by E. P. Clark
There was more nodding, and fierce exclamations of joy and approval. Half of Dasha wanted to join in. Those people…they were terrible, truly terrible, and they certainly deserved this, and probably much worse besides.
“And what then?” Dasha found herself asking.
The others all turned to look at her. She cringed away from their gazes.
“Then we go after other raiders the same way.”
“No, I mean…” said Dasha. “I mean, what about us then? What will happen to us?”
“You ain’t afraid, are you?” said Svetochka scornfully. “This ain’t just about us! It’s more important ‘n that! So what if some of us are caught? It’s putting a stop to these raids as counts! Putting a stop to all the awful things they does! You saw what they done to our own people here! A bit of suffering against all of that…”
“But what about us?” repeated Dasha, interrupting her. “How can we stop awful things from happening when we’re planning to do awful things ourselves? What does that make us? Who will we be after we’ve done that?”
“Heroes,” said Svetochka. “Just like what Zem’ needs! Everyone’s standing around, not knowing what to do, talking an’ talking, gabbling like hens with their heads cut off—what they need is heroes! Someone to stand in front an’ tell ‘em which way to go, just like you said! That’s what we’ll be giving ‘em! Heroes who stand in front an’ shows ‘em the way!”
Dasha found herself shaking her head, even as everyone around her was nodding. “No!” she cried. “Don’t you understand? This is the bad thing you were all afraid of! If we do this, we won’t be heroes! Or even if we are—that’s not the kind of heroes we need! That’s not the kind of heroism we need! No matter how glorious, how wonderful the ends—no matter what we’re striving for, what we’re fighting for, if we do it by burning people alive, we’re still, we’re still…we won’t be standing in the front showing the way to go, we’ll be standing in the back dragging everyone back to where we used to be! We’ll be turning Zem’ back into a land where princesses made war on each other, and tortured and killed each other’s children when they captured them!” She pulled her shortsword out of its sheath and waved it for emphasis, making everyone jump back. “You say all this like the ends justify the means, but the means are the end. However we do this, that’s how it’s going to end up, because whatever you do, that’s who you are. If we do it by cruelty and murder, we’ll just be making more cruelty and murder, and, and, and…” She dropped the sword from her shaking hands, and her stomach dropped with it, lurching painfully as if she were about to be thrown from a horse.
“An’ what?” said Svetochka, even more scornfully than before, distracting her before she could pick up the sword or sort out what her visions were screaming at her blindly. “Were this something the domoviye taught you, or were it the sisters at the sanctuary? An’ what does those soft-handed sisters know about something like this? An’ the domoviye? All they do is sit in the shadows an’ get fat off our food, if they even exist at all.” She put her hand to her brow and pretended to peer around the room, looking at shadows. “I don’t see any of ‘em here, do you?” The others all laughed, and their laughter had an ugly edge to it. Dasha’s stomach clenched with fear. Now she knew how that bear had felt…
“I say we can’t trust her,” continued Svetochka. Her face was exultant, like a drunk woman’s, and Dasha could see that her words had taken her over, just as happened to Dasha sometimes. Except instead of saying the right thing, instead of making good magic, what was pouring out was curses and cruelty. “Everyone knows the Tsarina’s fast friends with foreigners, an’ maybe more ‘n friends,” Svetochka continued, “they keep sending her men as envoys; I heard all about it while I were there in Krasnograd. An’ we all saw how our Dasha doted over that Birgit. I say she’s in league with ‘em. It ain’t us she loves: it’s them.” She was smiling, and her eyes were dancing with a light that had nothing of mirth in it. Dasha glanced over at Vladya, and saw the same light in her eyes. The flames of the burning buildings and burning people would dance in just the same way, Dasha could see it, she could see it as clearly as if it were already happening, just as she could see what Svetochka and Vladya would become, if they were to do it. Because Svetochka was right, in a sense: whatever would happen to the victims tonight would be a small thing, set against whatever would happen later, as a result of their actions. But Dasha could see just as clearly that Svetochka had it backwards: the big thing that would come later was not the peace and safety and freedom that they were dreaming of, but the flames dancing in Svetochka’s eyes. “The means are the end,” she repeated stubbornly. “We can’t set off in the opposite direction of where we mean to go. If we want to end cruelty, then we have to end cruelty, not make more of it.”
