I sighed. “Why did I suddenly start seeing ghosts when I came to Europe?”
“You probably always saw them but mistook them for other people.” Tania hugged her basket tighter against her side, one hand reaching protectively under the red-and-white checked cloth covering it.
“About that,” I said. “I have the vaguest memory. Maybe it’s not even memory, but anyway. When I was real little. I do remember being scolded for pretending someone was there. My grandmother was adamant about pretense. That’s all I remember, her being mad at me for the first time.”
Tania said soberly, “She had denied everything, had she not?”
We both knew the answer to that and fell into silence.
I brooded as we climbed, first inventing excuses for Alec’s avoiding me at the Hanging Gardens and when none of those were convincing, totting up reasons for leaving Dobrenica. Meantime, Tania and I zigzagged up streets that switch-backed up the steep mountainside. Here and there I glimpsed older houses and an occasional round, tile-roofed cottage set among ancient trees. Toward the end we had to bend forward, feeling for purchase on the slippery ground. I wished we’d taken a sleigh, though that icy steepness might have been challenging even for reindeer.
Finally Tania led the way up a stone footpath past a fiercely tangled hedge of holly and hawthorn. We ducked through an arbor and emerged onto a small plateau that overlooked Riev.
The city was a beautiful sight, sloping gently below the peak of Mt. Adeliad, and divided by the shallow valley made by the River Ejya. On the cliff above the river, I could make out Beka’s house, which was much larger than I’d thought. It, too, was mostly hidden among very old trees, but I was able to make out the dome of a glass cupola, below which Prime Minister Ridotski had to be keeping his famous orchid collection, which he’d described at the masquerade during summer.
To the far right, at the highest point, the palace was like a crown, its snow-topped complication of roofs gleaming in the sun.
Below the palace, were more modest, modified mansards along the finer business streets, and everywhere else, slanted gables and a forest of chimneys. “Someone told me you used to sit on ridgepoles,” I said to Tania. “I think that’s awesome. Was that for cats?”
Tania looked down at the path. “It was to watch the dance of the mist ghosts, when the moon was full and the sky clear. Also, during the sun’s eclipse, though that only happened once, when I was eight or nine.”
“What are mist ghosts?”
She lifted her shoulders. “I do not know what else to call them. Not like the ghosts we see when we are close. These are silvery, as if made of vapor, coming and going like this.” She wiggled the fingers of her free hand. “It is as if they are almost visible and yet not.”
Chill ran through me. “I saw those. During the funeral mass.”
Tania gave me a startled look, then a slow nod. “You are the first to ever tell me you have seen them! We must go inside. They are waiting.”
I followed her up a swept stone pathway, bordered by the stumps of severely trimmed rose bushes poking out. Behind the house, on a smaller, higher cliff dotted with linden trees, inside a holly and hawthorn border, I made out rows of beehives that were blocked from view as we stepped onto a broad porch.
The house was small, no more than two or three rooms under an attic loft, the furnishings so old they brought Tante Mina’s cottage to mind—where my grandmother’s governess had lived since World War II. Inside, enthroned on a very old chair, sat little Grandmother Ziglieri, who I’d met at Anna’s wedding, wearing widow’s black. She had to be near her century mark. Her eyes were narrow, framed by countless lines, but her gaze was alert.
A young wife—recognizable as a married woman because she wore her hair tied up in a kerchief, and an apron over her skirt and tunic blouse—came forward to greet Tania, who set her basket down and lifted the checkered cloth. The two seemed about the same age. The wife had slanted eyes and red-glinting dark hair curling out from under the embroidered kerchief. She watched as Tania lifted out a kitten with a bandaged paw.
She and Tania vanished with the kitten into an adjacent room, followed by a junior-high-aged girl with honey gold braids. Then Grandmother Ziglieri said, “Come forward, please.”
Small as she was, she dominated the room. “Welcome, child.”
Seated across from her were three older women. One looked like she might be a nun. She wore a pince-nez, and her mouth looked like it smiled a lot, though she was serious now. Another, a tiny old woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair, was familiar. She wore expensive clothes with that distinctive French air.
