Come Hell or High Water, Part 3: Deluge – Sample Chapters

The Chariot

(Sunday night, August 11, 2002)

[The Chariot: the seventh of the Major Trumps, the charioteer struggles to steer the steeds that threaten to pull him to pieces]

 

George had two errands to run now that Magdalena was gone. He needed to meet Fen’ka and Jarnvithja, who were to deliver the great sword of Bruncvik to him. And he had another task to attend to on his way to get the sword.

Before sending Magdalena with the magical staff of Rabbi Loew to meet Elizabeth in the Old Town Square, where they were to sabotage the Astronomical Clock, he had spoken to the hotel desk clerk about arranging an appointment with a local prostitute.

“I would like to meet at her apartment, not here at the hotel,” George had confided to the clerk, winking as he adjusted his clerical collar. “It might not look good, you understand, if she were seen coming to my room.”

“Of course, Father.” The clerk answered the Jesuit from New York in a bored voice, as if accustomed to requests like this. “What time should I make the appointment for?”

“I would also appreciate meeting someone who is—how to say?—not adverse to light bondage,” George explained. “She should have her own rope and be ready for a session that involves…” George fumbled for the right word. “I understand that this can cost extra. The cost is of no concern.”

“I understand. Of course.” The clerk also seemed to have heard this request many times before. “I will need to make some phone calls. What time did you say you wanted to make the appointment?”

George gave the clerk the approximate time he’d like to meet the woman later that evening, and a short while later, a bellhop had delivered an envelope to his room. Inside was a note that simply indicated a woman’s name, her address, and the price in Czech currency.

Now, George waited to be sure Magdalena was well on her way from the hotel and slipped a few supplies into his pocket. Then he stepped out of the hotel, found a taxi, and gave the address to the driver. The driver nodded and quickly deposited George at the door of the apartment house a few blocks away. George walked through the lobby and up a flight of stairs to a door on the next floor. He knocked. The door swung open.

“Good evening.” The woman at the door was young and lovely, a beautiful sheer robe revealing her provocative curves as a silk sash hugged her hips.

“Good evening,” George answered. He stepped inside and closed the door. “It is a pleasure to meet you…”

“Agafia.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. He slipped a hand inside her robe and pressed his palm against her breast. She winked and placed his other hand against her hip.

“You received my instructions?” George whispered into her ear, feeling himself respond to her attractions.

“I did,” she purred. “Come right this way.” She turned and kept one hand entwined with his as she led him down a short hallway to a door on the left. They entered a room filled with sumptuous Victorian-era style furniture, a Tiffany lamp casting a warm glow across the scene. A few candles twinkled around the edges of the room. A dining room chair stood alone on a plush Turkish carpet in the midst of the richly detailed parquet floor. Coils of silken white rope sat on a nearby table, its surface polished to a glossy sheen.

You will excuse me, my dear,” he explained as he stepped away from her, “but I am a man of strict habits and there are certain—shall we say, small fetishes?—which are necessary.”

“Such as?” Agafia asked.

“I must make a slight rearrangement of the furniture,” he told her. “May I?”

Agafia nodded, seemingly intrigued by his request.

George turned the chair slightly so that a person sitting in it would face north. He also brought a candlestick from a shelf and set it on the edge of the rug. Then he pulled a small object from his pocket and bent over, his back to Agafia, and traced a circle on the floor around the chair and rug. He slipped the object back into his pocket and turned to face Agafia, who seemed slightly bemused.

“You are interested in bondage?” Agafia asked coyly. She pulled the sash around her waist loose. She shrugged and the robe rippled down into a puddle of fabric around her feet. Naked, she stepped into the middle of the room.

George caught his breath. Agafia was exactly the sort of woman he could enjoy the whole night, but there was no time for that now. He had to finish the task at hand and then go meet Fen’ka and Jarnvithja.

“Yes,” he answered, his rising desire making his voice a rough growl. He picked up the rope and ran his palm along the smoothly braided cord. He and Agafia smiled at each other. He joined her next to the chair. He stood behind her and leaned forward, bringing his head down to brush his cheek along her throat. She leaned her head back, exposing the length of her neck, sighing and relaxing against his body. He guided her into the chair and wrapped the rope snugly around her torso.

“Not too tight, is it?” he asked, as if concerned about Agafia’s welfare, standing behind her and pulling the cord gently up beneath her breasts. He leaned down again, running his tongue up her throat and tickling her ear.

“No, it is not too tight,” she answered. She sounded delighted, in fact, enjoying herself, no doubt relieved that her guest did not seem to be dangerous. The ropes were snug but not so tight that she could not wriggle her way out of them easily, if needed.

George’s cheek rested against her neck. Desire rumbled in his throat. He closed his eyes. Agafia’s scent filled his head and momentarily distracted him. She murmured something he did not understand. He nuzzled her earlobe again and slowly stood upright behind the chair. She leaned her head back against him and he heard the sounds of desire rising in her throat too.

He rested his palms on her shoulders, gently stroking her upper back with his thumbs.

“So beautiful,” he whispered. “So very beautiful.” He gazed down over her shoulder. He slipped loops of rope loosely around her wrists and the back legs of the chair. Then he pulled the whole rope tight. So tight that it cut into the tender flesh beneath Agafia’s breasts. She gasped.

“Rough, heh? You like it rough?” she snarled, as if changing character from smooth seductress to wild tigress. “You like a girl who fights, heh?” She bucked in the chair, nearly knocking George over.

“Yes, I like it rough,” he agreed, pulling the cord even more tightly around her and tying her hands firmly against the chair legs. “I like a woman who fights but ultimately knows her place.”

Agafia struggled against the rope but George could tell that it was not heartfelt. It was only an act to please her client. She seemed to feel that she was in no real danger. He came around and knelt before her, pulling the ends of the rope forward and binding her ankles against the front legs of the chair. She continued her muted protests.

Still kneeling before her, he buried his face in her lap. His energetic attention there quickly had her writhing and bucking in the chair again, though he was unsure if it was simply a pretense she thought would please him. Raising his head, he looked up at her and winked.

“You sly man,” Agafia gasped out. “How dare you come into my flat and take advantage of me in such a manner?” He was sure this was a script she had followed many times before. He stood and came around behind the captive woman again.

“How dare I?” He mocked her question. “How dare you invite me here and drive me mad with such shameless, brazen temptation?”

“Tempt you?” Agafia retorted. But before she could continue the pretend argument, George had plucked her sash from the floor and pulled it tight between her teeth, knotting it behind her head. The gag now throttled the words she struggled to enunciate.

“I must make one more slight adjustment,” George announced. He took the small object from his pocket and bent over again, tracing a small triangle on the rug that was just large enough to contain Agafia on the chair. She watched, winking at him when she caught his eye as he stood. She seemed to think this was still a part of the game they had been playing. Then he returned to his place behind her, where she could not see that he was careful to keep his feet outside the boundary of the triangle he had drawn around her. He closed his eyes and leaned forward slightly.

George ran his fingertips lightly along the tendons of her throat and then along the underside of her breasts. “Temptation? That is something we are both well acquainted with, I think,” he muttered. “But for now, we must forgo temptation and get to the real purpose of my visit this evening.”

He lifted his face to the north. “I conjure, O Gadriel, the lord of warfare and knowledge and beauty and seduction! I command you, who revealed the secrets of occult power to mankind! I adjure you, who taught Eve the pleasures of the flesh and became the father of her son Cain! By your delight in woman’s flesh and by the blood of this whore that I offer to your honor and might and by the power of Solomon who bound you, by the authority of Lucifer and Apollyon to torment you, and by your own power: I command you to come without delay and follow the instructions that I give!”

He pulled the object from his pocket again. This time he flicked it open: it was a switchblade knife and its finely honed blade, which he noted Agafia could see out of the corner of one eye, glittered in the dim and flickering candlelight.

A muffled scream was caught by the gag in her mouth. She attempted to throw her weight back against George, fighting against him now in earnest. But he was too quick. With a deft flick, he made a long but quick gash below her left nipple.

Agafia bucked and writhed and threw herself from side to side, back to front. Blood spurted from the cut and then dribbled down her body. Behind her, George kept his hands on her shoulders and leaned his weight into her. Suddenly, she stopped fighting and she slumped against the chair she was sitting in, her body still, her head tipped to one side.

He undid the gag. Air escaped from Agafia’s mouth in a quiet whistle. Seemingly unconscious, her eyes closed, she drew another gentle breath.

“Gadriel: come with your wrath and fury and indignation, your troop of destructive angels!” he barked from behind the unconscious woman.

The flame of the candle soared high, a pillar of flame in the circle he had traced. It crackled and sizzled, the glare of the candlelight making it difficult to see anything else in the room. George held up his hand, still holding the bloody knife, to shield his eyes. The wick sputtered and popped, sending a shower of wax droplets cascading across the room.

“Why call me?” a deep, gruff voice demanded. “Why have you dared disturb me?” The voice dripped with malice and hatred. The woman in the chair lifted her head and twisted her neck, as if trying to see who it was that stood behind her. “What is it you want of me, mortal?” The furious male voice was coming from the mouth of the prostitute. Her eyes, now open, were bloodshot and filled with hatred.

“I am in the midst of combat, Gadriel,” George answered, his voice icy and even. “I need your aid to set free the flood that has been building and waiting to descend on Prague.”

The woman rocked in the chair, straining against the ropes. Even as the chair seemed about to tip over, it struck the invisible boundaries of the triangle George had traced around it and remained upright. The candle flared.

The demonic voice snarled at the Jesuit in rage.

“You cannot escape the triangle,” George reminded the demon imprisoned within Agafia’s body. “Just as I am protected by the circle against any devils you might have brought with you from Hell into this world. Now listen to me! Obey me!”

The sputtering candle within the circle dipped and rose as if buffeted by a winter gale. Gadriel screamed and roared, still trying to escape and still imprisoned within the unconscious prostitute. “Set me free, mortal! Give me my liberty and I will give you untold riches! I will fulfill your widest fantasy! Only set me free upon the earth!”

“Never!” George barked at the demon he had called. “I will give you liberty only to fulfill my command to set free the flood and wash away the bridge that protects Prague!”

The demon paused in his raving and twisted the prostitute’s head to look over her shoulder again, attempting to see the man who stood behind the chair. Venomous laughter erupted from Gadriel’s throat.

“Wash away the bridge that protects Prague? You are mad, mortal! The power of that bridge is infamous! Its magic is unequalled and invincible! No flood can wash it away or destroy the protection it affords Prague! You are mad!”

“I am not mad, Gadriel!” George retorted. “You are bound to obey me by the conjuration worked with the prostitute’s blood and the proper invocations! I, and I alone, have found a way to poison the magic of the bridge and render it vulnerable and weak. So vulnerable and so weak that it and its protective shield around Prague can be washed away by a flood of sufficient strength. That flood, which I have also prepared, needs only to be set loose by you.”

Gadriel stopped trying to look over Agafia’s shoulder and faced the sputtering candle, the high flame having nearly consumed the entirety of the wax candle. The demon was silent and then nodded.

“Very well, mortal man. I will let loose this flood you say can wash away the bridge and its power,” the ancient demon finally agreed. “But when your project fails and the bridge stands and your enemies destroy you, I will be waiting for you in Hell. I will be waiting and I will take special delight in tormenting you! You will be bound to me forever, as I am bound here to your command for these brief moments on Earth.”

“My project fail?” snorted George. “I think not! No one before me has discovered the secret to poisoning the power of the bridge and now—once the sword of Bruncvik is removed from its foundation and delivered to me—I will also wield the power of the rabbi’s staff, the sword, and the Astronomical Clock. All the most important mystical defenses of Prague will have fallen into my hands when Jarnvithja and Fen’ka deliver the sword to me! My power will become a legend among the occult practitioners of the Earth. The bridge’s magic will fail and the city it protects will be washed away. Svetovit will trample it under his horse’s hooves and then I will give him leave to trample the modern world beneath his horse’s hooves as well. It is I, not the bridge, that will be invincible!”

Gadriel listened. Then he laughed quietly. The laughter grew in strength until it sounded like thunder to George.

“I will be invincible!” the Jesuit repeated. “Now, go! Do as I command!”

The demon continued to cackle but the sound subsided, and slowly Agafia’s head dropped again to one side. The candle’s flame gradually descended until it was little more than a spark wrapped around the fragment of wick that remained in the pool of wax in the candlestick. Gadriel was gone to do as George had bid.

“Fail? Never!” George repeated to himself, kneeling to wipe the switchblade clean on Agafia’s robe. The quiet of her gentle breathing filled the room. He slipped the knife back into his pocket after slicing through a loop of the ropes around Agafia’s body so she could struggle her way out of them when she woke, though the knife caught on her skin and left a bright red line beneath the rope. She wouldn’t be in good shape afterward, and she’d have an ugly scar which might impinge on her ability to attract clients in the future, but she wouldn’t die. That could cause complications.

George looked around the room one last time. He had touched nothing but the rope and he knew that fingerprints were notoriously difficult to lift from textures such as the cords binding the prostitute. There was no physical evidence that could link him to this incident and he knew from previous experience that she would recall little or nothing of his visit when she awoke. He took a handful of Czech coins from his pocket and contemptuously tossed them at Agafia’s feet.

“Gadriel will rue the day he thought to mock me!” the Jesuit promised as he closed the door of Agafia’s apartment behind him and set out to meet Jarnvithja and Fen’ka under the Charles Bridge.

 

 

 

Father Dmitri and his four companions fled from the Astronomical Clock, where the Dearg-due had miraculously disappeared into the darkness with a final echoing shriek, but only after murderously feeding on Wilcox. After navigating the empty nighttime streets, they stood catching their breath in the comparative safety of the arcade beneath the Powder Tower. Fr. Dmitri, the Eastern Orthodox chaplain from Tennessee, looked at the others: his wife, Sophia, Magdalena’s friend Victoria, and the other two academics, Sean from Dublin and Theo from Oxford, who like Fr. Dmitri, were visiting Prague to attend the twin conferences on Evil and on Monsters.

Theo gasped. “What just happened there?”

“Evidently, my nephews in Ireland have vanquished the evil Dearg-due,” Sean answered. “Either they or my graduate student. We won this round!”

