by Anna Bright
“You’re shield-maidens,” she said. “Torden would be so proud.”
Torden. My stomach clenched.
Our odds had already been long. I doubted now, more than ever, that I’d ever see him again.
Would he ever hear what had happened to me? Would my father? Would I be able to tell them of my fate, or would the Imperiya swallow us whole, leaving no trace behind?
I couldn’t bear to watch Anya weep. I steeled myself to leave.
But when I turned to face my guards again, Anya stepped between Cobie and me, her face resolute.
“I conspired with them,” she said to the guards. “Take me, too.”
My jaw worked, horrified, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. And then the shackles hit her skin.
“No!” I blurted. “No. No.” I turned to the guards. “She’s lying. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s— Don’t—” I lunged toward Anya, scrabbling ineffectually to remove her cuffs. But the guards only shoved me away.
After all, who would falsely admit to treason? Who would give themselves up for a crime of which they were innocent, just to protect a friend?
“Anya.” My voice shook, my panic rising. “Anya, don’t do this. You have Skop. You can be free. You can be happy.”
“I did, and I could.” Her words came out steady. “But an ending with you carried off by enemy soldiers is not a happy ending, Selah. You are my sister, and I will see this through with you.”
Tears gathered in my eyes. “But I chose this,” I said. “I never wanted anyone else to get hurt.”
“Yes. And now—” Anya swallowed and cast a glance at Skop, then back to Cobie and me. “And now, I’m choosing you.”
All the money that e’er I had,
I spent it in good company;
And all the harm that e’er I done—
Alas! It is to none but me,
And all I’ve done for the want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night—and joy be with you all.
. . . All the comrades e’er I had
They’re sorry for me going ’way
All the sweethearts e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay;
But since it came unto me lot—
That I should rise and you should not
I gently rise and with a smile
Good night—and joy be with you all.
—“The Parting Glass,” folk song of Alba
28
THE IMPERIYA YOTNE: THE GRAY ROAD
Cobie, Anya, and I walked a hundred nights behind the wagons carrying the soldiers and their gear.
It couldn’t have been a hundred. Of course I knew that.
But then, it had to have been a hundred. A thousand. In no fewer than a thousand nights could the black gown in which I’d sat down to negotiate with Gretel have become the rag I wore, ripped along its hem, stinking with my sweat, muddy with the dirt of the road and the rain that beat down on us mercilessly. Our wrists chafed under the shackles binding us to the wagon, growing first sore, then raw, then bloody when the skin broke.
Anya’s fair hair became matted and filthy; Cobie had to hack a slit in her dress so she could walk. My elegant party shoes grew dusty in the dirt, filthy in the mud, breaking against the cobblestones where the road was paved. Anya was worst off; she’d been barefooted when we’d been captured.
We took turns wearing the two pairs of shoes between us. Whoever went without padded her soles in fabric ripped from our gowns. It didn’t matter; our feet were soon torn and bleeding. A trail of red leaked behind us on the Gray Road.
That was the English for what the soldiers called the path we walked. They spoke only Yotne, which neither Cobie nor I understood. Anya knew a little, and what she heard made her face grow pale. After a few days of asking her what she could gather from them—where we were going, how long we would be on our way—I stopped asking her to translate.
They’d said our destination was Stupka-Zamok, and I already knew what that meant. It was the tsarytsya’s capital, the name of her house and of the city in its shadow, of the heart of her empire.
It meant that we were lost already.
Every step we took through the Imperiya’s conquered lands felt like a step I would never be able to take back. We crossed out of Shvartsval’d and across the rest of old Deutschland, which the Imperiya had sectioned off into new terytoriy. From there, I didn’t know where we went; I didn’t recognize the names of the places.
Anya, Cobie, and I spent our nights in barns and farmyards and cellars, hungry and cold. But the soldiers wanted for nothing. In every village we passed, they walked into farms and pubs and shops, demanding they be served immediately, taking bottles of wine or loaves of bread or fresh clothes or shoes. They never paid.
