by Anna Bright
The third had been to allay her fears that Norge was involved. If Torden was here for me, without Konge Alfödr’s permission, it meant he wasn’t here to do reconnaissance; he represented no threat from the Shield.
I’d feared she would smell my deceit.
Still, the last piece of my plan had been the most essential. I was lucky Aleksei was such a talented liar. I’d known he was scheming alongside me as soon as he relaxed at my side.
Like the jade-green snake tattooed around his upper arm, he’d shed his skin again.
“You knew she wouldn’t be able to resist, if she thought she’d found my weakness,” Aleksei said, flopping down on the hearth. “You led her to think I loved you.”
I shrugged dully. “I didn’t have anything she wanted. I had to make her think marrying us would allow her to manipulate you.”
I’d had nothing to bargain with. But I’d turned out my pockets and bought Torden’s safety with what little I found.
“Thank God Gretel didn’t send in the resistance,” I said. “It would’ve just been more lives lost. More people captured.”
Anya stared into the oven. “Do we know where she’s keeping the boys?”
“She’s trying to conscript them, for the moment,” said Aleksei.
“The more fool she,” Anya said bitterly. Cobie nodded.
Aleksei scratched the back of his neck. “You could try to contact Gretel now that Wolf Night’s past,” he suggested.
Cobie shook her head. “We’ll never be allowed in her rooms again.”
“And besides,” I said, “Midnight’s secret police have radios. They’re listening in all the time. Midnight told me.”
“Would’ve been smarter if she hadn’t.” Cobie rolled her eyes.
“I know,” I agreed. “I might have tried again, but she wanted to get a dig in.”
Midnight and her shortsightedness. She would sacrifice a lead without a second thought, all for a moment’s gratification. She would never learn focus.
An idea began to buzz low and insistent in my veins.
“What we need,” I said, “is someone capable of seeing past the end of their own nose. Someone who actually cares what happens to this city. Midnight is petty; that’s her undoing.”
Cobie frowned. “Selah, you’re speaking in riddles.”
I swallowed hard. “We need the Rusalki.”
There was silence in the kitchen. Aleksei stared at me, looking tired enough to tip over.
Anya left the hearth and began to pace. “You heard what they said. They will hate Aleksei and the rest of us forever. They will never work with us.”
“They don’t care about us. Not really. That’s the thing.” I shook my head.
I thought again of Momma. She’d been dogged, devoted. She’d taught me and disciplined me and loved me with everything she had.
The Rusalki wanted their children. If they had to pull the city down with their bare hands to take them, I believed they’d do it. Who they allied with was irrelevant as long as their children were safe when nothing was left of the Mortar but rubble.
“Did you not see the knife at Aleksei’s throat?” Cobie demanded. “They’ll kill him!”
“We can wait,” Aleksei said urgently. “We can bide our time. Marry, watch, wait for a chance to get ourselves out.”
I fought my cringe at the word marry. “Except Baba Yaga could change her mind at any time and kill all of us,” I fired back. “Torden, the drengs, the Beholder crew.”
Anya and Cobie both tensed.
It was cruel of me to press on their worries—for Skop, for Will. But we couldn’t forget that their lives hung in the balance of our choices.
“We cannot trust her,” I insisted. “She’s a Wolf and she’s made it clear that rules—hers and everyone else’s—are made to be broken. How long is the tsarytsya going to wait, watching her armies dwindle, before she does something worse?”
Anya hesitated. “We don’t know how to find them.”
“But they know what they want,” I said. “And one of us managed to keep his hands clean last night.” I fixed Aleksei with a stare.
He sat back, shaking his head. “I can’t go to those women. I can’t. They won’t—”
“You have to,” I bit out. “Aleksei, you’re the only one of us left. If you don’t, we will be married in three days and Cobie and Anya will be trapped here forever and Baba Yaga will get her claws into your home and mine.”
Aleksei said nothing for a long time. Then he looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “The Rusalki won’t speak to me. The tsarytsya stole their children. And I stole their childhood, because she told me to, and I was a coward.”
