Light and Sweet

 … Emily was five.

Emily was five, and she lived on a farm with chickens and cows and goats, and her father always smiled. Her dedushka was made of smiles, and chasing, and tickling. Her life was lived in light that seemed golden and diffuse, as if she were moving through an ocean of sunlight. It was autumn, she had just had her birthday, and the leaves of the trees were becoming gold and red.

“Well, moya devuchka, have you come to watch me again?” her father said, as he saw her peeping from behind the fence. He was working with his machines again. Father loved his big machines, his great thumping machines that stomped on the ground like feet. He swept her up in his arms, his thick brown beard tickling her face. She giggled.

“But what do they do?” Emily asked again. She’d asked before, and he’d answered before, but she liked to hear him tell it.

“They stomp and they stomp on the earth, like the feet of giants,” her father said, making his face look terrible, like the face of a giant. “They stomp on the earth, and they make noise. And the earth hears that noise, and it listens, and it understands. And the earth talks back, sometimes.”

“You talk to the earth?” Emily asked, wrinkling her nose with disbelief. “And it talks to you?”

“I do.”

“What do you talk about?”

“About what the earth likes, and what she doesn’t like. What she wants.”

“What does she want?”

“She wants people not to hurt her,” her father said. His face became mischievous. “She wants little girls like you not to use your da’s shovel to dig holes.”

“I only dug one hole, and Vas was the one who started it, anyway!” Emily was outraged. Vasilly, the big black dog with such soft sweet eyes, was always digging. That’s what dogs did, and Emily didn’t see why little girls shouldn’t be allowed to as well.

Her father tickled her and put her down, and she ran away, laughing, her feet flying beneath her.

“Emily, sweetling, come here now and let me braid your hair.”

It was her mother, soft and young and gentle. Her face was kind and tired. Emily had a strange feeling that she’d seen that face in a mirror looking back at her. But Emily didn’t look like that when she looked in mirrors. Emily was five, and she was small and brown and she had already lost two teeth.

Mama was sitting in her rocking chair, and she had an ivory brush in her hand.

“I hate having my hair braided,” Emily spat. “I don’t want to.”

“Come, you can’t run around with your hair flying around your face,” her mother chided. “And your hair is so pretty! Like mine, look. Look, we have the same hair. And I always wear my hair in braids to keep it nice.”

Grudgingly, Emily came to sit in her mother’s lap and submitted to the torture of having her hair brushed. Her mother’s hands, though, were gentle and the brush moving over her scalp made her feel sleepy. It made her think things she didn’t want to think about. She clenched a handful of her mother’s skirt in her fist, feeling the softness of it.

“Mama,” she asked, “when is it the full moon again?”

Emily felt her mother’s body tense.

“Why do you ask that, sweetling?”

“I don’t—” Emily paused and reconsidered. “Vas doesn’t like it when the full moon comes.” The big dog, who was laying on the floor at their feet, raised his head when he heard Emily speak his name. He stood up and put his nose under Emily’s hand. She petted him. “Vas doesn’t like it when you have to stay in your room.”

“I’m sorry that Vasilly doesn’t like it when I stay in my room,” Emily’s mother said, the brush still moving gently in her hand. “But Mama has to stay in her room when she’s feeling ill.”

“People yell a lot when they’re sick,” Emily said matter-of-factly, but it was really a test, to see what her mother would say. But her mother said nothing, just sectioned Emily’s hair into two parts and began braiding, pulling the long hanks of hair together tightly as she worked down.

“He only stays five days,” Emily stated the fact with precision and finality. “Five times that the sun goes up and down. And then he’s gone.”

Mama’s hands stopped braiding. They lay heavy against Emily’s head. Emily felt them trembling slightly.

“That’s right,” Mama said. “Five days. Five days he’s here, and then he’s gone. You’re a very smart girl, Emily.”

“So when is it, Mama?” Emily asked, after a long time of her mother not saying anything, a long time of Mama’s hands still against the back of her head. “When is he coming back?”

