The Usurper's Crown (35 page)

“You can’t see ghosts?”

“Not without a great deal of preparation, no.”

“But you can help that boy?”

“Yes, if they let me.” Avanasy was very close behind her. She could feel him, close enough to touch, but not willing to do so. He would not want to feel her pull away from him. She knew that.

“And if I hadn’t seen what I saw?”

“We might have been gone before he was ill enough for them to ask for help from a stranger, especially since they’ve been so robbed before.”

Ingrid let out a long, slow sigh. “Well, that’s something then.”

“Is it enough?”

Ingrid turned to face the man whose ring she wore. Even in the dim light she could see the worry and hope warring with each other in his face. “For now,” she said honestly. “You will have to give me time, Avanasy. This is … unexpected is far too faint a word.”

He took her hand then and kissed it softly. “Just remember, my heart, that you are not alone. Tell me always how it is with you, and we will come to understand this new thing together.”

“I promise,” she assured him.

He leaned forward to kiss her and she tilted her mouth up to meet his, but all at once, the world seemed filled with the sound of tromping boots and the shouting of coarse voices.

“I believe our hosts are coming home.”

As Ingrid watched the fishers flowing into their village, she was struck by the familiarity of the scene. Oh, the clothes and the faces were strange, but the attitudes, the combination of dour weariness and neighborly joviality was a thing she had witnessed all her life. Men and women called out to each other, split up to enter into their homes, joked with their fellows, greeted or scolded their children, or simply stretched their backs and shoulders before stooping to enter their own doorways.

Eventually, an older man with a gray beard that now had only a few threads of what must have been its original golden color made his way to the god house. He glanced at Ingrid and Avanasy with one appraising blue eye.

“So. I was told you’d be here.”

Avanasy made his bow and Ingrid curtsied, but the man ignored both gestures, instead moving straight to the altar and the icon. He bowed first, laying down a small cache of shells and what Ingrid was sure were pearls. Then he kissed the icon, his eyes reverently closed. Only then did he turn to face the strangers.

“I fear you’ve had a thin welcome,” he said, cocking his head toward Avanasy.

“I have heard of your troubles, Keeper …”

“Hajek Ragdoksyn Kraichinivin,” he said, tucking his thumbs into his sash. “And who are you, sorcerer?”

Avanasy hesitated for a moment, and then evidently decided that the risk of the truth was less than the risk of a lie. “I am Avanasy Finorasyn Goriainavin, and with me is Ingrid Loftfield.” Ingrid nodded to the keeper, who looked her up and down with a face gone suddenly hostile.

“A Tuukosov?” he demanded.

Avanasy touched Ingrid’s arm to reassure her and shook his head. “No, good keeper. She is from an island much further away than that.”

The keeper’s expression relaxed at once. “Malan’ia’s calling for a parley about the pair of you. I think she’s hoping you’ll be run out for a pair of frauds.” He pursed his lips. “She’s even muttering you brought the fever on young Iakhnor.”

“Then he has got the first flush of it?” asked Avanasy quietly.

Hajek nodded. “So she says. I must go there now and offer Dimska’s words of blessing.” He plucked one of the pearls off the altar and tucked it into his sash.

As the man turned, Avanasy said, “And what do you think of us, Keeper?”

“Ah.” Hajek held up one thick finger. “I think you have to be who you say, or you’re a great fool to be giving out that name.” His grin showed a scattering of crooked teeth clinging to his pink gums. “Yes, I know it well, and you thought I might. But we’re loyal to the true empress here.” His voice went suddenly grim. “We are her people, and none others, especially not that Hastinapuran bull who calls himself emperor.” For a moment, Ingrid thought Hajek might spit, but he refrained, probably because of the house he was in. Instead, he just shook his head, his bearded face gone sour. “If it’s the fire and snow with Iakhnor, I’ll have you sent for, and then we’ll see.”

He left them there, striding out into the fading daylight, calling to people they could not see and receiving their hails in return.

“What has happened?” murmured Avanasy to his retreating back. “What have they said? What are they doing?” His fist clenched.

“Can’t you find out?” ventured Ingrid. “Some spell …” It felt odd to say the word in perfect seriousness.

