by Anna Bright
I was nearly nauseated with fear. The sickening terror made me less guarded, somehow. “The stories would say never give your true name to a stranger,” I blurted. “Why should I tell you?”
“I shall not be a stranger for long.” Grandmother Wolf never took her eyes off me. “And you should tell me, because I already know.”
She did. I wasn’t sure how, but her face told me she knew who I was.
My heart collapsed, and I pointed a shaking finger at the tip of the phoenix’s eastern wing.
“Ah, yes.” Baba Yaga’s eyes lit with recognition, and she sat back, satisfied. “The stepdaughter.”
My tongue tripped over itself. “I—I don’t know—”
“You were to be bride to that boy in Shvartsval’d.” She smiled, revealing long, straight teeth.
Bear. Torden. Fritz.
“He was one of my many suitors.” Sweat filmed my palms.
“It had slipped my memory,” she said. “You were so guarded, I was curious. I searched my correspondence, and your stepmother’s letters reminded me.” She smiled slightly. “She must hate you mightily, to propose a marriage alliance so far from your country.”
The words were like a blow to my stomach. I knew Alessandra had written to the tsarytsya—how else could the suit have been arranged? But I ached to be confronted yet again with how truly, how powerfully, my stepmother hated me.
I swallowed hard, forcing myself to think of Torden. Of the good that had come from the harm Alessandra had done me. Of red hair and red-gold lashes and freckles and strong, kind hands.
“Or she must have greatly desired to ally with my Imperiya,” the tsarytsya added lightly, when I did not reply. “Indeed, I hope soon to reach your side of the ocean. An alliance between us would have made for very light terms for your terytoriya.” She paused, considering me. “That could still happen. I could find you a husband in my court. You could have your freedom again.”
“No.”
I made it a full sentence. Baba Yaga waited for more—for pleas, or an explanation. But I said nothing else.
Her face grew cold, businesslike. “The girl you defended. Why? What is she to you?”
“Because General Midnight beat her with a shovel when she started losing a board game,” I answered as steadily as I could. Where were Cobie and Anya?
She smiled at this. “We take Tooth and Claw very seriously. It helps us sharpen our own.” She held up her hands; her nails were filed to points. Then her face grew thoughtful. “Do you think you could have won, with as few armies as Polunoshchna possessed?”
“I don’t know,” I hesitated. “But her lack of strategy couldn’t have helped.”
“There are a hundred girls in the world like that serving girl,” the tsarytsya said thoughtfully. “Vasylysa came from a town on the border between the land of the Whelp and the Wolves. Her father was a headman, and she wanted to be just like him.”
I sat forward, curious against my own will. It had been ages since I’d had a story.
“But?” I asked.
“But she lost her mother,” Baba Yaga answered. “And her stepmother grew tired of her, just like yours did.” I drew back as if stung.
The tsarytsya smiled cruelly.
“Go,” she said. “Rejoin the girl in the kitchens, where you belong.”
Anya and Cobie were in the laundry when I returned. Vasylysa was peeling potatoes; a bruise was forming near her elbow where Polunoshchna had struck her. She gave me a weak smile, and I returned it.
“Where have you been?” Cobie hissed, dropping the towel she was scrubbing and pulling me into the laundry. “We left through the wrong door and couldn’t go back to find you.”
“Playing dice with my life,” I said, showing her my shaking hands. Anya took them in her own and drew me close to the tub as I related my conversation with Baba Yaga and her generals. “What about you? What was her room like?” I asked, taking up the washing alongside them.
They had searched it as rapidly as they could after Polunoshchna ordered them to shut the door, rummaging first through her closets and then her desk. “A few of the papers seemed to be important,” Cobie said.
“One on top of a stack looked like a report,” Anya added. “There were notes all over it, and a lot of it was crossed out and rewritten. Some of the words matched the ones on the map over her desk.”
“A map?” I asked. “Can you read it? Could we use it, if we got away?” My heart rose like a shot, painful and sharp, at the thought of Torden and the Beholder and home.
