I try the door, but it won’t budge. I’m stuck here, it seems, and I’m hungry. I poke through the shelves looking for something to eat, and I find half a tin of tea and a jar of preserved cherries. I fill the samovar and brew some tea. It tastes of mildew more than anything else, but it is warming. The cherries are so sour they make my tongue curl, but they will do for a meal.
Then I crawl under the cobwebbed blankets of the yaga’s narrow bed and in a moment I’m asleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The House through the Mist
I WAKE TO A strangely comforting feeling of the bed rocking and I sense the steady lope of the hut’s chicken legs running again. I look out the window. The sky is still grey and the forest is dark but the trees outside are dead, black and burned. Their branches are jagged and bare and the ground is ashen soil.
I must be in the Dead Wood.
I can almost feel the War that happened here so long ago. Death lingers between the blackened trees as if the ghosts of the dead soldiers inhabit the emptiness.
But on the other side of the Dead Wood is the River Dezhdy, which will lead me to the High Stikhlo Mountains and on the other side of the High Stikhlo Mountains is the Republic of Birds—and Mira. Even now, I can see a grassy, sloping bank through the trees. The riverbank.
But the hut turns sharply. It pushes into a thicket of trees, out of the Dead Wood and into a patch of icy forest.
‘You are going the wrong way, Hut,’ I tell it firmly. ‘We must follow the river.’
The hut continues into the forest.
I don’t like being ignored. ‘Listen to me,’ I say. ‘You’re going the wrong way. The Dezhdy leads up into the High Stikhlos which lead to the Republic, which is where’—I feel my voice catch—‘which is where Mira is.’
The hut quickens its pace. Rain starts to spatter against the windowpanes. And I start to shiver, and not just because the icy rain is leaking through the roof: I’m shivering because this creepy hut is taking me somewhere I don’t want to go.
I go to the door but it is still stuck.
I wrench the knob. Nothing.
I lean my whole body against the door, and push with all my might. Still nothing and, worse, the hut tips so that I lose my balance and crash against the opposite wall with such a thump that all the pots and pans clatter down from their hooks. I charge at the door with the arrow Fedor gave me, but the arrow splits in half on impact.
I try the window but as soon as I have undone the latch it re-latches itself.
‘I hate magic,’ I say. ‘And I hate yagas.’
But if I hate yagas, I guess this means I hate myself. And why shouldn’t I? It was hard enough to like myself when I was plain, ordinary, sometimes-spiteful, often-envious Olga. Stepdaughter of the beautiful Anastasia. Sister of the talented and charming Mira.
But now I’m not ordinary and unremarkable—I’m different. Different in the wrong way. I think of the look of fear and horror that came over Mira’s face whenever we talked about yagas. And the shock on Father’s face when he saw me enter the map the night I left the Centre.
My nose is running and I realise I am crying. I wipe the snot on my sleeve. See? Yagas really are disgusting. Then, because I’m not finished feeling angry, I pick up one of the pots that fell when the hut lurched and throw it against the wall as hard as I can.
The hut keeps running through the forest.
I slump against the wall and sink to the floor, disturbing a layer of dust in the process. It floats around me in a thick cloud then settles. I don’t know how long I stay there, watching the trees slide past the window while the rain falls heavier and heavier and drips through the roof.
I am trapped and I will stay trapped until the hut has taken me wherever it wants me to go. I don’t know where that is. I only hope it’s to Mira.
The thought of her—frightened and in danger—makes me so desperate that I haul myself up again and start kicking at the door. I kick so hard that it splinters beneath my boot, even though I know it won’t open for me.
But just as I give it one last kick, the door opens and I hurtle through it, landing in a cold, murky puddle.
I look up to see iron gates looming in the mist.
With a creak, they swing open.
I don’t like this at all.
I scramble to my feet and make to run, but an outstretched chicken claw prods me through the gates and onto a muddy path. I am about to turn and run again when I notice the house. It is tall and turreted, and its roof is studded with gargoyles. In books, enormous houses with foreboding iron gates and roofs studded with gargoyles often appear out of the mist—but not like this. This house is part of the mist, as if it were made from the weather.