“You’d have us just lie down an’ let ‘em walk over us, would you?” said Svetochka. Her mouth was still quirked in a strange little half-smile, and her eyes were still full of dancing flame. “You’d have us do nothing?”
“No! But I would not have us burn people alive!”
“So what would you have us do?” asked Svetochka. “Pray? Ask the domoviye for help?”
“Perhaps. We would think of something. Something other than burning people in their beds. Something other than…don’t you see?! This is the bad thing, the terrible thing, that you both felt was waiting for us! This is it! And you’re doing it yourself! You can stop this terrible thing, the thing you didn’t want to happen, just by deciding not to do it! You just have to not do it!”
“What do you say?” asked Svetochka, turning to the Vladya and the soldiers. “What we gotta do? Listen to her? Not do what we wanted ‘cause it’s too risky?”
“No!” said Vladya scornfully, while the soldiers murmured something that couldn’t quite be made out, but that sounded like agreement with Vladya, not Dasha.
“The others has spoken,” said Svetochka, turning to Dasha, “an’ they spoke for me, not you. Now we just gotta decide what to do with you.”
Dasha’s heart jumped in her chest, even more painfully than before. Everyone’s eyes were turned her way, with looks that made a whole torrent of visions go cascading past, each worse than before, all showing them torturing her…killing her…the flames were burning in all of them, dancing gleefully in their faces…they were not going to let her go, they couldn’t trust her now to help them and they couldn’t let her go, so they were going to get their blood up, whet their appetites, practicing their killing on her before they went on to the main event…she realized that she was afraid, terribly afraid, not just of death, but of the pain they were going to put her through first…she took a step backwards and they took a step forward…she took another step backwards, and they closed in on her, so there was nowhere left to go but the corner, the corner in the shadows…a small hand closed around hers.
“Come with me, Dasha,” it said, and sucked her into the shadows.
Chapter Thirty
There was pressure, and coolness, like being deep underwater, and then they popped out in a grove of tall pines. The sky overhead was the black of after midnight, and the stars were looking down on them hungrily, like wolves. The domovaya’s little paw held tightly onto Dasha’s hand, and she looked up at Dasha with the same hungry expression as the stars in her round black eyes, which shone even without light.
“Where are we?” asked Dasha.
“Near the cabin, Tsarinovna,” the domovaya told her.
“The travelers’ cabin? Where the raiders are?”
“Yes.”
“What are we going to do? Rescue Birgit and the others?”
“Yes, Tsarinovna. If you are willing. If you are willing to do what it takes.”
“Is this the third time?” Dasha asked. “You—not you; one of the others—told me that the third time I called for you would be the important one. I didn’t realize I was calling for you, but I suppose I was. So is this the third time?”
“Yes, Tsarinovna.” The domova
ya blinked at her, and for a moment her eyes glowed gold. Dasha blinked too, and could feel her own eyes shining in the darkness, as if lit from within.
“So what do I have to do?” she asked.
“You won’t run away this time, Tsarinovna? You won’t say you have to do things your way, and run away?”
Dasha shook her head. Light seemed to bounce around inside her skull, and shine in all directions, filling up the grove with its glow.
“There isn’t any way other than my way,” she said. “Whatever we do will be my way. So what do I have to do?”
