by Jane Kindred
…
“Fever’s breaking.” A cool hand brushed the damp hair from my face. I was shivering uncontrollably.
“She’ll be all right. Let’s get her back to bed, poor thing.”
A man’s strong arms lifted me out of the icy cold, and I put my own around his neck, resting my head on his shoulder as he carried me to a soft bed.
“I missed you, Kae,” I murmured.
He patted my hand as the covers were drawn up about me. “Hush now, Anazakia. You’re all right.”
Warm and dry at last, I let my head sink into the pillow. I was so terribly tired.
The smell of blinchiki frying woke me and I opened my eyes, suddenly aware that I was famished. I was in a brightly colored bedroom with blue-and-silver-papered walls, the narrow wooden bed in which I lay draped with layers of cotton brocade and thick wool. I sat up and drew my knees to my chest beneath the covers, wondering how I’d gotten here.
“Ah, there she is!” A round-faced woman with short, auburn curls and bright, smiling blue eyes brought in a tray filled with blinchiki, tart smetana, and jam, along with a steaming cup of tea. “We thought we might have lost you for a bit there.” She set the tray on my lap.
“Where is this? I don’t remember…”
“I’m not surprised, dear. You were delirious when they brought you.” She nodded at the tray. “Go ahead and eat. You need your strength.” She pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed while I dove into the plate of little pancakes. “I’m Yulya Volfovna.” The name seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Your friend Belyi sent you here.”
“Belyi?” She could only mean Belphagor, but I was surprised he’d have given his name that way. It was so close to Beli, Vasily’s private pet name for him. Both of them had been somewhat mortified when Ola picked it up. “I don’t remember him sending me.”
“You collapsed at the train station. A couple of boys searched your pockets for identification and found this.” She took a folded piece of paper from her apron and handed it to me. Belphagor had given me the note more than two years ago when we first came to St. Petersburg, escaping Heaven. About to face certain death at the hands of the Seraphim, he’d written down the address of the only person he could trust—an address in Tsarskoe Selo. I must have missed it when I’d transferred Belphagor’s callstone to my winter coat.
“He was a boarder of mine a few years ago,” said Yulya. “Down on his luck, poor dear. I grew very fond of him.” She nodded at the note. “It says to keep you from the militsiya. I gather you’re in a bit of trouble, as he was then. You can count on my discretion.”
“Thank you.”
“Drink your tea, dear. You need to get some fluids into you. It was all we could do to get you to swallow a few ice chips while you were in the fever.”
I took her advice and drank the sweet, black tea. “How long was I ill?”
“The boys brought you nearly a week ago. I was afraid your fever had gone too high at one point. We put you into a bathtub packed with ice. Perhaps we should have taken you to the hospital, but the note…well, thankfully, you managed to pull through.”
Yulya was insistent that I properly convalesce. When I told her my daughter had been taken by her nanny and I had to find her, she expressed dismay and sympathy, but asked how I meant to go about this. I had to admit I had no idea, other than the vague answer that something had driven me to Tsarskoe Selo. She insisted I’d be better equipped to begin my search once I’d gotten my strength up, and I had to agree. I could barely walk to the washroom that first day after my fever broke.
She sat with me to try to retrace Love’s steps and work through where she might have gone. I didn’t bother to tell her of the Nephilim, as I would have had to leave out much. Instead, I told her Love had taken Ola to a restroom on a trip to Solovki and never returned. When I said we were living in Arkhangel’sk, Yulya looked at me with such stark perplexity, saying, “Pochimu?” that I had to laugh. Why, indeed? Fate seemed the only answer.
She brought me books of photography to look at while I rested, and one was a souvenir book of the imperial parks at Tsarskoe Selo. This picturesque setting among the trees seemed a likely spot to begin my search for the syla. When I was feeling strong enough, I asked Yulya how to get there.