In one hamlet, they found a stash of books hidden in its headwoman’s home. They cut her throat.
Just beyond the edges of a village, they found a squad of deserted Imperiya soldiers living alone in the woods. They locked them inside their hut and set it ablaze.
Once, perhaps worst of all, they found a couple had been harboring three children in secret and had not informed the town’s governor, another one of the tsarytsya’s puppets. As the soldiers surrounded the house, I’d gotten to my feet, horrified, as if to chase them away like stray dogs.
I’d passed out from rising too quickly.
Anya and Cobie wouldn’t tell me what happened to the children.
I had heard of the Imperiya’s cruelty. But to witness it, unchecked and unbounded, was another thing entirely. I prayed for the souls of the dead every night before I fell asleep.
After they emptied a farm’s larder or walked from a pub having eaten and drunk until their bellies were swollen and their lips stained, the soldiers marched on, caring nothing for what they left behind them, tipping their heads back at the sky and howling at the moon.
The road wound one night through a beautiful, antique city with buildings of ancient stone and lampposts out of a fairy tale. But the lampposts were clouded with ash, as useless by night as by day, and the stones were black and sour pink with mold and mildew. My heart ached at the sight of a lovely old building whose rainbow windows had been smashed and boarded up.
It put me in mind of Winchester Cathedral. Here, as there, I couldn’t tell if it was a church or a library. But it didn’t matter. The tsarytsya’s soldiers had sacked it.
A gray sky hovered above, as if the clouds were worried enough to want to keep close but afraid to come too near. They, too, saw what the Imperiya had done.
We crossed a river to enter the city, traveling via the only bridge still standing. Anya broke into sobs when she heard the soldiers call the city Prakha.
One of them slapped her across the face and told her, in words even I understood, to stop making noise. Anya put her tears away then.
I tried to ask her what was wrong—Cobie had raised her eyebrows and glanced around us, as if to ask what isn’t wrong?—but Anya couldn’t bring herself to explain. Not then, and not as we lay in our cell while the soldiers went out. By the time they returned, smelling of wine and making filthy-sounding jokes, Anya had cried herself to sleep.
Only a night later, as we lay huddled together a few yards away from a campfire, did she explain.
“My mother always told me Prakha was a city of magic,” she whispered, tears chasing trails down her filthy cheeks, clinging to her fair lashes. “When I was little, I asked if she would take Fredrik and me someday. She said that of course she would—that I could go to the city and wander its bridges and its streets and hear its musicians play. That even its stones would love me.”
Something low and terrible clenched in the pit of my stomach.
The city would have loved Anya. It was impossible not to love Anya.
But its bridges were too ruined for happy wandering, and its stones were too shattered to care for her beauty and kindness.
<
br /> “That was before, of course,” she finished brokenly. “And now my mother is gone, and now Prakha is, too.”
We didn’t speak after that. We just scooted closer together, the three of us with our rag-wrapped feet and our torn dresses, like a litter of hungry pups waiting for their mother to come home.
Day after day we walked the road.
In another life, I might have thought the country beautiful. The leaves on the trees that lined our way were green where they hadn’t been cut down; the villages we passed looked utterly idyllic, where they weren’t reduced to ash.
Some days, we climbed mountains covered in stones that stabbed at our sore feet; others, we were forced to ford rivers of muddy water that stung the cuts in our skin. Nightly, I worried over our scrapes and blisters, afraid infection would set into the places where we were broken. Cobie brushed me off, trying to be strong for all of us; but I woke up in the middle of the night and found her missing, once. I came upon her near the place the soldiers had established as a latrine, leaning against a tree, staring away into nothing.
She wasn’t crying. I took her by the arm and led her back to camp.
Cobie just lay down next to me, her back against the stony ground, eyes wide on the stars that shone down on us without mercy.