“We domoviye are peaceful creatures,” the domovaya told her. “For the most part. We love the home, and the hearth, and humble things. The things of humble women, not those who seek to raise themselves over others, and rule by fire and steel and blood. But the home and the hearth are full of fire and steel and blood too. Every kitchen, every hearth, is a place of fire and steel and blood, and we are full of that too, when we need to be. We do not care too much who sits the Wooden Throne in Krasnograd, or what noblewomen get up to in their fine gowns and finer homes. But when our villages, our humble little homes, are attacked, we fight back, just as humble women do when those who are violent and cruel threaten to take away the few things that they have. The gentlest dog, the laziest cat, will bare their teeth and bite if driven to it. And we have been driven to it. These raids have driven us to it. We wish to fight back, to protect our humble homes. And we want your help to do it. We will do it anyway, but with your help we will do it better.”
“How?” asked Dasha.
“We are gentle and humble and fierce, Tsarinovna. We thought you would be fierce, Tsarinovna, and that it would be our part to teach you to be gentle and humble. But instead you came out of your mother’s womb gentle and humble as well, and it seems we must teach you to be fierce. But the ferocity of the gentle is a terrible thing. We would have you hold us back from the horrors that we might do. We would have you take this sorrow that has visited our land, and transform it into something of wonder and greatness. Sometimes you must get down into the muck to lift out those who are in it, and that is what we intend to do. But then you have to get back out of the muck again too. We would have you lift us out, if we cannot do it ourselves. Right now we are filled with the rage of the righteous, and it burns in us like a raging house fire. But the rage of righteousness, no matter how it seems to warm you, will soon destroy you and everything you hold dear. You have to bank those fires so that you can use them to forge the tools of progress, just as we learned to bank our hearth fires to cook our meals, and the fires of our forges so that we could make, not just the swords of war, but the knives of the kitchen. Not just warhelms, but horseshoes. But right now our fire is threatening to rage out of control and burn through us as well as those we count our enemies. Your mother once said—not to us, but we were watching in the shadows—that in order to set the world on fire, you have to have a fair amount of inner flame. We all—including her—thought she was speaking of you. And perhaps she was. And it is true. We must have that inner flame to do what must be done. But you must have more than just flame. Flame on its own tears down as much as it transforms. Set something on fire, and you end up with less than what you had when you began. If we do this, if we start this fire, we risk ending up with less than what we already have. We risk turning Zem’ into nothing but smoking ruins, like those you left behind in that village. We risk becoming no better, and maybe worse, than the raiders we wish to stand against, and doing their work for them. So we must not do that. We must take these troubles and let them turn us into something greater than we already are. And that is where we need your help. We need you to help us turn it into something more, to transform destruction into creation. To work the greatest form of magic.”
“How?” asked Dasha.
“You have to take what we have and make it more than what it is, better than what it is. You have to help us make creation without destruction. You have to stop thinking two times two equal four, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. You have to take two times two and make it equal five.”
“How?” asked Dasha.
The domovaya shrugged. “That is up to you. But we intend to take our people and our land back from these invaders. With fire and steel and blood. It is up to you to provide the water, to bring the element that makes things greater than they already are. Now come. It is time.” Before Dasha could object, the domovaya grabbed her wrist and sucked her into the shadows again.
They popped out just outside the cabin, right up against its back wall. The light shining out from its windows hid them from the sight of those inside, and also those standing guard outside. There were two of them, not more than a dozen paces away, leaning against the open gate and gazing with longing at the cabin, rather than down the path. Seeing the foreigners this close made Dasha’s skin crawl, as if she had brushed up against a snake in the grass. Had these men killed any of her people? Like as not they had.
The shadows in which Dasha and the domovaya were standing were growing thicker and thicker, until they resolved into a dozen more domoviye, their little black eyes shining fiercely in the darkness.
“Let us set the cabin on fire,” said one of them, whose eyes were glowing the hottest. “The Tsarinovna could lay her hands against the wood, and set the whole thing on fire. We would be cleansed of this filth.”
“No!” hissed Dasha. “Our people are in there! And I’m not burning anyone alive!”
The fire-loving domovaya looked disappointed.