Anya shook her head, grimacing as the lye soap stung a cut on her hand. “I can’t read the map, or the papers,” she confessed. She cut a glance at Cobie. “But we found something else.”
“What? What is it?” I shook my head, waiting for them to spit it out.
“Books,” Cobie said in a rush. “She’s hoarding them. She’s got dozens.”
The books that had gotten the headwoman on the Gray Road brutally murdered. The books stolen from the shelves of Katz Castle. The storybook I’d had to leave behind on the Beholder. Their weight seemed to collapse all upon me at once.
I couldn’t form a response. But I shouldn’t have been surprised.
There was no end to what Grandmother Wolf would catch between her jaws and carry away.
34
Wash was in high dudgeon the next morning. Two of the maids hadn’t shown up to work, and one of the cooks had sliced open her hand peeling potatoes, so Wash cooked at double time; but even she made mistakes in her hurry. Once, she threw up her hands and tossed a whole batch of pelmeni dough into the bin, muttering about chebureki and her mind being elsewhere. Wash dragged the back of her wrist across her forehead, looking exhausted.
I didn’t know what chebureki was; we’d never made it in Baba Yaga’s kitchens. Perhaps it was food from Wash’s home.
I wondered if she’d been so tired that she’d forgotten herself. Forgotten where she was and who she was supposed to be feeding.
This was the problem with our repetitive chores: they kept the hands busy and left the mind far too free to wander.
But Wash didn’t say anything else. She made up more dough and rolled it out and was soon frying pelmeni in such a frenzy that I asked if I could help. She shook her head, tossing something off in Yotne.
“She doesn’t want us burning the castle down,” Anya translated.
I laughed at this—before my too-limber memory reminded me someone else had warned me once of just the same thing. You wouldn’t mean to do anything, Lang had said. But a single stray spark could burn us alive.
I’d stolen eyelashes from his cheek, and he had pressed his temple to mine. He’d kissed me, hands in my hair.
We had too much time to think.
Were the crew coming for us? Had they carried on down the Canal Route, into the Mediterranean Sea, and made for home? Or, perhaps, east for Zhōng Guó?
Did I even want them to put themselves at risk rushing in to save us? It could provoke retribution from Stupka-Zamok. It assumed Cobie, Anya, and I could not free ourselves.
I didn’t know if I wanted someone to charge in and save us. I only wished I knew the ones I loved were as lonely for me as I was for them, left as I was only with their memories and my battered knees and knuckles.
My faraway thoughts haunted me all that day as we worked. As we plated supper I eyed the stovetop, spattered with grease from feeding the endless appetites of Baba Yaga and her people.
A single stray spark.
I wondered how many sparks I would have to light to burn this place to the ground.
And whether, if Baba Yaga’s house burned, it would take me with it.
Baba Yaga, who outlawed belief in anyone but her. Baba Yaga, who forbade her people to sing or make music. Baba Yaga, who took children from their families to raise them as she saw fit.
Who had books upon books in her own room for her own use.
Not that I imagined she took any particular pleasure in them.
But study was necessary to any ruler’s success; Momma and Daddy had insisted on that, and the nuns had worked hard to teach me.
I thought of Bear’s library. Of the tapestries clinging to Valaskjálf’s walls, so the deeds of the brave could never be forgotten. But the need to learn ran deeper. Study wasn’t crucial only for the powerful, just as good, hard work wasn’t good only for the poor.
But the tsarytsya knew best.
Did her people really believe that? I doubted it rang true far out in the empire, but what of her people in this city? They had looked healthy and well-fed, protected in their little private fortresses—but were they content?
Twice, now, we’d seen packs of her own wolves deserting her.
I wondered if there were more here in Yotunkheym who resented her rule. Any who, like the Waldleute in Shvartsval’d, rebelled against her in secret, who we might call on to help us.
Fearful though I was, I longed to go to the tsarytsya’s room. To search its hiding places and to dig out the books she hoarded like a dragon.
I longed to let her feel my fire.
Cobie and Anya had tidied her room again that day. As we plated dinner, they told me they had something.