“Tell them your plan,” Anya said. “Tell them how you’re going to help them get their children back. How if they and the Vodyanoi and the Leshii take Stupka-Zamok, they can take their sons and daughters home, to the wild or elsewhere in the city or wherever they want.”
“Do we have a plan?” Cobie interjected.
“The wedding!” Anya said, decisive. “The maids have been talking. It’s going to be a massive affair. People will be distracted and the city will be swarming again.”
The wedding. My wedding.
I had set out in search of that day, had left my home and my father behind to quest for it, had marked the days in ink and ash as I waited for it to come. And now that it was near, I wished I could scrub it out of existence, like blood off stones.
Aleksei sat on the hearth and cried in silence. With his head bowed and his shoulders shaking, he looked little older than one of the children in his ranks.
When he was finished, he lifted his head, tears streaking his face. “I sold my soul,” he said.
“So help these women.” I put my hands on his shoulders. “And buy it back.”
57
It took two days to clean the castle of Zatemnennya’s filth. I was removed to my new rooms the next morning. The day before my wedding.
She was waiting for me when I arrived, standing over a trunk full of gray garments. A bridal trousseau the color of ashes, of a life burned to the ground. The tsarytsya spread her arms wide, showing me all her teeth in a smile. “What do you think?”
“I’d never seen myself in gray,” I said as smoothly as I could. “Then again, I’d never seen my own claws for what they were.”
To marry Torden, I would’ve worn green, or gold. But that day would never come.
I felt toothless. Clawless. My chest ached from the knife I’d driven into his heart.
Baba Yaga’s smile only grew more ferocious. “Delightful.”
“Will Aleksei be admitted to my chambers tonight?” I cast my eyes down, clasped my hands.
She arched her brows. “Do you wish him to be?”
With Anya and Cobie in the basement, so many floors away, I’d be glad of the company. “It might ease tensions tomorrow.” I bit my lip, tried to look like a blushing bride.
The tsarytsya liked me blunt, forceful; I knew this girlish, timid version of me wouldn’t impress her. But I wouldn’t know how to feign confidence about a night alone with a boy—not even for Baba Yaga.
“As you will.” The tsarytsya waved a hand, disinterested. Then she looked at me sidelong. “I wish to speak to you of other things.”
The tsarytsya leaned near to me, whispering as though she had a secret. My stomach twisted. “I know that you despise my General Midnight, my Polunoshchna.”
I smoothed my face. “I serve Polunoshchna as I serve Vechirnya, as I serve Rankovyy, as I serve you, moya tsarytsya.”
She laughed wearily. “Oh, my little Zolushka. I may not be young anymore, but my eyes are still good. You are quite the pretender, but I see. I see.”
The Baba Yaga of whispers and wild rumors was famed not for her eyes but for her nose, keen enough to scent out Bears and Wolves and Lambs alike. Could she smell me for the liar I was?
“I will marry you to my General Bright Dawn,” she said softly. “And someday, after me, you wil
l be tsarytsya.”
The room rang with my silence. “Surely, moya tsarytsya,” I finally said, “you jest.”
But her face did not collapse into amusement. Grandmother Wolf waited, expectant.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because I see myself in you.” Baba Yaga bared her teeth in a smile. “I have not always felt like mistress of my own destiny. I took it, as you have taken yours.”
I moved away from her slowly, backing against the fireplace. The ashes on the hearth were soft beneath my bare feet. “What do you mean?”
“I was captured once, as well.” Baba Yaga’s voice was low and sweet. “Held hostage for a week. Scared for my life. And I did escape. But that was long ago, before I even became headwoman.” She paused. “Back when they called me Vasylysa.”
I froze, then shook myself. No. She—
“You?” I breathed. “Your—your name is Vasylysa, too?”
It was a common name, I knew. Common as Ivan.
“Too? That’s what they called me.” She fingered the silver-gray thread on my wedding gown, smiling absently. “Vasylysa the Beautiful. Before they called me Grandmother Wolf.”
