Diary of Anna the Girl Witch 2: Wandering Witch

by Max Candee

  “Ah,” he said. His thin shoulder shuddered against the palm of my hand. “The ghosts. The rootless souls, looking for the way home — the way they forget while living as men. I used to help them find that way, guiding each to the afterlife of their choice … or of their beliefs. But now I’m here, and they’re drawn to this place, but they can find no relief. Confused, scared, anxious, they’re easily manipulated. And they may do anything for a remedy.”

  “Why can’t they find the way on their own?” I asked, puzzled.

  “As I said, they forget; that’s just how it works. Your grandmother is the only person in the world who belongs to both worlds. She is both alive and dead. Have you noticed her bone leg? That’s the leg with which she stands in the kingdom of death.” He sighed. “And I’ve been locked up here long, haven’t I? There must be scores of restless souls in the world of the living…”

  “Has she always been this mad?” I asked.

  “It’s very complicated, Malyshka.”

  “Can you try to explain it to me?”

  “Explain?” He grinned. “No. But I think I can show you.”

  He took my hand with his slim, dry fingers — his skin was cracking, showing white bone underneath — and pressed it to his forehead. “Close your eyes,” he said, his voice deepening and growing in strength. “I’m not strong enough to escape, but I can still do a few things. Listen now. Listen to my thoughts.”

  Koschey’s voice filled my mind, mixing with the warm feeling in my heart, demanding my full attention. And then this new wave of sound seemed to open a new dimension in my mind. It was as though my thoughts were melding with his. Not completely, but I could hear what he was thinking. I could even see some things — like a thirteen-year-old girl with red hair standing with one hand on the bars of a cage.

  Is that me? I thought. Is that what I look like to you?

  Yes, he thought. But that is not important now. Listen to me. Listen to my tale. Listen to your tale.

  I did.

  And suddenly, I could hear his thoughts as if they were mine.

  * * *

  The girl is waiting for me to speak. To explain. But how can one explain these things to such a fragile creature, young, untaught, and still so very, very mortal?

  Still, just as she said, I have to try.

  “I’ve known your grandmother for a long time,” I begin, framing the words in my mind, knowing that they will fill hers. “Longer than you can imagine. Eons. Millions of years. When I first knew her, she didn’t look as she does now. She was young, beautiful. Can you imagine how long ago that must have been?”

  The girl looks blank, trying to absorb this. I feel the confusion in her mind as she hears both my thoughts and hers, tries to balance the two, to pick them apart — and grasp just what I’m saying.

  “Beautiful?” she says, dazed.

  “Oh, yes. Very. Even frighteningly so. Pale cheeks just blushed with sunrise. Eyes the violet of a sunset. And hair that fell to her ankles, shimmering copper and bronze and gold in the sunlight. Oh, she was fair; she was fair.”

  I can see the question in the girl’s eyes: Is her own hair that same color? It will be interesting to see whether she asks or prefers not to know.

  She says nothing, and the silence may be too long. I forget how silence unnerves the mortals, who have so little time that they must rush everything they say, rush their every thought. Best to carry on.

  “Yes. Beautiful; she was beautiful. On the outside. But inside… I don’t know how best to explain this. Not only am I ancient, Anna Sophia. I do not see the world the way you do. Just as your days are limited, so are your senses. There are so many colors in the world you cannot see…”

  No, this isn’t helping. She is only growing more confused.

  “Open your thoughts,” I whisper. Just for a moment, I push my mind further into hers so that, for an instant, she catches a glimpse of how I see the universe, the limitless space teeming with color and life. Her eyes begin to sparkle with an excited glow — the glow of remembering something she long since forgot.

  I pull my mind back. She is far too fragile to risk letting her share my thoughts that completely for too long.

  And besides, this way there are things I can keep secret.

