Michael moved to follow X, but Marfa quickly crossed the room and grasped his arm. “This is brute force magic, these styervo practice; it has nothing to do with life or subtlety,” she whispered. “If you learned anything at all from me, you can see this.”
He hesitated, his dark eyes meeting hers for the first time. But X’s voice from the hallway interrupted them. “Let’s go, Mike. I’m not going to wait all day.”
Pulling his sleeve from Marfa’s grasp, Michael left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Pizd’uk,” Marfa cursed. “I’ve seen this before, Katzy, this govn’uk magic, this Nazi magic.” She stomped to the table and cleared the tea cups and plates, piling them in the sink. “What they want is to remake the world in their own ugly image.”
She fetched a chair and yanked down skein after skein of herbs, selecting wormwood, felsom, and purple loosestrife for protection, mixing them up with her own spit and blood and clippings from her hair, whispering a zagovorui over and over again as she worked. Using the mixture, she barred all entrances to her apartment against her enemy. She would be ready, when the time came.
* * * *
The night came on and the storm gathered its power. Outside the window, the wind howled and the rain pelted down. Marfa imagined the beach, so placid and white all summer, lashed by the raving waves, great chunks of sand bitten and washed away, the Art Deco hotels cowering under the onslaught.
At last, using all of her strength and concentration, she opened herself to the storm, inviting the magical element to ground itself through her. Bolt after bolt struck the building. The walls shuddered and the roof above her creaked as if pried at by giant fingers of wind. Above the building, she imagined, those with talent might see an immense, wind-whipped vortex of magical element spiraling down, herself the focus of its energy. At the tip of the whirlwind, she sensed the magic sparking like electricity in her nerves and thrumming in her bones, and felt the thistledown hair on her head stand on end.
As the storm reached its height, they came, as she knew they would. She heard a rushing sound distinct from the storm like the wings of a thousand blackbirds, and then a pounding at the door. She flicked a finger and the door flew open. On her shoulder, Katzy hissed and spat, her tail twitching madly. The hallway outside teemed with shadowy, black-clad figures. At their head stood X, his face pale and twisted with fury.
“Witch!” he shouted. “You dare to steal our magic?” He lifted a studded boot to step into the room, but the rune spells of protection crackled in the doorway and he was forced to leap back, singed.
Marfa smiled. All of their conduction rods, set to capture the energy of the storm, had been rendered useless when she had drawn the element down through herself. These warlocks would wreak no changes on the city tonight. She raised her voice to chant a zagovorui of diminishment, and her words rang out like a trumpet. The mass of shadowy bodies in the doorway drew back.
Then it heaved, and spat forth a single figure: Michael. He looked frightened and pale in the stormy light. A hand pushed him from behind, and he stumbled over the threshold, into Marfa’s apartment.
X returned to the doorway, his face gleaming with triumph. “Invite me in, Mike,” he ordered. The dark shadows drew up in ranks behind him. “Invite me in,” X repeated, his voice growing angry. “Invite us in, or we can’t come in!”
Marfa opened her arms, beckoning. Michael hesitated like a hunted rabbit, looking from X to Marfa and back again. Surely, she thought, he could see that X’s hateful magic had no place in it for a man like him.
He spoke, and she barely heard his voice above the roar of the storm. “Will you teach me, Marfa?”
Sparks leaped from the ends of Marfa’s hair as she nodded. At the same moment, a huge bolt struck the building, and Marfa absorbed it without flinching, knowing that to those watching she must be surrounded by a sparkling blue aura of elemental magic.
Michael’s eyes widened, and he seemed about to speak. Then, X filled the doorway, his round spectacles flashing. “Let me in, Mike!” he screamed.
“How can I refuse him?” Michael shouted.
Marfa smiled. He would learn, soon enough, that the kind of bastard magic practiced by warlocks like X was not best countered with strength. “Just close the door, Michael.”
For a moment, Michael seemed to doubt her. Then he turned his face away from X, and Marfa rejoiced to see the youthful smile she had come to know well forming on his lips as his eyes met hers. He reached out to close the door.
Howling in rage and pain, X thrust a hand through the crackling ward in the doorway and gripped Michael by the throat. Marfa leaped up from the rocking chair with a shout of surprise—the wards on the doorway should have been impregnable. She scrabbled in her mind for the zagovorui of protection, and cursed herself as the rune spell eluded her. X had time to shake Michael once, twice, before Marfa, with a flick of her fingers, sent bolts of element scorching across the room, flinging the intruders down the stairs and slamming the door. Michael dropped to the floor like a bundle of rags.
Marfa released the storm from her control, allowing the vortex of magic to whirl away. As the light of the element faded from the room, she lit a candle and went to kneel beside Michael. She straightened his arms and legs and put a pillow under his head. In the flickering light, she held his hand and chafed his wrists. The storm raged outside the window, but she paid it no mind. The city would have to do battle with the storm as best it could; she needed her strength to save her apprentice.
* * * *
As the night wore on, Marfa kept watch over him, chanting the zagovorui of healing. “Water, green river, daybreak,” she began. “Sun by day, moon by night. May the mother wind cover you with her veil. May she blow away all your aches and pains, tears and sorrows. All will be well.”
At first, his body twitched and shook under her hands. She tried feeding him tea, but he only retched it back up again. “All will be well,” she insisted, until her voice grew hoarse. With the element still coursing through her body, the cure should have been effortless, but her ministrations had little effect. A core of darkness within him resisted her spells and herbs. At last, though, she felt the rune spell take hold. The words bathed and renewed him, releasing him from the warlock magic that held him.
As she continued to work on him, he lay unmoving but for his harsh breathing, shrouded in his black coat, his face pale. Katzy paced up and down the room nervously, finally coming to rest curled up against Michael’s side, lending him her strength. Marfa worked on. Gradually, as dawn approached and the winds of the storm died away, his breathing eased, and he slept.
* * * *
The room was gray and quiet with morning when Marfa climbed stiffly to her feet. She left her silent apartment and passed down the stairs and out the front door, knowing that she had to assess the storm damage before she could rest. Katzy could look after the patient, if he awoke.
The city felt preternaturally still, as if exhausted by the beating it had taken during the night. All along the street, the trees stood like bedraggled maidens, shaken and weeping, some of them prone, flattened by the ravaging wind. Leaves and branches, roof tiles and bits of garbage littered the streets. A sign reading ¿Por qué pagar más? had gotten wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree on the corner of Fifth and Collins.
Marfa climbed the wooden stairway leading to the boardwalk and looked out over the wide white sands and the still, luminous water. She found herself thinking of her old home. The Russian village was long gone, had been swept away in the terrible war which so many years ago had stormed across Europe, destroying all before it. As a girl, along with her sisters and girl cousins, she had learned magic at her grandmother’s knee. They were all gone now, lost in the diaspora of the war, herself the only survivor.
Slowly, she picked her way over the sand to the edge of the ocean. No wind blew, and the water lay still, a mirror reflecting the sky. In the distance, cargo ships headed back to port after riding out the storm at sea. They seemed to be floating up into the air on water the same still silver-gray color as the sky. A light, teasing wind began to blow, ruffling and darkening the waves, and the ships settled back down onto the water again and headed home, to safe harbor.