Authors: Mercedes Lackey
She didn’t get much time to appreciate it though—
She heard a strange sound above her head, and looked up.
There was a whirlwind in the sky above her, descending rapidly down onto her. Her first instinct was to run—but of course, that was not what she needed to do. She stood her ground as the sand-colored, top-shaped vortex homed in on her, whining a high-pitched note that set her teeth on edge. Of course, this thing had waited until she was alone.
She ducked as it hit her, and used those long sleeves to screen her face; a good thing she did, or she would have been blinded by the debris in the wind. She was in the center of a whirl of hot, dry air full of sand and dust that engulfed her and almost stole her breath away. And then she felt her feet lose contact with the ground.
Despite her best intentions, she screamed. It did no good of course. She felt it take her, and with a sickening lurch, felt it hurtle up and sideways with her suspended in the middle of it.
All she could think of at that moment was Sasha….
It seemed to take forever, but the time between when the whirlwind picked her up and when it deposited her on the battlements of the Katschei’s castle could not have been very long at all. It had been mid-afternoon by the sun when she had called on The Tradition to disguise her. It was still mid-afternoon, though perhaps just a bit later, now.
But when the whirlwind dissipated and she could see again, she got a tremendous shock. The Katschei’s castle had once stood in the heart of a bleak, oppressively dark and overgrown forest, one where all the trees were droop-branched pines, more black than green, where the ends of the branches dripped endlessly, where fog wreathed the landscape and the space between the trees was host to unwholesome-looking mushrooms and briars with thorns as long as a finger.
Not anymore.
Now the castle stood in the heart of a desert.
In every direction, all she could see were sand dunes and little patches of scrub. The sun beat down on her like a hammer on an anvil, and the sky was like an upturned enamel bowl, glaring and pitiless.
“Hmpf.”
She turned, hearing the sound behind her, and stared.
He was twice as tall as she, and barely half-clothed. His skin was the color of beaten bronze, his eyes black and slanted, and his head mostly bald except for a topknot of black hair as coarse as a horse’s tail, bound at the base with a gold ring. He wore baggy silk trews of an eye-watering scarlet color, and shoes that matched with pointed, upward-curling toes, a pair of gold bracelets around his biceps, and nothing more. He looked down at her, arms folded over his hairless chest.
“And what are you?” he asked in a strangely accented voice.
She didn’t have to act to get her voice to tremble. As it happened, she
knew
what this was, because she had heard about them from her father, in his tales of his family’s war with Drylanders of the Southern Kingdoms. It was a Jinn. And most Jinn were evil. “A bereginia, sir. A simple dweller on the riverbank—”
“Enough.” He cut her off with a gesture. “Go down and join the others. You serve me now, whatever you are.” His voice rang in her ears, with overtones like a brass gong.
She looked where he pointed, down into the central courtyard of the castle, which was, at least, still a garden. She saw three other young women down there, one listlessly reading a book, one picking at embroidery, and one sitting and staring at nothing.
She glanced back at the cruel, scowling face of the Jinn and scuttled down the cut-stone stairs from the battlements to the courtyard, feeling entirely too much like a mouse in the gaze of a cat that is not quite hungry…
…yet.
She entered the garden not sure of what her reception was going to be. The first thing she noticed was that all the young women were wearing a very different set of garments than the ones she would have thought they’d have been captured in. Instead of blouses, skirts and vests, or shifts and sarafans, or even the brocaded silver-white gowns the swan maidens had worn, they all had on a variation in color and embroidery of the same outfit; filmy, baggy trews of the sort that the Jinn wore with a short skirt over that, an equally filmy blouse with very short sleeves, and a vest. Most of them had their hair braided and wrapped around their heads, for coolness, she thought. Katya entered the garden near one dressed all in white and silver, who had been the one staring listlessly at nothing. The girl gave her an indifferent glance; Katya recognized in her features the stamp of her sisters. This then must be Yulya, the missing swan maiden. “You had better get a servant to show you the way to our quarters, and change out of that, if you don’t want to roast,” the swan maiden said indifferently, then went back to staring at nothing.