I tried to sleep. But I was ravenous, my stomach filled with nothing but the grasping pains that plagued me all day and the few bites of hard bread the soldiers fed us at night. We had learned better than to try and gather anything on the road; one day, the three of us had picked up acorns as we hurried behind the wagon, scarfing them as the soldiers paused for lunch.
The soldiers had not let us stop hours later when we could hardly walk for retching, for the cramps that racked our stomachs.
And though my legs burned—we were covering twenty or twenty-five miles a day, at least—the ache in my heart was more potent.
For Potomac, its warm summer nights and fireflies. For the Beholder, its gentle rocking like a lullaby. For food, and my books, and candles at night to see by.
I missed my rosary. The soldiers had taken it, and Margarethe’s crown, when they had searched us on the road that first day. My ring was safe only because I’d braided it hurriedly into my hair the first time the guards had stopped to relieve themselves.
Most of all, I missed my family. My father. My godmother. Lang, and the rest of the crew, and Torden.
I carried his ring in my hair and Lang’s kiss on my lips and wondered if either of them ever thought of me, if Perrault had gotten word to our friends or my godmother.
I wondered if I’d drop into the Imperiya’s jaws and be forgotten entirely.
I chose this, I reminded myself, with every step throbbing in my swollen feet. I chose this. I chose this.
Leirauh’s freedom gave me confidence that I’d done what was right. But only the comfort of Cobie’s and Anya’s presence was enough to keep me moving forward.
We walked on. My throat was dry from thirst. My feet throbbed and bled. My wrists chafed with even the slightest movement, as if glass were buried beneath my skin.
The same, day after day.
But one night, as the sun began to set, a new sight appeared on the horizon.
A city, jagged as a wolf’s claws, its stones gray as ash. It rose over a gate made of black iron spears, a skull atop each one.
Anya wept as she had in Prakha. But I knew she had never hoped to wander these stones.
“They call her house Stupka-Zamok,” she said quietly, wiping her face with the backs of her dirty hands. “They call it the Mortar.”
We had fallen off the edge of the world we had known. We had come to the source of the decay we had so long feared.
We had come to the land of shadows.
Midnight
When Baba Yaga locks the door,
Children pass thereby no more.
—“Baba Yaga and the Wounded Whelps,” Yotne tale
29
YOTUNKHEYM, THE IMPERIYA YOTNE: STUPKA-ZAMOK
The sight of the skulls brought a scream to my lips, but I didn’t let it break loose from my mouth and into the air.
I gripped Cobie’s hand as we walked closer, Anya ahead of us.
I’d heard the word bone used as a color before. Hannelore had argued one night with Ingrid over whether a gown was cream or eggshell or ecru or bone. I hadn’t realized there was any difference between the shades.
The skulls mounted atop the spears varied from sun-bleached white to faded gray to charred black.
Bone was, in fact, many shades. But every skull of every shade watched me with the same hollow eyes.
Cobie made a sound—a vague catching in her throat—and I squeezed her hand. Anya drew inexorably toward the gruesome fence as if drifting on a nightmare, unable to look away from the bones lifted high before us.
One of the guards shoved Anya, barking something I didn’t understand. And the gates opened.
The homes we’d passed on our journey were different, place to place. Some had been little white plaster things, red-tile roofs draped atop them like blankets. Some had been brown wood cabins; others had been cozy lodges of red brick, or of drystone, with little green lichens sprouting along the seams between the rocks.
I’d expected ruins here. I’d expected age, decay, water stains. All the Gothic mystery tied to childhood dreams of witches and dark queens, of the hungry headswoman who became the tsarytsya.
My childhood imagination was not disappointed.
We entered a city of a thousand little fortresses, each of gray and black stone, each of them armed to the teeth. A hedge of wooden and iron spikes surrounded the nearest house; algae grew over a miniature moat surrounding another. An underfed dog with a mud-caked coat barked and snapped at us from behind the fence of a third. The houses grew larger, taller, and sharper as we walked on, many surrounded by uniformed guards.
