My Trojan Horse Majesty (The Russian Witch’s Curse #5)

23. Izzy

Chapter 23

Izzy

I t’s happening again, just like before.

I’m awake, and I’m not awake. I have a body, and I don’t. When I glance down at the split-rail fence in front of me, I can tell it’s substantial. But when I press my hand against it, my hand slides right through.

I’m here.

And I’m not here.

I can’t tell whether I’m a ghost or this is a dream, but either way, it’s not my life.

Leo’s far easier to spot this time. He’s whistling, his shining face utterly breathtaking. He’s walking in a jaunty manner I could never imagine he might walk, bouncing just a little with each step, his feet kicking up puffs of dust. He’s also dressed in fine clothing, albeit not very modern. Even with the dust, you can tell that his black boots were quite shiny before. His pants, dark and finely made, are somewhat voluminous. His tunic’s finely woven.

“Father,” he calls as he rounds the bend where the road meets the path to the rough-hewn wooden building behind me. “Father, it’s me.”

It must be the summer, because it’s not cold.

It’s actually very, very hot.

But everywhere I look, there’s nothing but clouds of dust. No crops grow, and no grass either. In fact, even the trees that line the road sport no more than a few brown, bedraggled leaves. There’s clearly been a drought.

A bad one.

“Father!” Leonid’s beaming, as if he’s not worried in the slightest about the lack of greenery. “I’m back. Did you hear me?” He sighs, wiping the dust from his face with a piece of cloth, and mutters, “You can’t be working that hard. What would you even plow?” He chuckles then, like it’s a joke.

He walks right past me without pausing, and I trot alongside him as he goes into the wooden building. But before I can go more than a few steps, he turns around and ducks back out.

“If you’re not here. . .” He scratches his head.

“Leonid?” A woman with dark grey hair waves from across the yard.

“Natalia,” he says. “Have you seen my father?”

Again, they’re speaking Russian, and somehow, I understand it.

Her face falls. “He’s. . .” She points. “He’s ill.”

Leonid moves faster then, his steps not jaunty at all. “What’s wrong?” He rushes toward her with an urgent stride that pains me. “What happened?”

She shrugs. “Everyone’s ill—there’s no food. Not anywhere. At the grand house, they killed the horses even, but they didn’t give any of that meager meat to us.”

“They killed—” Leonid clenches his hands into fists. “That can’t be. Surely it’s not that bad.”

“The family’s not in town. They went to St. Petersburg,” she says. “It was the steward who ordered the horses be slaughtered.”

“Where is he—my father, I mean?”

Natalia’s head tilts and she clucks. “If he’s yet alive, he’s in Zoya’s old hut. When she died, her daughter took in all those who were suffering.”

He takes off at a ground-eating pace. I worry I won’t be able to keep up, but apparently in this dream-memory, I’m as fast as a racehorse, and as tireless as a robot. When Leonid finally stops running, I can barely make myself follow. I’m sure he feels the same way, but I don’t want to see what’s inside.

He ducks into a small, earthen-walled hut. The roof thatch isn’t in very good shape, and it smells like moldy puke. I wish these non-dreams didn’t come with quite such authentic smells. No one has bothered to clear out waste or clean this place in quite some time, and the smell of sickness makes even the more normal, disgusting smells more pungent.

As I follow him inside, I realize it’s worse than I feared.

There are three cots in the hut, and side-to-side, they nearly span its width. On the far right side, there’s a man with crazy, tufty white hair. He’s moaning, at least. His arm keeps thrashing around, and he’s calling for something. I’m not sure what.

The bed between’s ominously empty of all but soiled rags.

But the cot on the far left has a man lying on it, and that’s the one Leonid approaches. He drops to one knee, and I crouch to peer over his shoulder. The man on this bed looks terrible , with sores opened up on nearly every part of him that’s visible. “No.” Leonid shakes his head. “Father, I came with good news. You were right—we’re Rurikid, and I’ve unlocked the magic inside of us.”

His father turns his head, but his eyes are rheumy. If I had to guess, I’d say he can barely see at all. When he smiles, it looks more like a grimace. The two teeth that remain in his mouth don’t look great, and the smell as I draw closer leaves me gagging.

He smells like rotten meat.

Unworried about all of that, apparently, Leonid clasps his hand. “Father, I can set fires, I can make lightning, and. . .” He drags a breath in slowly. “I—I can’t help you at all. Neither of those powers have a healing element.”

His father shakes his head and tries to move his hand, but it looks like a struggle.

“I was busy learning, and I didn’t make sure you were alright.”

“Leh—” His dad chokes. “Lehnid. . .” He shakes his head. “Proud.”

A tear rolls down Leonid’s face. “If they won’t give me their powers, if they won’t share the water with these people who are dying, if they won’t heal the world, I’ll make them .”

His father’s eyes close, and he drags in a breath, but it sounds like it could be his last. It looks like any day could be his last. Leonid presses a kiss to his father’s miserable forehead, and then he stands. When he leaves his father, he looks terribly resolved.

He walks slowly, almost like he’s in a trance, until he reaches the empty wooden building. He stands there, looking around. “No water anywhere,” he mutters. “Except. . .” He ducks around the building and trots toward a circular stone structure behind it.

As he climbs up on the top of the stones, the wind whips through his hair. “You said I can’t,” he calls out in Russian. “You said I mustn’t force your powers, but they’re not yours. They’re mine , and I won’t abuse them, not like they do. I know what it’s like to need. I know what it’s like to want. I watch the people they ignore, and I deserve the power to fix this, to care for them.” He spreads his hands wide.

The wind screams past.

He’s standing on a well, I realize. A water well. He grabs the rope and begins hauling it up. Once it hits the top, he plonks the bucket down on the side of the stone circle.

“Here I am,” he calls. “I’m Rurik’s child, and I can sense the power inside of me, but it’s blocked, much as this stone blocks the water and also keeps it safe.”

I wonder who he’s talking to?

Maybe Baba Yaga?

Himself?

He grabs the bucket, and he holds it up in the air. The wind whips past again and again, pulling on his hair and his face. The stones beneath his feet hold him up, but it honestly looks almost like something else is holding him aloft. He throws the water up in the air, and at the same time, lifts both hands. A bolt of lightning strikes one, and an explosion of flame engulfs the other.

And then I feel it—a great, sucking vortex sensation.

Leonid’s eyes shine like the sun, and his arms tremble, and the wind howls, and the ground beneath us shakes, and then the earth underneath his feet splits open in a long, terrifying line, and Leonid falls forward into the gap.

After he disappears, I expect to blink out.

But I don’t. I just keep staring at the gaping hole in the earth, a hole Leonid created, trying to claw the powers he desperately desired from the earth itself.

Just when I’m about to sit down and bawl, a large, terrifying grey horse clops his way out of the crack in the earth. Smoke streams from its flared nostrils. Every hoof strike causes the ground to tremble. When his head turns my direction, his eyes are flames. He snorts, and smoke billows toward me.

My child.

I scream, and he must hear me, even in this wraith form, because he laughs and laughs and laughs.

The sound scares me more than anything else ever has.