From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 85
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
But as someone who had little desire to return home herself, Millie couldn't blame her. Home was where the pain was. Joy was here.
"You won't be expected to go," Selene said. "None of you have to, if you do not wish to. I leave it up to you, though we would rather not send the whole of either Coven."
"Why is that?" Katya asked.
Selene's features spoke before she did, and they were grave. "Because if the worst should come to pass, there must remain a seed from which we can re-grow."
It was the most beautiful way to say 'I don't want you to all die at once' that Millie could imagine.
But Elise gave no sign of having heard it. Her eyes wavered with indecision and memories that she still hadn't shared with anyone, even Millie.
"In addition," Eustacia began, "None of the six apprentices are going, which means they will be vulnerable, should someone choose to take advantage of your absence. So in addition, I will request that some of you stay to keep them safe."
"I will not go," Anastasia said immediately.
A wave of gratitude passed over the opposite side of the table, but it was with knowing sympathy for Anastasia's impossible position. The witch 'Alexandra Smirnova' could probably have gone with little incident, but the tiny chance that the very real, last secretly-surviving child of Tsar Nicholas II would be recognised in a place full of royals, rulers and diplomats was too great, and she had the presence of mind to realise it.
"And I am happy right here. I've seen France," Ivy said, turning her eye to Millie, Elise and Vickie. "Which leaves one of you three to stay. Or go."
"I will go," Elise said suddenly, looking up to Selene. "I must. You will need a translator, yes?"
"That means me, too," Yekaterina said. "Elise can't do all of it by herself."
"Merci," Elise said.
Millie swung her attention to her best friend. "I guess that means one of us stays."
"Go see France together. And have someone else pay for it, the way it should be," Vickie said with a wry smile, even if her eyes were still unhappy about why. Her smile faded to match them. "And keep them safe," she said, nodding at Elise and Yekaterina.
"Are you certain, Victoria?" Selene asked. "I'd thought you would want to bear witness to such an historic event. For personal reasons, besides."
"Whatever desire I may have is outweighed by who is extending the opportunity. If they wish to claw back some measure of goodwill from me, they can start with a genuine apology, not a bribe. Unless I am given sufficient cause to change my mind, I will stay."
"Nastya, have you seen Sveta?" Katya asked Anastasia as the latter went about her knitting, needles flashing in the sun of her bedroom window as she wove together something as-yet unidentifiable out of dark blue yarn. "She bolted as soon as breakfast ended. I'm worried about her."
"I saw her go out the back," Anastasia replied, "I thought she went out to the thinking path. Didn't she?"
"Unless she's on the other side of the airfield already, I didn't see her out there. Help me look for her, would you?" Katya said.
As the two of them made their way outside, Katya regarded the former princess, and youngest member of their Coven. Though she was only seventeen, her eyes wore the years of middle-age. Brighter and more expressive than they had been just weeks earlier, they still didn't belong to the face they were set in. The circumstances of the brutal, cold-blooded execution of the Russian royal family the previous summer still wasn't widely known in the press, but in the course of coming to terms with it, she had made Katya privy to every horrifying detail.
Under the ruse of being moved to a safer location, the entire family had been led down into the basement of the safe house they were being held in. The family and their close, personal staff had been made to wait in the dark until one of their captors came down and said a brief word about how they were 'sentenced to die' before the men who had been responsible for their safety opened fire. Anastasia's father, the tsar, her mother, three sisters and primary-school-aged haemophiliac brother were all gunned down in front of her, Anastasia only having been spared by the family jewels she had sewn into her corset for safekeeping deflecting the bullets.
She was still alive when she heard her would-be executioners debating whether to burn or bury her body. She Manifested before they could make a decision, vanishing into the Russian wilderness.
"How are you doing?" Katya asked.
"Fine. Why?"
"You have more reason than anyone to be upset at a reminder of what happened. I thought you might want to talk about it."
Anastasia's smile was small, but genuine. "Thank you, Katya, but no. I'm more worried about Sveta. I don't think she should go, either. Being around diplomats… what if she's recognised?"
"I think it's too late for that. She's been in the newspapers already."
"True. But her seeing them… she's too sensitive, I think."
It was an understatement, given Sveta's incredible Manifest, but Katya took Anastasia's meaning as intended and nodded her agreement. "And Paris. She might be overwhelmed."
When they found her, it was in a place that was both easy and difficult to be overwhelmed by: Ivy's greenhouse. Through the glass, they could see Sveta standing before a rose bush, staring out at nothing.
"Sveta?" Katya said, rapping on the door. Ivy was nowhere to be seen, so Katya let herself in, approaching Sveta from behind. "Are you all right?"
Sveta's long, auburn hair hung to the middle of her back, a fiery contrast to the muted colours she consistently wore now. The fabric was fine, and the flower patterns were complex enough to be interesting, giving her something to touch and focus on when she wanted or needed to, but bright colours would dazzle her in the sunshine, leaving beige to make her look perpetually drained.
Thankfully her green-and-gold eyes were as intensely colourful as ever—but when she turned them on the rest of her Coven, they were haunted.
