The Five Daughters of the Moon

by Leena Likitalo

  Those were the conditions we had to agree to. It wasn’t a hard choice for us. We wanted to help Alina more than anything else in the world.

  We donned the blankets as cloaks and rushed after him like animals released from a cage. Our freedom was short-lived, however. As soon as we stepped out of the train, the four remaining guards, the ones that always stink of liquor and cigarettes, formed lines on both our sides. Boy held the back.

  I didn’t care. I was ecstatic to walk under the open sky once more. The day was just about to yield to the night, and everything was of that particular shade of blue that not even the most talented artists can quite capture. The clouds, the snowfields, the shadows bore the blue veil proudly. The freezing cold air stung my nostrils, tickled my lungs. Yet I puffed white clouds in excitement. For at that moment I remembered what it felt like to be free.

  The town was small. A dozen or so two-story log buildings loomed over the main street. There was just enough space for my sisters and me on the path that the townspeople had trampled during the day. Fresh snow crunched under the guards’ boots—they had to walk through the snow banks. We must have made a strange sight: Captain Janlav carrying my sister, four girls wrapped in gray blankets, akin to ghosts in the falling darkness, guarded by soldiers who might pass as our shadows.

  We neither saw nor encountered anyone as we walked to the end of the main street. There, we took a lane to the right and continued a bit farther. At first, I didn’t see the cottage. The town had no streetlights, which wasn’t that surprising, since we hadn’t sped through a city in a week.

  I wanted to ask if this was where the doctor lived, but then I remembered Captain Janlav’s instructions (which had sounded more like a warning to me) and bit my tongue instead. The same thought must have crossed Merile’s mind, for she and her rats trod on my hem. When I glared at her from over my shoulder, the question was writ across her brown face.

  Since Captain Janlav was carrying Alina, he wasn’t the one to pound on the door. Beard was. As his red-gloved fist landed against the thick planks, it felt like an omen, and that made me think of Nurse Nookes, whom I’d sometimes called a witch, though she most certainly wasn’t one.

  But perhaps it was witchcraft that I happened to think of her just then. I kid you not here, Scribs. You’ll believe me when I describe to you the strange events that unfolded next.

  The door opened, but no one waited behind it. An aroma of crushed nettles and garlic gasped against us, so thick I could taste it. Captain Janlav stepped in without hesitation, Celestia at his heels. Elise made sure to tag along so close after her that no guard could slip in between, and I and Merile did likewise. Then the small cottage was already so full that the remaining guards didn’t dare to squeeze in.

  “Fire. I shall warm myself by the fire!” Merile limped to the fireplace, where a black kettle boiled above glowing embers. Her rats trotted after her as if nothing else mattered. As if they were right at home in the cottage.

  My eyes took a while to get accustomed to the dark interior. I first felt the bunches of dried herbs and feathers brush against my head rather than saw them. A crude table occupied most of the room. Jars and glass bottles lay scattered on the wide planks. There was a small alcove at the back of the room. A woman emerged from there.

  “Honored midwife, the little one has taken ill.” Captain Janlav wagered a step toward the woman.

  The old woman halted before him. A shawl as black as an old crow’s feathers drooped against her hunched back. Her gray hair rested against the nape of her neck, in a knot that I doubted could be undone. Age emphasized her features, the beaky nose and beady eyes that a milky veil of blindness shrouded. Her blue-tinted lips drooped against her teeth so that I could easily distinguish the shape of each. She glanced at Alina, then past me at the open door and the guards there. No, not quite at her or the guards, but at their feet. She croaked, “Close door.”

  Beard met Captain Janlav’s eyes from across the room. The captain nodded curtly. The soldier instantly obeyed. From this exchange I deduced that both of them were (and still are) desperate to keep my sisters and me safe, if you can believe that, Scribs. But about that we can debate later. Let me tell you what came to pass now before I stop believing it myself.

  Once the cottage’s door creaked shut, with the guards remaining outside, the old woman turned her full attention to us. At first I didn’t understand what she was looking at—our uncomfortable sabots or the snow we’d brought in. Then it struck me. Though blind, she was, quite impossibly, studying our shadows.