“Never mind the servant, I’ll show you,” said another in blue, the one who had been embroidering, making a dismissive gesture at Yulya. “And never mind her, either. She’s terrified, so terrified it’s made her go all numb.” The girl managed a shaky smile. “So am I, but it hasn’t made me go all numb. I almost wish it would. That bronze fellow says his magic will protect us but—” she glanced up at the sky with a shuttered look of terror “—I keep expecting to melt at any moment.”
So this would be the snow maiden.
The third girl, all in red, looked up and nodded solemnly. “It’s a Jinn, you know,” she whispered. “It’s trying to do what the Katschei did, only much more cleverly. It’s trying to come here, where The Tradition doesn’t know how to cope with it. It took over the Katschei’s castle, though, so The Tradition is making it do what the Katschei did—collect girls.”
“He doesn’t like it, either,” said the snow maiden. “Every time The Tradition makes him send out one of his whirlwinds, he gets very irritated.”
“It doesn’t like being forced into anything,” the other said, closing her book. “It was like that all along, of course, but being confined to a bottle for two hundred years has made it very…” she seemed to be searching for the right word “…angry.”
“How do you know all of this?” Katya asked, eyeing the other doubtfully.
The girl sighed. “Because I was the first one it took captive, before it even came here. I was an apprentice to a hedge-wizard, and he was the one that let the Jinn loose. He bought the bottle from a sailor—he thought it was just some odd magic potion. He broke the seal and opened the stopper on it to analyze it—now, of course, I know that the stopper and the seal were part of the spell that kept the Jinn confined—and the Jinn came boiling out and destroyed him. Then it began wrecking his tower. I was down in the cellar decanting things and heard the noise and hid. By the time the Jinn got down there, its anger had cooled somewhat, and it decided to take me captive to serve it.” Katya noticed at that point that the girl looked very, very tired. “Not like a servant. It leaches power from anyone that has it to save his own. I’m sure it would
much
rather take more powerful people to leach from, but it decided to take over the Katschei’s castle, so young women are all that The Tradition will let it capture. Still, it must keep us alive so we can recover more power he can steal again. It means we are generally safe.”
“Unless, of course, he can use us as bait to lure in other things. Princes. Sorcerers.” Katya shrugged. “Why do you keep calling him
it
?”
“I—don’t know,” the young woman confessed. “I suppose because it didn’t show any interest in…” She blushed.
“I had as soon couple with a donkey.” The brass-toned voice made them all start, and the Jinn faded into view, looking down at them with scorn. “You are mere animals, for all that you talk. Your conversation is like the chattering of apes. You irritate me. Go to your quarters.”
Yulya, the swan maiden, shrank back the moment the Jinn appeared; she went absolutely white and, like her sister, she trembled in every limb. The snow maiden and the apprentice, however, though pale and frightened, stood their ground, at least insofar as not falling to pieces in front of him. The snow-maiden took Katya by the hand and led her off toward a doorway in the wall of the courtyard, while the apprentice took Yulya’s hand and tugged her insistently away, breaking her out of her paralysis.
The thick stone walls of the castle, built to withstand the assault of any foe the Katschei could imagine, give immediate relief from the desert heat. The snow maiden sighed involuntarily as they penetrated deeper into the corridors, with Yulya’s quiet sobs making a melancholy counterpart to their footsteps.
“I’m Ekaterina—Katya,” Katya said, into the uncomfortable silence. “Marina,” and “Klava,” the other two volunteered. Yulya just whimpered.
The room that Marina brought them to must once have been one of the Katschei’s audience chambers—although it was possible that this chamber might have once held the Katschei’s own collection of captive girls. Although there were no windows, it was illuminated brightly enough, with glowing lanterns spaced at intervals along the walls. The light that came from them was a cool blue, which made all of them look just a touch cadaverous. It was furnished very simply, with heaps of pillows and low cots. There were books here, neatly arranged in a bookcase that looked out of place. Yulya went straight to one of the cots and lay down on it. Marina went to a chest and rummaged around, coming up with an outfit just like her own, in green. Taking the hint, Katya changed into it, and realized that no matter what it looked like, it was very cool and practical. Wardrobe taken care of, the three of them arranged themselves on pillows as far from Yulya as possible.