"I never thought I would go back to that world," she said. "I thought this new Svetlana was the only Svetlana."
"You don't have to go," Anastasia said. "Stay here with me, Vita and Ivy."
Sveta shook her head weakly. "I think I need to. I can't call myself shut of something if I can't face it. That would mean the opposite, wouldn't it?"
"It doesn't have to be this way. You've barely talked about what happened to your family," Katya said, "but every diplomat in the world is going to be at Versailles, it'd be like learning to swim by jumping into the ocean."
Sveta nodded. "Maybe. Or maybe I need to stop hiding. Immunise myself by reminding myself of what happened. That's what you always say, isn't it, Katya? Little by little, take its power away."
"Reminded of what?" Anastasia asked before Katya could reply.
"Of the work my father did on behalf of yours," Sveta said.
Stop, Nastya, please, for the love of God, Katya thought, but only Sveta would have heard it, and the former princess plunged ahead regardless how loudly Katya screamed in her own head.
"But you said you enjoyed the traveling, the exposure to all the different languages and cultures."
Katya winced.
Sveta looked far away, through walls of glass and time itself. "That was before the war. Before the revolution. Father was one of the few holdovers the Bolsheviks kept when they took over. They needed his connections and personal relationships to help get us out of the war, and he agreed—to keep me and my mother safe." Sveta's fingers found the stem of the rose, the petals trembling in time with her heart. "But what they actually needed was someone to take the blame. They had to keep their promise to the people and get the Empire out at any cost. No-one knew what the cost would be when my father started talking to the Germans, but when we found out, no-one wanted their name on it."
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had given away almost a third of Russia to Germany, along with most of its mining industry. They had been ruthless and exploitative terms, and not so much a treaty but a complete capitulation signed by a nation that had already imploded and was desperate to stop the bleeding in any way it could.
A blood-red petal shook loose and drifted down, drawing Katya's eye to the real blood seeping from Sveta's fingers as the thorns bit into her skin.
"They put no effort into it at all. Gave my father no support. They immediately framed it as German ruthlessness, that there was no better deal to be had, but they knew. They just wanted it over. So, believing that he was acting in good faith on behalf of Russia's new rulers, my father signed it. He did his duty."
Katya put her hand on Sveta's, trying to pull her fingers away from the tearing thorns, but they didn't relent. Sveta winced in pain, and there were tears in her eyes, but still she held on, still she bled.
"And as a reward, they took his life. The people in those territories blamed my father, and the soviets did nothing to disabuse them of that notion. They let those people tear him apart, and did nothing. They let him take the blame, started rumours about how he had sabotaged the negotiations to spite Lenin. Said his loyalty to your father and 'his war' made him want to make the soviets look as foolish as possible, to rob them of keeping their biggest promise to the people. And the people believed it.
"They sent us down there on a 'fact-finding' mission. To help negotiate the displacement of thousands, to look the people in the eye as the Germans took their land and homes, and tell them face-to-face why it was good for them."
The soil was as quick to suck up Svetlana's blood as she was to give it, but in the end it remained black and cold.
"The people swung the weapons, but the soviets signed his death warrant. We were betrayed on every side." Sveta turned to her Coven, her eyes pleading for a help Katya didn't know how to give. "I wasn't with him and mother when they were butchered, and I Manifested too late to save them. Only when their murderers arrived at my door with intent to do the same to me. They said they'd come to take me to join my parents…"
Tears and blood, salt and iron, spattered the dusty floor of the greenhouse. A place dedicated to life was forced to endure a story of death, and that it was Sveta's story felt like an utter perversion of both the location and their sister. Those beautifully alien eyes should never look as human as they did in that moment, Katya thought. Robbed of their gentility, their perception, they were mere windows then, into a pain that was horrifyingly familiar. The pain that had made all three of them who they were, and joined them as a Coven.
"Svetlana… I… there's nothing I can say," Anastasia said, her voice barely up to the task of such an admission.
"It's not your fault. My father served yours faithfully for over twenty years, even if he didn't always agree with the decisions he was asked to carry out. He did his duty to his king, and believed that signing that treaty on behalf of those who would later murder him would at least end the loss and suffering," Svetlana said, shaking her head. "For my sake, he believed. And it killed him."
"Sveta…"
"So that's why I have to go," Svetlana said, certainty suddenly solidifying on her features. "Versailles is the true end of my father's work, and I will see it done." Her hand wrenched free of the stem, and she looked down at the blood running freely from the four dark holes that had been punched in her pale skin, unimaginably painful for someone as sensitive as she. "No matter the cost to me, he deserves that much."
Whenever she was cross, Victoria inevitably found her way to The Shed. Exercising her magic had a calming effect on her that little else came close to replicating, even if she was forced to be more judicious with it than before.
"Good morning, Miss Ravenwood," said Martha Oswald, one of the new apprentices. With her short blonde curls and rosy cheeks, she looked even younger than her twenty years, like a primary school student that had snuck away from her lessons to see for herself what these witches were all about.
"Good morning, Martha."