  “You say honored midwife . . .” The old woman spat on the gnarled plank floor. She stamped her sturdy boot over the phlegm and swirled it as if to put out a cigarette. “Bah! Say as it be or me no help.”

  Captain Janlav glanced at Celestia, then Elise. The corner of his mouth twitched, as did his moustache. There was indecision in him. Desperation, too. “Very well. I’ll say it.”

  The old woman stared at him, her blind gaze bright with wisdom and age. In the light of the embers, it seemed to me that her black clothes shimmered and took on strange hues, red and yellow of autumn, those of glorious decay. Though I’ve worn the most luxurious of clothes myself, I’ve never seen any fabric behave in that way.

  “Help the little one,” Captain Janlav said, “Witch at the End of the Lane.”

  I gasped, for as soon as he named her, it all made sense. The cottage I hadn’t at first noticed, the old woman’s strange demeanor, his hesitation before her. My sisters and I, we’d been brought to a place of darkness, and danger, even. Celestia’s shoulders drew back as if she were about to speak, but of what, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

  The witch waved my eldest sister quiet, barely missing a bouquet of herbs tied to dry from the low ceiling beam running across the length of the cottage. She was more commanding than my sister, the one who would be the empress sooner than any one of us could have predicted. Oh, Mama . . . No, I won’t think of that. I will write of the witch.

  “No talk. Me look.” The witch hustled to the other side of the table and swept the bottles and jars aside. She motioned Captain Janlav to lower Alina. He didn’t move, not till he received a nod from Celestia. As frail and young as our sister is, she fit on the cleared table with space to spare.

  The witch gazed beside Alina, at the shadow that folded itself on Merile’s white cloak. Her grin revealed the gaps between her crooked teeth. Then she gestured at the door, her words aimed at Captain Janlav. “Now you go out.”

  Captain Janlav’s shoulders hitched up. His hands curled into fists as if he could only barely refrain from unstrapping his rifle and aiming it at the witch. “It’s my responsibility to . . .”

  The witch cut the air like a bird’s wing strikes. Her almost see-through sleeve shifted about her arm long after the movement itself had ceased.

  “You here. No help. Matters with woman’s body.” The witch traced with her finger the shadow of our little sister. “Even girl’s. No cure when men present.”

  Captain Janlav’s jaw set hard and his brows knit tight. I could almost sense what he was thinking. Alina needed help that no one but the witch could offer. My sisters and I were his responsibility, his prisoners. Would we tell the witch of our distress? What could she do to help us? Could we escape through the tiny windows behind the table? No, they were too small. Was there a back door? No, none at all.

  “Very well then,” he grunted, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I’ll wait outside. But if I hear anything alarming, my men and I shall storm in, with drawn swords and loaded rifles.”

  The witch smiled in a self-satisfied, smug manner as the captain strode out and pressed the door shut behind him. I expected her to ask us questions next: who we were, why we’d come to her. She didn’t. Instead, she brushed her hands against her black hem, and it seemed to me as if her fingers sank into the fabric (in the dim light it was impossible to be sure of anything). Then she bent over Alina, to study what ailed our sister.

&nbs
p; “She has a condition,” Celestia said in a gentle voice barely audible over the crackling of the embers and the hiss of boiling water. We knew how to tell the litany without prompting for every single one of the doctors who had visited Alina, all asking the exact same questions.

  “Condition, they call it?” The witch glared at Celestia from under her bushy, gray-brown eyebrows. The whiteness over her eyes ran thicker. “Me can see that much with me own eyes.”

  I expected Celestia to argue, Elise to cry a protest. But neither of them said a word. Merile and her rats remained by the fire, unfazed, unmoving. Were they that cold, or under some sort of spell? I think the latter, but I won’t ever know for sure. And now that I think of it, Scribs, it’s better that way.

  The witch, still bent over Alina, parted my sister’s lips, and sniffed at her breath. Her bulbous nostrils flared. She shook her head. “Sweet. Why?”