“But at the loss of Wilcox, Peter, and Alessandro!” Sophia burst out.

“But many more will be lost if we fail now,” Fr. Dmitri interjected. “We have only one hope of stopping the Dearg-due’s ally, George. We must reactivate the power of Prague’s Royal Road before he can destroy the magic protecting the Charles Bridge.”

“All right, this was your idea,” Theo told Fr. Dmitri. “What do you think is the best way to begin?”

 

 

George stepped out of Agafia’s building and hailed a taxi that took him back toward his hotel. Alighting from the taxi near the Little Town Square, he strolled down Bridge Street past the nearly empty restaurants and taverns. He followed the road underneath the bridge to the pool where he met Fen’ka’s ghost and the troll Jarnvithja the night before. The water, normally so tranquil in the pool, rushed and eddied as it poured into the alcove under the bridge and then rushed out again, leaving trails of foam on the surface that circled repeatedly as if caught in a whirlpool. The water level was much higher than it had been even the night before, let alone its usual early to mid-August level.

“There is almost no room for that boat to slide into the pool from under the bridge,” George observed. “Certainly not room for Jarnvithja to stand as she steers the boat with her pole. Will she even get through? Should we have selected an alternate meeting place?” he wondered. He stepped as close the water as he dared lest he be caught in the relentless grasp of the furious river and pulled into it. He looked about and allowed a quiet smile to bloom on his face. His plan was working with more efficiency and skill than he had dared hope.

Lights from a hotel behind him played across the surface of the water. The rush of the water made it impossible to hear the approach of Jarnvithja’s barge. George wondered how long he should wait before attempting to meet the troll at some other point along the river.

“I didn’t bring any of the tarot cards or dandelion with me,” he realized. How would he call Jarnvithja to a new meeting place? He had no choice but to wait for her there. At least it was nearly midnight on a Sunday evening and the streets seemed deserted. No one was coming or going from the hotel behind him. There were no sounds of footsteps on the bridge. There would be no witnesses to his reception of the great sword from Jarnvithja if she brought it to him as he had instructed.

He finally decided he had waited long enough and was turning to go when something caught his attention out of the corner of one eye. He paused and looked more closely across the water towards the massive stone pillars that supported the bridge.

There it was! The boat was sliding under the bridge into the stone-lined inlet. The cloaked and hooded figure of Jarnvithja sat alone in the back of the boat, where Fen’ka had sat before. There was no sign of Fen’ka anywhere in the boat. The troll’s gnarled and taloned hands grasped the bargepole and attempted to guide the boat through the surging current. George saw the boat sway and wobble in the river, buffeted by the conflicting currents. Jarnvithja finally brought the boat to rest at the edge of the swollen river, near where George was standing. The wooden bottom of the boat scraped against the stone paving where Magdalena must have stood when she first met the burned woman and her spectral escort.

Under the hood, Jarnvithja’s face was lost in shadow, though George could see her eyes glinting in the darkness. A handful of tangled hair tumbled out of the hood and down one shoulder, wet and glistening in the damp mist thrown up by the churning river.

“So. You’ve come.” It was a statement more than a question that George directed to Jarnvithja. The hood inclined as the troll slowly nodded.

“I was not sure you would come this evening,” George continued. “Or, I was not sure that you would be able to bring the boat to land here.” He gestured to the swollen river at his feet. The hood turned and bent as Jarnvithja seemed to inspect the water level. The hood’s movement eventually ceased and the troll seemed to fix her gaze on George once again.

“The athame of Prague,” George announced. “The sword of Bruncvik. You extracted it from the foundations of the bridge, yes? My breaking of the enchantment of the mortar was successful, was it not?” He could not keep the note of pride out of his voice. He had done what no one had been able to accomplish in the six hundred and fifty years since the construction of the bridge.

Jarnvithja nodded again. She pulled the bargepole out of the water and laid it down the length of the boat. A considerable portion of the pole extended out over the water from the prow. She then reached toward her feet, bringing her face nearly level with her knees. The swollen hunchback rose above her, wrapped in shadow and her dark cloak. Her talons scrabbled against the boards of the rowboat floor and then her shoulders stiffened and George thought he heard a grunt of effort. The hunchback shuddered and the giant troll woman sat upright again, raising her hands, in which she now grasped the great broadsword in its scabbard, extracted from the foundations of the bridge.

She held the sword upright, its great hilt resting against the knuckles of her hands. George caught his breath. The sword of Bruncvik, one of the four magical tools of Prague and one of the most powerful magic talismans of medieval Europe, was his to take. What power would be his to command once he held the sword? Had Fen’ka and Jarnvithja considered that? By taking possession of the sword, which together with his destabilizing of the magic of the bridge—which the presence of the sword, taken from its foundations, amply proved—he would be acclaimed one of the greatest Grand Masters of the ages. With the magic of the sword, he might even be able to hold death at bay and win immortality. That was more than he had dared to think when Gadriel had taunted him in Agafia’s apartment.

Jarnvithja was using both hands to hold the sword and it wobbled slightly. This ancient artifact was a material reality and no mere spectral or disembodied vision. It was clearly much heavier than anything she had been accustomed to holding aloft for a great many years. “How many years?” George wondered. “Probably for as many years as the river itself has flowed through this valley,” he decided.

He stepped toward the boat, the chill water rushing into his shoes and up his legs. He reached to take the sword from Jarnvithja, but in a single, swift motion, she laid the sword across her lap, causing him to nearly lose his balance and topple into the water as his hands closed on empty air. George glared at her and, cursing under his breath, closed his right hand around the scabbard, reaching for the hilt with his left. But Jarnvithja kept one hand on the hilt and another on the scabbard and refused to let the sword go.

“Do not toy with me, troll,” George warned her furiously. “I can walk away from this effort to revitalize Fen’ka’s curse as easily as not. If I leave you and that witch, who will come to her rescue again? No one knows as much about the magic of the bridge as I. That should be self-evident; when have you or the dead in the river whom you command ever before been able to extract the sword from the foundations? That proves that the magic of the bridge is crumbling, does it not? That means, for the first time since it was built, the bridge is vulnerable. So when the bridge is washed away in the coming flood, the full power and wrath of Svetovit will be unleashed against the city. Both he and Fen’ka will be forever in my debt. But if I walk away and refuse to set them and their power free, and you are to blame for having angered me, do you not think that they have ways to make your existence beneath the river more miserable than ever in the days to come?”

Jarnvithja’s hood remained steady, as if she were staring him in the eye and daring him to make good his threat. He stood there as well, the cold water crawling up his trousers, daring the troll to release the sword or see him turn away.

Then his patience snapped. “Very well. You think to wield the sword yourself? You think to be the one to set Fen’ka and her curse free with it? Hardly! You have no idea of how to wield the blade or harness its power. You can explain to both Fen’ka and Svetovit why you did not deliver the sword to me.” He hissed and turned, splashing water onto the cobblestones as he stepped out of the swollen river towards the hotel and the road above.

A clatter and a splash behind him caused George to look back over his shoulder despite his intention to walk away. Jarnvithja had taken the barge pole and plunged it into the water beside her boat. It stood, quivering, as if it were a great tree caught in a windstorm. She spread her arms, raising her hands from the sword as if to invite him to take the blade from her knees.

George paused. “I should send her back to face Fen’ka and Svetovit,” he thought, “and let them punish her for keeping AAthem trapped and fettered, powerless to vent their wrath against the city.” But he wanted to be acclaimed as one of the greatest Grand Masters of magic even more than he wanted revenge. He wanted to be known as the one who had overcome the magic of the Charles Bridge. He needed the sword in his hands to do that.

Did he trust Jarnvithja? Would she clasp her hands back onto the sword and refuse again to let him take it? Did she seriously think that she could be the great heroine to liberate Svetovit’s power from the constraints the bridge and the other magical tools of Prague had placed on his power? George plunged back through the water and reached for the sword on her lap.

More swiftly than he could have imagined, Jarnvithja reached over with one hand and seized the barge pole from where she had wedged it between the underwater cobblestones and swung it in a wide arc. The pole crashed onto the back of his head as the troll-woman’s other claw-like hand wrapped itself around his throat. The pain and surprise nearly blinded the Jesuit as the claw tightened. His feet slipped on the cobblestones and his arms flailed, momentarily useless as his mind struggled to understand what was happening.

The boat rocked and glided back over deeper water. The barge pole cracked against George’s skull again while Jarnvithja struggled to keep her grasp on his windpipe. The sword slipped off one of her knees and the point of the scabbard thudded against the bottom of the boat. George kicked against the sideboards and tried to push himself away from Jarnvithja, but her stranglehold was too tight.

She dropped the pole into the boat beside her and clutched the top of the sideboards to steady herself. George could no longer feel cobblestones beneath his feet and his lungs burned from lack of air. He stretched his hand toward the boat, hoping to reach something to use as a weapon to free himself. He kicked against the sideboards, causing the boat to rock wildly.

Even as his body fought to free himself, his mind fought to find a reason for Jarnvithja’s murderous attack. The lack of oxygen, the pain, the physical effort made it difficult to think, but suddenly he realized why.

“Troll! You are known to lure swimmers and others into the river and then kill them, adding to the armies of the dead that you command beneath the waves!” George gasped at her with what little breath he could manage. “You think… killing me… I will have no choice but to do your will—and that of Fen’ka and Svetovit!” His fingers scratched at the sideboards, but Jarnvithja’s reach was too long and kept him from getting hold of either the barge pole or the sword.

Jarnvithja continued to hold tightly onto the sideboards with one hand and George’s throat with the other. Although she held his head at nearly the same level as hers, they were both drenched with water kicked up from the river by their struggle. He tried to swing his legs into the boat and she swept her hand along the top of the sideboards, knocking his legs back into the water with a tremendous splash that surged over the sideboards and into the bottom of the barge.

A dark miasma hovered at the edge of his mind and it was an unavoidable temptation to consider simply slipping into the dizziness and letting the darkness consume him. With a last effort of thought and strength however, George reached for the sideboards and grabbed them with both hands. Pulling up his feet and bracing them against the boat, he flung himself backwards into the river, pulling the boat over on top of himself.

The move caught Jarnvithja by surprise. Unable to shift her weight quickly enough, the boat capsized and plunged the Jesuit and the troll into the cold water.

Jarnvithja now clutched at George’s neck with both hands. He heard the water roar in his ears. Clouds of frothy bubbles swirled about, engulfing them as the last remnants of air were forced from the folds of their clothes. George kicked at Jarnvithja, tangling his legs in her long, flowing cloak. He swept his arms through the water as he saw the contents of the boat—the barge pole and the sword—sinking through the waves beside him. He lunged toward the descending sword, dragging Jarnvithja along with him. His lungs were bursting with pain and—unable to stop himself—he gasped for breath underwater, swallowing the river instead of air. He knew he was dying.

But then he felt something falling past his hand and he curled his fingers around whatever it was, hoping to use it to strike back in some last futile gesture of defiance. If it was the barge pole, he would plunge it into Jarnvithja’s torso; if her body was as solid as her hands around his throat, then perhaps that would drive her off.

But it was not the barge pole. It was one of the leather straps hanging from the scabbard of the sword. He couldn’t so much see as feel the embossed decorative work on the leather. He pulled it, hugging the scabbard as it slowly came through the dark water towards him. He clutched the hilt of the sword and wrenched it free of the leatherwork containing it as he took one last, desperate gasp of river water into his lungs.

A shimmer of light reflected off the edge of the sword’s blade, even in the turbulent water. The sword slid out of its scabbard, exposing the length of the great blade. George pushed the leather straps of the scabbard up along one arm, looping it around his elbow and grasping the hilt with both hands. Then he swung the blade in a long arc directed at the troll’s midriff.

Jarnvithja’s hands sprang loose from George’s throat as she fell back into the water, away from the sword slicing its way towards her through the water. At the same moment, George coughed and sputtered and realized that he was breathing air and not inhaling more water. There was also a surge of something not unlike electricity in the water around him, a hum and thrill of power that heightened his senses and raised the hair on his arms and neck. The barge pole rested on the bottom of the river beside him. Jarnvithja’s cloak swirled and coagulated in the river, concealing her face and hands and any semblance of a person that might be hidden in the roiling cloth, which continued its retreat from him, back towards the main body of the river.

George’s head burst through the river’s surface, his body propelled upward by a thrust from below. He stumbled onto the cobblestones and stood there, gasping and coughing, leaning on the sword as its point dug into the mortar between the cobblestones. He turned to look back over the river, water running down his face and clothes, streaming back to the river it had come from. There was no sign of the overturned boat, no indication of the struggle that had just taken place beneath the waves. The current surged in from the river and back out again, just as it had while he had been waiting for Jarnvithja’s arrival.

George bent his neck and shook his head, scattering drops of river water from his brow like rain. The sword, whose magic was crafted to protect and defend, had done just that for him: protected and defended him from Jarnvithja’s terrible assault. As long as the sword had rested in the bridge’s foundations, it had lent its power to the bridge and supported its magical defense of Prague. But now the sword was in his hands. Now he would wield that magic to protect and defend himself. He had intended to use it to protect and defend Fen’ka and Svetovit, but now, whether they had conspired with Jarnvithja to drag him into the river and slay him or not, he would use it to demonstrate the superiority of his power over theirs. Even Svetovit would learn to obey George now, after the fulfillment of the curse that was an unavoidable aspect of Svetovit’s liberation.

“But it will be the last time Svetovit will act on his own behalf. They will all pay for the troll’s betrayal,” George snarled his promise to the night sky. “Svetovit. Gadriel. Fen’ka. Jarnvithja. They will all learn to serve, rather than expect to be served.”

 

 

Fr. Dmitri and his companions stood in the arcade beneath the Powder Tower at the end of the street running alongside Our Lady of Tyn.

“All right, this was your idea,” Theo told Fr. Dmitri. “What do you think is the best way to begin?”

Dmitri had clearly been thinking about this very question. “I think that we should begin with a circle of salt here, in the portico beneath the tower itself, but a circle that opens out onto the Royal Road,” he explained, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard. “Not a circle closed in on itself, but one that leads out through the gate onto the Royal Road through the Old Town, yes? We should also release the energy of the first tarot card here by lighting it in the circle after it is drawn. Then we can trace the route of the Royal Road, pouring a single line of salt out of the chalice and lighting the next few tarot cards as we go. At turns or intersections of the Royal Road would probably be best.” He paused and looked around the group. More murmurs of assent and nodding heads met him.

