Chaos Tryst (4 page)

Thoughts of the window and the dark oppression of the Scar transported Maks to a time he normally avoided through force of will. He’d become practiced at suppressing his past, but there were catalysts—moments, scents, symbols. Ignoring the window had become rote; in breaking it the returner had inadvertently brought him hope. And hope unlocked doors.

In his head he sidestepped fetid puddles of memory. Working not to slip, he almost missed the weight of the returner’s hand on his arm. Perhaps she acted to anchor him. Useless. Soon his mind overflowed with pains of the past and he sank into the remembrances of a time before his parents became stone.

An image of the bone witch, Baba-Yaga, rose before him. She’d taken a liking to his father in those days. No mystery there. Mikhail had been an incomparable craftsman, especially when he worked in amber. Each piece his father shaped held magicks. Maks fondly remembered his brothers and himself receiving sculpted toys that moved of their own volition. In those times the bees encircling his mother’s special statue flew freely around the honeycomb or followed her in a swarm of protection.

From his understanding, Baba-Yaga had wanted his father to mold monsters for her—creatures of stone and semiprecious gem she would use to gather infants, the sustenance to appease her power along with her palate. The bone witch offered Mikhail a taste of the foul puissance she would gain as a result. He hadn’t wanted anything but to watch his wife, Valentina, dance and his children grow. If only he hadn’t told the witch his truth. Perhaps…

A shiver of regret passed over Maks. The warm squeeze of the hand on his arm fought off the chill and he continued to follow the memory.

He’d been at his mother’s side when Baba-Yaga came to collect her. A hunting expedition had called Mikhail and Dmitri away. Pride infused the memory. The common folk had begun to tell tales of the man and the bear who hunted as one. His father and brother had carved their place into folklore early on.

With the elder males gone, Valentina took Maks and baby Konstantin into the forest. Like her, Maks had the gift of dance and song. She wanted to teach him to use it.

He’d done well. Valentina had laughed as he spun by a riverbank, flowers growing where his feet struck. Her breathtaking smile lit her face as she clapped and kept time with bare feet.

Who could’ve foreseen the arrival of the bone witch? Only the babe sleeping in a basket by the tree stump their mother sat upon. And he could not yet speak. Baba-Yaga oozed from the tree line and seized Maks as he danced. She bit into his shoulder, the sting of her teeth searing. Before his mother’s name slipped from his lips, venom seeped into his body. The last he saw, Valentina had risen, her visage fierce, twin daggers twirling dangerously in her hands.

The witch must have made a bargain to convince his mother to leave her two “sleeping” babes behind. Maks guessed it was something to free him from the effects of the poison—Valentina had never spoken of it after her return. He’d awoken to Kostya’s wails and darkness, his body curled around the baby’s basket with his mother’s daggers at his fingertips.

Guilt had seized him. Chest aching, it took him a great while to bury the emotion deep within his subconscious. After Maks carefully placed the blades in the basket, Bear had taken over. He’d gripped the handles in his teeth then tracked his father and elder brother.

Mikhail had taken the news of his wife’s abduction with a curt nod of his head. He and Dmitri left the younger boys in the care of the Faebled Gypsy side of the family and left on a hunt for Baba-Yaga’s ever-moving hut. Having done his duty Maks turned his face to the wall of a wooden caravan and cried. During the following days he’d allowed no one to console him. Only the return of his mother could.

As Dmitri told it, their father had outsmarted Baba-Yaga and won Valentina back without having to craft monsters. The witch hadn’t taken the loss well. She’d cursed the couple. In time their love would rot, turning them against one another; and their children would never find succor in love nor families born of it.

Valentina’s chaos had fed the spell. Mitya recalled watching it coalesce in a rain of shimmering red particles that painted their mother’s face in stricken shades.

After his family retrieved their two younger members, they’d all returned to their home to find the stained glass mounted in a formerly solid wall. Since then it followed the family, making itself a part of each home they’d taken. His parents fought the curse until Dmitri came of age. When the time came, Mikhail and Valentina kissed their children goodbye before combining their magicks. They’d turned to marble to escape the end of their love—a horror neither of them could bear. Their three sons hadn’t fared much better. Somewhere inside, in a place Maks dared not think on too long, he believed his and his mother’s entropy had united to cause their family’s misery. He had given the bone witch an opening and his mother had enhanced the curse.

