by Anna Bright
I swallowed painfully. This near, he smelled like salt and ink.
It was so good to see him. I was so angry at him. I hated that this moment had gone sour.
“No one else could’ve done it?” I whispered. “The camp? No one could’ve handled it but you?”
“The place was in chaos,” Lang said again, sounding confused.
“I see.”
He scrubbed a hand over his cheek and his temple. “I wanted it to go perfectly.” His tone shifted, growing desperate. “No hitches. No surprises.”
“And I wanted you to be there!” I burst out. “I wanted you in that courtyard while everything went to hell and I got married because I thought I had to bargain for your life!” Tears leaked from my eyes and I swiped at them, angry, impatient.
I watched his face, waiting for the moment I could see he understood. But it never came.
Lang dragged his hands over his face. “I want to know why you only get angry with me,” he said, almost pleading. “I want to know why everyone gets a chance but me.”
Defensive. Competitive. Angry. We stared each other down, breathing hard.
These questions, the accusations, the excuses—they were the last things that should be said between two people in love after so much time apart.
I am rash, Torden had once told me. Impatient.
By all accounts, he had charged in. Torden could have wrecked any number of careful plans when he’d come in to rescue me. Perhaps I should have wanted him to behave like Lang, who’d hung back and considered, again and again. In England, in Shvartsval’d, even today.
Lang had been doing important work in the Leshii camp. But I had wanted to see his face.
Perhaps that was selfish. But I couldn’t be sacrificed again and again for the greater good, set aside for a succession of causes. No matter how urgent. No matter how noble.
“Because I cared for you—care for you,” I said brokenly. “But I want the person I love to love me selfishly.”
The river batted against the sides of the boat, and for a long time, both of us were quiet. The crew had moved away, none of them wishing to overhear this conversation.
Back in the city, the sounds of fighting seemed to have quieted, and the smoke had thinned. No explosions had shaken the ground for a while.
Every hour I waited in the Imperiya could have consequences for my father’s life. For my own safety. For my position in Potomac. But I needed to see this through.
I walked down the gangplank and back toward the burning city, casting aside my own rescue.
“Get Wash and the ones who need to be protected to safety,” I said over my shoulder. “Anyone who wants to see this witch burn should come with me.”
62
The city had the abandoned sense of a ruin. But we could hear the crowds outside the tsarytsya’s home from a mile away.
We hurried down a street lined with empty-looking little fortresses. I’d thought they looked familiar when I saw the dog I’d pitied the night of Zatemnennya, looking bone-thin, its fur covered in mud.
I didn’t ask the others to pause for me as I climbed over the low fence to where he lay chained. The dog whimpered, but I came near slowly, crouching before him and letting him sniff my hand before I slipped the collar off his neck.
Once free, he scratched and wiggled, seeming almost to shiver with happiness. Then he sat up, tail thumping hopefully. I clicked at him, and he jumped the fence after me, trotting behind us as I caught up with the crew. And when we rounded the corner and came to face Baba Yaga’s smoldering tower, we found that the battle was over.
A few gray-clad soldiers remained; but they sat in groups on the ground, their hands behind their heads, ringed by rebel guards. People all over the courtyard were stripping off their gray uniforms and clothes, pitching them into the fires still burning in the wreckage, changing into fresh clothes the resistance were passing out in shades of green and blue and white and gold. Some of the garments fit their wearers; some didn’t; no one seemed to care.
The tsarytsya was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t surprised that more soldiers and civilians were surrendering than sticking to her side.
I promised myself that, someday, I would lead people loyal to me, or not at all. I would never govern the fearful. Because this was its end: fire, and a broken city, and people desperate for something new.
We moved through the courtyard, looking for our friends. One of the Rusalki began to sing.
The young woman was cuddling a tiny girl with soft cheeks; I supposed she hadn’t gone to the Leshii camp. I supposed she wanted to stay. To see her choices through to the end, like I did.
