by Anna Bright
The door slammed shut behind us, and a bar swung down into place against it with a heavy clang.
I jumped and glanced back at the doors and realized only then that the carvings at their top and bottom were teeth.
Gripping Anya’s hand, I turned back around. Her face was pale and somber, her blue eyes too big. I knew we were thinking the same thing.
When Baba Yaga locks the door,
Children pass thereby no more.
My fingers dragged my empty pockets, scrabbling for a rosary that wasn’t there as we crossed the wide atrium of Baba Yaga’s house to the narrow iron stairway, just wide enough for two to pass, at the center of the tower. Shafts of light cut through the windows as the guards forced us up the steps. Their glass was stained, like the windows in a church, but where the windows in Saint Christopher’s in Potomac and the cathedral in Winchester had shimmered with color, the ones in Baba Yaga’s house were gray like quartz. Artfully leaded wolves and teeth and towering plumes of smoke lurked at their edges.
Through the windows, I saw the citizens of Stupka-Zamok going about their lives and business. I wondered if they knew what happened outside the walls of their city or inside their tsarytsya’s house. I wondered if they cared.
My shackles clinked on my wrists as we climbed, long cold chains clattering against the bannister and dragging between my legs. Hunger gnawed at my belly and bones.
I quit counting the steps after a hundred and fourteen, because that was when my feet began to leave bloody prints on the iron latticework. I stopped, dragging my soles over my shins, trying not to whimper, trying to wipe up the blood.
One of the guards cursed and butted me with his gun, and I couldn’t stifle my cry.
My nose was running when we reached the second story from the top of the tower. Most of the floors we had passed were ringed with doors, but this one had just two, each a high thing made of smooth wood the color of a shadow. Like her front door, this one was carved top and bottom with long, sharp teeth.
A sentry opened the door, and we found Baba Yaga holding court inside.
The walls of the tsarytsya’s throne room were gray stone, punctuated with windows of the same smoky leaded glass. Mismatched oil paintings and marble busts and terra-cotta vases and ragged tapestries dotted the walls and filled pedestals across the room. Men and women in gray garments, their elegance betraying their rank above the citizens outside the tower, filled the spaces between the miscellaneous artwork.
I wanted to grip the doorframe and force our guards to pry me loose. But Anya slipped her hand into mine, and I put my hand on Cobie’s shoulder, and we walked forward. The room went quiet.
“Ah,” said Baba Yaga, surveying us. I kept very, very still.
The tsarytsya of the Imperiya Yotne was tall and thin, with pale, papery skin and long gray hair that hung loose down her back. She had a stately, high-bridged nose and remarkable eyes—not for their color, which I’d wondered about so many weeks before; they were an ordinary-enough shade of brown.
Grandmother Wolf’s eyes were hungry.
The tsarytsya’s throne was not built of finger bones, as the chair in the Baba Yaga story was; it was a high-backed chair of iron wrought into twisting patterns like smoke. She sat tall in its rigid seat, and a brilliant silver crown studded with emeralds and sapphires rested on her brow. She took in each of us in turn as a guard said something quietly in her ear.
“Your names,” she called. Her voice was low, for a woman’s; it bubbled and popped unexpectedly, like brew in a cauldron.
I stepped forward, chains rattling against my legs. “Selah—”
But Anya lifted her chin and followed me, before I could say any more. “Anya, Prinsessa of Varsinais-Suomi, lately of the house of Asgard.” The crowd lining the room began to murmur, their eyes darting back and forth.
Anya pretended not to notice, but I saw the deep breath she drew in through her nose, the hard swallow at her throat as she kept her gaze on the woman on the throne.
“I’m Cobie Grimm.” Cobie tossed the words out.
Anya was still holding my hand. She gave my fingers a squeeze, and our shackles clanked together. My free hand reached for Torden’s ring in the matted hair at my nape, searching for comfort.
