Page 30 of Spring's Arcana
HATE WHAT IT HOLDS
She was still producing blue words under her breath at a good clip when the brakes grabbed and the van came to a jolting halt. Nat scrambled for the driver’s side—it was, after all, as far as she could get from the biggest door, and what came next after a driverless van kidnapped you?
The big passenger-side door would open, of course, and she’d find out who had sent the whole contraption. It could have been a rescue attempt, but she wasn’t betting on that. Not after being held to a chair by a grandmother’s dark gaze, not after a shop full of invisible seamstresses, and definitely not after seeing a man nailed to raw creosote-soaked lumber split open and a… athingcome out.
The talking cats of Brooklyn had nothing on this.
Her brain shivered. Shefeltthe movement inside her skull, despite knowing it was an absolute impossibility; you could crack open someone’s head-case and poke around without a lot of anesthetic because the gray matter didn’t send pain signals.
She was shaking her head, too, tiny little tosses like one of the cats with whiskers burnt by misadventure, or like a best friend in sixth grade when Nat led her to the dry spot under the skirts of the holly tree on the playground at Mother Mary Elementary and the tiny mushrooms growing there, singing in their bird-piping voices.
What was that little strawberry-blonde girl’s name? She’d run away and never talked to Nat afterward; the childish heartbreak still wrung at Nat’s heart.
Jenny Tisdale. That was her name. Her family moved away.“Sonofabitching motherfuck,” Nat whispered, and followed it up with afew choice terms Uncle Leo muttered while working on engines, when he thought Nat couldn’t hear.
“And good evening to you.” A rich, dry, but somehow fruity baritone reverberated outside the van. The door rolled open and cold air rushed through; she glimpsed concrete, the orange edge of city-night glow against low smooth clouds ready to dump more snow at a moment’s provocation. Where in the fucking city was she now? “You sound like your mother, you know.”
All the spit in Nat’s mouth dried. She hugged her knees, wishing she had refused the green dress. The heels still clasped her feet and the skirts still covered everything they should, but her hair was a mess of curls falling in her face and the rest of her felt wildly disheveled.
Nothing was visible out the door except a concrete half-wall, a slice of something that looked like an HVAC hood, and painted lines like a basketball court. A thin scrim of ice in faint ruffled patterns turned the ground into a slick glitter, and a dark shape in the near distance was the familiar bulk of the Morrer-Pessel Tower.
From the angle, she was on a rooftop in Soho. Pretty high, too. Who needed the subway when you had a flying van?
The dimness near the door turned sharp, and as she watched, a shadow detached. It swelled, like a paper doll unfolding and acquiring terribly real weight, and the woozy terror came back.
She could pinch herself, she supposed; when it got bad in middle school she’d worn long sleeves to cover the bruises, each one a savage little bite as if she could train herself not to see what was clear as day.
What other peopledidn’tsee. Or maybe they did and pretended not to, and she’d never acquired the trick or was incapable of learning, like she was apparently incapable of getting the kitchen clean enough or finding a job that would earn enough for escape or—
“Don’t worry. It’s only a helpful shadow, not the other kind.” The baritone swelled into a gentle laugh, but the sound spread goose bumps up her arms. “I apologize for the impoliteness, and for the bumpy ride. But I felt it necessary to move before someone could convince you to do something rash, my dear Drozdova.”
The paper cutout vanished, folding back into the deep gloom in the back of the van. Nat stayed where she was, trying to keep the door, the back, and the passenger seat in view all at once. The thought that she was in a few shadows herself wasn’t comforting at all. “Who the hell are you?” She meant to channel some of Mom’syou’d better have a good answer to this question, bustertone, but instead, what came out was a breathless squeak.
“Oh, yes. How rude of me, naturally we haven’t been introduced.” A flowing laugh, like a tide of desert sand creeping over desiccated bones. “But names—we all have so many. For example, you are Drozdova, the Lady of Black Earth, Granddaughter of bleak Winter, and the rising sap in the bough. But you are also…”
The urge to sayit’s just Natwarred with a second, much deeper imperative to give her other name, therealone—not the one on her birth certificate, because Mom said that was just Nat, too.
But the cats said otherwise, and Nat was glad she’d listened to them at least that once. She bit her lower lip, sinking her teeth in so she didn’t give anything away.
Fairy tales and the cats were both very clear onthatpoint, thank you very much.
“Wise little girl.” He laughed again. How could a voice sound so dry? Even her cheeks felt tight, as if she’d opened the oven and bent into the first blast from its mouth. “Wiser than her years, which isn’t surprising. I am called Kolya, and the Reader, and He Who Hides. But I am also called Koschei the Dollmaker, and I welcome you to my domain. You may enter freely. None of my servants will harm you if it can be avoided, and neither will I.” Each word was given equal weight, a clock’s dry ironic recital of seconds passing. “There is much profit to be had in our alliance, Miss Drozdova. You are the means of finding something Dmitri Konets wants very badly, but if he does reacquire it he will tear you into small bits and probably consume quite a few of them.”
It wasn’t so much what he said as the tone—placid, amused, with the ring of complete sincerity—that convinced her. After all, she’d seen Dmitri’s teeth, and even with his funny shiny boot-toes the man was terrifying.
But it didn’t answer the question of whether this guy, whoever he was, would end up being worse. Not to mention Baba wasn’t the only one wanting her to pick something up at the corner store, so to speak. She was betting this guy didn’t just hanker for a bottle of vodka. “And what doyouwant?”
“I want you to find the gem, of course. It’s in an iron setting like dead twigs, and your mother stole it from Baba Yaga upon a moonless night. I don’t suppose the old witch told you that.”
“She…” Nat gulped in a mouthful of frigid air. Were there flickers of movement in the oppressive shadows, or was it just her imagination? “She just told me that if I found something for her, I could save my mother. And Mom…” Her mother’s voice, soft as a cricket-whisper.Don’t tell anyone the riddle, Natchenka. Everything in it is a signpost, and you don’t want anyone else to guess. Go along with what Baba says until you get to the Key, but hurry. I can’t hold on much longer.
That was what was so terrible about this guy, Nat realized. He sounded like Mom, like death. Or dying.
“I possess the power to show you where the Knife is, Miss Drozdova. That’s the first piece you need to find, isn’t it?”
Her mother’s voice, riding tepid breath into Nat’s ear.The path starts with the Knife.
Nat scrambled for the door, nylon carpet burning her palms and rasping her skirt. She tumbled out onto a rooftop, Coco’s heels grabbing a rippled sheet of ice as surely as cleats, and found herself blinking against a stinging cold wind—her hair doing its best to blind her by lifting in a cloud—and facing a cadaverous man in a matte black suit, his bolo tie pulled very tight against a scrawny neck. The bolo’s slide was a dark oval gem with a secretive vertical gleam in its heart, very like a cat’s-eye, and his wrists protruded from his cuffs, dangling large, soft hands with long expressive fingers. For all their delicacy, the phalanges looked very strong, kelp waiting to wrap around an unwary swimmer’s legs, dragging down to cold lung-crushing depths.