Avanasy shook his head, pacing to the far side of the hut. “Scrying without the proper tools is an uncertain business. You might see the past, or the future, or, more likely, nothing at all.” He tapped the wall with his fist. “And the proper tools can take months to create. The best take years. There was so much I could not bring with me, and so little I believed I’d need.” He added absently and Ingrid knew he was talking because he could not bear the thoughts silence would bring, “At least part of me believed she would call me back within a few weeks, when her anger had passed. When that call did not come …” He shrugged. “I did not believe I would have any need for such divinations again.”

They were silent for a moment, then Ingrid rubbed her arms. The evening was turning chill, as was only to be expected with the ocean wind blowing so constantly. “Why did the keeper say the boy had fire and snow?” she asked, changing the subject and feeling something of a coward for doing so. She knew who Avanasy was, and what had brought him to her. She could surely stand to hear him speak about it when he needed to. Surely.

“It’s the local name for the fever,” he answered, circling the hut to the hearth. “The victim turns red and white from the fever, spots and swelling.” He crouched down next to the woodpile. “I think Dimska will not begrudge us some warmth in her house.” He reached for some kindling, but before he could lay it in the hearth, Hajek’s voice sounded from outside the house.

“Sorcerer!” he called. “Sorcerer, come quick!”

Avanasy was on his feet and out the door in the next heartbeat and Ingrid hiked up her skirts to follow fast behind him. Keeper Hajek swung around as soon as he saw them, stumping off between the scattering of round huts to one bright with flickering light and full of murmuring voices.

Hajek, Avanasy and Ingrid had to push their way through the mass of people to get inside. It seemed as if the entire village had crammed itself into the hut to stare. The boy, Iakhnor, lay on a pallet in front of the hearth, where the fire had been built up so high Ingrid feared the chimney might catch fire.

It could not have been more than two hours since they had seen the boy, as wide-eyed and spry as the other young children. The change was terrifying. He lay wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire, his skin as white as paper except for fist-sized blotches of red on his cheeks and neck. Sweat poured in rivers from his face and yet he shivered constantly as if from some awful ague. A stout woman, her hair covered by an embroidered cloth, knelt beside him and buried her face in her hands, rocking back and forth while all her neighbors stood about solemn-faced and watched the boy perspiring his life away.

The ghost was there too. He stood beside the woman, but all his attention was on the boy, waiting for that last moment when the child would depart with him, Ingrid was sure of it.

“Ingrid,” murmured Avanasy, and Ingrid knelt beside the woman, wrapping her arms around her.

“Shhh,” she said, stroking the woman’s head. “Shhh, it will be all right. It will be all right.” Useless words. This woman’s child was dying and it would not be all right, but the woman buried her face in Ingrid’s shoulder, and sobbed, and Ingrid held her, and that was all that could be done. Avanasy laid his hand on the Iakhnor’s head, and then his heart. He looked at the red weals, the blazing fire, and the whole village crowded in to see the contagion.

“I will need a birch pole with the bark still on it,” he said to Hajek. “And a strip of red cloth, and salt. As much as you can bring me.”

“For what?” snapped the old woman whom they had spoken to when they first arrived. Malan’ia, Keeper Hajek had said her name was. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd. “What will that do, sorcerer?”

“Of itself, nothing, mistress,” said Avanasy, working to keep his voice even. His hand still lay on the Iakhnor’s chest, and even over his mother’s cries, Ingrid heard that the boy’s breath was becoming ragged. Jesus and Mary, it was taking his tiny body so fast. And they were all in here, breathing the bad air. Oh, God, this was going to be a disaster.

“If I can begin before sundown,” said Avanasy firmly, “it can allow me to drive this illness from the whole village.”

“Lies,” Malan’ia snorted. “The boy wants sweating and beating with birch branches to stir the fever from his blood. That’s all.”

Avanasy rose. Ingrid saw how hard and still he held his face as he towered over the shrunken woman. “Mistress Malan’ia,” he said softly, but his words stilled all other voices in the hut. Even the woman Ingrid cradled fell silent. “I grieve for your losses and if I could find the one who lied so to you and yours, believe me, I would make him regret his works more than you ever could. But if I do not work quickly, by morning the boy will be dead and half your people will be ill. If I fail, you may deliver my bones to Dimska for judgment if you choose, but if I am to have any chance at success, I must begin now.”

