Lois Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi

Ekaterin mustered her patience. Jadwiga was older, but Ingi seemed brighter; he might know more. “How did Ma Roga come to be living here in the zone in the first place?”

Jadwiga repeated, “Forever,” albeit with less conviction than before; then, apparently struck by the question—had she never considered it till now?—added, “Boris would know. He knows lots.”

Ingi added, “You’re just some kind of city tourists, anyway. You don’t belong here.” He turned to Jadwiga: “We don’t have to tell them anything.”

Before Ekaterin could decide on the best way to disabuse the boy of his misapprehensions, Jadwiga put in, “Don’t worry. When Boris comes back, he’ll make them go away. He made that bad hunter go away, that time!”

Ingi bit his lip. “Shut up about that!” he hissed to her. “Just… don’t.” Jadwiga rocked back, offended.

Now what’s this tale? Nothing good, Ekaterin suspected. She just managed not to rub her forehead with her gloved and contaminated hand. Her nose itched; she sniffed. “Does Vadim visit you often?” The children seemed to speak of him without fear, which restrained her provisional fury with the man. Somewhat.

Jadwiga nodded vigorously. “He comes on his day off, usually. Not every time. He taught Ingi to read . But he won’t take us a ride in his van!”

By the expression crossing Ingi’s face, this was a shared peeve. “You should ask him again for your next birthday, if…” He cut himself off abruptly.

If you are still alive? “So you’ve never flown? Never seen the zone or the district from the air?” A sneaky method of getting the pair of them to Hassadar General occurred to her, but she set the ploy aside. For now.

Ingi was drawn out again despite himself. “Is it amazing ?”

“Like magic?” said Jadwiga.

Ekaterin blinked, suddenly made aware of how familiarity bred not so much contempt, as unmindfulness. Blindness, even. “Yes. Yes, it is. I quite enjoy flying.” She added rather at random, “My husband gave me my lightflyer for a Winterfair present.”

Both youths looked wildly impressed. “He must like you a lot ,” said Jadwiga.

“Well… yes,” Ekaterin admitted.

“Is he rich? Like a prince?”

“There aren’t any real princes, Jaddie,” said Ingi, impatient again. Embarrassed? “That was on Old Earth.”

“That’s not so! Vadim said there was one born in Vorbarr Sultana, far away over nine and nine districts where the emperor lives in a golden palace.” This last was delivered in a fairy-tale sing-song. “Is that true?” she demanded of Ekaterin.

“Not… not exactly…”

Ingi gave a self-satisfied sniff.

Ekaterin took a breath. “The capital is only three districts to the north, the Imperial Residence is made out of gray stone blocks, mostly, and there are two little princes and a princess now, but she’s just a baby.”

Enrique raised his brows at her through his face mask—in amused approval at this unwonted precision, perhaps.

Silence, as they digested this. “Have you seen this, for real?” asked Ingi at last. Enrique’s glance swung to include the boy. Ingi, Ekaterin thought, should get to know Enrique. She suspected they might hit it off, once Enrique got over his stolen-radbug grudge, which, now that they looked to be recoverable, he likely would.

“Yes.”

Jadwiga sat back with a sigh of profound satisfaction. To know that she lived in a world where princesses were real? Ekaterin recalled the unselfconscious joy she’d witnessed in Gregor’s and Laisa’s faces, when they’d shown off their new daughter to her on her last visit to the Residence. How agonizingly different must have been the emotions of Jadwiga’s real parents, when they’d… thrown her away in the zone?

In the hard Dendarii Mountains not far to the south, it had been the stern Time-of-Isolation custom to cut the throats of mutie infants, an approach that had stretched secretly into modern times before being finally stamped out. There’s this place in the woods. In these softer lowlands, had a seeming-softer custom lingered on too long? What is this haunted place, this… dreadful orphanage? Ekaterin was growing frantic for facts. They could not be worse than her imaginings.

“Ingi!” cawed a hoarse voice, echoing through the trees. “Where is the brat? Ingi, you’ve let the goats loose again. I’ll tan your hide.” That last sounded too tired to be a credible peril, but the source of the call rounded the raised hut.

Be careful what you wish for …

Two people led another shaggy pony, burdened with sacks hanging over its round barrel. A man of middling height had a hand out balancing, of all things, a battered old upholstered armchair, threadbare with foam padding showing through, slung teetering atop the animal. As the white-garbed strangers came into his sight, his snub features set in a scowl, which somehow made him look beefier than he actually was.

The older woman stumping forward wore skirt and tunic and heavy boots. She was shorter and slighter than the fellow, but her frown was fiercer. The pony took advantage of the distraction to buck and dump its load, which the man caught at only enough to direct its groundward thump.

The responsible grownups. Finally.

Such as they were…

“Trespassers!” snapped the woman, coming at them.

The fellow grabbed a length of firewood from the pile by the house and raised it in uncertain threat. “Should I beat t’em, Ma?”

Enrique jolted, but Ekaterin flung out a hand to bar him from rising. She was intensely aware of her stunner, strapped unreachably beneath her rad suit. This confrontation teetered on a slope no one was going to be able to scramble back from, if it came to blows.

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 .