“What chalice?” Theo reminded them. “Magdalena has the chalice again. I threw it at the Dearg-due, remember? Magdalena took it, with the rabbi’s staff.”

“Then we shall simply have to pour the salt directly on the road,” Fr. Dmitri’s wife, Sophia, answered, running her fingers through her hair.

Victoria pulled the tarot deck and box of matches from between the canisters of salt and handed them to Fr. Dmitri, asking, “Which one do you think we should use first?”

He thumbed through the deck and set several cards nearly at right angles to the others. “These will be good to start with,” he announced, extracting the cards he had selected and returning the others to Victoria, who wedged them back into the bag.

“We should use them in numerical order,” he went on. “The ‘royal road’ of the cards begins with the Magician, so he should come at the beginning of the Royal Road of Prague as well.” He sorted the cards in his hand according to the Roman numerals printed on them and then put them into his pocket, keeping out only the card bearing the image and title of Magician.

“Theo, open a canister of salt, please,” he instructed as he creased the card and wedged it into the paving stones at his feet. “Victoria, shake the salt out and draw a circle around us. And draw the beginning of a line that leads from the circle out onto the street, along the Royal Road.”

Theo wedged his thumb into the small metallic spout of the first canister and gave it to Victoria. She began to walk around the five people at the base of the Powder Tower. She tipped the cardboard canister slightly, so that the salt fell in shimmering cascades to the ground. As she made the circle, the others held their breaths. The salt sparkled against the paving stones. Victoria approached her starting point and hesitated, looking back to the priest.

Fr. Dmitri, however, was busy with the card and matches. He had squatted down and pulled out a match, striking it against the side of the box. The tip flared as the flame burst into life. As he brought the match close to the card, the flame wavered and stretched toward the card, as if yearning to leap across to the image. Sophia held her breath, afraid the card would not burn. The fire hovered at the priest’s fingertips, and then it did seem to jump to the card. The flames flickered along the creased ridge of the card and then flowed out along the image, illuminating the anxious faces of the five watching it.

The face of the Magician on the card smiled at those watching, the four magical tools on the table before him—staff, chalice, sword, pentacle—seeming to grow larger as the flames spread and the card’s edges blackened and curled. For an instant, the card burned, shining like a star fallen to earth, and then the fire blinked out. A delicate, twisted snowflake of ash fluttered away.

Dmitri squatted a moment longer before attempting to rise to his feet. Sean reached out to help him when Sophia gasped and pointed to the air just above them, where the last wisps of smoke from the burning card still hovered. They all looked to where she pointed.

Incandescent colors slid through the air. “Just like the Northern Lights,” Theo muttered. “I gave a guest lecture once in Alaska,” he explained sheepishly. Colors danced and sprang around them, gradually coming together to make a three-dimensional translucent replica of the image on the card they had just burned. The figure of the Magician stood there, his hand raised in command or blessing. The four tools hovered there as well, faint but present. The flowers that had been depicted on the card bloomed in the air. The robes of the Magician stirred in the slight breeze and he seemed to be speaking, his lips moving slightly but no sound reaching the ears of those witnessing the vision. Then the colors brightened. The intensity of the lights flickered and the image slid back into a chaotic, undulating rainbow, which then dispersed into the night.

They took a collective breath again, awkwardly looking at each other even as a reverent silence descended on them. Sean finally pulled Dmitri to his feet. The priest shook himself and cleared his throat.

“We should take turns, yes?—pouring the salt,” he said gruffly, trying to hide the emotion in his voice. His wife gave him a sympathetic look.

Sean took a canister from the bag. “In Celtic practice, the chalice—or whatever is used to hold the salt—should be wielded by a woman.” He scratched his chin beneath his auburn beard, apparently debating which woman he should offer the canister of salt. He held it out and Victoria grasped it.

“You take it,” Victoria said, offering the canister to Sophia. Sophia took the cardboard container and held it as her husband would hold the Eucharistic chalice on Sunday. Theo and Sean took up the bags of additional salt canisters. Dmitri pulled the next tarot card from his pocket and the little procession set out down the Royal Road toward the heart of Prague.

Sophia tipped the container in her hands, scattering a thin but steady stream of salt onto the cobblestones. Some of the salt drifted to one side or the other, and none if it fell thickly enough to make a clear and discernable line down the road, but Dmitri knew they all felt the thrum, the gentle vibration of power and life that gently reverberated beneath their feet. They made their way slowly, so as not to scatter the salt in too dispersed a pattern. Sophia gave the salt container back to Victoria to carry as they passed the large windows of the crystal shops displaying delicate wineglasses and other sparkling Bohemian crystal. Sean and Theo took turns as well, alternating who carried the bags as the procession continued its quiet march.

They approached the first intersection of the Royal Road with a side street and paused. Fr. Dmitri found a crack in the mortar between the cobblestones and inserted the card, the High Priestess, so that it stood upright. He bent low and struck a match, holding it near the card. The scent of the striking match hung especially pungent in the air. Again the flame flickered and stretched from the match towards the card until it leapt onto the edge of the image. It glowed and then swept across the face of the card. Shadows shifted and danced on the walls around them. They looked up in expectation, caught between hoping for and fearing another vision.

The card withered in the flames. They held their breaths. No vision appeared. The fire of the burning card spurted up into an instant of intense life and then extinguished itself, the ash of the card falling down between the cobblestones.

 

 

Magdalena had come straight to George’s room, breathlessly knocking on the door and struggling to stop herself from pounding it down and causing a scene. She stood in the hallway clutching the staff and chalice, panting, knowing her brown hair was in disarray, until finally she heard the lock click and the door opened slightly. George peered into the hallway and then stood aside to admit her. He was wearing pajamas and holding a glass of wine.

“I met Elizabeth, just as you told me,” she told him, still clutching the staff and chalice as she sat on a formal chair next to the desk and he headed for an easy chair.

George nodded. “She showed you how to interrupt the magic of the Astronomical Clock and disrupt its balance, correct?” he asked.

“Yes, she did,” Magdalena hastened to agree. Unable to stop herself, the whole story of the events on the Old Town Square tumbled out of her mouth as George sat and calmly sipped his wine. She hardly paused in her urgent recounting until she reached the point at which Elizabeth had ordered her to bring the staff and chalice back to safety, sending her back to the bridge and her decision to come directly to George and tell him what had happened.

“What do you think happened next, George?” Magdalena asked at last. “Was Elizabeth safe there? Or did the professors from the conference find a way to send her back to Ireland? Is that why she insisted I leave her there? Because she knew she would not be coming back with me?”

He closed his eyes and tapped his glass against the arm of the chair, thinking as she sat, catching her breath after finishing her report. “I think I must agree with you,” he concluded at last, opening his eyes and sipping his wine again. “Elizabeth has been forcibly returned to Ireland, kidnapped by magic as it were, even if you did not witness her departure. Everything points to that. Fen’ka’s enemies have driven Elizabeth back into her grave and won this round of the struggle.” He looked intently at Magdalena. “Do you see how these men and their unwitting accomplices will stop at nothing to prevent us from clearing Fen’ka’s name? It is all the more important, therefore, that we redouble our efforts to clear her even as we take appropriate measures to protect and defend ourselves. Do you understand?”

Magdalena hastened to agree. “Yes, of course I do. We must. That much is obvious. It’s just…” She looked at George, pleading, feeling her eyes fill with tears. “You said we each had a role to play. Can we manage without… without Elizabeth to fulfill her role?” She let go of the chalice and it fell into her lap as she fumbled for a tissue from a pocket. “I miss her already, George. I miss Elizabeth.” She wiped her eyes and looked at him, biting her lower lip.

“Yes, I shall miss her as well,” the Jesuit master of black magic conceded. “As for her role, however… If you and she did as instructed tonight and the disruption of the clockworks was successful, her role will have been completed and her mission accomplished. That achieved, we are that much closer to the accomplishment of our final goal and Elizabeth would want—more than anything else, don’t you think?—that we hasten to complete the vindication of Fen’ka.”

Magdalena realized the truth of his words. “Yes. Yes, I see that. We cannot let her effort be in vain. We can clear Fen’ka, just the two of us, if we must. We shall!” A new resolve formed in her mind to continue and achieve the task she had been set, as well as having set herself.

George finished his wine and set aside the glass, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Now, it is important that you recall this as carefully as you can,” he instructed. “Who was in the group that met you in the Old Town Square? Who was involved in the plot to send Elizabeth back into her grave in Ireland?”

Magdalena thought carefully, picturing in her mind those who had interrupted her and Elizabeth’s magical work with the clock. “We were interrupted by… let me think… it was Theo. He threw the salt canisters at Elizabeth. Sean was also there. My friend, Victoria. Former friend,” she corrected. “Also that Orthodox priest, Father… Dmitri. And his wife, Sophia.” George looked up abruptly at the mention of Sophia.

“Hmm… troubling, that,” he muttered. “But Alessandro was not among them?”

“No,” Magdalena answered. She understood the difficulty. “We knew there were two people working to stop us—Sophia and Alessandro, who had been to the synagogue, asking to get into the attic—but only one was on the square tonight. Sophia. So where was Alessandro?”

“I know Elizabeth went to speak with him,” was all George said. “Perhaps she dissuaded him from joining their efforts to stop us.”

“Perhaps he provoked her,” Magdalena surmised. “She may have been driven to protect herself against Alessandro.” She shuddered, picturing the probable carnage if Elizabeth, the Dearg-due, had been forced to kill him. “But if so, he deserved the punishment.”

“Quite so. But I thought she also planned to speak with Sophia. I wonder, was she unable to keep the appointment?” George asked.

“Either dealing with Alessandro took longer than she expected, or she was unable to dissuade Sophia,” Magdalena decided. “But it seems Sophia has drawn others into her effort to keep Fen’ka’s name darkened by false accusations of witchcraft. She must think that Svetovit and the other spirits Fen’ka invoked during her life were the demons and devils the Christians claim. How naïve!” She congratulated herself on her own sophistication.

“Our enemies are becoming desperate, Magdalena,” George warned her. “Perhaps that is why Sophia has gotten others involved in this struggle. Or, more likely, she has become a pawn in the hand of her husband, Dmitri. He must realize that he cannot stop us in the short time that remains. The noose around the throats of Fen’ka’s enemies grows tighter and he knows he needs help. Their time grows short.”

“How short? How is the noose growing tighter?” Magdalena pressed him. “Because we are gathering the four magical tools?”

“In part,” George agreed. “We have the rabbi’s staff and Bruncvik’s sword, and we have disabled the Astronomical Clock. But recall the invocation of justice and judgment we performed together? How we spilled the dregs of the spiced wine and the burning charcoal onto the streets of the city?”

“Yes.” That had been an amazing experience that Magdalena would never forget.

“You told me you warned the doorkeepers at the synagogue that a tremendous flood was coming to Prague and that the cultural artifacts in the attic needed to be preserved, correct?” he went on.

“Yes. I did. How are those connected?” Magdalena wondered.

“Justice is coming inexorably, Magdalena. Fen’ka’s enemies, our enemies, know this. They know that justice is coming. They will stop at nothing to prevent that. There is a flood coming, Magdalena, a flood that they have summoned. The coming flood is part of their efforts to keep Fen’ka imprisoned by the past,” George explained. “The magic of the Charles Bridge, built by those who murdered Fen’ka to protect themselves from her wrath, has been shaken and is crumbling. But they have taken advantage of this and created a flood, a flood that is coming to wash away not only the bridge but much of the city as well.”

“They created this flood?” exclaimed Magdalena. Fear and anger bubbled up within her.

“They created the situation that makes the flood possible,” George told her. “Their invocations against Fen’ka—and those, like us, who support her—must have been extremely powerful, invoking powers and magic rarely invoked. It takes time for judgment such as you and I invoked to come to fruition, but it will. In order to prevent that, our opponents made their own invocations, and for those counter-invocations to be successful, the weather conditions had to shift. Their counter-invocation must therefore have reached backwards, as well as forward, to accomplish its work. Their magic reached the atmosphere and back into the early summer to make this flood possible.” He paused, regarding Magdalena speculatively.

“Apparently, Dmitri and the others will do anything they can to stop us,” George warned her. “So it seems we must fight fire with fire,” he said at last. “Now that we know who is working to hinder us, we can more directly protect ourselves and further our efforts to vindicate Fen’ka.”

“What should we do? How do we prevent them from flooding the city?” fretted Magdalena. “How can we stop so many people who oppose us?”

“It will take thought. Much thought,” George agreed. “Their strategy is devious, cunning. Let me consider the possibilities overnight. Meet me downstairs in the morning and we can discuss possible responses as we walk to the conference.”

She stood, understanding that she was being dismissed by the master. “Shall I leave the staff with you, then?”

George reflected on this before answering. “For the time being, I think that would be best. Leave the staff here. Take your chalice home, though. I doubt our enemies will dare try to enter your apartment again. But you should protect yourself, Magdalena.” He went to his luggage and rummaged about in it, pulling something out and returning to Magdalena at the door.

“Take this,” he told her. “Hang it in your apartment, near the door or windows. It will keep unwelcome intruders out.” He leaned toward her and she offered her cheek for a kiss. Then she was in the hallway, George closing the door behind her.

She looked at the object in her hand. It was a medal of the Infant of Prague.

 

 

“What is wrong?” asked Victoria. “Where is the High Priestess?” She searched for the vision she had hoped to see.

“I’m not sure.” Dmitri stood. “Perhaps because we are further along the Royal Road and not at the beginning? Could that be the difference?”

“Does the missing vision mean the power of the card was not released?” asked Sophia.

“Hard to say,” Sean replied, though Victoria knew she had been asking the group and not any one person.

“Or perhaps because the other was burned in the circle of salt at the Powder Tower,” suggested Theo. “Let’s try the next card here as well, but first make a circle of salt around it.”

“I am sorry to have wasted the High Priestess card and lost its power, but I think you are correct, Theo,” Dmitri told him. “We should burn the next card here as well, within the circle of salt.” He took the next card, the Empress, from his pocket and placed it upright between the cobblestones, as he had the previous card. He looked to Victoria and gestured around them.

