Rosa and the Veil of Gold (13 page)

“We’re not leaving the cottage, right?” he said, finding himself a chair.

“Who’s the Snow Witch?” she said.

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“Nanny Rima’s stories?”

Daniel thought hard. “No. No recollection.”

“Damn.” Em chewed her lip for a few moments. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll work out what to do next.”

She filled him in about the bear, the Snow Witch, the gold, and the fact that they could never be asleep at the same time. As he listened, he grew horrified at the idea that they should leave the safety of the cottage.

“But, Em, we could die out there,” he said. “If we just wait here…”

“What, Daniel? What happens if we wait here? We live with Vikhor happily ever after?”

Daniel stared at her. Outside, night was closing in and a breeze
freshened from the north. Tree branches rubbed and scraped on the roof and eaves.

“Rosa,” he said at last. “Rosa will come for us.”

Em paused. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“She’ll figure it out. She believes in enchantments, she knows we have the bear.”

Em laid her hands on the table calmly. “Okay, Daniel. But what if she doesn’t?”

“She will.”

“But what if she doesn’t?”

Daniel pressed his fingers to his forehead, screwing his brow into a frown. “I don’t fucking know.”

He heard her chair scrape back, and when he looked up she was pulling bread and honey out of the pantry. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Making dinner. We haven’t eaten since we got here.”

Of course. Making dinner. Like everything was normal. “You amaze me,” he said, and he heard that his irritation was poorly concealed. “How can you be so calm?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Daniel, I would have thought under the current circumstances, you could find more to be amazed about than me.”

“Sorry,” he said, finding the ragged edge of a fingernail with his teeth.

“I’m sorry too,” she replied, then came to sit next to him. “We’re in this together. We can’t snipe at each other. It’s dumb.”

“I know that,” he said. “I know that, it’s just…”

“We’ll stay here, but only for a week. If Rosa doesn’t come, we have to move.”

Dread swirled in his stomach.

“I know you hate it, Daniel. I know that fear is strangling you and all I can promise you is more uncertainty,” Em said. “Whatever happens, just breathe and keep breathing. As long as you’re breathing, you’re alive. As long as you’re alive there’s nothing to worry about.”

They flipped a coin to decide who would sleep first and Daniel won. Em was glad, because he looked exhausted and pale, and the
oblivion of sleep would give him a chance to escape. She was glad for her own sake too; he was wearing her out.

She sat with her back to the stove staring out the window into the dark overgrown garden, breathing deep and regular. Daniel was awake for a while: she heard him tossing and turning. Eventually, an empty stillness in the room told her that he had dropped off. For light, she had one candle. When it burned down it was time to wake Daniel, and give him a fresh candle to last until dawn.

And so, in the dim cottage, she waited.

Outside, the wind grew fierce, the tiny panes in the windows rattled.

She hoped that Daniel was right, and that Rosa would come for them. Rosa seemed capable and intelligent, and she clearly knew more about enchantments than either Em or Daniel, but Em would not rely on her.

She eyed the bear, who sat wide awake on the table. The candlelight flickered gold and amber on her bright surface.

“You started this,” Em whispered. “Are you going to help us get home?”

There was no answer of course and, anyway, Em knew that the bear didn’t care if she and Daniel made it home or not. They were expendable.

Outside, in the distance, there was a crash and a thud—like a tree being pulled over. Em glanced over her shoulder at Daniel. He stirred but didn’t wake. Em crept to the window, pressed her face against the glass. Her breath made fog which obscured any view through into the thick foliage.

Another crash and thud. Curious, she went to the door and stepped out into the dark. She pulled the door behind her, but kept the handle firmly in her palm. Sounds drifted towards her on the wind.

A scream. A crash. The howling of a sucking whirlwind which rattled off into the icy reaches of space.

Then, a baby crying.

She paused on the doorstep and listened. Another tree came down, somewhere miles into the woods. The crying continued, louder or softer depending on the strength of the wind. Rattling and howling and trees shaking and falling.

Abruptly, the crying stopped.