“We should slip inside,” said the domovaya who had brought Dasha. “Through the shadows. And rescue our people. And then set the cabin on fire.”
“Can’t we find a way to do it without setting anything or anyone on fire?” Dasha asked.
“And what will we do with all these raiders, Tsarinovna?” asked the domovaya. “Politely ask them to go?”
“Not set them on fire,” said Dasha. And she could see already how they had one 2—the raiders—and another—getting them to leave—and multiplied together they invariably equaled 4—setting the raiders on fire, or otherwise killing them in some particularly unpleasant fashion. Which logic dictated was the correct decision, the only answer to the problem. If you multiplied 2 times 2, it always equaled 4, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. Unless you changed the rules of the game, or chose to use something other than logic to solve the problem. Unfortunately, Dasha couldn’t think of anything else right now. She was caught in the iron grip of the domoviye’s logic and her own and all the training her tutors had given her to work through problems in a sensible fashion and solve them in a way that other people could follow. But when you’re forging your own path, you can’t worry so much at first about whether or not other people can follow, because if they can follow, it probably isn’t a new path.
Dasha wanted to say all these things to the domoviye, and to remind them that she was supposed to help them create this new magic that would save them from doing what they were about to do, but she couldn’t think of what she could offer instead, other than the suggestion that they try to look in through the windows before running into the cabin blindly.
“Can you not see into the cabin without looking?” asked the domovaya who had wanted to set it on fire.
“No,” whispered Dasha. “Not normally. Can you?”
“Yes,” said the domovaya, sounding, she thought, unpleasantly smug.
“Well, what do you see?” Dasha demanded.
The domovaya closed her eyes in a slow blink. When she reopened them, they glowed even more brightly than before, so that Dasha felt like shielding her face from the glare. “Bad things,” she said.
Dasha waited for a couple of heartbeats, but the domovaya offered nothing more, so she edged cautiously over to the nearest window, and, her heart in her mouth, peeped with one eye through the thrown-open shutters, expecting to be caught at any moment. But the people inside the cabin were occupied with the spectacle unfoldin
g inside it.
There were at least—Dasha counted quickly—twenty of the foreigners, at least half the party, packed inside the cabin. Ratibor, Yaromir, Yuliya, and the two drivers were chained up in one corner, looking rather the worse for wear. Mitrofan, who had been driving the cart with the men, was lolling against the wall only half-conscious, and Lyokha, who had been driving Birgit and Yuliya’s cart, had blood streaming down his face from his nose. Yuliya was trying to stem the flow with the sleeve of her shirt, and failing.
Birgit was standing, or rather, being held up by two of the raiders, in the middle of the cabin. A large man with a much finer sword than any of the others was shouting at her, jabbing his finger into her chest and then pointing at the corner where the other prisoners were huddled. Dasha couldn’t understand him, but she didn’t need to make out his words to guess at his meaning: he was accusing Birgit of collaborating with the Zemnians. Which was sort of, in a horrible way, true. Dasha wanted to go bursting into the cabin and shout at him that Birgit hadn’t had a choice, she’d been forced into everything that had happened to her by cruel circumstances, but she doubted very much that such an argument would weigh heavily with him.
The man with the fine sword was now saying something to the other raiders, who all laughed and cheered in an unpleasant fashion, their eyes gleaming with anticipation. The man with the sword laughed too, and with one swift motion sliced through the front of Birgit’s sarafan and shirt with his blade.
Dasha didn’t know how it happened. One moment she was standing outside looking in, and the next she was inside the cabin, the domoviye ranged all around her. More seemed to be welling out of the shadows with each blink of her eyes. The raiders all stood, frozen in the positions they had been caught in, reaching for Birgit with evil intent.
The shadows from the corners began slithering up the raiders’ legs, just as they had with the man who had attacked Dasha in the inn. The raiders screamed and tried to beat them back like flames, but to no avail. Some part of Dasha knew that she should feel pity and horror, but it was eclipsed by the burning joy in her chest.