“I don’t suppose you’ve tried to escape?” Katya asked.
Klava rolled her eyes. “Marina is a snow maiden,” she pointed out. “Even if we could escape, she wouldn’t last very long out there in the desert.”
Katya nodded. “Still,” she persisted. “Did it ever even look like there was a way to escape?”
“Nothing that I ever saw,” Klava said, after a moment of thought. “Some of the Katschei’s servants were still here when the Jinn took this place, and they simply accept him as the new master. Some of them came back. And the Jinn has servants of his own, and a lot of them are human. You didn’t see them, but he has lots of soldiers.”
Katya pondered. “Does he stop you from exploring this place?”
Marina shook her head. “That’s how we got all the books. He doesn’t bother with us as long as we don’t try to kill ourselves or try to escape in any obvious way. And don’t worry,” she added, “I can tell when he’s about, invisible. Right at the moment we can talk about anything.”
“Right,” Katya said, and set her chin. “Then let’s talk about how we are going to get out of here.”
When three days went by without so much as a word, Sasha began to worry. When a week had passed, he became certain that Katya was in trouble. And when a fortnight had come and gone—
—that was when he decided that he was going after her.
He sent only a short message to his brothers and father.
I will be traveling and am not certain where
. Unlike Katya’s duty, the tasks of the Fortunate Fool had never yet involved an emergency. With luck, nothing would fall apart in his absence.
So hear me, my Luck. Let nothing fall apart in my absence.
He took the message with him out to the innkeeper, who had sent messages on for him before. The man looked at the folded, sealed piece of paper, then at him, and nodded. “Tinker just came in this morning. Heading to Vasilygrad.”
“Perfect,” he replied, and handed over a half-dozen silver coins. The innkeeper would keep one, give one to the tinker, and promise the rest when the tinker returned with proof of delivery. The man would do as he promised of course. The innkeeper was a good judge of men.
Then again, you didn’t cross someone married to a witch. It was pretty obvious now why no one ever stole things from this inn.
Sasha had no real idea of where he needed to go, but that had never stopped him in the past. Now, if ever, was the time to rely on the Luck of the Fortunate Fool, the Luck that would put him in the right place, at the right time, without fail.
He went straight to the innkeeper’s wife after sending on his message. As she was the local witch, she would be the best place to start.
“Your betrothed is long away,” she said shrewdly, the moment he walked into her fragrant kitchen. The door stood open to let out the heat, and the air was full of the scent of perfectly baked bread. “I sense this was not planned.”
“My betrothed answered the summons of her father, and it has taken longer than either of us thought,” he replied. “But I do not think it is her father that is detaining her.”
The witch nodded, and bent to remove loaves of rich, dark bread from the oven. “I do not, either, though I have no real word to give you. Whatever has gone amiss, it has a land-feel to it, not a sea-feel.”
He did not even have to think what his answer would be now. If Katya’s father was not the problem, then she was in trouble; and if she was in trouble he would find his way to her. “I was already going to go to her. Is there any help you can give me at all?”
“These.” She nodded at the bread. “I dreamed you would go, though I did not know why—I only saw you taking to the road and the road stretching on before you farther than I could see. I began my baking for it last night, when I woke from the dream. Other than that—” She shrugged, and then looked up at him, a rueful expression on her face. “I am not very powerful. My abilities lie mostly in seeing what is to be seen here in the village, some healing, a little advice, once in a while, a dream. And bread.”
“Then I will have that, and your blessing, little mother,” he replied, and bent to kiss her hand, a little rough with honest work, and so very different from the hands he usually had to kiss.
“Oh get on with you!” she said, blushing, as she snatched her hand away. “Take my bread and my blessing, and bring your love back.”
So when the Fortunate Fool rode out a short time later, it was with the blessing of the Witch of the Jolly Sturgeon, a pannier full of rich bread wrapped for travel, and only the vague direction that the troubles had a “land-feel” to them.
But Sasha was not stupid. He knew The Tradition like few in this kingdom. He knew his land and its people. And he was accustomed to looking at the vaguest of hints and turning them into answers.
