by Anna Bright
Midnight would mock the soot on my hands. I wondered if she would still call us ash-girls if we burned their world to the ground.
When I was done counting, I studied the line of scratches. We had been in the witch’s house for sixteen days. We would remain twenty more.
My breath came heavy, angry, at the time that had been stolen from me. Time I could have spent with my father, with Torden, in Potomac.
Grandmother Wolf had taken it. I would give her no more.
Time felt shorter than ever. When we left the tsarytsya and her generals at breakfast, we raced upstairs.
Cobie shut Baba Yaga’s bedroom door, facing it with her knife out, and began to count down from eight minutes. Anya tore around the room, refreshing linens with inhuman speed.
I strode instantly to the radio. Torden had given me a frequency to use.
“Hello?” I asked the silence.
Nothing.
“Hello?”
“What is our heart?” asked a voice in struggling English.
“Ash,” I said, without hesitation.
Ash, he’d said, so very long ago. It is Asgard’s rune. All our blood wear this over their hearts.
“And what is our journey?” asked the voice, as Torden had said it would.
“Reid,” I answered.
And this—he’d pointed inside his left wrist—is Reid. It means ride, the work and the journey of our lives.
“Very good. To whom am I speaking?”
“I’m Selah, seneschal-elect of Potomac. If Hermódr is at Flørli I need to speak to him immediately.” Torden had told me his older brother spent many of his days at the fortress, keeping watch over the fjord and overseeing radio transmissions.
Seven minutes, Cobie mouthed to me.
I’d had no luck last time, failing to reach Perrault, rebuffed by Gretel. I hoped for better fortune today.
“Selah?” Hermódr burst out over the radio. My heart rose as I nudged the volume down.
“Softly, Hermódr,” I cautioned him, even as I wanted to sing out with relief. Hermódr was Torden’s steadiest brother, the wisest and most discerning son of Asgard, its best politician. I could rest easy with my message in his hands. “Look, I’ve only got a minute. I need you to listen carefully. Do you know where the Beholder has gone?”
“Yes,” Hermódr answered immediately. “The Beholder sailed the day after you spoke to Perrault. Pappa declined to send aid, I’m sorry to say. Torden took as many of his drengs as would flout our father’s orders just days before your people arrived, and he would transfer no more.”
My heart raced. “But they sailed the next day?” I breathed. They could be here soon. If we could find them—but how? And what if they walked into Zatemnennya unawares?
Four minutes, Cobie mouthed, holding up as many fingers.
“That’s probably for the best, anyway,” I said quickly. “Hermódr, we suspect the tsarytsya is preparing to attack Asgard.” As simply as I could, I explained what we had found in Baba Yaga’s office—the evidence she’d been gathering her zuby in the Upper Northern division of her ranks.
Hermódr sucked in a sharp breath. “Do you know when?”
“No,” I admitted, pinching my lips shut. “The moon cycle,” I said suddenly. “The lunar cycle is significant to the tsarytsya and her people, almost to a spiritual degree. She may attack the night of the lunar eclipse, or maybe the night of the next new moon or full moon.”
“That makes sense.” Hermódr’s voice warmed. “Thank you, Selah. Thank you for warning us. You may have saved lives.”
My voice turned wry. “Let your father know I’ll be collecting on this debt.”
Hermódr laughed. “Give her hell, Selah.”
“Stay safe, brother.”
I shut off the radio, returned the radio to its original frequency and volume, and turned to Cobie and Anya, heaving a sigh.
“And now,” I said, “we watch, and we wait.”
53
We spent the next twenty days pretending. We let Baba Yaga and her generals think us meek as lambs, gentle as doves.
Polunoshchna sneered at me and called me Zolushka and left me messes at the table to clean up. I kept my head down.
She and the rest thought they knew what was happening to us.
They thought they were grinding us down, as Sunset did when she led the pestykk into foreign lands, as Midnight did when she slipped through the night like a wraith and did the Imperiya’s dirty work. As Baba Yaga did every time she ordered her Wolves to whet their claws.