  “See what I mean?” I say. “And other things you cannot see either, like the color of a person’s soul.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can see a person’s soul, Anna Sophia. I can see what they are, what they hide in themselves, the good or the evil they carry, whether they are aware of it themselves or not. And Yoga … she was aware of it; she knew perfectly well what she was. And so did I. When she first appeared, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She must have been used to that; most beautiful women are. But I also saw the contrast between her face and her body. Within her was utter darkness, a blackness so profound I could hardly believe it possible. I had never seen anything like that before. People’s souls … they aren’t like that.”

  “What are souls like, usually? What’s mine like?”

  They always ask that. But I never tell.

  “Most souls are … mixtures. How could they not be, humans being what they are? Some lighter, some darker. Some that from afar look gray, but get closer and it’s like…” How to put this in terms her human mind can understand? I think of a moth’s wing and let her mind see it as well. “You see?” I say. “From afar, it seems dull and brown or gray. But as you get closer, you see that there’s a rainbow of shades there, that its scales overlap and change depending on how that moth spreads its wings or how the light strikes them. Just like humans, whose souls alter in response to events, in proportion to the choices they make. But Baba Yoga’s…”

  My mind goes blank, traveling back in time, remembering that first sight of her. The few moments of contemplating her beauty, and then the hammer blow of seeing her soul, threatening to knock all air out of my lungs. I let Anna Sophia see the briefest echo of that image, and she gasps, trying to push away from me, trembling, but I hold her hand tightly pressed to my forehead. Even if I do not let her suffer the full strength of what I’d seen, she must know, must understand…

  “See? Blackness, darkness redefining the notion of black. It was like staring into an abyss. But it wasn’t some empty darkness. No, it was something worse: not the absence of white but the distinct presence of black. It was overwhelming and tarry, and I knew that if I let her soul touch me, it would stick to me like pitch, that her soul could corrupt anything it chose to. Even me.”

  “Why was she like that?” the girl asks as I let the image fade. She seems so lost, trying and failing to ground herself between our two minds.

  I let the image of Yoga fill that space where our thoughts are one. Yoga, her grandmother’s original name, corrupted to Yaga by the inhabitants of this land. Yoga is the constant search for knowledge, for enlightenment. And Baba Yoga, who wasn’t at all a Baba — an old woman — at that time, reached that knowledge after years of meditation, energy practice and quests. Enlightenment stemming from a pure heart usually makes a person’s soul clean and bright and full of love for the Creation. But her heart hadn’t been pure.

  “I had seen her soul, and she must have known,” I say. “But she poured green wine into cups and we drank. It would have been rude to refuse.” I hesitate, not sure how much to tell.

  “What did you do? Why was she there?”

  I remember how Yoga whispered to me and how there was such temptation in her voice, warm as honey to offset the snow-chilled wine. The things she said made so much sense. She poured more wine, and I grew as thirsty for it as I was for her to speak again. I drank her words and let the light shine on her hair, her skin, the jewels of her dress — anything that might glitter and let me forget the void underneath.

  But I cannot tell my child this. Although … although I probably just did.

  “Dad?”

  How long have I been lost in my reminiscences? I must pull myself together. I cannot
let this prison cloud my mind.

  “She proposed that … with our powers, the two of us could take over the worlds of the living and of the dead. And that we ought to.”

  “Are we not made for each other?” she said, a finger trailing over the hem of her dress. “And are not the worlds made for us too?” The wine shone on her lips, and I found myself thinking that I could kiss it from them, that she was offering me the universe for the price of a kiss. It seemed a bargain, a bargain I so longed to make. Yet beneath the shining crown of her hair, there was blackness, blackness, blackness…

  I cannot let my daughter see that memory.

  “I won’t deny that I was tempted,” I say. “To rule not just one world, but both of them! But … no, not with her. I told her so. I told her to leave, to let me be, that I didn’t wish to make a deal with a woman who had turned herself into a devil.”

  It took so much strength to say those words, to pull back from the brink of her lips.

  “So that’s why she has a grudge against you?” Anna Sophia asks.

