by E. P. Clark
“I’m not tired,” Dasha said quietly, standing up and gently pushing the others back with hands that were entirely flame-free. “But when I see anyone suffering, especially innocent animals, I become very angry.”
“Come on,” said Aunty Olga, giving her a very strange look, as if Dasha had suddenly started speaking in some foreign tongue. “Let’s go back to the kremlin,” she said, taking Dasha by the arm. “It’s time to eat anyway. Come on.” She tossed a coin at the man with the bear, who caught it neatly and dropped it in his shirt pocket. He gave Dasha an even stranger, and much more irritated, look than Aunty Olga had, as if she were some cruel trickster spirit sent to plague him, and jerked hard at the bear’s chain and then gave him a kick for good measure as he shuffled with slow painful steps back into the cage.
“Never mind,” he called out to the crowd. “He’ll dance again for you, never you worry! And more besides! We have all sorts of entertainment for every taste! Anything you want, we can provide!”
Aunty Olga began leading Dasha away from the market. Dasha glanced back and saw that a crowd was still gathered around the spot where she had been standing, and that, denied the spectacle of any further fits from her, were now turning their attention to the bear, who was being dragged out of the cage again and being forced to dance once more. Dasha could see his life, unfurling before her like a scroll detailing some famous history, she could see an entire life of caging and kicks, an entire life—worst of all—of not being real to everyone around him, and knowing it. He didn’t have words—just as she hadn’t, back there!—but he still knew things, he still knew what everyone around him was feeling, at least as clearly as Dasha did, probably even more so. He knew things that those around him didn’t, he saw them when they didn’t see him, felt them when they didn’t feel him, heard them when they didn’t hear him, tried to speak to them when they didn’t believe he even existed, other than as a heavy shuffling body for them to look at so that they could tell themselves that they themselves did not have heavy shuffling bodies.
Aunty Olga pulled Dasha around a corner, and the market disappeared. A pang went through Dasha, and she knew she’d done something very wrong, made the right choice that was really the wrong one, dreadfully wrong, and that she needed to go back and rescue the bear, save him from all those who would count themselves her kin and yet destroy everything she held dear, but she couldn’t see how, all she could see was failure, every path, every possibility that she saw led to failure and even more suffering than before, and then the kremlin wall was rising up in front of Dasha, and they were through the gate, and it was too late.
“Let’s go see if there’s any food waiting for us,” Aunty Olga said, in a falsely bright voice, like that of a mother trying and failing to lie to a sick child and tell her that she was well. “And I’ll send for Dima. You were always fond of him, weren’t you, Dasha? I’m sure you’d like to see him.”
“Of course,” Dasha agreed, nodding her head, which felt huge, and suspended somewhere on the far side of the corridor from her body. She followed Aunty Olga obediently to the chamber where they had taken their meals, and sat down, still obediently doing as she was told, as Aunty Olga went off to procure them some food, companionship, and whatever else she deemed necessary for Dasha’s recovery.
***
The proffered food mainly made Dasha feel queasy, but she ate it down anyway, not wanting to hurt Aunty Olga’s feelings, and hoped that the rumblings in her belly weren’t too obvious to everyone around her. The arrival of Dmitry Marusyevich did make her feel better, even though it was a shock to see him looking almost as old as Aunty Olga. He still stood straight and tall, and strode with energy into the room on his long legs, but his hair was completely silver, and every inch of his face was lined. Which only made his smile as he saw Dasha even deeper and broader, but still, it should have been his granddaughter he greeted with that smile, she thought, not the daughter of some woman who lived hundreds of versts away, and had no blood ties to him. But he had no daughters at all, and therefore no granddaughters, and Dasha, she guessed, was the closest he was ever going to get.
If that thought troubled him, though, he gave no sign of it, throwing his arms around Dasha and kissing both her cheeks, before holding her out and saying, “But I shouldn’t be doing this any more! You’re a proper Tsarinovna now! I should be bowing down to you!”
“Don’t be silly, Dmitry Marusyevich,” she said, looking down at his boots in embarrassment.
