Enchantment (40 page)

Katerina raised her head and looked Esther in the eye. “Then there’s a way through the protections on this house, yes?”

“Of course. I don’t know what it is, but that’s why I’m so vigilant.”

Katerina pulled away from her, returned to her father.

“Ivan’s mother is a witch,” she said. “A good one. Not as strong as the Widow, but strong enough to withstand her here.”

Matfei looked alarmed.

“Yes, she’s here. That’s why her armies haven’t followed up on Taina’s weakness, with you imprisoned and silenced as you are. Father, be patient. I
will
come back. You
will
be freed. And we
will
get this curse taken from you.”

He closed his eyes.

“That’s right, Father. Sleep. And pay no attention to what I will whisper now to the men who guard you.”

He opened his eyes only long enough to wink at her. Then he closed them again.

She zoomed the vision back. Now the guards were visible.

“Shame on you,” she whispered. “Shame on you.”

Both men at once grew alert.

“Did you hear that?” one of them murmured.

“Hear what?” the other one lied.

“Dimitri made you do it,” she said. “Dimitri is in the service of the Vile Widow. She comes to him by night and tells him what to do. She gave him the spell that keeps King Matfei silent. He is the servant of the enemy. But you are the servants of Christ.”

Both men crossed themselves.

“I am Katerina, and I will return. I will have my husband, Ivan, with me, and he will teach you the wizardry of his strange and powerful land. All those who stand with Dimitri will be destroyed. All those who stand with me will live, and we will free our land from the shadow of the Widow. You have heard me. As loyal men, true Christians and sons of God, you will keep faith with the oath you made to my father. Prepare the others as well. Let no man move against Dimitri before I come, but let no man stand beside him when I do.”

“Yes, Princess,” they murmured. “I promise, Katerina.”

“And let no further harm come to my father. Mercy will be remembered.”

At once one of the men moved to Matfei’s side and unfastened the bands that held his wrists together. The other quickly set to work on his ankles.

“Now I see you are true friends of the king, and true Christians. I watch you sometimes, from afar; Jesus watches you always, from inside your heart.” She took a deep breath. “Look up, into the air above you, and see the face of her whom you will follow.”

At once Esther stepped back, uncertain of what Katerina was going to do. She had never heard of such a thing.

Katerina spat into her hands, rubbed her hands together, then smeared the saliva on her face, rubbing, rubbing. Then, before it could dry, she lowered her face to the water and gently pressed through the surface tension. Esther leaned in, looked over her shoulder. The water shimmered, but the vision held long enough for Esther to see how the soldiers looked up and saw the face of their princess.

Then Katerina lifted her dripping face from the basin. The water spilled and sloshed. There was no more vision in it. Katerina raised her skirts to her face, wiped away the water and the spit. And then wept again into her skirts.

“It’s a monstrous enemy you’re fighting,” said Esther, putting an arm around her daughter-in-law’s trembling back. “But you’re luckier than she is, for
she
has to face
you
, and I have never seen anyone so fierce.”

Katerina only wept louder, and buried her face in her mother-in-law’s shoulder.

Ivan stood in the front yard, waiting for Ruthie to arrive. The twelve-year-old boy across the street was fumbling with the string on a new kite. Not the most mechanically gifted of children, Ivan concluded. But there was a good breeze this morning, so it wouldn’t be as oppressively hot out in the back yard as it had been yesterday. The forecast was thunderstorms late in the afternoon, and then clear again—hot and muggy, in fact—for the Fourth. Today, though, there was a breeze, and that called for a kite.

Katerina has never seen a kite, Ivan realized. They were a Chinese invention and they didn’t come to Europe until . . . well, until later. Before Benjamin Franklin, but after Baba Yaga. So much for my future as a historian.

The boy across the street—what was his name? Terrel Sprewel. Never Terry, just Terrel, even though the name Terrel was clearly invented as a back-formation to allow the nickname Terry without saddling the kid with a really geeky name like Terence. Though you might as well tape a kick-me sign on your baby as to give him a name that was not only weird but rhymed.