Victoria turned to Sophia, saying, “I made the last circle. You should make this one.” With a nod of gratitude, Sophia drizzled out the salt as she walked in a small circle around the others, huddled around the card. As she completed the circle, her husband struck another match and lit the card of the Empress.

More quickly than either of the previous cards, the fire rushed to embrace the card and consume it. The cardboard image blackened and disappeared beneath the growing puddle of soot across its face. The fragments of ash burst into the air as if shot by a cannon. Along with the others’, Victoria’s head jerked up and back, following the flight of the ash with their eyes.

Two great writhing, rippling serpentine ribbons of rainbow light materialized above them. The colors flared and faded, pooling together and then pulling back from each other like waves retreating from the shore, only to rush back in again. Embracing like lovers, the ribbons of light rose in a column and then burst into a fountain of tumbling stars that showered down toward the earth but then, as if caught in some powerful updraft, the stars swung up toward the sky again.

In the midst of the fireworks, two images appeared, facing each other. Both were women, of regal bearing and immense authority, who sat on a throne. One was arrayed in a great, flowing robe and veil and held a scroll on her lap. A strange, horned cap rested on her brow. Her expression was serene, her eyes solemn. A crescent moon was caught in the folds of her cloak around her feet.

Facing her, the other woman was resting on the pillows of an ornate divan. Wreaths of stars and ivy crowned her brow and she held a scepter in one hand. Free-flowing locks cascaded down her shoulders. Sheaves of golden wheat rustled around her feet and a multitude of flowers adorned her gown. She seemed about to laugh.

The two women hovered above them a moment, gazing at each other. They nodded to each other, as if recognizing each other after a long absence, and then turned their attention to the people on the ground. The woman with the scepter extended her free hand toward the earth. The woman with the scroll lifted a finger toward the five gathered around the burnt cards as she arched an eyebrow. Then both images blurred and faded into the night.

No one spoke. No one dared to breathe. Quiet and confidence suffused them. Finally Victoria spoke the words that articulated what they must have all realized. “That was the High Priestess facing the Empress, was it not? They were both here.”

“Which was which?” asked Sophia.

“The woman with the scroll was the High Priestess.” Victoria was happy to have an opportunity to contribute what she could to the skills and knowledge of these academics who had spent their professional lives studying, if at arm’s length, the magic they were all engaged in now. “She with the crown of stars was the Empress.” They continued to stare in the air where the women had sat on their thrones.

Dmitri shook himself. “We shall continue, yes?” he asked at last. “We do have a task at hand to complete,” he reminded them. The others nodded. As they set out down the Royal Road, Sophia sprinkled the precious white crystals onto the roadway.

The street curved gently as it led them back toward the Old Town Square but there were no intersections to cross or sharp turns in the road. Sophia and Victoria took turns pouring salt onto the road, the men taking turns carrying the bags.

“Wait a moment!” exclaimed Sean. “This building. This building here!” He pointed to a building on their right with a broad, gently arched doorway. A small plaque identified it with two numbers, one red and one blue. “When Hron led us on the tour of the Old Town our first evening here, he pointed this out as the residence of a Queen Eliška, related somehow to the Queen Judith who built the first bridge over the river. The Charles Bridge was built to replace the Judith Bridge, didn’t Hron say? If George’s intent is to wash away the Charles Bridge with a flood, wouldn’t this be a good place to release the power of the next tarot card?”

Dmitri looked at the building and then up and down the length of the road they had come. “It has been quite a distance since we burned the cards of the High Priestess and the Empress. It seems we should burn another one along this portion of the road and yes, this does seem an appropriate place to do so, given its association with the construction of the bridges.”

He took several cards out of his pocket and selected the card numbered ‘IV,’ putting the others back into his pocket. He bent over and found a crack in a cobblestone to insert the card of the Emperor. Victoria, who was holding the salt at that point, traced the circle of salt around them as Dmitri struck the match and held it to the card.

This time it was the card that seemed to yearn for the flame, as it fell toward the match in Dmitri’s fingers. The fire struck the image and quickly ate a hole where the face of the emperor had been. The soot-edged hole grew and consumed the card from the center outward, the fragmentary frame of ash collapsing into the void that had been the image.

The quivering rainbow appeared once again as the power of the card was released to join the regenerated power of the Royal Road. The image of the Emperor shimmered into sight above them, a stern-faced man garbed in the folds of a thick cloak who sat on a massive throne of carved stone. A jeweled crown glittered on his brow, sparkling in the light of the rainbow that circled him in imitation of the salt encircling the people on the ground.

The Emperor reached out a hand toward the residence of the queen and then gestured up and down the street. The rainbow whirled about him in its dizzying dance, bursting into shards of multicolored light, which skipped along the length of the street as stones might skip along the surface of a lake. The image hung above them a moment longer and then also shattered into explosions of fireworks, the sparks fluttering towards the street but fading from sight before touching the earth.

Sean was the first to break the awe-filled silence that followed. He sighed loudly and coughed to clear his throat.

The procession began its progress along the Royal Road again, the salt gently falling toward the cobblestones. The vibration of power beneath Victoria’s feet had become unmistakable when the street widened and melted into the expanse of the Old Town Square. Now it burst out of its constrained channel of the street and flooded into the cobblestones of the Old Town Square. Tiny stars and rivulets of light coursed through the air above the street and out into the square. A distant rumble filled the air. Was it the power of the Road she heard or the roar of the near-flood stage river not far away?

The path of the Royal Road led across the Old Town Square. The group stepped into the center of the Old Town, everyone reluctantly moving toward the body of their friend Wilcox and the Astronomical Clock opposite that marked the continuation of the Royal Road out of the square as it made its way toward the castle. From where they stood, Victoria could even see the illuminated prison tower at the corner of the castle, said to be haunted by the ghost of the knight named Dalibor.

 

 

Magdalena had to do something. She did not know what had brought the academics to the base of the Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square, but they had hurt Elizabeth, the Dearg-due, there. George thought they had even discovered a way to send Elizabeth back to her grave in Ireland.

They were still in the Old Town somewhere, doing something to thwart Magdalena’s effort to undo the miscarriage of justice that had led to Fen’ka’s execution. They were trying to stop Magdalena from stripping away the lies that had killed Fen’ka and still maintained the corrupt power structures of the modern world. She couldn’t be as calm about the academics tonight as George seemed to be. She had to do something. She had to avenge her friend Elizabeth. She had to do something to stop them and avert the flood they were bringing towards Prague.

First, she rushed out into her small back garden and gathered a few handfuls of the stalks and blossoms that grew there in haphazard fashion. Not sure what she was picking in the dark, she knew from her months of study before the conferences that all of these would have some magical effect. Then, in too much of a hurry to turn on the kitchen light, she dropped them onto the kitchen table and rummaged through her kitchen drawers in the half-light coming from the living room. She found a green candle stub, not as large as the one she had been looking for, but it would do. She lit it at the stove and fixed it to the charred wooden tabletop with a drop of hot wax. Then she took her ritual dagger—her athame—and first traced a triangle pointing north around the candle and then a circle around the triangle, much like she had done that night last spring, so long ago, when she had conjured the two spirits in her garden.

Then she lay the athame aside and sat down at the table, also facing north. She placed her palms down on the tabletop, on each side of the circle she had traced in the surface of the table. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

“Breathe slowly and deeply,” she instructed herself quietly. “Like the meditation books instruct. Slowly and deeply.” She felt her pulse slow a bit and the quiet of her steady breathing spread throughout her body. When she felt the quiet tickle the periphery of her consciousness, she opened her eyes.

Nothing in the semi-darkness of the kitchen seemed to have changed. The flame atop the candle burned like a small star and cast dancing shadows around Magdalena whenever an occasional breeze wafted through the side window. She stared at the candle, though, her eyes unable to see anything clearly in the flickering shadows and darkness of the room. Her pupils grew large and round as she focused only on the candle’s flame and the rest of the room fell away from her consciousness. She was much more aware of herself there in the shadows than she had ever been in the light. She felt the tabletop beneath her palms, felt each of the tiny pricks on her hands from the rough, burnt splinters, but was aware of little else. She heard the sound of her own steady breathing and noticed it had become even slower.

She stared into the candlelight, seeing the dirty smudge of the wick at the heart of the flame. The flame dipped and wavered, then grew steady and elongated as its tip reached upward, ever upward, and the flame itself stretched and narrowed. There was a breath of a breeze and the flame severed into a pitchfork of flame, its three tines struggling to remain erect, before it melted back together into one steady point of fire.

Deep within the flame was a shimmer as colors shifted and rearranged themselves to become a vision. Magdalena saw the Old Town Square. Or at least a previous version of the Old Town Square. There were the churches and the Old Town Hall with its squat square tower and façades of buildings that looked much as they did today but were different in some fashion Magdalena could not easily identify. There was a woman tied to a stake in the Old Town Square in the heart of a fire. The woman seemed angry and defiant, proud and furious. But then she seemed to cough and choke, and her face fell forward and the fire rushed up to consume her. Magdalena wanted to look away in horror and disgust but could not tear her eyes from the fiery vision.

“Fen’ka!” Magdalena whispered in amazement, recognizing the woman at the stake.

The colors in the candle’s flame shimmered and shifted again, resolving again into the Old Town Square, but this time a small group of people was emerging from beside the Tyn church into the square. She could see the Astronomical Clock as well, and the Hus memorial built over the place where Fen’ka had been tied to the stake in the first vision. Magdalena leaned forward and peered as close as she could into the flame. She saw the academics approach the Astronomical Clock. One of them seemed to be sprinkling something onto the cobblestones.

Without taking her eyes from the fire, she reached with one hand for the pile of stalks and petals on the table. Clutching one, she pulled it from the pile and held it out. The bent and crumpled leaves of the stalk shriveled as it sucked darkness into itself from the candle’s wick. A thin line of smoke curled into the air. Then Magdalena dropped what she realized was a dandelion across the candle wick, where the fire ballooned out around the stalk only to then rush in and consume the plant offering. Ash coalesced where the stalk had been consumed, wrapped around the candle’s wick, and then either fluttered away or dropped onto the table. Magdalena wasn’t sure. She only knew that the dandelion was gone.

Continuing to peer into the fire and seeing the small figures slowly making their way toward the Astronomical Clock, Magdalena reached again toward the botanicals plucked from the garden. She found a few sprigs of woodruff between her fingertips and set them carefully in the soft wax atop the candle. Immediately, they caught fire and shriveled in the flame. A sweet fragrance hovered momentarily in the air to tickle Magdalena’s nose and then faded away.

 

 

George sat at the desk in his hotel room, congratulating himself again on how easily he had beguiled Magdalena and calmed her fears. But the news she had brought him was disturbing. Sophia had survived Elizabeth’s attack. Additional academics had gathered to thwart him and his plans. He left his drink unfinished on the dresser and went down to the front desk to ask the clerk for a small candle or votive light.

“I am sorry, sir,” the young, pimple-faced clerk on duty answered. “No candles are allowed in the rooms due to the threat of fire. The streets here in the Little Town are narrow and fire trucks would have a difficult time reaching us if a fire were to break out. Perhaps you heard of the fire in Lisbon that destroyed the Chiado, the medieval quarter of the city, in 1988? The entire area burned because no fire trucks could navigate the narrow, twisting streets. Surely you can appreciate our difficulty.”

George shook his head at the clerk, who was hardly more than an adolescent. “I can appreciate the difficulty, but surely you can appreciate my difficulty as well. I am a Jesuit, after all, as you may recall from seeing me in my collar earlier. I still must read my evening prayers and I find a candle burning in front of my crucifix a necessary aid to my concentration. Surely you could find one small candle?”

“Well, yes, Father… I can appreciate the aid of a candle in your prayers,” the clerk stammered. “But I am not sure where I would find one… We do not keep such items at the front desk.” The young man bit his lip. His eyes darted around the lobby behind George.

The clerk snapped his fingers. “I know, Father!” he exclaimed. “I know just where to find a candle for you!” He bolted from the front desk into the darkened breakfast room across the lobby. He returned a moment later with a tea light, which he placed in George’s outstretched palm.

“The kitchen staff always set them out beneath the aluminum trays in the evening when they prepare the dining room for breakfast,” the clerk explained, winking. “That way they only need to put the eggs and sausage in the trays and light the tea lights to keep the food warm. They will never miss one!”

Back in his room, the tea light burned on the desktop. He traced a small circle around the candle and set out the prescription vials filled with herbs associated with malevolent magic that Elizabeth had seen him use the night before during their preparations to poison the magic of the Charles Bridge.

George sat quietly, breathing slowly and deeply, staring into the candle flame. He saw images and colors shift and dip, curl and twist, resolving into figures and then unraveling again. He saw Magdalena staring into the candle in her kitchen and he saw the people in the Old Town Square that she saw in her own candle’s flame. He saw her take the botanicals she had gathered from her garden and burn them in the flame.

“Ah, she cannot hope to accomplish this on her own,” he muttered. “Good that she wants to strike back, to defend her city—she thinks!—and avenge Elizabeth. But she does not have the skill needed to do this.” As he shaped the words with his lips, he reached for one of the bottles of herbs without taking his eyes from the vision in the candlelight. He dipped his tiny spoon into the vial of pennyroyal oil and then dripped the oil into the tea light, next to the burning wick. In a moment, the oil, associated with fire by the medieval alchemists, had been consumed by the fire and its magic added to that Magdalena was attempting in her kitchen.

 

 

The path of the Royal Road led across the Old Town Square. In the center of the Old Town, Victoria and the academics moved toward the Astronomical Clock opposite them, which marked the continuation of the Royal Road out of the square as it made its way toward the castle on the opposite side of the river. The clock also marked their recent encounter with Magdalena and the Dearg-due. Magdalena had been sent away with the chalice and the rabbi’s staff by the Dearg-due, but the Irish undead had seemingly been returned to her grave in Ireland just as she had been about to kill them all. Even so, she had killed one of their small group, and Wilcox’s mangled corpse still lay in the shadows of the alleyway across from the Clock.

Sophia, pouring the salt from the canister, paused and looked around the dark square that had once served as the most important market of Central Europe.