“Very soon, sweetling,” her mother said, and there was a terrible apologetic sadness in her voice that Emily hated. “Very soon.”

And then, Emily was in her father’s lap, and he was holding her tight, rocking her. One ear he pressed against his shoulder, the other ear he kept covered with his big hand so she could not hear the screaming.

“Let … me … out!”

The voice coming from the other room was her mother’s voice, but not her mother’s voice. There was nowhere they could go in the house where they could not hear the screaming, and now it was winter, and too cold to go outside, where there was snow swirling. There was a big fire in the fireplace. It glowed orange and red, and sometimes the logs in it fell apart into shimmering, shattered embers. Emily could see the snow through the frosted windows, little bits of white reflected in the candlelight.

“I know you’re out there, you and that brat of yours! You think you can lock me away forever? One day you will be careless. I will find a way out. Oh, and when I do … when I do! That will be such joy, Lyakhov. I can hardly wait.”

Her father began humming—a low soft tune that resonated from his deep chest and filled Emily’s ear. She concentrated hard on listening to it, trying to block out the terrible words that rang through the house from behind the locked door upstairs, the sounds of things being turned over, things breaking and shattering.

“I’ll kill her in front of you first, that mewling brat, that squealing little get of a Kendall. And I won’t let you die, I won’t allow you to die, until she’s cold on the ground in front of you in a pool of her own blood …”

And Emily closed her eyes, and listened to the humming as hard as she could, until her father stood up abruptly, still holding her in his arms. His face was dark and horribly sad and he did not smile.

“Emily, devuchka, come with me.”

He quickly bundled her in her coat and shoes, put a scarf around her neck and a hat on her head, and they walked out of the house, into the swirling snowy darkness until they came to the barn, where he set her on a bale of hay. Even though Emily was very cold, and the barn was very dark, she was glad to be away from the screaming.

Shivering, she watched him light a lamp. It gave a thin yellow flame. He came close to her, setting the lamp beside her.

“I want to show you something,” he said, his breath frosting white. He spoke to her in Russian, the language he always used when it was something important. Some secret the two of them shared, something secret that Mama should not know, for Mama did not know Russian. He pulled something from inside his coat, something that gleamed in the low light. He showed it to her. It was two sticks made of silver—the kind of sticks her mother wore in her hair. But she had never seen Mama wearing them before. They were so pretty. Emily reached out to touch them with her finger.

“It is very important that you keep this secret.”

Emily listened very hard, looking into her father’s face, and then at the hair sticks.

“These are very special things. There is writing on them. It is called Faery Writing. The writing says something very important. There are people, friends of mine, who will need to read this writing.”

Emily looked at him, confused. She didn’t understand, so she listened harder.

“We may have to leave soon, Emilichka.” He used her baby name. It made her feel very small and very grown up at precisely the same time. “We may have to leave and go see my friends. Maybe it will happen that you find them and I don’t. If you do, you have to tell them that there is a secret written on these hair sticks. A dangerous secret.”

“Will Mama go with us?” Emily asked. She was still confused. He was talking about going somewhere but he hadn’t said where, and he was talking about friends, but he hadn’t said who. How was she to know who his friends were? What if they were going someplace she didn’t like? She shivered more, her small bones rattling, and it was only partly the cold that made her do so.

“My friends are Russians, just like me. You will know them because they are called the Sini Mira.”

“Sons of the Earth,” Emily said, in English.

Her father nodded, smiling at her. His smile was like a new-kindled fire; it warmed her all through her body. But it vanished so quickly, it was almost as if it had never been there.

“That’s right,” he said. “It is very important that they get these, Emilichka.” He touched her cheek, let his warm hand linger on her face. “And there’s another important thing for you to remember. You must never tell Mama. You must never tell her about the Faery Writing. Promise me, Emilichka. Promise me that you will never say a word to her.”

“I promise,” Emily said, the cold around her seeping into her body like darkness, swallowing her up, swallowing her whole …