The Usurper's Crown

by Sarah Zettel

  “Dimska’s tears, no!” cried the grandmother. One of the little girls shrieked and darted away behind the kettles; soon all the children were screaming and running away, leaving the little boy dazed in his grandmother’s embrace and the old women shouting for the children to stop that nonsense!

  “Take him home, Edka,” said the headwoman to the grandmother. “We’ll send for his mother.”

  “But I’m not sick!” protested the boy. “I promise I’m not. I feel fine!”

  “Of course you do,” murmured his grandmother. “This is nothing. It will pass.” But she was looking up at the headwoman as she spoke and her eyes were bright with tears. “Come, help me home, Iakhnor,” she said to the boy. “I need my tea.”

  Dutifully, but with a rebellious, frightened frown, the boy took his grandmother’s arm and let her lean on him as she shuffled toward the cluster of huts. The ghost, its head and shoulders drooped in what Ingrid could only believe was an attitude of misery, moved to follow them.

  The women had drawn the children back, clustering around them like so many birds around their chicks, as if their bodies alone could ward off what they had just seen. The headwoman, however, rounded on Avanasy.

  “What are you? What do you know of this?”

  “I told you, Mother,” said Avanasy without even blinking. “I am a sorcerer. I can help you, I promise it. It is possible that the boy need not die, nor anyone else.”

  Two bright pink spots appeared on the woman’s wrinkled cheeks. “Last winter, we had a man come here. He said he was a sorcerer too. Had plenty of fine tricks to prove what he said. Said he could dose all the goats against the winter dropsy, and he did too, and took plenty of pennies for his trouble, and this spring, what do we have? Not a kid born alive, and no milk fit to drink.”

  Avanasy’s face hardened. It looked to Ingrid as if he wanted to curse, but he controlled himself. “I ask no fee for my work,” he said doggedly. “I ask only that you let me do what I can for the boy, and for your people.”

  The woman’s face darkened with her internal struggle. The other women huddled together, whispering and darting glances at Ingrid and Avanasy. She scanned them and their children, seeking for other traces of ghost or smoke, and saw none, much to her relief.

  “And her?” said the headwoman suddenly, pointing at Ingrid. “What will she take?”

  Pride drew Ingrid’s shoulders back. “Nothing I am not freely given, I promise you, Mother,” she said.

  That silenced the headwoman, but did not lighten her expression at all. “Well, I don’t know,” she said flatly. “It’ll have to be talked over. You can stay ‘til it’s decided.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” said Avanasy gravely.

  “Ara!” snapped the headwoman to another of the grandmothers. “Stop fussing, old woman, and take these two to the god house.”

  A particularly ancient woman bent almost double under her dowager’s hump broke away from the others and hobbled past them without a word. Avanasy bowed once more to the headwoman. Taking this as her cue, Ingrid curtseyed again. Together they followed the ancient dame toward the center of the village.

  Ingrid found she could not tell one of the round, stone huts from the other, until Ara led them around to a threshold that had been painted red. She stood aside, gazing at them sourly as Avanasy thanked her. She did not wait about as he and Ingrid entered the gloomy hut.

  When Ingrid’s eyes adjusted to the dim interior, she saw a single round room with an altar in its center. The altar was a simple affair; carefully piled stones surmounted by a polished wooden plinth holding a plaque that looked to be worked brass or bronze on which the figure of a weeping woman had been painted. She stood ankle-deep in the foaming tide and a pair of gray seals raised their heads to her.

  There was little else to see; some bales, baskets and folded blankets, a table and two chairs, a hearth built against one wall with a stack of firewood beside it.

  “This, I imagine, is Dimska of the Tears,” said Avanasy. He bent and kissed the icon. “We should leave some gift as well.” He drew his pouch from his sash and brought out a pair of copper coins which he laid at the icon’s base.

  Ingrid realized she was staring. She blinked and looked away, but not soon enough. Avanasy smiled at her.

  “This is very strange for you, isn’t it?”

  Ingrid nodded. “Although I’m not certain what my trouble is. My family was never one for church, not really. Mother had us all baptized, and she read the Bible on Easter and on Christmas, but that was the end of it.”

  “To honor the divine in one form, Ingrid, is to honor all its forms. Here, the divine is Dimska,” he gestured toward the icon, “who performed some great miracle that helped her people.”

  Ingrid nodded. “It’s just one more thing to get used to, I suppose.” She shook herself. “Avanasy, what happened out there? What did I really see? What’s happening to me?” She shivered again. She couldn’t help it. It was wrong, what she had seen, where she was, everything that was happening. It was all wrong, although she could not have said why.

  Avanasy was beside her at once, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. “Ingrid, I’m sorry. I did not foresee anything of this kind, and I should have.” He held her for a moment, and Ingrid let herself be held, letting his warmth enfold her and ease the shivering that crawled up and down her skin.

  “Magic in your world is buried deeply. For it to make an appearance at all, it must be strong, but I had, I have, no good measure for how strong. What plagued your sister on your shores was in your world nothing more than a restless spirit. On this shore, it would have been a monster, a lord of the storms and hurricane. There, it touched you and left no effect. Here …”

  “Here I’m beginning to see things.” She pulled away from him and stared out the door, looking at the tiny slice of the village it showed her; gray walls, pale roofs, gray sky, gray and stony ground. “Oh God, and Grace tried to warn me.”

  “What?”

  “Before I left … as I was leaving actually. I thought … I did not take her seriously. Not really. I thought she was trying to trick me into staying, which she was …” Ingrid shook her head. “Grace told me she was beginning to see things, that she’d had a premonition of Leo’s accident.” She drew in a long, shaky breath. “She thought the ghost might have done something to her.”

  In the distance, she could hear the faint sound of women’s voices calling and children answering. Other than that, the world was hushed.

  “Probably it was not done deliberately,” said Avanasy. “The touch of the immortal can affect the mortal being. It can bring … changes.”

  “Changes, like the second sight?” Ingrid clutched the doorframe more tightly. She could not bring herself to turn around, but she also could not say why.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all that’s happened to me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Avanasy softly. “I don’t even know that I have correctly interpreted what has happened. I am far from my books and my tools.”

  Ingrid nodded and bit her lip. She felt him move close behind her, but she still did not turn to look at him. She continued to stare out at the tiny piece of gray world. By straining her ears, she could just hear the sea, an eternal rushing sound that would never silence. She could smell its salt on the wind.

  Something was happening inside her. She could feel it stirring in her blood and her bones. She had no name for it and no way to perceive what she might be at its finish. Fear gripped her, and anger at her willingness to come so far in such ignorance; for all she knew her love for Avanasy was real and to let him leave alone would have broken her heart, and yet, and yet …

  “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.