They were not to know that we could not be ground down. We could not be broken. We would simply watch, and wait. And then we would loose our own claws.
Despite what Vechirnya had said, the day of the lunar eclipse dawned with a festival feeling on the air. We woke hours before dawn to begin cooking, to feed the tsarytsya and all her guests. We ferried food and alcohol up and down the stairs, avoiding the eyes of the courtiers and the hands of the soldiers as they grew progressively drunker and rowdier. Ivan was nearly falling down by eleven in the morning.
I stared out every window I passed, wide-eyed and waiting for any sign of the Beholder. I had heard nothing from Perrault, though I’d switched the radio on and listened feverishly every day.
Wash eyed us all with greater trepidation every time we left the cellar for the house upstairs.
Dinner, at twilight, was a raucous affair. Vechirnya and Polunoshchna and Aleksei, acting as Rankovyy, sat at Baba Yaga’s left and right hands, at a long table of her soldiers. Tall bottles of vodka were passed up and down its length, the caustic-smelling alcohol sloshing into glasses and onto the floor. Sunset drank deeply; her breath was astringent. Butter and fat and meat and jam, more than anyone needed, were passed from serving dish to plate.
As I worked, Midnight bit into a greasy chicken wing and flung it at me. It batted lightly at my shoulder and I stepped back, confused.
“Eat up, Zolushka,” she laughed. Her eyes were red and unfocused, wild and glassy with liquor.
“Thank you, my General Midnight.” I bent to pick up the wasted food and put it onto my tray.
“What?” she screamed, her voice too loud even amid the riot of the room. “Are you too good for my scraps now? You were glad enough to take them when they earned you a spot at the table.”
I never wanted your place, you fool, I wanted to say.
I will smash the entire table and arm those you’ve hunted with all your teeth and claws.
But I was stronger than Polunoshchna.
“As you say, my General Midnight,” I answered, almost mechanically. I kept my face pleasant.
Baba Yaga smiled into her glass.
A soldier grasped at Cobie’s thigh as she walked past him, and she jerked away. The tsarytsya glanced out the window, brows arched. “Has night fallen already?”
“It has.” Aleksei met my eyes, willed us toward the door.
Cobie glanced down at the soldier. “In that case—” She jerked her elbow in the direction of his nose. A sharp crack sounded, and blood poured down his face. “Go,” Cobie ordered us as the soldier swore at her in Yotne, still trying to grab her. We dropped our trays and ran.
Baba Yaga laughed and howled with mirth.
“Run, run, little lambs,” she called. “Run for the cellar and bar the door against the wolves.”
The sound of her cackling chased us down the stairs to the kitchens. Wash locked the door behind us, chained it, and set the crossbar.
The kitchen was fuller that night than it had ever been after dark. Maids and cooks sat on piles of linens in the laundry, on top and in front of the oven. Some had babies with them. A few had even smuggled in small children. I wondered where the little pestykk were tonight, and how long these children could be kept from their ranks.
The women kept their voices low, kept their eyes open with glass after glass of tea from the samovar, and kept as far from the door as possible.
Cobie kept her knife out whil
e we waited.
The knock came a little after midnight. A few of the maids started, but I rose and walked to the door.
“No!” Wash rushed to my side. “No, do not open it.”
“Selah?” Torden called through the door. “Selah, it’s only me.”
“He’s my friend,” I said to Wash.
“No man is your friend on Zatemnennya.” Her eyes were full of fear. “Those in this room you can trust. When you leave this place, you have left all promise of safety.”
Her face was so earnest, her palm on my shoulder so insistent. Wash, a woman who barely knew me, desired to protect me more fervently than even my own stepmother had.
She was a good person, and I would not have been safe in this place without her. Tears filled my eyes, but I blinked them away.
“There’s never any promise of safety,” I said. “But I’m trying to have faith and be brave.”
Wash took a short breath, a heavy one. “If I unlock this door, can you swear he will do no harm to the women inside?”