Terrel used to try to follow Ivan, back when Ivan was in middle school and he ran through the neighborhood instead of around the lake. Back when it was still faintly ridiculous in the neighbors’ eyes that a Jewish kid should be jogging. Terrel was a toddler then, and Ivan had to stop and make him go back. What’s he doing in the front yard without a parent watching him, anyway? Once he had to take Terrel to the front door, the kid was so persistent, and his mom acted as if Ivan had somehow committed a crime by suggesting that she ought to prevent the child from following Ivan on his five-mile run. Maybe she thought I should take him along. Maybe she
wished
. That would be sad, to grow up with a mother who kind of hoped you’d run away.

Maybe you’d end up all by yourself, trying to get a string tied onto a kite so it has some hope of flying.

Ivan’s impulse was to cross the street and lend a hand, show the kid how it was done.

Then he remembered—it wasn’t safe for him to cross the street by himself. Who’s the toddler now?

The string was tied. It wasn’t in exactly the right place, but it would probably do. Terrel carried the kite to the end of the block before he started his run. Ivan wondered why he would do that. Why not start running from his own front yard? The answer was obvious, though. Terrel wanted to get the kite flying just as he reached his yard, so he could stand there in front of the windows with the kite in the air where his parents could look out and see him. Maybe they were better parents than Ivan thought. Maybe they would be looking. But he thought not. They never watched. Terrel was always alone. No applause. And yet it still mattered to the kid. He was still hungry to have his mom or dad tell him he did OK, or even watch him without a word, just to have their eyes see that he could get a kite up into the air.

Ivan practically willed it up. Run faster, he thought. Let out more string as you go. Let it catch. Rise up! Faster now! Good, it’s working. It’s caught! Let the string bleed out now, a little more.

He wasn’t doing it. He was keeping the kite on too short a tether. It was going to fall.

“Let out more string!” Ivan called.

Terrel didn’t even look over. He just obeyed. The string spun out; the kite staggered a moment, but the breeze caught it, carried it up. Terrel stood there, letting out a little more. A little more. Only when the kite was definitely up there, quite high, did Terrel look over at Ivan and grin.

It wasn’t his parents he wanted to have watch him. It was me.

“Good job!” cried Ivan. “First try.”

Terrel held up the string in his hand, offering Ivan the control of the kite. Ivan waved it back. “You’re the kite-flyer, Terrel. It’s all yours!” Then Ivan pointedly turned to look up into the sky, watching the kite, so Terrel wouldn’t try to insist.

I can’t go to your side of the street, Terrel, or the witch will get me.

The gusty wind was making the kite dance. Ivan wondered what it would be like, to be up there himself, in a hang glider, for instance, and catch one of those downdrafts. Drop like a stone for fifty feet, then recover and soar again.

Hang glider. That’s something they could build in Taina, definitely. It wouldn’t be paper, but Matfei had some silk, it had been part of his wife’s dowry. Light dry wood for the frame—if Ivan learned enough about the aerodynamics of it, surely he could build at least one. That might be useful, to get someone inside Baba Yaga’s fortress.

Someone alone and unarmed—how useful would that be? Because there was no way that someone carrying a heavy sword and buckler would be able to fly in a hang glider.

Oh, well. Never mind.

The front door opened. Terrel’s mother came out onto the porch with a woman from up the street. For a moment Ivan thought, with some relief, that his assessment was wrong, that Terrel had indeed earned some applause for getting the kite into the air. But the women ignored the boy, continuing an animated conversation.

A small hairy dog charged out of the front door, dodged between the women on the porch, and ran straight for Terrel. With his eyes on the kite, stepping forward and backward as he kept the kite line taut, Terrel was completely unaware of the dog until it was bashing into his legs, tripping him up. Terrel lost his balance for a moment, and in the effort to keep from falling, he stepped on the dog. Not too hard, but enough to send the dog yipping and yelping toward Terrel’s mom.

Now she noticed him. “What are you doing! Are you trying to kill him? You think a
kite
is more important than a
living creature
? You make me
sick
sometimes, Terrel, the way you step on everybody and everything around you!”

It was an astonishing display of temper. The neighbor lady was as appalled by it as Ivan was. But Terrel took it all in stride; he assumed a submissive pose, looking at the ground, no longer watching the kite. Apparently he knew—probably had learned it very young—that this was the only pose that turned away wrath. Ivan noticed, however, that behind his back he kept a firm grip on the kite string and was surreptitiously trying to keep it taut.