“But you told me—that serving girl—” I broke off, unable to speak.
“The girl?” She frowned.
“The girl who was cleaning the fireplace.” My voice grew shrill. “The girl I spoke up for. The reason you acknowledged me in the first place. You called her Vasylysa.”
She waved a hand. “I don’t remember her. I remember you lifting your chin in Midnight’s face, speaking to her with no fear.”
My mind reeled. I tried to focus, to remember everything the tsarytsya had said about Vasylysa’s banishment, Vasylysa’s testing.
“Selah!” The tsarytsya snapped. She was close to my face, her expression annoyed. “Forget about serving girls and fireplaces. Forget about her. She is nobody. She is not like you and I.”
Nobody.
I had called myself nobody when I first met Polunoshchna. But Baba Yaga had searched me out. She had even broken her own rule to lure me into the open, had told her generals to speak English, had seated me at her table to see what I would do if she gave me teeth and claws.
My mouth was dry. “And we’re . . . ?” I asked.
“We are the stepdaughters. We are the girls who become wolves because no one will feed us like lambs. We are the girls in the stories, and the world is ours.” The tsarytsya’s papery-skinned hands clenched into fists. “We take what we will, and it belongs to us by right. We are wolves and queens and the moon, and our people love us. That is where the others belong in the stories: in the crowds, watching us from illuminated edges.”
Baba Yaga had been pacing the room, chin lifted, eyes bright. Now she stopped, her gaze earnest on me. “That is why most of them should not read the stories, little Selah. The songs and the paintings and the stories make them think they are heroines and heroes. They put false visions into their minds.”
It was brutal. Selfish. Hideous.
She had built herself a high, horrible tower, and she looked down on the world from above, and she believed herself greater than it all. “What happened to Vasylysa?” I asked, hardly able to breathe.
“I killed the captain who had captured me on the border in Medved,” the tsarytsya said. “I rode back to my father’s village and to my stepmother’s garden and salted every square inch of the earth she tended more carefully than she had ever tended to me. And then I turned her and my stepsisters out and took back my house.”
“And after that?” I choked out.
“I took my spoils to every impoverished home in our village. And then I took my revenge. On the Bear, and on everyone else who had been content to let us starve.” Baba Yaga’s brown eyes shone with terrible fire, lit aflame by the memory.
I pressed my lips together, terrified, desperate to stroke her ego and keep her calm. “And now you reign over all.”
“And you will, after me. I want Rankovyy managed, and I want Polunoshchna to doubt herself at every turn. It makes her work harder.” She winked at me.
Baba Yaga had escaped the monsters only to become a monster herself.
“I’m not like you,” I whispered hoarsely. “I don’t think I’m like you.”
I did not want her favor, or her throne. The tsarytsya was wholly repulsive.
And yet, some part of me wished to know whether she saw a wolf or a lamb before her.
“You are the stepdaughter who was turned out, as I was,” she said, fixing me with her gaze. “You are the prisoner who traveled barefoot across thrice-nine lands to come to the thrice-tenth kingdom, and arrived bleeding but upright on my doorstep. You are the girl who hung on by her fingernails, ash on her face as the world burned around her, and survived.”
“No.” I shook my head, ever so slightly. “I survived because I had friends to love and protect me.”
“You survived because you had the grit to do so.” Her tone was final. “And if you can survive, you can rule. If you will let me teach you, I will make you heir in the stead of the children I never wanted.”
My heart was a block of ice. I was cold with horror at the glimpse I’d gotten inside her brutal mind.
I should have shut my mouth. I should have let her leave when she turned to go.
“Moya tsarytsya,” I called. She looked back at me. “What makes the girl Vasylysa any different from the girls in your cellar? If you escaped, and fought back, what makes you think someone else won’t do the same?”
I posed the question as a rhetorical. As a fascinating thought game I wanted her to play with me. But I was telling her future. It was the same verdammt story, over and over again.