  Oh, to be so innocent. I even laugh. There’s something about the guilelessness of the young, their ignorance. How little they can grasp how the spider’s web is made, how every strand depends on another, how much more complex everything is than it seems.

  “It is not that simple,” I tell her. “Nothing ever is. At that time, she simply … left.”

  Yoga didn’t rage as I had feared, or attempt to attack me. No, she merely nodded and stood to leave. And just as she was about to — she turned, and she smiled a sweet smile, a delicate one. That smile pierced my heart like a shard of ice and stayed there.

  Then she left.

  “She left,” I repeat. “And then, sometime later … I don’t know how long it would seem to you, whether it was a length of time or not. One gets confused. But … well, whether it was a lifetime of yours or ten of them later, she sent me a letter. A raven flew to me to deliver it. ‘Immortality is lonely,’ she had written. ‘Though we cannot be partners, can we not at least sit down and talk as friends?’”

  There was more than that in the letter, but I cannot tell the child this. I cannot. Already she sees me trapped by my weakness. How much more can I let myself be debased in her eyes, this child who has come so far to find me…

  My daughter.

  “Immortality is lonely,” I say. “The lives of mortals are so brief they pass away like butterflies on a summer’s day. You are born, you grow so quickly, and then you die. How can you build a real friendship with someone who will be gone in the blink of an eye? How can a human ever be much more than a pet, a close companion? One day you’ll have to sit next to one as he or she dies.

  “And so I was glad to receive Yoga’s letter. And I was glad to agree to see her. Loneliness grows on you so slowly, sometimes you don’t even realize how solitary you’ve become. But her letter brought mine to the fore. And I realized it could be painful to be alone. The very word, loneliness… It became like ice in my heart.”

  I still wonder whether Yoga had enchanted that letter or whether it was my own mind that turned her smile into that wound in my heart.

  “And so I allowed Yoga to come to me. She too knew the burdens of immortality, so who better to speak with? And she was good company, clever and magical, knowing so many things. And still beautiful, of course. We talked about so many things, about the deepest reaches of magic and about the funny things we had seen mortals do in our time. She made me smile; she even made me laugh. Her sense of humor was not quite so vicious then. Or at least she hid her bitterness better. I enjoyed her company immensely.”

  And all the time within her was churning that tarry maelstrom of blackness, and I closed my eyes and pretended not to see. Especially not when she leaned close to me and I could smell her honeysuckle and blackberry scent, feel the warmth of her pulse beating in her throat and her lips golden with mead, and hear her voice whisper those three words, those three deadly little words…

  “She told me that she was in love with me, Anna Sophia. That no one else could truly understand her, that no one else was worthy of her or me, and I… I…”

  I couldn’t turn away; I didn’t want to turn away. I let her press close to me. Her lips were sweet with mead, her breath fragrant as apples. And she was so warm in my arms, so soft and warm in my arms … and her hair was thick and copper and shone bright as the rising sun as it drowned my hands… I closed my eyes and tried to forget everything but the taste of apples and mead and the smell of blackberry and honeysuckle. I closed my eyes and refused to see — pretended not to see — the cascading darkness. I only saw the bronze waterfall into which my hands were plunged, nothing else, nothing else, nothing else…

  “I was weak,” I rasp aloud, pulling Anna Sophia’s hand away from my forehead so she can’t see what I’m remembering. “Weak and foolish.” They are among the hardest words I have ever spoken.

  I wait for disappointment to blossom in Anna Sophia’s eyes. It does not come.

  Softly, she puts her hand back on my forehead.

  “Well,” I say. “I was younger then. And foolish, as I told you. That’s no excuse, of course, but it‘s a fact. I could still see all that evil inside her. Her soul had not grown even a little bit lighter. If anything, her darkness seemed to have become thicker. But … what she said made sense. We were the only ones who could understand each other. So… I decided I was in love with her. And I told her so.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  I wonder if this child has ever been in love. Even if she has, at her age, how could she know all the subtleties of desire, all the little tricks we play on ourselves, everything we mask by using that word “love?” Yoga was in my arms, and my loneliness was abated. It was spring; the air was drunk with blossom. To admit that something was wrong would have broken that spell. Not that she had enchanted me. Not in the proper sense of the term; at least I don’t think so. It was a spell I had cast on myself or at least collaborated on. And how could I let myself bring that dream to an end?

