by Anna Bright
“What was that all about?” Cobie glowered at her as we climbed the stairs.
We reached the landing of the first floor, and Anya went stone-faced.
“Reconnaissance.” Then she turned into the nearest bedroom and began to strip sheets off the mattress.
Ivan, Anya informed us quietly as we worked, was at his regular post this morning. We had caught him during the brief half hour he was alone, when his fellow soldiers took their noon meal. “He said he’s there from sunrise to three in the afternoon, and that he had to stay on duty during lunch, because he’s the freshest recruit. He thought I was flirting.”
“I did, too,” Cobie admitted.
Anya balled up a sheet and threw it at her, accusatory. “That boy is our enemy, Cobie Grimm.” She glided to the washbasin and gathered up the wet towels, piling them into her basket. “Besides, Skop’s waiting for me. Somewhere out there.”
She swallowed hard and stared out the window, at a river the color of pewter winding beyond the city wall. My gaze followed hers, and I knew I was searching for the Beholder, as I searched for her everywhere I went. But she had no way of finding me, so high in this tower, caught in Stupka-Zamok’s sharp teeth.
We pulled sheets from beds, cases from pillows, towels from washbasins, replaced them all. Room after room, floor after floor. Some belonged to courtiers, some to staff, others to soldiers.
I was grateful not to meet any of Ivan’s fellows in their quarters.
The stairs rattled beneath our weight as we hauled ourselves up and down their length. “Who built a staircase this narrow for a house so large? What a nuisance.” Anya clicked her tongue as we huddled against the railing yet again for half a dozen soldiers to troop past, whistling appreciatively at us; I had to pinch Cobie on the arm to stop her snarling at them.
“Be smart,” I whispered. “Save all that up for later.”
Cobie’s lip curled, but she nodded, and we carried on.
The second floor from the topmost, we knew from our first day, held the tsarytsya’s throne room and her grand dining room; we bypassed it and carried on to the top floor. But a uniformed guard at the door shook his head. “Ni. Nasha tsarytsya sleeps.”
But the door opened behind him. We met the eyes of the tsarytsya, their red rims the only color in her pale, bony face.
I expected her to turn us away. To order us downstairs, never to return to her chambers again. After all, she knew Anya’s name. She knew her allegiance. She knew how dangerous a shield-maiden could be.
But Baba Yaga only eyed us dismissively, as if she were staring down a huddle of sheep alone with no shepherd. “Come back tomorrow,” she said, and shut the door.
Back down in the kitchens, the cook eyed our piles of dirty linens with grim approval. Freckled arms elbow-deep in a batch of dough, she nodded to the laundry door.
“I know, I know,” I mumbled.
“Wash,” we said simultaneously.
The laundry was empty. Sheets and towels formed mountain ranges at one side of the room; the other was a forest of lines and clothespins. I took a cake of harsh soap and dunked a pillowcase in one of the great tubs.
The soap stung, humidity clung to the stone walls, and the room soon grew so hot from the fires under the tubs I wished I could work in my underwear. But here, at least, we were free to talk.
“So there are fourteen floors,” Cobie whispered. “Top floor is Baba Yaga’s room. Second from the top—the thirteenth—is her throne room and her dining room.”
“Two through twelve are the bedrooms and offices of personnel and guards,” I added, scrubbing the soap cake over a sheet. “We didn’t go into any of the offices—should we have?”
“Maybe,” Anya said. “We’ll have to wait and see if the cook sends us up to empty rubbish, to take up meals.”
My arms fell still, tangled beneath a heavy, wet sheet. “How are we going to get out?” I asked softly. “I wish the two of you hadn’t come. I wish you weren’t trapped here with me. I—” My words caught in my throat. “I think we might survive this. But escape? There’s only one exit, and it’s under guard. And besides, where would we go?”
Weeks of starving and the day’s hard work had left me weary, and weariness made me doubtful. Would I ever see my home again? My father, my godmother? Would I ever meet my little brother or sister?
“I’d want to follow the river north to the sea, but we’d be caught,” Anya said. “Rivers mean towns, and towns mean guards. If we can get our hands on a map and try to find neutral territory, we can attempt to contact the Beholder somehow.”
