The Enchantress of Bucharest

by Alex Oliver

  A pall of smoke from the graveyards darkened the summer sky and made the light yellow-gray. Ash was falling like dirtied snow. It had needed the driest tinder and most seasoned wood to build the first pyre, but now they were true bone-fires, and fed themselves on the fat and the skeletons of the city's many dead. She didn't at first distinguish the smell of wood smoke from that of burning fat. Not until she turned the corner and came into the quiet end of Furrier's street, where for the past three years she had rented the rooms for her salon.

  There a whiter smoke gathered in cloud-like roiling, the building itself gutted and smoldering - a heat haze still wriggling over the acrid black spikes of wood that poked from the tumbles of brick.

  Four other figures, huddled close to each other, stood next to what had once been the door. All of them looked at her sharply when she exclaimed "No!" and darted forward as if to run inside. There had been books, in there. There had been her master bibliography - her guide to which grimoires were worth the study, which mere swamps of lies.

  She scrambled over the blackened door step, her coal black shoes crunching over a surface that still exhaled heat. There had been a mirror which the Englishman had had some success in enchanting. It must still be in here somewhere, and maybe she could rescue...

  A hand caught her shoulder and another closed on her skirt, pulling her out of the still steaming wreckage. She turned on them "I have to find--"

  "I don't think so." The hand at her shoulder belonged to Bogdan. "I think, with the country at war, perhaps we should all move on."

  She didn't like his narrow, displeased look, politely contemptuous, as if he'd been served a dish of rotted eel at a state banquet and was trying not to spit it out over the floor. Since he clearly knew it was she, she folded her veil back over her headdress to reveal her blotchy, unhandsome face. If he would scowl, she would give him a reason. "That mirror could be invaluable in battle - for a general to see the battlefield all at once, where the enemy feints, where his sappers tunnel under? I should present it to the Voivode at once as an earnest of what the mages of Bucharest can achieve—"

  "Madam," Bogdan drew himself up, all sharp edges and glitter. "Do you think the Voivode, or anyone else, would trust you again, now it is known how you've gulled us all this time? I think not. I suggest, for your father's sake, you do the decent thing and find a nunnery that will take you in, for surely no decent man will ever have you to wife if he values his independancy and the ability to be his own man."

  "That's what you came to say to me?"

  "It is."

  "Then good day, sir." She gave him an achingly correct curtsy and sized up the others of his little band as he walked away. Two Roma women, looking sympathetic yet also vaguely amused, and a tall sprightly young man with red hair whom she didn't recognize at all. "We can take the meeting to my house. I can have someone dig through the wreckage tomorrow, once it's cooled. This doesn't have to be..."

  "Your pardon, lady," said the eldest woman, running one of her necklaces of coins through her fingers. "But it seems to me you will not benefit from associating with the likes of us, and we will not benefit from your reputation neither. We get blamed for everything as it is. So we're not interested in catching this sort of trouble. We'll be going back to our husbands now and telling them to keep well away."

  That left Ecaterina standing outside the wreck of her salon with half her face flushed from the heat, the other half red with anger. The strange young man shrugged at her and opened his mouth to say something, when a bottle hurled from a passing carriage burst on the ground between them and showered them both with glass.

  "Evil witch!" a woman's voice yelled. "I hope you suffer as you have made my son's poor heart suffer. All false. A thousand times false."

  Ecaterina kicked at glass that smelled of palinka. "Do you know the story of the garden in which everyone looks beautiful?" she asked her one remaining companion. "That ended much like this."

  "At least the village girl got a little time with her prince," said the redhead, and grinned in a way Ecaterina thought she recognized. "Even if she had stayed beautiful and they'd married, who's to say it would have ended well anyway?"

  "No one ever suggests she was wrong to trick him in the first place," Ecaterina mused. The thought that she was living in a fairy tale eased her heart a little - made the distress seem outside herself, poetic, and therefore easier to live with.