“Are you sure she’s yours, Svetoslavych?” said Dmitry Marusyevich, laughing and giving her a squeeze around the shoulders. “I never thought I’d see you with a shy daughter!”
“Since I don’t have any brothers that I know of, yes,” Oleg told him, grinning. The pride in his voice made Dasha feel even sicker. “Whose else’s would she be? Just look at her! If she’s not my daughter, I’m blind and a fool!”
Dmitry Marusyevich eyed her up and down again. “You have a point,” he said. “And look!” He let go of Dasha, allowing her to flop down on a bench and hide her face as best she could, and turned to Svetochka. “It’s Svetochka! Do you remember? Olga Vasilisovna and I came through Khladniye Vody, oh, five or six summers ago, and I brought you a little wooden horse. Only,” he smiled at the memory, “you told me toys were for little children, and you were almost a woman grown, and you gave it away. And Olga Vasilisovna wanted to give you a new set of clothes, she had them made specially for you here in Lesnograd, but they were all too small, and you had to give those away too. So in the end you got nothing from us, despite all our good intentions! My, how you cried! And told us never to come back again, too. But here you are now.” He went over and embraced Svetochka, who stood there with the expression of a dog suffering the attentions of a spoiled child, and backed away till there was a bench between him and her as soon as he released her.
“Svetochka’ll be joining you,” Oleg told him. “Well, Olga. She’ll be coming to stay with Olga, travel with her, things like that.”
“So I hear,” said Dmitry Marusyevich, with another warm smile for Svetochka, who smiled weakly and retreated till her back was against the wall in response.
“Dima,” said Aunty Olga, “why don’t you take Svetochka and Susanna Gulisovna to…to…take them out and…”
“Spar with them,” put in Oleg. “I’ve been training with them, but we haven’t sparred in days, not since…” he glanced awkwardly at Dasha, “anyway. It’ll do them good to spar with someone other than me.”
There was a pause that was slightly too long before Dmitry Marusyevich said, too brightly, “Of course! Come on, girls, let’s see what you can do.”
“I don’t want to spar,” mumbled Svetochka, speaking to her boots. “I’m not any good at it.” But she was chivvied out of the chamber anyway, leaving Dasha alone with Aunty Olga and Oleg.
“How long?” Aunty Olga demanded as soon as the others were gone. “How long have you been having fits, Dasha? And why hasn’t your mother told me anything of this!” She looked over at Oleg. “Why haven’t you told me anything of this? Why hasn’t anyone told me anything about this? Why hasn’t…Fits are serious! People die from fits! Not that that’s going to happen to you,” she added quickly, seeing the look on Dasha’s face. “But why hasn’t anything been done about this? You should have been taken to see a healer as soon as you got here! You shouldn’t have been let out alone, you shouldn’t have been let out of our sight, not even for an instant! How could you have ignored it?” Now she was almost shouting, as she turned to Oleg. “How could you let her out of her sight even for an instant, knowing her delicate condition?! How could…”
“It wasn’t exactly up to me,” said Oleg drily. “It was mainly Dasha’s doing.”
“That’s no excuse! You’re her father! You’re the one watching over her! And what is her mother thinking, letting her go off like this! She should be safe back in Krasnograd, not gallivanting all over the countryside, weakening herself, putting herself in the god
s know what kind of danger! Someone should be doing something about this! Someone should be watching over her!”
I’m not Lisochka! Dasha wanted to shout. You can’t save her by stifling me! But when she imagined herself saying that, she saw the hurt that would bloom on Aunty Olga’s face, and how little good it would do. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anything else to say either, so she just sat there in silence while Oleg and Aunty Olga argued over her as if she weren’t even there, until the prickles began to spread across her scalp again. Their argument came to an abrupt halt when she shrieked and smacked her head against the wall.
“Dasha!” cried Aunty Olga. “What are you doing! What are you doing! Be more careful!”
“I can’t,” she told Aunty Olga. “It’s a fit. If I could control it, it wouldn’t be a fit.”