“We’d do best to stay in the woods and the wild and get back to Norge that way—I know, I know.” Cobie grimaced as Anya made a face. “But the Shield’s house is secure. From there we could hail the Beholder and wait.”
To hide in Asgard, huddled behind the Shield of the North with Torden at my side and Anya’s brothers around us? It sounded like a dream—a coward’s dream, but bliss nonetheless. I fought down my aching. “Perrault said he would contact Alfödr. They may already know where we are.”
“Here’s what I really want to know,” Cobie continued. “What’s the tsarytsya’s plan if someone attacks this place? That staircase is barely wide enough for two of us to walk up side by side. If there were an emergency, people would die.”
“Maybe she doesn’t care about the people who serve her,” I said quietly.
“Does she care about herself?” Anya muttered. “Because her room is on the top floor.”
“Maybe there’s an exit from the roof,” Cobie said.
I swallowed, feeling my shoulders sag. “Or perhaps she believes the tower is impregnable. Her city is well guarded, and her house is a pillar of stone.”
Cobie set her jaw and dropped her clothes in the tub. “Maybe she thinks it is,” she said, taking each of our hands, her own slick with soap and water. “Maybe she feels untouchable here, behind all her spears and skulls. But never forget that as secure as this place is, and as unafraid of us as she may feel, we are already inside. And now, we know where she sleeps.”
32
Wash set us to work again the next day. I renewed my vows to watch and wait and observe with every step up and down the rattling stairs.
Stupka-Zamok bore no resemblance to Winchester Castle or to the Neukatzenelnbogen. Those were peacetime palaces for royal courts, beautiful monuments to the glory of their noble lords—though Katz Castle had been left to rot.
Now, there was a place with gaps aplenty, where any number of things might slip out.
If anything, Stupka-Zamok reminded me of Asgard. Konge Alfödr’s house was surely airier, broader built, more cheerful altogether; but it had the look of a place continually refortified. Asgard was not a palace, or even a castle. It was a fortress, safeguarded by its mountaintop height and its stone walls and Alfödr’s thegns and drengs.
Stupka-Zamok lacked Asgard’s natural protections. But it was a fortress all the same, surrounded by a jagged city of teeth and spears and bones. Its only concession to the beautiful palaces I’d visited along my way was the treasure heaped everywhere; but that had been done artlessly, tastelessly, the work of thieves and not curators.
At least I had an answer, now, to where the portraiture and gilt and statuary torn from the walls of Katz Castle—and, likely, a hundred other great houses—had gone.
We reached the top floor far too soon, and found the tsarytsya’s door already open.
The room was half a great ring, like the tsarytsya’s throne room below. It, too, was dotted with mismatched busts and statues of every shape and size; the walls were covered with framed paintings and woven tapestries ill-suited to the castle’s design and to one another.
At the heart of the space was a gray wooden table, flanked by chairs. Baba Yaga sat at its center, her eyes fixed on a board. Two women sat across from her, both in gray Imperiya uniforms.
One of the soldiers wore a wide black band above her elbow and another around her shiny, dark
hair. She was pale-skinned, slim, and looked to be in her late thirties; a few gray strands shone in her braid, but her dark eyes were keen as flint.
The other looked younger—not quite thirty. She had a lean face, with a chiseled jaw and freckles on her nose and cheeks, and she wore a red band around her arm and around the short peach fuzz that covered her scalp. Her limbs were muscled, her skin tanned, and she had the look of a lioness: patient, thorough, relentless.
The room was silent but for a maid who sat before the fireplace, scooping out ashes, her little spade clanking and scraping against the stones and her bucket. The woman in the black band shifted in her seat, her jaw twitching.
Cobie, Anya, and I stood stock-still until the tsarytsya raised her eyes to us, irritated.
“Through there,” she said, lifting her chin at a door.
“No, wait.” The dark-haired woman pointed idly at me. “I need her.” Then she beckoned to the girl at the fireplace.
