you,” the
koldun
said finally. “You will grow worse with age. I can make you as other men.”

Maksim shuddered all down his spine. He thought it sounded like a threat, and he did not doubt the
koldun
would see it through.

He was losing his voice again, as he sometimes did when his madness rode him. But he made himself shake his head, and he laid the deer down at the
koldun
's feet and backed away.

The
koldun
said nothing; he only turned away into the dimness of his hut and left Maksim standing there with deer's blood on his hands.

Maksim went away still believing the madness was a gift. Among the Cossacks, a violent man was a useful man. Battle was his natural inclination. His fellows learned to launch him in the right direction and then stay out of his way; his
ataman
learned how to command him, at least some of the time. When there was no fighting to quell his thirst, he could wrestle his brothers, he could fuck with abandon, or, failing all else, ride or run or drink until he dropped in exhaustion.

Maksim began to understand that he would live a very long life. He'd thought for quite a while that he would live all of it as a Cossack.

History happened, though. He did not change, or not quickly, but things around him did, and as his madness grew in him—and grew less welcome—he thought again of the
koldun
.

When he reached the place where the
koldun
had lived, he found that the man had died and left no successor. Maksim did not mind so much; he had already had another good idea. He left the Cossacks to their newfound gentleness and went looking for a war.

He did not have to look far. Not that year, and not for many years after.

APRIL 30

  
WANING GIBBOUS

Lissa dropped off the fertility spell early the following day. She dressed carefully for it in a black shirtdress with long sleeves: ugly and unsuitable for the weather, but correct.

Stella had come back sometime in the late hours; Lissa could see her tousled hair hanging over the arm of the sofa. She tiptoed past and did not slam the door.

She couldn't help a thread of worry under her manufactured calm. The sleep eggs hadn't been as effective as she'd thought they should have been—what if she was off her game? What if the fertility eggs proved ineffective too?

Izabela Dmitreeva was staying with her mother-in-law and a gaggle of other relatives. When Lissa arrived, sweating in her heavy dress, two old men were watching television in the den; one made the sign against evil, and the other merely looked at her, his rheumy eyes level and cold. The mother-in-law had a familiar face; Lissa could not recall her name but thought she'd taken eggs for kidney stones the year before. Izabela Dmitreeva ushered Lissa into the kitchen and thanked her very graciously for taking the time in the midst of her own troubles.

The apartment smelled of boiled vegetables; when Lissa had finished explaining how to take the eggs, Izabela Dmitreeva pressed upon her a Tupperware container of cabbage rolls, calling her
koldun'ia
again.

Izabela Dmitreeva did not seem to have any doubt that the eggs would work. She had already begun knitting a baby blanket, Lissa saw; it lay in a basket on the windowsill, a jumble of knitting needles and pale-yellow yarn.

The old men weren't so sanguine. On her way out, she saw the sign again, and one of the men cleared his throat and hawked horribly into a Kleenex.

Lissa took the subway home and found Stella in the kitchen, making coffee. Making coffee for her, apparently.

“I didn't even hear you go out,” Stella said, eyeing the ugly dress. “There's fruit salad. And muffins.”

“I didn't know we had muffins.”

“I made them,” Stella said. “To say sorry.”

“Hold that thought,” Lissa said and jogged upstairs to change into a lightweight T-shirt and a denim skirt. Bare-legged, she came back down to find Stella setting out plates and cups in the kitchen.

The muffins turned out to be lemon cranberry and delicious. Stella picked at hers, and every time Lissa glanced at her, she glanced away.

“Look,” Lissa said. “It was nice of you to bake for me.”

“I want to stay,” Stella said.

“With me? But—”

“There's so much I could do to help. This house … it isn't really yours yet, you know? And you shouldn't have to do it all by yourself. I was thinking you might be able to use some rent money. And—”

“But that's all about me,” Lissa said. “I don't need all that.”

“Oh,” Stella said. “Okay.” And her great dark eyes began to well.

“Hey … look, I'm sorry. It was nice of you to come, and…” And what else did you say to a stepsister you didn't know, anyway? Lissa filled her mouth with coffee.

Stella jumped into the gap. “That's just it; I don't think it's right that your only family is all on the other side of the ocean and never visits. And I can't change Dad, and Mum doesn't really count as your family, I guess, but there's me, and I want to know you better. You're … you're so quiet, and maybe you could use some fun sometimes. Or cry on my shoulder, if that would help. Or, you know—”

“I don't want to cry on anyone's shoulder.”

“I do!” Stella said, dissolving.

Lissa, after a frozen moment of awkwardness, handed her a napkin.

“I can't go back,” Stella sobbed. “I can't deal with it there. You know how many messages Erick's left on my phone in the last three days? Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! He's scaring me.”

“Erick?”

“Boyfriend.
Ex
-boyfriend. He just won't leave me alone.”

“So you ran all the way to Canada?”

“I'll find a flat if you don't want me,” Stella said. “I have everything I need. I have a job already.”

“A … what?”

“Last night,” Stella said, wiping smeared mascara from beneath her eye. “Everyone needs servers, right? And I don't have to worry about paperwork, because Dad got my Canadian citizenship set up ages ago. So I made the rounds of your neighborhood. And I found the Duke of Lancashire. You know, up near Bloor.”