by Jane Kindred
Kae went still as stone. “I never did that. Never.”
I wanted to strike him. “Don’t you dare lie about it. Don’t you dare dishonor Ola by denying what you did to her! You came here to surrender to me, to take responsibility for what you’d done.”
“I never did that!” He tried to shout the words and coughed violently, holding his throat. “Don’t you think I remember every horrid, hideous moment of it? My hands and mouth acting as if they weren’t my own? I remember every black drop of blood upon my blade—putting my sword through my Ola.” He expelled her name with a choked gasp as he regarded me fiercely. “And through you, though somehow, mercifully, you lived. I am trapped within a dream from which I cannot wake, a nightmare of such ugliness that I not only wish I were dead, but that I’d never lived. But I never, ever did what you are saying.”
Clutching the key so hard the iron cut into my flesh, I tried to breathe against the tightness in my chest, misery and hatred threatening to overwhelm me. “You’re a monster. A monster or mad!”
To my horror, Kae began to laugh, a rough, ugly sound of bitter mockery. “My dear Nenny.” He spoke my childhood nickname with vitriol. “I am both. But I know full well what I’ve done and what I have not. Full well.” He stepped back and slammed the door.
“Then who did?” I flew at the door and pounded on it in fury before locking it with a jerk and turning to lean against it. Angry tears scored my cheeks. I’d avoided any contact with Kae, avoided saying any of the things that had just erupted from me, knowing it would only make me feel worse. As it had.
Lively stared at me, holding her stomach as if I were the one who might cut out her baby. “I’m sorry.”
“Just give me the damned spell.”
The magical objects were contained in a muslin bag inside a small silk pouch, sewn shut by Lively with a few expert stitches. The red pouch, fragrant and aromatic, went under my pillow while I whispered three times as Lively instructed: “I shall see Ola in the Nightworld and she shall see me. There shall be no barrier between us.”
When I slept, it seemed I didn’t dream at all, yet I was aware of sleeping and time passing, as if I waited in the wings between dreams, an intermission between acts. I wondered if I’d done something wrong, or if Lively wasn’t the apothecary she claimed to be. And then in the empty space inside my head, I saw her: Ola. But not my child. I gasped and stumbled in the stuff of dreams, falling at her feet and looking up at her in disbelief. With my heart so full of joy and grief at once, I could do nothing but weep. My sister had come to me.
“Nazkia!” Her eyes were wide with astonishment. Ola took my hands to lift me up, solid, warm, and real.
I fell into her arms, clinging to her as if I could keep her if only I held tightly enough. Her dark honey curls were just as I remembered them, tumbling over one shoulder from a loose, upswept coiffure. We’d always prided ourselves on how the four of us looked a set. “Four heads of honey hair,” my father would say when we huddled together laughing. She was dressed as I’d last seen her, in a simple gold chiffon with an empire waist to accommodate her belly…only there was no belly now. And no blood. Mercifully, no blood.
I looked up into my oldest sister’s deep blue eyes, full of tears as mine were. Though Maia and I, the “Little Pair,” had been closest in age and close companions, Ola had always been dearest to me. But I wanted them all. I wanted them with me. “You all left me. How could you leave me alone?”
“Nazkia, dearest.” She stroked my hair. “I told you to run. And I’m glad you ran. I couldn’t bear it if you’d suffered as the others did. You are our little light in Heaven, the proof we were there once and not forgotten.” Ola tucked my unruly curls behind my ears as if I were still the impish little girl who had to be looked after to make sure I was presentable. “And he couldn’t have borne one more death upon his hands. He couldn’t have come back from that. Not from you.”
I drew back and looked into her eyes, full of wistfulness and sorrow. “What are you saying, Ola? Who couldn’t have?”
She smiled sadly. “Kae, of course. My poor Kae.”
I stepped away. “How can you say that? How can you speak of him tenderly? He murdered you! He murdered his own wife. That was enough not to come back from!”