“You,” Wash called across the kitchen, tucking stray wisps of black hair behind her ears. She pointed at the three of us as we finished pouring the last of the bloody-red soup into bowls.
“Wash?” I asked. I was eager for the kitchen to be empty. I wanted to see what they’d retrieved from Baba Yaga’s lair.
Wash frowned. “No. Go. Serve.” She gestured from the bowls to the stairs.
“Us? Serve dinner?” Anya asked.
“Tak. Spasibo,” Wash added.
“Um, okay,” I stammered. We’d never served before.
I raced for the trays I’d seen the maids use. “Okay, okay, okay.” We set eighteen bowls of borscht onto them and started up the stairs. They were heavy; I tried not to look down as we climbed and climbed. Baba Yaga, I suspected, would not look indulgently on a dinner spilled down her stairs instead of served at her table.
Suddenly, Cobie paused on a landing at the head of our line. She glanced around.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. “We have to go!”
“Wash said dinner is already late,” Anya said. For lack of a name for the head cook, I had shared my nickname with her and Cobie.
Cobie shook her head. “I wish we could poison the food. We could do it all right now, all the bowls, then run.”
“Are you crazy?” Anya demanded. “Poison the food? And lose our heads to the tsarytsya’s guards here and now?”
“We wouldn’t be punished if they all died,” Cobie argued. “The castle would be in chaos. We could get away in the melee.”
“Are we going to feed her guards, too?” I demanded in a whisper. “She’ll have sentries posted at the dining room door. And what if the poison didn’t work on everyone? And since when are we killing people?”
“Selah.” Anya rounded on me. “She’s killed thousands. Thousands upon thousands.”
I froze, suddenly cold despite the sweat on my skin from cooking and carrying. “But we aren’t the arbiters of justice. We aren’t government, we aren’t God.”
“We are government, actually,” Anya said, blue eyes large and serious. “You will be, someday. I will be, too.”
“Either way, we’re prisoners, and this is war. How are we getting out of here, if not by attacking her?” Cobie asked.
I had no answer for that.
I could only think that Daddy would understand me giving arms to resistance fighters, but poison—he was being poisoned himself. How could he ever understand or forgive me that?
I couldn’t countenance it. “Let’s just go serve dinner.”
We climbed and climbed to the thirteenth floor and didn’t speak again. A guard opened the door opposite the throne room, and we passed inside.
A long ash-gray table, identical to the one in the tsarytsya’s salon, was surrounded by guests; empty chargers sat before them. “Finally,” the tsarytsya intoned.
I put my tray down on a sideboard and nodded Anya toward the table. She walked slowly from guest to guest as I set bowls from her tray before them.
“My General Midnight,” I murmured as I served her, seated on Baba Yaga’s right. “My General Sunset.”
Vechirnya gave me the barest nod. She wore a gray coverall that left her lean arms bare, but for the red band around her bicep. Her arms were tanned, their hair blond from days in the sun.
“Zolushka,” Polunoshchna sneered. Her dark hair was shiny and perfect and clean. I felt filthy before her.
The seat on the tsarytsya’s left was empty; she gestured for me to put the soup bowl down anyway. “He’ll be along,” she said, waving a papery-skinned hand.
Past a host of gray-clad guests, three children sat at the table’s far end, dressed in repulsive child-size replicas of Imperiya military uniforms. My stomach dipped convulsively at the two little boys and girl like military-style dolls.
I glanced from the children hungrily spooning up soup—the girl trying to hide the drop she’d spilled on her trousers, one of the boys’ stomach growling even as he ate—to Cobie and Anya, and I knew we were all thinking the same thing: we were glad, after all, that we hadn’t had anything like poison to hand.
I could barely look at the children. They were the starving-eyed little boy and girl from the fairy tale made flesh.
So eager to lap up their food. So eager to accept warmth wherever they found it. So unaware Grandmother Wolf would open her jaws soon and swallow them whole.
Down in the kitchens, I gasped for breath, overwhelmed by nerves, by the guests ignoring me even as they sneered at me. By General Midnight’s open disdain.
Zolushka.
