Spells of Blood and Kin (9 page)

He ran, first, away from the people and the bustling port, over the tumbled rocks along what was left of the ancient city wall and up a sun-scoured hillside. His legs itched with the time spent confined. He dumped his things under a patch of scrub, his coat and his neckcloth and even his boots, and he ran until his feet bled slick.

He limped back down toward the town in the evening to find that an animal had mauled his belongings about, and his coat lay spread in the dust. It smelled of herbs and dried shit. He put it to rights as best he could and went to find meat, drink, and the latest news of the war.

What he found instead was a dying woman.

She lay in a narrow cul-de-sac where a house butted up near to a high section of the fortification. Maksim had heard the city had been shelled in many places during last year's siege, but here the wall was as sturdy as ever. The woman was a faint, pale splash in the twilight of its shadow: white underskirts tumbled up over a torn spring-green gown. She whined very quietly.

She was bleeding. The smell came to Maksim like liquor, threading through the scents of frying fish and horse dung and ocean breeze. He was across the street in an instant, forgetting the more mundane needs that had driven him down from the hills. His mouth sprang with saliva.

Here was blood, and once blood had been spilled, more would always follow, and Maksim would be in the thick of it, one way or another. He did not stop to think that the war had moved on from here, that if this woman had been injured by a soldier it had been one of the allied soldiers stationed here or passing through, that any violence he would be drawn into on her behalf would only see him exile himself from yet another city. He did not think at all, just knelt on the dusty cobbles outside the spreading pool and reached to touch her throat. Her skin and hair were fair and fine. Her heart beat like a jeweler's hammer.

“Ven aquí, cobarde,”
she murmured.

“I speak no Spanish,” Maksim said in Russian. He looked at her eyes: one blue, one nearly all black where the pupil was blown. He looked at the injury to her head, but it was obscured by clots of blood dried messily into the curls of her hair.

He brought his face close to hers and sniffed along her brow, where the red ran freely, and he touched the tip of his tongue there, just for a moment.

“Muere conmigo,”
the woman said, and she stabbed Maksim in the stomach.

Maksim swore. He rocked back on his heels.

The knife slipped free and blunted its tip on the cobbles. Maksim poked a fingertip into his injury and found it deep enough to bleed, but not at all vital.

“Would you care to try again?” he said to the woman, in English this time. He felt like laughing, the pain a bright bubble just below his rib cage: surprise was already becoming so rare a thing in his life.

“Yes,” the woman snarled, almost soundless.

“Even though I have not hurt you?”

“You would,” she said, and with that, Maksim could not disagree.

Moved by something he hardly recognized, he placed the knife in her hand and folded her trembling fingers about it. One of her palms was opened to the bone.

She could not raise herself enough to strike at his body again. Gasping, she lashed the blade across his forearm and then dropped it again.

“I have not the strength,” she whispered. Maksim could barely hear her over the pleasant buzz of evening in Cadiz, gulls crying over the rooftops, hooves and wheels on the cobbles, the distant chime of bells from the ships shifting on the harbor waves.

“And if you had the strength, that is what you would do? Spend it on stabbing me?”

Her chin dipped in a nod. There were other people passing the mouth of the cul-de-sac, children playing with a hoop, bright saffron and poppy frocks catching the sunset light, and this woman had no thought of calling for help. She only clenched her blood-slick fingers closer around the hilt of her knife.

Maksim said, “You have a fine spirit for a woman.”

The woman's eyes looked strange and flat; he wondered if she was still awake, really, and if she was afraid. Her heart was not beating so fast now. It skipped and started, the way a sparrow closes its wings in flight and then flutters them hard again.

The blood scent was too much; Maksim had kept himself on a leash all week at sea. He stopped considering and bent down to taste the freshest rivulet at her temple.

She twisted like a snake and bit him.

“I think you are meant to live,” Maksim said. “Here.” And he laid his opened arm to her lips and let her taste what it meant to be
kin
.

She spat and fought him for a moment, but he bore down, free hand tight on her jaw. Then she bit him again, right on the fresh cut, making him jerk and laugh and lap at her face. She was shivering now, heartbeat picking up again, stronger under the grip of Maksim's thumb.

