Chapter 7: A Blizzard in Carpathia
On Saturday morning, two weeks later, the forecast is heavy snow. Marina takes one look at the frosty gray sky and skips her usual jaunt into Muggle Bucharest. She apparates straight to Transylvania, early enough to join Charlie and Katie for the Saturday morning field survey of the reservation.
Flurries are swirling deliciously in the cold air when they land at the compound and tumble into the mess hall, stomping their feet and laughing, to a sizzling hot lunch. Four hours later, Charlie returns from the afternoon medical round with snow clinging to the knees of his jeans and the tops of his dragonhide boots. "It must be coming down at two or three inches an hour," he announces. "Did Fergal fly or apparate to Constanta?"
"Apparate," says Katie. "He knew the blizzard was coming, said he'd get back sometime tomorrow or first thing Monday morning."
Marina, lounging in front of the fireplace with a book, looks up uncertainly.
"Don't go back tonight," say Slovadan and Katie, almost in one breath. Apparating in a snowstorm is difficult—both wind and precipitation interfere with the air currents that make apparition possible—and flying, of course, is rash and dangerous in a heavy snow.
"No, I'll stay," says Marina, rummaging through her memory to recall whether she still has a spare pair of pajamas in her old room in the bunkhouse. She is interrupted by a loud pop as a slightly bedraggled Viktor steps out of the fireplace.
"Viktor!" exclaim Charlie and Katie together.
"Marina!" exclaims Viktor. "I was hoping you were here. I went by the flat and Mrs. Bogasieru said you'd been out all day. She made some fish cakes for you but she's feeding them to Cezar instead."
Slovadan throws Marina a searching look that means, what was Viktor doing stopping by your flat, without even an invitation, as if he's been there before? Frequently? She ignores him.
"I'm staying the night here," says Marina. "Until the snow stops. I should have told her, but I wasn't sure—"
"You'd better stay the night, too, Viktor," interrupts Katie. "Nasty weather, and the Floo Network always seems to go down in heavy snow—especially on a weekend when the Techniwizards are all off duty."
"Viktor may need to get home tonight," warns Slovadan.
"No, I'll Floo my parents while the Network's still working and tell them not to expect me," says Viktor, "if you're really willing to have me."
"Of course!" says Katie. "You can have Charlie's old room in the bunkhouse. It looks right out on the edge of Minnie's yard—"
"Or you can stay at the Hermitage," says Charlie hastily, seeing the look on Slovadan's face. "I finished the guest room. Chess?"
After dinner Charlie invites Marina back to the Hermitage for coffee. He does not invite Slovadan, who glowers at the departing foursome as he laces up his boots and retires across the courtyard to his cluttered lair on the third floor of the bunkhouse.
At the Hermitage, Charlie and Katie serve up small dishes of piping hot coffee topped with whipped cream and retire tactfully to their own quarters. What transpires next is not the canoodling that the young married couple probably intended to facilitate. Viktor pulls a small notebook out of his pocket and says, "I'm so glad I found you. I was worried that you might be stuck somewhere in the blizzard, and I have a new lead."
Marina, who intuited this development the minute Viktor spun out of the fireplace, nods.
"Did you live with Stefan Dobrega, during the years you were studying with him?"
"No," says Marina. "No, I lived in very carefully chaperoned lodgings in the village, with Tomas and Nina Cioran."
"Why them?" asks Viktor, who knows the names but vaguely.
"Oh," says Marina. "Well, they offered. Tomas was—is—the consulting Healer at the dragon reservation. Nina is a half-blood—a foreign half-blood—a German half-blood. They—well, they felt sorry for me, and—er—identified, and they invited me to come live with them until I took my NEWTs. Rather conveniently, they lived in the same village as Stefan, on the Tarnave Mare near Sighisoara. Slovadan and the Director thought it was suitable. My lessons were parceled out from there: Stefan taught me Transfiguration and Defense against the Dark Arts; Tomas and Nina taught me Potions and Charms; the Director and Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank taught me Care of Magical Creatures; and once a week I went into Bucharest to see an eccentric old witch, Drina Aureliu, who taught me History of Magic. She was the one who got me the librarian job at the Ministry."
"How often were you at Stefan's house?"
Marina shrugs. "Five, six days a week. I usually took Sundays off, and I sometimes missed Thursdays, if I was late getting back from Bucharest."
"And the days that you did go to Stefan's—did you have regular hours for lessons?"
Marina laughs. "Stefan didn't have regular hours for anything. He was the sort of man who never remembered, at lunchtime, whether or not he had remembered to eat breakfast. I was more of an apprentice researcher than a student. I might be there for an hour, or twelve—as early as dawn and as late as midnight. I wasn't allowed to walk home alone after dark—it was only a hundred yards, and this was before the war started, but even then it wasn't safe—but once I got my Apparition license, I would just apparate back to Tomas and Nina's, however late it was."
"Stefan Dobrega had a housekeeper, right?"
"Izabela," says Marina. "Izabela Dobrega. She was a cousin of sorts, on the father's side—middle-aged, stout, very serious—"
"That's not the name," says Viktor. "Not the housekeeper I had in mind. Do you remember someone named Luiza Spiru?"
Marina purses her lips. "She was one of the interim ones," she says after a minute. "The summer I took my NEWTs, there was a terrible epidemic of vanishing sickness. It was all over Romania. Even one of the ministers, Glad Ursu, came down with it. Izabela caught it around the end of June, just after I took my NEWTs. It took us the better part of three days to find her, and then Stefan sent her off to Blodenheim—that's the wizarding spa in Moravia—"
Viktor nods. Of course. No doubt he's been there, but Marina grew up poor.