  Weak, weak.

  “Perhaps I was in love; perhaps I merely said I was because I didn’t want to lose her company. I don’t know. We all lie to ourselves at least as much as we do to others. Probably more. I don’t know if I was lying whenever I said ‘I love you’ to her, but I lied to myself every time I told myself I couldn’t see the darkness pouring out of her. But ignoring it proved a terrible mistake. I should have known, I should have guessed, I should at least have suspected what she was up to. Your grandmother never does anything without a reason, without some profit for her. You must remember that. All the time I was with her, she was siphoning off my life power — my prana. Adding its strength to her own, draining me dry, as if I were an orange she’d sunk her teeth into to suck out its juices and leave its flesh and rind parched and arid.”

  Yoga was subtle about it at first; I have to give her that. She didn’t start immediately. And when she did, she took barely a drop, the faintest lick of my life force gone with every kiss, so little it might have happened accidentally. And then the theft of my breath as I slept, the extra flavor in our wine I couldn’t place, the lullabies she sang me as she kneaded my shoulders, the little charms she spun, the net she wove so finely that I didn’t even notice it trawling my being and catching my strength in it. How patient she was, so that even now, I’m not sure how long it was before I noticed I was weakening, and even then I did not suspect…

  “I grew ill,” I say. “I dried out. And still I spent time with her, let her visit me, went to visit her. I ignored all the warnings. I ignored that I was losing prana and she was there, as powerful as she’d ever been and still overflowing with her evil. I even let her become my nurse because who else could understand what I was going through? I grew weaker and weaker until not only my strength but my body was affected. I’d never realized before how much my health depended on the strength of my magic.

  I fell bedridden in her home, and still she sat by my side, seeming to do a
ll she could to cure me, stroking my forehead while whispering kind words — and still sapping my strength away. Replacing it with her darkness. I should have known; I should have noticed. I had touched her pitch and it was flowing into me, a cancerous, devouring flood.

  “Eventually she must have grown bored with playing nurse by the fire, and she left me to wallow in the sweat of my sheets on my own. From time to time, she would come by to take more from me. She had dropped all pretense, but I was too weak to notice. I could hardly even think. I remember I was so feeble I wondered whether this might be what it’s like to die. If I was about to discover that I was, in fact, mortal.”

  I can’t help but shudder and see that the girl is entirely captivated by my tale. Caught in my memories, she’s almost forgotten that I’m still here, alive.

  “Yoga must have worried about that too, but by now she couldn’t be bothered with me. There was little enough to drain. But letting me die might be a waste. If I built up my strength, maybe my magic would return. And then before I had grown too strong, she could come back and leech it from me again. Can you imagine? To have a permanent source of powerful life force to enable her to build up her own strength. To leave me trapped in that bed, like a tree you plant and then torture to make it produce more fruit. It was all she had ever wanted from me… And now that she didn’t have to pretend, she didn’t have to waste time curing me. She could leave that distasteful task to someone else.

  “So she sent her daughter. Sereda.”

  “Mom,” the girl says softly.

  “Yes,” I say. “Seredushka. She came in, carrying some jars and herbs to make a sort of healing potion. At first I thought it was Yoga herself, and I turned to look at her and—”

  How to explain?

  “Can you imagine if you’d lived all your life in the darkness, in some night without stars or moon, and the only light you’d ever seen was a candle flame? Then one day you awoke and found that the sun had risen? Seeing your mother for the first time was like that. She was beautiful, yes — almost as beautiful as her mother, though in a softer way. But it wasn’t that. It was her soul. Her soul was blindingly white. I don’t know who her father is. But he must be a very good man.”