She smiled and told me we were three blocks away. Insistent that I was still too weak to go alone, Yulya walked with me to the grounds of the palaces. Like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, these, too, were eerily familiar. The Alexander Palace bore a striking resemblance to our Summer Palace at the foot of the mountains of Aravoth, and the Yekaterina was a stunning copy of the Camaeline, where Kae and Ola had spent the brief days of their marriage.
I humored Yulya by touring the blue confection of the Yekaterina Palace, feeling every interminable moment of the passing time but uncertain how to separate myself from my well-meaning host. Wandering the grounds among the burnished filigree of the dying trees, Yulya led me over a bridge above a mossy canal and into a more wooded area. It was the perfect setting for the syla, and I considered how to politely ask Yulya to leave me here alone. I doubted they would come if someone else was with me—if they’d come at all, since it wasn’t the time of year in which I customarily saw them. But the words “Tsarskoe Selo” had been quite clear, and I could feel something in the air, something that said I’d come to the right place.
“Have you ever seen a fairy ring?” Yulya asked the question abruptly as we stared down at the algaed green of the canal. Her eyes twinkled when my head sprang up. “You look as though you’re searching for something you can’t see. Perhaps the thing you’re looking for isn’t in this world at all.”
Wordlessly, I followed her along a narrowing trail departing from the structured gravel paths of the park proper. I wondered if she’d spoken euphemistically or if she indeed knew of the Unseen World, but I didn’t dare ask. The woods closed in around us, and the sky was becoming dark with clouds when we entered a small circle of trees where the branches bent overhead to keep the clearing secluded. A small grassy meadow opened within it like a hidden grotto. In its center rose a perfect ring of mushroom clusters like the one that marked the place I’d first met the syla in Novgorod.
I jumped as an announcement rang out over a loudspeaker that the park was closing for the day, but Yulya took my hand and led me forward to stand inside the ring. The trees around us began to move in the wind, the colored leaves fluttering from the branches over our heads like giant flakes of burnished metal as the late afternoon sun set them alight. With the breeze came a quiet, rhythmic whisper: Padshaya Koroleva. It was what the syla had called me before: the Fallen Queen.
The trees shimmered, vague shapes dancing in the light between the leaves as if they were superimposed over something else. I looked to Yulya to see if she was aware of what I saw, and she smiled back at me. The landscape shimmered once more before disappearing completely.
We were no longer standing in the wooded parks of Tsarskoe Selo, but in a vast, empty hall with walls tiled in brilliant, golden amber and a ceiling vaulted with sweeps and curls of gold. It was the inspiration for the opulent Amber Room I’d just seen in the palace, but on so much grander a scale that I could scarcely comprehend it.
I clung to Yulya’s hand, dizzy and disoriented, though she seemed perfectly at ease. As I took in more of our surroundings, a cluster of graceful beings at the far end of the hall became visible. With hair of amber gold and shimmering bronze skin, they were dressed in garments so similar in color that at first I’d thought them part of the room itself. They curtsied deeply in my direction.
“Go on, devushka.” Yulya released my hand. “They’ve been waiting for you.”
I approached them, walking over a floor that was also tiled in amber. A dozen of the shimmering syla stood under the arched entrance, all genuflecting.
Such reverence always made me uncomfortable. “Please. Don’t bow to me.”
They rose and spoke as one. “You are Queen.
”
One of them stepped forward to speak for the rest. “The syla are grateful Queen has come. We lose many sisters to fire angels, but Hall of Echoes they cannot enter, so we ask Queen to come to syla when we cannot come to Queen.”
“I saw your sisters,” I said sorrowfully. “I couldn’t help.”
“The Queen will help. That is why you come.”
“But I came because…I thought…” My face prickled with heat as I realized how selfish my assumption had been. I’d imagined they’d called me here to tell me where to find Ola, expecting them to help me while their sisters were being slaughtered. “Of course,” I amended. “I’m not sure how, but I’ll try to help in any way I can.”
The syla’s eyes softened with compassion at my fumbling. “You look for Little Queen. The syla have seen Little Queen.”
My heart leapt. “You’ve seen her? Where is she?”
“We see Little Queen surrounded by a sea of white. Little Queen shall take the flower of the fern.”