Em let herself back into the cottage. Daniel hadn’t woken. She took up her position next to the stove, resumed her deep, even breathing. Best that Daniel hadn’t heard the noises, especially not the crying and its sudden cessation. Daniel’s imagination was a slave to uncertainty. Em’s was not.

Vikhor had been right, when she’d asked him what work he did in the woods…she didn’t want to know.

Rosa didn’t come.

Dawn followed dawn, and Daniel saw them all while Em slept. No light footsteps approached the cottage, no soft voice called him from the fields, no raven-haired beauty in a lace dress appeared, ready to take him home.

The possibility of her coming grew more remote with each sunset in the leshii’s cottage. Even if she crossed the veil, how would she find them? They could be a thousand miles from where they first entered this strange land.

Em kept him busy with tasks around the cottage, her mouth a firmly drawn line of determination. Cooking bread and pancakes, sewing together cloaks and backpacks from the pile of furs and skins they found at the back of a cupboard, repairing hats and gloves. If they did speak to each other, it was about anything but the impending journey. Em loved to play logic games, she was a phenomenally bright student of Russian, and her memory for things she had seen and done was astonishing in its detail and scope. She could recite almost all the words from every documentary she had ever narrated, and was happy to fill the time by telling Daniel everything she knew about the Crusades, or the lives of puffins on the Faroe Islands, or the latest advances in genetic technology.

Once six nights had passed, though, she dropped all pretence of diverting him from the topic uppermost in his mind.

“We’ll have to head off tomorrow, Daniel,” she said baldly, as he pulled up the blankets and lay down to sleep.

“I know,” he said, pressing his toes against the chimney. He closed his eyes and prayed that Rosa would arrive some time in the night, but she didn’t.

Morning light bathed the kitchen as they organised their packs. Daniel’s held the food; Em’s was lighter, holding only the moleskin and the bear. Daniel wore a rough woollen shirt and pants, many sizes too large, which he had found in the leshii’s wardrobe. Em had sewn herself a similar outfit, and had made shoes from bark and fur with the remnants of her old shoes and leftover squares of material.

Daniel’s heart fluttered and he tried to focus on small things to keep his imagination from panicking. He packed bread and pancakes into the plastic shopping bag the bear had travelled in. It was only then that it occurred to him he hadn’t seen the bear all morning.

“Em,” he said, quickly checking under the bedcovers and in the back of the wardrobe, “where’s the bear?”

Em dusted off her hands and came to stand with him at the table. “Pick up the loaves of bread again. You’ll feel the difference.”

“What?”

“Go on.”

He did as she said, unpacking the bread. The second loaf he reached for was obviously heavier than normal. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed.

“She’s made of gold,” Em said. “We don’t want anyone to know we have her. She’s our ticket home. If we don’t have her when we get to the Snow Witch, then we have nothing to bargain with.”

Daniel smiled. “She won’t be happy, packed away in a loaf of bread.”

“No worse than a plastic bag,” Em sniffed. “Although I think we should keep her separate from our food. Somewhere she can’t get lost or stolen. Here.” She handed him a sling made of her cashmere scarf. “Tie this around your body, under your cloak. Guard her with your life.”

Daniel did as he was told, sliding the loaf into the sling and tucking it under his arm.

“Now sit down,” Em said. “One last important thing.” She began taking off the ring on her right hand. “Do you have any gold on you? Anything at all? Vikhor didn’t seem to think it mattered how big or small a piece it was.”

Daniel sat down as she pulled out her earrings and laid them on the table next to the ring. “I’m sorry, Em,” he said. “I have nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

He held out his hands, showing her a plain silver ring on his right pinky finger, and a tatty woven band on his left wrist. He didn’t even like to wear a watch, in case it increased expectations that he would turn up on time. “I’ve never been able to afford gold.”

Em glanced at their meagre stockpile. “We have three items. That’s three questions.”

Daniel shook his head. “Perhaps we should just stay here.”

“You know we can’t. You know we have to leave. We have to find the Snow Witch. She’ll get us home.” Em scooped the jewellery into her palm and hid it in the bottom of her pack. “Are you ready?”

Daniel stood, taking a deep breath. “I guess so.”

They opened the door onto the cool, sunny morning, and headed into the east.

