The Midnight Court

by Jane Kindred

  “Nazkia.” He shook his head as he grinned and tickled Ola. “You don’t know how close I came to striking you when you told me you’d shown up there on purpose.” He was still smiling at Ola, but his words were deadly earnest. “That was a very dark moment, finding you there after what I’d traded Aeval to keep her off your trail.”

  “I know,” I said unhappily.

  Belphagor sighed. “It takes off a bit of the sting to know you didn’t come willingly. At any rate, if you’re right about these syla, if Aeval’s sent the Seraphim to find that flower, I don’t think we can stay here any longer. Even with the protective charm the Grigori placed around the dacha, our presence in Arkhangel’sk Oblast can’t be much of a secret. Vasily’s rescue party last summer wasn’t exactly discreet.”

  Though I’d known it was coming, I’d been dreading the day he would say this. I loved our dacha, and I mustered a halfhearted protest. “But if anyone knew we were here, surely they’d have made a move by now.”

  Belphagor passed Ola off to me, to her visible disapproval. “Love found more communications after you went to bed. I don’t know why Aeval’s been quiet this long, but apparently she’s suddenly in the mood for proclamations. There’s an official bounty on your head. Anyone can collect the reward. All they have to do is return you to Heaven—dead or alive.”

  Vtoroe: Cause and Effect

  Whether Anazakia had really encountered her invisible friends, Belphagor declined to venture a guess, but it seemed unlikely she’d actually possessed the flower of the fern. The Russian folktale stood in for a fertility rite sublimated by the Orthodox Church’s feast day for St. John the Baptist. Perhaps Love had told her about the tradition: young maidens traipsing into the woods with their suitors on midsummer’s eve to look for the fiery blossom. Legend said it bloomed only for an instant at midnight on this single night of the year, and if a lad were quick enough to grab it, he’d have good luck. But ferns didn’t flower. It was a euphemism for getting laid.

  That stupid rumor he’d begun about her madness had no basis in truth, but Anazakia had been through more than one event traumatic enough to prompt a bit of fantastic imagination. In a very real sense, she’d been murdered along with her family. With the help of a demon elixir that had allowed her to be in two places at once, one of her had been losing to Belphagor at cards in the Demon District of Elysium, while the other had been at the palace. When the shade of her murdered double reunited with her, she would have died a second time had Vasily’s firespirit radiance not healed the wound the shade brought with it.

  Belphagor sometimes wondered if that intimate moment in the washroom of a train car in the middle of Siberia had been the start of Vasily’s and Anazakia’s attraction to each other. Certainly the literal spark between them had begun when the angel returned the favor and healed Vasily after the Seraphim nearly killed him. But one thing was certain: if Belphagor hadn’t left Vasily alone to go on his fool mission to the queen, his malchik would never have taken the angel to his bed.

  If, if, if. Belphagor nipped that line of thinking in the bud with a growl of irritation at himself. It was foolish to dwell on things that started with “if.” If Vasily had never taken the angel to his bed, there would not be Ola. Any amount of jealousy he felt over Vasily desiring someone else was insignificant next to the joy the child’s existence brought him. Her little flame was the light of his life.

  And it was almost certain she was the fiery blossom Aeval sought, not some mythical fern.

  He knew damned well they should never have stayed here this long, but he’d been sick for months after their escape from Heaven, and by the time he’d gotten back on his feet, it seemed too much like home to let it go. And home was something he’d never had before. Playing house with Vasily and Anazakia was too appealing—he’d let himself be lulled into complacency. It was well past time to move on. But moving on would be difficult with Vasily pulling one of his famous disappearing acts; he hadn’t come back last night.

  It was the way the gruff firespirit always dealt with emotion he couldn’t reconcile. In the early days of their relationship, the younger demon had returned to the streets where Belphagor had found him whenever conflict arose. The conflict then was of Belphagor’s own making, trying to reconcile Vasily’s obvious devotion and desire for him with his equally obvious youth and inexperience. Invariably, Belphagor would wind up dragging the boy away from whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into and back to the rented room at The Brimstone for a sound thrashing—which only led to more conflict. It had been worse than torture to deny himself what Vasily was so eager to give. And in the end, utterly futile. Vasily had worn him down.