“Of course you can control it! Just…try harder! Try harder, and be more careful! You have to be careful, Dasha, you have to be careful! There’s only one of you, and, and…be more careful!”
“When you tell me to be careful, you just make me feel like hurting myself more,” Dasha told her. She thought that was a perfectly sensible thing to say, especially since it was true, and also in keeping with Aunty Olga’s own bluffness, but instead of the nod and the laugh she had been expecting, Aunty Olga’s face crumpled up as if Dasha had struck her.
“I’ve been telling her to be careful this whole journey, and it hasn’t done any good at all,” Oleg told Aunty Olga. “And be fair: would you expect it to? When was I ever careful? When were you ever careful, Olya? Remember yourself at seventeen!”
Dasha thought that was even more sensible than what she had said, but Aunty Olga seemed determined not to be sensible. Instead of agreeing with Oleg, her face crumpled up even further, till she looked like the last of last year’s apples, and she said, “She isn’t me! And she certainly isn’t you! She’s…precious.”
“Yes, well, that never stopped you from getting into trouble,” said Oleg. “Or running away, or doing any number of thoughtless things.”
“I’m not her!”
“No, thank the gods,” said Oleg. Dasha thought he might be struggling not to smile, and for the first time she felt the fact that Olga was his daughter, just as she was. She normally saw them as brother and sister, as they pretended to be, and the same age, although now Aunty Olga looked even older than him. But he was her father, and had been a man grown before Aunty Olga had even been born, and just now, when he was looking at Aunty Olga with amused patience, Dasha could see that, feel that he was trying to be a father not only to her but to Aunty Olga, poor at it as he was. But right now he for once seemed to be able to find the right words. “Dasha’s not you, Olya, and the gods forbid that you should ever have a daughter like yourself, just as such a punishment would be.” Now he did permit himself a small smile. “And it’s not Dasha’s fault that she’s sick—”
“I am NOT sick!” Dasha exclaimed.
“Dasha, you have fits, you have the falling sickness!” Aunty Olga told her. “You need to be—”
“I do NOT have the falling sickness!” Dasha protested.
“Dasha, you just had two fits and it’s barely even midday! You have the falling sickness! How could your mother…”
“It’s not the falling sickness,” Dasha interrupted her. “It’s my gift.”
“Gift! What kind of gift causes fits!”
“Mine, apparently,” said Dasha.
“Your mother never had fits!”
“Except when she did,” Oleg put in.
“She didn’t!”
“Didn’t she faint and fall off her horse a time or two, when she was riding with you? Marusich still clutches at his heart whenever he thinks of it.”
“That was different! And she was a woman grown! It was different!”
“Well, different or not, Dasha’s here now,” Oleg said, before Aunty Olga could say any of the other things she looked as if she wanted to say. “And she made it this far without coming to any harm, so like as not she’ll make it back. And if she has the falling sickness, well, most don’t die from it, and there’s little we can do about it anyway, so I don’t see what crying and shouting and pulling out our hair will do about it, other than drive her to another fit.”
“I get fits when I’m angry,” Dasha said. “Or upset. But it’s my gift, it’s not a sickness, it’s my gift. I can’t control it, and so I get fits instead.”
“Well, why hasn’t your mother had you trained?” Aunty Olga demanded, snatching at this new thing to criticize Dasha’s mother for, which Dasha didn’t think was fair at all. “I thought she was having you trained! She told me she had the best sorceresses in Krasnograd training you. Not that that means much, but she should have done something, she should have gotten someone to train you…”
“She did,” Dasha said. “Well, she had sorceresses come try to train me, but it didn’t do any good. I’m hopeless at magic. Except that I’m not, and it’s causing these fits.”
“Have some of our sorceresses come look at her,” Oleg suggested. “Maybe they’ll know something those Southern sorceresses didn’t. And she should go to the sanctuary too, the one where…the one near here.”