Rosa stood at the top of the stairs in the guesthouse doorway, staring out into the garden. A breeze from the west turned the undersides of leaves to the afternoon sun. Bees buzzed around Anatoly’s head near the hives, catching light on their wings then dropping it again as they descended. All day, Rosa had waited and still Anatoly hadn’t found time to come and speak with her.

Three times now he had said, “When the time is right, Rosa.” But “right” for Anatoly was not right for her.

In his white bee-proof suit, the veil over his head made him look like an alien’s bride. He slid the frames in and out of the boxes. The alternate drawing and clunking chipped at her nerves. She tapped her foot, she chewed the inside of her cheek, she longed for a cigarette.

“Fuck him,” she said, turning and pulling open the door to the cupboard. The wych elm shoot was now six inches long: she needed to know if this meant she had enough magic to cross the veil yet. If not, she needed more spells, more exercises, more information.

Rosa grabbed the pot and thundered down the stairs, striding across to the hives. A fine cloud of bees swarmed and separated around his head. He turned to watch her approach.

“What is it?” he asked irritably.

Heedless of the bees which spiralled around it, she dropped the pot onto the top of a hive. “Don’t ignore me.”

“I’m not ignoring you, I’m busy,” he said. “You should go back to your guesthouse. You’ll get stung.”

Rosa could feel a bee had settled on her hair, another on her upper arm. “I don’t care about getting stung. I care that you still haven’t spoken to me, and I have this to show you.” She indicated the shoot.

Anatoly lifted the edge of his veil and peered at it. “What is it?”

“It’s the seed that you gave me yesterday afternoon.”

A number of emotions chased each other across his face in a moment. Surprise, disbelief, puzzlement. Then he adopted his usual sombre expression. “You’ve done well. Keep going with the spell.”

“I need new spells. I don’t care to grow trees, Anatoly. I will be satisfied with nothing less than crossing to the other world, and that won’t happen while I’m teaching Makhar decimals.”

She had raised her voice, and Anatoly glanced around nervously. He used the back of his glove to brush the bee out of her hair. “Come with me,” he said, dropping his equipment.

Back at the guesthouse, the door safely closed behind them, he removed his veil and gloves and fixed her with a steely glare.

“Why aren’t you afraid of me, Rosa?” he asked.

“Should I be?”

“Everyone else is.”

“We had an agreement. I’ve been here three days and I’ve taught your son and stuck labels on jars and washed dishes every night. You’ve taught me one spell that I didn’t care to know.”

Anatoly’s top lip twitched, and Rosa braced herself: she didn’t know if he was repressing a laugh or a snarl.

He smiled, shook his head and chuckled. “Will one spell a day satisfy you?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

He nodded, his fingers on the end of his beard. “You are much stronger than I thought, Rosa. I’m sorry. Don’t come to me again out in the open. Ilya may have arrived at any moment.” He squeezed her hand. “Meet me at the front gate in ten minutes. There is something we must do together before we can proceed any further.”

Anatoly kept her waiting for twenty. Divested of his bee-protection suit, he now wore a stained pair of overalls and a musty flannel shirt. He handed Rosa a button.

“Here,” he said, “keep this safe a little while.”

While he unlocked the gate she turned the button over in her fingers. It was shaped like a bow, and most of the yellow paint had come off to reveal brown plastic beneath. “Whose is it?”

“It’s Luda’s. I pulled it off one of her shirts.” He ushered her out and locked up behind him. “Rosa, her jealousy is an impediment to us getting any work done. I love my wife, but she isn’t reasonable.” He smiled. “Perhaps I love her
because
she isn’t reasonable.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“A simple hiding spell. One can use it for specific things—hiding an object, for example—but it’s also possible to use it to create a blindness in another individual. Not just to an object, but to an activity. Provided you have something they treasure to bury.”

Rosa looked at the button again. “She treasures this?”

“She treasures the shirt. Her mother sewed it for her as a wedding present. It is long since too threadbare to wear. Now, keep your eyes open for an ant hill.”

They trudged into the woods. Each ant hill she pointed out was dismissed by Anatoly as not being the right one.

“So what kind of ant hill is the right one?” she said finally, when they had been searching for forty minutes.

