The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “You’re dangerous, you know. Dangerous to others.”

  I know.

  “That must not be very pleasant.”

  More pleasant than when others were dangerous to me.

  Dasha couldn’t really argue with that. “Why now?” she asked instead. “Why are you revealing yourself to me now?”

  I am stronger here. I am not alone.

  The prickling on Dasha’s scalp grew stronger. “Not alone?” she repeated.

  No. There are other water-maidens here. Other water-maidens have been drawn to this place. I could feel the pull too. This is a strong place for us. More and more are coming.

  “Ah…well…well…why? Why is this a strong place for you?”

  Vika’s steam-shape billowed like a shrug. Ask the others, Tsarinovna.

  Dasha looked around wildly, expecting to see more shapes forming out of the steam. But there was only Vika, staring at her impassively. “How do I ask them?” she asked.

  That is up to them.

  “Tsarinovna?” It was the voice of the tall sister, calling from the antechamber. “I don’t mean to disturb you, but there is food waiting for you, when you are ready.”

  “Coming!” Dasha called back. She looked back at the figure of Vika, expecting it to disappear, but it stayed where it was, still watching her impassively. Dasha stood.

  “I’m leaving now,” she announced to Vika.

  And I am coming with you. The steam gave a great billow, blowing into Dasha’s face and choking her. When she was done coughing and sputtering, most of the steam was gone, along with Vika.

  Tfoo! She’s slipped inside of me! Dasha looked herself over carefully, but she looked just the same as she had before. If Vika was inside of her, she was leaving no trace. Dasha didn’t feel any different, either. Perhaps Vika would reveal herself at a later point. Dasha dumped the rest of the water over herself to rinse off, dried off, and went into the antechamber to dress.

  She wanted to put her own clothes back on, but now that she was clean, they were too dirty to touch. She turned them inside out, trying to touch them as little as possible, and tried to jam them into her pack. But A Compilation of Tales was in the way, so she had to take it out, stuff the dirty clothes into her pack, and carry the book in her free hand.

  The sanctuary robe she had been given was of scratchy wool, which protected her against the evening chill as she followed the tall sister from the bathhouse to the main building, but promised an evening of itchiness ahead. Dasha thought about asking the tall sister how they all stood wearing the robes day after day, but then imagined how that would make her sound, and how the sister might become offended, and so said instead, “I have fresh clothes in my other pack. They must be with my companions. Do you know if they are here?”

  “They got in last evening, Tsarinovna, and we put them in the visitors’ cabin. Don’t worry, they’re comfortable enough, and we can send someone to fetch your things tomorrow morning.”

  Which meant just one night in this itchy wool, Dasha thought. That wasn’t so bad. Well, it wouldn’t be so bad once it was over. Right now it loomed ahead of her like an interminable trial.

  “And here we go, Tsarinovna, the dining chamber is just through this door over here. We’ve taken to barring the doors at night, to our shame, but this little one should still be open. We’ll just slip through here, past the garden…ah. The mist is gathering. Let’s go around the other way.”

  “The mist is dangerous, then?” asked Dasha, as they turned around and the tall sister began leading her at a brisk pace in the opposite direction, away from the mist that was pooling in the garden and towards the front entrance to the main building. “Is it because of water-maidens?”

  The tall sister stopped dead. “How did you…what do you know about…them?” she asked.

  “Well…”

  “Never mind. Here isn’t the place to talk of it. Come, we should get inside first. Then you can tell your story. To Vlastomila Serafimiyevna. This is beyond the likes of me.”

  The tall sister had to knock on the big front doors to the main building, and assure the sister who apparently was sitting in guard on the other side of who she was, and then wait while the doors were unbarred from the inside, and the doors, which were sturdy but worn and warped, were painfully pulled open, creaking and groaning like living things.

  “There’s mist gathering in the garden, Bronya,” said the tall sister.

  “Good you came in this way, then, Senya,” said Sister Bronislava, pulling the doors shut again as quickly as possible and barring them. “I’ll warn the others, and you do likewise.”