Something about it holds me. I can’t look away.
From somewhere behind me a voice says, ‘Olga Oblomova, welcome.’
I am already cold, in a soaked-with-mist kind of way, but hearing my name like that turns me another kind of cold altogether.
A woman appears beside me. She is small and round, with silver eyes and silver-white hair and a face as wrinkled as an old raisin. She holds a silver umbrella to protect her from the rain. I am struck with the unplaceable feeling that I have seen her before.
‘How do you know my—?’
She steps around me and gives the hut a brisk pat. ‘Very well done, little hut,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
The hut dips down on its chicken legs, almost like it is curtseying, then scrabbles back into the forest.
The gates creak shut behind it. And I see the letters wrought in iron at the top of them. From where I stand they are back to front, but it takes me barely a moment to pick them out.
I feel the blood stop in my veins. They say:
Bleak Steppe Finishing School
for Girls of Unusual Ability
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bleak Steppe
I AM STANDING INSIDE the gates of the Bleak Steppe Finishing School for Girls of Unusual Ability. The school that no girl has ever returned from.
The school where girls are boiled down to their bones and their bones are boiled into soup.
I rattle the gates, but I know they won’t open.
‘You’d best come in,’ says the woman. My fingers are blue from the cold, but I cling to the gatepost. I will never find Mira now.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ the woman says. As she walks towards me, a chain of keys clangs around her neck.
I curl an arm around the gate. If you ask me, there’s plenty to be afraid of. I remember all the whispered conversations passing from one girl to another at rehearsals for the Spring Blossom Ball—the things that happen to the girls who are sent to Bleak Steppe. Sent here.
‘You needn’t be frightened,’ she says.
I don’t move.
‘You know,’ she continues, ‘girls come here with the strangest ideas in their heads. They beg us to spare their hands, plead for us not to cut out their tongues. They scream wildly that they don’t want to be thrown in the soup pot. Those rumours aren’t true, Olga. Why would we want to drain the magic out of young yagas,’ she asks, ‘when we are yagas ourselves?’
I keep my grip on the gate, but I turn my head, just the tiniest amount, so that I can see her. ‘You mean… you’re a yaga?’
The woman takes a key off her chain. She tosses it onto the ground. It winks brightly before it is sucked under the mud. Am I supposed to be impressed?
The woman watches the ground intently. She smiles when the soil starts to bubble and a mound of dirt forms. ‘Stand back,’ she says and before I can ask why, a slender tree has sprouted from the ground. It grows quickly. It is soon as tall as me and then twice as tall. And it is shining silver. Its branches spread out, leaves unfurl, blossoms appear and, finally, heavy silver orbs hang from its boughs: apples. A tall silver apple tree stands in the place of the key. It is beautiful and eerie in the misty night. I could gaze at it for hours.
‘More of a showy trick than an
y practical magic,’ says the woman. ‘But it illustrates my point. Now, will you come inside?’
I stay where I am. Wind ruffles the branches of the tree. A silver apple falls to the ground.
‘Of course, you can always stay where you are, hugging the gatepost. But I think you’ll be happier inside.’ She wraps her hand around the tree trunk, gives it a twist and the tree disappears. When she opens her hand, the key rests on her palm. She threads it back on its chain and walks towards the misty house.
‘Pick up that apple, won’t you?’ she calls from further down the path. ‘They can be surprisingly tasty.’
I pick up the apple, slip it into my bag and follow her down the path, trying to ignore the fast, loud thump of my heart.
We come to the most enormous door I have ever seen—and I have seen the front doors of the Stone Palace. The knocker is set as high as my head and the strange—yet also strangely familiar—woman has to stand on her tiptoes to reach it. She heaves the door open. And with a feeling of sick inevitability, I follow her through to meet my fate.
The inside of Bleak Steppe is not at all like the outside. We stand in a cavernous hall of blue-tinged stone. It is warm in here, thanks to the blazing fire that crackles blue in the centre of the room. My clothes and boots, which were soaked from the mist and caked with mud, are now dry and clean. I touch my hair and then my face. They are dry, too. Noise floats down from upstairs. It takes me a moment to work out that it is the patter of footsteps. Chatter. Laughter. Girls’ laughter.