“On my mother’s grave. By all the saints and angels,” I swore.
She wet her lips and glanced between Anya, Cobie, and me. “I am going to unbar the door, and the three of you will go into the corridor.”
We nodded.
“Inshallah, we will all live to see the dawn.”
Inshallah. If Allah wills, it meant.
My throat grew tight. I had heard no sacred words these many weeks. Hers left me in awe of her bravery—to speak of her Muslim faith so boldly on a night like tonight. To look heavenward in an hour when men chose to become their lowest selves.
Wash bent and kissed my forehead. The maids drew back against the wall in horror as she lifted the bar.
“One—” I cast my eyes back to the kitchen and its women and thanked it for keeping me safe.
“Two—” Anya grabbed my hand and I took Cobie’s.
“Three.” Wash opened the door and pushed the cluster of us into the hallway.
The kitchen door slammed behind us, and the bar fell against it.
Torden waited in his gray uniform, holding three more. The chance we’d waited for was here.
But the relief I’d expected didn’t come.
Soon, we’d be free. But though Torden stood before me, all I could hear was the clang of the crossbar behind us and the howl of the wolves outside.
54
“Put these on. Quickly.” Torden shoved gray uniforms at us, then turned away, rifle lifted.
It felt like madness to uncover myself on a night like this. But I stripped out of my shift alongside Cobie and Anya and put on the loathsome gray uniform, tucking my hair under its cap, trying to ignore the bloodstain splashed across its ribs.
Cobie unwrapped the knife from her leg. Torden handed Anya a blade of her own and produced a small gun from his hip for me.
“Do you know how to use this?” he asked.
The metal of the gun felt hot under my fingers, as though it were cursed. More likely, it had recently been fired. I met his eyes but didn’t speak.
“Point it. Shoot it.” Torden pressed his forehead to mine, swallowing. “Can you do that?”
I would have you far, far from your enemies, he had told me once.
But my enemies—people who’d gladly kill my friends—were here. I couldn’t use a knife the way Anya and Cobie could. But I could lift the gun. I could shoot it.
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I can.”
“Then let’s go.”
We followed Torden up the stairs and found the tower in chaos. Men and women—mainly men—ran up and down Baba Yaga’s impractical stairs. On one of the landings, two soldiers fought with swords, laughing and bleeding, one wearing the tsarytsya’s emerald-studded crown lopsidedly over his head. Another gray-uniformed guard burst through the front door with two guns under one arm and three burlap sacks stuffed under the other.
There were always sentries at the front door—always. But tonight, its guardians were the threat. The danger was inside and out and locks and keys made no matter.
Coins spilled against the floor and shots cracked against the walls. Blood spattered the stairs and the floor. The women in the basement would be scrubbing it from the stones tomorrow morning if they survived the night.
“Come on.” Torden hurried us toward the door.
All was dark outside but for torches and the moon. Its pale face was a deep sunset red against the midnight sky.
It was every ill omen I’d ever feared.
Aleksei met us in the courtyard. “You took long enough,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Then,” Torden said, “we’d better run.”
“Shadows keep us,” Aleksei murmured, half a prayer, half a curse. And then, we ran.
We raced through the streets of Stupka-Zamok, past private fortresses where fires burned against the night. On one side, men threw a battering ram against an iron-girded door. On another, a crowd of gray-clad soldiers lit a match and set a moat to blazing.
A trunk of gold and gems spilled in the street and a crowd descended upon it. When a young woman tried to snatch a precious stone from the pocket of the old woman beside her, the old woman struck her across the face and began to shove the gold and gems into her mouth, swallowing them whole. They would be hers come morning and hers thereafter—unless someone cut them from her insides before dawn.
Soldiers and citizens raced to and fro, stolen animals on leads behind them and stolen coins rattling in their pockets and stolen bottles of alcohol souring the night with their stench. We were far from the only ones running, seeking to hide their deeds and the things they had carried away.
All around us, howls rang up from men who had become animals. The moon burned low and threatening against the black sky, leering at the violence below.
