From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 123
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
"And you still won't go back? It's not the place you remember anymore. It could—"
"I know, Katya." Victoria glanced down to find her fingers working in her lap. "Please. I don't want to have this discussion again right now."
Katya nodded, and the topic was dropped. It would return, however. It always did. "While you were in the bath, I took the liberty of unpacking your clothes and hanging them up. The books I thought you would like to organise yourself."
"A wise decision."
As Katya resumed her brushing, she began to hum, and Victoria listened. The longer she let herself be administered to, it truly began to settle in where she was and why.
It was done.
She was home.
Home… a word that prompted a long breath, and the need to speak of it. She may have had no desire to do so about the asylum, but there were other elements of her past she had been more willing to face recently.
"I sold the property," she said with barely enough energy to get past her lips. Nonetheless, the free hand that had been smoothing Victoria's hair slid down to gently grip her shoulder. "That's why I was late coming back."
For 15 years the land on which her family home had been built and subsequently destroyed had lain barren and all but abandoned, still in her name. She could never bear the idea of someone else having it, of building anything on that land that wasn't her old life.
Needing reassurance of the new one, Victoria found Katya's hand and held it tightly. "I knew I was leaving for good this time."
Beneath Victoria's fingers, there was the barest twitch. "I'm proud of you."
Victoria nodded her thanks. "It had to be done. But… I've ended five uninterrupted centuries of Ravenwood land ownership in Nottingham. We are truly gone now."
It was no more true now than when she'd signed the papers, why did it feel that way all of a sudden?
Katya's knuckles passed under Victoria's thumbs, solid and warm. "No, Vita. You're here. And Longstown is nothing if not a place of new beginnings."
"It is, thanks in large part to you."
Katya shook her head, gentle snowfalls whispering in Victoria's ears. "To us. Just because you did your part by telephone and on your breaks doesn't diminish your contributions in the least. I won't take an ounce more credit than I'm due. We built this place. Together. The same way we're going to run it." She sniffed, and ground away the glassiness that coated her eyes with a shoulder.
Victoria nodded, only letting go of Katya's hand with reluctance when she withdrew it to resume her task.
"And since we're on the topic of new beginnings," Katya said with something altogether different in her eye: mischief, "I'm going to try something I've wanted to see since they made you grow your hair out."
Before Victoria could object, her hair was all slicked straight back into a single strip to fall behind her ears and drip down her back, making her tense up like every drop was a freezing-cold beetle finding sudden purchase on her spine.
Stepping back to admire her handiwork however, Katya couldn't repress the grin that followed.
"What?" Victoria asked, not at all in favour of the look. It worked for Pretoria because she was a water witch; she was supposed to look like she'd just climbed out of a lake.
"I don't know that I've ever seen your ears before. Or your forehead."
Victoria clucked her tongue a few times. "And?"
"It's nice to know you have them. I was worried after years of uncertainty," Katya said, leaning down for a closer look. "I had no idea you have a widow's peak."
"Well, back under cover they go. You may now go forth as one of the few living souls able to claim they have seen Victoria Ravenwood's ears. I should expect you to not abuse such knowledge."
"Only when it suits me."
"All I can ask, I suppose."
This time, without Victoria's scowl to cow it into hiding, Katya's smile came unhindered, along with a pair of stainless-steel shears. "Just like before, then? The bob?"
"Yes, please."
"It's very popular now, you know. All the movie stars have it."
"Yes, well, I did it first, and I'd like it back," Victoria said irritably.
With a few great hacks, Katya took off everything between Victoria's shoulders and the bottoms of her ears, and with a few more cuts here and a bit of shaping there, Katya was finished.
Victoria looked into the mirror without hesitation this time to see that finally, after eight years away, the face looking back was the one the witch world knew to belong to the Raven; the one Victoria Ravenwood had always chosen to present, not so as to begrudgingly comply with a dress code that had been written effectively to spite her.
"That was fast," she said with an approving turn of her head.
"No offence, but it's not that complicated," Katya replied. As she looked into Victoria's reflection, she seemed to summon up something she had been meaning to ask for a while. "Do you mind if I try something else?"
"I like it like this," Victoria said.
"I won't cut it. Just… move it. It'll fall back like this all by itself if you don't like it."
Victoria had only had a few seconds with her old self, but if ever there was a time for change, it was now. "All right. I trust you."
With a few deft strokes and a finger's length of Brylcreem, Victoria's hair was parted down the middle and swept up and back to hook behind her ears again, but without being slick or even particularly straight. It had shape and volume, which added some femininity to how boyish it would have been otherwise. It left her a rakish sort of androgynous that Victoria found herself immediately taken by.
"Go get dressed properly," Katya said.
Nodding with enthusiasm, Victoria returned to her room and rummaged through her extant hangers to produce a black men's dress shirt with black tie and white suspenders to hold up perfectly-pressed black trousers with silvery pinstripes. Safely ensconced within a rack at the bottom of her closet was her favourite pair of black Dealer boots, so perfectly polished they served as yet another reason she never wore skirts.