“Have we met?” I asked.
She smiled. “At a party during summer. We spoke briefly about ballet, which was my passion when I was young. And more recently a day or two ago, you visited my brother’s home after you rescued the Baron de Vauban.”
Honoré. I remembered the smell of smoke, and my scratched up hands more than I remembered her. “You are Beka’s Great-Aunt Sarolta?”
“Yes.”
Next to her sat an old man, and in the background, near the tiny kitchen, hovered the kid with the braids; she wore a long knitted sweater, dyed a kind of streaky blue, over a skirt embroidered with flowers and leaves and birds.
Grandmother Ziglieri addressed me in Dobreni, “Do you yet speak our tongue?”
“I’m still learning, Grandmother.”
“Come forward. It is well enough for a test.”
She motioned me to the table, on which sat an honest-to-circus cliché crystal ball.
“Look. Tell me what you see.”
I sat on a hassock embroidered with entwined whitethorn leaves and red berries, and stared down into the crystal ball. Wham! Images flitted like crazed bats through my head, too quick and too splintered to catch. They spun away, leaving the twinkle of distant stars, drawing me down and down. . . .
Do not fall. I don’t know where the voice came from, or even if I imagined it instead of hearing it. I shut my eyes, and caught myself as I was about to tip off the hassock to the floor. I straightened, wrenching all those bruises down my side.
Someone exclaimed softly behind me. Grandmother Ziglieri said, “Not the sphere, Margit.”
The young wife, Margit, picked up the ball with both hands, and carried it away. Then she returned with a pyramid prism similar to the one Tania had showed me, but smaller.
The images in it were like splinters of mirror: half a baby’s face; rushes; smoke billowing from the fireplace; a woman’s watchful eye. Mine?
Another muffled exclamation, and Grandmother Ziglieri said, “It is not in balance.”
Margit looked up. “Tania?”
“I brought several,” Tania said.
A five-sided pyramid was set before me. When I bent over it, red lightning flashed in its depths, corresponding with sharp pangs in my head.
“You are angry,” the Grandmother said imperturbably. “Take a moment. Breathe out your anger. It will not serve you. It distorts what you see.”
I sighed sharply, then did some tai chi breathing as everyone waited. Another peek made me squinch my eyes shut—it was like a steadicam on speed, jittering through a smear of images too blurred and too quick to decipher. I turned away, dizzy and nauseated, restraining the urge to fling that prism through the nearest window.
“This place is a wellspring of Vrajhus,” Grandmother Ziglieri murmured.
“Wellspring?” I repeated.
The old widow turned her head. “Baroness, will you explain?” Beka’s Great-Aunt Sarolta said, “The wellspring is a place that makes it easier for you to see but is more difficult to control when you have the ability and no training. Do not attempt to see all times and all places. It is very dangerous if you attempt that and succeed.”
“Dangerous, like vampires will get me?”
A frisson went through them, a quick exchange of glances and shiftings of posture, then she said, “The danger is what some have called madness. It might b
ecome difficult to regain, and to keep, your mind in the here and now.”
Okay, that was really creepy.
“We exhort ourselves to learn control as we experiment. We start simply, and learn to control the small things. Then venture beyond. Does that ease your mind?”
“Control.” I swallowed. That made sense. From ballet to fencing to just about everything, you’re taught control of the easy stuff before you get to the hard stuff.
She said, “Now give yourself a simple goal. Try to see this room.”
The next prism Margit set before me was six-sided, the faces rectangles instead of triangles.
I braced myself, looked into one of the long rectangular faces . . . and felt the inward sense of pressure ease. No splintered bits of image or flashing lights. Framed like a widescreen TV was the room I sat in, the furnishings in slightly different places. The room was blurred by smoke haze as a wimpled woman in a long, ragged-hemmed, woolen dress tended a cauldron over the fire . . . two men sat before the fire, working with wood, one young, one old and bearded, their smocks and leathern trousers dark-hued.