  "Oh, well if you'd done it to gain your true love, that would have been understandable," said the boy, in an offhand, careless way that just made Ecaterina surer of her guess. "But for just having fun and being invited to parties, and laughing at the girls and making the boys jealous of each other... maybe they think that's selfish."

  "But you know how it is, to want to be someone different – someone better than yourself. It is Mirela, isn't it, under there?"

  He (she?) took off his cap and swiped a hand through his carroty hair. By the time the hand had fallen back to her side, she was a girl again, with curly ebony hair and dark skin and much better clothes than Ecaterina had seen on her last. "So I'm guessing no more salon? No more learning things for us and for our," she took a run up to the word, hurdled it hastily, "posterity?"

  The sound of trotting hooves and wooden wheels on wooden street, rattling like the cogs of a water-mill. Ecaterina recognized the same matched pair of horses she had heard before, grabbed Mirela by the wrist and pulled her along to the closest church. They had just ducked inside when the carriage - obviously having made a great circle for the sole purpose of hurling more things at her - came past again.

  "I'm not going to let them stop me. If more people were involved in magic there wouldn't be all this war. We'd be able to concentrate on the important things, like getting these monsters out of our city."

  They had stepped into a richer world, white and gold and pink marble all around. Painted stars gleamed above out of a richly indigo sky, where angels were making music among pink and violet clouds. The arched rooms of the church - entrance and nave, sanctuary and aisles - were heavy with the sort of silence left behind by many people thinking and feeling passionately. There was smoke here too, but it smelled of rare spices, heady and warm.

  Off the side of the right hand aisle a series of carved oak partitions had been set up, marking chapels dedicated to individual saints and martyrs. They ducked into the smallest, where an all but extinguished candle gave out a dim storm light in its amethyst lantern, and a silver-mounted icon of Saint Parascheva watched them with almond shaped eyes.

  Ecaterina cast the veil back over her face. Mirela knelt beside her, and in the process of lowering herself she turned from girl to old lady, wrapped in black shawls, concealed beneath a heavy headscarf and a shape that proclaimed her of no interest to anybody. "I envy your gift," Ecaterina said softly. "To pass unseen. I had to choose between peacock and gargoyle, and never truly wanted either."

  "Always the same on the inside, though, isn't it? Who you are."

  Mirela exchanged a glance with the flat saint. The stuttering light made her eyes seem to stir. If Ecaterina looked at her long enough, it was as though her face bulged out of the frame, became rounded and real. She was listening, though she didn't speak.

  "About the monsters," Mirela whispered. "My lord is taking them away. I thought you'd like to know that. We have wagons and everything arriving. I hear the idea is to jam them in, tight as in slave ships, in the bottom of the carts and cover them up with supplies. Then when the army gets down to the coast, they'll sneak aboard ship and we'll take them with us. So you'll be alright, back here. They'll all have gone to war, like the boyars."

  Ecaterina was ashamed of herself, because the first thing she thought was that the girl was lying. But lies ought to at least be more plausible than the truth, or how could they ever be believed? "How could he control them enough to do that? How could he get them to cooperate?"

  Nightmares flickered into her thoughts like the death-throes of the candle. She saw again the
look that had passed between Vacarescu and the strigoi in the white silk - the old man who had taken Stefan from his family, and walked beside him as a surrogate father.

  A priest looked in through the pierced work carving of the wall. "Well," Mirela clucked in mingled disapproval and amusement, just like an old lady sharing scandalous gossip. He shook his head, tolerantly, light running like quicksilver over his pectoral cross - the only part of his outfit that wasn't black. All the color had been sucked from Bucharest, it seemed.

  "He brought the strigoi with him from Valcea. The white one and the lady. They listen to him, maybe a little. Though God knows for how long, now there's only one of him and hundreds of them."

  Ecaterina took far too long to understand this news. Her father admired the man, had told her of his awkward reception to the prince's court. The reason he'd given for not being seen in town before. 'I have been containing a plague.'

