The Wise and the Wicked Read online

  Dedication

  TO LANA POPOVIC AND

  JORDAN BROWN, FOR EVERYTHING

  Epigraph

  Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

  —Clarice Lispector

  For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

  —Carl Sagan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Rebecca Podos

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  •••

  In an old house built of bloodred bricks, with a tea shop in the converted front rooms, there lived three sisters and their mother.

  Solnyshko, the eldest, was willow-tree tall and sweet. Zvyozdochka, the middle child, was beautiful and sharp as a cut diamond. The youngest, Zerkal’tse, was small but hard, like an unshelled nut. Each was different as could be from her sisters, except that all three had their mother’s eyes, the deep green of leaves in the part of the forest where sunlight doesn’t reach. Of course they did; you can always recognize heroines in stories by their eyes, a sign of powerful gifts within. And this was a family with very powerful gifts.

  Or they had been, once upon a time.

  Once upon a time, their ancestors had lived inside an immense forest of towering pines beside the republic of Russian Karelia, south of the White Sea.

  Once upon a time, the forest was cold and foreboding, and braved only by those seeking miracles. Those who’d heard whispers that the woman in the woods could foretell a person’s fate, could grant wisdom and health, and—if the seeker was worthy—could ward off death itself. She and her daughters were revered and respected by those who believed. They were legends.

  But the world around them changed, as it does. The cities to the west were touched by war. Political factions wrestled for the land, fighting and dying and destroying, in the way men do. Farms lay fallow; bridges and buildings were demolished. Factories and processing plants sprouted up. Typhus and cholera and diseases of deprivation burned through settlements, killing thousands.

  So it was that the people became fearful for their lives. Stirred by rumors—by stories—and hungry for the power to save themselves, a band of city-dwelling men went into the forest. They trampled brush that had gone unstirred for centuries, hacked through delicate black thorns, and sloshed through clean river water with their foul boots to steal the secrets of the woman in the woods for themselves.

  Long had the woman believed they would come. She had heard the tales of the settlements from miracle seekers, caught the stench of desperation and decay and greed on the westerly wind. She knew of the darkness in these men that stained what was good, like blood in water. And so she was prepared. She sent her daughters away on a ship bound for America to protect them. But they left their greatest secrets behind, and by the time they’d crossed the ocean, they had become shadows of themselves, believing it better to be small and safe than strong and hunted.

  This was the legacy of Solnyshko, Zvyodochka, and Zerkal’tse. Deep green eyes, greatly weakened gifts, and the stories their mother—the granddaughter of the woman in the woods—told them in their beds in the old brick house. Each night, she passed along what diminished wisdom their ancestors had brought with them to their new home, this foremost: that the world has never been very kind to powerful women.

  • One •

  Ruby was in the tub with a teacup of Stolichnaya, when her sisters rattled the door.

  “Occupied!” she called, hunting for a spot to stash the cup before they barged in. There wasn’t any. Their only bathroom was tiny, stuffed with a pedestal sink, toilet, and a cracked claw-foot tub that took up three-quarters of the black-tiled floor. The whole house was like that: small, splintered, overcrowded. There was nowhere to hide, and no space to keep secrets, at least not between the sisters. With a resigned sigh, Ruby plunged her cup beneath a veil of bubbles and let it sink, hitting the bottom with a small, sad thunk. She squirted another dollop of Dahlia’s Flower Empower bath bubbles into the water, snatched whichever book topped Ginger’s pile on the toilet tank, and settled back just as the door burst open.

  When the steam cleared, Ginger leaned against the frame, long fingers twisting the doorknob back and forth in its socket. “A little Tolstoy before bed?” she asked, lemon-mouthed.

  Ruby glanced down at the spine of the book. “Anna Karnina is awesome.”

  Her sister snorted. “Kar-e-nin-a.”

  “I said that.”

  “Uh-huh. Just get out of the tub. I need the mirror.”

  “But I’m at the best part,” she protested as Dahlia slipped into the bathroom beside Ginger.

