That spider is more afraid of you than you are of it, Ekaterin’s great-aunt, who was not afraid of much, used to intone. Ekaterin fancied Ma Roga, not the man trailing her—Boris?—was the designated spider-killer here. Jadwiga would not see the danger, and Ingi would try to collect it…
“You two!” the woman cried, waving her arms as if trying to daunt a couple of goats. “The rangers didn’t bring you, I don’t see their van, so you don’t belong here. This is our place. Get along!”
Ekaterin stared up, trying to channel her husband’s iron-plated bravura. “That happens not to be the case.” She rose, as much to override Ingi’s mouth opening with some scrambled explanation as Enrique’s valiant but untrained lurch to defend her. She wheeled to face the woman, uncomfortably conscious that she was abruptly the tallest person here, so long as lanky Enrique stayed down. “Lord Vorkosigan has given me oversight of the District Department of Terraforming, under which the Vashnoi exclusion zone falls. We’re all standing on his land.”
The woman jerked back, jaw working; whatever she’d been expecting the outsider to say, this wasn’t it. She came back with, “Well, he t’ain’t using it now, is he? This is cursed ground. So go away, or I’ll curse you, too!”
She made an utterly convincing Baba Yaga, no doubt of that, with her stringy gray hair falling across her clenched, tangled eyebrows, her crow-bright glare. Jadwiga, Ingi, the fellow waving the length of log, and, yes, Ekaterin all flinched. Had that threat worked to drive off interlopers before? Ekaterin suspected so.
If Boris swung, Ekaterin must try to block it, roll and rip off her suit and reach for her stunner after all. Because the vision of that log crashing down on Enrique’s irreplaceable head was a lot more horrifying. Ekaterin’s heart drummed in dismay. If it came to the worst, this crew hiding their bodies and relocating the lightflyer wouldn’t be nearly enough; Miles would turn the zone upside down and pursue them into the next world, figuratively or literally. Which would be exactly zero consolation for anyone. Curses indeed.
It was Enrique who broke the spell, looking up and asking in perfect earnest, “Really? How would that work, precisely?” His other auditors might imagine he was challenging them, or maybe mocking them; Ekaterin expected he was mentally devising a double-blind study.
Ma Roga stared back, nonplussed, in profound mutual incomprehension.
Now or never. Ekaterin stripped off her right glove and held out her hand. “Are you Ma Roga? I’m Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan. And lifting old curses is just what we’re here for. Ma, we need to talk.”
Briefly, Ekaterin was afraid the woman did not comprehend the gesture at all, and Jadwiga rather confused the moment by chirping, “Her fella’s a sorcerer, Ma! He makes magic bugs!”
“Scientist,” Enrique corrected glumly from his seat on the ground, as if he’d given up on being listened to.
Yes, much more dangerous.
Ekaterin held her extended hand steady. She wondered if the other woman was going to knock it away, but instead, staring at it, Ma Roga said, ” ‘T mutie lord your husband, then?” She glanced up, sharp eyes glittering through her brow-thatch.
Ekaterin thought about Miles’s weary teratogenic spiel, so often repeated and so seldom believed, and said only, “Yes.”
The old woman neither slapped away the hand nor took it, instead tucking both her own behind her back in a weirdly childish gesture of withholding. Ekaterin let her arm drift down, neither shoved out in insistence nor withdrawn as an option. The stalemate couldn’t last, but at least the upraised log, too, drooped as if in echo.
Keep talking. Miles could do this sort of thing in his sleep, and actually did, come to think, if mumbled and surreal. More surreal than this? Ekaterin inhaled. “I expect it’s going to be a long talk. Why don’t we all go sit someplace more comfortable?”
Especially Boris. Boris, still hovering in anxious menace, definitely needed to sit comfortably. Real son…? Maybe there was some faint resemblance between the pair in their bones and coloration. Boris’s da was notably not in evidence, so likely a grim tale there, too.
“And maybe,” Ekaterin added, “a long listening.”
Ma Roga just said, “Huh.” But one hand came out of hiding, if only to motion toward the hut.
Under Ma Roga’s barked directions, the children were set to unlading the pony, and Boris to lugging the armchair around front, where tall Enrique was drafted to help boost it up onto the porch. Spoils of a shopping trip to some zone rubbish tip, apparently. After sending Ingi to round up the goats and contain them in their pen, Ma took the new seat as a rightful throne. She did not invite the interlopers inside, though Jadwiga darted within and returned clutching a couple of musty cushions for their visitors’ behinds. Having captured her own princess, or at least real lady, the girl seemed as loth to let her go as her beloved flower bugs. The youngsters—all three of them, since despite his size Ekaterin was not at all sure Boris counted as a functional grownup—sat with their legs dangling over the edge.
The radbug project took a lot of explaining, not necessarily helped by Enrique’s technical corrections. Ingi at last fetched a bug for an illustrative sample, which led to the whole lot of them dismounting again from the porch and trooping around to the shed. Boris left his log behind; progress?
This was clearly the first Ma had learned of Ingi’s thefts, or gifts, as he insisted. She cuffed him, though not Jadwiga, hard on the head, and snapped, “Idiot. This led them here.” It was hard to read her expression through her smoldering stare—heartbreak, fury, despair? Nothing like hope or relief, anyway.
“Yes,” agreed Ekaterin, “but it was going to happen soon regardless. If the project works, changes are coming for the whole zone.” This can’t go on might pass unsaid, since it was plainly understood.
There was plenty to take its place. “How long have you lived here?” Ekaterin’s wave around took in the whole encampment. And the graveyard. “Because I think Vadim is going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.” And his supervisor, and whatever other of his fellow rangers had colluded in this concealment.
Jadwiga, not really following all this but sensing threat, defended hotly. “Vadim’s all right! He’s my big brother! He takes care of us all.”
A little silence followed this damning praise, till Ma Roga jerked her head at Ekaterin. “You and me. Let’s take a walk.”
Ekaterin quashed any hint of hesitation. “Very well.”
Enrique, waved off, turned instead to conscripting the youngsters to helping him capture, count, and contain his stray bugs, science lecture thrown in gratis. Ekaterin followed Ma Roga out of earshot into the woods, where the old woman pointed to a couple of stumps. Ekaterin sank onto one, reflecting on the quip, You can turn a tragedy into a comedy just by sitting down. She had a feeling it wouldn’t prove true here.
Ma Roga sat opposite, seeming to turn thoughts over in her mind. Ekaterin waited.
She finally leaned forward, hands clasped between her skirted knees, gaze on the ground, and said, “You ever hear of the Vashnoi marauders?”
“If it’s that bandit gang that plagued these parts thirty years ago, and hid out in the zone, yes.” Theft had led to more daring theft, then, inevitably, murder by accident, then by design. The pointless torture-murders of all the inhabitants of a poor outlying homestead had brought down fully-equipped retribution from the district, zone or no zone.