Nevertell

by Katharine Orton

  One night, as Lina tended to the plants in the greenhouse, she felt the atmosphere change. Right away, she knew that Svetlana was behind her. “Hello, Babushka,” she said. “Have you come to check on my progress?” Lina had not seen much of her grandmother since the liberation of the camp. That journey to save Lina’s mother had almost crushed Svetlana. She’d spent weeks sleeping.

  “I’ve come to take you somewhere,” said Svetlana. “Don’t worry, you have done enough work to keep people fed while you’re gone, and I will return you to your greenhouse afterward. Nadezhda will watch over them, with Katya and Bogdan. We will need the shadow child, Natalya, with us.”

  “Nevertell,” came Natalya’s whisper. She was never far from Lina’s side these days.

  Svetlana wrapped them up in her cape.

  They traveled through the tundra — sometimes using Svetlana’s cape, sometimes with Lina and Natalya riding on the back of Svetlana in her giant falcon form. There was no great rush this time. Not like before.

  It was a different experience from when Lina had crossed this land with Bogdan. For a start, they weren’t being chased. Secondly, spring had come. Bright wild flowers — yellow, orange, purple — bloomed from under sparkling frost. The rivers ran, carrying chunks of ice. Ravens barked at them from the trees and argued among themselves over pine cones in the retreating snow.

  In the cool of the forests, they heard the padding of paws at times and caught glimpses of curious wolf faces, all white and gray, peering at them through the trees — before the animals loped away to safety.

  For a time, they stopped at Svetlana’s tower. Here, Lina sensed Natalya drift from her side toward the gardens. Lina guessed she wanted to walk among the plants. She’d seemed to enjoy doing that in Lina’s greenhouse too.

  Lina ran her fingers along the icy, translucent walls with their blue tinge and stared at all the flecks of silver and gold deep inside. She spent time in the luscious courtyard, gathering inspiration for what she could grow at the former camp. Her home. They even paid a visit to Pechal, who seemed much smaller and less frightening to Lina now. It helped that he wasn’t trying to drown her.

  Svetlana herself looked smaller these days too. Lina wasn’t sure if it was because she was less afraid of her, or if she’d actually shrunk — perhaps because she wasn’t storing such an unhealthy amount of cold magic inside her now. Her mother had used to say she was petite.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Lina as they prepared to leave the tower. She shifted awkwardly. Though Svetlana wasn’t quite as frightening as she used to be, she could still give a piercing glare. Lina cleared her throat. “You used to talk about all humans being bad —”

  “They are,” snapped Svetlana, and then narrowed her eyes at Lina. “Mostly.”

  “But you loved my grandfather so much you searched for him for years . . .”

  “I’ve told you,” Svetlana muttered, “he was different. He was everything.” A distant look came into her eyes. When she continued, it was more to herself than to Lina. “I would have carried on searching for him until I’d turned everyone alive into ghosts. If that’s what it had taken to find him. I would have shown them how you earn a title like Man Hunter.”

  Lina’s voice came out weak and hoarse when she next spoke. “But how could you believe all humans are terrible when you were in love with one — when your children are at least part human?”

  She knew what Bogdan would say. Leave it, Lina. There’s no reasoning with her kind of hatred. Perhaps so.

  Svetlana’s look softened. “In truth,” she said, “I knew I’d gone too far with the wolves. But I excused it to myself by saying those people bound by them were getting a second chance. That they would be helping to make amends for the deeds of their kind, by aiding me. Searching with the wolves and reporting back — as they did. And I needed them. How would I have had a chance of finding Anri and my children otherwise?

  “Not returning home for so long changed something in me. That much is true. I fear I lost myself too, out in the wastes.” She sighed. “I have started to release them, my wolf-bound. I’ve made it my business to find their families, to explain — and to do what I can to help them. That will be my new focus — as well as finding the next targets of the secret police and spiriting as many of them as I can to your peach forest for safety.”