Terrel’s mother was holding the dog now, speaking comfortingly to it, but with snide barbs at Terrel. “Did the mean boy kick you and step on you?” And then she turned her full attention back to her son. “Let go of that kite right now. You heard me! Let it go this instant! You will learn that living creatures are more important than
toys
.” She poured so much scorn into the last word that Ivan wanted to smack her.

He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but it really was unbearable. He spoke in a loud voice, so he could be heard across the street. “Mrs. Sprewel, I was watching the whole thing, and Terrel could
not
have avoided what happened. The dog tripped him up before he even knew it was there.”

Mrs. Sprewel glared at him like a bug in the frosting. “Thank you for your observation,” she said. “I’m sure that makes poor Edwin feel
much
better.” It took a moment for him to realize that Edwin was the dog.

Ivan tried to soften the whole thing by turning it away from the issue of dog-stomping. “Terrel did a great job of getting the kite up there on his first try—a gusty day like this, it wasn’t easy.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t recall inviting you into this conversation,” said Mrs. Sprewel. Behind her, the neighbor woman rolled her eyes.

Ruthie’s car pulled up in front of the house.

Momentarily ignoring Ruthie’s arrival, Ivan smiled and waved cheerily at Mrs. Sprewel. “You’re quite right, Mrs. Sprewel. But I did wonder why your dog wasn’t penned up or on a leash, as the law in Tantalus requires.”

“He’s on our property!” Mrs. Sprewel said, outraged but now on the defensive, which was all Ivan had hoped for.

“The dog wasn’t on your property when it tripped your son and nearly killed him,” said Ivan. “You really should watch that dog. It’s a menace!” Then, with a wave but without another glance, he turned to Ruthie and greeted her with a smile as she got out of the car. Ruthie, unaware of the contretemps with the neighbors, gave him a friendly hug and a sisterly peck on the cheek.

Only after she pulled away from him and headed for the back of the car did he realize how deftly she had manipulated the greeting. Old habit had made him hold her just a little too tightly and a little too long. And perhaps she broke away a little more quickly than would have been normal, even for a perfunctory social greeting. He could almost hear the thought in her head: Take
that
, lover boy.

He also noticed that she was wearing a wig. How odd. Had she gone Hasidic all of a sudden? Not likely. No doubt just having a bad hair day.

Ruthie opened the trunk. Ivan stepped into the road just long enough to get the picnic hamper out, then carried it around the house into the back yard. Behind him, the dog barked. But Mrs. Sprewel wasn’t yelling at Terrel anymore, and the kite was still up.

Ruth saw the wasp land on Ivan’s back as he bent over the trunk to pick up the hamper. She didn’t say anything to Ivan. Instead she silently invoked the wasp: Sting the bastard! Thinks he can hold me like old times, thinks he still has the
right
to pull me close enough to mash my breasts up against his chest and hold me there—well, that’s a right I give to those who deserve it.

The wasp didn’t sting him. But it didn’t fly away, either. As Ruth followed him around the house, she could see the wasp crawling along his shirt. Plenty of time. Besides, if the wasp didn’t sting him, she had the brownies. Plenty of itch and sting in
those
, if she chose to serve them to him. Not all the brownies, of course. Just two of them on which she placed the itching powder from the gypsy’s bag, then put icing over them. She probably wouldn’t serve those to Ivan and his bride. She had much greater hopes for the one big piece of chicken breast that she injected with the thin clear fluid from the gypsy’s jar. Let Ivan eat that while Katerina was in the house on some made-up little errand and see whether he wanted to be married to the shiksa after that.

I can’t believe I’m even taking these things seriously, thought Ruth. This is magic, witchcraft, superstition.

But why shouldn’t it work? Witchcraft was simply an alternate way of viewing the universe, every bit as valid as science. Folkways were often wiser and more in harmony with the earth than the hard-edged metallic thinking of the engineers. Ivan used to laugh at her when she said things like that, and once he asked her if she believed that principle applied to recipes and directions. “Don’t you expect directions to have a one-to-one correspondence with the highway system?” But that was just patriarchal thinking. Anything women said or thought had to be put down by men. She hadn’t realized that Ivan was such a patriarchalist until after he betrayed her, but love is blind.