“Something is wrong,” she announced to the others. “Something is very wrong. I can feel it. Do you feel it?”

Victoria, Sean, Theo, and Fr. Dmitri all stopped as well and examined the dark square.

“Something does seem amiss,” Theo agreed. “Everything seems calm and still, but…”

“You mean, everything except for poor Wilcox over there?” Sean nodded toward the body of their friend. “We should do this part quickly before someone else comes along and discovers the body. If an alarm is raised and we are anywhere in the vicinity, the authorities will want to know why we did not raise the alarm ourselves.”

“Sean is right,” Fr. Dmitri agreed. “At the very least, the authorities could ask difficult questions about why we are all here in the middle of the night and did nothing. Or they may suspect us of… harming Wilcox ourselves. We must hurry.”

“Wilcox would have wanted us to do so,” Theo agreed. “We should burn the next card here and move along.” He pointed to a spot on the cobblestones a few steps ahead of them.

“Wait,” Victoria objected. “What is that smell?” A pungent, sweet smell suddenly engulfed them. “Is this something more about the Dearg-due?” she wanted to know. “Is there more mischief she can still cause us?”

 

 

Magdalena, eager to see what would happen now to the figures in the fire, saw that they had paused midway across the square. She pursed her lips and slowly exhaled, causing the candle flame to dance wildly.

 

 

The smell hung in the air around them in the Old Town Square.

“Is this something more about the Dearg-due?” Sean repeated Victoria’s question. “I do not know. I don’t think so. If the cairn was erected atop her grave in Waterford, I do not see how she could manage to harm us here again. But…”

“Look!” Sophia pointed toward the Hus memorial across the square. “The memorial! Do you see it?”

Victoria turned with the others.

“See what?” Theo asked. “I don’t see…”

Before he could finish his sentence, a blue spectral fire burst from the base of the Jan Hus memorial. It roared and rose around the memorial as if to consume the statuary in the conflagration. Shades of blue and white rippled through the ghostly fire. The flames swirled and danced, rising higher and roaring louder. Heat radiated across the square and they all stumbled back as the heat collided with them.

“What caused that? Where did it come from?” Victoria cried. “What can we do now?”

No one answered her as they stared in fascination at the roaring bonfire.

Without warning, the fire swept out in a line across the square, much as earthly fire might ignite a trail of gunpowder. It rushed toward the three academics, who all scattered away from its reach. The sheet of flames divided into several rivulets of fire, each taller than a man and snaking after them, as if each were a living thing hunting each of the professors.

Sophia threw the canister of salt in her hand at the fire, but the fire only licked it up and continued undaunted. Victoria grabbed Sophia by the hand and pulled the priest’s wife away from the racing flames. The women screamed as they ran, not watching where they were going. They only knew they wanted to get away from the pursuit of the fire. They could feel the unendurable heat of the fire bearing down on them.

 

 

Magdalena, in her kitchen, saw the blue ghost-fire erupt across the square and chase down the scattered academics. She stared in fascination at what she must have caused.

 

 

Fr. Dmitri did not know which way to run. The fire whipped across the square so quickly it was nearly upon him before he had a chance to move. Where had the others gone? Were they safe? Was his wife safe? He could hear the women screaming but did not know what that meant.

 

 

Magdalena exhaled another long, slow breath as she sat at her table, examining her thoughts and wishes. The candle flame dipped and swayed.

“I caused the ghost-fire?” she asked herself. “Do I want them hurt by the fire? Or did I only want them stopped?” she wondered. “But they hurt Elizabeth. They killed her again, just as her husband beat her to death three hundred years ago! Is hurting them the only way to stop them? Is that what I want?”

 

 

Theo found himself running toward the Astronomical Clock. The sheet of flame pursuing him swept around as if to encircle him and he veered toward the body of Wilcox, managing to dart through a gap in the blue-white flames before the circle closed him in entirely.

He glanced at the torn and bloody body of his friend as he ran, gasping for breath.

“Now is the time, old friend,” he whispered to the corpse. “If there is anything you can do from the other side, do it now!”

 

 

In his hotel room, George saw the ghostly fire as well and knew he had caused it, not Magdalena. A sly grin crept across his face. “It is not enough for them to be frightened.” He chuckled. The chuckle became a quiet snarl. “They must be stopped!”

He reached for another prescription bottle and extracted a few tendrils that he added to his tea light, careful to hold his breath as the fire reduced the slivers of poisonous mushroom to ash.

 

 

Theo tripped on a cobblestone and fell, knocking his chin against a manhole cover. The salt canisters in the shopping bag he carried spilled across the alleyway. His lungs felt as if they were on fire. He rolled onto his back, ready to kick at the approaching flames, as if that might stop them. The fire paused and wavered, as if searching for him, and then, seemingly picking up his scent, it raced toward him again.

The fire touched Wilcox’s body and suddenly Wilcox was there, standing beside his own corpse. The standing Wilcox seemed to be wounded in the same way the corpse had been wounded, but he was standing nevertheless.

“Wilcox?” croaked Theo. “Is that you?”

Wilcox looked at Theo still sprawled on his back and nodded.

Then he was gone.

 

 

Sean found himself trapped in the arcades along the façade of Our Lady of Tyn. The flames swept along the length of the façade and around each end of the series of vaulted arches, enclosing the Dublin professor in a tunnel of stone and fire.

Sweat drenched his clothes. The heat was suffocating. He looked from one end of the arcade to the other. “Dare I try to run through?” he asked himself. “Might it part around me if I clutch the Infant of Prague medal in my fist?” He had seen Sophia throw the salt at it to no effect, so the shopping bag of salt canisters he grasped in one hand would be of no use. He searched his pockets with his other hand, trying to find the religious medal that had shown them the real Dearg-due beneath the mask of Elizabeth’s face.

The heat became more intense. It was difficult to breathe. He had to get out.

“Is it waiting for me?” He looked all along the wall of fire, crackling and roaring. “It seems so… conscious, somehow. Should I chance it even without the medal and try to run through?” He bit his lip to steel himself for his attempt at escape.

“Five, four, three,” he counted down under his breath, rocking from foot to foot like an Olympic runner. “Two…”

The fire rushed towards him and Sean cried out, dropping the shopping bag and throwing up his hands as he fell back against the centuries’ old stone wall behind him. Then Wilcox was in front of him, facing the fire with his own arms spread wide.

The fire fell upon Wilcox, and Sean wasn’t sure if the roar in his ears was the fire or Wilcox crying out. The heat was unbearable. Sean gasped for breath and his lungs felt as if they were being seared by the hot air he was gulping. Wilcox kept standing with his arms open, as though he could embrace all the flames as they bore down on Sean. Even though the fire produced no smoke, it was hard for Sean to see. His eyes filled with tears.

“The heat, the heat…” he whimpered. “Wilcox, you’ve been killed! What are you doing here?”

Wilcox either didn’t hear him or was ignoring him. Leaning forward, he did seem to be struggling to contain the flames and hug them to himself. The fire kept pouring in through the arcade at Sean and Wilcox. It kept coming and Wilcox kept struggling to embrace it, absorb it, contain it within his arms.

Sean felt his knees buckle. He was dizzy with the heat and lack of air to breathe.

Wilcox was still there, fighting to crush the fire into his chest. Then his arms collapsed around his torso and the fire winked out.

Sean fell to his side, gasping and choking, gulping in the cool, fresh air of the night.

 

 

As quickly as Wilcox had vanished, he was again standing over Theo as the fire lunged at the Englishman down on his back. The fire howled and crackled, sparks popping and flying as the lash of fire hurtled into Wilcox’s open palms. He held the fire as if it were a large swirling beach ball, the flaming sphere growing larger and hotter and brighter as the mass of flames threw themselves at the dead professor. Theo saw Wilcox fighting to press his palms together as if to crush the fire between them. He could hear Wilcox grunt and gasp and struggle to keep the fire from exploding from between his fingers.

Then with one last, great effort, Wilcox pressed his palms together and both he and the fire were gone.

 

 

George couldn’t believe what he was seeing in the flame-vision of his candle. Something—he couldn’t see what—was extinguishing each arm of the ghostly fire as it bore down on each of the academics.

“I have to stop whatever assistance they have called,” he realized. “What can best reinforce the power of the fire?” He glanced at his yellow vials on the desktop. Picking one, he extracted a few crumbs of oleander leaves and petals, which he fed to the candle flame.

 

 

Fr. Dmitri ran as quickly as he could, certain the fire would catch him before he could find refuge near the Saint Nicholas’ Church across the square. Looking down, he realized he was treading on the mosaic crosses that marked the execution site of the Protestant nobility along one side of the Old Town Hall. The fire swept up behind and around him and he was caught against the wall of the Old Town Hall, the fire pausing in a ring around the outermost of the mosaic crosses.

“Bogoroditsa, spasi nas!” the priest gasped, crossing himself.

Then a man stood there, his back to Fr. Dmitri as he faced the fire with outstretched arms.

“Wilcox?” The priest was not sure he could trust his eyes. He raised his hands to shield his face from the blistering heat.

There was a roar and crackle as the fire leaped higher, the heat rippling across the priest’s body. It felt unbearable. He crossed himself again and sank to his knees, burying his face in his hands.

The flames popped and crackled. He could hear a man grunting and wheezing, gasping for breath as if in the midst of a great physical struggle. He did not dare take his hands away from his face and thought his knuckles must be blistering in the inferno. His lungs felt seared.

“Get down!” a distant voice cried in some corner of the priest’s mind. He had dim memories of a fire drill in his grade school, when the students had been instructed to keep their faces near the floor if trapped in a fire because that was where the cooler air could be found.

Fr. Dmitri fell forward and held his breath, pressing his face against the mosaic crosses and cobblestones. Tarot cards tumbled from his pockets and scattered around him. The rough stones scraped his cheek and knuckles. He wanted to weep but bit his lip, afraid to take the deep breath that was inevitable if he started to cry. Was the air really any cooler or safer to breathe here next to the cobblestones?

Unable to hold his breath any longer, he gasped and feared for the worst. The nightmarish heat surged into his lungs but even as it did so, it also surged over and across his back and up the wall behind him and was gone.

Did he dare lift his head? He tilted his face just a bit and peered through his fingers.

The wild conflagration and the man who might have been the dead Wilcox had both vanished.

 

 

Sophia and Victoria, hand in hand, were running as quickly as they could away from the flames. Their screams gave way to labored breathing and panting. Afraid to pause and look around, Sophia was unsure if they were running back down the Royal Road they had just come from or down some other lane leading away from the Old Town Square. The heat on her back was intolerable. Blue and white flickered on the edges of her vision, ghostly firelight reflected in the store windows as they passed.

Unable to breathe and unable to keep running, Sophia pulled her hand from Victoria’s and bent double, clutching her knees and gasping for breath. Pain knifed through her ribs. Victoria stumbled to a halt and reached for the Sophia’s shoulders.

“Sophia!” cried the younger woman, trying to pull Sophia forward. “Do not stop! Come with me!” She glance fearfully behind them and Sophia too sensed the wall of blue-white fire rising high behind them and sweeping around them. Unimaginable heat engulfed them. White-hot sparks snapped at them.

“Is this how we die also?” whimpered Victoria, bending over and burying her face against Sophia’s shoulder.

A dark figure, the blurry silhouette of a man, seemed to materialize against the bright flames.

Clutching each other, Sophia struggled with Victoria to stand erect. Sophia nodded toward the figure, dark against the flames. Victoria peered in that direction. The figure seemed to be leaning forward, pressing both palms against the wall of fire as if to push it back. It was impossible to tell for sure, from where they stood, but the shadow-man seemed to be holding the fire at bay. Maybe he was even pushing it back a little. But the fire encircled them and burned all the hotter and more brightly around them for being held back.

Sweat stung Sophia’s eyes, making it more difficult to see. She felt the rage of the fire on her back. Victoria turned her head back toward her, eyes squeezed closed, and pressed her forehead against Sophia’s shoulder again.

Sophia glanced up at the heavens, squinting against the brilliance of the flames, hoping for help or inspiration. “How do we help him hold back the fire? How do we drive back the flames?” she asked the night sky. The walls of flame high above them seemed to lean towards each other, fingers of flame reaching out as if to crush the women and the shadow-man in the grasp of the bonfire.

Victoria, her eyes still pressed tightly shut, screamed again.

 

 

Fr. Dmitri slowly gathered the tarot cards from the cobblestones around him and stood. Breathing deeply of the fresh air that now surrounded him instead of flames, he stumbled forward and realized Theo and Sean, bringing their bags of salt canisters, were also converging on the center of the square.

“Where is Sophia? Did you see which way they went?” the priest asked the other men.

“No,” Sean answered. “It was all too fast.” Theo shook his head.

Dmitri turned anxiously, searching the square for some sign or hint of where his wife and Victoria had run. “Wilcox…?” he began.

“Yes,” Sean agreed. “Wilcox stopped the flames.”

“Do you think he has stopped the flames for Sophia and Victoria as well?” Fr. Dmitri was frantic. “But how could he? The flames were growing stronger… we must do something to help him!”

“How can we, if we don’t even know where they are?” Sean asked, his own fear for the women coloring his voice.

“There.” Theo pointed at the base of the Hus memorial. “The fire came from there. If we could do something to extinguish it at its source…”

A woman’s cry rang out from a lane near the Tyn church.

“Sophia!” cried Fr. Dmitri.

Dropping the shopping bags of salt canisters, Theo and Sean ran off toward the Tyn church.

But the priest knew he would never get to the women as quickly as the younger, fitter men. He had to do something to stop the fire. Now.

He hurried to the Hus memorial, where a thin line of the spectral fire continued to burn around the base, and dropped the tarot cards onto a bench. He quickly rummaged through them, chose one, and picked it up. Stepping over the low chain that served as token security around the memorial, he laid the Star card at the base of the statuary.

 

 

Sophia bit her lip. The fire was blisteringly hot. The roar of the inferno and Victoria’s screaming made it impossible to hear anything else. She wiped her eyes with one hand and for a moment the shadow-man flickered as if about to vanish.