“Hmm. English. You are all a long way from home,” said the tsarytsya. “You, less so, Prinsessa Anya, but what a surprise to see you, nonetheless.” She emphasized Anya’s title, but her gaze wandered to me, as if she couldn’t quite place me.
Anya had interrupted me on purpose. She was protecting me again, distracting the tsarytsya and the court with her name and title.
When none of us said anything more, the tsarytsya shifted in her seat, tone growing businesslike. “Come you here of your own accord, or are you compelled?”
I stiffened. This, at least, was exactly what the Baba Yaga of the story had said.
I straightened my shoulders and told the tsarytsya what I had told myself again and again on the Gray Road to her house. “I chose this.”
She cocked her head amid the startled murmurs of the crowd, pointing a bony finger at Anya and then at Cobie. “And you?”
“Yes,” Cobie said, without a moment’s hesitation.
Anya nodded. “Yes.”
Baba Yaga took us all in a moment longer, the silver crown listing over her pale brow. Then she jerked her head at a guard. “Make them useful.”
“Tak tochno, moya tsarytsya.” He brought his heels together sharply and hustled us from the room.
I cast a glance over my shoulder as we passed from the throne room, back at the bloody footprints I’d left on the slate floor.
I determined then and there that it was the only blood I or my friends would shed in this house. We would survive and get back to the ones we loved.
My father was waiting for me. My new little sibling was waiting for me. Fritz had been right: I would have to be clever to live long enough to see them again.
If you’re one step ahead of them, Penelope had taught me, they still haven’t caught you.
The tsarytsya was still watching us as we left—still eyeing me, as if she were a haruspex and I her sacrifice, no more than organs and entrails laid out before her divining gaze.
And the look in her eyes chilled me to the bone.
30
The guard took us to the kitchens and left us. A dozen women at least were hurrying around the crowded set of rooms, but one—a tall, pretty woman around thirty, with dark hair and a smattering of freckles on her pale cheeks—looked us over, drawing back in horror at my bloody footprints on her floors. She tried a couple of different languages before landing on one we understood.
“You must wash,” she said, a little impatient.
A sink full of plates and cups and pans caught my eye. “Wash the dishes?” I asked.
“Ni!” the woman burst out, flinging a string of exclamations at me I didn’t understand. “Go wash yourselves.” She motioned us toward a huge tub of water in the next room. A scullery maid passed us a cake of soap, and one at a time, we began to clean ourselves, wincing at the water’s icy temperature, hissing in pain as the lye soap stung our broken skin.
When I climbed out and pulled on my new plain gray shift, I finger-combed my hair and quickly braided Torden’s ring back into it, tying the end with a thread—the last relic of my ruined gown before another maid tossed it onto the fire. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat as the dress smoldered on the logs, tried not to think of how I’d felt in it when Lang kissed me goodbye, when I sat down to meet with Gretel.
The cook was sweating before the stove and the great oven at the center of the kitchen, ringed by worktables, surrounded above by hanging cast-iron pots and bunches of dried herbs. She dragged the back of her hand across her forehead and then did point to the pile of dishes. The cracked porcelain sink was full of pans filmed with fat, with dirty dishes coated in gravy and gristle. “You three—wash.”
My bones ached, and I wanted nothing more than to li
e down before the fire and sleep for a hundred years. But we were clean, we were together, and we had traded the company of male soldiers on the road for that of women in a kitchen. These were blessings.
Most important of all, Anya had protected me. With luck, it was possible that the tsarytsya might never learn who I truly was—that we could exist just beyond the bounds of her notice while we lived in her house.
I tried not to think about how long that might be. I tried not to dwell on what Anya’s announcement of her presence might cost her. I tried to tell myself a house this large was bound to be full of gaps, and that we would stay alive until we could find one and slip through it.
I didn’t ask the house to hide me, as Burg Rheinfels and the Shvartsval’d woods had pretended they would. I’d learned not to trust a place that felt safe.
Cobie and Anya and I—we were our only shelter. I asked only for a door. For an escape.