  Where Vasily might have disappeared into the northern Russian burg of Arkhangel’sk, however, Belphagor couldn’t imagine. A six-foot-five demon with flame-red locks and neck piercings wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Belphagor knew he sometimes spent time at the banya in town when he was gone for less than a day. It wasn’t a surprising choice, given the steamy heat and the birch branch flogging that typified the Russian baths. Vasily also knew Belphagor wouldn’t pursue him there; stripping down to display his scars and prison tattoos for a bunch of provincial strangers wasn’t Belphagor’s idea of a good time.

  There wasn’t much point in worrying about Vasily’s safety. The firespirit could take care of himself. All Belphagor could do was wait for him to return.

  In the meantime, he had to get in touch with his old friend Dmitri, chieftain of the Grigori. Once Heaven’s “Watchers,” they were the most powerful clan of Fallen in the world of Man, direct descendants of angels from the Order of Powers who’d fallen when the world was new. News from Heaven had been nearly impossible to get since the assault Dmitri had staged with Vasily on the celestial Winter Palace to get Anazakia and Belphagor out. The Fallen residing in Raqia didn’t trust the ancient clan of purebloods, and demons who fell and remained in the world of Man were leery of those who’d allied themselves with a grand duchess of the supernal House of Arkhangel’sk, deposed or not.

  The result was a near total blackout of news that had once flowed freely between the spheres. They still had the gypsy underground, the information conduit of the Roma who called themselves Night Travelers—a secret society that believed in the unseen world, they served as liaisons between the celestial Host and the disparate clans of terrestrial Fallen. Of course, there was little to liaise on when no one was speaking to anyone else, but the Night Travelers were the best source for reaching Dmitri. He moved frequently and kept his location private. Officially, the Grigori—and their Nephilim kin descended from human interbreeding—didn’t exist. Unofficially, they were Heaven’s Exiles, and fair game for any Seraph who might be sent to the world of Man in pursuit of celestial fugitives.

  With the breakdown in communication, there’d been no contact with Dmitri in nearly a year. Belphagor had convinced himself that in this case, no news was good news, but it was bad strategy at the wingcasting table to assume your opponent was weak simply because he was silent. Success at the game relied on quiet planning and careful watching.

  And Aeval was clearly still in the game. Blackout or no blackout, Belphagor needed to determine precisely what was going on in the celestial sphere.

  …

  Heaven’s renovations were coming along nicely. It had been a stroke of genius, Aeval had to admit, to turn the workers’ strike to her advantage. Blaming the deaths on that insipid grand duchess had turned burgeoning hatred and mistrust into sympathy and civic pride. Aeval was suddenly just as much a victim as they were, and the villain of the piece was the House of Arkhangel’sk.

  The people forgot that Aeval’s policies had not only continued the oppression of demonkind, but had made the proscriptions against them stricter. She could frame the relocation camps that had begun to empty the squalid streets of Raqia—with its illicit and immoral business her predecessors had overlooked—as a program of common welfare. The red pentacles the Fallen were forced to wear on their c
ollars and sleeves when they went out became a badge of pride, not a mark of Cain; the curfew, a measure for their protection against the hooligan angelic youth who were prone to harass them.

  Aeval promised freedom, holding out the unsigned Liberation Decree as a lure to ensure demonic cooperation. She’d been on the verge of signing it, she told her people, when Bloody Anazakia had wreaked such havoc in Elysium that it had to be postponed until order was restored and the proposed document could be given the attention it deserved. Well-bred angels, freshly home from the universities at Zevul, took up the cause in an effort to view themselves as enlightened men, and Aeval became their champion of celestial equality.

  Regrettably, it had been necessary to sacrifice Kae to achieve these aims. As principality, he’d been a surety for her claim to the throne in the beginning, but he’d become a liability as her power grew. To be sure, he’d made a most elegant scapegoat, achieving near-martyrdom. Even the Fallen had mourned his demise.

