Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

He lunged at it, but he was just slow enough that his fingers only closed on a tuft of fine black fur. The cat darted under a nearby fence. Its wide-pupiled eyes gazed at him quite calmly as he took up the eggs again.

  It should fear him more. His nature would have had him snap its neck before he could think. The eggs would wear off eventually, and he would be a danger to whatever, whoever, was near him.

  He sighed. His eyes stung. He did not want to be a danger to small cats. He would sit down for a moment before resuming his search. Just a moment to rest his eyes before going on.

  SHULGIN, RUSSIA: 1707

  Smoke billowed up from the burning tents. The ataman was laughing, one side of his moustache singed to curling char.

  The ataman’s chest was bare, running with sweat, and his long cherkesska flapped open, buttons slashed off and one lapel scored with a ragged tear. He shook his saber in the air, and blood flew from the blade.

  “A fine night!” he said. “A fine night, Maksim!”

  Maksim heard the words as if through a waterfall, did not see the man’s face at all, only the weapon and the blood scattering. He ran at the ataman and tried to slash his throat.

  The ataman blocked him, still laughing. “You are very slow, and your saber is dull,” he said. “You have been fighting-mad for many hours. Our foes are dead or have fled, and it is time for you to put your saber down.”

  Maksim tried to raise his saber again, but one of the nicks in the edge caught against the ataman’s blade, and he could not seem to free it.

  “Maksim,” the ataman was saying. “Be calm now. The fighting is over for this day.”

  Maksim still had fight in his arms, but the ataman repeated himself until at last Maksim dropped his saber.

  “It was a very good madness,” said the ataman. “Come back from it now.”

  Maksim, at the touch of the ataman’s hand on his shoulder, startled and began to tremble.

  The ataman soothed him like a beast, petting his arm. “Your brothers are over at the fire. Have you any hurts that need tending?”

  But Maksim did not have his voice yet. He recognized the ataman now—a man he’d been following since last summer, through a long and messy campaign—and he was able to follow him dumbly toward the cooking fires, but when Maksim drew near the others, some of whom were wounded, the smell of blood and gunpowder made his lips draw back from his teeth. He covered his eyes with his hands so the ataman would not see the madness returning in them.

  The ataman looked at Maksim’s face and shook his head. “I will have someone come to you. But perhaps I should make sure you cannot forget that the fighting is over for now.” The ataman took off his sash and used it to bind Maksim’s hands together.

  Maksim pulled mindlessly at his bonds until he hurt himself, and then he was still, mostly.

  After some time, a woman came to help him strip off his scorched and slashed cherkesska and douse his injuries with vodka. He was still too much in his madness to answer questions, but he was able to make himself submit to her touch. After she stitched the worst of his injuries, he went to sleep there on the ground, still bound, wrapped in his battle-filthy coat.

  When he awoke and freed himself, he found he was one of the heroes of last night’s action. He drank with his brothers; he rutted with the woman who had cleaned him up. His injuries healed very quickly.

  But the madness did not quite leave him. He fell into it again each time they fought, and each time took longer to return to himself. And when they were not fighting, he was quicker to anger, flush with energy that had to be wrestled out. He thought he had not always been this way.

  He began to notice people flinching from him a little. He heard rumors about himself: that he was a shape-changer who became a beast at the full moon, that he was possessed by an evil spirit. None of the rumors he heard were true, but he began to understand there was something at the heart of them.

  Finally, he sought out a koldun. The koldun was frail, stooped, blind in one eye; Maksim was a Cossack in the prime of his youth, and yet he feared the koldun so much that he trembled with it as he stood in the hut to ask his question.

  The koldun demanded the price of a deer, which Maksim chased down on foot.

  When Maksim returned with the animal slung over his shoulders, still steaming, the koldun said, “You have only to look to that hunt for the secrets of your nature.”

  “What do you mean?” Maksim said, growling a little, for the heated blood of the deer still stained his hands.