 

 

Theo turned down the lane he thought the scream had come from. Sean was following right behind and nearly stumbled down onto the cobblestones when Theo suddenly stopped. The fire was raging before them, its roar filling the alleyway and its shimmering blue and white flames reflecting off all the windows of the stores on either side. Heat rolled off the immense bonfire in great waves and Theo instinctively raised a hand in front of his face for protection.

Within the depths of the translucent, brilliant flames they could see two blurry, indistinct forms huddled together.

“Victoria! Sophia!” Sean called out.

Closer to Theo and Sean, but still within the circle of fire, was a third figure that could only be Wilcox. Against the brilliant light of the fire, it was hard to make out anything more than the dark outline of the dead professor, whose throat had been torn out by the Dearg-due. He was leaning forward and pressing his palms against the wall of fire as if to push it back. He was struggling, his feet slipping on the cobblestones. He twisted slightly, pressing one shoulder against the flames.

“Wilcox… how can we help?” Theo called to their friend.

Wilcox, his feet slipping and sliding, turned his face toward Theo. But then the fire crackled and burned even more hotly, more brilliantly, and the silhouette that was Wilcox withered like a dry leaf in a campfire. Twisting up like a feather of ash, the shadow-man Wilcox shriveled and vanished.

The flames roared in triumph and swept in to consume the women at the heart of the blaze.

“NO!” screamed Theo and Sean together.

 

 

“YES!” chortled George, delighted at the scene playing out in the tea light’s flickering flame. “Yes!”

 

 

At the Hus memorial, Fr. Dmitri’s hands hovered near the card he had placed at the statuary’s base. He hoped desperately that he had chosen the correct card, as it depicted a kneeling figure pouring two pitchers of water onto the ground and was generally interpreted as a message of hope and renewal. The blue-white ghost fire flickered around the base of the memorial and then flared out around the card, which blazed for an instant before the entire ring of fire went out as if doused by a bucket of water. Steam hissed, rising from the soggy ashes of what had been the tarot card.

 

 

Roaring more thunderously than a waterfall, the flames rose and twisted into a knot high above Sophia, Victoria, Sean, and Theo. But without warning, the flames then plummeted to the ground and vanished.

 

 

“No!” cried George, shocked to see the great ring of fire suddenly vanish. He slapped both hands against the desktop and it trembled with the double impact, causing the tea light to tremble as well and extinguish itself when the hot wax spattered the desktop.

 

 

Sophia and Victoria nearly collapsed as the cool night air rushed in where the fire had been an instant before. Theo and Sean ran to catch them before they could fall and guided them, shaking and trembling, back to the Old Town Square.

Sophia’s husband was waiting for them, still at the Hus memorial. He hurried to wrap her in his arms.

“We must hurry,” he urged. “We cannot be sure that the fire is truly extinguished or if it might not be rekindled at any moment.”

Before he had even finished speaking, Sophia heard the wail of police sirens approaching the square from behind the Tyn church.

“Someone must have heard the screams and called the police,” Sean offered, looking nervously around the square.

Collecting the shopping bags of salt, they hastily agreed that burning the remaining tarot cards on the continuation of the Royal Road would have to wait until the next day.

Theo moved as if to leave the Old Town Square along the same alley that would lead them past Wilcox’s body, but Victoria pointed to another way that would lead them down a street behind the Astronomical Clock, which she said led more directly to the bridge and away from the approaching police.

“Thank you, my friend,” Sophia heard Theo whisper as they nevertheless paused for a moment before exiting the square, the police sirens growing louder as the patrol cars neared the square. Then they all hurried as quickly as they could back across the bridge toward their hotels before either the police arrived or the fire could reappear.

 

“Curse their wives and children!”

(Fall–Winter 1356)

 

Petr burst through the door into the house with a burning stick in his hand.

“Petr!” cried Nadezda, seeing her brother brandishing the stick. “What are you doing?”

He dashed across the room and tossed the large stick across the hearth, into the fireplace under a bubbling kettle. The stick vanished in the flames, its fire swallowed by the larger, controlled fire cooking their dinner. Petr stood panting before the hearth, his tongue hanging out, a broad smiled plastered across his ten-year-old, soot-streaked face.

“I did it, Nadezda! I helped burn the witch,” Petr exclaimed proudly.

Nadezda felt her face blanch. “Petr! How could you do such a thing?” she demanded. “How could you be so cruel?” She paused. “What witch?”

“Fen’ka,” her brother answered. “The old woman from the edge of the forest. We burned her in the Old Town Square. First, we dunked her in the river to see if she was a witch, and then, when she wouldn’t sink, we burned her.”

Fen’ka? Burned in the Old Town Square? Their grandmother had known her, grown up with her, told them about her. Nadezda even remembered being taken by her grandmother once to visit her old friend, but that had been years ago. When Nadezda had been even younger than Petr was now. Nadezda had heard the rumors and the stories for a long time, about how their grandmother’s childhood friend was a witch, but had never thought the suspicions and bad feelings would ever come to something like this. Well, this certainly explained where her younger brother had been all day, but how had this happened without her knowing about it?

Nadezda squatted down in front of her brother, taking both his shoulders in her hands and looking squarely into his face. “Petr. Tell me everything. Exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

Petr cleared his throat and swallowed. Nadezda knew she sometimes made him nervous. He complained about her always telling him what to do, even before their mother died. When she had gotten married and moved into her own house with her husband, Vavrinec, she had left him alone with their father. But then their father had died, and he had had to come live with Nadezda and Vavrinec. As if that wasn’t enough, the baby had been born shortly thereafter and although Petr loved his baby nephew Milos, she could tell he was jealous. Jealous of the way Nadezda hovered over the cradle, jealous of Milos having both his parents alive and well, jealous of Milos’s being young and having no responsibilities, since now that he was ten, Petr was expected to go out and work every day with Vavrinec at the bakery.

Petr looked into Nadezda’s eyes. “I was helping Vavrinec at the bakery this morning, just like I’m supposed to do,” he began. “We went to get the flour from the mill. Over in the Little Town. I was standing with Vavrinec while the miller’s apprentices loaded the sacks of flour on our wagon when all of a sudden, a big crowd was all around us. They were shouting and pushing. It was exciting. I went to see what was going on.

“The crowd went down to the place on the river, by where the gypsies always camp, you know?” he asked to make sure she understood.

Nadezda nodded. She knew the place.

“That’s when I saw Fen’ka,” he continued. “Everyone was saying that she was a witch, like they always do. But this time they were so mad at her, not scared at all. They were shouting and screaming at her and then the men tied her up, put her in the boat, and took her out to throw her into the river. They were all screaming but she never said anything. When they threw her in the water, she stayed down a long time and they were just about to pull her up by the ropes tied around her—you know?—when the river tossed her back up to the surface. Proved she was a witch, the river did. Then Fr. Conrad, from Tyn church—remember him, with the scrawny neck?—he pulled her skirts up to show everyone the devil’s brand on her butt! Final proof that she was a witch, you know? He was so glad to finally get everyone to believe him. Remember how he’s been saying for so long that no one should allow a witch to live? Well, then someone shouted, ‘Burn her!’ and then everyone started shouting, ‘Burn her! Burn the witch!’ So we took her back to the Old Town Square to burn her!”

Nadezda saw the excitement burning in her brother’s eyes. Yes, she knew Fr. Conrad at the Tyn church and had heard him preach many times his shrill, angry sermons. She knew that her brother was young and angry at their parents for dying and leaving him alone, forcing him to live with her and her husband. He had a hard time keeping his mind on his chores at the bakery and had to be constantly reminded to sweep the floor, tend the fire, or watch the store. He was always running off to play with a stray dog in the street or get into a fight with another boy, or play a game with other apprentices who had a few free minutes at odd times during the day. She knew Petr was a good boy at heart and could grow into being a good man. But he was a handful now.

She had been the firstborn and was ten years older than Petr. Even though her parents had several other children after she was born and before Petr, they were the only two who had survived. Their mother had always been a hard worker alongside their father, selling vegetables in the market, and her mother—the children’s grandmother—had lived with them and taken care of them during the day. Grandmother had gotten sick first and died, just as old grandparents are wont to do, but then their mother had gotten sick and died too, leaving Nadezda in charge of the house. She had been almost seventeen then and her father had postponed finding her a husband as long as he could. He loved his family and could not bear parting with his daughter so soon after his wife and mother-in-law had died. But finally, he had relented, giving in both to the expectations of his neighbors and his own good, common sense. He knew that he could not keep hold of Nadezda forever and that she needed to marry and continue her own life. She had always been friends with Vavrinec, whose family lived nearby, and as the children grew older, he had seen the love blossom between them. Even though Vavrinec and Nadezda had both tried to hide it from the families—“such a shy, modest girl,” her father always remarked—the look in their eyes when they glanced at each other and the nonchalant way they tried to say the other’s name of course gave them away. Nadezda’s father had been delighted to finally agree to Vavrinec’s request to marry Nadezda. Vavrinec had served as the neighborhood baker’s apprentice and so her father knew that Nadezda and his grandchildren-to-be would always be cared for and have enough to live on.

Her father had kept Petr with him at home, although she knew it was hard. The boy was left by himself during the day while her father was at his stall in the vegetable market. Some days, Petr went to help him and was popular with the other vegetable sellers and their customers. Other days, Petr played with his friends, went fishing, or tried to help keep the house clean. Even though it was hard for her father to care for a boy Peter’s age alone, he wanted to keep Petr at home as long as possible. Other boys his age were often sent to live as apprentices with various craftsmen, but he spoiled Peter, and he knew it.

The accident at the vegetable market had killed him instantly. Nadezda had been able to bid her grandmother and mother farewell before each had died, as they had been ill and death, though never happy, had not been unexpected. But the mad horse in the streets, the careening wagon crashing into the market stalls, their father trampled by the horse and then crushed by the wagon wheels as he tried to save others—that had been unexpected. She had not seen him for a few days before his death and now would never see him again. At least, not on this earth. She had not been able to say goodbye to him or tell him that he was going to be a grandfather, as she had just discovered this herself. She had been planning to see him that evening when he returned from the market and tell him the good news when people had come running to her house to tell her of the terrible accident. So she had been happy to take in Petr and give him a home. Vavrinec had been just as happy to take the boy in, doubling the size of his quickly growing family. He was also happy to take Petr in as an apprentice at the bakery, teaching the boy a way to support himself when he reached adulthood.

In his heart of hearts, Petr must have known it wasn’t true, but in his darker moments—of which there were many—she knew he wondered if they hadn’t taken him in simply to get free help around the house and at the bakery. He was angry, very angry, that Mother and Father had left him. He must be terrified that his sister would leave him in the same way.

Nadezda knew all this and understood the excitement in her brother’s eyes. A chance to be part of a crowd, to see something up close he had only heard about in stories from towns further north along the river. But such a terrible crowd, such a horrible story had come to life in front of his eyes.

“And then what happened, Petr? Then what?” She stopped herself from shaking him roughly to get the rest of the story out of him.

He looked away. “That’s when it got scary,” he muttered.

That could mean anything. “Scary? How? What do you mean?”

He paused, keeping his eyes averted. Finally he looked back at his sister’s face. “We took Fen’ka into the square, where a stake had been set up for burning her. Everyone kept pushing and shoving me, it was hard to see what was going on and what was happening. But then she started to scream at us. She called Svetovit to make us afraid, to teach us his power and make us afraid. She wanted Svetovit to curse us. That’s when the sky got dark and the lightning started. Then we tied her to the stake,” he told Nadezda, the excitement flushing his face again for an instant. “We tied her to the stake and lit the fire. She kept screaming. She wanted Svetovit to take away what we want and make our tables into traps. She wanted the earth to become iron. That’s when the other apprentices ran up to the fire. It wasn’t burning very well and so they brought oil. But no one would give me any to pour on the wood. So I grabbed the stick from the fire and got away when the soldiers came and tried to put the fire out, but they couldn’t, and she screamed one more time that we should all receive no vindication. What’s that, Nadezda? What’s ‘vindication’?”

Nadezda felt ill. That her grandmother’s friend had been murdered in the square by the crowd that had always gone to her, looking for help, was sickening. But this news of Petr’s that Fen’ka had cursed the crowd as she was dying… That worried her.

Squatting in front of her brother, with her hands on his shoulders, her legs pricked her like pins and needles. She slowly got up and sat on the bench along one side of the table. She pulled her brother onto her lap and held him, stroking his hair and trying to control herself. She finally found the words. “Tell me, Petr. Tell me exactly what she said.”

“I told you already.” Petr squirmed in her arms.

“Tell me again,” she said softly, closing her eyes and trying to shut out the image of the old woman consumed by the fire and screaming at the crowd. “Tell me exactly what she said and what happened when she said it.”

Petr cocked his head and looked at his sister strangely. “Why is that so important?” he demanded.

“Trust me. It just is.” Nadezda sighed.

Petr thought hard for a moment. “She said…” He took a breath. “She said that Svetovit should teach us to fear him and pay attention to him. That’s when the lightning started and it got dark and the wind started blowing. Then she said that we should all be cursed, in the town and in the castle and in the square. That’s when we poured the oil on the fire and I grabbed the stick. ‘Lay to their charge guilt upon guilt,’ she said, ‘and let them receive no vindication.’ That’s when the lightning hit. A bolt of lightning hit the square right in front of the fire and the soldiers came running from around the Town Hall!” His eyes lit up at the memory of all the commotion. “Everyone started running and screaming and the soldiers tried to save Fen’ka but she was a witch and they couldn’t. I watched them for a few minutes and then ran home before they tried to get me in trouble for burning the witch like she deserved.”

Nadezda took a deep breath. She shook her head. That was about as much information as she would be able to get out of her brother. She held him for another moment and then let him slide off her lap. “All right, Petr.” She sighed. “I’m sorry Fen’ka was burned and I’m sorry that you were part of it. But it’s over now. Let’s hope nothing worse happens and no one else gets burned.”

Petr looked at his sister. “Should I go back to the bakery now?” he asked.

“Yes, go back to the bakery and help Vavrinec clean up before dinner,” she instructed him. He ran out the door. Nadezda stepped across the room to close the door behind him but she paused on the step and looked at the sky.