“He couldn’t see us, Nazkia. I don’t know what he saw, but there was something in his eyes. He was full of rage and fear—and madness. He wasn’t himself.”
“Not himself! What kind of an excuse is that for slaughtering your family? Not oneself is when you say an unkind word to the ones you love, not thrust a sword into them!”
“You know he was not himself.” She reproached me as if I were being impolite. “You must take care of him. He has no one else.”
“Ola!” I couldn’t respond, horrified that she grieved not for herself, or for me, but for the one who’d killed her.
She lifted my chin, again relegating me to the part of the willful child. Though Azel had been five years my junior, his status as heir and his poor health placed him in a different role within the family, and I had always remained the baby.
Ola held my gaze with hers, allowing no prevarication. “I was his sweetheart, Nazkia, but you were always closer. You were his dearest friend.”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Please, at least try to be kind to him. He’s lost everything.”
Like the child I’d been reduced to, I put my hands over my ears to shut her out. Ola looked back over her shoulder and it seemed dawn approached, a strange pinkish light bleeding across the ephemeral place in which we stood.
“I have to go, dear Nazkia.”
“No!” I clung to her hands. “Please don’t leave me again. Stay with me!”
“You know I can’t.” Her form grew less distinct as the light advanced. “Promise me you’ll at least try to do what I’ve asked. As long as Kae is heartbroken, I cannot rest. It hurts so to hear him weeping.” Her hands within mine now felt as formless as water.
“Oh, Ola.” I bit my lip and shook my head in defeat, unable to deny her anything. “I’ll try. But he doesn’t even own up to what he’s done.” My voice was bitter. “He denies that he butchered you, that he cut out his own child!”
Ola was fading. “Oh, Nazkia, no!” Her voice had become a distant echo. “It wasn’t him, it…”
“Ola, come back!” What was she saying? Who had done it if not him? She was gone, and I was only dreaming. I screamed her name and surged out of sleep to find Vasily’s warm body against mine, his arms holding me close.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Hush.” He kissed the top of my head and I burst into tears.
Vtoraya: Written in the Chora
He was not to speak to her, and he was not to give her anything other than water and the daily bowl of gruel and heel of bread. In the beginning, after the crying stopped, she’d often called out for her mama, but now she was quiet. The only time she made any noise at all was on bath day.
Once a week, his mother brought a bucket of cold water down to his room with a sponge so he could wash. He was only three, but he’d learned to be quite self-sufficient. He didn’t feel like three. He didn’t know what he felt like. He only knew he remembered days that didn’t belong to him, remembered living in a fancy palace and reading books, learning things that would, at present, be far beyond his years.
When he finished washing, he was to pull aside the plank covering the oubliette and dump the water into it. This washed any soil at the bottom through a grate in the floor. Every time he tipped the heavy bucket into the hole, the girl screamed, and she cried for some time afterward. He supposed she didn’t care for baths.
It was far too dark and deep to see her on the bottom of the oubliette, but he imagined she must be younger than him. He felt a little sorry for her, like one might feel for a family dog put out in the cold at night. One couldn’t explain to the whining dog why it wasn’t appropriate for an animal to sleep in the house. Of course, he’d never seen
a dog, or even been told about them, so this was something else he couldn’t possibly know.
His mother told him bad people were looking for the girl and she must stay hidden to keep her safe. If she could only understand, he knew she’d accept her lot as he had.
He was special, his mother told him, and couldn’t go out into the sunlight or play with other children, or he’d get sick. And so he’d been content to spend his brief days in little rooms like this one. It was only recently, since he’d begun to imagine this other life that wasn’t his own, that Azel had begun to wish for something else.
§
Pale morning rays cast watery images across the ceiling through a glass brick wall of clearest moonstone blue. Love rolled over toward the door, troubled by the distant sound that had woken her: Anazakia, crying out in her sleep. Though Nazkia had assured Love many times she wasn’t to blame—they’d all assured her—Love couldn’t let go of the guilt at having been left behind when Helga’s Cherub disappeared with Ola. As hard as the first months after their abduction had been, imprisoned with Ola in the desolate island monastery in the Russian White Sea, she’d taken comfort in the fact that at least she was there for Ola, that she could care for her and be certain no harm came to her.