“Easy,” he crooned to her. “Easy.” And her shivering abated until he could barely feel it, only a hint of it traveling through his frame as he lay with his head pressed close to her sternum and licked the dried blood from over her throat.

After a while, the woman's breath slowed to long, shallow sighs, and her eyes fell nearly shut, and her hand cupped lax over Maksim's elbow, almost cradling his arm to her slack open lips. Maksim sat up and spat on a handkerchief and wiped his face clean. He made bandages for the woman's gored hand and breast, as well as he knew how; the loss of blood would maybe have killed her if Maksim had not happened by, but more likely, it would have been a long death by fever, infection, her humors unbalancing themselves while she lay abed. That would not happen now. He felt almost as if he had done a good deed.

Maksim pillowed her head on his folded coat and went back out into the street. He felt lovely now, blood-drunk and exhausted and surging with life, all the tension of the last week spent. His head nearly spun with it, as with the best liquor, and he had to school his face to sobriety before he met someone.

Two women, Spaniards, came his way, carrying bolts of cloth. He called out to them in English, “There's been a crime. A lady is hurt.” He pointed back toward the wall.

His own disarray, his unsteadiness, the blood on his clothing must have spoken for him. The women led him to sit against a salmon-colored wall at the edge of the cul-de-sac, and one of them gave him a drink from a wineskin while the other sought whatever passed for the law here. The siege might have left the city battered, but in the half year since it seemed to have rebounded thoroughly—the street and the nearby plaza buzzed with people, sailors and soldiers of all the allied armies, fisherfolk and blacksmiths, priests and clerks, and, once they were aware of the incident, every one of them seemed to have a reason to come over and look at Maksim and the lady he'd found.

In no very long time, Maksim was following quite a procession uphill farther into the town: a litter carrying the injured woman, a pair of young men in official-looking uniforms, and a rabble of attendants, including the two women Maksim had approached and several young children, all of them chattering in Spanish.

They seemed to know where the injured woman lived; they brought her right to a townhouse door and made a hubbub there. Maksim followed everyone inside.

An elderly man ran into the parlor, wheezing with dismay. “Augusta! I did not even know she had left the house. Where is her servant? Has someone fetched the surgeon?” He collected himself and seemed to be repeating the same things in Spanish. A number of people ran out again; someone gave the old man a drink; others carried Augusta into another room.

Maksim went to follow.

The old man fixed upon him then. “Sir? You are?”

Maksim had not thought at all about who he might be, in this city, in this house.

He fell back upon a favorite subterfuge: stumbled forward, leaned upon the back of a chair, and pulled it down with him as he let himself drop.

As he lay boneless on the old gentleman's parlor matting, he thought how much he liked Cadiz already, with its sunny plazas and steep streets and its ships endlessly coming and going; and unless he very much missed his mark, he'd have a place here for a few days, at least.

Someone came to lift him to a settee, and he feigned awakening and weakly accepted a glass of what turned out to be canario. A sympathetic maiden held it to his lips for him, even.

When the surgeon had finished with Augusta, he came to Maksim, sleeves tied up and arms bloody to the elbow.

He carried a curved needle and a fine length of gut. He cut away Maksim's slashed shirt and sponged gore from the surrounding skin.

Maksim swallowed down some excellent whiskey and lay back with his eyes half-lidded as the surgeon placed his stitches, tiny piercing pains that spread into the duller flare of his injury, and though it was pain, it was also pleasure.

He slept in a narrow bed spread with a starched coverlet, and in the morning, he awoke to the sympathetic maid, who brought him black coffee and bread and told him that Miss Hillyard had survived the night, and she thanked him tearfully for saving the woman's life.

The maid had a romantic notion; Maksim could see it. She thought him a hero and a gentleman and probably had him as good as married to Augusta and herself elevated to a grander position. The maid would be disabused of it all soon enough: when Miss Hillyard began to feel the effects of Maksim's blood, she would cause a scandal one way or another. Maksim found himself eager to see where the madness would take her: he had never made a woman
kin
before, and he wondered if she would feel it as men did. She had not been raised to the sword as Maksim had—or any of the other
kin
he had encountered. She had probably been trained to sweetness all her short life, though Maksim thought, from her rage in the alley, that it had not quite taken.