  The White Death had come to Bucharest, but days after he arrived in it.

  Her teeth were chattering. She had to raise both hands and dig in her thumbs beneath the jaw to keep them silent, though the shudder worked through her wrists and arms and into her shoulders. The emotion she felt was still almost too big to put a name to, too big to be contained. She felt it like a wall of fire around her ten paces deep. The altar was inside it, and the green-faced saint, and the sense of something teetering, teetering, about to fall.

  Her father liked him. Had welcomed him without reservation, brought him into their house. She had liked him. He was the only one left who still treated her as he had before her glamour slipped - the only one who saw her as she was and was not repelled.

  And why should he be repelled by anything human if his household was made up of monsters?

  How smoothly he had lied when she asked about the old man, led her to believe he was an unpleasant surprise he found waiting for him when he moved in. She should have known the timing was far too coincidental for that. She should have known when he hacked her brother's head off in front of her that he had no human sensibility in him.

  But for him, Stefan would still be alive. The strigoi, oh yes, she could hope and plan for it to be destroyed, but it could not help its nature. It had little choice but to be what it was. But Vacarescu had chosen to expose her family to its notice - to expose all Bucharest to its curse.

  Had Stefan done something to him, to be so targeted? No! Absurd. Stefan was the kindest child who ever lived. It was worse than that. Vacarescu had killed him and not even meant to. Simply did not care enough to make it stop.

  The sphere of fire had reached its largest point - almost out to the street. Now it slowed, turned and rushed back together into a fireball centered in her gut. Every part of her felt incandescent like the sun with rage, powerful, unstoppable. I will kill him for this. I will have vengeance. For my brother and for every other mourner in the city today, I will have justice.

  "Catia? Are you... well?"

  She blinked, aware again and surprised to find Mirela's borrowed face close to hers, a hand on her arm undecided between support and shaking. "Um. I thought everyone knew that. Where I come from, everyone knows. Perhaps I shouldn't have said. You can forget I said it, can't you?"

  With this new heat inside her, Ecaterina could almost have laughed at that. Forget? Not likely. "You said 'we'll take them with us'. Are you going to war? You are not a man, no matter what you look."

  Mirela shrugged one shoulder, an oddly girlish gesture from the crone she appeared. "You don't want to see what will happen when the Turkish army meets our undead one? I suppose I could stay here and dance for gaujo men who think I'm just a free whore, but I went off that when they gave me up to die. Now... I don't know what I want. But if I don't go and see, I never will."

  Ecaterina had spent every moment since Stefan's death feeling hollowed out inside. Now that hollow ached less, filled as it was with purpose. She had been turning over a reply to the girl when she felt it - a sort of snag, as though a harp string had caught her sleeve, but within her.

  "Wait a moment," she folded her hands as if in prayer, fixed her eyes on the eyes of the saint, and felt again for the little catch and thrum. With her mind turned inward she could almost see it, a thread of blue-white along her spine. It twined up her backbone and curled around her skull in one long spiral. Returned along her breastbone and thence to her belly, where it spilled out into the world from an oval place a finger's width down from her navel.

  Two colors - it was a two colored strand, the white and the blue so intertwined as to look silver. If she took the crackling fire of her anger and applied it to the blue line, the two sprung apart, like a magnet rejecting its like. But if she touched it to the white, it brightened, and a burst of fullness, of pleasure and confidence whipped through her bones and soaked slowly into her blood. After minutes of silence, she felt it rise from her blood to her skin and paint it with energy.

  She threw back her veil once more. "What do you see? Is it back? The glamour - I felt it this time. I made it happen."

  Mirela twisted her age-spotted hands in her lap as she looked. She scrunched up her face, thoughtfully. "I don't see anything different."

  "Something happened."