It was dark, much darker than it should have been, even at this late afternoon hour. There was a distant rumble of thunder and a droplet or two of rain fell, but the wind was also blowing and it was chilly for the time of year. How had she missed what was going on in the square? That they lived on a byway in the Újezd district of the Old Town, near \the New Town, far from both the bridge and the square, did not excuse her ignorance of that afternoon’s events. Unsure of how her presence might have made a difference to the outcome, she was nevertheless certain that events would have played out differently had she been there. She had heard the thunder cracking throughout the skies earlier and had seen the lightning but had thought it no more than a late September afternoon storm. What had Fen’ka unleashed?

Vavrinec made his way home later, escorted by Petr, who had returned to the bakery and now sported a fine dusting of flour in his hair. Sending him off to wash in the bucket behind the house, Nadezda asked Vavrinec if he knew what had transpired that afternoon.

“Yes, I was there,” he admitted sheepishly. He confirmed Petr’s recollection of the day: he and the boy had been across the river in the Little Town at the mill loading bags of flour when they had become separated in the crowd that swept down to the river to test Fen’ka in the swiftly flowing water for witchcraft. All work had ceased as the miller and his apprentices were also caught up in the excitement. “It would have been impossible to get the cart back across the bridge,” Vavrinec pointed out. “There were too many people, all shouting and pushing and demanding that she be burned.” He had followed the mob across the bridge to the Old Town Square, where a stake had been erected before the church of Our Lady of Tyn, where the priest Conrad, who was leading the horde, served the Mass and preached.

“She called out curses on everyone in the square,” Vavrinec recounted. “Everyone in the towns and in the castle, all the wives and children of the city as well. She invoked old Svetovit and demanded that he make the heavens brass and the earth iron, that he make feast days into traps, and take away what people want as well as what they have. There was lightning but no rain, thunder but no outburst. I even thought I saw a tremendous bank of storm clouds over the bluff behind the Jewish Quarter that looked like four-faced Svetovit.” He shuddered. “The lightning hit the square and it became a nightmare of confusion.”

Nadezda collapsed onto a bench along the table for the second time that day and shook her head. “It frightens me, Vavrinec. She was my grandmother’s friend, you know. They grew up together. I met Fen’ka, Vavrinec, and she knew the old ways better than anyone. Better than my grandmother, even, and my babička knew more of the old ways than anyone in the four towns of Prague.” She looked into her husband’s eyes. “If she invoked Svetovit to avenge her death, it could mean the end of everything in the valley.”

Vavrinec sat beside his wife and took her hands in his. “Do not worry, Nadezda,” he soothed her. “Fen’ka may have known more of plants and herbs and their properties than everyone else in the valley all together, but everyone knows that Svetovit is only an old and powerless devil. He can’t even stop the building of the new cathedral on his own hill! How dangerous can he be to the four towns in the valley? Who can tell if he even still loiters about Hradčany to listen to the complaints of anyone who cares to address him?” He chuckled.

Nadezda studied his face and finally nodded in agreement, holding his hands tightly and drawing comfort from his calm strength. “You may be right, Vavrinec. I hope so, for all our sakes.”

That night, as she banked the fire, Nadezda wondered if she could trust her husband’s estimation of Svetovit’s inability to avenge Fen’ka’s death.

“There seems to have been no immediate strike against the four towns,” she comforted herself. The red coals glimmered and blinked beneath the dusting of ash that would retain the heat and allow the fire to be rekindled the next morning. Banking the fire was always the last activity of each household before retiring for bed and rekindling the flames was always the first activity on arising each morning. Fen’ka would have been doing this same activity last night at about this same time, Nadezda realized. Now Fen’ka’s hearth was cold and dark. Nadezda thought of her grandmother as well, banking the fire each evening. The continuity of the fire was an image of the continuity of the family and the household; the skill of each woman to conserve the fire of her kitchen was a point of proud competition throughout each neighborhood of the four towns that together made up the metropolis that was Prague. It was a mark of shame to ask a neighbor woman—even if a good friend—for coals in the morning, as it was a badge of honor to maintain the family hearth from day to day, week to week, month to month, year after year after year. Some hearths were rumored to have not needed a neighbor’s coal to be rekindled in the morning for a generation or more.

When she and Vavrinec had wed, they had brought fire—in the form of coals on a shovel—from her father’s house to the hearth of the house where they would make their new family together. She could not remember the last time that either her grandmother or mother had gone to get coals to rekindle the fire she had grown up with, and she had not needed to fetch coals from a neighbor since establishing her own hearth here with Vavrinec. They had taught her well. She smiled at the memory of her grandmother first showing her how it was done when she was a small child, and then the more formal lessons she had received as an older girl. It was during those times together with her grandmother, raking through the coals and placing them just so (“here, not there, child,” her grandmother would gently point out), that her grandmother had told her the traditional Bohemian tales and of the old ways that she and Fen’ka had learned from their grandmothers at the hearths of their childhood homes.

Nadezda rose and brushed the soot from her palms. Vavrinec was already in bed in the other room, waiting for her. Milos, little more than a year old, lay in his crib next to their bed. In the principal room of the house, the only light still burning—apart from the coals in the hearth—was the oil lamp that always burned before the image of the Mother of God hanging in the corner of the room. The wick of the lamp required trimming from time to time and the oil required replenishing, but it was a cost and an effort Nadezda was happy to expend. The burning oil lamp was a constant reminder to bless herself as she went about her daily tasks at home and to say her simple morning and evening prayers. The image, which depicted the Holy Mother and her Divine Child cheek to cheek as they kissed or whispered secrets to each other and was similar to those in the Slavonic monastery of Emauzy in the New Town, was something she had inherited from her mother and grandmother, who had inherited it from another, earlier grandmother. It, like the fire burning on the hearth, spoke of the continuity of Nadezda’s family and the lore passed from mother to daughter over more generations than Nadezda ever hoped to count.

Petr stirred, asleep on his cot along one wall. Vavrinec had promised to make a room for Petr in the attic when Petr was older, but for now he slept here, near the fire, where Nadezda could hear him if he called out in the night and comfort him. His nightmares and frights and weeping came less and less often, but there were still occasions when she needed to stroke his forehead and sing him a lullaby, much as their mother had sung to them both when she was alive.

Kissing her brother on the forehead, Nadezda went in to her husband and son. Svetovit had done nothing to disturb her family thus far. “I hope he never does,” she addressed the Mother of God as she passed the image.

 

 

Over the course of the next few weeks, Nadezda’s fears came to seem groundless or even foolish. Life proceeded as usual, the day-to-day round of working and cleaning, cooking and washing. The sun rose and the sun set. Nothing dangerously inexplicable seemed to happen anywhere in the towns that lined the river. Svetovit was quiet as ever.

But then Conrad, the German priest who had instigated the burning of Fen’ka, slapped the Italian prostitute Lucrezia in the Tyn church, causing her to strike her head against one of the columns in the nave. She had died within moments, and word of her death at the hand of the priest spread almost as quickly. His predawn vigil beneath Lucrezia’s window near the church, now closed as a result of Lucrezia’s death within the sacred precincts, became known, and when his murdered body was found beneath her window, it was considered by many an act he had brought upon himself. It was only when Conrad was seen after his funeral, still stalking the lane below Lucrezia’s window, that Nadezda became suspicious. The next morning, Nadezda met her childhood friend Alena, who was also Milos’s godmother. Alena was expecting her first baby and had asked Nadezda to serve as her baby’s godmother as well.

 

“It seems like divine justice.” Alena offered her opinion to Nadezda as they mingled in the crowd that filled the vegetable market of the New Town. “He had Fen’ka burned. He killed Lucrezia with his own hand. Now he cannot rest in his grave and wanders beneath her window. Is that not the justice of God, Nadezda, that condemns him to such restless remorse?”

Nadezda was examining vegetables, some of which she placed in her market basket, ready to pay the merchant when she had finished her selection. Milos slept, wrapped tightly in his swaddling bands, on her back between her shoulders. “Yes, it does seem like a suitable heavenly retribution,” Nadezda agreed. “But I can’t help thinking that Fen’ka’s curse might have played some role in closing Heaven and Hell to him. Vavrinec told me that she demanded Svetovit make the heavens brass and the earth iron. Is it impossible that Fen’ka and Svetovit were able to entrap Father Conrad in a hell of their own devising? Do you not see that as well, Alena?”

“Perhaps,” Alena was willing to concede as she added to the vegetables in her own basket, moving along the rows of a particularly large stall. “But is Svetovit able to contravene the judgment of God? How could Fen’ka’s words prove more formidable than those of God in heaven?”

Nadezda shook her head,, smelling some fruit before adding it to the collection in her basket. “It does sound outlandish. Vavrinec insists that I am nervous over nothing. Perhaps God allowed Fen’ka’s curse to come true because it accorded with His judgment. Who can tell?” Nadezda turned to Alena and shrugged.

Alena seemed to be mulling the possibilities as they continued shopping. “That curse—was it one curse, Nadezda, or a series of curses?—her curse was the last thing Fen’ka spoke. Everyone knows the power of the last words of the dying. Even those criminals executed for their crimes. The last words of a man on Earth can even sway the judgment of God. If God can be persuaded to show mercy, could He not also be persuaded to be strict, to show no mercy, to let the whim of the condemned stand firm?” Alena handed her basket to the merchant to tally what she owed. “After all, Nadezda, do we not collect the remains of the executed—and even splinters of the gallows that the condemned die on—like the relics of the saints precisely because they can win God’s favor and persuade Him to enforce the dying wish of the condemned?”

Nadezda could not resist adding to her basket as she waited for Alena to pay the merchant. She then gave her basket to the merchant’s wife, who also worked at the stall. “Now Vavrinec would say that your words could be mine, arguing for the power of Fen’ka’s curse!” She laughed. Alena laughed with her, taking back her basket from the merchant as she paid the sum he asked. “In the end, who can say?” Nadezda was constrained to admit, parting ways with Alena to continue their workaday errands.

“Truly, Nadezda. Who can say?” Alena kissed her friend on the cheek and, waving gaily, turned down the street that led to the fishmongers.

That evening, in bed as the boys Petr and Milos slept, Nadezda recounted her conversation with Alena to Vavrinec. He laughed and shook his head.

“What do you think, Vavrinec?” Nadezda wanted to know. “Yes, I know you think Svetovit is powerless and Fen’ka’s words meaningless, but is not this the kind of thing she would be pleased with?”

“She would be pleased, yes, with Father Conrad’s fate.” Vavrinec nodded, rubbing his brow.

“So, Vavrinec, could not the rest of her curse come true as well? If she had a hand in shaping the priest’s fate, making the heavens brass and the earth iron as you told me she cried out, who can say that her words could not also shape the fate of everyone in the Old Town Square that day.” She paused as she realized the implication of her own words. “Even the fate of men such as you.”

“It is all too hard for the likes of a baker such as me to puzzle out, Nadezda!” Vavrinec burst out, chuckling. He tussled her hair and hugged her shoulders against his own. She leaned into him, happy to have a reason to pursue her thoughts no further.

 

Little more than a fortnight later, Nadezda’s suspicions were raised again. Vavrinec reported over their supper that word had come through customers at the bakery that one of the Italian masons who lived on the far side of the Little Town and had labored in the reconstruction of the castle or the construction of the cathedral—the informant had been unsure—had died and his wife gone mad. But the dead man had approached drunks and whores who roamed the dark streets of the Little Town by night and begged them to pull a nail from his skull. “It would give him rest, he said, it would.” The gossip in the bakery had gone on and on, repeating the tale as another customer entered, each time adding another detail or flourish to the account. “The dead man always begs, ‘Pull the nail and let me rest in peace.’ He cries and wails for mercy, that he be allowed to rest, if only the nail be wrenched from his head. But, of course, none will touch him or the nail,” the story always ended. Vavrinec finished his recounting of the events and silently sipped the fish stew Nadezda had prepared.

Petr looked across the table at his sister. “What do you think, Nadezda? Do you think a dead mason really walks the Little Town or are the drunks just drunk?” He was slurping happily through his bowl of stew, nearly ready for more. “I heard the story in the bakery today, Nadezda, and you should have seen how excited and frightened the old gossips were when they heard that news!”

Nadezda swallowed her last spoonful and set her bowl down. “It is odd,” she announced at last.

Vavrinec looked at her. “I tell you this tale only because I am certain that you would hear it from others, whether I will it or no,” he offered, glancing towards Petr, who was scraping the sides of his bowl before helping himself to more. “I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from others and became concerned. Before you thought that I was hiding anything from you.”

“Thank you.” Nadezda’s voice was even more quiet.

Petr looked up and turned from his sister’s face to her husband’s and then back again. “Why so solemn, Nadezda?” He took his bowl to the pot hanging at the edge of the fireplace and ladled more stew into his bowl. He sat down, waiting for an answer. He looked at Nadezda and Vavrinec again, appearing perplexed.

“It is only…” Nadezda began hesitantly. “It is unusual for such an apparition to be seen in the Little Town, Petr, especially so swift on the heels of the apparition of Father Conrad under Lucrezia’s window. Two apparitions, so swift on the heels of each other, is unusual indeed.” Nadezda, whose downcast eyes had been focused on her hands folded in her lap, looked up and into her husband’s eyes.

“Do you still think the curse is of no consequence, Vavrinec? Someone must take steps to protect the city, both Prague altogether and the four towns individually. It may soon be too dangerous to stay anywhere near here, Vavrinec. Does not thought of all this frighten you?”

Vavrinec shook his head. “The only thought that frightens me is that you take all this talk of curses and maleficia and the walking dead and lay it all at the feet of Svetovit and Fen’ka, holding them responsible for every tale of something strange or unusual that you hear.” He reached out and opened his palm, waiting for her to rest her hand in his. He held her hand on the tabletop and continued.

“It is talk, Nadezda. It is only talk and gossip and tales for scaring children who will not sleep at night.”

“It was only talk and rumor that lit the fire that burned Fen’ka; might you say as well, Vavrinec? Do you think that words and tales have no power?”

Her husband squeezed her hand. “Yes, words and tales can kill. But not because the words of a dying woman call on Svetovit to avenge her!”

“I wish I could be as certain, Vavrinec. Too many of the walking dead make me wonder…”

 

 

“Did you hear, Nadezda?” Alena grasped her friend’s arm as they exited their Újezd neighborhood parish church of St. Martin after the midmorning Mass on Christmas Day. Alena, her womb growing ever larger, was expected to deliver her child in less than a month.