The woman walks briskly across the floor. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for gaping later, Olga,’ she says, and I realise my mouth is hanging open. ‘The dining hall is this way.’
We go through another door and pass a small room filled with buckets of soapy water where dirty bowls and dishes appear to be washing themselves: they jump in the steaming water, tangle around with the dishcloth, then leap out again, flicking themselves dry in the process.
The woman clears her throat. ‘What did I say about gaping?’
I scuttle after her and come out into a long, narrow room occupied by a long narrow table. All the seats around it are empty, but it is strewn with crumbs and, here and there, a stray fork or spoon, and there is a pile of dishes at one end. It seems the school is full of girls. Real, live girls who haven’t been turned into soup.
‘I expect you’re hungry,’ the woman says, and she looks up to the ceiling. ‘Baba Basha, Olga has arrived.’
The blue-tinged stone of the ceiling ripples and darkens. Clouds roll across it, growing thicker, turning grey, then darkening until they are almost black. A clap of thunder shakes at the walls of the room and the clouds break apart. It’s strange and beautiful to watch, though I don’t understand what it has to do with me being hungry. I don’t understand much about Bleak Steppe at all.
‘Watch out, Olga,’ the woman says, smiling, ‘or you’ll get splashed.’
Rain falls from the roof. And it is only because I have seen a series of similarly impossible things—a key that turns into an apple tree, a fire that burns blue, a kitchen where the dishes wash themselves—that I do as she says. I push my chair back, as if I am quite used to rain falling from the ceiling, and I watch as it pools on the tabletop. Only it doesn’t pool, it falls into the shape of a bowl of dumplings and a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea, a hunk of bread, a wedge of cheese and half an onion.
Then the clouds above us roll away, and the rain stops. But the food remains. It looks and smells quite real, and apparently it tastes quite real, too, because the woman bites into the cheese with satisfaction.
‘How—?’ I start but she waves me away.
‘Eat first. Then there’ll be time for questions,’ she says through her cheesy mouthful.
The dumplings are delicious, rich and good and spiked with sharp herbs. Next, I eat the biscuits, the whole plateful, and slowly lick the crystals of sugar from my lips. Then I slurp the tea down in one swallow.
Across the table, the woman takes alternating mouthfuls of cheese and bread until she finishes both. Finally, she turns to the onion. She sprinkles it with salt and raises it to her lips. And then I remember. The sled. The snow. The paper twist of salt. The muttered conversation with the yaga in her hut.
‘You’re the onion woman!’ I cry. ‘From the sled!’
‘Onion woman?’ she says, with a crunch. ‘That’s hardly flattering. My name is Mijska. Baba Mijska to you.’
‘I can hardly believe it,’ I say. ‘You must admit it’s quite a coincidence, us happening to take the same sled.’
She fixes me with a shrewd look and bites into her onion. ‘I’ll admit no such thing,’ she says when, at last, she is finished chewing. ‘When it comes to our pupils, we leave nothing to chance. It’s easy to get some of you here. Others present more of a challenge. But we make sure you all get here eventually. You don’t really think it was a coincidence that I sat next to you on that sled?’
‘But why—?’ I begin.
Mijska cuts me off. ‘Because Bleak Steppe is the only place where you are free to be what you are.’
I have so many questions that I want to ask. Is Bleak Steppe really a school? What does it teach? How do you know that I’m a yaga? Have you been watching me this whole time?
I must look bewildered, because Mijska swallows the last of her onion in one quick gulp. ‘Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning,’ she says.
The beginning of what, I wonder.
‘Bleak Steppe was founded nearly one hundred years ago,’ Mijska says, ‘by Baba Basha, one of three members of the Imperial Coven—’
‘The Imperial Coven? The yagas that stole the firebird’s egg? The ones who started the War in the Skies?’ I say, barely believing this could be true. And haven’t I heard the name Basha before?