Cobie and Anya passed through the door, glancing back at me with eyes wide. I shook my head, confused, and waited as the scullery maid at the fireplace drew near to the dark-haired soldier. The girl’s shovel dangled limply from her fingers; strands of mousy hair had come loose from the knot at her neck and hung around her face.
The dark-haired woman said something in Yotne, to which the maid only shook her head. She tried another language, and then another, and then said in English, “Do you want me to lose this game?” To this, finally, the girl shook her head vigorously.
“No, no, my lady Polunoshchna.” Her voice shook, but my heart throbbed a little—I hadn’t known any of the other maids were English speakers. How had she come to be here? Was the tsarytsya’s reach truly so limitless?
The soldier held out her hand, and the girl passed her the little shovel she’d been using to clean the fireplace. “I am not Lady Polunoshchna,” she said, dealing the girl a stunning blow across the elbow with the back of the spade. “I am your General Midnight.”
“Yes, yes, General,” the girl gasped, clutching her arm.
“And I ask you again, do you want me to lose?” Polunoshchna gestured at the game board, dark braid swinging behind her. The girl bit her lip, and Polunoshchna raised the shovel again, aiming this time for the girl’s neck.
“Stop it!” I shouted. “Control yourself!”
All four pairs of eyes turned to meet mine.
“Who are you?” Polunoshchna demanded.
I wet my lips. “I’m no one,” I said. “Send her away. You need someone to clean the fireplace, I’ll clean it.”
She studied me for a long moment, nostrils flared, and I wondered if Polunoshchna and the tsarytsya would let my nonanswer stand. Polunoshchna had just demonstrated such breathtaking selfishness, I banked on her not much caring.
The tsarytsya was harder to read, especially as I was studiously avoiding her eyes.
“Fine. Go,” Polunoshchna snapped at the scullery maid, who ran from the room, still cradling her elbow. The general tossed me the spade, and I bent to collect it from where it clattered to the stone floor. “Do it silently. And close that door,” she added, nodding at the room where Cobie and Anya were quietly cleaning.
I shut it silently, then sat before the fireplace, ash bucket by my side. Baba Yaga and the two women continued to play.
“It is your turn, Vechirnya,” said the tsarytsya. I glanced carefully over my shoulder and watched Vechirnya, the woman with the shaved head, reach for the dice and declare something in Yotne to Polunoshchna. The two women rolled a die twice each, and then Vechirnya reached forward, sweeping General Midnight’s pieces from the board and replacing them with her own.
Quietly as I could, I cleaned the fireplace, climbing onto the hearth to reach the ashes in its depths and sweep the soot from its walls, listening as they played on. Vechirnya and Polunoshchna spoke in Yotne at first, but Baba Yaga drew them back to English.
It made no sense. Perrault had been very clear that the tsarytsya insisted on Yotne. If she preferred English at the moment, I feared it was for some very particular reason.
When I was finished, I stood a respectful few feet from the board, waiting for Cobie and Anya and watching.
The game was played over a map of the world—of sorts. But the continents were misshapen and covered with pebbles, and their die seemed to have more than six sides.
“I challenge you for the Bear Whelp’s paw,” General Midnight sneered at Vechirnya. She moved a few pebbles into the other soldier’s space.
As I studied their maneuvers, my hand crept unbidden to the back of my head where Torden’s ring was nestled in my braid.
“Do you have lice?” Polunoshchna snapped at me. “Stop fidgeting, before I shave your head like Vechirnya’s!”
I flushed and yanked my hand from my hair and wished again I were a thousand miles from this tower.
“Tooth and Claw, girl,” said Vechirnya to me, lifting an eyebrow at my poorly disguised interest. Her voice was low and frank and refreshingly not laced with venom. “Have you ever played?”
I shook my head. She held something out to me, one of the pebbles, and I took it.
It was not a pebble, I found as I held it in my hand. It was a claw, from a dog or a cat perhaps, dyed red as blood. All the game pieces were claws and teeth, as the name implied.
I studied Vechirnya’s gray uniform, the red band around her arm and her head. “No, General . . .”
“Sunset,” she supplied.
“No, my General Sunset. I have never played.”