“What did I hear?” Nadezda laughed, wrapped in her warm winter cloak. Had the betrothal of one of their friends been announced? Was a newlywed expecting a child? Or was a longer-married woman expecting to add to an already large family? Another possibility occurred to her. “Did Sorina give birth?” That baby’s arrival had already been delayed nearly three weeks.

“No, silly goose! We would certainly have heard about that! Do you think I would have waited until the end of the Mass to tell you if Sorina had given birth last night? On Christmas Eve?” Alena hung on her friend’s arm as everyone around them exchanged greetings of “Happy Christmas! Vánočni stromeček!” Alena guided Nadezda to one side of the crowd, away from the bulk of the congregation who still struggled to make their way through the doors of the church onto the small square.

“No, Nadezda.” Alena’s tone was suddenly serious. “Did you hear about the old beggar woman Božena and Anežka, the wife of the Old Town council member? They had that tremendous argument in the Old Town Square on St. Nicholas’ Day. Do you recall?”

“Yes.” Nadezda giggled. “I wish I had been there to see it. They were ready to strike each other like serpents almost on the doorsteps of the church of St. Nicholas—and on his feast day, yet! They certainly never seem to have listened to the injunction to love their neighbors, did they?” Both women laughed.

“No, they certainly did not. But remember—they both died last week, just before the last Sunday of Advent. Since then, they’ve both been seen circling each other exactly where they had their fight, and look ready to kill each other again if they could!” Alena eagerly continued, “Not only them, but also the two gentlemen, Aleksandr and Jiri, who died so sudden-like in November. The two gentlemen have been seen in the Old Town Square with Božena and Anežka on moonless nights. Or so I’ve been told.”

Nadezda felt the blood drain from her face and grasped more heartily at Alena’s arm for support.

Alena leaned close to her friend’s face. “It is too many now, is it not, Nadezda? Too much death and too many of the dead walking abroad. It is all Fen’ka’s doing, is it not?”

Nadezda was certain of it now. Unexpected deaths were not uncommon. But there was no way Vavrinec could explain away so many otherwise inexplicable and twisted turns in the fates of these folk who had been unable to rest in their graves after Fen’ka’s ashes had been deposited in the river Vltava, swirling and lost in the water rather than resting quietly and still in a grave somewhere.

She nodded.

“What can we do, Nadezda? We need to protect the four towns somehow. You would know better than anyone. You remember the old ways that your grandmother taught you.” Alena’s eyes grew larger. “You are the only one who can know how to set Fen’ka’s words aside. How can we stop the curse before it consumes us all?” Nadezda could see the fear in Alena’s eyes.

“I do not know. Why do you say that only I can set Fen’ka’s curse aside?” Surely Alena was wrong to place so much trust in her. “There must be someone who knows the old ways better than I. Or surely one of the priests knows how to stop such a thing, or one of the theologians at the new university. They would know how to prevent a curse.”

Alena shook her head. “No, they would not, Nadezda, and you know that. Only someone who knows how Fen’ka would use the old ways could know how to set them aside.”

“No,” Nadezda countered quietly. “That makes no sense, Alena. You are frightened and fear feeds on itself. Go home and forget all this. Go home and celebrate Christmas. Let me speak with Vavrinec and discover what he thinks now about all these things. I will share his thoughts with you before the New Year comes.”

Alena looked at Nadezda and Nadezda could see that Alena’s fears were not calmed.

“I promise, Alena.”

 

 

“Such things are not uncommon among the dead plagued by jealousy and the desire for vengeance. You know that, Nadezda,” Vavrinec pointed out to her on the night after Christmas, in the pause between their first and second sleep, when she brought up her discussion after the Mass with Alena. “Need I remind you of these things?”

“No, Vavrinec. If it were simply that Božena and Anežka were seen in the Old Town Square, refusing to lay down their feud, I would agree. If it were only Božena and Anežka with Aleksandr and Jiri, I would be willing to say that the two men were somehow caught up in the women’s feud and leave it at that. But I have heard in the market that the moneylender František, the miser who lived near the Little Square, burnt to death trying to escape his burning house, and he has also been seen at night running through the streets of the Old Town, still aflame and clutching his coins. Do you remember the Tuscan bricklayer who has been seen wandering near the castle and in the Little Town, asking people to pull the nail from his head so that he can rest among the dead? So very many will not rest in their graves since Fen’ka’s curse, and there were few, so very few before that. This is not natural,” Nadezda insisted. “Fen’ka’s curse and Svetovit must have had a hand in shaping the demise and torment of all these people. If I only knew enough about what exactly Fen’ka uttered as she burned and could see how her words were played out in the lives of these folk—the priest Conrad, the miser František, that bricklayer from Tuscany and his mad wife, now Božena, Anežka, Jiri, and Aleksandr—then I could determine if it is really her curse that is driving these events or if it is simply an unusual confluence of jealousy, anger, and divine judgment. Do you not see that, Vavrinec?”

Vavrinec sat in bed, his arms crossed across his chest, and pouted in the dark.

Nadezda groaned with frustration. “You would rather insist these events were all driven by anything else rather than admit that Fen’ka’s curse is slowly working itself out here in the midst of Prague. Why, Vavrinec, why? Why could Fen’ka’s curse not lie behind all these events?”

Vavrinec turned to his wife. “Why, you ask? Because if I agree with you, that Fen’ka and her curse are responsible, then you will take it upon yourself to chase her down—even though she is dead. You will force her hand in some way to remove the curse—or will die in the attempt!” His eyes glistened as he spoke. “You would drive yourself to your death in the attempt to save Prague, and that I could never bear, Nadezda.” One tear streaked down his cheek and he swallowed hard to stop any further tears from coursing down his face.

She realized the truth of his words even as they spilled from his lips. While she was sure that Vavrinec would bear up under his grief and eventually find some measure of happiness, it would not be fair to either Petr or Milos. Her brother Petr had already lost their parents and now relied only on her to see him safely to adulthood, and she knew from experience and from watching Petr how cruel it would be to knowingly deprive her son Milos of his mother at such a young age.

She took Vavrinec in her arms and stroked his hair gently, as he had so often done for her. “That will never happen, Vavrinec,” she promised in a whisper. “Never.”

 

 

It was almost New Year’s Eve when Nadezda was able to find time to speak with Alena. They were in the marketplace of the Old Town Square examining some of the beautiful wares still available as gifts for Epiphany, coming in exactly one week. Although most of their gift-giving had taken place on either St. Nicholas’ Day or Christmas Day among their families or their husbands’ places of work, it was still the custom to give gifts throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas, which would culminate on Epiphany.

Alena was still not convinced to set aside her fears for Prague. “Surely you would have enough sense to find some way to undo the curse without it costing your own life,” she argued with Nadezda. “I think Vavrinec is being unreasonable to think that saving Prague necessarily comes at the cost of dying.”

“He does make the point, though, Alena,” Nadezda defended her husband’s view, “that jealousy and anger can drive the dead to walk, as can unrequited love—if Father Conrad was in love with that Italian girl—or some other, unrelated hex.” She thought of the Italian mason and his wife, the one who asked passers-by to pluck the nail from his head that he might rest in his grave. “All these events may simply be coincidence and… and… Why, Alena, you might even see the hand of Fen’ka in the disappearance of that novice from St. George’s Convent that Petr heard ran away on Christmas Day. Do you think that Fen’ka’s curse drives everything that happens in Prague?”

Alena finally had to agree that she was too willing to see the hand of Fen’ka everywhere. “It does seem extreme,” she said sheepishly, and blushed. “I would have thought the curse responsible for the disappearance of that novice if I had heard it first, from someone else. But if you put it like that…” She hugged Nadezda.

“So, on New Year’s Day, what will my godson be wearing when you come to eat at our house?” Alena asked, her former bubbling, happy self. Nadezda happily lapsed into her own previous, pre-curse self as well, and described the new garments Milos had received on Christmas.

 

 

For several days after Epiphany, it was nearly impossible to find anyone willing to discuss anything other than the transformation of the banquet guests into animals that had occurred at Jan Capek’s inn in the Little Town. Mad dogs, squirrels, geese, serpents, donkeys, even peacocks—the guests had been transformed as they had begun to eat the stew the innkeeper’s cook was famous for. Even one of the serving girls had been transformed as she had begun to taste the stew herself afterwards. This was unmistakably a work of magic, and all Nadezda’s suspicions of Svetovit and Fen’ka raged again. She knew better than to raise them with Vavrinec, though. She resolved to keep her eyes and ears open for the least suggestion of anything gone amiss that any of her neighbors or the people in the markets might be willing to talk about. Even the missing novice from the convent near the new cathedral. The missing novice had probably simply run home to her family, but Nadezda had heard a whisper that perhaps the girl had been seized by an imp conjured by one of the other novices.

“An imp that she had conjured because of Fen’ka’s curse!” Nadezda suspected when she heard the tale. There was nothing Nadezda was not willing to hold Svetovit and Fen’ka responsible for.

Alena saw the change in Nadezda and joined her in collecting news of the goings-on in Prague that could possibly be construed as the result of Fen’ka and her curse. What surprised them both was the eagerness of some to also lay these events at the feet of Fen’ka and the disbelief of others who refused to consider the possibility that her dying words might have the power to work her will even from beyond her watery grave.

“It seems that Vavrinec was hiding the talk of all the taverns from me for months!” Nadezda declared to Alena. “I was at the bakery for bread yesterday and asking some of the apprentices what the latest news might be in the taverns, and they said everyone was talking of Fen’ka again, just as they had after Fr. Conrad’s death and that Tuscan mason—Bartolomeo. They all said that Fen’ka’s curse must be responsible and must also be behind the transformations at the inn. One of them even reminded everyone else that she had cried out, ‘Curse them eating and drinking!’ If that doesn’t describe what happened at the inn, what does?”

Alena agreed. Her husband had finally told her a similar tale. “He said that he hadn’t told me before because he knew that I would tell you, and that Vavrinec did not want to encourage you to see Fen’ka’s curse as the power responsible for all these things. But he also says that many of the men laugh at the suggestion that Fen’ka might have truly been a witch. Even the men who were there and had a hand in burning her at the stake. Now they all say such things are nonsense, the delusions of old women and children, and that there are no such things as witches.” She paused. “But they never say what Fen’ka was burned for if she was not the witch they all claimed she was.”

 

 

Not long after Epiphany, more news reached Nadezda’s ears. A German youth was found in the butcher’s parish of St. Jakub on the morning of their patronal feast day, his hand grasped firmly in the fist of the statue of the Mother of God.

“It seems he had broken into the church and unlocked the alms chest in some manner, even though he had no tools for picking locks on him when they went through his pockets later,” Vavrinec admitted to Nadezda when she asked him what the news in the tavern had been that night. “The hand of the thief was held so tightly by the statue that he hung there, his feet unable to reach the floor, dislocating his shoulder. Finally, the only way to get him down was to cut his arm off at the shoulder and leave it in the grip of the statue.”

Nadezda was banking the fire for the night, listening to her husband, and she nodded as she tidied the coals and arranged them as she always did. He sipped at a final mug of ale as he sat at the table and watched her. Realizing that she would discover what she wanted to know from other sources, such as Petr or the other apprentices at the bakery, or even strangers she might happen to speak to in the markets, he saw no point in concealing the happenings in the town or the conjectures of the men in the taverns.

“Another act of justice, many say. The statue of the Mother of God apprehended a thief about to steal the alms given for the relief of the poor,” Vavrinec reported. “Justice such as one might hope for or expect from God and His saints to protect the poor and the needy. But others say…”

“Yes? What do others say?” Nadezda prodded.

“Others say that something must have gone wrong, terribly wrong, with the young thief’s plan or he would never have dared enter the church in the first place. Whatever went wrong, whatever drove him into the church and made him so overconfident as to dare open the alms chest, right there at the feet of the Mother of God, was the result of…” He hesitated to say the final words but finally coughed out the witch’s name. “…Fen’ka’s curse.”

Nadezda sat back and surveyed her work in the fireplace. “That sounds like a witch’s curse to me. Drive a young man to desperation, promise him success, and then withdraw whatever assured him that he could succeed with his plans.” She searched her memory. What had Vavrinec told her that afternoon in September when Fen’ka had died in the fire? She quoted her husband’s words back to him. “She invoked old Svetovit and demanded that he… take away what people want as well as what they have.” Yes, that was it! “Take away both what they want and what they have. The thief found in St. Jakub’s Church has certainly lost everything he wanted as well as what he already had—his arm,” she pointed out.

She continued to gaze into the fireplace and think. Streaks of red laced through the ashes, twisting and glimmering like snakes, connecting still-smoldering bits of wood or chips of coals that would not last the night. It was not always evident how the heat connected each straggling coal to another but the glowing trail was there, hidden under ash or soot. “Just as Fen’ka’s curse underlies and connects all these events since her burning, even if the trail is not always evident or visible.” She considered Vavrinec’s concern that her pursuit of the truth about Fen’ka’s dealings with Svetovit and the probable consequences for Prague would prove her undoing.

She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him. “Behold, Vavrinec. I have simply begun to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I have not destroyed myself yet.” He smiled at her in return, looked into his ale, and continued smiling.

“Every curse has a key,” she continued, staring into the fireplace, “a clause that is central to it and which must be fulfilled before the full weight of the curse is unleashed and the victim bears the brunt of it. Like the tale of Sipkova Ruzenkaye, the beautiful princess who slept for one hundred years.” Nadezda was thinking aloud as she arranged the puzzle pieces of Fen’ka’s curse in her mind. “The key, the necessary clause of the curse, was that the princess prick her finger on the spindle. The last of the godmothers could then rewrite, though not eradicate, the curse. Though the princess had then to still prick her finger, the prick resulted in a century-long sleep rather than death as the original curse had insisted.”

Vavrinec nodded to show he understood the logic of Nadezda’s thought. “If I can sort out the puzzle pieces and discover the central key, we can rewrite it, Vavrinec, and save us all before anything worse comes to pass. All we have to do,” Nadezda murmured, “is put the pieces of the puzzle together and find the key that unlocks Fen’ka’s curse.”