Mistress of the Solstice (35 page)

I loved and hated him at the same time. And I could not draw my eyes
away.

Elena cradled something in her hands. My hand itched as the familiar
shape of a warm oval object that seemed to fill it. I felt it so often
in my dreams. Except that, unlike me, Elena didn’t seem
to be bothered by it.

Perhaps because she knew what it was?

“This is a good place to swim,” my
father said. “The best one on the whole
lake.”

Don’t listen to him!
I prayed silently. I didn’t care
what my father did to his women once he was tired of them, but I
didn’t want to see it.

I couldn’t look away.

“I would love to go for a swim,”
she said, her face glowing with happiness. She loved him so much. I
hated her for that. “But I cannot leave my
baby,” Elena continued. “She will
freeze.”

“Give her to me,” my father said.
“I will keep her warm for you. For
us.” He gave her an affectionate look that I knew
was a lie.

Elena hesitated for a moment. Then she opened her palm and handed the
thing she held to my father.

It was an egg. A spotted bird’s egg.

“I wish she could grow up to be
human,” Elena whispered, looking fondly at the egg.

“She will,” my father said.
“After all, her father had a human form once. After
she hatches, I’ll teach her to change shape like he
used to. Now, go, swim, my love, we’ll both be waiting
for you right here.”

Elena was as silly as I’d suspected. Without hesitation
she pulled off her dress and jumped into the Sacrifice Pool. As soon as
she did, my father turned and walked back into the forest.

It took her a long time to die.

She struggled against the current that pulled her underwater, against
the tugging weed, with more force than I had imagined existed in her
slender body. She rose to the surface and the air filled with her pleas
and screams. She screamed to my father’s retreating
back. And then, when she realized fully what he had done, she turned
away from him. Her eyes went empty at this realization, but she did not
cease her struggle.

I admired her for that.

Not long after her first screams echoed though the woods, a black bird
flew out of the trees and darted over the Sacrifice Pool. He must have
been nearby, but not close enough at first to see what happened.

Raven circled low over the water, trying to pull her up with his claws,
trying to fetch something big enough for her to hold on to. He got so
dangerously close that her gripping hands almost pulled him underwater
with her.

He would have given his life for her. But in his bird form he could do
nothing to help her. If only he hadn’t forsaken his
human form!

His eyes were two pits of despair as he struggled, drenched and
exhausted, unwilling to give up and yet powerless to do anything for
his love except to die with her.

In the end he chose life.

Perhaps it was for the sake of the egg, his unborn child, now safely in
Kashchey’s possession.

As her struggle finally ceased, as the water closed over her head one
last time, he dropped in fatigue on the bank of the lake and lay there
for a long time.

I had never known before that birds could cry.

I sensed the bonds of Wolf’s hold weaken. Numb, I sank
onto the grass.

“What did you do to her?” my father
demanded.

“I showed her the true story of her birth. From an egg
that you hatched, Kashchey.”

“What of it?” my father asked.
“There is no harm in her knowing that! She was born
as a dove, but I taught her to take her human form. Just like I
promised her mother.”

“And what about Raven?”

“He knew. He didn’t seem to care. So I
kept her to myself. I brought her up as my own daughter. What else
should I have done?”

Wolf fixed him with a long stare, but didn’t say
anything. Instead he turned to me.

“What you saw, Marya, was more than the story of your
birth. It was also the story of the first Solstice Sacrifice in your
kingdom. Kashchey devoured her soul, and her love gave him power and
eternal youth. It changed him. That’s when he realized
the tradition must continue, and that the Solstice night—the shortest
night of the year—was ideal for this deed.”

“Not true,” Kashchey protested.
“The Solstice tradition and the Kupalo cult go back
into the ages.”

“Not in this form. Solstice fertility rites are indeed
ancient, but they have long become no more than festivities, with some
suggestive symbolism. Devouring a virgin’s soul to feed
your power—that, I can tell you, was your invention,
Kashchey.”

“But why—?” My lips did not obey
me. They felt dry, cracked. Cold. I subsided, listening to
Wolf’s steady voice.

“Kashchey raised you as his own. He learned to control
you with magic, taught you to believe that Solstice Sacrifice in your
kingdom was an old and important tradition—all because you were so
perfect for this role. You see, for the sacrifice to work, the one
conducting it must be untouched by love. He soon found he
couldn’t do it himself, because his constant love
affairs drove him in random and dangerous directions. But if he had a
high priestess who could control her feelings so well, he
wouldn’t have to worry at all.”

Control my feelings.
I
remembered how my father taught me not to form any attachments since
early on. How anyone that caught my fancy tended to disappear, until,
at thirteen, he had taught me the horrible lesson of lust and love once
and for all. I always thought this control was part of my power.

“Before you came of age, he was forced to choose the
Mistress of the Solstice from old, spiteful women who had already
wasted all their capacity to love in this world. But such women never
had enough feelings left inside them to gain him real power. And yet he
couldn’t use a young woman instead. The Drink of Love,
another important component of the rite, is a powerful potion and no
young woman could withstand it. You were his perfect
chance.”

“I don’t
understand,” I whispered.

“You have bird’s blood in you. You
have much passion, but for the passion you have, you are much more
resistant to the urges of human flesh. Only Kashchey, having brought
you up, knew how to control you.”

Kashchey, so often caressing me; the lovers he’d
procured for me. How I’d always longed for his touch
more than anything, and yet, we had never taken that longing further
than dreams and desire.

It had worked, perfectly. I could never love my father the way I yearned
to. And as long as he was near, I could never love anyone else.

