Page 40 of Spring's Arcana
In short, Candy smelled exactly like her mother on a good day, and Nat’s face crumpled. There was even the faint edge of talcum, and a breath of roses from the water Mama dabbed under her eyes each nightto keep them fresh, Natchenka, now run along to bed.
“You poor little thing. I’ve got a mind to go find your mother and give her a bit of advice. Thinks herself so much better than the rest of us. Well, there’s thingsIwon’t stoop to, not even for money, honey, and that’s saying something. Why Baba let that… oh, well, I know why, because she’s old and it doesn’t matter one way or another, not to her. But sending you out with Dmitri? That’s just too much. He’s a bleak creature now, but what do you expect? Takes pure will to keep going the way he does.”
It would be nice to have a noun, lady. All Nat wanted was to go home and go to sleep in her closet, hoping that in the morning she’d wake up to a world just as pale and cold and dull as everyone had always insisted. A world where her mother would just be some crazy old woman dying by inches and Leo just a…
“Oh, God,” Nat whispered, her stomach twitching like a fish drowning in air. “Help me. Please.”
“Honey, you are in the right place. I’m always here to help, and we should start at the beginning.” The woman took a deep breath. Candy’s arms slithered away, and she stepped back, eyeing Nat critically. “We’re gonna need something that doesn’t sting, but none of them are deep enough to need sutures. So it’s butterflies and my special iodine, and I’m going to tell you a thing or two, little girl. You’d better listen to Mama, now.”
Nat suppressed a guilty flinch. Candy’s eyes widened slightly, and her jaw set. A small silver trolley trundled into view, obeying her impatient beckoning like a fat old sheepdog knowing it would get there in its own sweet time. On its broad back a shining steel medical tray made soft busy noises, a glass bottle of disinfectant clinking against a container of cotton balls as the wheels turned.
“Like a pinch on a bruise, is it? Sorry. Mostly everyone listens to their mama, sometimes it just comes out. And I’ve got my girls to keep me in the habit, we’re everywhere the wind blows, mostly. They do their best by me and I reciprocate. That’s what it’s all about. ’Course I might not go where there’s no people butyou,you’ll go everywhere. That’s the nature of the thing.” She glanced at Nat’s expression, nodding slightly as if it confirmed a guess. “I call usdivinities,though there’s other words. It’s as good a name as any.”
Divinities. All right.“Okay.” There was nothing else to say. Nat let her hands be lifted and examined under the steady bright light. Candy’s bent profile looked very young, a trick of shadows or maybe really good makeup. Her lashes were too thick to be natural, but even this close Nat couldn’t see the glued-on line, and skin that beautiful couldn’t be real either.
But somehow, impossibly, it was.
“See, most of the time we just sort of coalesce when there’s a need. But sometimes we move when our followers do. Your mama moved here, but she needed some way to stay. I suppose it wouldn’t occur to her to just get out of the way and let a younger woman take over. It’s terrible, but embedded patriarchy always is.” Candy dabbed a little of the brown liquid on Nat’s forearm, where the deepest pattern of slices still wept. Amazingly, it didn’t sting; Nat’s flesh just went numb, like Novocain was supposed to work.
Of course Nat had never been to the dentist’s. She knew about the chairs from horror stories and movies; Mama had never taken her to the doctor except for shots—but now that Nat thought about it, she never went in for a booster, and just assumed Mama had taken her in when she was too young to remember. Nat had never really been sick—oh, a few colds or tummyaches, but no ear infections, no tonsillitis, never a broken bone.
“Anyway, she could always go back and see if she transforms,” Candy continued, matter-of-factly. “It’s painful, but it happens. Better than what sheobviouslydecided. And sending you after the Heart to pay the toll, that’s a fine how-do-you-do.”
“Excuse me.” Nat tried not to sound prim. “But… okay, you know what I’m supposed to get?”
“Nobody told you? Time was when Dima wouldn’t pass up the chance to tell a girl with eyes like yours every little thing that crosses his mind. Well, I suppose you’ve passed the point of mortal skepticism after the night you’ve had. Maybe that was even Baba’s plan; the old lady hates answering questions.” Candy pursed her lips, painting another few shallow slices. The iodine smelled medicinal but also fresh, like clean laundry hung outside—maybe it was juice from that huge tentacled monster hanging in its macraméhammock. Mom would know; she knewallthe plants. “There we are. Now, honey, you want something to drink. I’ll make you some hot chocolate, but we’ve gotta be quick. You ain’t my only client tonight, as the saying goes.”
Candy kept painting the slices with a numbing, soothing touch, talking in a low confidential tone, and Nat’s body turned cold, then hot, then cold again hearing it all spelled out so matter-of-fact. The light over the stove flicked on, a battered tin saucepan settling on a cherry-glowing electric ring, and milk was poured from a thick heavy glass bottle with no visible means of support.
Why not? Her dress had been made by invisible hands, too. Nat watched as the tiny cuts on her arms healed under sticky stuff that was definitely not iodine, no matter what Candy called it. The dress itself tugged and twitched, threads spinning across shallow razor-slices.
The cloth was healing itself.
If the sorcerer had wanted to really hurt her, he could have. Was he saving that for later, if Nat could be induced to give him directions to the jewel? It was, Candy told her, about the size of a man’s fist, and scintillating.
“It’s a gem, yeah,” Candy said, examining a long slice on the back of Nat’s forearm. “But it’s also a Heart. One ofours,you understand? He gave it to pay for passage, is what I heard.” She glanced at the hallway as if she expected someone to be lurking in the gloom, listening. “And listen to me, little girl. You better never,everlet Dmitri Konets get his hands on it. He’ll kill you just for holding it, let alone being Maria’s daughter. Do you understand?”
Nat nodded. She had no problem believing Dmitri could put a bullet or two in her just as easily as he had in the sorcerer. She was a means to an end, nothing more and as usual. “It’s a… heart, but also a gem?”
“Like a big ol’ blood-touched diamond. I imagine Maria has it in some kind of setting, to keep it from flying back to its owner.”
“The owner…”Oh, wow.
“Oh, we can live without little things like hearts, honey. Just so long as they suspect, or even better,believe. Lovely little mortals.Sometimes I wish they weren’t so blind, but you know…” Candy shook her head, her earrings swaying. “Then I get angry, seeing what they do to my girls. Those are hungry nights.”
“You’re saying my mother is a…”A divinity.
“Well, she was. Now it’s you.”
“What’s happening to her?” It was a stupid question, Nat realized. She’d been staring at what was going to happen to Mama for a while now. It had started well before the night with the ambulance, her mother losing weight and complaining of fatigue, staring at Nat with bright blue bloodshot eyes.
“Well, the younger supplants the elder in certain cases. Because sometimes,whereyou’re born is important too.” Candy skimmed her palm over Nat’s forearm, almost cross-eyed concentration turning her face into a schoolgirl’s again. A trick of light could make her look younger or weathered; her curls bobbed as she blew lightly across damp disinfectant. “Anyway, she should just accept it.”
That’s my mother you’re talking about. Acceptance wasn’t really in Maria Drozdova’s dictionary, and Nat’s heart gave a slight traitorous twinge. “So the Heart can make her not… not die?” Was that how it worked? That was probably why Mama wanted her to bring everything to the hospice first.
Simple enough, Nat supposed. She hadn’t saidwhenshe’d deliver the item to Baba, and could even argue de Winter hadn’t even said precisely what she wanted Nat to fetch.
It felt dirty to think that way, but she was trying to save her mother, wasn’t she? That was worth a little filth.