Every last one was dressed in gray. Leaning against walls and crouched behind fences and jeering at us as we walked past in chains.
There had been little gray anywhere in Norge. It had been a world of blue—blue-eyed boys, blue skies, blue Bilröst—banked in fields of gold.
England had been gray. But England had also been green—its sky full of mist and its earth the color of an emerald, scattered with copses of trees and rose gardens and patches of lavender. England’s gray had been the gray of a sky just before a gentle rain, the gray of a pearl or the wing of a dove.
This city was the gray of smoke and ash belching from teetering chimneys. The gray of a wolf’s pelt. The gray of unrelenting stone. And there was no green to be found inside its skull-topped gates.
More uniforms pushed past us as we were hauled through Stupka-Zamok’s streets, narrow and twisting between the houses that towered overhead like broken teeth. Soldiers in clusters strode around us, calling out to one another in sharp, clear voices; soldiers in formation marched past. Each time, we and the crowds of shouting and shoving commoners had to wait for their ranks to pass so we could carry on.
Once, we paused before a dozen soldiers being dragged on leads through town by a pack of their gray-uniformed fellows. Anya shut her eyes, listening hard as the bound men cried out, as their captors scoffed and insulted them.
“Deserters,” she finally whispered. “Baba Yaga does not look kindly on those who forsake her service.”
In the villages we had passed, we had met gauntness, hollow eyes, starving ribs. I had anticipated more of the same here. But if the gazes of the people of Stupka-Zamok were a little strained as they whispered and looked away, pressing close together to avoid us in the cramped, winding streets, they looked well-fed inside their gray clothes.
I saw no children anywhere.
And above the soldiers and the streets and the roofs of the hundred private fortresses, a great house rose stories high. Clouds hung heavy and gray overhead, and large birds of prey circled low.
I thought of every fairy tale I’d ever read, and I knew. A witch lived in that ho
use.
It was a high tower of merciless gray at the choked, spiky heart of her world, skinny as a pike but for the top two floors, which bulged out into a wide, flat-topped disc. Windows dotted each floor, enough to see everything happening in the city below. Discordant statuary and fountains were scattered around the tower’s base, as if plunked there as an afterthought.
Remembering the tale I’d found in the Roots as a child, the whispered warning circulated by the tsarytsya’s opponents, I called up the picture of her storied hut: a cottage on chicken legs, groaning and shrieking high above the ground. That much was true; the disc at the top did almost seem to stand on a long, skinny leg over the city. And though the tower did not move as Baba Yaga’s hut did, the city around us grated and screeched with harsh sounds, with the whine of rusty metal on hard stone.
But the little whelps in the story had had to ask Baba Yaga’s yzbushka to turn away from the forest and to look upon them, and in this, reality differed from the fairy tale.
Baba Yaga’s tower had eyes in every direction. And unlike the children in the tale, I had no hope we’d find the comforts of hearth and home inside.
We stood before great iron doors carved top and bottom. One of our guards stamped twice on the stone porch, and the doors swung, creaking, to admit us. I bit back a gasp of relief as my feet met the cold slate floor of the foyer, clear of shattered glass and debris. My shoes had broken beyond repair that afternoon, and I’d walked the last few miles barefoot.
I held Anya’s and Cobie’s hands, as if we were little girls playing a game, and stared upward. Fourteen stone floors were stacked like iron rings above us, bridged by a delicate-looking iron staircase and echoing with harsh Yotne words. Dozens of windows admitted a dull, smoky gray light.
And everywhere, everywhere, moving around and around, the gray uniforms of Imperiya servants and soldiers. The effect was dizzying; I swayed.
Cobie wrapped an arm around my waist, her strength barely enough to hold me upright. I could feel the places where, in four weeks’ time, my gown had loosened and my frame grown thinner. Looking at my friends—my beautiful friends, with their dirty fingernails and greasy hair and their bodies grown gaunt—I couldn’t believe I had ever envied their slimness. Hunger had made me wiser.