“And a healer,” said Aunty Olga, her mouth set in a grim line. “I’m having a healer, a proper healer, not one of those Southerners, come look at her. I’m not leaving anything to chance, I’m not sitting aside and watching as she hurts herself, I’m not neglecting her the way everyone else seems determined to! Come, Dasha: you should go to your chamber and rest, while I call a healer for you.”
“I don’t need a healer,” Dasha argued. “I’m not sick at all!”
“Nonsense! You can’t be trusted to know if you’re sick or well. Now come upstairs and lie down quietly in your chamber, or I’ll lock you up there for the rest of your stay here.”
Dasha thought Aunty Olga must be joking, or at least ignorant of the simple cause of the fits, but all Dasha’s explanations that the fit had happened because she was angry fell on deaf ears, even though she repeated it three times as she was being marched upstairs to her chamber.
“Would you have lain here quietly, when you were my age?” Dasha asked, when Aunty Olga pushed her down on the bed by main force.
“I? I…no,” said Aunty Olga. She clutched at her arm for a moment, before shaking her head and letting it go. “But I’m not an example to you, my girl. You shouldn’t do what I did. You should do everything differently from me. And you will! You won’t make the same mistakes I made, I’ll make sure of that! Now lie here and don’t move while I fetch the healer!” And she marched out, the sound of her slamming—and locking!!—the door drowning out Dasha’s spluttering protests at being locked up like a criminal or a little child, just because she had had the misfortune to have a fit. Having fits, she wanted to tell Aunty Olga, didn’t mean she was stupid or mad or dangerous. She was still the same person she had been that morning, she wanted to say, when Aunty Olga had confided in her and seemed to be looking to her for help, but the door was long closed and Aunty Olga was long gone before she was able to come up with those words in a form she could have uttered aloud.
Chapter Eleven
Once Dasha realized that she really was locked in her own bedchamber, and for her own good, the prickling started again, this time starting at the base of her throat and spreading around to the back of her neck and rising up to her scalp and then over her head and down onto her forehead, till she wanted to scream and claw at her eyes and beat her head against the door. Which would make it rather more difficult to convince Aunty Olga and the healer that she wasn’t mad or ill. She settled for pacing the floor while digging her nails into her forehead, and when that brought some relief, she sat back down on the bed, her head hanging. How could Aunty Olga do this to her! The one person she’d trusted to take her side and not be hysterical and crazy! The one person she’d always thought would love her no matter what, who would always have her back! The person she’d been running to
wards when she’d run away from all the others! And it was that very person who had locked her up and was determined to ruin everything! How exactly Aunty Olga’s actions were going to ruin everything, Dasha couldn’t say, except that she felt BETRAYED, this day hadn’t gone at all as she had wanted or expected and she had been BETRAYED, and everything was a mess, everything had gone wrong, it was all ruined, ruined, ruined, and she had never been able to do anything right and never would be able to, she couldn’t even do something simple like rescue that poor bear from his captivity, which should have been so easy but instead Dasha had choked and fallen silent like the worst kind of coward, and then when she had tried to do something, instead of succeeding, she’d been shouted at and locked up herself by the very people who claimed to love her and have her best interests at heart. And now some strange woman was going to come and poke and prod at her and ask her embarrassing questions and maybe tell Aunty Olga that she was ill, really ill, and would have to spend the rest of her life locked up for her own good, and, and…tears were falling on Dasha’s hands, and making a sizzling noise as they landed.
Why now! she thought, blowing at the flames dancing across her fingers and shaking her hands to try to put them out. Why couldn’t this have happened back at the market? Why couldn’t I have summoned flames when I needed them, instead of falling into that stupid fit?! Why does my body and my magic keep letting me down, just when I need it most? Despite all her efforts, the flames were not going out. They were not harming her or hurting her, but she was afraid to touch anything, including her own clothes, for fear of setting them on fire. Blowing on the flames only made them leap higher. Dasha tried willing them to go out, and even commanding them “Go out!” out loud, which had absolutely no effect whatsoever. She went over to the ewer of water on the table by the wall and tried plunging one hand in, and then the other. The flames were burning just as brightly when she pulled her hands out as when she had put them in.