Alessandra. Vasylysa’s stepmother. Baba Yaga herself. They were sisters in arms, guilty of hurting the Vasylysas of the world. Culpable for all the girls they had wounded and embittered.
Those girls would get their revenge. And the architects of their suffering would have only themselves to blame.
“Because there are none like me, and few enough like you,” Baba Yaga said to me from the doorway. “We, little Zolushka, are the end of the story.”
Aleksei came to me in the dark.
“Selah?” he whispered though the just-open door.
I tugged him inside. “Come in.” Aleksei winked at the guard outside the door. I wrinkled my nose at him. “Oh, ew.”
“You’re right, I should’ve let him think we were plotting the demise of his empress and the end of the world as he knows it,” Aleksei countered.
“Shut up.” I pulled him toward the bed, sitting cross-legged on its edge. He bounced twice on the mattress before he settled, crossing his long, bony legs. Two candles flickered in sconces on the wall. “What happened today?”
Aleksei held up his index finger. “I found Torden, Fredrik, and the rest of the drengs.” His mouth was a tight line. “They’re alive.”
I exhaled. Alive would have to be enough for now.
“And the Beholder’s crew?” I asked.
“Nothing.” His voice was chagrined. My heart sank. “I searched high and low for them. Midnight’s keeping her cards close to her chest. But I won’t give up,” Aleksei added quickly.
I bit my lip and nodded. “What else?”
Aleksei held up a second finger. “I found the mothers,” he said. “The Rusalki.”
“You did? How?” I exclaimed.
“They couldn’t keep away,” Aleksei said, smiling grimly. “Actually, I wouldn’t have seen them at all, but a little girl started waving at nothing beyond the edge of the training ground, and my guards apprehended a few of them.”
I leaned forward. “And?”
“And I recognized some of them. So when we were alone, I used the call sign from Shvartsval’d you taught me. I tried to reason with them, explained what we wanted to do.” Aleksei paused. “And they spat in my face.”
“They what?”
“They called me a thief. They called me a monster. A barbaria
n.” Aleksei tried to smile. “It got very tiresome, mostly because they were entirely correct. But I tried, Selah. I tried to tell them.”
“I know you did.”
We are the girls in the stories, and the world is ours.
The tsarytsya was wrong.
This was not her world. Lands and worlds and stories belonged to everyone.
And Yotunkheym belonged to its mothers. Its children. Its cooks and its maids, its servants and its lambs, and the people who loved its wilds and its cities alike.
I hoped so badly not to leave it to the wolves.
“Can you remember anything about them?” I put a hand on his arm. “How many were they?”
He steepled his skinny fingers, thinking. “There were nine of them, not all Rusalki. Six women, three men, eight with Yotne accents. One with an English accent, actually.”
“English?” I blinked at him. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I couldn’t forget a girl like that. Dark hair and pale skin.” Aleksei smiled. “And it was the strangest thing. She had fistfuls of yellow flowers stuck in her pockets.”
58
I had imagined my wedding day a hundred times. It was impossible not to, given the reason Alessandra had sent me abroad. I’d pictured it all so clearly—a gown, Daddy and Godmother Althea, a priest. Rings at Saint Christopher’s, candles in Arbor Hall.
In Stupka-Zamok, my wedding day meant no family, none of the rites of my religion. It meant dressing alone in the gown Baba Yaga had supplied, with its sheer gunmetal chiffon layers, its silver embroidery. It was a dress for an ash-girl.
It meant waking to Aleksei, his thin frame curled up across a pile of pillows, his hair a shock of black against the sheets.
We had both come of our own accord, for our own reasons, and seen and done and learned hard things.
Aleksei had found that this place was not who he was. And I had learned that I could be sharp, and fierce, without betraying the person I wanted to be.
While Aleksei dressed, I prayed the Rosary. My fingers longed for the comfort of my old prayer beads or the knotted fabric of my makeshift version—abandoned now in the cellar closet—but even without them, I knew the sequence of prayers, etched into my mind by years of quiet meditation.