Her song was a distraction for her daughter, a bright chant that repeated itself. The little girl laughed, and people around them began to stare, but a woman sitting beside them sang along. The dog I’d unchained trotted over to them. When the little girl patted him on the head, he settled beside her.
The song was simple, insistent, punctuated with claps and stomps. It grew slowly in the midst of the courtyard of spikes and stone, like a vine curling up a wall, insistent as a tree pressing up through soil. Others looked as if they wanted to join in, but weren’t sure how.
It had been so long since music had sounded inside this city’s gates.
Aleksei came to my side, looking like a starving man as he watched. His shirt was deep green and his trousers were undyed; the colors suited him.
“Teach them how to sing, Aleksei,” I said, taking his hand. “This is how it begins.”
He eyed the tower and nodded. “These are my people. And besides,” he added, sounding grim. “It’s high time we called down the witch.”
Shed of his gray uniform, Baba Yaga’s General Bright Dawn shed his title, and took up the song.
He clapped his hands, stomping his feet against the flagstones and making his way to the front door. Two men and a girl and the woman who’d started the song drew near his side.
“It’s a song about a red berry,” said a voice in my ear. “A red berry, and going to sleep beneath the pines.”
It was a voice I would have known anywhere, even here, even at the burning end of the world.
I turned and flung my arms around Torden, and for a long moment, the fires of the revolution disappeared.
I was far from Baba Yaga’s house. I was safe in Torden Asgard’s arms.
He eyed my scrapes and bruises in dismay. But I shook my head and nodded back to Aleksei and the others. “Who are they?”
“The leaders of the Leshii, the Rusalki, and the Vodyanoi. Marya, Ivan, Melek, and Ahmet.” The Rusalka woman bounced her daughter on her hip as she walked and sang, the dog still trotting behind them.
“What a coincidence,” I mused. “Isn’t your name Ivan?”
Torden smiled, and I wanted to kiss him.
Aleksei and the resistance leaders sang on, weaving their way to the door. More and more of the crowd began to mimic them.
The former citizens of the Imperiya stood outside of Baba Yaga’s house, singing and stomping and clapping, demanding she appear. They put me in mind of the children in the tale, standing outside the chicken-legged house in the woods.
Turn your back to the trees and your face to us, yzbushka! I wanted to scream up at her tower. Come down and face us.
Then, as if she had indeed been conjured, Baba Yaga appeared in the doorway, Polunoshchna at her back. Vechirnya was nowhere to be seen.
The tsarytsya eyed Aleksei, disappointed. I didn’t understand her when she spoke.
Torden leaned down to me and translated.
“‘You did not come of your own accord,’ she’s saying. ‘You were compelled by your so-called father. The so-called Shield of the North.’” Torden scowled.
But he hadn’t. Aleksei had come to her of his own accord.
And when he had seen the tsarytsya’s claws and teeth for what they were, of his own accord he had rebelled.
She was wrong, and the crowd knew it.
And then
Baba Yaga’s keen eyes sought me out. “This could all have been yours,” she said in English. Around me, I heard whispers, murmured translations into Yotne and Deutsch and other tongues I didn’t recognize.
I held her gaze, not flinching. “I never wanted it.”
“The more fool you, Zolushka,” she spat.
My anger rose. “No, you are the fool!” I shouted back at her. “These people aren’t minor characters in a tale about you, or about me. Their stories are theirs. This is their country. It was always meant to be theirs.”
I seized Torden’s hand and Yu’s nearby arm and nodded to Hermódr and Bragi and Bear. We crowded close behind Aleksei and the resistance leaders.
“Call me ash-girl, if you wish. But it’s your house that’s burned to the ground. And you lit the match yourself.” I lowered my voice. “I did warn you.”
Baba Yaga said nothing.
“We took what was ours,” Midnight protested.
Always the taking with Polunoshchna, I thought. When she did manage to focus on one fact, she lost sight of the rest of the picture completely.