My hopes fell. They’d seen this before. It was what they told me after Ola was born. “That’s why they’ve taken her. Your sisters told the Seraphim what they’d seen.” It sounded as if I were blaming them, and I stopped, flustered.
“Come.” The syla took my hand. “Walk with syla in Polnochnoi Sud.” The Midnight Court. It was a term I hadn’t heard before.
“Yulya…” I turned back, but she’d disappeared.
“Tyotyushka has seen many times.”
I gaped at them. “Yulya is your aunt?”
The other syla laughed, the sound bubbling like a pebbled brook throughout the Hall of Echoes.
“She is mother to Little Brother. The syla call her auntie.”
I was baffled by this but followed them to their Polnochnoi Sud.
A series of arches opened into a hall even more immense than the first. The opulence was nearly incomprehensible. The court was lined with columns covered in bands of sapphire, emerald, and peridot, rising from a floor that seemed to be made of black onyx, like a calm, deep ocean at our feet. The hall had no ceiling but was open to a sky that could not be the one above the Alexander Park, for this one was vast and dark, and full of stars.
Unfamiliar constellations winked in the night sky, and on the horizon in all directions, showers of stars fell to earth between the open columns. Against these streaks of intermittent light, the darkness showed nothing of the forest surroundings that ought to be there, only what seemed to be a velvety greensward—endless, rolling, and empty.
Between the two largest columns at the far end of the hall, a high-backed chaise covered in creamy velvet dominated the daïs instead of a throne, and twelve ornate silver chairs were arranged in a semicircle around it. My guide led me forward along the narrow runner that spanned the length of the room—like Aeval’s decorative touches in Elysium’s Winter Palace, it was in the same pale cream—and stopped before the platform.
“Is where Queen presides. Midnight Court of Man’s transgressions. Our brothers build for Aeval when Man begins to spread seed over lands of syla and leshi.”
“Leshi?”
“Brothers of syla. They tend the trees. Aeval says build a court of trees, and leshi build.”
I turned about in astonishment. “This is built of trees?”
“Outside is trees. Inside is Unseen. Fallen Queen steps through trees. Now she sees. Just as only Queen sees when syla walk in world of Man, but all can see syla in Nezrimyi Mir.”
I shook my head, not really understanding. “But what is it exactly—the Midnight Court of Man’s transgressions?”
“Women seek justice of Midnight Court when they do not find in world of Man. Aeval answers. But no more. Polnochnoi Sud stands empty one hundred summers. When syla will not give the tsvetok paporotnika, Queen Aeval no more comes.”
“And now she wants my child to get the flower back.”
The syla didn’t disagree.
“But Ola doesn’t have the flower of the fern.”
“Little Queen will have. Little Queen will take.”
I couldn’t imagine how Ola was supposed to take the locket from Helga. She was only an infant. How could she take something Helga guarded so jealously? How would she even know to take it? If Aeval had known Helga possessed it, she would have simply taken it herself.
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
The syla smiled as if I were a child and couldn’t comprehend. “Syla do not see how, only will.” Leading me onto the daïs where her sisters now sat upon the silver chairs, she took the empty seat. “Just as syla do not see how Padshaya Koroleva will stop fire angels from consuming syla.”
“You want me to stop the Seraphim? But they’re of a higher order than my kind. I have no power over them.” This wasn’t entirely true. I’d vanquished them once from the world of Man, but there had been only three of them, and it hadn’t been my element alone that commanded them. And even if it had, vanquishing couldn’t stop them forever.
“Heaven sees order where is no order. Power comes from heart, and Koroleva will not be alone. The syla see Fallen Queen within the circle of ice and fire.”
Ice and fire. There it was again. “What does that mean? What circle?”
“Syla do not know the meaning of all things we see. We see only pryazha on spindle of queensdaughters. In the circle of ice and fire, the Fallen Queen shall spill the blood of fallen angel. Then fire angels stop.”
My own blood ran cold. “I won’t. I won’t take the blood of a fallen angel.”