  Lina nodded, and then she frowned. “But why did you do it in the first place? All those people you had wolf-bound? Like Natalya? What did they ever do?”

  “It may be hard for you to understand, being part of their world,” said Svetlana. “But I felt strongly, in my heart, that humans — all humans — had done this terrible thing to my family. And to me, personally. So I summoned my wolf spirits to help me search for Anri and my children. It felt like the only way. The only way.”

  “Babushka,” said Lina. “There’s something else I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you find us, all those years we spent in the camp? With your powers, and the cape, I would’ve thought . . .” Lina trailed off as Svetlana turned away. Both of them were silent for some time.

  “I put an enchantment on them.” Svetlana spoke so quietly that Lina had to lean in to hear her.

  “An enchantment? What do you mean?”

  Finally Svetlana looked at her again. “I put an enchantment on Anri and the children — so that they couldn’t be found. Not unless someone already knew exactly where to look. I thought it was necessary. I felt I understood the threats posed by humans more than Anri did. But when they went missing, when they were betrayed . . . it meant I couldn’t find them either.”

  Lina understood now. That had to be why Svetlana had needed her to summon her mother’s image in the water mirror.

  Over the rest of their journey, Lina studied Svetlana’s face in the moments she thought her grandmother wasn’t looking. She had to have felt partly responsible when her family disappeared. Had her anger and bitterness at losing them been even more destructive, her hatred of humans even stronger, because, in part, she actually blamed herself? Lina might never be sure.

  Finally they reached Moscow.

  Lina had seen photographs of the capital city, of course — the vast roads and the tall, square buildings with their walls of windows. The marches and parades.

  Now that they were here in the city, though, she could only think of her mother and all those she’d left behind in the safety of the forest. She wondered if everybody else was thinking of someone too. Up the stairs of those colossal apartment blocks, behind the outward show of patriotism they presented in the parades, was half this city really mourning the loved ones who’d been taken to camps? The missing? Those never heard from again?

  Lina knew “the missing” well. She’d spent her whole life surrounded by them.

  Despite it being early when they arrived, cars and buses already careened down the wide snow-cleared roads, honking and swerving in a system she didn’t understand. It gave Lina the sweats. Any second, she expected a crash. How could they go so fast and not hit one another? And yet, they all seemed to know where they were heading — as if by design. Lina could barely fathom the intricate workings of such a vast city and its people. It was comforting to feel a pressure on her arm as they walked the streets, knowing that Natalya held her tightly.

  Children with red scarves toggled around their shoulders walked to school, their cheeks and noses bright in the chilly spring air — though compared to what Lina had been used to, it practically felt warm. Lines of men and women waited patiently outside shops for their bread, their meat, their milk. Crane-topped towers, almost lost to mist, looked down over it all. Lina shuddered at the sight of those. They resembled the guard towers.

  Lina, Natalya, and Svetlana walked for what felt like hours until they came to a grand pavilion, its pillars stretching up to the sky. The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. In it were Lina’s grandfather’s famous gardens.

  Svetlana spirited them through the barriers because the gardens were closed. They’d b
een shut down, she told Lina, after the war.

  Even so, walking between the grand white pillars of the entrance was like crossing into another world. A kind of paradise, frozen in time. Straight in front of them stood a fountain as high as any building, which Lina guessed used to gush water from the enormous, intricate golden petals at the center. All around the edge stood life-size statues of people facing outward — each one of them glinting gold.

  “Look at that, Natalya!” said Lina. She’d made a habit of referring to her often while she worked in the greenhouse, tending the plants. To let her know she was thinking of her.

  “It’s called the Stone Flower,” said Svetlana. “Named after the old folktale.”

  Lina didn’t know the story. But the fountain definitely looked like something out of a fairy tale.

  The gardens were vast. All around were pavilions adorned with decorations just like grand temples — painted bright white and dedicated to particular things that the Soviet Union made or did, like pig farming, geology, or mechanization. Flax sheafs and grapevines were molded from plaster and decorated walls and ceilings. Giant figures of bulls bore up the roof of the Meat Pavilion on top of great white pillars.