I would watch. I would wait patiently. And when the time came, we would run.
For now, we set to work, me washing, Anya rinsing, Cobie drying. The cooks were plating dinner by the time we finished. My stomach growled and I tried not to stare at the dumplings, the brilliant red-pink soup, and what appeared to be lard sliced onto bread. Two of them disappeared upstairs carrying trays, one hauling an enormous thing like a silver vase full of hot coals and scalding water.
The pots and pans went immediately into the sink, and I was prepared to be ordered back to washing. I was grateful when the head cook beckoned to us instead and ladled each of us a bowl of something hot, like grits with cheese and mushrooms in it.
It was gone too soon, but the cook was probably wise to give us no more than a half cup each. I didn’t fancy waking up in the middle of the night to vomit beside the fire.
I turned to Anya. “How do you say thank you?”
She cut me a wry glance. “Spasibo.”
“Spasibo,” I repeated to the cook.
She nodded, not ungraciously, pushing back flyaway strands of her dark hair. Then the cook pointed again to the mountain of dishes in the sink. “Wash.”
My arms were trembling when we finished our chores hours later. The cooks and serving maids had long since left, and the kitchen had cooled considerably; someone had banked the fire in the great oven. Cobie, Anya, and I lay down close together on its hearth.
Anya’s hair was pale gold by its faint light; Cobie’s brow, in sleep, was finally smooth. I wished they were far away, safe, but I was thankful they were beside me.
I longed for a story. But absent my godmother’s book, I told myself the ones I already knew—the tales I’d read, and the ones I’d lived. As the embers burned low in the fire, I thought of the way Torden’s hair looked in the sunshine. Of his confident hands on his weapons and on my waist, and the way he’d joked with his brothers.
Thinking of Torden made me think of Lang—Lang and his jealousy, his competition, his kiss that had smelled of salt and summer. I’d forgotten my guilt on the Gray Road, but sifting through my memories brought it back.
Would Torden come for me, or was he too devoted to his father to leave home?
Would Lang come? Or was he bound up in some fresh endeavor now—in something new that had caught his attention, or some other prior commitment he’d hidden from me?
Had his kiss been a goodbye, or a promise?
I hoped the crew, at least, would push for our rescue. I had been so angry at them—but they were my friends.
I had read the old tales. I knew friends made along the way mattered at the story’s end, and that to be generous to friends and strangers alike was to pave one’s own way to a happy ending. Gods and queens and powerful fae rewarded those who proved themselves less cruel and selfish than the world said was only practical, only fair.
I had seen cruelty in abundance, and we had much to fear. But threatened though we were on all sides, we were still whole, still not broken or alone. My friends and I had passed through the gate of bones, and still, against terrible odds, we lived.
Sleep dragged at me. But I couldn’t rest yet.
I tore a very thin strip from the hem of my shift, though it was already threadbare and short. In the ragged cloth I tied careful knots in sets of ten, then joined the ends; a few more knots and two crossed splinters finished my makeshift rosary. In the silent kitchen, I began to pray.
I poured out my thanks for the fire, for the bath and the food and the door between us and the wolves beyond. Most of all, I offered my gratitude for the friends safe at my side and the ones I believed with all my heart would come for me.
I would hope. I would wait.
We were in a wicked, brutal house, a cold cast-iron cage, and we would survive it. But I would not let it make me brutal. I would not let it make me cold.
31
We woke to the clanging of pots and pans, ashes on our cheeks and arms and feet.
I was leaden with sleep. I’d been dreaming of the Beholder, of working in the galley with Will and of the candle I’d stolen that Lang had blown out.
“Zolushka,” muttered one of the maids. The head cook drew back at this, surprised, and dealt her a sharp answer.
I didn’t understand their Yotne words. But the maid’s was clearly an insult, and the cook’s was clearly a reproof.
“Spasibo,” I said to the cook quietly.
