Whether because of the enchantment or bad timing he cannot tell, but Vasili does not get to look at the bundle before everything goes terribly wrong. Just as he was planning to pull back the wrappings, the child's mother was jerked from her feet and lynched by unseen hands. Vasili backs away, holds the bundle tight and sways a little, like he learned to do when holding his sisters. His father said he would drop them, but his mother always found a time to let him hold them. For an instant he is a big brother again, holding that warm, wriggling thing to him, feeling the breath on his cheek. He would not let her fall.
The bundle in Vasili's arms, when he unwraps it, is only a breath of fog which dissipates almost immediately. A moment later the swaddling disappears as well, leaving his hands empty.
Vasili screams something unintelligible, shrill and primal like the shriek of an wild beast. He begins gulping air into his lungs like a drowning man, and falls to the ground to gather up the scraps of swaddling clothes before they are gone forever.
"She-he--" he stammers. "No, no no! He was warm! I felt him, he was
warm!"
Isabella wrote:"If only wishing made things so," Richard said quietly, and paused for a moment to openly weep.
Vasili stares at the Mordentishman, choking on his own gasps. "It-it
does, at least for some of us! What capricious justice is this, that reaches into the abyss to retrieve a child's beloved nurse--a playmate!--
but will not reopen those gates for the mother herself!?"
Still on his knees, Vasili turns his face upward and screams at the sky. "WHY US? Why not these two, torn apart by thoughtless, wicked men?
The child needed her! He would have been a great man with her by her side!"
Leila slinks up beside her master, unsure what to make of what she's hearing. Did he still consider her a blessing, after all that had happened? Was he truly a better man, because as a little boy he had wished her out of the abyss?
Vasili is beyond speech, and at the slight touch of Leila's tail he throws both arms around her and buries his screams and sobs in her fur. Forgoing all resistance, Leila is momentarily boneless, a child's stuffed toy for him to drag around, subject to his thoughtless neglect. Her face, however, is momentarily--blissfully--serene.
Isabella wrote:"Thank-thank Ezra you are both well. I-I-I beg your forgiveness for leaving at-at such a foul time. I-I-I proved a wretched guardian, I-I-I am sorry, Leila. But where-where are the others? I-I-I suppose I must not have been gone so long as it-it felt. We ought to find them."
Regaining her composure first, Leila slips around Vasili to face the others, giving her master a little more time to restore himself. She demures at Richard's apology--after all, no one could be everything to Vasili that she was--and informs the group of what Vasili has learned from talking to Tara.