  "Yes." Mirela smiled, a big, easy smile with undertones of relief. "But it's not the beauty which has come back. Only that I suddenly really like you again. It's probably the best thing you could have done - you're making people love you without seeing you as a towering beauty. Now you can force them to like you, and they won't have any idea that you're raping their minds again. They'll forgive you because they have no choice, and they won't even know it."

  'Raping their minds' was ridiculous. She was doing no more than any woman who had trained herself to appear personable and charming. But this was good. It was exactly what she wanted - the power without the appearance of it.

  "Tell me more about your plans to go to war, then. I think I would like to come."

  ~

  In the end, it proved easier than she could possibly have imagined. Her father was distracted organizing his own troops, and she could climb into the attic and hunt through centuries of trunks full of outdated clothes. She assembled an outfit suitable for a young hajduc, stitched herself a singlet that squashed her chest flat and cut off her hair at shoulder length. Her head felt strange without it. Lighter and less anchored, like it might float off to war without her. Since her hair was never seen - hidden modestly beneath headdresses and pearls, her parents noticed nothing. Or, if they did, her renewed likability prevented them from mentioning it.

  She stole food and a bedroll for her backpack, wrote her mother a letter apologizing for the anguish she had so recently caused and promising to return once Stefan had been avenged. Then, on the day when the armies finally marched, she waved her father off from the front door, a sombre shadow in petticoats, then ran up to her room, flung the skirts off in favor of trousers, slung her pack on her back and went out through the armory. There she picked up a sword and a rifle, and running out of the back door caught up with the train of wagons and foot-soldiers as it passed out onto the road.

  "What the fuck are you doing?" said the last man in the line as she sprinted up so hard she jostled him. He turned to her with a growl and a look like murder... and then his face cleared and his eyes widened and he broke out into a delighted smile. "Oh, sorry mate. Didn't see you there. Go on ahead of me. I bet they'd let you ride in the wagons, if you're tired."

  She wasn't, but when she smiled at the faces in the back of the last cart they hoisted her up anyway, and left her there when everyone else took turns about to walk. So she went to war sitting on a warm sack of grain, with young girls along the route showering her with flowers, and it was as though she'd woken up to find the color in the world had come back all at once and she loved it all the more for that.

  This half glamour was a great improvement on the old. All the advantages that came with being supernaturally likable, and none of the disadvantages of great beauty. When
she returned home again - and as all powerful as she felt at the moment, it did not occur to her to doubt she would - she would have to devote some time to experimenting on what else she could do with the innate power now she had discovered there was more to it than simply having it, like a sluice gate, either open or closed.

  But this - riding in a cart with a dozen other soldiers - was no place either for self-examination or for sudden changes of appearance. So she settled herself to sit and learn what she could of the battle plans while the countryside slowly changed from fertile fields to salt marsh, and seagulls began to wheel overhead with sharp cries from voices made of metal.

  Half way through the first day, her father's wagons caught up with those of Vacarescu. Glad to slip the chance of her father riding back along the column and seeing her - for he seemed the one most likely to see through a disguise of short hair and man's coat - Ecaterina jumped down from her wagon and walked up to see if she could join the other boyar's men. This was not quite as easy, as Vacarescu's men were all on horseback, and no one rode in his covered carts.

  Knowing what she did, she did not want to risk being in or close to those carts at nightfall, but she could not walk beside them without being spotted, and Vacarescu too seemed likely to see through her disguise. She considered simply asking one of his men to let her borrow his horse, riding up to the head of the column, shooting him in plain sight and trusting in her glamour to make all the watchers unwilling to punish her. She would plead her brother's death, and weep, and she knew she could have them eating out of her hand within minutes.

  But it was widely known in Bucharest that she had laid a spell on herself to make men her slaves. Without the beauty, clearly recognizable as who she was, she might be able to get away with a murder in the short term, but they would remember it, remember her. Sooner or later someone would find a way of breaking the glamour, or it would slip again by itself, as it had these past weeks. Then, even if she was not burned as a witch, she would be forced to become the outlaw she now pretended to be.