  “What part is that?”

  “. . . Where everyone is like, ‘Oh my god, Anna Kar-e-nin-a, she’s so crazy.’ You know?”

  “Ah, yes, that classic scene,” Ginger deadpanned.

  Ignoring them, Dahlia smiled sunnily. “Time to get out, Ruby! Polina’s coming over.”

  “Okay, yeah,” Ruby relented. She reached for her towel, but stubbornly waited to take it until they’d turned to leave.

  “Whatever, it’s all fogged up in here anyway,” Ginger muttered on her way out.

  Once they’d gone, Ruby fished the teacup out of the bath. The Stoli had been hard-won; her sisters kept the vodka in the back of the highest kitchen cabinet, not an easy climb for her five-foot body. She didn’t know why they bothered. A little vodka wasn’t going to kill her.

  That isn’t how Ruby dies.

  She scrubbed a towel over her head until her jaw-length brown hair puffed up around her ears like ruffled feathers. She wrapped the towel around herself and headed toward her bedroom at the end of the narrow hall, but paused in Dahlia’s doorway.

  As always, her oldest sister’s bedroom looked like an occult shop rammed by a tornado. Colorful beaded necklaces glittered in piles on the rug. Tarot cards and finger-thick crystals spilled across her desk beside a day-or-two-old bowl of cereal.

  Ruby liked this room. She liked that she could plunge her hand into any pile and pluck out something she’d never seen there before: a silver ring with an opal the size of a grape, or a black candle that smelled like pepper, or an entire loaf of bread in its plastic package.

  Her middle sister settled at the vanity and cleared a spot with her elbow, scowling but silent. Dahlia had three years on Ginger and eleven on Ruby, and was undeniably in charge, even if it was Ginger who made sure their bills were paid, their groceries shopped, and their small, scrubby lawn weeded in spring.

  Ruby was banned from Ginger’s room, and that was fine. From the hallway, it looked like a d
entist’s office—softly colored, clean, and cold.

  “What’s up, Ruby?” Dahlia chirped as she stepped into a silky, voluminous skirt patterned with blackbirds and ivy vines, the one she wore for clients. Ginger had a skirt just like it.

  “Is Polina bringing somebody?” she asked, eyeing her sister’s outfit.

  “Someone’s meeting us here.”

  “Who?”

  Dahlia hesitated, sorting out how much to tell her, Ruby knew. She wasn’t allowed to see clients with her sisters, judged too young for the “sensitive nature” of the family practice. She did not yet have her own skirt. Ginger dotted on cherry lipstick in Dahlia’s mirror, pressing together and then popping her lips. “She’s from out of town. Nobody you know.” Recapping her lipstick, she swept a highlighter stick above her cheekbones, flecked with the same perfect constellation of freckles as Dahlia’s. They’d inherited them from their mother, just like the straw-gold hair they dyed regularly. They did this at home, so every six weeks when they emerged from the little bathroom, it was splashed and stained, as if they’d been in there murdering fairies with jewel-colored blood—right now, Dahlia’s was a bright sky blue, Ginger’s a bold sapphire. They’d tried to convince Ruby to join them, but her overgrown pixie cut was too dark for dye to show; it only made her look pale and ambiguously Goth. Although her mother’s nickname for her had been zerkal’tse—little mirror—she’d never looked much like her, or like Ginger (zvyozdochka, the little star) or Dahlia (solnyshko, the little sun.)

  Except for their eyes—Chernyavsky eyes.

  Ginger cut those familiar eyes toward Ruby. “Were you gonna dress for company, or . . .”

  Remembering her nakedness, Ruby shoved off from the wall and trudged on down the hallway.