  Smiling to herself, Aeval recalled the brilliance of her gambit. She’d controlled the angel so thoroughly that when his impertinent cousin had managed to wound Aeval and sap her strength, he’d given her his own vitality in the same way he was controlled: with a kiss. Her kiss bound him to her, and the blood in his veins answered her call. But it also left him docile and compliant, and with the peasants in revolt, she’d needed him enraged. She’d sparked Kae’s passion by spilling his blood, and with his blood on her kiss, licked from the blade, she’d riled him to madness.

  He’d killed for her yet again, incensed by the sight of the vital fluid he was spilling. With his own nearly dormant beneath the strength of her will, he seemed enamored of the heat and vigor of the blood of others. He littered the floors of the Winter Palace at Elysium with the corpses of the ungrateful demons who defied her, saving her the bother of draining them of elemental power one by one.

  When the greater threat of the palace fire had closed in on them, Aeval had called forth Kae’s radiance, normally visible only in the terrestrial sphere. At her insistence, the elemental water that dominated his blood as a Third Choir angel of the Order of Principalities rose from within him like wings of silvered glass, and at the touch of her lips to his, every drop of it turned to ice. Like an exquisite sculpture kneeling before her, her angel had taken the brunt of the flame, and his element had repelled it. The shattering of his radiance was something she hadn’t anticipated.

  But Kae had served his purpose. With the captive power of his element, Aeval had propelled the flames into the square and cleansed it of rabble in a tidal wave of destruction. There was nothing left of the workers’ rebellion and none who could report on what had become of the last principality of the House of Arkhangel’sk.

  Aeval stretched her arms across the balustrade of her Summer Palace veranda and sighed with satisfaction as she surveyed her domain. Across the wave of deep green beyond the estate was the northern boundary of the Arkhangel’sk empire: the shining peaks of Aravoth. Even in summer, the ice caps rose from the darker earth like giant diamonds piercing its soil. Reachable only by careful passage through the rugged mountains was the small princedom of Aravoth itself. This was the Second Heaven, and beyond Aravoth lay the First, the frozen and uninhabitable Empyrean. But Aeval had always had trouble with boundaries.

  These invisible lines in the world and the Heavens merely represented to Aeval things Not Hers. She hadn’t been bound by the mystical separation of Heaven and Earth, and she would not be bound by celestial law. All the Heavens would belong to her, and everything below them. And not simply because she deserved it, but because Heaven and Earth needed to be brought to heel. Men and angels needed to be put in their places. Both had overrun their natural habitats, and neither had any respect for balance. Millennia of mismanagement had thrown the spheres out of alignment. If Aeval had to sow chaos for a brief interlude in order to achieve harmony, the concord she brought would be all the sweeter. And if it fulfilled her personal desire—what a happy coincidence.

  What stood between Aeval and her desire until now had been the wickedness of the syla. She had presided over them for more than a thousand years, providing for their every need, but like the simple folk of the world of Man who petitioned her Midnight Court, they’d turned against her.

  She had asked them nicely for the flower of the fern.

  At the close of the nineteenth century, few believed in the Unseen World, and her power had become nearly irrelevant. Women who once sought the justice of her court from every woodland village across the land ceased to come to her. It was certainly not for lack of need. Across every age, there were men guilty of the neglect and abuse of women. It was a universal truth that men feared the power of the genitive sex and sought to suppress it. The Slavic peasants of the northern lands were no exception, and in previous centuries, they’d possessed the perfect combination of coarse brutality and superstition—and bountiful, untouched woodlands.

  But as the twentieth century neared, this perfect triumvirate began to wane even there. Men began to be educated, if not exactly enlightened, and woodlands were in increasingly scarce supply—a circumstance that personally offended her as a force of nature. There was also an increasing lack of respect for the natural world and its innate power, orchestrated by none other than celestial messengers. Though the pagan traditions driven into near extinction in the green isles of the West had continued to thrive for several more centuries where Aeval had established her new court, “progress” eventually whittled the sphere of her influence until she was forced to adapt.