The night was ending and the sun was rising and she couldn’t see it at all.
“No more,” I said sharply. “No more.”
I pointed at Aleksei, at the Vodyanoi and the Leshii in forest green and river blue, at the Rusalka woman with her daughter. “These are the voices of the people you have wronged. And we”—I nodded at my friends standing behind them—“are the representatives of four sovereign governments, here to bear witness to these proceedings.”
I cleared my throat. “Be assured, Baba Yaga, that we will not meddle. But be also assured that Yotunkheym will no more conquer. That its next leaders, whoever they may be, will no longer ignore the will of its people.” I swallowed. “We will be watching. And so will the rest of the world.”
Aleksei and the resistance leaders stepped forward. And I closed my mouth, and fell back, and let justice proceed.
63
YOTUNKHEYM, THE FORMER IMPERIYA YOTNE
Baba Yaga’s empire had fallen.
Stupka-Zamok was taken, and her armies—her divisions in the east, west, south, and in the city—were scattered. But victory had not come without losses to our side.
The resistance had suffered blows. Many Vodyanoi and Leshii and Rusalki and Sidhe fighters had died, and many more were wounded; Veery, Bear’s knight and friend, was among the injured. I passed by as he was carried into a tent for surgery, swearing and sweating, his lean, ropy limbs twisted in pain.
I stopped short, suddenly flattened by a wave of delayed fear and exhaustion and an overwhelming sense of our mortality.
Veery might live, but he might not. And he could have been Torden, or Cobie, or Anya, or Lang. I’d known this already—of course I had. But hearing the cries of one of Bear’s best friends from inside the tent was different than just knowing the risk we’d faced.
There was news from Asgard, as well. The Upper Northern pestykk had attacked the Shield three days prior, the night of Zatemnennya, as I’d predicted. Torden and I stood over one of Baba Yaga’s radios that afternoon, speaking with Hermódr.
“We subdued them, but we lost nearly eight hundred men,” said Hermódr, voice so low it had the sound of a confession.
Torden paled. “I wish I could have been in both places.”
I squeezed Torden’s hand, feeling a surge of guilt. I’d wanted him to come for me.
He would not have chosen differently, but this was the cost: Torden, his heart torn in two.
But Hermódr was steady as ever. “The men knew you were fighting alongside them, on another front. And now the war is over. More lives have been saved.”
Torden kissed my knuckles, jaw tense. “How is Pappa?”
“He’s well. Minor injuries. Rihttá hasn’t left his side.”
“And Bragi?”
“Fine.” But Hermódr hesitated. “And Vidarr and Váli are fine.”
Torden stilled at this. I watched him taking inventory in silence. Fredrik and Aleksei were in Yotunkheym. Hermódr, Bragi, Vidarr, and Váli were fine. “Týr?”
He was the heir to Asgard, the one Alessandra had planned for me to court. He was a brute. But he was Torden’s brother.
Hermódr said nothing for a long moment. “He fell, Torden.”
Torden’s mouth opened and closed, but he didn’t speak. He sank into the desk chair, his hands planted on his knees, his brown eyes wide and dry with a grief too stunned for tears. “Did he suffer?” he finally asked, sounding strangled. “Was it a hard death?”
“We aren’t sure,” Hermódr said. “We found his body among others on the field. He died with his men.”
The brothers were quiet together, mourning in silence with leagues between them.
Týr had died, and Torden had not. I was grateful. He was haunted.
Torden would feel the weight of the lives he couldn’t save and the ones he’d taken. I knew him too well to believe otherwise.
High in Baba Yaga’s tower, I wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could and did my best to hold him together, as he had done so many times for me.
64
It filled me with fierce pride to watch the dragon defeated, to know I had helped put swords in the right hands. To hear the Rusalki tell Baba Yaga that the little pestykk had been returned to their families and that her teeth and claws had been scattered to the wind.
