Chains of Ice (13 page)

“Them?” He knew.
John knew about the deal Genny had made to talk him into going back to New York.
“I didn’t mean . . .” Fear made her tremble. Guilt gnawed at her nerves. “I shouldn’t have, but I was desperate . . .”

Through their joined flesh, she felt his rising emotion. Not anger at her, but rather an old, curbed anguish. “Do you know where I lived . . . in the summers of my childhood?”

That was not what she expected him to say. “In Rasputye? No, wait. You said you lived there in the winters.”

“But not the summers.” As she watched, his eyes bleached to a pale blue.

Yes, she was right to be afraid. He was a former soldier. He knew how to fight. He knew how to kill. And he had run away from the world because . . . because he had suffered too much? Or because he’d done something heinous?

He could hurt her; she knew that for sure. Yet still she believed . . . that he would not hurt her, not as long as she kept faith in him. She kept her voice hushed and calm, the way she spoke to the lynx. “What happened in the summers?”

“Every year, Olik and his wife sold me to the circus.”

“The . . . circus.” If this was anyone else, she’d say he was pulling her leg. “Like . . . under the big top? Tents and trained seals and acrobats?”

“No. Like fortune-tellers and puppet shows and . . . freaks.”

A picture formed in her mind of broken-down vans, of tents covered with grimy stars, of a large, bearded, heavy-handed master named Stromboli—she had tapped into her childhood memory of Pinocchio. “You’re kidding.” A burning started in her gut. “What kind of people would sell a child?”

“People who seize the opportunities presented to them.”

“What idiot told you that?” Her voice rose in indignation.

“Olik’s wife. Tanja is not an idiot. She is shrewd. They had no children, so Olik brought me home to work. She heard the story of my return to life, remembered the legend, and saw a greater prospect. The circus paid them very well for the chance to showcase me.”

Genny cupped her hand over the kitten in her lap as if to protect it from harm. “She’s a horrible woman!”

“Don’t you know? There are many horrible people in this world.”

“I do know. But I don’t have to like it!” The boy kitten dug his claws into her sweatshirt, walked his way up to her shoulder, then rubbed his chin against her ear. “John, what did you do in the circus?” She tried to imagine the worst job. “Clean the elephant cage?”

“It was a small, run-down circus, a Russian circus run by people who had no place in the world. They certainly had no elephants.” He held her wrist in an unbreakable grip, frozen in midair as if he’d forgotten he even touched her. “Gaspard was old and cruel, and he owned the act. Owned his wives. Owned his children. Everyone was afraid of him. We traveled from town to town. You can imagine. A dancing bear. Cockfights. A few freaks.”

“Freaks.” John’s story sounded like some horrid retelling of the
Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. “What do you mean,
freaks
?”

“Freaks like me.” John released her wrist, but not before she felt a surge of desolation.

She rubbed her skin and knew she ought to scoff at his contention he was a freak. But his hair was wild around his face and his eyes glinted hard as ice, and she was afraid—of him, and for him. “How did you . . . ? What did you . . . do . . . in their act?”

“There’s a legend that says when a baby is abandoned by its parents and dies, then returns to life, that child has special powers.” He spoke intensely, yet so quietly the lynx kitten snuggled into the wilderness of his beard and purred.

But Mama Cat read his mood, reflected his torment. She began to pace. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Genny lifted the boy kitten off her shoulder. She set him down, found a long, spindly twig, dragged it across the sand, back and forth, while he pounced and played. “I’ve heard that legend,” she admitted.

“I was their circus freak with special powers.”

“What special powers?” She stilled, held her breath.

“I can . . . move things. Push things. Hold things. With my mind.”

What an absurd story. She didn’t trust it for a minute. Yet . . . on the platform, he had caught her, when she would have sworn he hadn’t been physically close enough. Nevertheless, she had been saved.

He was obviously waiting for her to demand proof.

She didn’t have the guts. She didn’t want to know. Not here. Not now.

She resumed playing with the kitten. “What did they have you do?”

He laughed softly at her cowardice, then picked up his story. “When I was very young, I had no control over my . . . gift. So to make me perform, Gaspard locked me in a cage, put a rug over it—I was always in the dark—then when the crowds gathered, he offered me food . . . from outside the bars. I could only have it if I brought it to myself. It was particularly entertaining if it was a bowl of soup too wide to pass through the bars, and I spilled it and cried.”

“Okay.” Genny felt like Mama Cat facing a threat to her babies. “This guy locked a little kid in a cage and starved him. He shouldn’t have been allowed to keep you. Where were the authorities?”

John’s mouth twisted with scorn. “This was Russia in the eighties. The authorities were lucky to be paid. They weren’t even in authority. The circus moved all the time, from here all the way across Siberia to the far sea, then south, then west to the Crimea . . . and no one with any sense challenged Gaspard. No one.”

She flicked the twig back and forth, quicker and quicker. “And no one had any compassion for a child?”

The kitten leaped and attacked, wild with the joy of play.