“Did you understand anything they said?” Cobie asked.
Anya pursed her lips. “Soon, the tsarytsya kept saying.”
We piled plates of dumplings on our trays and made to return upstairs.
We served more smoothly this time. I set down pelmeni and Cobie collected empty bowls of borscht. I couldn’t help noticing how red were the mouths of everyone around the table.
We came again, at last, to the empty seat.
I glanced at Cobie. She shrugged and picked up the full bowl, and I set the plate of dumplings down on the charger.
The door swung open behind us. “O net!” exclaimed a familiar voice. “Ya ostalsya bezh borscht.”
Cobie looked up first, and the bowl of soup fell from her hands, crashing to the floor in an explosion of gray ceramic and bloodred soup. Anya and I turned.
Aleksei was framed in the doorway, pale and dark-haired and fine-boned as ever. His expression shifted from insouciance to shock when he saw us.
“Aleksei,” Anya whispered. “What are you doing here?”
Aleksei’s eyes darted to the tsarytsya’s, their sharpness at odds with the lazy tone of his question to her in Yotne.
“Angliyskiy, please,” Baba Yaga said, lifting her fork and knife. “It’s only polite in front of our guests.”
We weren’t guests, but I barely registered the words. I could hardly think.
This was wrong. All wrong.
“Aleksei?” Anya asked again. She looked stricken.
“I invited him,” the tsarytsya said, but she was watching me. “I saw how poorly he fared at Alfödr’s court, and how much worse things would become for him.”
“And you accepted her invitation?” Cobie demanded.
My brain reeled.
Baba Yaga ignored her. “Come you of your own accord, or are you compelled?” she asked Aleksei, examining the knife in her hand.
“Of my own compulsion, moya tsarytsya.” Aleksei bowed low and gave her a grin, his pale face contorting with the expression.
She smiled. “Then I welcome you with open arms, Aleksei Stupka. I am pleased you finally see this is where you belong.”
Aleksei. Aleksei Asgard was here, answering now to Stu
pka—a son of Stupka-Zamok. A son of the Mortar.
“Her.” Anya’s voice grated, harsh. “Here, with her. After everything our father did to keep us safe.”
“Our father,” Aleksei mused. “What did he do for us?”
“He took us in,” Anya growled. “He kept us safe.”
“He kept himself safe,” Aleksei snapped. “And he was ready to offer you up like a brood mare at the first chance.”
“And what of our brothers?” Anya shouted.
Torden. Fredrik. Bragi. Hermódr. Their names were seared on my heart.
“They chose him!” Aleksei fired back. “And now, I’m on my own side.”
Anya’s nostrils flared, furious, the blue vein pulsing in her forehead. The tsarytsya’s fine eyebrows were arched, her gaze on Aleksei and on us.
Anya charged at Aleksei and shoved him to the stone floor. The dinner guests gasped; even the guards were frozen in astonishment.
This was not Valaskjálf, prone to laughter and cheers in the event of a scuffle. And this was no tussle between brothers.
One of the little boys at the end of the table scrambled out of his chair and hid behind it. I wanted to scoop him into my arms. I wanted none of this to be real.
Anya straddled Aleksei, pinning down his knees and his left shoulder, and punched him in the mouth. She hit him until her knuckles and Aleksei’s teeth matched the bloodred mouths of Baba Yaga’s dinner guests. At a word from Baba Yaga, the guards recovered themselves and dragged her off him.
Aleksei stood and brushed himself off, spitting a broken bit of tooth onto the floor. I clutched Cobie’s hand. My breath came in gasps.
“Traitor!” Anya screamed as the guards hauled her out the door. “Patricidal son, treacherous brother, backstabbing friend—”
The door slammed shut behind her, but I could hear Anya—beautiful, golden-haired Anya, my friend, the princess—screaming herself hoarse all the way down the stairs.
Aleksei drew out his chair over the shattered porcelain and the spilled borscht at his feet, seated himself, and began to eat his pelmeni.
The neck of his uniform was torn, and the nose of the wolf tattoo nudged up his neck and above his collar.
