Free Chains of Ice by Christina Dodd Page A

laugh, then choked it back. “Of me ? Why?”
    “You have a look about you that we’re all too familiar with here. You look . . . gifted.”
    Genny almost wrenched her neck turning to stare at Mariana. “What do you mean, gifted ?”
    “There’s an old legend . . .” Mariana rubbed her arms as if cold had suddenly gripped her.
    “You are foolish, Mariana,” Lubochka called back, and sternly. “Don’t encourage her, Genesis.”
    But Genny had to know. “A legend? The legend? About the Abandoned Ones?”
    “You know it?” Now Mariana looked surprised.
    “I do. But why do you ?”
    Lubochka turned off the road. Genny and Mariana followed. The coniferous forest closed in around them.
    Mariana gestured widely. “It happened here.”
    “The legend happened here? No.” Perhaps Genny shouldn’t so openly scoff. But . . . “It’s a legend .”
    “All legends contain a grain of truth. All myths have their beginnings somewhere.” Mariana stated a truth she obviously believed with all her heart. “Look around.”
    Genny did. The forest was cool and smelled spicy with pine. The mossy ground sprang softly beneath their feet. The air grew warmer and, here and there, sunlight glowed like a benediction through the branches.
    Peeling off her coat, she stuffed it in the outer pocket of her backpack, then kept trekking. “Yeah. So?”
    “This forest was old when the Egyptians built the pyramids,” Mariana said.
    Genny remembered her feeling yesterday—that the forest was ancient, a living, breathing entity. And it seemed to watch insignificant humans come and go while it waited for a time when the trees would once more cover the earth . . .
    “Men come to harvest the trees. They bring their machines. They go into the woods . . . and they don’t come back. Or if they do, they’ve got the wind singing in the empty spaces of their heads.” Mariana tapped her forehead.
    They’re not the only ones. This woman was one taco short of a combo plate.
    Mariana continued so solemnly, she should be making sense. “Gods walk in these woods, and devils. Good and bad, all manner of creatures came into the world through this portal.”
    “Portal?”
    “The crossroads is here.”
    Lubochka marched farther and farther ahead, fallen branches cracking beneath her hiking boots, leaving Genny alone with Mariana and a bunch of trees that listened and nodded.
    Genny sped up. “I don’t know what any of this has got to do with me.”
    Mariana’s long strides easily kept up the pace. “You had dreams last night, didn’t you? Nightmares.”
    Mariana’s certainty set Genny’s teeth on edge. “Nothing special, just the usual. Going to the new high school and taking a test I didn’t know about. Going to a law conference, getting up to speak and realizing I forgot my speech. Seeing my mother on the street and . . .” She reined herself in. Seeing my mother on the street and knowing that she would, once again, look right through me as if she didn’t know me.
    She didn’t mention the nightmare with the eyes that watched her from the depths of the dark forest, or the fantasy—so erotic that again she blushed and hoped that Mariana attributed the color to the exercise in the cool air.
    “In the legend,” Mariana said, “the mother abandoned the girl baby because she had marks in her palms . . .”
    “They looked like eyes.” That part of the story always sent a shiver up Genny’s spine.
    “Yes. Eyes. And when the girl grew up, she looked witchy.”
    “Witchy. Are you saying I look like the girl? That I look witchy?” Genny was feeling exasperated. Frazzled.
    “She was beautiful—”
    “Men manage to resist me pretty easily.”
    “—with an oval face and a dimple just there—” Mariana pointed.
    Genny put her finger to the cleft in her chin.
    “Exactly.” Mariana nodded. “She had an abundance of dark brown curly hair, like yours, and eyes that looked brown. And when she grew angry or excited, gleamed like gold.