  “I’m on my way to Vlastomila Serafimiyevna as we speak, to bring the Tsarinovna to her.” Sister Yeseniya, that is, the tall sister, paused to allow Sister Bronislava to bow at Dasha. “I’ll tell her, and then warn the others.”

  “What about my father and the guards?” Dasha asked, as Sister Yeseniya led her away from the main doors. “Are they in danger? Should we go warn them?”

  “We warned them when we took them there not to stray from the cabin, Tsarinovna, especially at night, or when the mist is heavy. Now it is too dangerous for anyone to venture outside. Do not look so worried, Tsarinovna! They have your father with them. Like as not they’re safer with him than we are here.”

  That was probably meant to sound more reassuring than it did, so Dasha smiled at Sister Yeseniya as if she had, in fact, been reassured, and followed her all the way through the large building to the far end of it, where a large comfortable chamber full of tables and benches had been brightly lit with torches on every wall against the late-evening twilight. A bowl of what Dasha could smell from the threshold was borshch was steaming on one table, with a slice of bread sprinkled with salt and two pies by its side. A tall woman was sitting on the neighboring bench.

  “Tsarinovna!” cried the woman, rising as soon as Dasha stepped into the chamber. She was old enough to be Dasha’s grandmother at least, but even though her hair was completely white, she stood tall and straight, and when she strode over to greet Dasha, her steps were quick and springy, and her bow was deep and graceful. The bright smile she bestowed on Dasha did not hide her equally bright gaze, or the air of command that hovered around her like a second skin. She was, Dasha thought, how Dasha had always thought her grandmother should have been.

  “You can’t know how eagerly I have been waiting for this day, Tsarinovna!” the woman who must have been Vlastomila Serafimiyevna told her, leading her around to sit in front of the food. She took up the piece of bread and split it in half, offering one piece to Dasha, while taking the other for herself.

  “I thank you for…” Dasha began.

  “There is mist gathering in the garden, Vlastomila Serafimiyevna,” Sister Yeseniya interrupted, causing Vlastomila Serafimiyevna to pause mid-bite. “We had to go around to the main doors to come in from the bathhouse. And…” She nodded expressively towards Dasha.

  “Thank you for that, Sister Yeseniya,” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna told her. “Please go warn the others to remain inside for the rest of the night.”

  Sister Yeseniya bowed and left, moving at a half-jog. Vlastomila Serafimiyevna took a seat on the bench next to Dasha’s.

  “Is the mist caused by water-maidens?” Dasha asked, swallowing back her own piece of the salty bread. “Are you being troubled by them?”

  “I see you have your mother’s quickness of wit,” said Vlastomila Serafimiyevna, after a moment of looking at Dasha in thinly veiled surprise. “Not that I should be surprised. And as I said, I have been waiting for so long—your whole life!—to welcome you here. It was here where…”

  “I was conceived?” Dasha put in.

  “Your parents met, I was going to say, but yes. We all knew. Your mother told you?”

  “No. I guessed. I’m sure that is very nice for you, but I don’t like thinking about it very much, to be honest.”

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna smiled. “Of course you don’t, Tsarinovna. We
all feel squeamish when we gaze too closely upon our origins. And it matters little to you right now. How did you know about the water-maidens? Did you guess that too?”

  “Sort of,” said Dasha, starting on the soup. She hoped that in her haste to eat she wouldn’t splash her robe with borshch, which, her maids had informed her more than once, was almost impossible to wash out of clothing. She looked down at her robe. Borshch stains were probably the least of its concerns, and were unlikely to show anyway.

  “Have water-maidens come to you, Tsarinovna?” asked Vlastomila Serafimiyevna. Her gray eyes were bright as they looked first at the book lying next to Dasha’s bowl, and then tracked up and down Dasha’s face, as if she knew something Dasha did not, and could see the truth there. Which perhaps she could.

  “A water-maiden,” Dasha told her. “Vika.”

  “Here in our sanctuary?”

  “No. Well, yes. She came to me just now in the bathhouse. But she first appeared to me when we were on our way to the castrates’ sanctuary. And…I think she might be inside of me. She…I took her in when we first met…and then just now she appeared in the steam, but then she disappeared again, and I think I…inhaled her.”

