Wildwood Dancing Page 13

  “The valley is better off without folk who disregard rules and conventions set up for their own protection. Besides, it was not I who relieved this priest of his position.”

  “Of course it was! Cezar, your father was deeply respected here. Folk looked up to him as a leader of the community. That’s what the master of Vǎrful cu Negurǎ is supposed to be. You’re walking in Uncle Nicolae’s shoes now. You must go and visit this Church authority straightaway and ask him to bring Father Sandu back. And speak to Judge Rinaldo while you’re about it. Your father would never have dreamed of robbing our community of its beloved priest.”

  “I’ve upset you.” For a moment, I heard genuine contrition in his voice.

  “Promise me you’ll make them reverse this, Cezar. Show what you’re made of—do what’s right.” And, when he scowled at me, I added, “At least promise me you’ll think about it.”

  The scowl changed to an expression I could not read. “There might be room for some negotiation,” he said. I heard, in the back of my mind, a different voice saying, Nothing comes without a price. “You seem tired, Jena.”

  “I didn’t sleep very well. Now, what is it you need to see in these accounts?”

  We spent some time going through the latest ledger, which balanced perfectly and was entirely up-to-date. I kept waiting for Cezar to find fault, but he simply perused the figures in silence, asking an occasional question. Once or twice his hand brushed mine on the table and I withdrew my fingers. Once or twice he gave me a particular kind of look that made me wish Paula had not departed so abruptly.

  Just as we were nearing the last entries in the ledger, Cezar seized my hand in his, turned bright red, and began, “Jena—”

  Uh-oh.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I said hastily, jumping to my feet. “Have you been opening my letters to Father, Cezar? How would Gabriel know to shield Father from what was in them otherwise?”

  Cezar dropped my hand like a hot coal.

  Nice work, Jena.

  “Of course not! What do you take me for?” The flush faded. He put up a good show of looking bitterly offended.

  A man who wants what he can’t have.

  I drew a deep breath. “I thought I knew you,” I said. “There was a time when you used to listen to me. But the boy who was once my friend seems to be disappearing fast. In his place there’s an autocratic bully, deaf to any opinion but his own. I know that’s impolite, but it would be worse to lie to you. All you want is control. You shouldn’t seek to rule over what isn’t yours, Cezar.”

  There was a silence. Cezar’s mouth was clamped into a tight line. He closed the ledger and passed it to me, and I replaced it on its shelf. He held the door open; I went through. As we made our way down the narrow stairs, Cezar said quietly, “It must run in the family.”

  “What?” I was desperate to be back with the others and for him to go away.

  “You said all I want is control. That sounds more like you, Jena. A woman who seeks to have her hands on the reins day and night has a lonely future ahead of her.”

  Wretch. Mongrel.

  “You misunderstood me,” I said, pausing on the step below him. I was surprised at how hurt I felt—I had thought nothing he could say would touch me. “Being in control is good if one is running a business or a household. It’s seeking to extend that control where it’s neither needed nor wanted that offends me.”

  “Are you saying I offend you, Jena?”

  Finally he gets the message.

  “I don’t like your hate and your anger. It’s time to let all that go—to relinquish the past. I don’t like what you’re doing at Piscul Dracului. Taking over. Trying to show we can’t cope. You should at least allow us the chance to prove ourselves.” I went on down the steps.

  “Ah,” came his voice behind me, “but you’ve had that chance. It’s not been so very long since your father left, but in that time I’ve seen your funds squandered, your elder sister failing utterly to support you, Paula spouting dangerous nonsense, and Iulia making a spectacle of herself like a cheap flirt—”

  Hit him, go on.

  “Don’t say that!” I was within a whisker of carrying out Gogu’s suggestion. “You were ogling her just as much as your wretched friends! Iulia’s only thirteen, and she’s a good girl—”

  “Maybe so,” Cezar said weightily. “But without proper guidance, how long will she remain so? Jena, I value your sense of duty. I admire your attempts to look after your home and family in this difficult time. But—unpalatable as it may be to you—the fact is that the best person to look after business, farm, and household is a man. In Uncle Teodor’s absence, that man should be your closest kin: myself. The sooner you acknowledge this simple truth, the sooner the rose will return to your cheeks and the furrow disappear from your brow.”