  The Soviet hammer and sickle appeared everywhere too — and so did the five-pointed star she’d seen on the train. Statues of people towered far above them, bearing larger-than-life sheaves of wheat and waving huge flags. Their smiles, like the distant look in their eyes, forever fixed.

  Lina could barely believe that it had been humans who made this place and not gods — or magical beings like Svetlana. Then they came to the pavilion for childhood, with its many statues of children on plinths. “Who are all these people, do you think? And why do they have their own statues?” asked Lina.

  Svetlana frowned a little and her mouth tightened. “They were children who reported their parents to the authorities,” she said. “For ‘un-Soviet’ behavior. Come. Let us carry on.”

  The other pavilions represented all the regions that made up the Soviet Union. It was the one for Georgia that they were looking for — that Lina’s grandfather had worked on. Lina didn’t know what to expect when they got there or what they would do once they’d found it. But she felt drawn there by some kind of force.

  What they found was another vast, temple-like pavilion. This one had pillars stretching impossibly high, ending in elaborate decorations: wings — and grand arches covered in delicate petal motifs.

  The gardens were overgrown and withered. Even so, if she looked hard enough, Lina got a sense of what it must once have been like, of what her grandfather had tried to create. A sheltered sanctuary of green, partly concealed by the angle of the pavilion, which seemed to gather the garden into itself and stand guard around it.

  In their prime, the trees of all different sizes would have brought dappled shade of all shapes, and borne fruits like offerings to outstretched hands. The grass would have softened every step, and low, berry-peppered bushes would have brought color and treats from below. A paradise.

  Perhaps it could still be one.

  Lina felt an aching heat in her palms, like a kind of yearning: electricity, coiled and ready to whip-crack. She ran her hand over the bushes, no more than a thatch of sticks now, just as she had in her dream aboard the train.

  Greenness spread out from her touch. A sound like rushing water echoed around them: the sound of every plant, growing. Soon the entire garden burgeoned with berries and leaves. It was just as she’d imagined.

  “I wanted you to see this place,” said Svetlana, smiling, when Lina had finished. “It is a part of me. A part of you.”

  Lina breathed deeply. The air smelled different here. She closed her eyes and imagined being a plant, soaking in the sun through her upturned face — and her outstretched hands and arms. She thought of her grandfather and wondered how it was possible for her to feel so close to a person she’d never met — someone who was already gone before she was born. In a way, he’d helped shape her entire life from the start. Inspired this whole adventure.

  “Now that you are beginning to master your powers, I will make you your own cape, using this,” said Svetlana, holding out the small rectangular corner of cape that Lina had torn off so long ago. Svetlana must have retrieved it from the greenhouse. Lina had forgotten about it. “That way, you can travel more easily and visit here whenever you please. And I’ll help you learn to use it safely, of course. I’ll help you learn to control all of your abilities over time, so that you can use them without harm.”

  “Thank you,” said Lina. “For all of it. But don’t you want to use that scrap of cape to mend yours?”

  Svetlana looked at the tattered end of her own cape and raised an eyebrow. “No,” she said. “The missing piece reminds me of you, when I’m away. It helps me to remember what I’ve done. And how I must make amends.”

  Lina nodded. She could sense something in the air. Feel it lingering along every dappled path, every shaded nook, and down by the water of the fountains and ponds. It felt a little like being close to Svetlana’s shadows. Except it wasn’t that.

  It was more like memories, so strong they wanted to burst through the air and be relived, over and over again. As if the memories themselves missed being real.

  “Nevertell . . .”

  Lina and Svetlana looked to the empty space where the whisper had come from.

  Svetlana lifted her chin. “That was the other reason I brought you here. Natalya has something to show us.”

  Go on, child,” said Svetlana. “I can help you.”

