The Pond - Part 35

Izolda shook Nikolai’s arm. “Where is Dmitri?” she demanded again, voice shrill with fear.

Nikolai turned towards her, a bleak expression on his face. “The grinding wheel, it cracked. It must have had something to do with the speed in which it was turning. I have never heard of such a thing happening before.”

“But Dmitri, what happened to Dmitri?”

“He was the first to see the smoke. He, he shouted fire and tried to put it out himself. He slipped and he ended up under the grinding stone, trapped. The floor underneath him must have been rotted, it gave way. Somehow he ended up caught in the gears. We tried to pull him out . . .”

“No!” Izolda shrieked.

She tried to make her way into the burning mill, but hands held her back. She fought them, needing to get to her son, until her strength was gone. Nikolai wrapped his arms around her from behind and held onto to her.

“It was my fault,” he said brokenly. “I knew the mill could not keep going at such a rate. All I could see was the profit we could make, not the danger.”

A perfumed breeze wafted across them. Izolda stilled.

“No, my husband. It was not your fault,” she said with conviction.

The crowd on the river bank was silent. The workers had formed two lines from the river, one passing buckets full of water forward, the other sending the empty buckets back. The roaring flames began to die out and soon the flames were gone. The smouldering remains still sent black smoke into the air.

“Now there is no choice but to send for Mikhail,” Nikolai continued. “He needs to come home.”

Izolda went ridged in his arms, then forced herself to relax. “Of course, you are right,” she agreed, to placate him. But already she was formulating a plan to keep her remaining son safe.

The fire was out when they finally made their way back home. Nikolai would allow no one inside the mill to inspect the damage, not even to retrieve what remained of his son, until the mill was completely cooled down.

Too restless to stay inside, he went off down to the village. Izolda shut herself up in her workroom. She pushed her grief aside, focusing on ways to save her remaining son. Protection spells were useless, she knew that now. But there had to be something . . .

She sat in her rocking chair and leafed through the ancient text she inherited from Varnya, the one she had spent countless hours trying to decipher. In it were the darkest magics, ones that revealed themselves bit by bit, and only when she was at her most desperate. Never had she been more desperate than she was now.

And there it was. The spell that could save Mikhail. She read it over, then read it again, cementing it in her mind. There was no time to waste. The spell must be cast tonight, under the new moon.

The rusalka would be at her weakest now, having used so much of her power to assault the mill. And there was no doubt in Izolda’s mind that it was the rusalka who was responsible for the fire that caused Dmitri’s death. The scent of her perfume was unmistakeable.

It would take time for the creature to replenish her energies, time Izolda would take advantage of. She began gathering the ingredients she would need. And when Nikolai returned and called for her, she waved her hand to send him to sleep without a moment’s thought. When he awoke, it would be all over.

As she worked out the details of the spell, there was a part of her that also mourned for Mikhail. If the spell worked as it should, it would mean losing him, but he would live, and that was all that mattered.