“One with nine paths leading up to it.” Anatoly had stooped over another little mound, peering at it. “You see. This one has five.” He pointed out the streams in which the ants were leaving and returning.

Rosa bent to count them, then straightened her back. The low sun hit her eyes. Anatoly’s two shadows forked out from his feet. At the tip of the first shadow, she spotted another ant hill.

“There,” she said, hurrying over. “One, two…Yes, there are nine.”

“Good work,” he said. “Now where is the button?”

“Here.”

“You remember the structure of the zagovor?”

“Yes.”

“So, tell the button your spell and then bury it.”

Rosa sat on the ground, holding the button over the ant hill. “Spirits of the wood, I beseech you. Mother Moist Earth, I seek your aid.” Rosa thought for a moment. “In a city on the gulf, there was a girl who would keep a secret hidden. Her uncle didn’t know,
her lover didn’t know, her mother and father were dead and knew nothing. She angered her uncle and still did not tell. She lost her lover and still did not tell.” Rosa’s body grew warm, and she knew the magic was working. “She dishonoured the blessings of her dead parents and still did not tell. As her secret remains hidden, so will my dealings with this volkhv remain hidden from Luda Chenchikova.” She pushed the button into the opening of the ant hill with sweaty fingers. “My word is firm, so it shall be.”

Rosa turned to Anatoly, who met her gaze with a serious expression. He was silent for a few moments, then said in a measured tone, “Very well done, Rosa.”

She stood, brushing off her hands and trying not to smile. “What can we expect will happen now? Will she not see us?”

“She’ll still see us and hear us, of course, so we have to be careful not to be too open in our dealings. But she’ll not notice little clues, she’ll not read anything into our time spent together.” He rose and glanced back towards the farm.

“What about Ilya and Makhar? What if they put ideas into her head?”

“The ideas won’t take hold. She doesn’t like you, Rosa, and she still won’t like you. However, she won’t notice if we are missing at the same time, she won’t come looking for us at the bathhouse.”

Rosa noted that he’d used the word “bathhouse” instead of guesthouse, but didn’t question him.

Anatoly took a step closer, gazing down at her. “Rosa, we could do whatever we wanted. Luda won’t know.”

Rosa felt her body shrink from him, but held her ground. “All I want to do is learn magic,” she said firmly.

“Are you sure?”

“What are you suggesting, exactly?”

“I should very much like to get inside you, Rosa.”

“I should very much like you to stay right where you are.”

He chuckled softly. “You know, I have had lovers before. You wouldn’t be the first, nor the last. And a volkhv knows things about a woman’s pleasure that no other man knows.”

Rosa hated her stupid body for betraying her with a quick rush of curious excitement. She felt herself blush. “No,” she said. “Thanks, but no.”

He held his hands out. “The offer remains, should you change your mind. I won’t insist, and I won’t ask again.”

The spell was strong and effective. Ludmilla didn’t notice Rosa and Anatoly returning together from the woods, nor did she think anything of the way he visited her each afternoon while dinner was cooking inside.

Rosa found that now she was using her magic every day, she could endure more readily the tedium and indignity of her work at the farm. On Wednesday, Anatoly taught Rosa how to cure his toothache. On Thursday, Ludmilla reported a mouse leaving the fireplace: a fire omen. Anatoly made a magic square to hang on the mantel while Rosa prepared an enchanted egg to burn in the hearth. On Friday, Anatoly showed Rosa his spell for controlling the bees without the aid of smoke, but Ilya interrupted them before she could try it. Each night, she said a little blessing for Daniel and drew a little blood in his name. Each day, she could feel the magic growing in her muscles and sinews; the joints of her fingers were tight with it. She put off phoning Uncle Vasily—what would she say to him?—because she knew, she
knew
, that by the end of the week she would be strong enough to cross the veil.