Instinctively I reached past that time, and my perception shifted. Though again I saw the same room, the curtains were a different color, drawn back and tied in old-fashioned swags. A dog trotted in, the plume of his tail catching the light; I blinked, and there was a stocky, fair-haired young man in a rumpled German uniform sitting at the table, his chin stubbled, and pink from a razor scrape. He was reading a wrinkled newspaper. When I tried to focus on the newspaper’s date, the scene slid smearily—
Blink.
White curtains framed the window, and four children sat around the table, all wearing Soviet Young Pioneer kerchiefs. One was bent over a dog-eared comic—a forbidden comic during the days of foreign control. I could see the cover image in purple ink, depicting the mythical half-boy, half-faun Fyadar about whom Gran had told me stories when I was very small.
The children looked up as one, then swept the comic into a basket, a girl dumping balls of wool on top as the boy flung battered schoolbooks with Cyrillic print onto the table.
Blink.
Now I saw the room from an odd angle. It was us! It began to smear and slide, making me dizzy.
“Hold it still,” Grandmother Ziglieri said.
“I see the top of my head, as I look into the—ugh.” I shut my eyes, then opened them. “When I tried to look into the crystal inside the crystal—well, it was a mistake.” My entire body was clenched, my toes crunched up inside my boots. My scalp began prickling with sweat under my hat until I grabbed my hat off and stuffed it into the pocket of my open coat.
Nobody moved, so I bent over the prism again. This time I tried it with tai chi breathing, keeping my eyes open. One point . . . not the crystal in the middle. Grandmother Ziglieri’s intent face. Yes. I could hold that.
I tried to see what was next to her. The only thing I can compare it to is learning to ice skate—you hold the rail, venture out a step, let go, and immediately begin to skid. So you grab the rail again. Then you put your foot out once more, tentative and slow, your hand poised above the rail.
By keeping Grandmother Ziglieri at the center of the image—and seeing her as a portrait—I could sneak furtive stabs at other details: the nun’s folded hands, the Russian-style wool coat the old man wore, the wooden buttons, Tania seated on an old milking stool, watching intently. Margit hovered directly behind me, ready to move at the slightest flick of the Grandmother’s eyes.
The kid with the braids stood directly behind her, watching us all, the light from the window caught in the wisps of hair escaping from her braids and surrounding her with golden light.
I tried to widen my mental camera lens, but as soon as I saw myself it all began to slide away and then to dissolve.
Grandmother Ziglieri said, “That is enough.”
I sat back and discovered my entire body was damp with sweat, as if I’d done a couple of hours of hard fencing or danced an entire ballet.
Margit handed the prisms to Tania, who wrapped them in cloth and stowed them in her bag.
Grandmother Ziglieri said, “Do you have questions for us, child?”
“No.” I tried to get my soggy brain back online. “Yes. Amaranth. I keep seeing it everywhere, worked into stone and wood and weavings. Is it a real flower?”
The baroness said, “It is very common, with many types. Some are called weeds. Our amaranth, with the distinct heart-shaped petals around the diamond-shaped leaves, is the ever-blooming flower of Nasdrafus. We use the shape for very powerful charms.”
“There’s a door with it worked into the hinge,” I said. “At the fountain, oh, and there is one of those rowan trees, I think, only it looked . . .”
As soon as I mentioned the door, the nun stirred, and the man looked at the others. When I got to the rowan, they reacted again, and not happily. In the background, the teenager stepped back. The light limned her body, a gold-framed silhouette, head bowed.
Grandmother Ziglieri said slowly, “That tree is dead. Someone salted it.”
“Is this related to the rumors of protections being destroyed?” I hesitated, then got it out. “And vampires coming around?” I asked.
They didn’t laugh, or scoff. I found myself wishing that they would—where’s the safety of good old everyday reality when you need it?
Baroness Sarolta said, “We have discovered within recent days that many of the old protections—most untouched for generations—have been systematically demolished or defaced, over the past couple of weeks. If they were living protections, such as the hawthorn and rowan trees, the roots have been salted with hot water.”
