She came.
8
VALYA
I'm without makeup, in my honest secondhand wool coat, the sleeves a little too long, the collar softened by other winters. I keep the red ribbon in my hair to show a small loyalty to the women who raised me.
The bell over the cafe door makes a small coin sound that feels like a blessing spilled into a saucer. Inside, roasted tea hangs in the air like a thin veil, warm with clove and dark honey and a faint pine smoke. The enamel walls are the good green, scrubbed into virtue.
Dmitri is already there. He sits in the corner chair that lets him see the room and the door and his own reflection if he chooses. His coat is folded across the back of the chair with a neatness that belongs to ritual. His hands are still on the table, fingers resting near a chipped white cup. The stillness in his face is attention rationed like warmth when the woodpile is low.
I stop by the counter and choose tea with cloves and honey. I choose a plate with honey cakes that shine as if theyremember the sun. I carry both to him and sit facing the window. For a minute, we don't talk or greet. Somewhere behind the counter, a kettle sighs, and a tray of pastry gives off the warm smells of ginger and honey.
I make a little tent with my hands around the cup and let the steam find my face.
"I have not made up my mind," I say to the cup.
He doesn't rush his answer. "I know."
"Comforting. You are trusting your future to someone still arguing with her tea."
"I trust the women who taught you to argue well," he says softly.
"She would be the girl who carries her own light into the forest," I say, meaning my grandmother.
"LikeVasilisa," he answers, the corners of his mouth softening into lines drawn the way a river carves its banks.
I ask if he has readVasilisa, catching my voice before it tips into delight. He says she feeds the little doll, says her prayer, keeps the old rules even in the witch's house, and survives by honoring a mother's blessing. He speaks without forcing the room to listen.
He reaches for the cup, and the collar of his black knit pulls a fraction lower. A narrow lick of ink climbs toward the bone at his shoulder. I remember the dark line where the shirt did not hide it. I look at his throat and then at his face.
"Tell me a story," I say. "Not work. A story."
"I don't carry many stories," he answers. "I carry a sound."
"Whose sound?"
"A woman with a fever. Her voice made the walls hold." He looks at the cup, not at me. "Gospodi pomiluy."
"Lord, have mercy," I translate, because my grandmother taught me that one before she taught me to braid. "She lit candles when she said it. The room changed shape."
"My room did too," he says. "I don't remember her face. I remember that line."
He places the cup where the light falls, handle straight, saucer still. He says quietly that his mother left a prayer, told him to keep it, to feed it with breath. He says that winter was already in the house by then, that the window wore frost inside as well as out, and her voice thinned to a thread that still held. He says that in the dormitory later, when the lights went out and the bleach smell climbed the stairs ahead of the cold, he would say the words once and the hunger would sit down and behave.
He looks at me. The ice gray of his eyes, ringed darker at the edges, doesn't change so much as sharpen. What lives there reads as unspoken resolve rather than warmth.
"That is quite a fairy tale," I say, not quite smiling. The steam rises between us like a page turning.
Dmitri falls quiet, letting his thumb rest against the saucer as if remembering a different rim. He turns the cup a quarter-inch so the handle points toward me. His gaze drops to the small cross at my throat and lifts to the ribbon in my hair.
"Your cross sits like it knows the place," he says, voice clearas water. "You touch it before you answer hard questions. The ribbon today. Is that for her?"
"For my grandmother," I say. "She tied a red thread when the season turned. She said it kept the old promises from wandering."
He inclines his head, as if the answer fits a pattern he respects. "She taught you the rules with her hands," he says. "Candles, braids, small prayers. You kept them. Like Vasilisa."
Something warm opens behind my ribs. My shoulders loosen a fraction. "Yes. Like Vasilisa," I say. The agreement tastes sweet in a way that has nothing to do with honey.