Sasha had only just ridden the boundaries of the kingdom. He knew where the trouble spots were and he had dealt with them. So whatever had happened, whatever it was that Katya was to look into, there were two things he knew for certain. The place had to border the sea, or the Sea King would not be concerned about it. And it was not
inside
Led Belarus.
So. The logical place to start would be to follow the coastline northward, to cross the border into wilderness claimed by no Kingdom. There were plenty of nasty things there, lurking in ancient, be-spidered and be-haunted forest. There were no few things he had sung out of Led Belarus that could have gotten stronger since he removed them. There were also rumors of very, very powerful Old Things. If one of
them
had decided that decades, centuries of quietude were about to end, then things could be very interesting indeed.
So northward he went. As it happened, there were a few creatures he could ask for advice on the way, and it would be in the true Tradition of the Fortunate Fool to do so.
He pressed his horse as much as he could to reach his first destination by nightfall.
The woods to the right were still haunted-looking, but nothing like as sinister as the last time he passed this way. Instead of oppressive, endless shadow beneath the trees, there were will-o’-the-wisps, not dancing off into the distance, mockingly, but hanging quietly in one place or at worst, drifting about a little. The scent of the place was of fallen leaves, cool, old—not of death and decay. Still unnerving, but not terrifying.
The trees, though they stirred without a breeze to move them, and made ominous creaking noises, did not reach out to grab him or his horse as they made their way down the path. The path did not grow holes, or roots, or stones to trip the horse. It did not suddenly seem to squirm in a different direction. In short, it remained an ordinary, common path.
So far the Rusalka was keeping her promise.
He arrived at the lake as the moon was rising, and looked around. The atmosphere was little changed, but, nevertheless, it was changed. Again, the scent was subtly different; not rank with a hint of corruption, but cool, a bit damp, and ever so faintly scented with waterlily. There were still wafts of fog on the surface and wreathing around the verge, but they didn’t go above waist-high, and the moonlight illuminated the area quite brilliantly.
There were no evil little silver slivers of fish in the clear water. Just an ordinary carp nosing about the bottom, a few tiny sticklebacks darting past, and a perch dozing just under a lily pad. And frogs were singing all around.
He dismounted from his horse, took the first loaf of bread from his pannier, laid it on a stone near the edge, and waited.
He didn’t have to wait for very long.
A head shot up out of the water, shaking long, silvery-blond hair out of her eyes. “Bread!” the Rusalka exclaimed. “Do I smell fresh bread?”
“From today’s baking,” Sasha replied. Rusalkas, although technically ghosts, still ate. It was a contradiction that Sasha had never been able to reason out, and so he had never bothered to try. “A bargain for a little information. Sorry I don’t have butter.”
The Rusalka jumped out of the water and seized the loaf of bread, sitting right down on the stone to tear a chunk off and start eating. She paused with the bite halfway to her mouth. “What sort of information?” she asked.
“Is there anything you know of that might be stirring to the north that would attract the attention of the King of the Sea?” he asked.
Frogs punctuated the silence. “Hmm.” She ate her first piece while she thought.
“Just guesses would be fine,” he said encouragingly.
“Well…I
would
have mentioned Katschei the Deathless, except that he didn’t manage to live up to his name,” she said, smirking. “His castle is vacant, but I doubt that anything would have moved into it. He was a vile thing, and would have left it completely filled with traps of all sorts.” She shook her head. “It is not a place
I
would venture into, no matter what treasures are there.”
He made a mental note of that anyway. If something was strong enough, clever enough, to get past the traps, it would certainly be strong and clever enough to capture Katya. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Baba Yaga roams up there.”
He bit his lip over that one. Baba Yaga never was, and Traditionally never would be, the sort to stir up the kind of trouble that
would
get the Sea King’s attention. Not that she didn’t stir up trouble! And not that she wasn’t absolutely deadly! But she didn’t ever involve herself in the matters of Kingdoms. He suspected that she just didn’t enjoy the sort of impersonal misery that conquest and subjugation created. She performed her evil one person at a time.