“But people wear those protection things, don’t they? I see them in windows, too.”
The baroness touched the necklace glinting at the neck of her beautiful sweater. “Some no longer wear the protections. They believe that Vrajhus has faded, or they do not believe it exists at all. Some of this can be explained away by the teachings of the Soviets, but only in part. Vrajhus itself has its . . .” She looked to the side.
“Tides,” said the old man. “A useful metaphor, even if not correct.”
“Tides, yes. Though we talk of patterns.”
“And we of seasons.” The nun’s eyes crinkled behind the pince-nez.
“We have no measure for its waxing and waning, though many factors contribute, such as light and the flow of water,” the baroness said. “And there are elements we cannot explain. Around 1950, many of us thought that Vrajhus was fading from the world, for there was so little sign of it here. Yet we kept faith with the protections anyway.”
“Some regard them as traditional rituals,” the nun said. “A comfort, you could say.”
“As perhaps you yourself have found, it is difficult to prove these things when one person’s perceptions are not those of her neighbor.” The baroness spread her hands.
“Have you more questions?” Grandmother Ziglieri said. “I must return to my village before the weather worsens.”
Obviously I wasn’t going to learn everything in one visit. “Thank you,” I said to them all.
The grandmother gave me a dignified nod, and the nun uttered the Dobreni blessing. The baroness said, “When you experiment, remember: control small things first. You can always ask my grandniece Rebekah for clarification. Though she has much to learn—we all do, so very many things were lost when I was young—she studies diligently.”
“Thanks.” I pulled myself together and got to my feet. They were all still sitting—probably to talk about me, as soon as we were gone.
The kid walked out behind Margit, who addressed Tania in a low voice, one hand patting Tania’s basket.
The dizziness dissipated as I headed down the stone path. My senses were sharpened, almost to a painful degree: the sight of the city below, glinting in the slanting winter light; the sounds of the rising wind soughing through the evergreens above the plateau; the smell of mud and fireplace smoke; the taste of cold air.
With my heightened senses, I caught the gist of Tania’s and Margit’s conversation:
“. . . we keep the windows tight.”
“Unlock the windows, Tania. The animals have learnt to be wary. If they smell the Shadow Ones, they will not go out.”
Margit stepped back and gave the old-fashioned farewell, but she spoke all the words instead of the abbreviated version: “Go with God’s blessing.”
She vanished inside, and Tania joined me, clutching her basket. The kid stood a yard or two away on Tania’s other side, and all three of us gazed out over the city below the massing clouds, underslung like hammocks of gray wool. The top of Mt. Adeliad, up the white-coated slopes behind the palace, was already obscured.
“The city is older in the middle, isn’t it?” I asked, peering directly below, at Natalie’s neighborhood. “The palace isn’t the center. That fountain of St. Xanpia seems to be the center of the old part.”
Tania inclined her head. “The fountain was the center until the eighteenth century, when the city expanded across the river southward, joining some of the old castles that became manors. Finally their grounds were broken up, and the streets laid for the great houses along the ridge.”
I gazed over the city, thinking about how there were always layers that one didn’t know about, even if they were right under your nose. In this case, the protections.
I said, peering down at the St. Xanpia circle, “Vampires have magic, that’s what I understand.”
Tania touched her wrist, where her crystal bracelet was hidden by her coat sleeve. “They are from the Nasdrafus, and though we are taught they do not have the powers here that they do beyond the border, it is bad enough.”
I remembered Tony’s words. “Powers like glamour, that’s what I was told. What exactly does that mean?”
Tania said soberly, “What does it mean, to be attracted to one person but not to another?”
“You mean they’ve got magical pheromones?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Pheromones. . . . Sister Franciska says that is a very inexact science, for even if we identify our pheromones, why do they work for one person, but not for the next? She says that the glamour operates on a sense we are not conscious of; not as we are conscious of scent, sight, sound, taste, and touch.”
Blood Spirits Page 23