Baba Mijska frowns. ‘That’s a history lesson you’d do well to unlearn, Olga. The Coven didn’t steal the egg, they concealed it. And if they hadn’t, the War would have been much worse. Better a divided Tsardom than no Tsardom at all.’
I nod, but I’m still not sure I understand her. After all, a yaga would say that the Coven was only hiding the egg. Then again, Masha said the same thing in the banya back at the Centre for Avian Observation. And if the stories about girls being boiled down to their bones at Bleak Steppe were not true, then perhaps the stories about the Coven might be wrong too. I press my hands to my temples. My head is beginning to hurt.
‘They paid a high price, though,’ Baba Mijska continues. ‘And the rest of us paid it along with them. Once the yagas were banished from Stolitsa by the Tsarina, the Tsarish people were quick to turn against us. Many of us left Tsaretsvo. Most went to places where their particular skills were welcomed: the Argentinian Pampas. New York. Tasmania. I hear there’s a large number of Tsarish yagas living in the Bermuda Triangle. But some stayed. A lot of the older, more traditional yagas couldn’t be persuaded to go. They took to their huts and wandered the Borderlands instead, plying their magic. But even yagas can’t live forever. Most of the huts are empty, now, though they’re not without their uses.’
‘Like carrying girls to Bleak Steppe against their will?’
‘Well, you were hardly going to come voluntarily, were you? Not with all those terrible rumours. You know, Bleak Steppe is the only school of its kind, the only one that instructs yagas in the art and science of magic. You are a yaga, Olga, and Bleak Steppe is where you will learn your craft.’
‘And what is that?’ I am leaning forward. My fingers are gripping the edge of my chair. ‘What is my craft?’ I can hear the delight in my voice. I am hungry to know. All of a sudden I can’t think of anything more wonderful than being a yaga.
‘The better question would be,’ she says, ‘what is your medium? A yaga’s medium is the one thing that she can bend to her will. Or I should say, one thing that she can learn to bend to her will.’
‘What’s your medium?’ I ask.
She takes my teaspoon and stretches it out into a l
ong silver ribbon. ‘I should have thought it was obvious,’ she says and, tying the ribbon into a bow, she turns it into a spoon once more. ‘It’s silver. But yours will be something quite different. It might be wax, or oak wood, or silk, or sugar.’
‘How do I find out what it is?’
Mijska covers the teaspoon with her hands and when she opens them again the spoon has turned to a silvery liquid. The silver runs through her fingers and spreads, slowly, over the table, until it is a shiny pool, almost like a mirror. I look into it and Tsaretsvo appears in outline across the silver. Lakes and forests and mountains and cities appear. In the corner, a compass rose shows North and South, East and West. The silver has formed a map.
‘Maps,’ I say, almost laughing. It makes sense. I make sense. ‘My medium is maps!’
‘Hmm, most useful,’ says Mijska thoughtfully. ‘You will start tomorrow.’
‘But Baba Mijska,’ I say, ‘I can’t. I must go. My sister—’
‘Mira,’ she says, and I look up in surprise—how could she know about Mira?
‘Well, we are yagas, dear,’ she says, and then she presses my hand in hers. ‘A most precarious situation. You will have to learn fast.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Glimpse of Ptashkagrad
I STARE AT THE empty plate in front of me, trying to make sense of things. Bleak Steppe is a school where girls who are yagas learn their craft. Girls like me. I am brimming with excitement. But then I remember. I don’t have time to learn—I need to find Mira.
Then again, maybe Baba Mijska can teach me to use my medium to help me find her. I push the plate away. ‘Baba Mijska,’ I say. ‘Whatever I need to learn, I need to learn it tonight. I must set out for the Republic tomorrow.’
‘I see you’re anxious to leave,’ says Mijska. ‘But I’m afraid that won’t be possible. No girl leaves Bleak Steppe before Baba Basha decides it.’
‘Baba Basha is here?’ I say. ‘Baba Basha, one of the Imperial Coven?’ I remember now—I’ve seen her in Varvara’s memories.
The Republic of Birds Page 10