  My fingers rose automatically to my forehead. What furrow? I’d been so busy, I couldn’t remember when I’d last looked in a mirror.

  Is that all?

  “Are you quite finished, Cezar?”

  “Don’t be angry, Jena, I—”

  “Are you finished?”

  “For now. I simply ask you to think about this. You judge me too harshly.”

  “All things considered,” I said, “I think I’ve shown remarkable self-restraint. You can forget about my making little trips to your door through the snow to grovel for money. You can forget about sending men over to help on the farm. As you can see, I’m perfectly capable of making my own arrangements. And I’ll find someone else to take my letters to Constanţa.”

  He did not reply. Both of us knew there was nobody else. Few people had the means to travel such difficult ways in wintertime. Our position was so isolated that I’d have no opportunity to seek out other merchants or traders before the spring. When Father was home, much of the business was conducted through his agents in the towns, using Dorin as a go-between. But Dorin had been asked to stay away. If I wanted to send letters to Father, Cezar was my only means of delivery. That meant I could not write the truth—not all of it.

  “I’d advise you not to come here for a while,” I said, struggling to keep my voice under control. “You’ve made me quite angry and you’ve upset Paula. Please take your friends and go home.”

  Go, go, go, odious man.

  “I think—” said Cezar, but I never heard what he thought. We opened the kitchen door on an uproar. In the center of the room stood small, wizened Petru, and by the hearth a younger man of similar build: his grandson, Ivan. Petru was telling some kind of tale, stumbling over his words as Daniel and Rǎzvan and my sisters bombarded him with questions. Florica, pale as bread dough, was muttering and crossing herself. Tati alarmed me most of all, for there were hectic red spots on her cheeks and she was clutching her tea glass so tightly I expected it to shatter at any moment.

  “What—” I began, but Cezar’s bigger voice boomed over mine.

  “Sit down, all of you, and speak one at a time. Tatiana, what has happened here?”

  Tati turned her big violet eyes on him, but did not speak.

  “Iulia?” I queried. “What is it?”

  “Petru has a terrible story,” Iulia said, her lip quivering.

  “A killing.” Petru’s voice was as grim as his seamed and creviced face. “Ivona, daughter of Marius the miller. Only fifteen years old. Her mother went in at dawn, and there was the girl, sprawled across the quilt like a rag doll, white as snow: a bloodless corpse.”

  “What are you saying?” I whispered, not prepared to acknowledge, even to myself, that I already knew the answer.

  “She had puncture wounds on her neck,” said Florica heavily. “A bite.”

  “You know what that means.” Petru tightened his lips.

  And although nobody actually said it aloud, our blanched faces and shocked eyes spoke the words for us, into the silence of a shared terror. Without a shred of doubt, this was the work of the Night People.

  Cezar took charge immediately. He would
head straight down to the village to meet with Judge Rinaldo. The able-bodied men of the district must arm themselves however they could in readiness for going out into the forest at dusk to hunt down the evildoer. They would bring him to justice or they would kill him. Even as Cezar spoke, Petru and Ivan, Rǎzvan and Daniel were donning cloaks and gathering their belongings to leave.

  Tati had fled upstairs. After a little, my other sisters followed, leaving me to deal with the situation.

  “Jena,” Cezar said gravely, “I will be advising all households to install appropriate defensive measures—not just on their dwellings, but on barns and outhouses as well. I want Florica to do the same: garlic, iron nails, amulets—whatever you can manage.”

  “Marius’s place was well protected,” Petru said, pulling his sheepskin hat down over his ears. “That didn’t stop the creature from coming in.”

  Tadeusz’s words rang in my head: I am not bound by man’s fences or fettered by his puny charms of protection. Cezar’s eyes were full of dark purpose. Disgust, guilt, and fear churned inside my belly.

  “I don’t want any of you girls going outside,” Cezar said. “Nor you, Florica, unless you absolutely must. You’ll need to tend to the work of the farm, I know, at least until we can spare Petru. But keep it to what is essential, and be always on your guard. Come back inside and bolt your doors and windows well before dusk.” He was looking at me closely. “It’s all right, Jena,” he said in a different tone. “We’ll catch this beast—I give you my promise.” He took my hand. “I think, after all, one of us should remain here with you. Rǎzvan, will you stay at Piscul Dracului in my absence? Make sure the young ladies are not frightened. You should keep your crossbow at hand at all times.”