  “You follow blood. You shed blood. You are kin to the others who share your blood. Blood is the only end,” the koldun said as if that was all Maksim needed to know.

  The koldun waited, smiling, his sighted eye bright in a web of wrinkles, while Maksim clenched his hands on the fine-boned limbs of the deer and fought down both the desire to run at him and the desire to run away.

  “I can take it from you,” the koldun said finally. “You will grow worse with age. I can make you as other men.”

  Maksim shuddered all down his spine. He thought it sounded like a threat, and he did not doubt the koldun would see it through.

  He was losing his voice again, as he sometimes did when his madness rode him. But he made himself shake his head, and he laid the deer down at the koldun’s feet and backed away.

  The koldun said nothing; he only turned away into the dimness of his hut and left Maksim standing there with deer’s blood on his hands.

  Maksim went away still believing the madness was a gift. Among the Cossacks, a violent man was a useful man. Battle was his natural inclination. His fellows learned to launch him in the right direction and then stay out of his way; his ataman learned how to command him, at least some of the time. When there was no fighting to quell his thirst, he could wrestle his brothers, he could fuck with abandon, or, failing all else, ride or run or drink until he dropped in exhaustion.

  Maksim began to understand that he would live a very long life. He’d thought for quite a while that he would live all of it as a Cossack.

  History happened, though. He did not change, or not quickly, but things around him did, and as his madness grew in him—and grew less welcome—he thought again of the koldun.

  When he reached the place where the koldun had lived, he found that the man had died and left no successor. Maksim did not mind so much; he had already had another good idea. He left the Cossacks to their newfound gentleness and went looking for a war.

  He did not have to look far. Not that year, and not for many years after.

  APRIL 30

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Lissa dropped off the fertility spell early the following day. She dressed carefully for it in a black shirtdress with long sleeves: ugly and unsuitable for the weather, but correct.

  Stella had come back sometime in the late hours; Lissa could see her tousled hair hanging over the arm of the sofa. She tiptoed past and did not slam the door.

  She couldn’t help a thread of worry under her manufactured calm. The sleep eggs hadn’t been as effective as she’d thought they should have been—what if she was off her game? What if the fertility eggs proved ineffective too?

  Izabela Dmitreeva was staying with her mother-in-law and a gaggle of other relatives. When Lissa arrived, sweating in her heavy dress, two old men were watching television in the den; one made the sign against evil, and the other merely looked at her, his rheumy eyes level and cold. The mother-in-law had a familiar face; Lissa could not recall her name but thought she’d taken eggs for kidney stones the year before. Izabela Dmitreeva ushered Lissa into the kitchen and thanked her very graciously for taking the time in the midst of her own troubles.

  The apartment smelled of boiled vegetables; when Lissa had finished explaining how to take the eggs, Izabela Dmitreeva pressed upon her a Tupperware container of cabbage rolls, calling her koldun’ia again.

  Izabela Dmitreeva did not seem to have any doubt that the eggs would work. She had already begun knitting a baby blanket, Lissa saw;
it lay in a basket on the windowsill, a jumble of knitting needles and pale-yellow yarn.

  The old men weren’t so sanguine. On her way out, she saw the sign again, and one of the men cleared his throat and hawked horribly into a Kleenex.

  Lissa took the subway home and found Stella in the kitchen, making coffee. Making coffee for her, apparently.

  “I didn’t even hear you go out,” Stella said, eyeing the ugly dress. “There’s fruit salad. And muffins.”

  “I didn’t know we had muffins.”

  “I made them,” Stella said. “To say sorry.”

  “Hold that thought,” Lissa said and jogged upstairs to change into a lightweight T-shirt and a denim skirt. Bare-legged, she came back down to find Stella setting out plates and cups in the kitchen.

  The muffins turned out to be lemon cranberry and delicious. Stella picked at hers, and every time Lissa glanced at her, she glanced away.

  “Look,” Lissa said. “It was nice of you to bake for me.”

  “I want to stay,” Stella said.