“And then there was the Needle,”
Wolf continued. “The ingenuous way to separate his
death, to take it away from his body so that he could enjoy his life
without aging or fear. Again, you were the perfect guardian for it,
Marya. Your powers, your solitude, your devotion, made the Needle safer
with you than it could have possibly been with Kashchey
himself.”

“Why can’t you just leave us alone,
Wolf?” Kashchey asked. “What went
between me and Marya is none of your business. Why go through all this
trouble to destroy our Solstice night? Why do you
care?”

Wolf turned to him. His eyes gleamed with an expression I read as
triumph. But I also caught more in their depths. Bitterness. Pain.

“You know this feeling, Kashchey? Of deeds long past,
coming back to bite you in the face?”

“What do you mean?” My
father’s voice faltered. He was afraid, I realized.
Afraid beyond measure.

“Elena was my ward. I swore an oath to keep her
safe.”

The silence that followed was filled with the echoes of deeds long past.
When I could no longer bear it, I fought for strength to turn to
Kashchey and meet his dark gaze.

“Why, father?” I whispered.
“Why did you have to kill Elena?”

Raven’s eyes opened in a flash.

“You killed her,
Kashchey?” The air trembled from the power in his
voice. “
You killed
her
?”

He was faster than anything I’d ever seen. Faster than
the Gray Wolf himself, and much faster than Kashchey could ever be. He
darted down from the branch and stripped the Needle from
Wolf’s mouth. Rising high into the air, he bit it with
his deadly sharp beak.

A snap echoed loudly over the water. The Needle broke, its pieces
dropping in a terrifyingly slow motion, straight into the whirling
waters of the Sacrifice Pool.

The ground shook with thunder. My father, Kashchey, as if struck by
lightning, began to twist into impossible shapes as he burned from
within, with a cold fire visible only through his eyes. His face
contorted in agony, morphing his dark, handsome shape, into an old,
gnarled one, and then on to a distorted corpse, and worse, an inhuman
monster.

I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the horror I knew I
would never forget, no matter how hard I tried. His screams seemed to
go on forever. They still echoed after his body finally crumbled into
pieces, and then into dust.

And then a wind blew, carrying away what was left of my father, my
entire life, my world…

I woke to the feeling of someone’s hand gently stroking
my cheek, someone holding me in his arms and supporting my lifeless
body.

I was blind and unfeeling.

I was dead.

I was a bird that flies above love, forever out of reach.

I was a dove, the daughter of a prophetic Raven and the beautiful maiden
who betrayed him, and was betrayed in turn.

I was the Mistress of Kupalo, and I could never feel.

A voice whispered in my ear, like the whispering of grass in the fields
of wheat and cornflowers on a bright summer afternoon.

It was that voice that made me slowly remember my body, limp against the
lively form that supported it and kept it from collapsing on the
ground.

It was that voice that made my senses slowly return, one by one, so that
I could feel the chilly morning breeze on my face and hear the rustling
of leaves and the soft murmur of the flowing water.

I still couldn’t see, but I realized then that my eyes
were shut, that they were closed forever, that I was unable to bear the
loss of my father, my world, the man who made my weaning into new life
feel like death.

“Marya,” the whispering voice
called to me, and it was not my father’s voice that
said it, it was not my father’s hands that caressed me,
taking away my pain.

I was alive, I realized. I actually existed.

Ivan spoke. I heard his words as if from a great distance.

“Marya, it’s all right now.
You’re free.”

He was talking to me.

Free.
How could I ever be
free from the horror I just witnessed, from the emptiness it left
behind? How could I ever be free from the deeds of my past? I had been
used and taken advantage of by the man who was my whole world, by the
man I believed to be my father. He had forced me to do despicable
things. And now, he was gone. Forever.

“Marya,” Ivan said.

I clung to him, inhaling his natural scent of freshness and sunlight.
Tears streamed down my cheeks and I felt his hand gently wipe them
away. He held me to his chest and I buried my face in it, shaking with
sobs.

He stroked my hair, words flowing over my limp form in
his arms. “I know this is not the time to talk about
such things, but I just wanted you to know. Ritual or not, I
didn’t—didn’t mean to force you to
marry me. You don’t have to. I will never do anything
to hurt you again. And—I’m sorry. I truly am. I never
wanted to bring you pain.”

Part of me understood the words. The other part wanted
nothing more than to be soothed by the sound of his voice, his
caressing hands, his arms cradling me as if I were a child. I heard his
words, but my mind couldn’t follow them.

There would be time for this later, to think, to decide, to regret.
Perhaps there would be time to get to know him better, this boy of
age-long wisdom who cut his way into my heart like a spring sunbeam
cuts its way through winter ice.

Free. I am free.

I opened my eyes.

The new day was dawning. Alyona was gone, but the rest of the
participants were all present.

Except Kashchey.

The Gray Wolf sat at the very edge of the water, the halo of rising sun
shining at his back. He watched us with an expression I
hadn’t yet learned to read. Raven sat beside him.
Sunlight bathed his feathers, making him gleam as if covered with
molten gold. I couldn’t make out the expression on his
face at all.

“Father.”

“Marya,” Raven said gently.

“I—”

“You are free now,” he said.
“And I hope, from now on, you will be
happy.”

I nodded, feeling the warmth spread through me at his gentle expression.
And then, I turned my head to look at Ivan. The warmth of his smile
washed over me and I felt as if coming home, as if a part of me that
had been missing for the longest time had finally found its way back to
its rightful place.