Now Ola had no one but that horrid Helga. She’d been Anazakia’s nanny, and she ought to be capable of taking care of Ola as well as Love had, but Love hadn’t seen evidence of a nurturing bone in her body. In the weeks she and Ola had been in Helga’s custody in the Citadel of Gehenna in Heaven’s Empyrean, the woman hadn’t demonstrated an ounce of warmth toward the child, refusing even to touch her. Love couldn’t stand the thought of Ola being in the care of such a cold, calculating creature.
“You’re awake,” said Kirill beside her.
Love turned and nestled under his arm. “Only a little.” His long beard tickled her cheek. Dear Kirill. Being whisked off to Heaven by the Cherubim had been difficult for him. He’d spent his life in service to the Church, yearning for God, only to find Heaven empty of Him. Kirill hadn’t left the monastery on Solovetsky Island since his eighteenth birthday, becoming a ryassophore monk by the age of twenty, and when Helga’s Nephilim had come to him posing as messengers from God with instructions to keep Ola hidden, he’d believed. He suffered now, knowing he’d allowed an innocent child to be taken from her mother for less than godly purposes.
More than that, he’d lost his moral compass, and that, in part, was Love’s fault. She’d unwittingly tempted him just by being herself. He seemed simultaneously to have nearly lost the will to live because of what he believed to be his sinful heart, and to have clung to that unworthy life because of the one who tempted him. She hadn’t realized he was falling in love with her.
When he’d confessed with shame that he couldn’t put her from his mind, she was so shocked and moved by his devotion she’d nearly let him destroy himself by breaking his most sacred vow. But as she’d touched him, kissing the flesh he’d mortified for the shame of loving her, she’d finally understood this was something she couldn’t allow him to do. No matter how desperately she ached for his touch, she couldn’t take his faith from him. She couldn’t take what he wanted to give.
Lying in his bed with his shy, desperate hands touching her body, she’d taken those hands in hers like a prayer and kissed them, shaking her head. After covering herself, she laid her head against his chest, whispered that she loved him, and cried herself to sleep within his arms. Neither of them spoke of it again. There was no need for words. She’d stayed with him that night and every night since, kissing him on the cheek as he gave her his sad smile, and lying fully clothed within his arms. She was afraid to leave him alone, afraid to be without him, and he seemed less tormented by having her near, as if resisting her temptation without running from it strengthened his belief in himself.
He no longer seemed to obsessively repeat the Prayer of the Heart he’d recited with such anxiousness from the moment she’d met him on Solovetsky, though she heard him calmly and almost unconsciously murmuring it from time to time. If sacrificing her desires gave him peace, she would do it gladly, even if she sometimes watched him with longing while he slept beside her. He was her Kirill and that was enough.
Kirill rose for his morning devotion and knelt in the pale, sea-blue light so like his eyes, his knotted prayer rope in his hands. As he crossed himself and began to pray, Love got up and went for her own morning devotion—a soak in the celestially famed Aravothan bath.
Returning refreshed in the plush white robe and slippers that were part and parcel of the Aravothan bath experience, Love paused at the top of the stone steps leading to the breakfast hall. The sound of urgent lowered voices carried up to her.
In addition to caring for Ola, it had been her job back in their little dacha in the Russian north to keep her finger on the pulse of celestial information. Back then, she hadn’t believed it was a literal Heaven of which the communications she intercepted spoke. She’d figured it must be a kind of clever, metaphoric code used by a powerful crime syndicate like the vory v zakone.
At home, the Internet had been her specialty, but even without her favorite tools of laptops and mobile phones, she couldn’t quite break the habit of keeping an ear out for information wherever it happened to come through. Love stepped back into the shadows, pressed herself against the wall, and listened.