  “With me? But—”

  “There’s so much I could do to help. This house … it isn’t really yours yet, you know? And you shouldn’t have to do it all by yourself. I was thinking you might be able to use some rent money. And—”

  “But that’s all about me,” Lissa said. “I don’t need all that.”

  “Oh,” Stella said. “Okay.” And her great dark eyes began to well.

  “Hey … look, I’m sorry. It was nice of you to come, and…” And what else did you say to a stepsister you didn’t know, anyway? Lissa filled her mouth with coffee.

  Stella jumped into the gap. “That’s just it; I don’t think it’s right that your only family is all on the other side of the ocean and never visits. And I can’t change Dad, and Mum doesn’t really count as your family, I guess, but there’s me, and I want to know you better. You’re … you’re so quiet, and maybe you could use some fun sometimes. Or cry on my shoulder, if that would help. Or, you know—”

  “I don’t want to cry on anyone’s shoulder.”

  “I do!” Stella said, dissolving.

  Lissa, after a frozen moment of awkwardness, handed her a napkin.

  “I can’t go back,” Stella sobbed. “I can’t deal with it there. You know how many messages Erick’s left on my phone in the last three days? Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! He’s scaring me.”

  “Erick?”

  “Boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He just won’t leave me alone.”

  “So you ran all the way to Canada?”

  “I’ll find a flat if you don’t want me,” Stella said. “I have everything I need. I have a job already.”

  “A … what?”

  “Last night,” Stella said, wiping smeared mascara from beneath her eye. “Everyone needs servers, right? And I don’t have to worry about paperwork, because Dad got my Canadian citizenship set up ages ago. So I made the rounds of your neighborhood. And I found the Duke of Lancashire. You know, up near Bloor.”

  Lissa shook her head.

  “The girls wear little kilts,” Stella said. “They hired me on the spot.”

  “I wasn’t expecting this,” Lissa managed.

  Stella tucked her head down. “Please let me stay until I find my own place. Please say I can.”

  “That’s … wow,” Lissa said. “Um. I have to think about that.”

  She thought she was being pretty awesome, not saying no right off the bat, but Stella’s face went all crushed.

  Lissa had no idea what to do with that. If Stella stuck around, she was either going to cave to emotional blackmail or kick her sister right out the door.

  It was an hour too early to leave for work, but she did anyway. Behind her, the house felt smaller than usual, with Stella still sitting in it, drying her eyes at the kitchen table. Not hers. Not right.

  At the print shop, Lissa’s boss, Mustafa, welcomed her back, patted her on the shoulder, and told her he’d stocked the fridge with her favorite iced green tea. He didn’t tell her the corporate orders were behind schedule, but she found that out quickly enough.

  She’d have to put in some extra time to get everything caught up, but that was okay. She had to pay off the funeral somehow, and Baba had left her, in addition to the house, the property tax bill; the heating system, which still ran on oil; the new sofa, charged to the Sears card.

  And if she worked late, she would not have to face Stella again just yet or the strangeness of the house or the people wanting eggs; she would not have to speak to anyone at all, only move quietly back and forth amid the scent of warm paper and the white noise of ink upon it.

  APRIL 30

  WANING GIBBOUS

  Maksim forgot where he was going on his way to Augusta’s apartment. The hazy sunshine lulled him even as he walked. He stopped to watch two boys sparring in a backyard, and he leaned upon the fence and stared unabashed until a woman came out of the house and brandished a phone at him.

  He shrugged at her. “No English,” he said and wandered away. He took a nap on a bench for a half hour. He woke sweating and off-kilter, half-glad his egg was wearing off and half-desperate for another already. While he thought it all through, he knotted one hand in the other until his bones creaked and came to the remembrance that he’d meant to see Augusta. He rose from the bench and trudged off toward her street.

  Her street was a shabby one, seen in daylight: rows of old Victorian rooming houses with sheets hung at the windows, and newer buildings with cheap brick frontages and cinder-block sides, all close-built right up to the edges of the lots so that the alleys were shoulder width and dark. People squatted in them sometimes in the summers. Many of Augusta’s neighbors didn’t seem to know how to wash. Some of them smelled ill. Maksim usually made Augusta come to visit him.

