Katrina paled, her face a mask, but the woodcutter bowed to the will of his Master and the prophetess.
Mother’s urgency breathed life into my metaphor, creating a shape—yes, a wolf, tearing at the windows, trying to get in. “I’ll go, too,” Bogdan volunteered. “Davai,” said Gleb, rising. Perhaps not wanting Pasha to get all the credit for bravery in Katrina’s eyes. The three piled into the kitchen, grabbed their skis and snowshoes, coats and hats, and returned through the hall to the front door to prepare for the bitter cold, wrapping their scarves around their faces, leaving mere slits for their eyes.
I snatched at Bogdan’s sleeve. “Please—don’t risk your life for a handful of pine needles. If you die, he’ll say it’s because you didn’t believe enough.”
He stroked my face, gently. “It will be fine. You have to trust.”
“Don’t say die,” Katrina snapped, trying to pull me back toward the workroom. “Can’t you see you’re just making it worse?” Her worried blue eyes followed Pasha out the door.
I yanked myself away from her grasp and stood in the cold vestibule after she returned to the others. They didn’t know how quickly death could come. Just in a minute. Tree limbs flew faster than horses out there. Your skin froze in moments.
Avdokia appeared at my elbow. “You can’t talk a fool out of a fire,” she said and slipped something into my pocket—a packet wrapped in paper. Meat. She must have stolen it from the pot right under Katrina’s nose. I choked it down, threw the paper into a corner so they wouldn’t find it on me. “Can you smell me?” I held out my hands to her.
“Don’t get too close,” she said.
In the workroom, my lunatic mother now sat in Ukashin’s chair, white as Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, Winter’s daughter. Maybe she really had seen a wolf, or a spirit, or a Dark Body from a far dimension only visible to her squid eyes, but you didn’t send precious humans out when these creatures were stalking.
Katrina and I wiped off a window and peered out at the tiny flicker of lantern light swinging off in the lee of the house. Then it was swallowed by the storm. All because of a woman who hadn’t been out of her room for months and talked to imaginary creatures in the dark. Ukashin sat by her side, knitting his brow like a priest at confession as she spoke into his ear. It was the first time I’d seen them together in the open, in the light. How reverently he was listening, his head bowed, nodding.
And then it struck me like a tree branch in the head. Taras Ukashin believed in my mother. This was no confidence game, not a clever use of her to appropriate her holdings or to lay further claim to the mystical Beyond. It was worse. He truly believed she was receiving insights from other worlds. I’d always assumed that he was controlling her—but what if it was the opposite? What if it was Vera Borisovna setting our course, not Taras Ukashin? Bozhe moi.
Mother continued speaking urgently to her—what? Lover? Communicant?—while her devotees ranged around the table, nervously resuming their tasks. I noticed that Magda could not take her eyes off Ukashin, the way he practically knelt at Mother’s feet, holding her hand. Jealousy burned in her like an empty pan on a hot stove. Ilya swallowed, his big Adam’s apple rising and falling. I saw that he was ashamed to be inside and safe when the other boys risked their lives on this fool’s errand.
Five minutes passed. Forty below, with a wind like frozen nails. My mother’s glance slid briefly over the rest of us without interest, as if we were dolls in a shop window. Something struck the house, and we jumped. She jumped as well. Good, she was not so insensible as all that.
“There are no wolves, you know,” I said. “It’s too cold. They’re asleep in their dens under the snow.” The minnows of her attention hovered over my face, their tickling mouths in my eyes, in my ears.
“So much red,” she pronounced. Evidently even inflowing had done nothing for my aura.
“Recent events have disturbed her energy, Mother,” Ukashin defended me. “But she is one with us.”
“She’s one with no one,” my mother said. “She’ll never be one with anyone. It is her fate.”
As if balling me into a lump like a greasy piece of paper and throwing me into a corner. So much for me. My lungs froze in my chest. I tried to think of people I had been one with—Genya, Kolya. The Poverty Artel. But a deeper truth uncoiled, like a fiddlehead fern. Around me, glances of pity. A ripple of unease traveled around the room—except for Magda. A pleased smile flickered around her lips.
“There’s no such thing as Fate,” I said. But what the high priestess said was oracle, and I had the horrible suspicion that she could be right. What if it was true? Damn her—why did she have to come downstairs when she’d been so happy in that creepy room with her weird icons and little polished stones?
Ukashin leaned toward her. “She’s with us for now, Mother,” he said. “In this time stream. And who can say more about anyone?”
I should have felt gratitude. Yet I still felt the teeth of the storm in my mouth, my horrible red aura, and wanted to hurt her for handing me such a fate like a slap. I wanted to wipe that otherworldly vagueness from her face. “Did your spirit guides tell you Andrei Petrovin shot himself?” I called down the table. “Your friend Andrei?” The attention swam back to me, regarding my outline as if it wavered in water. “That’s right—Andrei Petrovin. Notice you haven’t seen him around much? He’s lying in the icehouse, rolled up like a carpet.”
She turned away from me as she used to when I’d said something awkward to one of her guests, simply erased me from her attention. That was her answer. Her friend’s death meant nothing. Ukashin had been more perturbed.
“What else didn’t they tell you?” I shouted down the table. “Did you know I was pregnant? I’m going to have a child, Mama. This summer. Your grandchild.”
The devotees shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed that their priestess was being dragged into a matter so unseemly and personal when they’d given up every family connection, even their names. I could see that Magda wanted to get her hands around my throat. Ukashin stared at me. I could almost hear him—I can’t save you forever.
“Your grandchild, Mama. It’s Kolya Shurov’s.”
Now her vision cleared, and she saw me. Oh, yes. She remembered me now. Your daughter. She regarded me with something resembling fear.
“Yes, Kolya. We’ve been lovers since I was sixteen. Did you see that in your multidimensional universe?”
But then her vision clouded over, and she was scanning me, as she had in the room upstairs, as if she were reading a wall poster, a playbill for a drama at the People’s House. What was I, a little Ibsen? Or maybe Wilde?
“It won’t live,” she said.
The sound echoed like a gunshot in a long hall. When it faded, the only sound in the room was the roaring of the wind.
Doors slammed, and in a gust of frigid air, the trio of boys thundered into the hall. In walked Pasha, frosted white, hat, scarf, coat, boots, gloves, his arms piled high with fragrant fir, followed by Gleb and Bogdan equally laden. The relief was palpable. All uncertainty vanished, and the disciples beamed with the proof: their prophetess was wise, Ukashin was still in control, I was an alarmist and disrupter. You see? said the Master’s sideways glance. We know what we’re doing here. The others grabbed up the boughs and began rubbing the sills and doorways.
I lay on my pallet that night among the others, no longer marveling at our initiation into the mysteries of inflowing. Even hiding within the earth did me no good. I only heard my mother’s voice. I thought of her face, her calm. I wanted to slap her even now. Was she punishing me for insisting that there was no wolf and that she was no seer, only a madwoman? Or was she so crazy that she didn’t understand how terrible was her curse?