  Rǎzvan gave a curt nod. He looked annoyed. It was plain that the task of guarding a household of women was less to his liking than a manly mission of vengeance.

  “Remember my warnings. Keep the doors locked,” said Cezar. “Be watchful, all of you. This is a dark time.” And he was gone.

  “I have a confession to make,” I said to my sisters a little later as we sat in our bedchamber, shocked and quiet. “I don’t want to tell you, but I think I have to. This is probably all my fault.”

  They sat in total silence as I recounted my conversation with Tadeusz. I did not include quite everything he had said, but by the end of my account they were staring at me, incredulous.

  “Jena!” exclaimed Paula. “You’re supposed to be the sensible one! What on earth possessed you to listen to him? Have you forgotten everything you know about the Night People?”

  “He said that was old wives’ tales,” I told her miserably. “That we didn’t really know what they were like. And that could be true. It sounds as if someone walked right past the charms of ward at the miller’s house. So much for all those stories about garlic and silver crosses.”

  “That’s if it was one of them who did it,” said Tati. She was shivering even though she had her thick woolen shawl wrapped around her, and her face was pinched and pale.

  “Of course it was, Tati,” said Iulia. “You heard what Petru said. You just don’t want to believe it because of Sorrow. You don’t want to admit that he could have been the one responsible.”

  Tati was on her feet, eyes wild. “He wasn’t! Sorrow would never do something wicked like that—he couldn’t!”

  “We can’t know that,” put in Paula calmly. “We can’t really know much about the Other Kingdom, even though we’ve been visiting Dancing Glade for so long. It’s full of tricks and traps, masks and mirrors. Tati, I know you won’t like this, but Sorrow could be anything at all. The face he shows you may be only the one he wants you to see.”

  Relieved to have my younger sisters’ support on the issue of Sorrow, I risked a new suggestion. “There is one way to see the truth about the Other Kingdom,” I said. “We could go across at Dark of the Moon and look in Drǎguţa’s mirror, as Tadeusz told me. We could see the future. And if we could do that, we could change it—take action to prevent the bad things from happening.”

  There was a silence.

  “Jena,” said Paula, “I’ve spent a lot of time with the soothsayers and wizards of the Other Kingdom. We’ve talked about tools for divining the future. We’ve talked about portals and the way that time and space work between their kingdom and ours. Nobody ever said a thing about a magic mirror.”

  “Maybe they only tell you what they want you to know.” My voice was a little sharp. I felt as if I were walking on a knife edge. A girl had died horribly. The men would be out there tonight with their crossbows and cudgels, their pitchforks and scythes, hunting the Night People down. Yet something still drew me toward Dark of the Moon. It was not so much Tadeusz’s beguiling voice, though I knew that was part of it. Even after this—even after innocent blood had been spilled—I felt its pull. But far more powerful was the thought that Drǎguţa’s mirror might provide the answers we so badly needed. So easily, I could know whether Father would come home again; I could know whether Tati would get over her foolish infatuation and be safe. And if I went there, I could confront Tadeusz with what he had done. I could tell him that this vile act of bloodletting was not what I had wanted; that the price for mending a few fences should not be the life of an innocent young woman. I could make it clear that I had never asked for such offerings and that there were to be no more of them.

  “You wouldn’t actually go, would you, Jena?” Iulia was looking at me with a mixture of alarm and admiration. “After what’s just happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. In my pocket Gogu was still, as if frozen. I could feel his horror. No, Jena. No. “Maybe I won’t have to think about it. Maybe Cezar and the other men will catch the killer. Maybe Ileana will banish the Night People from her realm, and this will be all over.”

  “It might not be your fault, Jena,” Paula said. “It’s possible that the girl’s father did something to make the Night People angry, like setting fires in the forest or felling an oak. You can’t know.”