So, probably not Baba Yaga, though it was entirely possibly that Baba Yaga could have ambushed Katya on the way
to
her goal. “Anything else?”
The loaf was half gone. The Rusalka must have been starved for the taste of bread. He made a mental note to see that she got it more often. “They say Chernobog is seen there.” She looked up then, and shivered, eyes going opaque.
He didn’t blame her. Chernobog was said to be a god, though who knew? It was impossible to say. Whatever, the Dark One
was
very, very powerful, and
was
interested in the lives of mortals, and was entirely arbitrary so far as Sasha could make out. You could not tell what he would and would not do. Like many ancient spirits, he acted only as he pleased, and in tune with some balance and some logic that only he and The Tradition understood or could predict.
Though if it was Chernobog, the Dark One would not be acting directly, but rather through someone else. He had no interest in being a king himself—for a spirit as powerful as he was, that was a distinct demotion—but oh, how he loved to meddle in the lives of mortals! Meddle, then stand back and watch and laugh. No use appealing to him either; he let you get yourself out of whatever situation his meddling had put you in.
The Rusalka finished the last of the bread, and licked her fingers bare of crumbs. Nearby, a nightingale began to sing, adding his voice to the frogs.
“I cannot think of anything else,” she said. “Although there are plenty of evil things there. Plenty. More than enough to give your Katya a nasty surprise.”
He nodded. “But that is a start. Well—” He looked up at the moon. “I should go while there is light to ride by.”
She shook her head. “No. Stay.” At his askance look, she smiled. “I have no designs on you! I scent the Sea King’s daughter about you and I have no desire to challenge her! No, you can safely sleep here. I will guard your rest.” Then she added, softly, “You are a good man, Sasha.”
He flushed. He did try to be. Even if he didn’t know The Tradition as well as he did, he’d have been the sort to share his bread with an old beggar woman….
“Thank you,” he said, just as softly.
Then she laughed. And shook back her hair, and winked at him “And you are a Fortunate Fool! Such are always finding help in unexpected places!”
And so, somewhat to his own bemusement, Sasha unsaddled his horse and left it tethered to graze on the verge, while he rolled himself up in his cloak and slept through the night to the sound of frogs and a lovestruck nightingale, beneath the protection of a Rusalka.
Katya scanned the battlements carefully from her place in the Jinn’s garden. The other girls—and there were more of them now, for the Jinn had added a fifth maiden to his collection—were all in their rock-walled room. The new one might be very useful. She was a Wolf-girl, the opposite of a werewolf, a young Wolf-bitch who could take the form of a human at will—legends said it was by taking off her skin, but Katya had watched her, and she merely shape-shifted. She was very like the bear-people in that way, or a real werewolf, as opposed to the swan maiden who was human to begin with and took the form of a swan by putting on the feather cloak. As a Wolf, the girl was able to sniff out things that the others could not see nor sense. Like drafts or fresh air where neither should be. Katya had her exploring the cellars and dungeon as much as she could without getting caught.
The garden had never been all that lovely when Katschei the Deathless had lived here; he had been much inclined to dark and poisonous plants. In his absence though, most of those, needing nurturing, had died. So the weeds, and what good plants that once had flourished here and had somehow survived, had taken over. And then, just as the garden was at its most tangled, someone had taken a clumsy hand to it.
The Jinn, she supposed, was the one who had ordered some of that cleaned up. The fountain flowed clear, bushes and even trees had been cut back, and paths were newly graveled. But the Jinn clearly could not tell weeds from flowers, and the weeds were slowly choking out the flowers, in all but a few places. Granted, some of the weeds did look very lush and green, but stinging nettles were not what anyone would want in a garden, even if they did look like mint.
She sat next to one of those places where the flowers were winning, a bed of primroses that had completely taken over whatever else had been in there with them. The delicate pink blossoms, only faintly scented, spilled out over the cobbles containing them, looking cool and lively in what to her was dreadful heat.
The heat was enough to flatten anyone used to the climate of the north as she and the other girls were. The devastation this Jinn could wreak here if he spread his desert was appalling. The heat alone would kill many animals—and people, too.