“I was different. A freak! Everyone was afraid of me. Especially when I got older and refused to do what Gaspard wanted. Then he poked me with a pole until I got mad. I shouted. I rattled the lock, made the straw inside fly around. I wanted to break the bars, but I wasn’t strong enough. My powers weren’t strong enough.” John gazed into the forest, but he was here only in body. His mind dwelled far away and long ago. “The summer I was eleven, my voice changed, I grew tall . . . and I came into the fullness of my powers.”

She moved the twig more and more slowly. “Did you realize it?”

“No. No one did. I only knew that Gaspard had trained me well. Every time I saw him, I grew angry; and one day, he poked me with his pole . . . and without actually touching it, I pulled it out of his hands and beat him with it. Beat him until the blood ran. Beat him unconscious.”

She forgot the twig, forgot the kitten, forgot to play. “Did you kill him?”

“No. I wanted to, but the audience ran and screamed. The circus workers cowered. One of his daughters, the one who slipped me food on the sly, begged me to stop.”

“You stopped because she asked you?”

“Yes. I would have done whatever she told me.”

“Was she beautiful?” Genny imagined a sloe-eyed, dusky-skinned woman whose every movement was seduction.

“She was so beautiful.” He spoke worshipfully. “She was a tiny thing, only seven—”

Genny felt stupid.

“—and I all of a sudden realized that she was watching me beat her father to death.”

“And a father, any father, was something you envied.”

That brought John back from the past. “That’s true. Gaspard was a pitiless bastard. He treated everyone brutally. But his family never went hungry, and the only violence they feared was his.”

“Praise indeed.”

“Russia is a vast country filled with unbending rules and petty dictators. It’s tough to be different in Russia. It’s tough to be independent. They were, and no one who challenged Gaspard ever won.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.” John sat there, cuddling a baby lynx in his two broad palms, looking as wild as the cat he held. “The little girl unlocked the cage, gave me a little food and a little money—to this day, I don’t know whether her mother gave it to her or she stole it—and told me to get away before the police arrived. So I ran. Stowed away on trains. Hitchhiked the trucks. Made it all the way across Siberia, thirty-eight hundred miles, back to Rasputye. It took two months. I ate raw fish. I ate maggots from the garbage.”

Mama Cat paced harder, faster, casting more hard glances their way.

The boy cat pounced on the twig, over and over, trying to make it move.

“I ate snow, because in some places it never melts. I got back to Rasputye about the same time as the circus,” he said. “I went to Olik and Tanja and begged for sanctuary.”

“What happened?” Genny’s heart beat as if she’d been racing the whole length of Siberia . . . with him.

“They tried to sell me back to Gaspard.”

She felt as if she’d slammed down hard on her face. “What did Gaspard do? Did he take his revenge?”

“He would not have me. He was still limping from my attack.”

“Good for you! I wish you had—” She stopped herself.

“Don’t worry. I’ve killed enough evil men since then.” John wasn’t bragging. He wasn’t proud. He was merely telling the truth.

“Then what? When you weren’t profitable for those people, the ones who . . . raised you, owned you?”

“They took me to the station in Apasnee, bought me a train ticket, and told me never to come back.”

“And?”

“And I took the train. I found an orphanage. By the time I was seventeen, I was headed to the U.S.”

Troubled, she had to point out the one salient fact. “Yet here you are now. When you were hurt, you ran away and came back to Rasputye again.”

Gently he put the kitten on the ground, watched her ambush her brother. “If you ask the people of Rasputye, they say the crossroads draws people like me.”

“If you ask the people of Rasputye, they say everything we do is controlled by an ancient legend and such silliness.” Genny would not admit to him that Mariana believed fate had drawn Genny here. It made her seem bound to John in some mystical way.

The kittens rolled over and over, wrestling with youthful enthusiasm.

“Those people who raised you. Olik and Tanja. Are they still here?”

“Olik died at sea.”

“Good.” Genny hoped it was a cold, wet, miserable death.

“Tanja lives and thrives in Rasputye. She is respected for her business acumen.” With fine-tuned irony, John said, “Selling me was, after all, merely a business decision.”

Genny opened her mouth to reply hotly, then remembered—she had made a similar decision when she agreed to the deal her father offered. But surely she wasn’t as bad as a woman who sold a child to the circus . . . although perhaps that was only a matter of degree. “I haven’t met her in the
traktir
.”

“She seldom visits the
traktir
. She is far too respectable for that.”

“Oh, John.” Genny had never seen a man look so alone. She ached for the lonely, abused little boy he had been, and for the desolate, remote man he had become. She was angry at the couple who should have been his parents, at the circus people who so brutally mistreated a child. She wanted to do something for him, melt the anguish behind those cold blue eyes.

She knelt beside him, put her hands on his shoulders, and looked into his eyes.

He stared back at her, motionless, waiting, a man whose shoulders were warm beneath her palms, who smelled like clean air, like evergreen trees, like leather, and, incongruously, like lavender shampoo.

“John.” She needed to say . . . something. Something wise and comforting about how everything would get better soon.

But that was such a lie. How did one recover from a childhood such as his? What events drove him back here to the place of his torment? And what could she say, or do, to ease his suffering?

Her heart beat hard. She swallowed to ease her dry throat.

And she leaned into him and kissed him.