Scarlet in the Snow Read Free

three best stories, including
The Three Sisters
, the tale I’d started the fateful day Captain Peskov came to visit. (I was very proud of that one.) I gave myself the pen-name A.A. Fenicks, which I thought sounded intriguing, maybe even a little foreign, and certainly not like that of a girl of nearly seventeen living in some benighted hermitage in the provinces. I took my stories in their envelope, carefully stamped, to the post office next time we were in Kolorgrod, our small local town, giving as return address the post office itself, for I did not want anything to come to our house. The competition results would not be announced till well into the new year, and I had already devised a little plan about how I was going to tell the post office we were expecting a letter to arrive for a cousin called Messir Fenicks.
    Days passed. A week. Two. Three. Christmas came – not very merry, this year. Well, in truth it hadn’t been since Papa died. Oh, we tried; we made pretty paper decorations for the tree, Sveta baked a beautiful cake, and Mama had made us each a present: lovely wooden brooches, painted with our own exquisite miniature portrait. Anya’s wore an emerald tiara on her ebony-black hair and emerald earrings in her ears; Liza’s had a sapphire circlet on her brow, with a filmy veil over her hair like new-minted gold; and mine had hair the colour of fresh autumn leaves touched with the last of the summer sun, and a single magnificent ruby like a flame on a fine chain around her neck. I thought it was as if each of us had looked in a magic mirror and seen someone like us but touched with unearthly glamour, like a princess in a fairy tale.
    ‘You
ar
e my princesses,’ replied Mama when I said this. She kissed us all in turn. ‘You are my princesses, more precious than any jewel, and dearer to me than anything in the world.’ Then she sighed, and I knew what she was thinking.
    ‘Oh, Mama,’ I cried, ‘I wish I
could
make magic – real magic – not like that of Grandmother Dove!’ She was the village enchantress and a good old soul, but her spells were small, her magic little. She could make warts go away, improve a squint and weave a simple love-spell, but that was as far as it went. The kinds of things you heard the great enchanters and enchantresses could do – bend time and shapeshift and change destinies – well, they were as far beyond Grandmother Dove as the moon.
    ‘You do have real magic, my darling, each of us does; we only need to find it,’ said my mother gently. But that did not satisfy me, for it sounded to me like the kind of thing a parent says to stop you from dreaming of impossible things. ‘Mama, if I could find magic to change things for us, I’d do anything to get it, even hire myself as a servant to Old Bony if I had to!’
    ‘Don’t say things like that, little one,’ cried Sveta, overhearing me. ‘Old Bony has long ears, and if she should chance to hear you . . .’ Crossing herself, she glanced fearfully at the darkened window, as if expecting at any moment to see the grey-skinned skull-face of the fearsome forest witch grinning at us with all her sharp teeth.
    ‘Yes, if she hears you, Natasha,’ said Liza, grinning, ‘that old witch will have your heartstrings for her hair-ribbons, so watch out!’
    The thing is, Liza does not believe in Old Bony or great enchanters or even the poor little spells of Grandmother Dove. The only kind of magic she believes in is the spell of riches – the magic dust of money, the glamour of wealth – and truth to say sometimes I think she is right. If we had money, poof! All our troubles would disappear, swept away in the whirlwind of good fortune. As for Anya, she does believe in magic, but only in the sort that will somehow bring a prince to her door and take her off into a world of cloth, gold and purple velvet – a world where there’d be a beautiful new gown for every day of the year. If Grandmother Dove could work that spell, Anya