For their crimes, the tsarytsya and Midnight were to be imprisoned, and not executed. Her people were weary of blood, and chose no more to be Wolves. Sunset was never seen again, presumably having fled into the lands she’d once been tasked with conquering.
Vechirnya was wise, and careful, and I doubted we’d catch her. But her escape would be its own punishment; she would be looking over her shoulder forever. Knowing that she had brought night to so many lands, and that the night might well fall on her someday.
But things in the capital were ended quickly.
Some in the city returned to the wild. Others remained within its walls. And there, Stupka-Zamok—the Mortar—was being transformed. The tramp of soldiers’ boots and the city’s ubiquitous gray were replaced with music and color; and as the sun sank down on the horizon and limned every stone with warmth, one of the Vodyanoi issued the call to prayer. A hundred men and women answered, Wash among them. And on Baba Yaga’s house, others of the victorious rebels painted an icon above the door, the Madonna and Child larger than life and haloed with gold.
The city glowed with art and faith and defiance of the darkness they had shaken off, and it filled me with belief that all would be well—here in the place I left behind, and home, as I returned to right old wrongs.
The crowd remained in the courtyard into the night, eating and drinking and laughing and grieving for the lost. I sat with my friends against the tower wall, Torden nearly asleep against me, my crew and Bear and the Sidhe as easy and comfortable around our fire in Stupka-Zamok’s remains as we ever were at court.
It was the Sidhe who had kept the Beholder from ruin, Perrault explained to me. “They knew what we did not, and they’d warned us not to risk Zatemnennya.”
My protocol officer’s face was drawn. He didn’t look like a portrait, now, or a fox. He looked tired.
“I was supposed to guide you as you courted suitors. And instead, you end up in the middle of a war.” Perrault hung his head. “I never meant for this to happen. I never intended to answer to a woman like Alessandra at all.”
I thought of Aleksei trapped in Baba Yaga’s service, and thought Perrault’s might be a familiar tale. “Sometimes our plans get away from us,” I offered.
Perrault hmmed in agreement. “I wanted to join the Academy of New York. The immortals, they were called. I wanted to leave a mark, shape the language of New York with an eye to the future. And my mentor found me a place there.” He took a long breath, eyes trained on the ground.
“But?” I prompted.
“But the cost was too great. I had to supp
ort his proposals unreservedly, curry favor at near nightly salons. Politics and etiquette became my life. Worst of all, if he needed someone to collect from his debtors, I was his man. The day he was found dead in his mistress’s bed, I breathed freely for the first time in six years.” Perrault went pink with shame. “And then his daughter, Alessandra, appeared on my doorstep.”
I stilled.
“She told me that the debt I’d owed her father was now owed to her. When she left for Potomac, I prayed Alessandra would forget me. But we know how that story ended.”
My nerves fired at the despair in his face.
Would everything return to the way it was before, when we faced Alessandra again? Would Perrault bend again to her will? Would I?
“No,” I said, defiant. “We don’t know how that story ends. It’s not finished yet.”
I had to believe we’d be different. Stronger. That even my stepmother wasn’t powerful enough to undo how much we had changed.
Perrault watched me, a little despairing, as though wishing it could be true.
I scanned the crowds around us. “Perrault, would you have believed this morning that tonight was possible?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Me either.” Torden’s head drooped onto my shoulder. Across the circle, I caught Bear grinning at us, and I grinned back. “There’s still a chance this story ends happily.”
Torden reached for my hand in his doze, and Perrault eyed our linked fingers, curious. “Certainly, part of it will.”
“And if some,” I asked, putting all my heart into the words, “why not all?”
“Why not, indeed?” Perrault gave me a tired but genuine smile.
And when he returned to the Beholder to sleep and Torden finally roused himself to find some blankets, Bear took a seat next to me.
“Hello,” he said tentatively, settling cross-legged on the ground.
“Hi,” I said, almost like agreeing.