Maks shook off the thrall of his past. Could the curse have been broken when the window shattered? He pummeled his hope back down into a manageable size. Yet, if so, his brothers would be free to find mates and begin families of their own. Possibly their parents would return to them, as well. Good. Happiness had infused his life as fully as breath before Baba-Yaga. Having them back, with his brothers able to fill out the Medved ranks, would be more than enough for Maks. He would live vicariously through their joys—if the curse had truly been broken.

Maks did not allow himself the thought of a wife and cubs. There would be no family for him. The threat of passing on his propensity for chaos prevented him from risking the barest longing for those he could call his—

Ari yawned loudly. Maks erased any evidence of pain from his expression as he turned to her.

The returner trudged along beside him. Her head drooped and she barely lifted her knees with each pace, as though the joints were made of lead.

He allowed suspicion to color his voice. “What is wrong?”

She took her hand from his arm and rubbed her nose. “I’m so tired. I’ve been working nonstop for days.” She sighed but continued to move.

“This is not normal?”

“No. For some reason my entire family and all our friends have each found excuses to hire me in the last two weeks.” She scratched the top of her head. “The exhaustion is finally catching up with me. I’m dangerous when I’m sleepy.”

Maks flexed and folded his fingers. “Chaos dangerous?”

“Uh huh. You saw what happened to your window. I’m…I’m not nearly on my parents’ level but that’s part of the problem.” She looked ashamed for a moment but shook it off. “I need a nap…or a coma. A coma would be nice.” Light filled her eyes. “Hit me.”

He considered it. Bah. He could not. “I will not strike you.”

“You did it for the goblin.”

“He deserved it.”

“And I don’t?”

There was that. She did deserve it, but he still couldn’t do it. He would have to maintain calm enough for them both. “As you have told me,
vorovka,
pull up your underoos and handle it like a big girl.”

Ari groaned. “I did pull them up. They’ve got Wonder Woman on them and everything.” She clapped her hands over her eyes.

If it were possible for Maks to do more than gruff in amusement, he would have then. The realization caught him off guard. Normally only his brothers had the ability to bring him to the brink of laughter.

“You will be fine,” he said. “I am here with you.”

Why had he told her this?
She whirled in his direction with the glee of a child who’d had a good night trick-or-treating.
Oh no.
Without further warning she lunged, yelling, “Hold me.”

Maks extended his arm, a steel beam between them, and caught her on the neck before she had moved more than an inch. “Control yourself.”

She leaned into him. A couple of his fingers fell across her lips and smushed them. “Deres no need ta stong armee.”

“I would not need to strong arm you if you were in control of yourself.” He relaxed his arm. She straightened and sighed. “Mean and surly. And I’m not kidding about the mean this time.”

Maks forged ahead. A thought struck. Ari had said she couldn’t go to sleep without risking her entire night’s work. She took the job seriously. Why, then, had she asked him to knock her unconscious? He looked back. Ari followed behind him with lightness to her steps and a smile on her face. When she realized he watched, the smile dissolved and the trudging returned.

He turned away lest he smile himself. The returner had sensed his mood and sought to take his mind from his troubles.
Lovely and also kind.

And a liar by blood, a thief by profession, he reminded himself.

A stench saved him from examining the returner’s pros and cons further; dead plants and rot strangled his sense of smell. The closer they came to goblin territory, the worse the stink became. They had reached the Scar and would hopefully bypass the thirteen-foot width of it quickly.

Ari scrunched up her nose. “What is that stink?”

“I do not know.”

They rounded the last of the wall. Ari gasped and rushed to the hodgepodge faux-iron fence sectioning off this side of the Scar. Her fingers intertwined with ones akin to desiccated twigs.
Frannie.
She must have sensed their approach and come to meet them.