  I glanced at Celestia and Elise. They’d been as much as told to remain silent. Was I supposed to speak? Perhaps I was.

  “She hates honey,” I said. But since that alone sounded dumb, I added, “We thought she might wake up.”

  “Now you think?” The witch cackled. Not one of us joined the laughter. She paid no heed to us. Instead, she placed her ear against Alina’s chest. She listened for a long time; such a long time that I was about to ask if there was truly something very terribly wrong with Alina.

  The witch held up her bony forefinger. Her nail curled like a rusting scythe. I dared not to even breathe.

  At last, the witch raised her head. Her gaze, when she unleashed it upon my sisters and me, was white and filled with wisdom beyond even her years. “Little one be with shadows.”

  A shiver crawled down my back. Alina spoke of shadows all the time. But that was because of the illness that affected her mind. That was what the doctors had said, at least. It’s of course preposterous to think that the men of modern medicine might have been wrong. But as I huddled next to my sisters in the witch’s cottage, it seemed very much possible that even though Alina is the youngest, she could somehow see and even visit the world beyond this one, the place where shadows dwell.

  The witch cocked her head, waiting for us to tell her more about the shadows. I knew Celestia wouldn’t—she’s too rational to acknowledge this possibility. Elise wouldn’t either—she thinks with her heart and would never say anything that might show our sister in a bad light. I knew, I don’t know how and why, that the witch wouldn’t help Alina if she sensed that we were hiding something from her. It was up to me to say it.

  “A shadow of a swan visited our sister.”

  The witch placed her palms against the table and leaned over Alina’s still body, toward us. “Swan shadow, you say?”

  Scribs, I feared it then, that I’d said the wrong thing, revealed too much. The way Captain Janlav had studied the witch’s cottage was a clear warning. We shouldn’t tell her who we are. That might put her in danger.

  “And news? This swan bear news?”

  How could she possibly know? I shuddered as I thought of it, the cry from our little sister’s lips. The words I wanted to be a product of her shaken mind, not the truth.

  “Our honored mother is dead,” Celestia said, not in a whisper as I would have done if I’d ever found the courage, but as a statement that couldn’t be proven false.

  The witch circled around the table, running her finger along the smooth line of our little sister’s shadow. She halted before Celestia, Elise, and me, ignoring Merile. It struck me then that the witch considered Merile a child, too young to participate in the conversation meant only for adults. But in her blind eyes, I, who had yet to debut, was old enough to agree or disagree with her.

  “You five . . .” This close, the witch’s clothes seemed even stranger, almost translucent. She wore a dozen, no dozens of layers of thin black cloth, wrapped around her in an intricate, shifting pattern. “You come with guards.”

  I couldn’t stand her scrutiny. As curiosity toward a witch can never end well, I glued my gaze on the floor. But that turned out to be the exact wrong thing to do, for her shadow led a life of its own. She was old and young at the same time, dancing and stooping, and I’m not kidding at all here, Scribs!

  “Swan shadow deliver you news . . .” The witch’s croaky voice trailed off. She didn’t need to say more. She knew who we are.

  Scribs, now that I think of it further, I shouldn’t have said what I did. But the witch was the first person apart from the guards that we’d talked to since we had to leave home. The words kind of slipped out of my mouth unbidden. “Will you help us?”

  Elise grabbed my arm, fingers squeezing through my blanket and sleeve. That was my chastisement. I’d confirmed to the witch she’d guessed right. And by doing so I’d placed her in some degree of danger.

  “Me witch,” the witch said, in what I assumed was a proud tone. “Me help little one. That be in my power. Anything else . . .” She rubbed her elbow against her side and made a sound that resembled a fart! But if for a moment I was flabbergasted, even amused, her next words brought me back to the world of gloom. “Fail it be.”

  What harsh words, even from a witch! Elise’s hand remained curled around my arm, no longer a source of punishment, but one of comfort. I think the feeling was mutual.

  “We accept your terms,” Celestia said, and promptly proceeded to spit in her palm. Elise and I stared at her in awe. Our eldest sister was ready to make a deal with a witch! Those never came without a price, something you thought you were willing to give up, but that would cost you more than you realized.