After escaping the 19th century only moments earlier, Victoria felt hypermodern when she was fully dressed, flush with energy and ready to take on the world.
She emerged from her bedroom to Katya's wide, staring eyes.
"Your professor's heads would probably explode if they saw you like this."
Victoria peered into the mirror and ran a finger along the cresting-wave curve away from her widow's peak and back to her ear. Rakish. Yes, she could get used to that.
"I think they would, yes." The curl her lip took on at Katya's expression was unintended, yet not unwelcome.
Perhaps a dash too much moxie from this look, Doctor, Victoria thought.
But what was wrong with that?
The answer was obvious and immediate as she turned to the real Katya and held out an arm: nothing at all.
"Would you care to show me what I've missed?"
Victoria's first thought upon stepping outside was that sunshine falling on her neck again was glorious. It was sensitive to every breeze and the strength of the sun, but she found herself walking taller, holding her head higher, and not just from the fact there was less weight hanging from it now.
She took her first step onto the grounds of the EVE Witchcraft Conservatory as its co-headmistress an idealised version of herself she'd never thought to imagine. The miserable crust of someone else's expectations had turned out to be a chrysalis, and it was Katya who had freed the butterfly within.
"No fire I can see," the Russian said, eyes flicking to Victoria's ears.
"Keep a look out, won't you?"
As they strode down a tunnel of fragrant wisteria to the main building that held the offices, conference room and library, thoughts of rampant recent changes came into much sharper relief when Victoria looked out on all the ones that had taken considerably more effort than a haircut.
She undid her cufflinks and began rolling up her sleeves as she took in the recently-completed facade of what they called the 'main' building. "It's all new."
"You helped design it," Katya replied from behind her enormous sunglasses, darkened further in the shadow of a white cloche hat.
"I know, but it's finished now. All of this…" Victoria pointed from the new buildings to the fencing that separated EVE from the rest of LAC on one side and Longstown proper on the other. Trees and hedges had been planted in front to help hide it. The path they were walking on was paved with stones that were completely unmarred by weather or footsteps. "It's all ours."
The scent of myriad summer blooms was strong, as was that of tilled earth and fresh-cut grass. Guided by this invisible olfactory path, they needn't have looked where they were going to find their way to the front door of the main building.
Inside were the offices. Her office.
She was the co-head of EVE, and she had an office.
Selene had never had an office.
"Katya… is this real?" Victoria found herself asking.
The last decade in academia, dealing with so many hypotheticals, having to defend both herself and her ideas at every turn, the long, gruelling hours of study, recitation, hypothesis, testing, the torturous yet utterly gratifying writing and defending of her doctoral thesis, it had been easy to lose track of where reality started. There were times she had been so sleep-deprived that she had learned how to sleep standing up, and now, standing where she was, she wasn't entirely convinced she was awake.
"Yes," Katya said with a smile. "All of it. Shall we go inside?"
The foyer smelled of wood and paint. Adhesives for the wallpaper and linoleum flooring, the latter done in alternating rectangles of a silvery-grey and deep blue. The main hall leading away was adorned with art, along with framed newspapers and magazines that featured EVE's witches in one capacity or other, good and bad. There were several editions of newspapers from the day following the Flying Circus disaster, from London to Moscow, Paris to New York; Versailles; the day complete women's suffrage passed in Parliament; the day two years ago the 'Equal Work, Equal Pay' laws passed; the very first Magic Carnival; the trial and mob execution of a witch named Anna Blair. Finally, next to their office, was the very first issue of Magic magazine, which featured Katya on the cover, pointing at the reader above the caption 'You Could Be A Witch and Not Even Know It!'.
"I hate that picture," Katya said.
"That's why we put it up, I thought."
"It was. I was overruled. So much for being the boss," Katya said, coming to a stop before a door with newspaper taped over the glass.
"Is this us?" Victoria asked. She knew it was, she had the blueprints for the building all but memorised, but her earlier tussle with her state of consciousness had come back for another round.
Katya smiled. "Would you like to do the honours?"
Victoria looked at the yellowing newsprint a moment. "I think we should do it together, don't you?"
"Smashing idea."
"Please don't."
They each grabbed a corner and peeled the brown painter's tape away from the wood just enough to get a solid grip.
"Ready?"
Victoria nodded, and they yanked at the same time, tearing away the paper to reveal a brand-new pane of frosted glass, along with gold-leaf letters outlined in glossy black.
YEKATERINA GUREVICH
VICTORIA RAVENWOOD, DSC
"I still think your name should have gone first," Katya said. She removed her sunglasses and leaned forward to inspect the paintwork. "You were here first."
"But you did all the work while I was gone. It's the least you deserve."
"I took that by having the desk in front of the window," Katya said, snapping her sunglass case shut with a satisfied smile.
"That wasn't part of the agreement!"
"Executive privilege," Katya said.
"That's not what that means!"
"Captain's prerogative, then. Anyway, you weren't here and couldn't be reached. And the movers looked so very tired," Katya said with a frown so convincing anyone else would have believed it was genuine.