  If petitioners would no longer come to Aeval, she would create a new order in the world of Man. She was a master at manipulating men, but this would require influencing large numbers of them at once, and for that, she needed the power of the tsvetok paporotnika—the flower of the fern.

  The syla had guarded it for eons, offering a tantalizing opportunity at every midsummer for any mortal to possess it, but always playing tricks on those who came close, confounding their direction and inflaming their desires. Most seekers were effectively distracted from their purpose before midnight marked the end of the hunt for another year, finding a tangible opportunity for carnal pleasure more satisfying than the fleeting one of a mythical bloom.

  Aeval, however, was the syla’s queen, and when she asked for it, they should simply have given it. She had no need to justify herself to them. Instead they spoke nonsense about the queen of Heaven. It was to the first queen of Heaven this bloom had belonged, and only a queen of Heaven, they insisted, would have it. Aeval had boiled with outrage, unable to force their hands. But when at last someone sought the justice of her court, Aeval found the perfect opportunity to gain power in the world of Man.

  The Polish ballerina desired the love of a tsar, and so Aeval had given it to her. The petulant dancer was a woman Aeval could easily control—and through her, Aeval could control an empire. She gave Mathilde Kschessinska the prestige she wanted on the Russian stage, besotting not only the Grand Dukes Sergei Mikhailovich and Andrei Vladimirovich, cousin and nephew to the reigning tsar, but the young Tsarevich Nikolai himself. Nikolai dallied with the ballerina for three years, lavishing her with gifts and purchasing an apartment for her in St. Petersburg where he visited her as often as he liked, and then summarily informed her he would marry a German princess and Mathilde must step aside.

  The prima ballerina came to Aeval again, scorned and humiliated, and begged Aeval to make her Niki pay. Just beyond the palace of the tsar himself in the village of Tsarskoe Selo, the Midnight Court convened—unseen by all human eyes but the petitioner’s. Aeval heard Mathilde’s impassioned pleas and granted the petite dancer her revenge. What Niki dreaded most was his future, and so Aeval thrust it upon him, sickening his father, Tsar Alexander, a strong and healthy mountain of a man whom she felled with a simple flu. The ill-prepared Tsar Nikolai and his equally ill-prepared bride entered marriage and his reign surrounded by bad omens. Yet despite the unfortunate incidents and setbacks that m
arred their public life, the couple was blessed with a deep love for each other, and with four beautiful daughters.

  The syla were responsible for this overflowing cup. They had spun the cords of queens since time immemorial, and they had given this domestic bounty to a man whom Aeval desired to punish. Tsaritsa Aleksandra, however, had prayed for an heir, and since prayers to the god of Man were lost in the empty sky, Aeval grabbed this one and fulfilled it. The son Aleksandra bore Nikolai was even more beautiful than the daughters, but Aeval made certain he was also fatally flawed.

  And then those silly, wicked syla had sent the Russian tsaritsa a Holy Fool.

  The monk kept the boy alive, when his death should have driven the tsar into a state of crushing despair. Further, he protected the four grand duchesses from harm of any kind, making it impossible to curse Nikolai with personal calamity, the only thing that might break his bond with Aleksandra.

  Aeval had tried other methods. Used to dealing with the faithless and the neglectful, she’d erred with Nikolai in presenting herself to him in her usual form. When she failed to tempt him to unfaithfulness, she tried planting doubt, spreading rumors among St. Petersburg society that the monk had not only had improper relations with Aleksandra, but with her daughters as well. Yet the tsar remained steadfast in his belief in his beloved Sunny, and he would listen to no one who attempted to sway his mind. Worse still, the Holy Fool had become more than just a barrier to her means of weakening the tsar; he had begun to have his own undue and ultimately disastrous influence upon the tsar’s decisions through his closeness to the family.

  The Fool needed to die, but it had proven to be more difficult to achieve this than it ought. There were members of his considerable social circle who were more than willing to do the job at Aeval’s prompting, but the monk had proven unnaturally resilient. She was convinced her betraying syla had charmed him. Ultimately, it required poisoning, shooting, stabbing, beating, and then drowning him under the ice of the Neva to rid the imperial family of their protector.