  The witch spat in her own, callused palm. She clasped hands with Celestia. She stared at her feet, at the swelling shadow around my sister. “You know what me want.”

  “I shall give it to you gladly,” Celestia replied.

  After the deal was signed, the witch set to work. She hovered around the cottage, reaching up for the ingredients she’d need in her spell. In the dimness it was hard to see, and I’d never been that good at naming plants, not unless they grew in abundance in the Summer Palace’s gardens. But I did recognize birch leaves shriveled to gray-green, and fir and juniper branches. Nettles. Daffodils. And dozens, if not hundreds of plants I had no idea about, a variety of moss and lichen too. Feathers of all sorts, those of magpie set separately, those of other birds bundled together. I might have been imagining it, but amidst the plants and feathers hung bones, dried feet of chicken and rodents perhaps. Things better not to think about or risk losing sleep over.

  “Summer memory, grass, bare feet.” The witch lowered a long strand of what I hoped was just ordinary grass on the table, next to Alina. She glanced at Merile’s unmoving shape before the fireplace and said, “Lupine stem, you see too much.”

  The rats by Merile’s side stirred then. The black one turned to stare at the witch. So did the brown one. The witch shook her head at them. “You. No time yet. You sleep.”

  The rats lay down. They understood the witch’s words better than I did.

  I wrapped my arms across my chest. Elise noticed my discomfort. She placed her arm around my shoulder. “She’s helping us.”

  I knew that much, but still, any sensible person is afraid of a witch. Hence, I waited till the witch had drifted to the alcove before I whispered in as low voice as I could, “But she knows too much of us.”

  “Hush,” Elise whispered back at me. “She can do us no harm.”

  But the only light in the cottage came from the red-black embers. The tiny, thick windows didn’t let in the Moon’s light. That must have contributed to Captain Janlav’s agreeing to wait outside. Our father couldn’t see us. He couldn’t come to our aid.

  The witch returned to the table. In her right hand she clutched a clay jar. In her left a piece of dry rye bread balanced on top of a carved cup. “Sweet, one love, other hate. Give away. Again. More.”

  Elise’s arm, still around my shoulders, tensed. The honey was meant to represent me. The rye bread? That symbolized E
lise, but why and how? And why did my sister react as she did?

  “One more,” the witch said, motioning Celestia to meet her at the end of the table.

  In the dim, red light, my fair sister resembled a spark itself. Something that strived, for a moment, with unfathomable beauty and vibrancy, but perished when it strayed too far from home, into the merciless night. “What shall it be?”

  “Your finger,” the witch said, and I did gasp and Elise gasped too.

  But Celestia boldly held out her little finger. If she feared that the witch might cut it off, no trace of that showed on her face, or in her posture for that matter. The witch cackled as she brought her thumbnail against my sister’s fingertip and promptly nicked the skin. “In cup it go.”

  Celestia poised her hand above the cup. A tiny red drop swelled on the curve of her fingertip. It swelled larger, burst. Her blood trickled into the cup.

  “Enough,” the witch said, and Celestia stepped aside, sucking her finger. Scribs, the scriptures say that our blood contains power. Then again, your pages say many things. One day I’ll figure out what’s nonsense and what’s actually useful. I swear to you that, and if you really want to call yourself my friend one day, you’ll hold me accountable for it.

  “You watch,” the witch said to Celestia, Elise, and me before she gestured at Merile. Our sister hadn’t shifted an inch since entering the cottage. “Or you not. If you watch, you not stop. If you not watch, you not see.”

  Celestia nodded regally. As she’s the eldest, it’s her duty to watch over us. Elise shook her head and withdrew her arm from around me. She wanted no part in the witchcraft to come. I hesitated, I admit. A part of me wanted to wait by the fireplace, to warm up, to forget. But a greater part of me wanted to know what would come to pass, even if this would cost me dearly later. I shuffled to Celestia even as Elise joined Merile.

  The witch grinned at me, somehow pleased by my choice. “You watch. No more. No matter what come pass.”