"I thought we agreed that our desks would face each other, like Eustacia and Ophelia's. Why on Earth would that have—"
Katya threw open the door. "Surprise!"
Inside, their office was exactly as it had been planned, with both desks in the centre, facing each other.
"You are incorrigible," Victoria muttered, and went in first.
The desks were substantial, but not tall enough to prevent their owners from seeing each other; that was very nearly accomplished by the stacks of papers Alex had already piled atop slabs of dark mahogany that had all the more available space for the lack of lamps.
Behind the right one was a chair finished in black leather, while behind the other was one done in white, leaving no question as to which belonged to whom.
Victoria ran her hand over the high back of her own, felt the soft pebbly texture and took in a lungful of the smell. Leather, along with that of books, was a smell that carried with it deep significance. Her father's office had smelled of both, as had her mother's spartan little study. Neither of them had smoked, leaving the natural smells as the only ones in their home, and Victoria wanted any space that she would call her own, professional or otherwise, to smell the same way.
She looked over to see Katya standing behind the white chair, looking at her.
"What is it?" Victoria asked.
"You look happy. And that makes me happy," Katya said.
Victoria spun her chair around and sank into a kind of coziness that made Victoria feel like she was ensconced inside her workplace, the way the Long's test pilots were in their aeroplane cockpits.
When Katya sat down in hers, she propped her elbows on the desk and steepled her fingers, the face behind them stony and grave. "Doctor Ravenwood."
Victoria mirrored the gesture. "Mistress Yekaterina."
They stared across at each other that way for as long as it took for Katya's lip to start trembling. Then the dam burst in an explosion of laughter and she spun around in her chair with the enthusiasm of a carefree child. "Oh my God, Vita, what are we doing here?" she asked the ceiling. "This is all too much."
"You've been doing this for a while now. What do you mean?"
When Katya turned, her smile faded. "It always felt temporary. Like I was just improvising my way through everything until Selene came back to tell me off for doing it wrong. It never felt… I don't know, official. But you're back, and it feels it now… You and I… we… have an office? EVE. EVE has offices. I'm a witch with my own office. To do witch things in. That…" She tossed a disbelieving hand at the thought, scattering it to the wind. "What would my grandmother say to that? She wouldn't have even been able to conceive of it. 'Katyushka, this is only for you. No-one can ever know I teach you these things,'" she intoned in a thickened accent. Then her smile collapsed completely. "She would hate it."
"I never knew her, so I can't refute that, and I won't pretend otherwise," Victoria said.
"I know, and I appreciate that about you."
Victoria nodded. "But I think we both know where dwelling on the past leads us, and we have an awful lot of future to worry about." She looked around the room, to the empty bookshelves, to the bare floor, a black-and-white linoleum chessboard awaiting the pieces that would see EVE's first gambit as its own, separate entity.
The white queen looked across at the black.
"Yes, we do. You didn't come home a minute too soon, Vita. And if you don't mind, I would like to propose our first order of business as occupants of these desks, weighty and portentous as they are."
Victoria's heart gave a sudden thud. What had been so easy for her to say only moments earlier was now about to become their lives, and she braced herself for making her first real, consequential decision in this new era of not only her and Katya's lives, but EVE's.
"What would you like for lunch?"
With Lucie stabilised and receiving proper treatment, it was time for the worst part of every journey Millie and Niamh made to the Continent: waiting to go home. They would be flying back in the morning, which left an entire evening and night for something to go wrong.
They had been put up in the attic of a different local witch from where they had stayed the night before, away from prying eyes and cameras, but Millie would only go up there to sleep. The house was in the same kind of pastoral farmland that Elise had grown up in, coincidentally also in eastern France, but the area where Millie found herself hadn't been transformed into a toxic wasteland.
It had all the fresh air she could want and room to pace away her anxiety without fear she would fall into a poisoned quagmire. Here there were no vengeful ghosts of tens of thousands who had died violently for nothing, only cows and the occasional chicken.
Above her, the early-summer sky was awash with stars, and she immediately sought the Summer Triangle, the constellation she and Elise had long ago decided was theirs. No matter how far apart they might be, all either had to do was look up to find something they shared. Would Elise be looking up at the sky right now? Probably not, but she might be.
They were perhaps 24 hours from reuniting, and they would be the longest of Millie's life. They always were. There were decades piled up in the handful of days Millie had accrued waiting to go home. Twice circumstances had seen to lengthen that time and fill it with horror and danger, so she no longer allowed herself the luxury of trying to decompress early. As long as they were still in France, they were, like doctors, essentially on call. The travel time from Britain was a fraction of what it was compared even with the first time they'd made the trip, but those few hours could make all the difference.
They had before, to ends both triumphant and tragic.
They were celebrated for the former, but no-one blamed them for the latter except Millie, since one of the lessons Niamh had never been able to teach her was how to deal with the guilt. It could only be lived through and managed with experience. It didn't matter how many times people told her it wasn't her fault, it could only ever be purged through self-forgiveness. Or numbness, but Millie hoped she never got to that point. She knew what it looked like and how to get there, a lesson she'd learned from her father.