She passed me the die next, pointing out its sides, counting out their meanings. “Nul’—odyn—dva—tri—” On and on she counted, from zero to nine, apparently enjoying the sight of my head swimming.
She was brilliant, and cool. I strove to mimic her.
Midnight glanced over at us. “You’re distracting me,” she snarled. I withdrew a few paces as they each rolled again. When they were done, Sunset nodded briskly, pleased, and swept Midnight’s claws and teeth again from the map. Midnight sat back, arms crossed.
Her pieces, I deduced, were the black ones scattered far and wide across the board. I frowned, considering.
“What is it, girl?” asked the tsarytsya.
I started and shook my head. But she arched her brow, demanding my answer. Her gray hair shone in the smoky light of the window.
I couldn’t speak to the tsarytsya; I could hardly meet her eyes for more than a moment. I turned to Polunoshchna, my hands shaking. “My General Midnight, would it not be wiser to concentrate your armies?” I asked. “You seem to have fewer. Shouldn’t you cluster them together and shrink your border, to better defend your territory?”
“That is not the way of Wolves,” spat Midnight. “I take what I will, lack of numbers be damned. Now close your mouth, Zolushka, or I will beat you as I beat that other bit of kitchen trash.”
I thought of the scullery maid’s gasp of pain when Midnight struck her, of the girl cradling her injured elbow, and felt my anger rise. “You take what you will, and you lose it just as easily,” I said tightly. “And if you can’t win the game with a little noise in the background, the fault is with your focus, not with the world around you.”
General Midnight rose and slapped me across the face.
“Polunoshchna!” the tsarytsya barked. “Enough. Go.”
“Noh, moya tsarytsya—”
“Zabyraysya,” droned Baba Yaga. “Begone. I am bored. You too, Vechirnya.”
I worked my jaw. Blood leaked in my mouth where Polunoshchna had struck me.
“Tak tochno, moya tsarytsya,” said Sunset and Midnight, the former resigned, the latter enraged. Both generals rose, bowed, and left.
The tsarytsya turned her eyes on me. “You,” she said. “Sit.”
33
I pulled out a chair and sat down across from Baba Yaga.
“Tell me again your name,” she said.
My limbs shook. “Selah.”
“Selah from where?”
I swallowed hard. I was afraid to lie, but if she wanted truth, she would have to pry it out of me piece by piece. “From Potomac.”
“And where is Potomac, Zolushka?” The tsarytsya pushed the board a little closer to me.
I’d been right; they’d been playing on a map of the world, but the continents were formed of animals. Africa was a great ox, its horns curling at the lower tip of the continent. Europe was a fat sheep, Zhōng Guó a plump rabbit, South Asia and the Pacific Islands a scattered herd of deer, Australia a clump of fish. Ranneniy Shenok, far in the north, was a bear’s whelp. The Imperiya Yotne, at the map’s center, was a wolf. And the New World, far to the west, was a phoenix. Its wings were stretched wide, its tail feathers plumed, its head turned to the left.
There lay the world before the tsarytsya, hers for the taking.
And there lay my home. Far away and safe and mine, and I did not want to show her how to find it.
“My name is Selah,” I said again, stalling.
“I can call you what I wish.” Baba Yaga furrowed her brow, then smiled, disdainful. “As you are not a child of my Imperiya, I assume you’ve been nursed with the old tales, pacified with them from your infancy. To speak a name is to invoke meaning.”
“There are no names in the old tales,” I said, crossing my arms. “Only figures. They can be about anyone, about anywhere.”
I was stalling. There were names in the old stories—beautiful Belle, intrepid Jack, a litany of gods and goddesses. But more common were the figures who appeared again and again: the wicked queen, the wise old crone, the third daughter sent to seek her fortune.
Mostly, I was being contrary because she’d been condescending, and it made me angry. The old tales—the stories Momma had taught me—were not milk sops for crying children. They were meat and power and truth, and she had no idea what they meant.
“Zolushka is not a name. It is what you are. It means ‘ash-girl.’” Baba Yaga stared me down. “Now tell me who you are and where you are from and what you are doing in my house.”