On Friday night Rosa slipped out the gate with midnight at her back. She waited until she was well into the woods before fumbling for her cigarettes. The trees were quiet and calm, the clouded sky still and mute. She picked her way through the trees, more certain of her route this time, rehearsing in her head the zagovor she would use. An owl sat blinking on a nearby branch, and she hooted to it softly. It spread its wings and flapped away. Under the flapping, Rosa could hear something else. A distant shushing. She turned her eyes upwards. The air was still…no, the tips of trees on the dark horizon were moving. A shiver crossed her body. Cold from the approaching wind, but also anticipation. Bad magic stirred the air.

She hesitated. Should she run back to the guesthouse? The speed the wind was approaching wouldn’t allow her even to make it back to the gate in time. She glanced around for a place to hide, but how would she hide from an enchanted creature? They were cunning,
they knew the woods and were not confused by the dark. She froze as the wind bore down, making branches creak and lifting fallen leaves.

The shadow slid past two hundred feet to her right. A sizzle of adrenalin. Only the corner of her vision caught it and she turned her head to follow it with her eyes. It had already disappeared into the trees.

Rosa paused. Then followed.

The woods were alive with creaking and thudding and rustling. The shadow slipped between trees ahead of her, always too far ahead for her to see it clearly. Was it a leshii? A demon of frost or fire? This close to a crossing, it could be any kind of creature. Rosa both longed to see it, and was so terrified that her heart jumped in her chest.

Somewhere in the darkness, she lost sight of it. She stopped, panting, gazing around her. Turned in a slow circle.

It hit her from behind. A thud in the centre of her back which sent her flying to the ground. She cried out, quickly scrambling to her feet. It kicked her feet from under her and she landed again, this time on her back. It loomed above her.

Not a leshii or a demon. A young man with his face in shadows.

“Hey,” she said. “Who are you?”

He shook his head mutely then turned to run. Rosa stood, pressing her hand into her back. “Wait,” she called, but her voice was carried backwards on the wind.

He had disappeared.

Rosa brushed leaves off her clothes. Was it the same young man she had seen before, with Elizavetta? She was so angry at being knocked over by him that she considered heading back to the guesthouse and telling Ilya that his wife had a secret lover.

But that wasn’t why she had come out tonight.

The wind was dying down now. Just a random night breeze, not an omen of bad magic after all. She turned back the way she had come, finding her way to the field.

The veil waited. Her second sight revealed the bright colours and distant music. She walked right up to it, her palms brushing the space just outside the soft gold and violet waves. Her fingers tingled, her scalp prickled.

With a deep breath, she said, “Sister moon, I beseech you. Tsar air, I beg your aid.” Eyes turned to the clouds, she told her tale. “On a small green island in the cold sea, the youngest of three sons was born. His name was Daniel, and he fell in love with a rose who offered him only her thorns.” Rosa bowed her head, waiting until the pang of guilt and loss had passed sufficiently for her to continue. “She led him far and far away from his home and comfort, until he crossed the veil from this world to the next. As he has crossed, so may I cross this veil. My word is firm, so it shall be.”

Rosa stepped forward. This time, instead of the veil disappearing, it held. She felt resistance against her body, elastic. But she couldn’t push through it.

She stepped back and said the spell again. Tried the veil once more. The elastic gave a fraction, began to separate and dissolve into stars, but then sprang back stronger than before.

Half an hour passed, an hour. Over and over she said the spell and tried to step through the veil, until her body was sore from beating itself against the resistance, and sweat ran in rivers under her clothes and hair.

“Damn it!” she said at last, collapsing to her knees. She picked up a rock and threw it at the veil, watched it hurtle through to the other side and land in the field.

She took a moment to catch her breath, closing down her second sight so the colours couldn’t taunt her. She swore at the veil in every language she knew and lit a cigarette.

It was simply taking too long. Already Daniel had been gone more than a week. What if it took weeks or months to grow her magic? She felt a twinge of the raw panic she had been suppressing all week.

“Okay, patience, patience,” she said, pulling herself to her feet and making her way back through the woods. She thought of her mother’s bracelet. Anatoly had called it a worthless trinket, but if it was so useless, why did he have to keep it from her? And if it was more powerful than he said, then could it help her cross the veil? Maybe if she could find it without Anatoly knowing…

Footsteps in the forest had her withdrawing behind the trunk of a tree. She heard the footsteps pause too, as though wary of her. She waited, listening.