For the time being, Maksim accepted the coffee, smiled bravely, and allowed that he was well enough to sit up and speak with Mr. Hillyard this morning. Two weeks, he gave it, and then Mr. Hillyard could hang, while Maksim took his daughter to the devil.

Two weeks turned out to be too generous: barely a single one had passed before Augusta was well enough for trouble.

Maksim had formed a habit of looking in on her in the mornings, after breakfasting with her father. The first few days, she'd scarcely been well enough to greet him before sleeping again, but her new nature sprang strong in her, and before long, she was sitting up in bed, eyes bright below the new scars at her hairline and prevailing upon the sympathetic maid to very improperly wait outside the door while Maksim visited.

“I do not know precisely what you did to me, Mr. Volkov,” she said, “but I fancy it was something un-Christian.”

Maksim blinked. He had not been expecting such directness, though now that he thought of it, he should have: was this not the woman who'd tried to stab him even as her own life ebbed away?

“Un-Christian,” he said. “That is true. What do you remember?”

Augusta flushed pink across the bridge of her nose. “Not much after the men left,” she said and shut her lips tight.

“Tell me of these men, then. Were they strangers to you?”

Augusta nodded. “Soldiers,” she said. “Spanish.”

“Did they…” Maksim paused for a moment, but Augusta was already continuing.

“They wanted to despoil me,” she said, looking at Maksim very straight as if shaming him for his delicacy in avoiding the question. “One of them tried, but he was dead drunk, and I scolded him, and he wilted like a cut lily, and it made him angry. Then they both beat me until I fell, and then they spat upon me and left me there to die. And I thought at first you were like them, but … you were not.”

“I did not force my attention on you?”

“If you did, I do not recall it,” Augusta said, eyes going distant and dreamy. “You gentled me and gave me something to drink and I felt … I felt…”

“I shared my nature with you,” Maksim said. “It brings healing; you must have felt it straightaway. You will want to be careful to avoid questions.”

“I am already monstrous tired of playing invalid,” Augusta admitted.

“You must keep at it,” Maksim said, “but if you are good, I will squire you out after the house is abed.”

“I will be ready for a bacchanal at this rate,” Augusta said moodily, fidgeting with her coverlet.

“It takes us all so,” Maksim said. “But I had not expected it to come over you this early. Hold tight, and have your maid send for me if you have need.”

Augusta made it through the day without issue, or so Maksim inferred from the absence of any message, but that very evening, as soon as her father's lamp was snuffed, she was scratching at Maksim's bedchamber door, already dressed and bearing a flask of her father's finest.

She knew Cadiz scarcely better than Maksim did; she and her father had come from London only after the siege had ended, pursuing some business. Augusta waved her hand impatiently at Maksim's questions and said, “Does it matter? You promised me a bacchanal, not a polite conversation. I expect you to deliver.”

As it turned out, Augusta made a splendid maenad: fire-eyed, flushed with whiskey and exercise. Maksim watched her from the corner of the public house he'd chosen.

She led another girl down the floor, a dusky girl with wild curls tumbled from her scarf. Both of them were laughing, their skirts kilted up to display immodest ankles.

Around them, a circle of men applauded, clapped, and stamped. Maksim scanned the faces: enthusiastic, lascivious, drunk, keen. Rough men, the kind of men he assumed Augusta had not had cause to meet before now.

Her father seemed to have kept her on the shelf, dressed in white, pouring tea for his associates. Maksim thought it a great waste.

The fiddler in the corner struck a triumphant finish. Augusta and her partner spun apart to curtsy to the room and back together to salute each other. Augusta kissed the girl's hand, laughing up at her with mocking eyes, and they parted—the girl to pour wine and wipe the bar, Augusta to stand beside Maksim, chest heaving, hand pressed to the spot where the knife had nearly gored her heart.