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna was nodding. “I think I should hear this story in more detail, Tsarinovna, if you would be willing to indulge me,” she said.

  So Dasha told her the story, as best she herself understood it, of how she had encountered Vika in the woods, thinking she was a real girl, how she had lunged at Vika and gained her memories and, it seemed, taken her spirit inside of her, how she had, she thought, released Vika that night of the storm when she had jumped into the flooding stream, but how she had had a strange affinity for water ever since, and—

  “You did not have this affinity for water before?” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna interrupted her to ask.

  “No. I was…I was afraid of it. Oh, not to drink, or anything like that, although…my mother thinks it causes disease, you know, well, dirty water does, and so we always drank it boiled. So I suppose you could say I was afraid of water in a way. And I was afraid of pools, streams, things like that. I was afraid of jumping into them, swimming, getting sucked down.” She shuddered at the thought. “But ever since I encountered Vika, it’s the opposite. I know when it’s going to rain, and whenever I see water, I want to jump into it. Sometimes I do it without even thinking. Yesterday, when I was with Gray Wolf, I just…ran straight up to a bank and threw myself off of it into a deep stream. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even entirely know what I was doing. It was as if something had taken over me and was controlling me.”

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna nodded. “And this evening in the bathhouse?”

  “I was afraid at first, because the domoviye keep appearing to me in bathhouses, but I didn’t see any sign of them. Just as I was starting to relax, the steam started to billow, and then it formed Vika’s shape. She wasn’t solid, like she was when I first encountered her, she couldn’t touch things or talk, but it was her form and her face that I could see, and her voice that I could hear inside my head. And then the steam billowed again, and I started to cough, and when I could breathe again, it was all gone. Vika and the steam. So I think I inhaled it. Them.”

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna nodded again. “Like as not that is correct, Tsarinovna.” She fell silent, tracing the tabletop with one finger as if deep in thought.

  “So what about the water-maidens here?” Dasha asked. “My mother never mentioned anything about them.”

  “She was here in winter, Tsarinovna. She would not have seen them then even if they had been troubling us at the time, which they were not. They are more recent.”

  “What happened? Why did they decide to come here?”

  “A good question, Tsarinovna.” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna looked up from where she had been tracing on the tabletop. “Tell me, Tsarinovna,” she asked. “What are your gifts?”

  “My gifts? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I do not know, Tsarinovna. That is why I am asking.”

  “Oh. Well…they’re not very good, to be honest.”

  “How so, Tsarinovna?”

  “I get visions. Only they’re not very useful. A lot of the time they’re lies. Sometimes I can get true ones now, but I still can’t control them properly, summon them whenever I need them, and I can’t always do anything about the things I do see, even if they’re true, which often they aren’t. They’re just warnings, I think, but all they do is make me more worried. And other than that I’m horrible at magic. Well, I suppose I can tell when it’s going to rain now, although I don’t think that’s my real magic. And I’ve always known which way West is, which sometimes is useful, even though I don’t know why I have that as a gift at all. And…”

  “Yes, Tsarinovna?” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna prompted when Dasha trailed off.

  “Well, I keep getting these fits, and I got them when we came upon the prayer trees here, but that’s not what I wanted to say. What I meant to say was that…sometimes my hands catch on fire.”

  “Oh?” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna sat bolt upright and fixed Dasha with a gaze of what was unmistakably excitement. “Can you show me, Tsarinovna?”

  “No,” Dasha told her glumly. “I can’t control it. I can’t control any of it; that’s the problem. The water-sense and the direction-sense just happen to me, and the visions, they sort of…pounce on me. Like the fits. And the flames…they happen when I’m really angry, but I can’t summon it, and when it happens I can’t put it out. Once I even plunged them into a ewer of water to try to quench the flames, but they kept on burning. The flames can burn other things, anything that I touch will catch on fire, but they don’t burn me. At first I wouldn’t even notice them until I started burning things.”

  “Have you spoken to a sorceress about this, Tsarinovna?”