She shrugged, as if my objections were immaterial. “The syla do not tell Fallen Queen what she must do, only that she will.”
I shook my head, horrified. Whom was I meant to kill? The only Fallen I knew were Vasily and Belphagor, unless it was one of the Grigori or Nephilim she meant.
The syla seemed to guess what I was I thinking. “Fallen angel is one close to Koroleva’s heart.”
Vosmaya: The Things We Do for Love
Beside Vasily in the guest bed of Dmitri’s St. Petersburg flat, Belphagor was sleeping soundly. Vasily hated him for it—a hatred added to the long list of hatreds that filled him of late, nailed into place like planks on the windows of a wintering dacha over the jagged hole in his heart. How could Belphagor sleep? How could he go about his days as if the world hadn’t turned upside down and shaken him out into a blackened, burned-out sky? How could anyone do anything? Vasily could no longer remember how he’d once functioned or cared about anything at all.
Both Belphagor and Anazakia had gone on breathing, eating, and sleeping as though these motions were not like walking barefoot over shards of glass. Vasily wanted to scream at them—to beat at them. Taking a swing at Belphagor on that terrible night was the only moment he’d felt something other than despair.
Lying with his back to Belphagor in the borrowed bed, Vasily flexed his knuckles. He could still remember how Belphagor’s jaw had felt against them. He’d never done it before; Belphagor was the one who expressed his feelings with the strength of his hands. Belphagor had administered the sweet pain of correction that kept Vasily grounded, had let him know he was alive, and that Belphagor’s passions were aroused at the sight of him. He hadn’t touched Vasily that way in nearly two years.
The last thing Belphagor had done before leaving on his fool’s errand to Heaven was to measure the strength of his desire upon Vasily’s flesh with a freshly cut birch switch. That night had been a reconciliation after years apart over a foolish argument and stubbornness on both their parts. Vasily had gone to sleep in his arms feeling whole again after such a long time of incompleteness, and had woken to find Belphagor gone. He hadn’t returned until Vasily stormed Heaven to get him back nearly ten months later—ten months during which Vasily had taken comfort in the arms of an angel and she’d given him a daughter.
Everything came back to Ola. Never in his life had he considered having a child. He couldn’t have been less interested in them; they weren’t part of his world. He was an
gry at first when Anazakia told him, acting like a fool. And then he’d held Ola in his arms, regarding him with wide, lapis eyes like an alabaster doll. She’d stolen his heart. And Belphagor had let them take her away.
Vasily knew this wasn’t fair. Rationally, he knew it. But there was a part of him that suspected Belphagor was jealous, a petty voice in his head that said Belphagor had wanted her gone. How would he have felt if it had been Bel who’d slept with Nazkia, if Bel and Nazkia’d had a child? He didn’t like to think of the answer. He knew he was judging Belphagor by the worst of himself, which he also didn’t like to think of. But none of that mattered now. All that mattered was Ola.
He’d come with Belphagor to St. Petersburg when Dmitri had acquiesced in the face of Anazakia’s disappearance because it was at least some kind of forward motion. Sitting and waiting in the crypt-like silence of their unhappy dacha for word of Ola to come from others had been driving him mad. Anazakia had seen something on Love’s computer that sent her here. Something Belphagor had missed.
That she’d gone without him only added to Vasily’s bitterness. He’d often felt superfluous when it came to parenting Ola. The natural bond between mother and daughter was something to which he could only be a spectator. Never having experienced a mother’s love himself, it mystified him, and he felt inadequate in comparison. Ola seemed to prefer even Belphagor’s attentions to his own, always quieter around Vasily, always staring up at him with that serious face, where Belphagor made her laugh.
Vasily sighed, tossing fitfully. He looked over his shoulder. Belphagor was peacefully sleeping. Sleeping, the bastard.
…
“This is getting us nowhere, just like before.”
Belphagor buttered his toast while Dmitri’s boyfriend, Lev, poured him a cup of tea. Vasily was speaking to him at least. It was something.