She and two others were just getting ready for their practice time with one of the senior witches, but had yet to light the fires under their cauldrons or even set out their ingredients for the day.
As that senior witch was Millie today, Victoria didn't stop. She moved purposefully to her own work area, set apart from all the others, as her work required the most space. Bright red thread marked out the 'danger zone' around the perimeter, and it didn't take an apprentice long to find out why.
Though it was the only one to be visibly delineated from the others, to call her workspace private would be a gross exaggeration. It had her desk, piled high with notes, surrounded by various pieces of rubbish and detritus that she performed her magical exercises with.
Largest among them was the other massive engine block that had been saved from the wreck of Juno. It was still the biggest engine Victoria had ever seen, but when she'd received it during the cleanup, it had hardly been recognisable. Scorched and cracked, it had been well beyond salvaging and destined for the scrapyard. But, both as a reminder of that day and as a challenge, she had had it dragged out of the crater it had made when it fell to earth and brought here.
In two months of careful magic use, it was now as polished and whole as it had been the day it came out of the factory. In the light let in by the open doors, it gleamed, and Victoria still felt a sense of pride every time she looked at it.
What Elise did for bones and cuts, Victoria had done for solid metal, sealing the cracks by fusing the iron back together into a single block without need for any heat whatsoever, let alone melting it down completely and attempting to re-cast it. She had even gone so far as to scrape away the carbon scoring on the cylinder walls molecule by molecule, the same as she had done to the external burns and discolouration.
To the apprentices it was a miracle, and the day-to-day progress an inspiration to them to keep trying, even if that had never been Victoria's intent. It was a pleasant byproduct, to be sure, but it had been meant for her, and her own designs.
Though the object was large, the work itself had been small. That had been the point: using small amounts of magic over time to train her body more effectively than the huge feats she had been doing because she didn't know any better. She was stronger, Elise had said as much, but there was still that nagging unknown that made Victoria hesitate to push herself.
So glorious had it been to discover her talent for magic, and that her Manifest should so closely hew to her own interests and strengths, that she had never stopped to think about what toll it might be taking. Until the Circus, there hadn't been any signs that there was one, she'd told herself. She'd written off the pain at the asylum as being solely from her self-inflicted head wound, but looking back, its stubborn refusal to heal should have made her question it more than she had. The burst blood vessels in her nose and eye at the Circus were the reminders of how stupid she had been to ignore it. Though not nearly as dangerous as the head wound, they were a sign that when pushed to her limits, her body would still fail, even when she was completely healthy.
She had three journals on this desk alone cataloguing her magic use, her feelings afterward, her health, every scrap of information she could think to write down to help ensure that it never came to that. She'd even learned to take her own blood pressure. But it was all still so new. There was no frame of reference for what was happening to her, or any of the other Manifested witches. No-one had written any of it down before. And though part of her thrilled at the idea that she was possibly pioneering an entirely new scientific discipline, the price that she had already paid for what little she knew had been high. What would more knowledge cost?
What if she were eager to pay it?
Victoria sighed. For all it had taken for her to get her mind as close to straight as she had, another frailty had taken its place. Another worry.
In her heart, and her mind, she knew that it was to be expected. No-one had ever done the things she could do, at least not that they had reliable records of. Every step she'd taken since Manifesting was into uncharted territory, and with that came risk—the same as all discovery had since the dawn of time. She was no exception.
But it was her own body. That she didn't know how it would respond to the demands she placed on it was, on good days, irritating.
On days like today, she chose to ignore it.
"Martha, Esther, Dorothy, come here please," Victoria called out.
"Yes, Miss Ravenwood?" Martha said when they arrived.
"How much would you estimate that engine block weighs? It's made of iron."
Esther looked at it in trepidation. "Several hundred pounds?"
"Close enough. More than you could lift, however."
"Of course," Dorothy said.
Nodding, Victoria looked away from the young women and down. Down into the metal, to the iron atoms themselves. The 26 protons clustered tightly against the 26 neutrons, and the 26 electrons whizzing around them at terrific speed. All perfectly arranged and balanced as they had been since they were forged in the heart of some long-dead star.
With a thought, she suggested they no longer be.
Magic surged into them, and those perfect distances between their parts began to shrink. Tighter and tighter she crushed them, squeezing away more and more of the empty space that lay within all matter.
When she was satisfied she surfaced into the macro world, and the familiar disorientation washed over her before she could focus on the apprentices again.
They were staring at the ground.
There, on the same pallet, was the engine block still, only now it was four inches long.
"How about now?" Victoria asked.
"It looks like a toy!" Martha exclaimed, and rushed over to kneel beside it. "May I touch it?"
"Therein lies the lesson. What do you think?"
"Why not? It doesn't—" Martha reached toward it and there was a sudden crack of splintering wood. The tiny hunk of metal neatly snapped the slat it had been sitting on in half, crashing to the concrete and gouging out a tiny divot, sending concrete chips careening off the underside of the wood.
Martha yelped and fell over backwards in surprise, looking up at Victoria with a burning need for explanation.