  If Dahlia’s bedroom looked like it belonged to the Mad Hatter, and Ginger’s to an accountant, then Ruby’s looked a bit like it belonged to nobody, but was frequented by drifters who sometimes left possessions behind when they moved on. The bookshelf was bare except for strange little trinkets—a tube of lip gloss she’d never worn, with a unicorn’s head on the cap; a fist-sized garden stone with a rooster painted on it; a striped yellow billiard ball. On her nightstand, on top of a library copy of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, sat an unopened jar of Vegemite she’d taken from the World Market three months ago. Some would’ve kept their acquisitions stashed in the back of a closet or deep in an underwear drawer, but Ruby preferred to hide things in plain sight. There was one photo taped to the wall above the bed—Ruby and her cousins Oksana, Mikki, Lili, and Cece on the front steps of Polina’s house, arms slung around each other—but that was one of few identifying artifacts.

  She dressed quickly in sweats and a T-shirt, then met her sisters in the kitchen. Dahlia was boiling water, silver bracelets with tiny bells tinkling against her graceful wrists as she scooped loose tea into the strainer. Squeezing past her in the tight space, Ginger extracted cups from the cabinets and placed them on saucers on the counter. Three in all, none of them meant for Ruby.

  In the next room, the front door opened and shut without a knock to warn them, and before the sisters could move to greet her, Great-Aunt Polina stood in the kitchen in her steel-gray coat, unwrapping a black headscarf from her steel-gray hair in its tightly braided bun. Her broom skirt, unlike Dahlia’s or Ginger’s—embroidered with silver moons and stars—was plain black, brushing the tops of her dull black oxfords. “Girls,” she said in her Russian accent, the curled R and guttural L and the single syllable stretched into two. Nearly eighty years in America had not stamped it out.

  She lowered herself into one of the mismatched chairs around their kitchen table that still had its cushion. Dahlia set a steaming cup of tea in front of her at once, while Ginger whisked her coat and scarf off to the living room closet. Ruby stood without a specific duty, waiting to be summoned.

  “Come sit, kroshka,” Polina said as expected, pointing to the chair beside hers.

  She did so as her great-aunt riffled through the compartments of her oversized brown handbag, pulling out a little bag of homemade pastila baked in the old way, with honey and egg whites and sour apples from Polina’s backyard. Even the traditional Russian bakery in Portland didn’t make them like that anymore. Polina plunked it down on the table, waiting until Ruby slipped a square into her mouth to ask the usual questions.

  “How are you going in school?”

  “Okay. We were on Christmas break, but it ends tomorrow, so—”

  “Science is A, yes? What about English?”

  Ruby grimaced. “Maybe a B . . . minus.”

  “You’re too smart for B minus.”

  “I’m trying.”

  Polina patted her cheek once, her hand wrinkled and liver-spotted, but strong for ninety-five, and perfectly steady. That was her great-aunt all over. “You must work harder, because life is also hard. But you can do it. You are tough, kroshka. If only that cousin of yours is so tough. I see her yesterday, and she is dressed like a payats! Like a little clown! I tell her she is a woman now, a true Chernyavsky woman. She must act like it.”

  Polina could only be talking about Cece, who dressed in clothes as bright as she was.

  “What do you mean, she’s a true Chernyavsky?” Dahlia spoke up, settling on Polina’s other side with her own cup of tea. “Do you mean . . .”

  Polina nodded gravely. “Anfisa’s daughter sees her Time.”

  Ruby’s heart stuttered. “What? When?” There was a proud light in Polina’s still-clear green eyes, despite her harsh words.

  “Yesterday, I say this already. Her party is being planned now.”

  Ginger, standing behind Polina with the third cup in hand, raised a pale eyebrow at Ruby. “She didn’t tell you?”

  Ruby shook her head, fist tightening around the bag of pastila. While there were a few Chernyavsky cousins close to Ruby’s age, most of them attended private schools in nearby towns. Cece and Ruby went to Saltville High and were in the same class. Anfisa, who went by Annie and was their mother’s younger sister, had married a respectable gastroenterologist named Neil Baker. They lived on the west side of Saltville. Aunt Annie didn’t work, but was on the PTO as a full-time volunteer, decorating their gym for the annual Halloween dances and making cupcakes for every bake sale.