“Burnah, you’ve some untrimmed birch waiting in your shed, haven’t you?” asked Keeper Hajek mildly. “And Daliunda, didn’t your good man bring you home a red petticoat from the market at Musetsk?”

“He did,” said a woman’s voice from the back of the crowd.

“Good,” said Hajek firmly. “The rest of you, you will bring all the salt in your homes to the god house, and if any grain is left behind, Dimska will know it.” With that, he marched from the house.

His words might have been a spell in and of themselves, for all at once the crowd poured out the door, each person rushing to their own home to search out what was needed. Only one wizened woman stayed behind to kneel carefully next to Ingrid and Iakhnor’s mother.

“I’ll take her now,” she said kindly. “I’m old, and if I’m to be cursed, I can be spared.”

It was doubtful the mother even knew she was being passed from one set of arms to the other. She simply sagged against the old woman, insensible in her grief.

Avanasy bowed over the boy for one more moment, his lips moving in prayer, or perhaps in promise before he rose. “Ingrid, I’ll need your help.”

“What did she mean?” asked Ingrid as she followed him out into the sharpening night wind. “If she’s to be cursed?”

“It is believed that the mother of a dying child can pass the curse on,” he said, weaving a path back toward the god house. “That was why no one would stand by her, lest in her frenzy, she say their name and strike them down with the illness.”

Ingrid wanted to proclaim that for superstitious nonsense, but here, who was she to say?

“Ingrid, I have a delicate question to ask you.” Avanasy halted and turned toward her.

“What is it?”

He dropped his voice to the lightest whisper. “Are you virgin?”

Ingrid felt all her blood rush to her face. “Avanasy!”

“Forgive me, but it is important. As part of the spell, a ring of salt must be sowed around the village, and the salt must be dropped from the hands of a virgin woman.”

Ingrid tried to swallow her discomfort, but it was difficult. Speaking directly of such matters was not something she was accustomed to. “Yes,” she said finally. “I could do it.”

“Thank you.”

The god house now had a steady stream of people trickling in and out through its low doorway. Each person carried a covered dish or little cloth bundle. These they laid on the altar before kissing the icon and receiving a nod of approval from the keeper. As they departed, the villagers still glanced sideways at Avanasy and Ingrid. The suspicion Ingrid saw there tightened her throat. Avanasy did not seem to notice. He frowned up at the sky, which was fading from pale gray to the color of slate with the coming night.

“Time enough, but barely,” he muttered. “Ingrid, see if the keeper has a container that can hold all the salt and fill it. No one must touch it but you from now on.”

“I understand,” she said, but in truth she did not. This was Avanasy’s world, and his work, and that would have to be enough for right now.

Once inside the god house, they found a birch branch leaning beside the hearth with the red petticoat laid beside it. Avanasy claimed them at once, drawing his knife to trim the branch into a pole and to slice the petticoat to ribbons. At Ingrid’s query, Keeper Hajek produced an earthen soup pot and Ingrid began pouring the coarse and lumpy salt into it as fast as she could open bundles and empty dishes. The light was fading rapidly, and she could feel the tension thickening in the air.

She caught glimpses of Avanasy as she worked. He sat cross-legged, his eyes distant, his hands busy wrapping strips of red cloth around the birch pole so that they crossed each other, and crossed again, making a complex pattern, bright red against the white bark. She could have sworn he did not see what he did. His lips moved the entire time, working on some pattern of their own with breath and word that she could not hear.

At last, Avanasy stood. “Come,” he said to her. His voice was hollow. He was not there, not truly. His magic, his working, had laid hold of him and he was in a place beyond. Perhaps he was in the Land of Death and Spirit. Ingrid had no way to know.

She rested the pot of salt against her hip and followed him.

The entire village lined the rough path toward the cliff. This time, however, Ingrid was ready for their stares, and only lifted her chin. Avanasy paid no notice to them at all. His eyes were locked rigidly ahead of him, and his hand clutched the birch pole.

When they passed through the gate and stood just outside the rough wall, Avanasy rested the birch pole on the ground. He had sharpened one end, Ingrid now saw, so that it dug into the dirt.