On and on we ran. Sprinting down the dark street, we nearly slammed into them. Ivan and his friends, their gray uniforms and their hands smeared with sunset-red blood.
“Ivan!” he crowed at Torden, his face lit with unwearied delight at their shared name.
“Ivan!” Torden returned. His throat bobbed, tense and uncomfortable, beneath his smile. They exchanged a few words, slapping one another on the back, and Torden made to leave. But then Ivan spotted Anya.
“Shcho vidbuvayet’sya?” he asked. What’s going on?
I’d heard the phrase often enough in the Mortar. But the expression on Ivan’s boyish face, shifting from pleasure to confusion, was new.
Anya hesitated only a moment—the barest half second while she collected herself, arranged her features, pitched her voice just right. Then she darted forward, squeezing Ivan’s arm, squealing something that hinted at marvelous games and secrets.
I knew Ivan wanted Anya. He’d flirted with her, favored her.
But I hadn’t realized how far a captor’s trifling fancy was from real kindness.
And Anya had been a second too late.
For the first time, Ivan saw behind her performance. Ugliness replaced the bafflement in his expression as he realized he’d been tricked.
It was the change that had come over the entire city playing out on one boy’s face, Wolf Night in miniature.
Ivan wrenched Anya close by her arm, so hard and abrupt she stumbled. The other soldiers jeered as he kissed her, roughly, with no affection.
If Anya would not give herself to Ivan, he would steal her.
My stomach bottomed out.
I yanked the pistol from my hip and cocked it and pointed it at Ivan. “Stop.” I hardly recognized my own voice.
Ivan blinked at me, as if he’d never noticed me before. It was entirely possible he hadn’t.
A single shot hit him in the shoulder, and he staggered back, fresh blood blooming across his arm. Anya didn’t flinch. She ran toward Torden, who was securing his gun back at his hip.
He’d spared me the shot. But my hands still shook.
Cobie took the gun from my trembling fingers and holstered it for me. “
Come on,” she urged, tugging me away. “We need to get off the street.”
I followed her and didn’t look back.
“Here!” Aleksei led us into a narrow, unlit alley, noisy with yowling cats and stinking of garbage. Panting, we slowed, creeping through the shadows, picking our way around bins and broken buildings, hoping the night would hide us. Minutes stretched out like hours.
My heart pounded and the dark was thick and my breaths were so loud that I didn’t hear or see them until they were upon us.
The women were so quiet.
They must have followed us, waiting for our guard to slip. And after our brush with Ivan, it had.
Three or four dragged Torden aside. A crowd of them descended upon Aleksei.
I was sick at the prospect of even lifting my gun again. But I yanked it from its holster once more, my hands shaking. Sweat dripped down my back. Torden was very still in his captors’ arms.
“Stij,” barked one. She had a knife to Aleksei’s throat. A woman, cast in red moonlight. More than a dozen of them. I recognized them at once.
They were the mothers. The Rusalki.
I shoved my pistol in my belt and threw my hands up. “Wait. Wait! He’s a friend!” Torden began to speak to them in Yotne; Aleksei didn’t risk talking with a blade so close to his neck.
“He is not a friend,” spat the woman with the knife. She was young, dark-haired, and far too thin. “He is Rankovyy, Baba Yaga’s cursed General Dawn, and he has stolen our children.”
The parade ranks of little pestykk. The miniature gray uniforms. The choices and the childhood that had been ripped from them.
“Baba Yaga stole your children,” I said, my hands still up, palms open. “Aleksei did not know what she would demand when he accepted his post.”
The women murmured among themselves, restive. “Ignorance is no excuse,” snarled their leader.
“No.” I shook my head violently. “No, it’s not. It’s all despicable.”
“Selah . . .” Aleksei’s voice shook.
I shot him a glance. Shut up.
“But he’s one of us now,” I said. “We’ve been looking for you. We want to give you back your children. We want to help you take back your city—Aleksei, too.”