She gave me a bracing nod, then pointed at a pile of potatoes beside the sink. “Wash.”
It was her most frequent order, and the nickname I silently began calling her.
We scrubbed potatoes until Wash and the rest of the cooks looked like potatoes. As soon as we finished scrubbing one pile, another was placed before us. Potatoes were peeled, grated, boiled, mashed, fried into pancakes, stuffed into the dumplings they called pelmeni. When there were no more potatoes to wash, there were dishes.
I was used to the easy timbre of work in the galley. But there had been two of us in the Beholder’s kitchen, and a mere fifteen souls aboard; two dozen women worked in the tsarytsya’s kitchen and laundry, speaking as many languages, running a tower that housed hundreds—courtiers, soldiers, advisers, and Baba Yaga herself. There were no breaks in our labor; the work was constant. Wash cooked with all the ceaseless efficiency of an army general, with all the eye to taste of a parent feeding their family, clucking like a mother hen to move us from task to task.
I wondered if Wash liked kitchen work, and where she’d learned it. Had she grown up the daughter of a great house, and learned from her own cook? Had her father or mother taught her? Or had she learned as she worked, perhaps in this very cellar?
My mind turned the questions over like a spinning wheel as the three of us scrubbed dishes for hours. And then Wash issued a new order.
“You,” she said to Cobie, Anya, and me, then issued a long command in Yotne.
“Ya—idu?” Anya asked haltingly, pointing at herself. She spoke the Yotne words with the cadence of someone who’d learned a few bits of a language here and there—just enough to ask for something to drink or count to ten.
Wash nodded. “Tak. You three. Beds and towels—change them.”
I followed Anya out of the basement and up the stairs, oversize basket gripped tightly in my hands, dreading the inevitable sight of soldiers again. When we reached the first floor, Cobie glanced around the open foyer, then nodded at the house’s great front door.
Anya nodded. “Now. Let’s go.”
I felt like I’d been doused in cold water. “Now? We’re—just—now?” I’d told myself we would escape; but I’d banked on preparation, on allies. On a moment to get my feet beneath me.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Cobie said tightly. “The cook may never let us go again.”
“Okay,” I breathed. My heart was hammering in my chest, but she was right. We had to try.
I had seen the way Baba Yaga and her court had looked at Anya. And it was only a matter of time before she recognized me.
I had run out of time and tick marks long ago.
There was no knowing how much longer Daddy had left.
The three of us walked toward the door, heads down, baskets bumping against our hips. I prayed for gaps to open up and hide us.
I didn’t know where we’d go, if we got out. But anywhere was safer than Baba Yaga’s Mortar.
One step at a time. One blistered foot forward, stone past stone.
“Aghov! Stop!”
I glanced up; a guard stood before the door, his hand outstretched, barking at us in rapid Yotne.
Of course. Of course the front door would be guarded. It had been when we arrived. My heart sank a little.
“Mitä?” Anya let her eyes go wide, her voice almost childishly high as she babbled a string of language that didn’t sound like Yotne.
The guard’s brow furrowed. “Fins’kyy?”
The Yotne called Anya’s childhood home Finlyandi; she must have addressed him in her mother tongue. She nodded, and his scowl softened a little bit.
He was young—just a boy our age, no older than Torden or Aleksei. His brown hair was shaved nearly to his skull so it looked soft as a peach. But when he put his hands on his hips, the wolf tattoo on his forearm flexed, and I remembered where we were.
Anya asked a few more halting questions, and the guard ushered us back toward the stairs. One more floor, he seemed to be saying with a smile.
Cobie and I made for the staircase, but Anya paused, blond lashes batting over blue eyes sweet as a baby’s. She asked him a question, and he grinned crookedly, crossing his arms around his rifle.
“Anya,” she said, curtsying.
“Ivan.” He pressed a hand to his chest and gave a little bow. The wolf on his forearm shifted with his muscles.
Anya nodded, seeming to blush before hauling us up the stairs, giggling.