  They were nothing like Ruby’s small branch of the family—if the Bakers’ home was a tulip, hers was an old cactus—but it didn’t matter. Cece had always been her best friend.

  And yet a whole day had passed, and she hadn’t mentioned her Time.

  “I can’t believe she’s old enough.” Dahlia smiled down into her tea. “I remember when she was born.”

  “Whatever, she’s sixteen. That’s three years older than Ruby was,” Ginger reminded her. “And I was only twelve. I handled it fine.”

  “Okay, enough chat, girls.” Polina tapped Ruby’s cheek again, a bit more sharply to catch her attention. “It is almost time for us to work, so now you must go away,” she commanded.

  Though Ruby loved Polina—of course she did, Polina was blood—she knew her great-aunt wasn’t easy to like. Cece was a little terrified of her; most of the cousins were.

  Not Ruby. True, Polina looked at her from time to time as if searching for something Ruby was pretty sure wasn’t there, and it made her skin itch. But she preferred that to the way Aunt Annie watched her, as though Ruby was barely herself; as though she was just the glass pane in a picture frame that held a photo of her mother behind it. Aunt Annie’s face would twist with pity and betrayal at once. Polina’s never did. She hadn’t mentioned Ruby’s mother, hadn’t even said her name aloud since the night she left them all.

  Whatever her great-aunt did or did not see in Ruby, at least she saw her.

  Rising obediently, Ruby pressed a light kiss to Polina’s leathery cheek as tradition dictated, then slipped away to her room.

  Collapsing onto her bed, she stared up at Cece in the photo on the wall over the headboard. Pretty, chubby, colorful Cece. Cece, who�
��d never kissed a boy with tongue. Cece, who’d once collected caterpillars in a paper milk carton so they’d have someplace safe and warm to become butterflies, and peed her pants with grief when the girls peeled back the lips a week later to find a pile of dried husks.

  Cece, finally seeing her Time.

  Ruby had been waiting for this day for three long years, and now it was here. She wanted to meet up with Cece, now. She thought about texting her cousin their Super-Actual-Emergency Code, but as she imagined sitting across from Cece in their booth at the Rooster, ready to compare futures at last, Ruby’s throat closed tight as a fist. She suspected she’d need the rest of the bottle of Stoli to loosen it.

  She was still trying to work up the courage to send the text when she heard the car. The sputtering engine grew louder, and she crept to the window, kneeling with her elbows propped on the sill to peer out as the car turned into their driveway.

  Once upon a time, Ruby and her sisters would’ve been sought by despairing folk who trekked through the cold, endless woods to reach them. Now a woman climbed out of a gray car spattered with rust, stuffing a tissue under her nose. She looked up at the yard, and Ruby knew what she saw: a tiny house, the orange paint blistered, curling away in spots like half-peeled fruit. Battered wind chimes over a front stoop hardly any wider than Ruby.

  If they’d still lived in the big brick house where Ruby had been born, if their mother were still around . . . but she didn’t like to think about her old life, and neither did Dahlia or Ginger. They pretended their family had always existed in this diminished state. That was the story they all told themselves. On most nights, anyway.

  By day, they were the kind of people who seemed to belong in the house on Stone Road. Ruby went to school while her sisters worked the part-time jobs they could get without college degrees, scrambling to save for Ruby’s own (ultimately pointless) college fund. Ginger was an office assistant at a feed store, while Dahlia currently worked at ’Wiches and Wings, a butterfly conservatory and sandwich shop in one.

  And then some nights, rare but constant for the last few years, they were different people altogether. Polina would come with a client, or one would follow. Always women, always in dark plain clothing, in stained pants and with no jewelry or lipstick. Often, their cars had out-of-state plates. They looked desperate, as though they would have walked through the woods all night to get here, if necessary. Ruby wasn’t sure how clients actually found Polina, or where Polina found them. Nor was she completely sure what went on after she was sent to her room, but she knew enough.