mother and saw that Ruthie was staring at her with cold rage in her eyes. There would be no need to tell her that her engagement with Ivan was off. Obviously, she already knew.
If only Mikola had learned to read and write back when it was a new idea. Instead he had only picked it up during the past fifty years, when literacy became universal in the Soviet Union and you had to be able to read signs and newspapers in order to function in society. Even then he still thought of it as something of a fad, until now, when he realized that his shortsightedness might cost him dearly.
Back in the old days the stories inscribed in the priests' books seemed trivial and distant to him. He had his own life, his own duties, his own powers. Why learn to read about their god, who ministered to another people in a faraway land, when he had his own business to attend to?
Only once in those early days of literacy did it occur to him that he might learn to read and write. He was telling his wife at that time - Hilda? Bruna? - the story of the time when Bear first wandered across the Urals, thinking that whatever land he came to would be his alone. Bear was wilder then, ignorant, barbarian - but dangerous, volatile, full of powers that Mikola had never faced before. He had to be inventive, combine spells and incantations, devise clever invisible fences across time. He laughingly told his wife about the time he inadvertently put every bear in the forest to sleep for three days before he figured out how to make his new spell more selective. And his wife asked him - Hilda, definitely, the one who ran off with Loki when the Norsemen first started raiding down the rivers - Hilda asked him what he did to make all the bears sleep. And Mikola couldn't remember.
He had sat there thinking, and then took a walk and thought some more, and still he could not remember. Only late that night, lying awake in his bed, did he remember the simple and obvious mistake that had put the bears to sleep. He almost woke Hilda right then, to tell her, but she was tired and he didn't like annoying her because she had the most amazing temper. And as he lay there listening to her snore he realized that remembering that old spell wasn't what mattered. The important discovery was the fact that Mikola Mozhaiski was capable of forgetting a spell. He hadn't known that could happen.
I should write them all down, he thought as he lay awake that night. I should get some priest to teach me to write, and then I could record all my spells so I don't have to try to remember them. Commands to the waves and the wind, those I remember because I use them so often. The flow of the great sky river, that I could direct in my sleep. But the commands to each plant to wake up in the spring, I barely remember those, because they generally do it well enough without my help. And the spells to control insects in their flight, and the song to calm the birds - how did those go? He definitely should learn this new alphabet and all the words so he could write it all down and never have to worry about remembering.
But then he thought some more, and decided that it was a bad idea, for two reasons: What if he came to rely on the book, and then lost it? He'd be worse off than now. And - even more dire - what if someone stole the book and used the spells against him? Better to keep his memory sharp, so he would never need a book that might empower an enemy. That was when he began his long custom of rehearsing every spell he knew at least once a year.
He kept it up, too, for several centuries, until his people grew so rational that he had no more rivals, no enemies disrupting the right order with their local spells. Witchcraft and wizardry had so effectively been denied that his own powers began to weaken, for there were few who contributed to his strength by invoking his name. He could cast all the old spells, of course, but it cost him more, wore him out, and he stopped doing any spells but the essential