  Svetlana reached out her hand slowly, palm up. With her head turned to the side, out of the corner of her eye, Lina saw the outline of Natalya take hold of Svetlana’s hand. Svetlana instructed Lina to relax. “Let yourself be taken with her.”

  She did.

  The world around Lina drifted and swayed, like a reflection in water that had been disturbed. The walls and the steps beneath her melted into gray gloom and became hard to distinguish from snow — or sky. She recognized this feeling — from when Natalya had shown her the memories. The classroom. Svetlana and the roses. She breathed out and allowed it to happen. Then everything snapped back into focus in an instant.

  From beyond the arches of the Georgia pavilion, deep inside it, came voices.

  “Come,” said Svetlana. What they walked into was a room filled with rows of desks. Lina glanced behind her. Her grandfather’s garden had vanished. Instead, large rectangular windows looked out onto an open space with lush grass. Red roses grew around a tree at the center.

  “I’ve seen this before! Natalya showed me,” said Lina. “First in your hut and then when we were on the train.” She stared at Svetlana. “She saw you from her classroom window. This classroom. She watched you do magic.”

  Svetlana nodded.

  At each desk in the room sat a child, all dressed exactly the same. At the desk beside Lina sat a pink-cheeked little girl with brown pigtails. It was Natalya, just as she’d seen her beneath Svetlana’s cape. Natalya watched the teacher at the front of the class with her wide blue-green eyes, but her attention kept drifting to the window. She’d drink in the outside world for long moments. It seemed to Lina that she only glanced back to make sure the teacher thought she was paying attention. A dreamer.

  The shadow of Natalya still held Svetlana’s hand, surveying the vision with them both. As they all watched, the Natalya at her desk looked to the window and gasped. Her eyes grew a bit wider. Lina didn’t have to look around to know that she would see Svetlana outside — the memory of her — raise a rose from its bud in seconds, just to kill it.

  The real Svetlana lifted her chin and squinted straight ahead. “When I came back from one of my trips to the mountains, I found them gone. My entire family, missing — and I had no way of finding them. I only knew they had been betrayed by other humans, since that’s what some humans do. Supposed friends, entrusted with their location in the city . . . I searched for them. All this time, I’ve been searching.
”

  “And you had Natalya wolf-bound. Why? Just because she’d seen your magic?”

  “I saw enemies everywhere. I knew Anri had spoken in classrooms about his work. Even taken the schoolchildren for trips to see the gardens. It would have been just like him to tell them too much — about magic. I thought that’s why Natalya came to me, sneaking around, watching. I thought that she’d betrayed us to the authorities. This child became the first of my wolf-bound shadows.”

  “She’d seen something magical,” Lina said to herself. “She thought you were magical. And she only wanted to see if you could be real.”

  They were silent for a very long time. The children in Natalya’s memory went on scribbling at their desks.

  Lina cleared her throat, and when she spoke, her voice was soft. “Svetlana. My grandfather was arrested for speaking of real magic to children. But Mama said he’d also joked with friends that the Great Leader was telling them all a fairy-tale lie, when the reality of his ‘great achievements’ was very different. Mama always said that he was denounced by a colleague, and when the secret police came, they just decided to take my mother and uncle away too. That had nothing to do with Natalya. She was as much a victim as him. Or you. Or anyone.”

  Svetlana gazed down at the simple vision of the girl at the desk but directed her words to the shadow at her side. “Natalya, if this is true, then I am truly sorry. You came to me hoping for something wonderful — and I gave you horror.”

  A single tear flicked off the end of Svetlana’s long black eyelashes and landed on her cheek. It seemed to reflect everything — the whole world in miniature. She smudged away the tear with her finger.

  Shadow-Natalya left Svetlana’s side and tugged urgently at Lina’s sleeve. Apparently she had something else to show her. Lina looked around the classroom. A poster in bold black, white, and red caught her eye. It was taped to the classroom door, and it said:

  NEVER TELL CHILDREN ABOUT THINGS THEY CANNOT SEE.