“She’ll have to be told.” It was Sar Sarael. “We cannot keep her in the dark.”
“And how do you think she’s going to take that?” This was Belphagor’s voice, tight with anger. “It’s bad enough we’ve lost the support of the Exiles. Out of the thousands of Grigori and Nephilim we might have had fighting for our side, we have one. One! If you tell her the rest of the terrestrial Fallen have turned against her and allied themselves with the Social Liberationists because those malignant, twisted Malakim have manipulated a damn gypsy feud, she’s going to lose heart. And I tell you, Sarael, I’m starting to lose it myself. How many men does the queen have—men who are trained in savagery—for every one of your Virtues? No offense to your nature, but I saw the Virtues in action at Gehenna, and they simply aren’t up to the job.”
“That is why Her Supernal Highness’s field marshal is working with them,” Sarael responded with remarkable calm. “Who better to train them in savagery, as you put it?”
“We’re sending lambs to the fucking slaughter.” Belphagor’s boots sounded heavily on the tile as he paced. “No, Sarael, I’m sorry. You can’t tell her the alliance has gone to shit in the world of Man. We need at least one person to believe in what we’re doing.”
“As you wish.”
“If we could just find a way to counteract the damage the Malakim have done. If we could break their hold on the gypsies and get the lines of communication restored, we might be able to sway the Fallen back to our side. But too many Roma believe they’ve been visited by messengers of God.”
After a few more murmured words Love couldn’t catch, Sarael sighed. “Well, that’s moot now. Our scouts report the Supernal Army is on the move. Adequate forces or not, Operation Quintessence is now in motion.” His voice grew louder as he mounted the stairs. So as not to look like the eavesdropper she was, she slipped around the corner, back into the bath, and ran straight into Lively.
The demoness raised an eyebrow as Love caught herself against the doorframe to keep from bowling her over. “Back for another?” She eyed Love’s robe pointedly as she undressed.
Love blushed furiously, hating to be caught doing something stupid, and hating it more that Lively’d caught her. “I decided not to leave my clothes for the laundress.” She picked up the garments she’d left and began tugging them on beneath her robe. “I’ve barely worn them, and they do enough for us around here.”
Lively shrugged and stepped into the oil-glistening water, her belly surprisingly large without a dress draped over it.
“Hot water isn’t good for the baby.” Love spoke before she could stop herself. Damn it. Who
cared what happened to Lively’s stupid baby? Anazakia might have forgiven the girl for sneaking into Vasily’s bed and pretending to be her in order to get pregnant with his seraphic seed, but Love still held a grudge on her friend’s behalf.
“Really?” Lively paused halfway in with a worried expression and put her hand over her stomach. “I don’t know much about these things.”
“It’s probably all right if you only stay in a few minutes. But you don’t want to get overheated.”
“Thanks.” Lively lowered herself onto the tiled seat inside the steaming pool. “I guess you know a lot about babies.”
Love shrugged. “I’ve only ever been Ola’s nanny, but I always had a lot of younger cousins around to take care of.”
“I was the youngest in my family.” Lively leaned back against the rounded depression in the tile.
Love stopped listening, her mind running over what Belphagor had said, that her people believed they’d been visited by messengers of God. She wasn’t sure who the Malakim were in the context of a literal Heaven, but back home, she’d heard plenty about them from her own family.
They didn’t call themselves the Malakim among the Roma, but from the descriptions Anazakia and the others gave when they spoke of them, Love knew exactly who they were. They’d hung on the fringes of the Traveler communities for centuries, though there’d been more of them lately. They posed as friends of the Roma, promising deliverance from their oppressors in the form of a new prophet or preacher, or even a motivational speaker: the next big thing, the thing that would change their luck or their lives.
What it changed was the amount of money in the Roma’s pockets, and not from less to more. It kept them praying to God for help—waiting for the day he’d step in and deliver them and make them rich—instead of fighting against injustice. It kept them from looking for their own deliverance.