"—she had to take a total rest cure, flagons and flagons of flesh-colored dye, for eight weeks straight. Stefan wasn't really up to looking after himself for so long, so there was a series of interim housekeepers. The first one was Madalina something or other. She was fine for household spells but such a dolt, it drove Stefan crazy to be around her. And then just when he was starting to get used to her, she went off suddenly for no apparent reason, and he took on Luiza—I remember now—he said from bad to worse . . ."
"I think she might have had something to do with the murder," says Viktor.
"Luiza Spiru?" says Marina incredulously. "She was practically a Squib. I mean, she could do household spells, after a fashion, but they never came out right. She was only there for about two weeks, and every time I went to see Stefan I had to redo everything that Luiza had done to the house—"
"When you said that you and the housekeeper were the only two people who knew about the defense-by-transfiguration theory, which housekeeper did you mean?" interrupts Viktor.
"I meant Izabela."
"Did the others know anything about it?"
"I can't imagine they did. Madalina never seemed to take in anything, she had difficulty stringing five words into a sentence. Luiza—" Marina hesitates. "You know, I barely remember Luiza. She was sort of a stagy character—different personalities different days—as if she didn't quite like herself and kept changing her mind about who she wanted to be. A big heavy woman with an incipient mustache—"
"How old?" says Viktor.
"Ageless," says Marina. "Well, probably not over fifty. Her looks went fast, if she ever had any, but she moved in a youngish manner—awkward but strong. It was strange to see such a tall, physically powerful woman cast spells so incompetently."
The snow is still swirling outside the windows, and Viktor walks her back to the bunkhouse before the drifts lie too heavily. They light the tips of their wands and burn a narrow path in the snow, now nearly two feet deep, from the Hermitage to the bunkhouse door, where Viktor kisses her good night.
Her bedroom, always kept ready for her weekend visits, is on the top floor of the bunkhouse, across from the chamber that is conventionally known as "Wilhelmina's room," even though Wilhelmina never sleeps there. Marina climbs three dark flights of stairs, lit by torches at wide intervals, prepared to creep into bed. But Slovadan is standing at his chamber door, clad in an ancient blue terry dressing gown that badly needs mending. Marina realizes with a twinge of guilt that it has been months since she did any mending for Slovadan, and years since she actually paid attention to his wardrobe needs. Slovadan himself, so early emancipated, so early the man of the house, is nevertheless virtually incapable of household spells.
"Marina," he says with relief, "I was worried about your getting back safely."
"Viktor walked me back from the Hermitage."
"There was a reason why he came here today, wasn't there?" asks Slovadan quietly. "I mean, not just to see you."
"The Bulgarian Ministry is reopening the Dobrega case."
"Bloody hell, can't he keep you out of it?" cries Slovadan indignantly, for Slovadan thinks much of his little sister and little of Stefan Dobrega.
"Not if he wants to solve it," retorts Marina. "He needs to get inside information somehow. Izabela was sick all that summer, and there was no one else in the house."
"What does he want?"
Marina shrugs. "Names of the interim housekeepers, what sorts of experiments Stefan was doing that summer, his moods and his plans and the appointments he kept—"
"You didn't keep notes?" asks Slovadan, horrifed. "Marina, you promise me—"
"What, and give the Ministry an occasion to search my flat?" retorts Marina. Slovadan knows—has long known— that she suspects Ministry involvement in Stefan's murder, but his response was merely to caution her all the more strongly not to pursue justice. In Romania, half-bloods—especially poor ones—keep their heads down while the Ministry pursues its course. It's easier for those like Slovadan who make lives in which the Ministry has little play.
"Slovadan," says Marina firmly, "you know as well as I do that I never write anything down." She means, of course, anything that could be cited as evidence of subversive political views.
"Good," he says. He says more gently, "Marina, I worry."
She thinks, I worry too. Just because Slovadan is five years older than she is doesn't mean she doesn't worry. Just because Slovadan plays with dragons instead of politics doesn't mean she doesn't worry. She just doesn't voice her fears.
He says, "Are you going to marry Viktor?"
She thinks, when he asks me. If he asks me.
She says, "We haven't been dating very long."
Slovadan says, "I like Viktor." This is news to Marina. Charlie, Katie, and Fergal gave their permission—their enthusiastic permission—long ago. Antonja is ecstatic, and Mrs. Bogasieru is thoroughly intrigued. But Slovadan's dominant demeanor has been one of suspicion. Now, however, Slovadan says thoughtfully, even calmly, "He's all right. He'll take care of you."
"But," he says. She knew there would be a "but." "If you marry Viktor," says Slovadan, "you'll never know peace. He's a famous wizard in this part of the world. His war work is an open secret. And now he's undertaken a special case for the Bulgarian Ministry—"
"It's not really a special case," says Marina. "He's joining the Bulgarian intelligence service."
Slovadan looks at her mournfully. "I like Viktor," he says. "He'll take care of you. At least, I think. But if you marry him, you'll never know peace."
He's right, of course. She was already starting to realize that. She doesn't really need her big brother to tell her. But she thinks, staring down the dark, familiar hall to the bare single bedroom that has punctuated the last eight years, that peace is a little overrated. Peace sounds good when you're miserable. Peace sounds good when someone dies, when someone is eaten, when someone kills herself, when someone is killed.
It sounds no less alluring now, but it sounds much less necessary. There hasn't been peace and there isn't peace and there won't be peace, but if she marries Viktor, there will be Viktor.