  “I do know.” I took Gogu out and held him between my hands for comfort. “I can feel it. I can feel things turning dark. It started when the Night People came. It got worse when Tati encouraged Sorrow. Now I’m responsible for someone’s death. I have to put it right somehow.”

  “I told you, this is not Sorrow’s doing, Jena.” Tati was huddled on the bed now, hugging the shawl around her. “He’s the kindest of men, gentle and good.”

  “To you, maybe,” I said.

  A small voice spoke. “Tati wouldn’t fall in love with a murderer.”

  Stela’s words hung in silence for a little, then Iulia cleared her throat. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Love makes people do some odd things. I mean, Jena loves Gogu best in the world, doesn’t she? A frog. That’s just about the weirdest thing you could imagine.”

  Gogu twitched as she spoke his name. Then, abruptly, a sort of cloud fell over his thoughts, as if he were deliberately hiding them from me. “That’s not the same kind of love,” I said. “Anyway, Tati hardly even knows Sorrow.”

  Tati said nothing.

  “Love at first sight,” put in Paula. “If it happens in stories, why shouldn’t it happen in real life?”

  “It’s a mistake to let your head get full of stories about true love,” I said. “It just means you’ll be disappointed. There are no handsome heroes in the real world—only boring young men like Rǎzvan and Daniel. That’s probably the best any of us can hope for.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it, Gogu,” I said later in the day, as I threw out grain for the chickens under a leaden sky. “I owe it to that girl, Ivona, to cross over and speak to Tadeusz again, to tell him to stop. What if Cezar’s hunt actually kills one of the Night People, and then Tadeusz seeks vengeance for that, and so on, until the whole valley is awash with blood? I can’t wait until next Full Moon. It’s too long. Think how much damage they could do.”

  Brave. Brave, but foolish. You can’t go.

&nbs
p; “The Night People must leave this forest—they have to go home. I don’t know why they came here in the first place. If they left and took Sorrow with them, that would remove the danger and solve the problem of Tati, as well.”

  No response from Gogu. On the far side of the courtyard, Rǎzvan was shoveling away snow, clearing paths to the barn and outhouses. In Cezar’s absence he had surprised me by offering his help with whatever needed doing. It was clear he would rather have work to keep him occupied than stand about with crossbow in hand, trying to look fierce.

  “What else am I supposed to do?” I asked the frog. “Stop looking at me like that!”

  I could see by Gogu’s expression that he thought I’d overreached myself this time, and it wasn’t helping. I set him down to explore the woodpile by the hen coop.

  Don’t go at all. Full Moon, Dark of the Moon, keep well away.

  “You think Tati’s going to agree to that? Sorrow’s all she can think about. In her eyes he’s incapable of an ill thought, let alone an evil deed.” At that moment an idea came into my head. In one way it was ridiculous, given what had happened. In another it made perfect sense. “Unless,” I mused, thinking aloud, “she met someone else, someone nice and suitable—the kind of young man she could like and Aunt Bogdana would approve of. If I could get her interested in a real man, maybe she would realize how hopeless her attachment to Sorrow is. It might break whatever spell he’s put on her. I don’t suppose we could give a grand party. It’s too soon after Uncle Nicolae’s death, and the whole valley’s going to be consumed by the hunt for the Night People. Besides, our money’s gone; we can hardly feed guests on mămăligă. But …”

  I sat down on a stone wall, wrapping my arms around myself. Gogu had begun to forage in some old decaying wood. I averted my gaze. If he planned on eating beetles, I didn’t particularly want to watch. “It’s not just Tati,” I said. “Iulia’s been behaving strangely, too. Cezar accused her of flirting, and I think he did have some cause for it. She’s too young for that. I hate to admit it, but Aunt Bogdana has a point about manners and deportment. We all need opportunities to meet suitable young men. Like it or not, if we don’t want Cezar in complete control of Piscul Dracului and making all our decisions for us, we need to take this first step. We have to accept that Father may not be coming back.” I shivered. “Gogu, I can’t imagine Cezar as master of Piscul Dracului. He doesn’t love the place as we do. It would be just … wrong. Almost anyone would be better than him. Perhaps Aunt Bogdana’s friends have sons we could like, given time. Young men who would look after the castle and the forest. Men with good judgment and kind hearts.”