  “No. Not about the things that have started happening recently, since I left Krasnograd. I took lessons from sorceresses for years, but I made very little progress. Some of them—the more honest ones—said that I was the least gifted person they had ever tried to teach. And even now that magic is…starting to flow through me, I guess, or something like that, I can’t control it, I can’t do anything with it, and it’s as much a burden and a danger as it is a gift!”

  “Look at your hands, Tsarinovna,” said Vlastomila Serafimiyevna.

  Dasha looked down at her hands. Little sparks were jumping from finger to finger.

  “You see!” She tried slapping them and blowing on them, but they only grew from sparks into tiny tongues of flame, like a candle that had just been lit.

  “Give me your hands, Tsarinovna.”

  “I’ll burn you!”

  “I will pray for protection,” said Vlastomila Serafimiyevna. Dasha couldn’t tell if she was serious or if she was laughing at Dasha’s concern, but she held out her hands. Vlastomila Serafimiyevna took them in her own hands, which felt cool and strong. In a heartbeat, the flames all winked out.

  “How did you do that?” Dasha asked. “No one’s been able to do that!”

  “Watch, Tsarinovna,” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna told her. A heartbeat later, the little flames were dancing across both their fingers. Vlastomila Serafimiyevna allowed them to play across their hands for a moment, and then extinguished them again, before dropping Dasha’s hands.

  “Sometimes faith is stronger than will, Tsarinovna,” she told Dasha.

  “Really?” asked Dasha.

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna winked at her, which was not at all the response Dasha had been looking for. Dasha glared at her for a moment, and then a question occurred to her. “Can you do that with anyone?” she asked. “Maybe it’s not me at all. Maybe it’s your gift, not mine.”

  Vlastomila Serafimiyevna shook her head. “It is my faith, Tsarinovna, but it is your gift. You have to have the affinity for flame already in your flesh, if you wish to let the fire come out. Which you do, but I do not, not nearly so much. I can light a candle, and I can le
t your flames burn free, but that is the extent of my abilities. I am a woman of the woods, Tsarinovna, and my affinity is not for flame but for trees and earth and sky and living things.”

  “What am I, then, death?” Dasha asked.

  She had said it mainly to be clever, and expected Vlastomila Serafimiyevna to deny it vigorously, but instead she nodded. “Do not look like that, Tsarinovna!” she said. “You are fire, yes, which kills but also brings living warmth. Just as you are water, which drowns and nourishes in equal measure. A person is normally either one or the other, but you, Tsarinovna, are both, you contain them both within a single flesh, and they are battling against each other, fighting each other within your body. It is no wonder you cannot control them, and that instead you are having fits.”

  “Why did no one ever tell me this?” cried Dasha. “Why did no one…why are you the first to tell me this?!”

  “Because I am the first to see it, Tsarinovna? It is not common. And like as not, the two things were extinguishing each other in their battle, so that it was hidden from anyone who tried to look. But now, as the flames in you grow hotter, and the water rises higher, they can no longer be contained, they can no longer remain hidden, and now they are bursting forth, bursting your body’s banks, burning through its hearth, and making themselves known whether you will it or no.”

  “Can you teach me to control it? Perhaps faith is stronger than will, just as you said. Perhaps I need to learn from you, rather than from a sorceress. Perhaps…”

  A knock at the door interrupted Dasha before she could get her request out, or hear Vlastomila Serafimiyevna’s answer to it. “Come in!” called Vlastomila Serafimiyevna.

  “Begging your pardon, Vlastomila Serafimiyevna.” It was Sister Yeseniya, all out of breath. “I wouldn’t interrupt, but…”

  “Yes?”

  “The mist,” blurted out Sister Yeseniya. “It’s coming through the door. It’s coming inside.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Where?” Vlastomila Serafimiyevna stood up so abruptly her bench fell over with a loud bang, making Dasha jump and slop half her borshch down her front. Well, now she definitely knew that spilled borshch was going to show even on this shabby dark gray robe, and soon she would find out how well it washed out. At least she hadn’t gotten any on the book. The book…for a moment the title appeared to read Spirits of the North.