Choosing the card for Ryzhkova was difficult. Evangeline spread the trumps across a dark shale flat, searching for an old woman. Something about Madame Ryzhkova brought her grandmother to mind and set her skin crawling. Though they were safe in a hollow near a riverbank, Evangeline still watched the trees, wondering what would befall Amos should they be discovered. She didn’t fear for herself; the refrain that had followed her since Krommeskill wrapped around her as well as any blanket: I am a killer. She touched the card named the Magician. It was fitting — Ryzhkova practiced what some thought witchcraft.
Amos shook his head in dissent. Ryzhkova had called the Magician the breath of God. His teacher was many things, but the will of the divine wasn’t one of them.
Evangeline studied the pinch around his mouth and the urgency in his hands. Unused to anything but his approval, she said, “Very well, teach me who she is.”
His fingers paced, tips sliding across paper as they’d done thousands of times, waiting for the cards to sing to him, each a bird bearing messages, telling him what they were and who they were meant to be. When his longest finger glanced the right card he snatched it from the shale: the High Priestess.
“Don’t be silly. That’s a young woman, and with a cross as well! Madame Ryzhkova would never wear one. You’d do just as well to choose the Devil.” She frowned and turned thoughtful. “Your teacher does not like me.”
He tried to laugh — an ugly scraping — and blanched at the sound.
Evangeline smiled and touched her palm to his cheek. “Your voice is not so terrible. Only a little broken. I don’t mind.”
Amos blushed and returned his focus to the High Priestess. He removed two cards from the deck and set them by Evangeline’s toes — the World, with its garland of leaves and sky blue as cornflowers, and above it he placed the Sun’s benevolent face. He held the High Priestess between his fingers once more, then set it atop the other two, covering them with her stately robes.
“Above Heaven and Earth, is she?”
Though it was not the precise meaning he’d intended, it was close enough to the truth. He thought of Ryzhkova’s wry laughter, the way she teased him, how she’d shown him to wrap his hair, and her poor, bent hands. Those were the hands that had touched his most often. Peabody cared for him, slapped his back, and schooled him in being both Wild Boy and man, but Ryzhkova had taught him most how to be human, how to care.
Ryzhkova was above Heaven and Earth. She had been his mother.
“This is how you see her?”
He smiled and nodded. He knew Evangeline feared her, cringing fear that makes bodies tight. It was because she did not know the countless hours he’d spent with Ryzhkova, her patience and the care she’d taken to ensure that he would be more than a Wild Boy. She didn’t know it was Ryzhkova who’d given him his name. He took the card into his palm and touched it to his heart.
Evangeline placed her hand over his.
He grew bolder in his thievery.
As they traveled toward Burlington, driving rain forced their lessons indoors. Amos snuck Evangeline inside the wagon with Sugar Nip and the llama. With rain preventing travel and the troupe having taken to their rooms, they would be safe; Ryzhkova would assume he remained with Peabody, while Peabody would assume he stayed with Ryzhkova. Evangeline left the oilskin tight over her tub, inviting no guests or inquiry. Together they curled up in the straw that lined the wagon and closed their eyes, listening to the mix of breath and storm.
* * *
A hand knocked on Madame Ryzhkova’s wagon. She was unaccustomed to speaking with the man who called; in truth she found him disturbing: he smiled through a mask.
“Is Amos here? I had hoped we’d pass the evening playing dice,” he said. “He was not with Peabody, and so.” Benno cocked his head and Ryzhkova sensed his movements, cultivated ease. “He is not with you?”
“Have you seen the girl?” she asked.
“Melina? With Susanna, mending dresses.”
He knew exactly who she asked after. “The Mermaid,” she said and squinted at the tumbler. He shifted uncomfortably on his feet.
“Ah,” Benno said. She watched his features slide, detecting a hint of worry just before his measured words. “No matter. I shall find Nat, then. Unless you would like a game, Madame?”
“I will tell Amos you were here,” she grunted. “Leave me.”
Ryzhkova knew her cards were missing before opening the box. She felt the lingering energy of Amos’s fingers on the lid, the heat that stayed in his wake. She looked at the space where the cards should have been and trembled, thinking of the Tower and a long-ago reading. Betrayal and a woman. She had not expected herself to be the betrayed. Her legs buckled and she sat heavily on the floor. “Yelena,” she whispered, “you are a fool.”
Rusalki did not leave their home waters. It was knowledge she had come by through sorrow. The girl was supposed to have vanished once Peabody steered the menagerie to follow a different river, yet somehow this one remained, stronger, wilier than others.
As a child, long before she dreamt up Madame Ryzhkova, when she had been just Yelena and thought only of weaving, she had watched through a window as a woman lured her father into their stream. Stepan, her father, had been burly and strong from working the fields, with a beard thick and black like bearskin but soft as down. She remembered tangling her fingers in it. Her three brothers were nearly grown and gone by the time she’d been born — off to fight, farm, and sail. She’d had her father to herself and she’d adored him. Yelena loved how he’d picked her up and swung her around as though she were nothing more than a grain sack. He’d called her little dove and told her that he loved her best, better than her brothers. “You are my crown,” he’d said.
Then the woman came — the pale face in their stream.
Across a month she watched her father weaken and their fields go fallow, burning in the sun. Instead of working, Stepan had spent his days at the stream. Her mother threatened to poison the water and Stepan threatened to tie her to the stove. When Yelena asked to ride with him in the cart while he worked, he would not answer. When she stuffed his pockets with bread, he returned with it uneaten.
Her mother began to pray.
Yelena watched him die. Through slender alder trees she’d seen the woman’s luminous skin and laughing eyes, had seen her father reach toward the woman to embrace her. His hand, once so warm and strong, was thin and wasted. His dark bearded face disappeared into the woman’s soot black hair. Yelena had called to him but her voice did not carry. She shook her mother, but her mother stayed rooted, praying. By the time Yelena reached the banks, her father had long since been dragged beneath the water.
Once Stepan was drowned, her mother moved quick and sharp as a switch, piling their possessions into a wagon and moving them to a distant village on the edge of a still black lake. Yelena had cried, not wanting to leave her father, knowing that he was in the stream. Her mother slapped the backs of Yelena’s hands. “If we stay, waiting for your father, she will take away any man we love. Would you have her drown your brothers?” her mother had asked. Yelena considered; what was a lost brother or two if it brought her father back? “When she kills them their deaths will be on your head,” her mother warned. Then Yelena understood. No river would be safe again, but other waters would not hold her father’s face. When her mother died she left her homeland, crossed countries and an ocean to leave the woman in the river and her father behind. In this safe land she bore her daughter and baptized her quickly to anchor her soul. Now, a lifetime later, a woman from a new water was tempting the boy who had become her son.