Maks took a place beside Ari at the fence and fisted his hands around the bars. What had once been lush bark-brown skin was rough and fallow. Hair he remembered flowing to the ground in a mane of flowering ivy had been reduced to dried and broken stems, sticking out here and there across the exposed scalp.

This could not be Frannie standing before him, the stench of her almost overwhelming. He had often admired the half wood nymph, half wood sprite and her commitment to the hills of her birth. She’d never been as strong as an earth goddess—the combined goblin and ogre territories were the extent of her reach—but she’d cared for the land for centuries, and it had blossomed beneath her loving ministrations. So much so the district had originally been called by her name. Time and egos had changed Frannie’s Way into Fanaweigh. Still it remained hers. Her charge. Her child.

She’d tended the hills, woods and fields until the Scar sprung up and displaced the central gardens. Nothing grew there anymore, as though the soil had been salted. And now this bastion of green growing things stood before him wasting away, as did the motherly power she exerted over Fanaweigh. Frannie could not leave the land yet she could no longer live there either. Vicious circles did not get much worse.

Maks had known she was not well but he hadn’t anticipated this. He’d been too involved in the day-to-day workings of his own life to worry over Frannie or her namesake. Modern life worked this way. In his mind the Scar had become another part of the Faebled world. They’d always known darkness and destruction. He hadn’t thought to make an effort to change things. Knowing the magicks within him, he likely would have worsened the situation. Lame. This was no reason not to have tried.

Did the Grand High Oni even realize he played the accomplice in the murder of his own kingdom? Maks doubted it.

Frannie would soon be dust and nothing more. What would become of the denizens of this district then? And why hadn’t Maks’s Oracle of Order brother, Konstantin, divined this outcome?

Another oddity.

The returner stroked Frannie’s face and rough patches of skin disintegrated. Ari made to pull away but the earth-spirit grabbed the hand and cradled it to her cheek.

“Is there something we can do for you?” Ari asked. Frannie shook her head sadly.

Maks said, “I will speak with the Grand High Oni. He must be made to see reason.”

“You think he’ll see reason when protests and human lawsuits haven’t changed his mind?”

Maks snarled at no one in particular. To Frannie he said, “Have you appeared to the Grand High Oni? Surely he—”

The earth-spirit shrunk back, covering her mouth with a brittle hand. The twigs on her scalp shook.

Ari forced her body as far into goblin territory as the bars allowed and reached for Frannie. The other Faeble was slow to reach back. “She’s afraid of The Ogre,” Ari said, sadness coating her voice.

Maks practiced his calming exercise three times over. It would not do for Ari and him to become emotional at the same time. The effects of their combined chaos could cause the Scar to grow or suck Frannie down into the earth for a final burial.

“As I have said, the Grand High Oni and I will have words tonight.”

Ari nodded, still focused on comforting the earth-spirit. Her care appeared to have wrought a small improvement. The patches beneath where Ari’s touch brushed the skin away looked healthier—although not quite healthy.

“Wat are you two long and ganglies doing there?” said a voice. The border patrol had caught them. Three “officers” stood in triangle formation, doing their best imitations of menacing. Their mishmash uniforms caused them to fall far short of their goal; the leader wore a policeman’s cap she’d combined with medical scrubs and a marching band jacket. The oversized nightstick at her waist didn’t give her much of an advantage either. Not when any trespasser would likely flip themselves over laughing. Her squad mates were no less comical.

Ari whispered assurances to Frannie before stepping away from the fence. The earth-spirit vanished.

Turning to her ten o’clock Ari made a show of brushing off her jumpsuit and straightening her collar. When she’d finished, the glare she fixed on the three-goblin unit could’ve served as a master class in intimidation. Sparks of chaos blazed around her.

The patrol shifted uncomfortably.

As a spectator, Maks found himself liking the returner more and more.

“We’re planning on eating you three in a pie,” Ari said matter-of-factly, her arms folded across her chest. “We’ve already felled Corbel and Trajan.” She shook her shoulder pack and the henchmen moaned. The patrol gasped.

Yes, he liked her more and more—despite her shortcomings.

Taking his cue, Maks shuddered and unleashed Bear. The goblins eased backward. Ari blessed him with a sly smile.