  On this day, she must have seen or scented him coming; she stormed up the sidewalk, glowering, her boots heavy on the pavement. She had been choosing the same kind for decades now, plain black army boots with steel toes, and she would wear them until the leather wore down and the steel shone through. “You went to the witch,” Augusta said. “And you didn’t come back.”

  “I am here now.”

  “She couldn’t help you properly. Could she? You need me, after all.”

  “She is dead,” Maksim said, and he watched Augusta’s eyes flinch. “Her granddaughter, fortunately for me, is also a witch.”

  “That explains the stink.”

  “What stink?”

  Augusta flicked his scalp with her blunt fingertip. “You don’t smell right, and you’re all slow.”

  Maksim shrugged. “I have taken to the bottle also, and I have a piece of news to tell you, and I think you would prefer to hear it over a drink.”

  The look she gave him was wide-eyed and unhappy, but she led him to a dusty pub a few streets away. It was the kind of place where no one washed the windows or the floors, and the tabletops were sticky. The TV showed a soccer game; the announcer spoke in excited Portuguese, of which Maksim recognized a few words from his time in the Peninsula. Augusta ordered them each a glass of stout.

  “I’m a bit short in the pocket this week,” she said, flushing faintly over her nose and cheekbones.

  Maksim groped in his pocket and found a crumple of bills. He dropped them on the floor, gathered them up, set them on the table; a breeze from the open door nearly scattered them again, and Augusta cursed and slammed the saltshaker down upon the bills.

  “I don’t like you like this. I hope you’ll make this short so that I can go back to making some blunt.”

  “I can compensate you for your time,” Maksim said. “Or not, if that gives offense. Really, Augusta—”

  She bared her teeth at him. “Gus. Asshole. I’ve only been reminding you for a hundred years.”

  “Gus. Fine. The thing is … I may have made you a brother.”

  The pint glass shattered in her hand.

  By the time the sighing bartender had brought damp towels and a fresh g
lass, Gus had recovered herself enough to laugh, if a bit breathlessly. “All these years … it’s been just the two of us.”

  “The devil in it is, I do not know where to find him,” Maksim admitted, covering his face with his hands. He emerged a moment later to add, “And I am out of practice. At managing myself. I do not feel it coming in time to rein myself in, as you do. If I go about unleashed, I am afraid of what else I might do.”

  “Come on. I do stupid shit all the time, at least when I’m sober. And I’m half your age, anyway; it hasn’t hit me as much yet. But leaving that aside…” Gus said. “I want to know why you finally broke your streak. Why now. Why him, this fellow, and why can’t you find him?”

  “Koldun’ia Iadviga died, and her enchantment was undone,” Maksim said. “Ill fate came upon me immediately. I think it has been waiting for me, ever since—”

  “Ever since the thing you never talk about,” Gus said, crossing her arms over her chest and squeezing her elbows.

  “Yes.” And for a moment, the memory roared over Maksim as it had not done in years: the red of it, the heat, the taste of gunmetal. He nearly gagged.

  Gus laid her hands carefully on the tabletop, where Maksim could see them. He wondered if he’d made a motion or a sound.

  “Take a sip,” she said. “Good. Another. Don’t worry, I won’t press you. We’ve gone this long without talking about it, haven’t we?”

  Maksim shook his head, pressed his lips against the glass.

  “Whatever it was,” Gus said, “it drove you to take the spell. Didn’t it? By the time I caught up with you that year, you were different. You were all bottled up. And now you’re not, and that should be good, only you don’t think so. Am I warm?”

  Maksim nodded.

  “Take another drink,” Gus said. “This would be so much easier if it were last century, wouldn’t it? We’d just get on a boat and go somewhere else for a while.”

  “No boats,” Maksim said, hand tightening on his pint.

  “Easy. Easy. I already used up our glass quota here. No boats.”